IX

One Wednesday in June Sherman arrived home an hour earlier than usual from his office, as his wont was the first Wednesday in every month, on which day his mother was at home to her friends. They had not many callers. To-day there was no one as yet but a badly-dressed old lady his mother had picked up he knew not where. She had been looking at his photograph album, and recalling names and dates from her own prosperous times. As she went out Miss Leland came in. She gave the old lady in passing a critical look that made the poor creature very conscious of a threadbare mantle, and went over to Mrs. Sherman, holding out both hands. Sherman, who knew all his mother’s peculiarities, noticed on her side a slight coldness; perhaps she did not altogether like this beautiful dragon-fly.

‘I have come,’ said Miss Leland, ‘to tell John that he must learn to paint. Music and society are not enough. There is nothing like art to give refinement.’ Then turning to John Sherman—‘My dear, I will make you quite different. You are a dreadful barbarian, you know.’

‘What ails me, Margaret?’

‘Just look at that necktie! Nothing shows a man’s cultivation like his necktie! Then your reading! You never read anything but old books nobody wants to talk about. I will lend you three everyone has read this month. You really must acquire small talk and change your necktie.’

Presently she noticed the photograph-book lying open on a chair.

‘Oh!’ she cried, ‘I must have another look at John’s beauties.’

It was a habit of his to gather all manner of pretty faces. It came from incipient old bachelorhood, perhaps.

Margaret criticised each photograph in turn with, ‘Ah! she looks as if she had some life in her!’ or ‘I do not like your sleepy eyelids,’ or some such phrase. The mere relations were passed by without a word. One face occurred several times—a quiet face. As Margaret came on this one for the third time, Mrs. Sherman, who seemed a little resentful about something, said: ‘That is his friend, Mary Carton.’

‘He told me about her. He has a book she gave him. So that is she? How interesting! I pity these poor country people. It must be hard to keep from getting stupid.’

‘My friend is not at all stupid,’ said Sherman.

‘Does she speak with a brogue? I remember you told me she was very good. It must be difficult to keep from talking platitudes when one is very good.’

‘You are quite wrong about her. You would like her very much,’ he replied.

‘She is one of those people, I suppose, who can only talk about their relatives, or their families, or about their friends’ children: how this one has got the whooping-cough, and this one is getting well of the measles!’ She kept swaying one of the leaves between her finger and thumb impatiently. ‘What a strange way she does her hair; and what an ugly dress!’

‘You must not talk that way about her—she is my great friend.’

‘Friend! friend!’ she burst out. ‘He thinks I will believe in friendship between a man and a woman!’

She got up, and said, turning round with an air of changing the subject, ‘Have you written to your friends about our engagement? You had not done so when I asked you lately.’

‘I have.’

‘All?’

‘Well, not all.’

‘Your great friend, Miss —— what do you call her?’

‘Miss Carton. I have not written to her.’

She tapped impatiently with her foot.

‘They were really old companions—that is all,’ said Mrs. Sherman, wishing to mend matters. ‘They were both readers; that brought them together. I never much fancied her. Yet she was well enough as a friend, and helped, maybe, with reading, and the gardening, and his good bringing-up, to keep him from the idle young men of the neighbourhood.’

‘You must make him write and tell her at once—you must, you must!’ almost sobbed out Miss Leland.

‘I promise,’ he answered.

Immediately returning to herself, she cried, ‘If I were in her place I know what I would like to do when I got the letter. I know who I would like to kill!’—this with a laugh as she went over and looked at herself in the mirror on the mantlepiece.