At another time he might have smiled at the boyish frankness of the
question. But it was a better motive than the analyst's that prompted
his answer.
"Plenty of them, Margery, girl; too many for the good of the race. You
mustn't try to make a hero out of me. Once in a while I get a glimpse of
the real Kenneth Griswold--you are giving me one just now--and it's
sickening. For a moment I was meanly jealous; jealous of Raymer. It was
only the writing part of me, I hope, but----"
He stopped because she had suddenly turned her back on him and was
looking out over the lake again. When she spoke, she went back to the
business affair.
"When you invest money you ought to look after it," she said
magisterially. "You are a Socialist, aren't you? How do you know that
your money isn't being used to oppress somebody?"
"Oh, I do know that much," was the investor's protest. "Raymer is a good
boss--too good for the crowd he is trying to brother, I'm afraid."
"What makes you say that?"
"A word or two that he has dropped, now and then. When he branched out,
he had to increase his force accordingly. Some of the new men seem
inclined to make trouble."
Again she fell silent, and he saw the brooding look come into the dark
eyes. It was evident that something he had said had started a train of
thought--and the thoughts were not altogether pleasant ones. Analyzing
again, he fancied he could picture the inward struggle to break away
from the unpleasantnesses, and he shook hands enthusiastically with his
own gift of insight when she looked up suddenly and said: "See! the
breeze is freshening out on the water. You are fagged and tired and
needing a bracer. Let's go and do a turn on the lake in the _Clytie_."
From where he was sitting Griswold could see the trim little catboat,
resplendent in polished brass and mahogany, riding at its buoy beyond
the lawn landing-stage. He cared little for the water, but the
invitation pointed to a delightful prolongation of the basking process
which had come to be one of the chief luxuries of the Mereside
afternoons.
"I'm not much of a sailor," he began; but she cut him off.
"You'll do to pull and haul. Wait for me; I'll be ready in less time
than it would take another woman--_Fidelia_, for example--to make up her
mind what she wanted to wear."
He waited; and when she came down, a few minutes later, crisply boyish
in the nattiest of yachting costumes, he wondered how she could appear
in so many different characters, fitting each in succession and
contriving always to make the latest transformation, while it lasted,
the one in which she figured as the most enticingly adorable.
"Did you look in the glass before you came down?" he asked, standing up
to get the artistic effect of the shapely little figure backgrounded
against the dull reds of the house wall.
"Naturally," she laughed. "Why, please? Is my face dirty?"
He ignored the flippancy.
"If you did, I don't need to tell you how irresistibly dazzling you
are."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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