Otherwise Phyllis Part 44

"This is very kind of you, Mrs. Holton. Please be sure that I appreciate it."

Charles Holton bowed profoundly, and lifted his head for a closer inspection of Mrs. Lois Montgomery Holton.

He had called for Phil, whom he had engaged to escort to a lecture in the Athenaeum Course. When his note proposing this entertainment reached Phil, she dutifully laid it before her mother who lay on her bed reading a French novel.

"Special delivery! A wild extravagance when there's a perfectly good telephone in the house."

Lois read the note twice; her eyes resting lingeringly upon the signature.

"Wayland Brown Bayless, LL.D., on 'Suns.h.i.+ne and Shadow.' He was giving that same lecture here when I was a girl; it ought to be well mellowed by this time. Either the president of the college or the pastor of Center Church will present him to the audience and the white pitcher of Sugar Creek water that is always provided. Well, it's a perfectly good lecture, and old enough to be respectable: Smiles and sobs stuck in at regular intervals. I approve of the lecture, Phil. I'd almost make Amzi take me, just to see how Bayless, LL.D., looks after all these years.

Away back there when I heard him he looked so old I thought he must have been a baby playing in the sand when they carved the Sphinx."

She returned the note to Phil and her eyes reverted to the book.

"What about it, mamma?"

"Oh, about going! Let me see. This is the other Holton boy, so to speak--the provider of American Beauties, as distinguished from the dispenser of quails?"

Phil confirmed this.

"It's Charlie. He's taken me to parties several times. I rather think this note is a feeler. He doesn't know whether he ought to come here--now--" and Phil ended, with the doubt she attributed to Charles Holton manifest in her own uncertainty.

"We went over that the other day, Phil. As those wise aunts of yours introduced you to this person, I shouldn't suggest that you drop his acquaintance on my account. You see"--she raised herself slightly to punch a more comfortable hollow in the pillows--"you see that would merely stir up strife, which is highly undesirable. If you think you can survive Bayless, LL.D.'s, plea for optimism, accept the gentleman's invitation. There's only this--you yourself might be a little uncomfortable, for reasons we needn't mention; you'll have to think of that. I suppose chaperons didn't reach Montgomery with the electric light; girls run around with young men just as they used to."

"I don't care what people say, so far as that is concerned," replied Phil. "Charlie has been kind to me--and the lecture is the only thing that offers just now."

Lois laughed.

"Then, go!"

"And besides, just now people are talking about the Sycamore Company and father's connection with it, and I shouldn't want Charlie to feel that I thought he wasn't all straight about that; for I don't suppose he did anything wrong. He doesn't seem like that."

Lois reached for a pot of cold cream and applied the ointment to her lips with the tip of a slim, well-cared-for finger.

"You think maybe he's being persecuted?"

"Oh, I've wondered; that's all."

"I shouldn't worry about that part of it: if you feel like going, tell him you'll go. It will give me a chance to look at him. This is Charles, is it? Then it was Fred who came the other evening to see Amzi;--he's pretty serious but substantial--permissible if not exactly acceptable.

You'll have to learn to judge men for yourself. And you'll do it. I'm not a bit afraid for you. And it's rather fortunate than otherwise that you have specimens of the Holton family to work on, particularly with me standing by to throw a word in now and then."

So it came about that when Charles appeared the next evening, fortified with one of the village hacks, Lois went down to inspect him. Amzi had returned to the bank, and Phil was changing her gown.

Charles, having expressed his appreciation of Mrs. Holton's courtesy, found difficulty in concealing the emotions she aroused in him. He had expected to feel uncomfortable in the presence of this lady, of whom her former husband, his uncle, had spoken so bitterly; but she was not at all the sort of person one would suspect of being in league with the Devil--an alliance vouched for in profane terms by Jack Holton. Charles liked new sensations, and it was positively thrilling to stand face to face with this woman who had figured so prominently in his family history.

He placed a chair for her with elaborate care, and bowed her into it.

