Americans -- Europe -- Fiction; Europe -- Fiction; Love stories; Marriage -- Fiction; Married people -- Fiction; Socialites -- Fiction
“It may--it probably will,” he agreed. “But if one stopped to consider
such possibilities--”
“Don’t you have to, with a wife?”
“Oh, my dear Coral--how old are you? Not twenty?” he questioned, laying
a brotherly hand on hers.
She stared at him a moment, and sprang up clumsily from her chair. “I
was never young... if that’s what you mean. It’s lucky, isn’t it, that
my parents gave me such a grand education? Because, you see, art’s a
wonderful resource.” (She pronounced it RE-source.)
He continued to look at her kindly. “You won’t need it--or any
other--when you grow young, as you will some day,” he assured her.
“Do you mean, when I fall in love? But I am in love--Oh, there’s
Eldorada and Mr. Beck!” She broke off with a jerk, signalling with her
field-glass to the pair who had just appeared at the farther end of the
nave. “I told them that if they’d meet me here to-day I’d try to make
them understand Tiepolo. Because, you see, at home we never really
have understood Tiepolo; and Mr. Beck and Eldorada are the only ones to
realize it. Mr. Buttles simply won’t.” She turned to Lansing and held
out her hand. “I am in love,” she repeated earnestly, “and that’s the
reason why I find art such a RE source.”
She restored her eye-glasses, opened her manual, and strode across the
church to the expectant neophytes.
Lansing, looking after her, wondered for half a moment whether Mr. Beck
were the object of this apparently unrequited sentiment; then, with a
queer start of introspection, abruptly decided that, no, he certainly
was not. But then--but then--. Well, there was no use in following up
such conjectures.... He turned home-ward, wondering if the picnickers
had already reached Palazzo Vanderlyn.
They got back only in time for a late dinner, full of chaff and
laughter, and apparently still enchanted with each other’s society.
Nelson Vanderlyn beamed on his wife, sent his daughter off to bed with a
kiss, and leaning back in his armchair before the fruit-and-flower-laden
table, declared that he’d never spent a jollier day in his life. Susy
seemed to come in for a full share of his approbation, and Lansing
thought that Ellie was unusually demonstrative to her friend. Strefford,
from his hostess’s side, glanced across now and then at young Mrs.
Lansing, and his glance seemed to Lansing a confidential comment on the
Vanderlyn raptures. But then Strefford was always having private jokes
with people or about them; and Lansing was irritated with himself for
perpetually suspecting his best friends of vague complicities at his
expense. “If I’m going to be jealous of Streffy now--!” he concluded
with a grimace of self-derision.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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