"Yes--right in the corners of the eyes, just after he has smiled,
you'll see them come. They're not tired marks exactly, but rather the
old eternal questions: Why? What for? What's it worth? What's it all
about?"
* * * * *
And bringing up the rear of the cavalcade, Ernestine and Graham talked.
"Dick's deep," she was saying. "You don't know him any too well. He's
dreadfully deep. I know him a little. Paula knows him a lot. But very
few others ever get under the surface of him. He's a real philosopher,
and he has the control of a stoic or an Englishman, and he can play-act
to fool the world."
* * * * *
At the long hitching rails under the oaks, where the dismounting party
gathered, Paula was in gales of laughter.
"Go on, go on," she urged Dick, "more, more."
"She's been accusing me of exhausting my vocabulary in naming the
house-boys by my system," he explained.
"And he's given me at least forty more names in a minute and a
half.--Go on, Dick, more."
"Then," he said, striking a chant, "we can have Oh Sin and Oh Pshaw, Oh
Sing and Oh Song, Oh Sung and Oh Sang, Oh Last and Oh Least, Oh Ping
and Oh Pong, Oh Some, Oh More, and Oh Most, Oh Naught and Oh Nit..."
And Dick jingled away into the house still chanting his extemporized
directory.
CHAPTER XVII
A week of dissatisfaction and restlessness ensued for Graham. Tom
between belief that his business was to leave the Big House on the
first train, and desire to see, and see more of Paula, to be with her,
and to be more with her--he succeeded in neither leaving nor in seeing
as much of her as during the first days of his visit.
At first, and for the five days that he lingered, the young violinist
monopolized nearly her entire time of visibility. Often Graham strayed
into the music room, and, quite neglected by the pair, sat for moody
half-hours listening to their "work." They were oblivious of his
presence, either flushed and absorbed with the passion of their music,
or wiping their foreheads and chatting and laughing companionably in
pauses to rest. That the young musician loved her with an ardency that
was almost painful, was patent to Graham; but what hurt him was the
abandon of devotion with which she sometimes looked at Ware after he
had done something exceptionally fine. In vain Graham tried to tell
himself that all this was mental on her part--purely delighted
appreciation of the other's artistry. Nevertheless, being man, it hurt,
and continued to hurt, until he could no longer suffer himself to
remain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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