She was a much more smoothly finished product than her daughter. He liked "smart" women, and Mrs. Holton was undeniably "smart." Her languid grace, the faint hints of sachet her raiment exhaled; her abrupt, crisp manner of speaking--in innumerable ways she was delightful and satisfying. She was a woman of the world: as a man of the world he felt that they understood each other without argument. The disparity of their years was not so great as to exclude the hope that little attentions from him would be grateful to her; it was a fair a.s.sumption that a woman who had dismissed two husbands would not be averse to the approaches of a presentable young man. He wished to fix himself in her mind as one who breathed naturally the ampler ether of her own world. It would be easier to win Phil with her mother as an ally.

"You did go to Madison? I suppose all good Montgomery boys go to the home college."

"Well, of course that was one of my mistakes. You never quite recover what you lose by going to these little freshwater colleges. You never quite get the jay out of your system."

The obvious reply to this was that in his case it had not mattered, for patently he did not even remotely suggest the state or condition of jayness; but Mrs. Holton ignored the opportunity to appease his vanity.

"Oh!"

Phil's "Oh" was ambiguous enough; but her mother's was even more baffling.

"Of course, we all love Madison," he hastened to add; "but I'm around a good deal, here and there over the country, and when I meet Yale and Harvard men I always feel that I have missed something; there is a difference."

"Clothes--neckties?" suggested Mrs. Holton.

"It's a little deeper than that."

"Knack of ordering a dinner?"

"Oh, you're putting me in a corner! I'd never thought it all out; but I've always felt a difference. If I'm wrong, there's n.o.body I'd rather have set me right than you."

Her laugh was enthralling. She had no intention of committing herself on the relative advantages of big and little colleges.

"Let me see, Mr. Holton, your business is--"

"Oh, I'm a broker in investment securities; that's the way they have me down in the Indianapolis Directory."

"You advise people what to do with their money and that sort of thing?

It's very responsible, I should think, and it must be wearing."

Her face reflected the gravity a.s.sociated with the delicate matter of investments. For a woman whose two matrimonial adventures had left her a stranded dependent she carried this off well, and she could play a part; and he liked people who could carry a part gracefully. She turned so that the firelight fell upon her face and raised a fan to s.h.i.+eld her cheek from the heat. Her use of her hands charmed him. He could not recall a more graceful woman in all his acquaintance. He added trim ankles and a discriminating taste in silk hose to his itemized apprais.e.m.e.nt of her attractions.

"If a poor lone woman should come to you with a confession that she owned, say, fifty to a hundred thousand dollars' worth of Government 3's, what would you advise her to do with them?"

It was as though she spoke of poetry or the moonlit sea. "Fifty or a hundred!" She could as easily have spoken of a chest of Spanish doubloons, or some other monetary unit of romance. He was flattered that she was taking so much pains with him; a woman who was so fair to look upon might amuse herself at his expense as much as she liked. It was delightful trifling. He felt that it was inc.u.mbent upon him to respond in kind.

"Oh, I should feel it my duty to double her income--or triple it. Few of us can afford to fool with Governments; but, of course, there are not many first-rate securities that pay high interest. That's where I come in: it's my business to find them for my clients."

"What would you recommend--I mean right now--something that would net seven per cent and be safe for the poor widow we're talking about?"

"Well," he laughed nervously, "I haven't anything better right now than bonds of the Hornbrook Electric Power at a price to net six."

"But--that sounds very conservative. And besides--they say there's not enough water in Hornbrook Creek to furnish power for any great number of mills. The engineer's report was very unsatisfactory--quite so. I looked into that. Should you say that the territory adjacent to the creek is likely to invite--oh, factories, mills, and that sort of thing?"

He colored as her brown eyes met his in one of her flas.h.i.+ng glances. She mentioned Hornbrook Creek in her low, caressing voice as though it were only an item of landscape, and the report of the engineers might have been a pirate's round-robin, hidden in an old sea chest from the way she spoke of it. It was inconceivable that she had prepared for this interview. She touched her pompadour lightly with the back of her hand--the smallest of hands--and he was so lost in admiration of the witchery of the gesture that he was disconcerted to find her eyes bent upon him keenly.

"Of course, it's got to be developed--like anything else," he replied.

"But--the fixed charges--and that sort of thing?"

He wished she would not say "that sort of thing." The phrase as she used it swept everything before it like a broom.