Page:The Smart Set (Volume 52, Number 4).djvu/10

THE CHARMED CIRCLE

“If anything should happen to your aunt what would you do?” she demanded one night ot a theater.

He was engaged in observing how society actors took their stage leave of the ladies they loved; whether they turned their back on them or walked away backward as those do who retreat from royal presences and thus imperil bric-a-brac. He was beginning to see that society actors may vary in their interpretation of social graces and these variations puzzled him He was so much engrossed in a provincial star of the John Drew school that she was compelled to repeat her question.

“If it happened in the night season I should go to Newport, But she'll outlive me,” he concluded gloomily. The play was one of high life as the author imagined 1t to be and his participation in its glories seemed very far away. A moment later he was sorry for the impression he had given. I hope she will live for years,” he said emphatically as he thought of her constant kindness. “She’s a dear old creature even if we don’t often agree on things.”

“She’s sixty-two,” Effie reminded him.

“That's nothing,” he retorted, “she’ll see eighty for certain.”

Speculation on the span of life is invariably risky. Even as he spoke the poor old lady lay dead 1n her house. And there was something grimly humorous in the manner that one so sparing in her diet should come to her end.

Horace had telephoned from the mill that he was going to dine in Buffalo and go to a theater. And as the night was hot and the ice almost gone she determined to cat the steak she had bought and cooked for him. A picce of this unaccustomed delicacy stuck in her throat and choked her to death ere her condition was observed by the woman who was working in the adjoining kitchen.

The house and ground left to her heir was worth about seven thousand dollars. She begged him not to dispose of it. There would come a time, she said in a letter written not so long before her death and delivered to him by her lawyer, when he would see that the dreams he dreamed were 1dle viddons and would reclize that marriage and a1 home were noarer to happiness. He did not tell Froe Horton that his aunt hoped he would marry her. But he determined to honor her wish not to sell the house, although he might never be able to endure it as a home.

There remained about twelve thousand dollars besties, and with this in cash and a draft on a New York bank he tore himself free of his native town. And his manner of going was as in- comprechensible as his whole life had been to those among whom he had moved. He did not even go to the mill to collect the monthly salary of seventy-five dollars that was due had he waited but twelve hours longer. Nor did he make the house to house visits that neighbors paid who were to adventure into distant parts. He left as caretaker the old woman who had waited on his aunt, and told her he would probably never return.

When he had gone they realized that this self-contained, good-looking, friendless son of their own soil was a stranger whom they had never known.

And since loyalty to strangers has never been accounted a virtue, most of them said he would come to a bad end, and many of them hoped 1t.

Horace reached New York during the last week of May and registered at a not too obtrusive hotel. It was not his intention to remain there long, since he had gathered from his researches in the literature of polite society that a bachelor gained more cachet if he had two discreet rooms somewhere close enough to Fifth Avenue to regard it as his nearest thoroughfare.

These rooms he obtained without difficulty. He had none of the dislike to getting the most for his money which many young men had whom he had observed upon the stage. There was a