The Business of Life

"Get your furs on," he said, in a dull voice.

"Do you wish me to go home?"

"Get your furs on!"

"Do you wish me to go home, Cary?"

"Yes. Good God! What do you suppose I came here for?"

She walked over to Desboro and held out her hand:

"No wonder women like you. Good-bye – and if I come again – may I remain?"

"Don't come," he said, smiling, and holding her coat for her.

Clydesdale strode forward, took the fur garment from Desboro's hands, and held it open. His wife looked up at him, shrugged her shoulders, and suffered him to invest her with the coat.

After a moment Desboro said:

"Clydesdale, I am not your enemy. I wish you good luck."

"You go to hell," said Clydesdale thickly.

Mrs. Clydesdale moved toward the door, her husband on one side, Desboro on the other, and so, along the hall in silence, and out to the porch, where the glare of the acetylenes lighted up the frozen drive.

"It feels like rain," observed Desboro. "Not a very gay outlook for Christmas. All the same, I wish you a happy one, Elena. And, really, I believe you could have it if you cared to."

"Thank you, Jim. You have been mistakenly kind to me. I am afraid you will have to be crueller some day. Good-bye – till then."

Clydesdale had descended to the drive and was conferring with the chauffeur. Now he turned and looked up at his wife. She went down the steps beside Desboro, and he nodded good-night. Clydesdale put her into the limousine and then got in after her.

A few moments later the red tail-lamp of the motor disappeared among the trees bordering the drive, and Desboro turned and walked back into the house.

"That," he said aloud to himself, "settles the damned species for me! Let the next one look out for herself!"

He sauntered back into the library. The letter that she had left for her husband still lay on the table, apparently forgotten.

"A fine specimen of logic," he said. "She doesn't get on with him, so she decides to use Jim to jimmy the lock of wedlock! A white man can understand the Orientals better."

He glanced at the clock, and decided that there was no sense in going to bed, so he composed himself on the haircloth sofa once more, lighted a cigarette, and began to read, coolly using the note she had left, as a bookmark.

It was dawn before he closed the book and went away to bathe and change his attire.

While breakfasting he glanced out and saw that it had begun to rain. A green Christmas for day after to-morrow! And, thinking of Christmas, he thought of a girl he knew who usually wore blue, and what sort of a gift he had better send her when he went to the city that morning.

But he didn't go. He called up a jeweler and gave directions what to send and where to send it.

Then, listless, depressed, he idled about the great house, putting off instinctively the paramount issue – the necessary investigation of his finances. But he had evaded it too long to attempt it lightly now. It was only a question of days before he'd have to take up in deadly earnest the question of how to pay his debts. He knew it; and it made him yawn with disgust.

After luncheon he wrote a letter to one Jean Louis Nevers, a New York dealer in antiques, saying that he would drop in some day after Christmas to consult Mr. Nevers on a matter of private business.

And that is as far as he got with his very vague plan for paying off an accumulation of debts which, at last, were seriously annoying him.

The remainder of the day he spent tramping about the woods of Westchester with a pack of nondescript dogs belonging to him. He liked to walk in the rain; he liked his mongrels.

In the evening he resumed his attitude of unstudied elegance on the sofa, also his book, using Mrs. Clydesdale's note again to mark his place.

Mrs. Quant ventured to knock, bringing some "magic drops," which he smilingly refused. Farris announced dinner, and he dined as usual, surrounded by dogs and cats, all very cordial toward the master of Silverwood, who was unvaryingly so just and so kind to them.

After dinner he lighted a pipe, thought idly of the girl in blue, hoped she'd like his gift of aquamarines, and picked up his book again, yawning.

He had had about enough of Silverwood, and he was realising it. He had had more than enough of women, too.

The next day, riding one of his weedy hunters over Silverwood estate, he encountered the daughter of a neighbor, an old playmate of his when summer days were half a year long, and yesterdays immediately became embedded in the middle of the middle ages.

She was riding a fretful, handsome Kentucky three-year-old, and sitting nonchalantly to his exasperating and jiggling gait.

The girl was one Daisy Hammerton – the sort men call "square" and "white," and a "good fellow"; but she was softly rounded and dark, and very feminine.

She bade him good morning in a friendly voice; and her voice and manner might well have been different, for Desboro had not behaved very civilly toward her or toward her family, or to any of his Westchester neighbors for that matter; and the rumours of his behaviour in New York were anything but pleasant to a young girl's ears. So her cordiality was the more to her credit.

He made rather shame-faced inquiries about her and her parents, but she lightly put him at his ease, and they turned into the woods together on the old and unembarrassed terms of comradeship.

"Captain Herrendene is back. Did you know it?" she asked.

"Nice old bird," commented Desboro. "I must look him up. Where did he come from – Luzon?"

"Yes. He wrote us. Why don't you ask him up for the skating, Jim?"

"What skating?" said Desboro, with a laugh. "It will be a green Christmas, Daisy – it's going to rain again. Besides," he added, "I shan't be here much longer."

"Oh, I'm sorry."

He reddened. "You always were the sweetest thing in Westchester. Fancy your being sorry that I'm going back to town when I've never once ridden over to see you as long as I've been here!"

She laughed. "We've known each other too long to let such things make any real difference. But you have been a trifle negligent."

"Daisy, dear, I'm that way in everything. If anybody asked me to name the one person I would not neglect, I'd name you. But you see what happens – even to you! I don't know – I don't seem to have any character. I don't know what's the matter with me – "

"I'm afraid that you have no beliefs, Jim."

"How can I have any when the world is so rotten after nineteen hundred years of Christianity?"

"I have not found it rotten."

"No, because you live in a clean and wholesome circle."

"Why don't you, too? You can live where you please, can't you?"