Alice Adams - Booth Tarkington (chrome ebook reader .TXT) 📗

her nods and vague responses to her young dependent’s gaieties were as meager as they could well be. Evidently the matron had no intention of appearing to her world in the light of a chaperone for Alice Adams; and she finally made this clear. With a word or two of excuse, breaking into something Alice was saying, she rose and went to sit next to Mildred’s mother, who had become the nucleus of the cluster. So Alice was left very much against the wall, with short stretches of vacant chairs on each side of her. She had come to the end of her picture-making, and could only pretend that there was something amusing the matter with the arm of her chair.

She supposed that Mildred’s Mr. Russell had forgotten Walter by this time. “I’m not even an intimate enough friend of Mildred’s for him to have thought he ought to bother to tell me he couldn’t find him,” she thought. And then she saw Russell coming across the room toward her, with Walter beside him. She jumped up gaily.

“Oh, thank you!” she cried. “I know this naughty boy must have been terribly hard to find. Mildred’ll never forgive me! I’ve put you to so much⁠—”

“Not at all,” he said, amiably, and went away, leaving the brother and sister together.

“Walter, let’s dance just once more,” Alice said, touching his arm placatively. “I thought⁠—well, perhaps we might go home then.”

But Walter’s expression was that of a person upon whom an outrage has just been perpetrated. “No,” he said. “We’ve stayed this long, I’m goin’ to wait and see what they got to eat. And you look here!” He turned upon her angrily. “Don’t you ever do that again!”

“Do what?”

“Send somebody after me that pokes his nose into every corner of the house till he finds me! ‘Are you Mr. Walter Adams?’ he says. I guess he must asked everybody in the place if they were Mr. Walter Adams! Well, I’ll bet a few iron men you wouldn’t send anybody to hunt for me again if you knew where he found me!”

“Where was it?”

Walter decided that her fit punishment was to know. “I was shootin’ dice with those coons in the cloakroom.”

“And he saw you?”

“Unless he was blind!” said Walter. “Come on, I’ll dance this one more dance with you. Supper comes after that, and then we’ll go home.”

Mrs. Adams heard Alice’s key turning in the front door and hurried down the stairs to meet her.

“Did you get wet coming in, darling?” she asked. “Did you have a good time?”

“Just lovely!” Alice said, cheerily, and after she had arranged the latch for Walter, who had gone to return the little car, she followed her mother upstairs and hummed a dance-tune on the way.

“Oh, I’m so glad you had a nice time,” Mrs. Adams said, as they reached the door of her daughter’s room together. “You deserved to, and it’s lovely to think⁠—”

But at this, without warning, Alice threw herself into her mother’s arms, sobbing so loudly that in his room, close by, her father, half drowsing through the night, started to full wakefulness.

IX

On a morning, a week after this collapse of festal hopes, Mrs. Adams and her daughter were concluding a three-days’ disturbance, the “Spring housecleaning”⁠—postponed until now by Adams’s long illness⁠—and Alice, on her knees before a chest of drawers, in her mother’s room, paused thoughtfully after dusting a packet of letters wrapped in worn muslin. She called to her mother, who was scrubbing the floor of the hallway just beyond the open door,

“These old letters you had in the bottom drawer, weren’t they some papa wrote you before you were married?”

Mrs. Adams laughed and said, “Yes. Just put ’em back where they were⁠—or else up in the attic⁠—anywhere you want to.”

“Do you mind if I read one, mama?”

Mrs. Adams laughed again. “Oh, I guess you can if you want to. I expect they’re pretty funny!”

Alice laughed in response, and chose the topmost letter of the packet. “My dear, beautiful girl,” it began; and she stared at these singular words. They gave her a shock like that caused by overhearing some bewildering impropriety; and, having read them over to herself several times, she went on to experience other shocks.

My Dear, Beautiful Girl:

This time yesterday I had a mighty bad case of blues because I had not had a word from you in two whole long days and when I do not hear from you every day things look mighty down in the mouth to me. Now it is all so different because your letter has arrived and besides I have got a piece of news I believe you will think as fine as I do. Darling, you will be surprised, so get ready to hear about a big effect on our future. It is this way. I had sort of a suspicion the head of the firm kind of took a fancy to me from the first when I went in there, and liked the way I attended to my work and so when he took me on this business trip with him I felt pretty sure of it and now it turns out I was about right. In return I guess I have got about the best boss in this world and I believe you will think so too. Yes, sweetheart, after the talk I have just had with him if J. A. Lamb asked me to cut my hand off for him I guess I would come pretty near doing it because what he says means the end of our waiting to be together. From New Years on he is going to put me in entire charge of the sundries dept. and what do you think is going to be my salary? Eleven hundred cool dollars a year ($1,100.00). That’s all! Just only a cool eleven hundred per annum! Well, I guess that will show your mother whether I can take care of you or not. And oh how I