The Business of Life

Mrs. Barkley leaned across the table toward him:

"What's the matter, James? You look dangerous."

His face cleared and he smiled:

"Nobody is really dangerous except to themselves, Betty."

She quoted saucily: "Il n'y a personne qui ne soit dangereux pour quelqu'un!"

Mrs. Hammerton added: "Il faut tout attendre et tout craindre du temps et des hommes."

Reggie Ledyard, much flattered, admitted the wholesale indictment against his sex:

"How can we help it? Man, possessing always dual personality, is naturally inclined toward a double life."

"Man's chief study has been man for so long," observed Mrs. Hammerton, "that the world has passed by, leaving him behind, still engrossed in counting his thumbs. Name your French philosopher who can beat that reflection," she added to Desboro, who smiled absently.

From moment to moment he had been watching Jacqueline and the men always leaning toward her – Reggie Ledyard persistently bringing to bear on her the full splendour of his straw-blond and slightly coarse beauty; Cairns, receptive and débonnaire as usual; Herrendene, with his keen smile and sallow visage lined with the memory of things that had left their marks – all the men there had yielded to the delicate attraction of her.

Desboro said to Mrs. Hammerton: "Now you realise where she really belongs."

"Better than you do," she retorted drily.

After luncheon there were vehicles to convey them to the pond, a small sheet of water down in the Desboro woods. And while a declining sun glittered through the trees, the wooded shores echoed with the clatter and scrape of skates and the rattle of hockey-sticks crossed in lively combat.

But inshore the ice had rotted; the end of such sport was already in sight. Along the gravelly inlet, where water rippled, a dozen fingerling trout lay half hidden among the pebbles; over a bank of soft, sun-warmed snow, gnats danced in the sunset light; a few tree-buds had turned sticky.

Later, Vail came and built a bonfire; Farris arrived with tea baskets full of old-fashioned things, such as turnovers and flip in stone jugs of a century ago.

Except for a word or two at intervals, Desboro had found no chance to talk to Jacqueline. Now and then their glances encountered, lingered, shifted, with scarcely a ghost of a smile in forced response to importunities. So he had played an impartial game of hockey, skated with any girl who seemed to be receptive, cut intricate figures with Mrs. Hammerton in a cove covered with velvet-smooth black ice, superintended the bonfire construction, directed Farris with the tea.

Now, absently executing a "grape-vine," he was gliding along the outer ranks of his guests with the mechanical patrolling instinct of a collie, when Jacqueline detached herself from a fire-lit group and made him a gay little sign to halt.

Picking her way through the soft snow on the points of her skates, she took to the ice and joined him. They linked hands and swung out into the starlight.

"Are you enjoying it?" he asked.

"That's why I signalled you. I never have had such a good time. I wanted you to know it."

"You like my friends?"

She looked up: "They are all so charming to me! I didn't expect people to be cordial."

"You need expect nothing else wherever you go and whomever you meet – barring the inevitable which no attractive girl can avoid arousing. Do you get on with Aunt Hannah?"

She laughed: "Isn't it odd? I call her that, too. She asked me to. And do you know, she has been a perfect dear about everything. We shopped together; I never had quite ventured to buy certain fascinating things to wear. And we had such a good time lunching at the Ritz, where I had never dared go. Such beautiful women! Such gowns! Such jewels!"

They halted and looked back across the ice at the distant fire and the dark forms moving about it.

"You've bowled over every man here, as a matter of course," he said lightly. "If you'll tell me how you like the women I'll know whether they like you."

"Oh, I like them; they are as nice to me as they are to each other!" she exclaimed, " – except, perhaps, one or two – "

"Marie Ledyard is hopelessly spoiled; Athalie Vannis is usually discontented," he said philosophically. "Don't expect either of them to give three cheers for another girl's popularity."

They crossed hands and swept toward the centre of the pond on the "outer edge." Jacqueline's skating skirt was short enough for her to manage a "Dutch roll," steadied and guided by Desboro; then they exchanged it for other figures, not intricate.

"Your friend, Mr. Sissly, is dining with us," he observed.

"He's really very nice," she said. "Just a little too – artistic – for you, perhaps, and for the men here – except Captain Herrendene – "

"Herrendene is a fine fellow," he said.

"I like him so much," she admitted.

He was silent for a moment, turned toward her as though to speak, but evidently reconsidered the impulse.

"He is not very young, is he?" she asked.

"Herrendene? No."

"I thought not. Sometimes in repose his face seems sad. But what kind eyes he has!"

"He's a fine fellow," said Desboro without emphasis.

Before they came within the firelight, he asked her whether she had really decided to give them a little lecture on jades and crystals; and she said that she had.

"It won't be too technical or too dry, I hope," she added laughingly. "I told Captain Herrendene what I was going to say and do, and he liked the idea."

"Won't you tell me, too, Jacqueline?"

"No, I want you to be surprised. Besides, I haven't time; we've been together too long already. Doesn't one's host have to be impartially attentive? And I think that pretty little Miss Steyr is signalling you."

Herrendene came out on the ice toward them:

"The cars are here," he said, "and Mrs. Hammerton is cold."

Dinner was an uproariously lively function, served amid a perfect eruption of bewildering gowns and jewels and flowers. Desboro had never before seen Jacqueline in a dinner gown, or even attempted to visualise her beauty amid such surroundings in contrast with other women.

She fitted exquisitely into the charming mosaic; from crown to toe she was part of it, an essential factor that, once realised, became indispensable to the harmony.

Perhaps, he told himself, she did not really dominate with the fresh delicacy of her beauty; perhaps it was only what he saw in her and what he knew of her that made the others shadowy and commonplace to him.

Yet, in all the curious eyes repeatedly turned toward her, he saw admiration, willing or conceded, recognised every unspoken tribute of her own sex as well as the less reserved surrender of his; saw her suddenly developed into a blossom of unabashed and youthful loveliness under what she had once called "the warm sun of approval"; and sat in vague and uneasy wonder, witnessing the transfiguration.

Sissly was there, allotted to Katharine Frere; and that stately girl, usually credited among her friends with artistic aspirations, apparently found him interesting.

So all went well enough, whether gaily or seriously, even with Aunt Hannah, who had discovered under Desboro's smiling composure all kinds of food for reflection and malicious diversion.