PAGE 3
Miss Delamar’s Understudy
by
Sloane was starting the next morning for the Somali Country, in Abyssinia, to shoot rhinoceros, and his interest in matrimony was in consequence somewhat slight.
“It isn’t the fear of the responsibilities that keeps Stuart, nor any one of us back,” said Weimer, contemptuously. “It’s because we’re selfish. That’s the whole truth of the matter. We love our work, or our pleasure, or to knock about the world, better than we do any particular woman. When one of us comes to love the woman best, his conscience won’t trouble him long about the responsibilities of marrying her.”
“Not at all,” said Stuart, “I am quite sincere; I maintain that there should be a preliminary stage. Of course there can’t be, and it’s absurd to think of it, but it would save a lot of unhappiness.”
“Well,” said Seldon, dryly, “when you’ve invented a way to prevent marriage from being a lottery, let me know, will you?” He stood up and smiled nervously. “Any of you coming to see us to-night?” he asked.
“That’s so,” exclaimed Weimer, “I forgot. It’s the first night of ‘A Fool and His Money,’ isn’t it? Of course we’re coming.”
“I told them to put a box away for you in case you wanted it,” Seldon continued. “Don’t expect much. It’s a silly piece, and I’ve a silly part, and I’m very bad in it. You must come around to supper, and tell me where I’m bad in it, and we will talk it over. You coming, Stuart?”
“My dear old man,” said Stuart, reproachfully. “Of course I am. I’ve had my seats for the last three weeks. Do you suppose I could miss hearing you mispronounce all the Hindostanee I’ve taught you?”
“Well, good-night then,” said the actor, waving his hand to his friends as he moved away. “‘We, who are about to die, salute you!'”
“Good luck to you,” said Sloane, holding up his glass. “To the Fool and His Money,” he laughed. He turned to the table again, and sounded the bell for the waiter. “Now let’s send him a telegram and wish him success, and all sign it,” he said, “and don’t you fellows tell him that I wasn’t in front to-night. I’ve got to go to a dinner the Travellers’ Club are giving me.” There was a protesting chorus of remonstrance. “Oh, I don’t like it any better than you do,” said Sloane, “but I’ll get away early and join you before the play’s over. No one in the Travellers’ Club, you see, has ever travelled farther from New York than London or the Riviera, and so when a member starts for Abyssinia they give him a dinner, and he has to take himself very seriously indeed, and cry with Seldon, ‘I who am about to die, salute you.’ If that man there was any use,” he added, interrupting himself and pointing with his glass at Stuart, “he’d pack up his things to-night and come with me.”
“Oh, don’t urge him,” remonstrated Weimer, who had travelled all over the world in imagination, with the aid of globes and maps, but never had got any farther from home than Montreal. “We can’t spare Stuart. He has to stop here and invent a preliminary marriage state, so that if he finds he doesn’t like a girl, he can leave her before it is too late.”
“You sail at seven, I believe, and from Hoboken, don’t you?” asked Stuart undisturbed. “If you’ll start at eleven from the New York side, I think I’ll go with you, but I hate getting up early; and then you see–I know what dangers lurk in Abyssinia, but who could tell what might not happen to him in Hoboken?”
When Stuart returned to his room, he found a large package set upright in an armchair and enveloped by many wrappings; but the handwriting on the outside told him at once from whom it came and what it might be, and he pounced upon it eagerly and tore it from its covers. The photograph was a very large one, and the likeness to the original so admirable that the face seemed to smile and radiate with all the loveliness and beauty of Miss Delamar herself. Stuart beamed upon it with genuine surprise and pleasure, and exclaimed delightedly to himself. There was a living quality about the picture which made him almost speak to it, and thank Miss Delamar through it for the pleasure she had given him and the honor she had bestowed. He was proud, flattered, and triumphant, and while he walked about the room deciding where he would place it, and holding the picture respectfully before him, he smiled upon it with grateful satisfaction.