Her surprise, as she withdrew herself somewhat forcefully from his embrace, was plain enough. "Well!" she exclaimed vaguely, and then looked at him. "You're getting fatter.""No I'm not," he rejoined, with the earnestness belonging to an important topic. "People think I am--but it's merely the looseness of these clothes. There's really no difference since I was here last."The glance they exchanged was so full of the tacit comment that this last visit was a long time ago, that Thorpe put it into words. "Let's see--that was just before Christmas, wasn't it?" he said.
"Something like that," she responded. "You were going to get married in a week or two, I remember, and THATwas in January, wasn't it? I was taking stock, I know."He nodded in turn. The thought that his only sister recalled his marriage merely as a date, like a royal anniversary or a bank-holiday, and held herself implacably aloof from all contact with his domestic life, annoyed him afresh.
"You're an awful goat, not to come near us," he felt impelled, in brotherly frankness, to tell her.
She put out her lips, and wagged her head a little, in a gesture which it flashed across him his own mirror might often have recorded. "I thought that was all settled and done with long ago," she said, moodily.
"Oh, I won't worry you with it, Lou," he observed, with reassuring kindness of tone. "I never felt so much like being nice to you in my life."She seemed surprised at this, too, and regarded him with a heavy new fixity of gaze. No verbal comment, apparently, occurred to her.
"Julia and Alfred all right?" he queried, cheerfully.
"I daresay," she made brief answer.
"But they write to you, don't they?"
"SHE does--sometimes. They seem to be doing themselves very well, from what she says.""She'd write oftener, if you'd answer her letters,"he told her, in tones of confidential reproach.
"Oh, I don't write letters unless I've got something to say,"she answered, as if the explanation were ample.
The young people were domiciled for the time being at Dusseldorf, where Alfred had thought he would most like to begin his Continental student-career, and where Julia, upon the more or less colourable pretext of learning the language, might enjoy the mingled freedom and occupation of a home of her own.
They had taken a house for the summer and autumn, and would do the same in Dresden or Munich, later on, for the winter.
"What I would really have liked," Thorpe confided to his sister now, "was to have had them both live with me.
They would have been as welcome as the day is long.
I could see, of course, in Alfred's case, that if he's set on being an artist, he ought to study abroad.
Even the best English artists, he says, do that at the beginning. So it was all right for him to go.
But Julia--it was different with her--I was rather keen about her staying. My wife was just as keen as I was.
She took the greatest fancy to Julia from the very start--and so far as I could see, Julia liked her all right.
In fact, I thought Julia would want to stay--but somehow she didn't.""She always spoke very highly of your wife," Mrs. Dabney affirmed with judicial fairness. "I think she does like her very much.""Well then what did she want to hyke off to live among those Dutchmen for, when one of the best houses in England was open to her?" Thorpe demanded.
"You mustn't ask me," her mother responded. Her tone seemed to carry the suggestion that by silence she could best protect her daughter's interests.
"I don't believe you know any more about it than I do,"was his impulsive comment.
"I daresay not," she replied, with indifference.
"Probably she didn't fancy living in so big a house--although heaven knows her ideas are big enough about most things.""Did she say so?" Thorpe asked abruptly.
The widow shook her head with dispassionate candour.
"She didn't say anything to me about it, one way or the other.
I formed my own impressions--that's all. It's a free country.
Everybody can form their impressions."
"I wish you'd tell me what you really think," Thorpe urged her, mildly persuasive. "You know how fond I am of Julia, and how little I want to do her an injustice.""Oh, she wouldn't feel THAT way," Louisa observed, vaguely.
"If you ask me plain, I think it was dull for her.""Well," said Thorpe, upon reflection, "I shouldn't be surprised if it was. I hadn't thought of that.
But still--why she and my wife could be company for each other.""You talk as if life was merely a long railway journey,"she told him, in an unexpected flight of metaphor.
"Two women cooped up in a lonesome country house may be a little less lonely than one of them by herself would be--but not much. It's none of my business--but how your wife must hate it!"He laughed easily. "Ah, that's where you're wrong,"he said. "She doesn't care about anything but gardening.
That's her hobby. She's crazy about it. We've laid out more in new greenhouses alone, not counting the plants, than would rebuild this building. I'm not sure the heating apparatus wouldn't come to that, alone. And then the plants!
What do you think of six and eight guineas for a single root? Those are the amaryllises--and if you come to orchids, you can pay hundreds if you like. Well, that's her passion.
That's what she really loves."
"That's what she seizes upon to keep her from just dying of loneliness," Louisa retorted, obstinately, and at a sign of dissent from her brother she went on. "Oh, I know what I'm talking about. I have three or four customers--ladies in the country, and one of them is a lady of title, too--and they order gardening books and other books through me, and when they get up to town, once a year or so, they come here and they talk to me about it. And there isn't one of them that at the bottom of her heart doesn't hate it.
