FullReads

“If you ask my opinion,” I said–I was feeling pretty sore about it–“that woman Florence is an absolute cat.”

“My dear Mr. Pepper, I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking your opinion on such a delicate subject. But I’m glad to have it. Thank you very much. Do I strike you as a vindictive woman, Mr. Pepper?”

“I don’t think you do,” I said.

“By nature I don’t think I am. But I’m feeling a little vindictive just at present.”

She stopped suddenly.

“I don’t know why I’m boring you like this, Mr. Pepper,” she said. “For goodness’ sake let’s be cheerful. Say something bright.”

I was going to take a whirl at it, but she started in to talk, and talked all the rest of the way. She seemed to have cheered up a whole lot.

She left next day. I gather she fired Duggie as per schedule, for the old boy looked distinctly brighter, and Florence wore an off-duty expression and was quite decently civil. Mrs. Darrell bore up all right. She avoided Duggie, of course, and put in most of the time talking to Edwin. He evidently appreciated it, for I had never seen him look so nearly happy before.

I went back to New York directly afterward, and I hadn’t been there much more than a week when a most remarkably queer thing happened. Turning in at Hammerstein’s for half an hour one evening, whom should I meet but brother Edwin, quite fairly festive, with a fat cigar in his mouth. “Hello, Reggie,” he said.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“I had to come up to New York to look up a life of Hilary de Craye at the library. I believe Mister Man was a sort of ancestor.”

“This isn’t the library.”

“I was beginning to guess as much. The difference is subtle but well marked.”

It struck me that there was another difference that was subtle but well marked, and that was the difference between the Edwin I’d left messing about over his family history a week before and the jovial rounder who was blowing smoke in my face now.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “the library would be all the better for a little of this sort of thing. It’s too conservative. That’s what’s the trouble with the library. What’s the matter with having a cross-talk team and a few performing dogs there? It would brighten the place up and attract custom. Reggie, you’re looking fatigued. I’ve heard there’s a place somewhere in this city, if you can only find it, expressly designed for supplying first-aid to the fatigued. Let’s go and look for it.”

I’m not given to thinking much as a rule, but I couldn’t help pondering over this meeting with Edwin. It’s hard to make you see the remarkableness of the whole thing, for, of course, if you look at it, in one way, there’s nothing so record-breaking in smoking a cigar and drinking a highball. But then you have never seen Edwin. There are degrees in everything, don’t you know. For Edwin to behave as he did with me that night was simply nothing more nor less than a frightful outburst, and it disturbed me. Not that I cared what Edwin did, as a rule, but I couldn’t help feeling a sort of what-d’you-call-it–a presentiment, that somehow, in some way I didn’t understand, I was mixed up in it, or was soon going to be. I think the whole fearful family had got on my nerves to such an extent that the mere sight of any of them made me jumpy.

And, by George, I was perfectly right, don’t you know. In a day or two along came the usual telegram from Florence, telling me to come to Madison Avenue.

The mere idea of Madison Avenue was beginning to give me that tired feeling, and I made up my mind I wouldn’t go near the place. But of course I did. When it came to the point, I simply hadn’t the common manly courage to keep away.