The Breaking Point Part 4

"Why? Because he gets up when you come into the room? Why in heaven's name don't you encourage real men to come here? There's d.i.c.k Livingstone. He's a man."

Margaret hesitated.

"Walter, have you ever thought there was anything queer about d.i.c.k Livingstone's coming here?"

"Darned good for the town that he did come."

"But--n.o.body ever dreamed that David and Lucy had a nephew. Then he turns up, and they send him to medical college, and all that."

"I've got some relations I haven't notified the town I possess," he said grimly.

"Well, there's something odd. I don't believe Henry Livingstone, the Wyoming brother, ever had a son."

"What possible foundation have you for a statement like that?"

"Mrs. Cook Morgan's sister-in-law has been visiting her lately. She says she knew Henry Livingstone well years ago in the West, and she never heard he was married. She says positively he was not married."

"And trust the Morgan woman to spread the good news," he said with angry sarcasm. "Well, suppose that's true? Suppose d.i.c.k is an illegitimate child? That's the worst that's implied, I daresay. That's nothing against d.i.c.k himself. I'll tell the world there's good blood on the Livingstone side, anyhow."

"You were very particular about Wallie Sayre's heredity, Walter."

"That's different," he retorted, and retired into gloomy silence behind his newspaper. Drat these women anyhow. It was like some fool female to come there and rake up some old and defunct scandal. He'd stand up for d.i.c.k, if it ever came to a show-down. He liked d.i.c.k. What the devil did his mother matter, anyhow? If this town hadn't had enough evidence of d.i.c.k Livingstone's quality the last few years he'd better go elsewhere.

He--

He got up and whistled for the dog.

"I'm going to take a walk," he said briefly, and went out. He always took a walk when things disturbed him.

On the Sunday afternoon after d.i.c.k had gone Elizabeth was alone in her room upstairs. On the bed lay the sort of gown Nina would have called a dinner dress, and to which Elizabeth referred as her dark blue. Seen thus, in the room which was her own expression, there was a certain n.o.bility about her very simplicity, a steadiness about her eyes that was almost disconcerting.

"She's the saintly-looking sort that would go on the rocks for some man," Nina had said once, rather flippantly, "and never know she was shipwrecked. No man in the world could do that to me."

But just then Elizabeth looked totally unlike shipwreck. Nothing seemed more like a safe harbor than the Wheeler house that afternoon, or all the afternoons. Life went on, the comfortable life of an upper middle-cla.s.s household. Candles and flowers on the table and a neat waitress to serve; little carefully planned shopping expeditions; fine hand-sewing on dainty undergarments for rainy days; small tributes of books and candy; invitations and consultations as to what to wear; choir practice, a cla.s.s in the Sunday school, a little work among the poor; the volcano which had been Nina overflowing elsewhere in a smart little house with a butler out on the Ridgely Road.

She looked what she was, faithful and quietly loyal, steady--and serene; not asking greatly but hoping much; full of small unvisualized dreams and little inarticulate prayers; waiting, without knowing that she was waiting.

Sometimes she worried. She thought she ought to "do something." A good many of the girls she knew wanted to do something, but they were vague as to what. She felt at those times that she was not being very useful, and she had gone so far as to lay the matter before her father a couple of years before, when she was just eighteen.

"Just what do you think of doing?" he had inquired.

"That's it," she had said despondently. "I don't know. I haven't any particular talent, you know. But I don't think I ought to go on having you support me in idleness all my life."

"Well, I don't think it likely that I'll have to," he had observed, dryly. "But here's the point, and I think it's important. I don't intend to work without some compensation, and my family is my compensation.

You just hang around and make me happy, as you do, and you're fulfilling your economic place in the nation. Don't you forget it, either."

That had comforted her. She had determined then never to marry but to hang around, as he suggested, for the rest of her life. She was quite earnest about it, and resolved.

She picked up the blue dress and standing before her mirror, held it up before her. It looked rather shabby, she thought, but the theater was not like a dance, and anyhow it would look better at night. She had been thinking about next Wednesday evening ever since d.i.c.k Livingstone had gone. It seemed, better somehow, frightfully important. It was frightfully important. For the first time she acknowledged to herself that she had been fond of him, as she put it, for a long time. She had an odd sense, too, of being young and immature, and as though he had stooped to her from some height: such as thirty-two years and being in the war, and having to decide about life and death, and so on.

She hoped he did not think she was only a child.

She heard Nina coming up the stairs. At the click of her high heels on the hard wood she placed the dress on the bed again, and went to the window. Her father was on the path below, clearly headed for a walk. She knew then that Nina had been asking for something.

Nina came in and closed the door. She was smaller than Elizabeth and very pretty. Her eyebrows had been drawn to a tidy line, and from the top of her shining head to her brown suede pumps she was exquisite with the hours of careful tending and careful dressing she gave her young body. Exquisitely pretty, too.

She sat down on Elizabeth's bed with a sigh.

"I really don't know what to do with father," she said. "He flies off at a tangent over the smallest things. Elizabeth dear, can you lend me twenty dollars? I'll get my allowance on Tuesday."

"I can give you ten."

"Well, ask mother for the rest, won't you? You needn't say it's for me.

I'll give it to you Tuesday."

"I'm not going to mother, Nina. She has had a lot of expenses this month."

"Then I'll borrow it from Wallie Sayre," Nina said, accepting her defeat cheerfully. "If it was an ordinary bill it could wait, but I lost it at bridge last night and it's got to be paid."

"You oughtn't to play bridge for money," Elizabeth said, a bit primly.

"And if Leslie knew you borrowed from Wallace Sayre--"

"I forgot! Wallie's downstairs, Elizabeth. Really, if he wasn't so funny, he'd be tragic."

"Why tragic? He has everything in the world."

"If you use a little bit of sense, you can have it too."

"I don't want

"Pooh! That's what you think now. Wallie's a nice person. Lots of girls are mad about him. And he has about all the money there is." Getting no response from Elizabeth, she went on: "I was thinking it over last night. You'll have to marry sometime, and it isn't as though Wallie was dissipated, or anything like that. I suppose he knows his way about, but then they all do."

She got up.

"Be nice to him, anyhow," she said. "He's crazy about you, and when I think of you in that house! It's a wonderful house, Elizabeth. She's got a suite waiting for Wallie to be married before she furnishes it."

Elizabeth looked around her virginal little room, with its painted dressing table, its chintz, and its white bed with the blue dress on it.

"I'm very well satisfied as I am," she said.

While she smoothed her hair before the mirror Nina surveyed the room and her eyes lighted on the frock.

"Are you still wearing that shabby old thing?" she demanded. "I do wish you'd get some proper clothes. Are you going somewhere?"

"I'm going to the theater on Wednesday night."

"Who with?" Nina in her family was highly colloquial.

"With Doctor Livingstone."