Lorraine did not press the matter of taking Cora on the vacation, although Cora had managed to invite herself!
“There is melancholia in our family,” she told Lorraine. “Oh, yes, several suicides—terrible, isn’t it? I try not to brood but I am a daughter of the sun, I crave love and life. How could I be content in this pokey place? Oh, Lorraine, I look upon you as a sister—do be good to me,” at which Lorraine’s gullible little self would be utterly won over and she would bake Cora’s favorite cake and make her a crêpe de chine waist and ask over, braving Dan’s wrath, some drummer who might be in search of a wife as well as a buyer for his dustless mops!
But there was another person who had come into The Corners since Thurley had left it and whom Dan regarded as every one’s enemy. He had said publicly that it was a patriotic duty to have this person, Owen Pringle, although he spelled it Oweyne and had a book plate, shot at sunrise, velvet smoking-jacket, hair parted in the middle and all!
As the record ended, Dan flung himself on the sofa, remarking, “I wish Cora and Owen would get married—ye gods, do you get it?” He chuckled. “I’d hand them a chest of small silver if they did. How about it—can’t you get Owen interested?”
“Oh, Cora wouldn’t consider him,” Lorraine said seriously.
Dan chuckled more than ever. “If you had a sense of humor, you’d have a lot of fun, but you take these people at face value. Now Owen clerked for me a month and disorganized the whole shop. I’ll tell you right now that unless he cuts out his nonsense and goes back to the livery stable from which he sprang, I’m going to get him away from here.”
“But his shop is artistic,” Lorraine murmured.
At which Dan tossed a sofa pillow good-naturedly her way. He proceeded, in his slangy fashion, to tell her that this Owen Pringle who had appeared from nowhere some months before and tried his best to create a real, true leisure class in the village was nothing short of several kinds of a fool; that when a full-grown man with apparently nothing the matter with him tries to make his living by starting a shop and spelling it shoppe, and has a wistaria tea room and an art department where you purchase impossible penwipers made of cherry-colored silk, baby bootees and old ladies’ knitted throws, smart Christmas cards telling about everything but Christmas, and writing paper that resembled butchers’ wrappings, as well as crazy old wooden stuff painted bright red and green and labelled “window ledges” or “door stops” _and_, horror of horrors, a millinery department which this Oweyne conducted himself, making hats resembling Weber and Fields,—it is time to employ violence! But this was not the worst of his offenses. Oh, no—he had tried to organize a country club and persuade hard-working, honest men to play golf instead of raising potatoes and instituted the polo craze, thereby demoralizing all the decent, well-broken delivery horses in the township. He lived at Dan’s old suite at the Hotel Button and gave chafing-dish parties and thought up smart sayings ahead of time. He wanted to organize a stock company and play “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” but Cora Spooner and June Meyers were the only two who had out and out joined, so the project was abandoned “for lack of funds and interest.”