The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him Part 83

"I think you are a society girl," continued Peter, "because you are the nicest kind of society."

Leonore fairly filled the room with her smile. Then she said, "Peter, will you do me a favor?"

"Yes."

"Will you tell Dorothy that I have helped you translate cipher telegrams and write the replies?"

Peter was rather astonished, but said, "Yes."

But he did it very badly, Leonore thought, for meeting Dorothy the next day at a lawn party, after the mere greetings, he said:

"Dorothy, Miss D'Alloi has been helping me translate and write cipher telegrams."

Dorothy looked startled at the announcement for a moment. Then she gave a glance at Leonore, who was standing by Peter, visibly holding herself in a very triumphant att.i.tude. Then she burst out into the merriest of laughs, and kept laughing.

"What is it?" asked Peter.

"Such a joke," gasped Dorothy, "but I can't tell you."

As for Leonore, her triumphant manner had fled, and her cheeks were very red. And when some one spoke to Dorothy, and took her attention, Leonore said to Peter very crossly:

"You are so clumsy! Of course I didn't mean that way."

Peter sighed internally. "I am stupid, I suppose," he said to himself.

"I tried to do just what she asked, but she's displeased, and I suppose she won't be nice for the rest of the day. If it was only law or politics! But women!"

But Leonore didn't abuse him. She was very kind to him, despite her displeasure. "If Dorothy would only let me alone," thought Peter, "I should have a glorious time. Why can't she let me stay with her when she's in such a nice mood. And why does she insist on my being attentive to her. I don't care for her. It seems as if she was determined to break up my enjoyment, just as I get her to myself." Peter mixed his "hers"

and "shes" too thoroughly in this sentence to make its import clear. His thoughts are merely reported verbatim, as the easiest way. It certainly indicates that, as with most troubles, there was a woman in it.

Peter said much this same thing to himself quite often during the following week, and always with a groan. Dorothy was continually putting her finger in. Yet it was in the main a happy time to Peter. His friend treated him very nicely for the most part, if very variably. Peter never knew in what mood he should find her. Sometimes he felt that Leonore considered him as the dirt under her little feet. Then again, she could not be too sweet to him. There was an evening--a dinner--at which he sat between Miss Biddle and Leonore when, it seemed to Peter, Leonore said and looked such nice things, that the millennium had come. Yet the next morning, she told him that: "It was a very dull dinner. I talked to n.o.body but you."

Fortunately for Peter, the D'Allois were almost as new an advent in Newport, so Leonore was not yet in the running. But by the time Peter's first week had sped, he found that men were putting their fingers in, as well as Dorothy. Morning, noon, and night they gathered. Then lunches, teas, drives, yachts and innumerable other affairs also plunged their fingers in. Peter did not yield to the superior numbers, he went wherever Leonore went. But the other men went also, and understood the ropes far better. He fought on, but a sickening feeling began to creep over him of impending failure. It was soon not merely how Leonore treated him; it was the impossibility of getting her to treat him at all. Even though he was in the same house, it seemed as if there was always some one else calling or mealing, or taking tea, or playing tennis or playing billiards, or merely dropping in. And then Leonore took fewer and fewer meals at home, and spent fewer and fewer hours there. One day Peter had to translate those despatches all by himself!

When he had a cup of tea now, even with three or four men about, he considered himself lucky. He understood at last what Miss De Voe had meant when she had spoken of the difficulty of seeing enough of a popular girl either to love her or to tell her of it. They prayed for rain in church on Sunday, on account of the drought, and Peter said "Amen" with fervor. Anything to end such fluttering.

At the end of two weeks, Peter said sadly that he must be going.

"Rubbish," said Watts. "You are to stay for a month."

"I hope you'll stay," said Mrs. D'Alloi.

Peter waited a moment for some one else to speak. Some one else didn't.

"I think I must," he said. "It isn't a matter of my own wishes, but I'm needed in Syracuse." Peter spoke as if Syracuse was the ultimate of human misery.

"Is it necessary for you to be there?" asked Leonore.

"Not absolutely, but I had better go."

Later in the day Leonore said, "I've decided you are not to go to Syracuse. I shall want you here to explain what they do to me."

And that cool, insulting speech filled Peter with happiness.

"I've decided to stay another week," he told Mrs. D'Alloi.

Nor could all the appeals over the telegraph move him, though that day and the next the wires to Newport from New York and Syracuse were kept hot, the despatches came so continuously.

Two days after this decision, Peter and Leonore went to a cotillion.

Leonore informed him that: "Mamma makes me leave after supper, because she doesn't like me to stay late, so I miss the nice part."

"How many waltzes are you going to give me?" asked Peter, with an eye to his one ball-room accomplishment.

"I'll give you the first," said Leonore, "and then if you'll sit near me, I'll give you a look every time I see a man coming whom I don't like, and if you are quick and ask me first, I'll give it to you."

Peter became absolutely happy. "How glad I am," he thought, "that I didn't go to Syracuse! What a shame it is there are other dances than waltzes."

But after Peter had had two waltzes, he overheard his aged friend of fifteen years say something to a girl that raised him many degrees in his mind. "That's a very brainy fellow," said Peter admiringly. "That never occurred to me!"

So he waited till he saw Leonore seated, and then joined her. "Won't you sit out this dance with me?" he asked.

Leonore looked surprised. "He's getting very clever," she thought, never dreaming that Peter's cleverness, like so many other people's nowadays, consisted in a pertinent use of quotations. Parrot cleverness, we might term it. Leonore listened to the air which the musicians were beginning, and finding it the Lancers, or dreariest of dances, she made Peter happy by a.s.senting.

"Suppose we go out on the veranda," said Peter, still quoting.

"Now of what are you going to talk?" said Leonore, when they were ensconced on a big wicker divan, in the soft half light of the Chinese lanterns.

"I want to tell you of something that seems to me about a hundred years ago," said Peter. "But it concerns myself, and I don't want to bore you."

"Try, and if I don't like it I'll stop you," said Leonore, opening up a line of retreat worthy of a German army.

"I don't know what you'll think about it," said Peter, faltering a little. "I suppose I can hardly make you understand it, as it is to me.

But I want you to know, because--well--it's only fair."

Leonore looked at Peter with a very tender look in her eyes. He could not see it, because Leonore sat so that her face was in shadow. But she could see his expression, and when he hesitated, with that drawn look on his face, Leonore said softly:

"You mean--about--mamma?"

Peter started. "Yes! You know?"

"Yes," said Leonore gently. "And that was why I trusted you, without ever having met you, and why I wanted to be friends."

Peter sighed a sigh of relief. "I've been so afraid of it," he said.

"She told you?"

"Yes. That is, Miss De Voe told me first of your having been disappointed, so I asked mamma if she knew the girl, and then mamma told me. I'm glad you spoke of it, for I've wanted to ask you something."

"What?"

"If that was why you wouldn't call at first on us?"