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

at the entrance to a driveway leading through fine lawns to the intentionally important mansion. It was a pleasant and impressive place to be seen entering, but Alice did not enter at once. She paused, examining a tiny bit of mortar which the masons had forgotten to scrape from a brick in one of the massive gateposts. She frowned at this tiny defacement, and with an air of annoyance scraped it away, using the ferrule of her cane⁠—an act of fastidious proprietorship. If anyone had looked back over his shoulder he would not have doubted that she lived there.

Alice did not turn to see whether anything of the sort happened or not, but she may have surmised that it did. At all events, it was with an invigorated step that she left the gateway behind her and went cheerfully up the drive to the house of her friend Mildred.

IV

Adams had a restless morning, and toward noon he asked Miss Perry to call his daughter; he wished to say something to her.

“I thought I heard her leaving the house a couple of hours ago⁠—maybe longer,” the nurse told him. “I’ll go see.” And she returned from the brief errand, her impression confirmed by information from Mrs. Adams. “Yes. She went up to Miss Mildred Palmer’s to see what she’s going to wear tonight.”

Adams looked at Miss Perry wearily, but remained passive, making no inquiries; for he was long accustomed to what seemed to him a kind of jargon among ladies, which became the more incomprehensible when they tried to explain it. A man’s best course, he had found, was just to let it go as so much sound. His sorrowful eyes followed the nurse as she went back to her rocking-chair by the window, and her placidity showed him that there was no mystery for her in the fact that Alice walked two miles to ask so simple a question when there was a telephone in the house. Obviously Miss Perry also comprehended why Alice thought it important to know what Mildred meant to wear. Adams understood why Alice should be concerned with what she herself wore “to look neat and tidy and at her best, why, of course she’d want to,” he thought⁠—but he realized that it was forever beyond him to understand why the clothing of other people had long since become an absorbing part of her life.

Her excursion this morning was no novelty; she was continually going to see what Mildred meant to wear, or what some other girl meant to wear; and when Alice came home from wherever other girls or women had been gathered, she always hurried to her mother with earnest descriptions of the clothing she had seen. At such times, if Adams was present, he might recognize “organdie,” or “taffeta,” or “chiffon,” as words defining certain textiles, but the rest was too technical for him, and he was like a dismal boy at a sermon, just waiting for it to get itself finished. Not the least of the mystery was his wife’s interest: she was almost indifferent about her own clothes, and when she consulted Alice about them spoke hurriedly and with an air of apology; but when Alice described other people’s clothes, Mrs. Adams listened as eagerly as the daughter talked.

“There they go!” he muttered today, a moment after he heard the front door closing, a sound recognizable throughout most of the thinly built house. Alice had just returned, and Mrs. Adams called to her from the upper hallway, not far from Adams’s door.

“What did she say?”

“She was sort of snippy about it,” Alice returned, ascending the stairs. “She gets that way sometimes, and pretended she hadn’t made up her mind, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be the maize Georgette with Malines flounces.”

“Didn’t you say she wore that at the Pattersons’?” Mrs. Adams inquired, as Alice arrived at the top of the stairs. “And didn’t you tell me she wore it again at the⁠—”

“Certainly not,” Alice interrupted, rather petulantly. “She’s never worn it but once, and of course she wouldn’t want to wear anything tonight that people have seen her in a lot.”

Miss Perry opened the door of Adams’s room and stepped out. “Your father wants to know if you’ll come and see him a minute, Miss Adams.”

“Poor old thing! Of course!” Alice exclaimed, and went quickly into the room, Miss Perry remaining outside. “What’s the matter, papa? Getting awful sick of lying on his tired old back, I expect.”

“I’ve had kind of a poor morning,” Adams said, as she patted his hand comfortingly. “I been thinking⁠—”

“Didn’t I tell you not to?” she cried, gaily. “Of course you’ll have poor times when you go and do just exactly what I say you mustn’t. You stop thinking this very minute!”

He smiled ruefully, closing his eyes; was silent for a moment, then asked her to sit beside the bed. “I been thinking of something I wanted to say,” he added.

“What like, papa?”

“Well, it’s nothing⁠—much,” he said, with something deprecatory in his tone, as if he felt vague impulses toward both humour and apology. “I just thought maybe I ought to’ve said more to you some time or other about⁠—well, about the way things are, down at Lamb and Company’s, for instance.”

“Now, papa!” She leaned forward in the chair she had taken, and pretended to slap his hand crossly. “Isn’t that exactly what I said you couldn’t think one single think about till you get all well?”

“Well⁠—” he said, and went on slowly, not looking at her, but at the ceiling. “I just thought maybe it wouldn’t been any harm if some time or other I told you something about the way they sort of depend on me down there.”

“Why don’t they show it, then?” she asked, quickly. “That’s just what mama and I have been feeling so much; they don’t appreciate you.”

“Why, yes, they do,” he said. “Yes, they do. They began h’isting my salary the second year I went in there, and