“Really?” drawled Frothingham. “That’s charming!” He smiled with good-natured raillery. “He had such a quaint way of showing it that I wasn’t _quite_ certain.”
When he had bowed and dropped the heavy portière behind him Catherine went to the window. She stood there until she had seen him enter his hansom and drive away.
“How beautifully he dresses,” she said absently to Honoria. “And what distinguished manners he has--as if he’d been used to being a gentleman for ages and ages.”
She seated herself near the fire--the tea-table was between her and Honoria. “You didn’t know that we were engaged, did you?” she went on, looking dreamily into the fire.
“Were you?” said Honoria--she never betrayed confidences.
“I think,” Catherine answered slowly, “I think perhaps it was because I didn’t feel at home with him--and I do with--Joe. He knows how to manage me.”
“Joe? Why, you used to act as if you disliked him.”
“So did I--think so.” Catherine sighed. “I wish,” she said after a moment, “that Joe had Beauvais House and--the title.”
At half-past four o’clock in a raw January afternoon Frothingham descended from a Pullman fiery furnace to adventure upon Boston. As he drove to Mrs. Staunton’s the rain sifted through the cracks round the windows and doors of the musty cab, and was deposited upon his face in a greasy coating by currents of the iciest air he had felt since he was last in Scotland. It was air that seemed to mangle as it bit, that sent the chilled blood cowering to the depths of the body instead of bringing it to the surface in healthful reaction.
“Loathsome!” he muttered as he looked out on either side. “Looks something like London--no, Liverpool. The people look English, too.” A big, dingy street car with bell wildly clanging darted from a narrow side street into the narrow main street which the cab was following. There was a bare escape from a disastrous collision. “It’s America, right enough,” he said.
The rain was whirling in the savage wind, umbrellas were tossing and twisting, impeding without in the least sheltering the sullen throngs on the sidewalks. Everything looked wet, and sticky, and chilly, and forbidding. “They certainly are English,” he said as he noted the passing faces; and he did not like it. In New York he had been amused by the variety--specimens of all nationalities, often several nationalities struggling for expression in the same face. Here the sameness was tiresome to him, and he missed the alert look of New Yorkers of all kinds.