The Business of Life

"Your room is ready; Aunt Hannah's adjoins. Quarters for other guests are ready also. Have you any idea how I look forward to your coming?"

Three days later his guests arrived on the first three morning trains – a jolly crowd of young people – nineteen of them – who filled his automobiles and horse-drawn vehicles. Their luggage followed in vans, from which protruded skis and hockey sticks. There being no porter, the butler of Silverwood House received them in front of the lodge at the outer gates, offering the "guest cup," a Desboro custom of many generations, originating in England, although the lodge had stood empty and the gates open since his grandfather's time.

Desboro welcomed them on his own doorstep; and there was, for a moment, an unconscious and unwonted grace in his manner and bearing – an undefined echo in his voice of other and more courtly times, as he gave his arm to Aunt Hannah and led her inside the hall.

There it exhaled and vanished as Mrs. Quant and the maids smilingly conducted the guests to their various quarters – vanished with the smiling formality of his greeting to Jacqueline.

The men returned first, clad in their knickerbockers and skating jackets. Cocktails awaited them in the billiard-room, and they gathered there in noisy curiosity over this celebrated house not often opened to anybody except its owner.

"Who is the dream, Jim?" demanded Reginald Ledyard. "I mean the wonder with the gold hair, that Mrs. Hammerton has in tow?"

"A friend of Aunt Hannah's – an expert in antique art – and as clever and charming as she is pretty," said Desboro pleasantly.

"High-brow! Oh, help!" muttered Ledyard. "Where's your library? I want to read up."

"She can talk like other people," remarked Van Alstyne. "I got next on the train – old lady Hammerton stood for me. She can flirt some, I'll tell you those."

Bertie Barkley extracted the olive from a Bronx and considered it seriously.

"The old lady is on a salary, of course. Nobody ever heard of anybody named Nevers," he remarked.

"They'll hear of somebody named Nevers now," observed Captain Herrendene with emphasis, "or," he added in modest self-depreciation, "I am all kinds of a liar."

"Where did you know her, Jim?" inquired Ledyard curiously.

"Oh, Miss Nevers's firm has charge of cataloguing my armour and jades. They're at it still. That's how I first met her – in a business way. And when I found her to be a friend of Aunt Hannah's, I asked them both up here as my guests."

"You always had an eye for beauty," said Cairns. "What do you suppose Mrs. Hammerton's game is?"

"Why, to make Miss Nevers known where she really ought to belong," replied Desboro frankly.

"How high does she plan to climb?" asked Barkley. "Above the vegetating line?"

"Probably not as far as the line of perpetual stupidity," said Desboro. "Miss Nevers appears to be a very busy, and very intelligent, and self-sufficient young lady, and I imagine she would have neither time nor inclination to decorate any of the restless, gilt-encrusted sets."

Van Alstyne said: "She's got the goods to deliver almost anywhere Mrs. Hammerton chooses – F. O. B. what?"

"She's some dream," admitted Ledyard as they all moved toward the library.

There were a lot of gay young girls there in skating costumes; Ledyard's sister Marie, with her large figure and pretty but slightly stupid face; Helsa Steyr, blonde, athletic, and red-haired; Athalie Vannis, with her handsome, dark face, so often shadowed by discontent; Barkley's animated little wife, Elizabeth, grey-eyed and freckled and brimming with mischief of the schoolboy quality; the stately Katharine Frere; Aunt Hannah; and Jacqueline.

All except the latter two had been doing something to cocktails of various species; Jacqueline took nothing; Aunt Hannah, Scotch whiskey with relish.

"It's about the last of the skating," said Desboro, "so we'd better take what we can get as soon as luncheon is over. Pick your partners and don't squabble. Me for Mrs. Hammerton!" and he led her out.

At table he noticed that Captain Herrendene had secured Jacqueline, and that Reggie Ledyard, on the other side, was already neglecting his own partner in his eager, good-looking and slightly loutish fashion of paying court to the newest and prettiest girl.

Aunt Hannah's glance continually flickered sideways at Desboro, but when she discovered that he was aware of her covert scrutiny, she said under her breath:

"I've been shopping with her; the little thing didn't know how to clothe herself luxuriously in the more intimate details. I'd like to see anybody's maid patronise her now! Yours don't know enough – but she'll go where there are those who do know, sooner or later. What do you think of her?"

"What I always think," he said coolly. "She is the most interesting girl I ever met."

"She's too clever to care very much for what I can offer her," said Mrs. Hammerton drily. "Glitter and tinsel would never dazzle her, James; pretense, complacency, bluff, bragg, she'd devilish soon see through it all with those clear, intelligent eyes – see at the bottom what lies squirming there – anxiety, self-distrust, eternal dread, undying envy, the secret insecurity of those who imitate the real – which does not exist in America – and who know in their hopeless hearts that they are only shams, like that two-year-old antique tavern yonder, made quaint to order."

He said smilingly: "She'll soon have enough of your particular familiars. But, little by little, she'll find herself in accord with people who seek her as frankly as she seeks them. Natural selection, you know. Your only usefulness is to give her the opportunity, and you've begun to do it, bless your heart."

She flashed a malicious glance at him; under cover of the gay hubbub she said:

"I may do more than that, James."

"Really."

"Yes; I may open her eyes to men of your sort."

"Her eyes are open already, I suppose."

"Not very wide. For example – you'd never marry her. Would you?"

"Don't talk that way," he said coldly.

"No, I don't have to talk at all. I know. If you ever marry, I know what deadly species of female it will be. You're probably right; you're that kind, too – no real substance to you, James. And so I think I'll have to look after my intellectual protégée, and be very sure that her pretty eyes are wide open."

He turned toward her; their glances met level and hard:

"Let matters alone," he said. "I have myself in hand."

"You have in hand a horse with a runaway record, James."

Cairns, on her left, spoke to her; she turned and answered, then presented her well-shaped back to that young gentleman and again crossed glances with Desboro, who was waiting, cool as steel.

"Come, James," she said in a low voice, "what do you mean to do? A man always means something or nothing; and the latter is the more dangerous."

As that was exactly what Desboro told himself he had always meant, he winced and remained silent.

"Oh, you – the lot of you!" she said with smiling contempt. "I'll equip that girl to take care of herself before I'm through with her. Watch me."

"It is part of your business. Equip her to take care of herself as thoroughly as anybody you know. Then it will be up to her – as it is up to all women, after all – and to all men."

"Oh, is it? You've all the irresponsibility and moral rottenness of your Cavalier ancestors in you; do you know it, James? The Puritan, at least, never doubted that he was his brother's keeper."

Desboro said doggedly: "With the individual alone rests what that individual will be."

"Is that your mature belief?" she asked ironically.

"It is, dear lady."

"Lord! To think of a world full of loosened creatures like you! A civilised society swarming with callow and irresponsible opportunists, amateur Jesuits, idle intelligences reinfected with the toxins of their own philosophy! But," she shrugged, "I am indicting man himself – nations and nations of him. Besides, we women have always known this. And hybrids are hybrids. If there's any claret in the house, tell Farris to fetch some. Don't be angry, James. Man and woman once were different species, and the world has teemed with their hybrids since the first mating."