Part 61 (2/2)

He resolved that the one safe step was to get Persis safely married at once and take her away from all of her acquaintances. Aboard his yacht would be one secure asylum. When they tired of that they could travel Europe, and the moment any old friend appeared he could decamp with her overnight.

He chuckled triumphantly over this plot, and set about its perfection.

He rejoiced to be in a position to compel Persis by way of her father's necessities. The support he had advanced to the ”old flub” he could threaten to withdraw unless the wedding were hastened. That would clinch it.

And then he glowed with the imagined scenes of the honeymoon. Persis might not love him as he wished, but he would have her for his own. He would have as much of her as any man could be sure of in possessing a woman. He knew he was not handsome, but he knew handsome men whose homely wives were notoriously false to them. Did he not know of wild romances that had ended in mutual contempt? Did he not know of unpromising beginnings that had ended in happiness? Monogamy was a gamble at best. And at worst he should have Persis for his own for a while.

CHAPTER XLVII

When Willie's mother left him in the aftermath of his nightmare she went to pay her duty call on Persis, to welcome her formally into the family and proffer her the use of the family name.

There was the most gleaming cordiality on the surface of their meeting, but the depths of both streams were a trifle murky. Willie's mother understood now why her own husband's fierce old mother, known as ”Medusa” Enslee, had received her with such constraint on a similar occasion. That mother had had to give up part of her name, too, and step back from being queen to being queen-mother, with endless confusion in the newspapers, the invitations, the correspondence, and the gossip.

The present Mrs. Enslee felt now a sympathy for the old woman she had hated. But it crowded out the sympathy she should have felt for Persis, who was suffering what she had suffered as a young-woman-afraid-of-her-mother-in-law.

It was bitter for Willie's mother, still beautiful, feeling herself as young as ever, to realize that henceforth she must be the ”the elder,”

or, worse yet, the ”old Mrs. Enslee.” Perhaps in a year or two a grandmother! It would be just like Persis to hasten that ghastly day.

At present Persis was not thinking of motherhood. She would have called it quite a ghastly day herself--one to be postponed by every ingenuity and subtlety known to American womanhood. She was thinking of her new name.

”You'll be Mrs. Enslee, and I suppose I'll be Mrs. William Enslee, or Mrs. Little Willie, sha'n't I, mama? Do you want me to call you mama, or shall I stick to Mrs. Enslee?”

”As you like, my dear,” said Mrs. Enslee, with a little shudder at being ”mama” to a strange woman and a rival. Persis rattled on in ill-managed embarra.s.sment.

”It will be pretty mixy with two Mrs. William Enslees, won't it? Like two in a single bed--pardon me! I'll have to be awfully good or awfully careful, sha'n't I, for fear my letters may fall into your hands? But I'll promise not to give away what I find in yours if you won't tell on me.”

Mrs. Enslee was rather pleased than offended at this. At least it credited her with the ability to create scandal.

She was like Mrs. Neff in hating to get too old to be suspected.

She smiled at Persis with Spanish coquetry, and offered her aid in the appalling details of announcing the engagement. It was the new mode to use the telephone for the more intimate friends. For others there were letters, calls, advertis.e.m.e.nts, luncheons, and dinners in all the exquisite degrees of familiarity.

She and Persis were going into business for a while on a large scale--a business for which Persis was peculiarly fitted and in which she developed an extraordinary energy.

When Persis had returned to New York from the Enslee country place to find her father helpless and dejected, the offer of Willie's aid had acted like a magic elixir. It had meant the payment of old bills, or their enlargement, and the opening of new credits. Dealers whom the mercantile agencies had secretly filled with alarm for the Cabot accounts had been subtly rea.s.sured.

In place of letters of pathetic appeal for a little something to meet a pay-roll there came letters announcing private views of new importations. Persis' own father called her his loan-broker, and said that she had earned the usual commission; he ordered her to buy new things. He complained of the shabbiness of her hats. Why hadn't she bought the lot she had spoken to him about some time ago? She did at once--and more.

Persis was like a child waking from a bad dream to find that it is Christmas morning and that its stockings are cornucopias spilling over with glittering toys.

And what woman lives that does not find more rapture in shopping with a full purse or an elastic charge-account than in any other earthly or spiritual pleasure?

The barbaric love of beads and red feathers and mirrors has never been civilized out of the s.e.x. The male succeeds in love and elsewhere by what he thinks and makes and gives; the female by what she looks and wears and extracts. The shops are her art-museums, her gymnasiums, her paradises, and the privilege of reveling among them is more voluptuous than any other of her sensualities. Shopping takes the place of exploration. That is her Wanderl.u.s.t.

And so when Willie Enslee arrived at the Cabot house with all his weapons ready to force Persis to an early marriage, he was astounded--he was even dismayed--to find that she offered no resistance, but greeted his proposal with delight. It was like making ready to besiege and storm a castle and being met half-way there by flower-girls instead of troops.

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