Part 2 (1/2)
After he had gone Dr. Sanford gave his chuckle such full vent that it broke into an explosion little short of a snort.
”I suppose there is something of the anarchist in me,” he said; ”but I confess to liking to see a self-conscious, self-made millionaire a trifle miserable, without, I trust, in the least compromising my standing as a good Christian.”
”Peter was certainly funny,” a.s.sented Mrs. Sanford, smiling now.
Then they forget Peter, these three. They forget everything but the fact that they were together. The detail of their talk Phil could hardly have recollected the next day, but every sentence of it came to him when he was prostrate in that noiseless and sightless world in France.
After the proud old pair were under the coverlets that night their theme was the same that it had been a thousand times. Following generations of professors, doctors, and lawyers had come the man of action. Philip had succeeded out in that forbidding world of business and strife: this was the wonderful thing to them.
”He's changed,” said the mother.
”Three years older,” said the father. ”The world has humanised him, made him fonder of us.”
”And didn't you think that he looked more like our ancestor?” Mrs.
Sanford always referred to the man in the square as ”ours.”
”Yes, the old blood. Action reappears and likeness of feature. What relation are those two Ribot girls? I was trying to think.”
”About seventeenth,” said Mrs. Sanford dreamily.
”What a lot of cousins they would make if they all stood in a row!”
mused Dr. Sanford.
CHAPTER II
TWO GIRLS ON A TRAIN
His object being to see England and not to become a member of the menagerie of home types in a pile overlooking the Thames Embankment, the hotel that Philip had chosen was a small one, where a truly English headwaiter, who was not trying to conceal a German accent, treated him with a lofty courtesy and his bath was brought by a maid instead of by the labour-saving device of pipes.
”You rise very early,” said the young woman in black at the desk.
”The King did not know that I was coming and I do just as I please,”
Phil replied; and she unbent a little from her dignity and almost laughed.
Against the criterion of all sniffy people who talk of how many times they have been abroad, which sometimes means only a journey from the London to the Paris and the Paris to the Berlin menageries, he was frankly one of the horde of tourists, rising at dawn to make sightseeing a diligent business, who are a.s.siduously cultivated by shopkeepers if somewhat neglected by the n.o.bility. When he moved on the Tower, Westminster Abbey, or Oxford, he made no attempt to conceal his red guidebook. He was at home with schoolmistresses from the Middle West doing a schedule on a set sum or with the wealthy acquaintance he had made on board s.h.i.+p who took him for a motor ride to Canterbury.
Now he was on the way to Truckleford to spend the night, in response to the invitation of the sixteenth degree cousin. Up to the moment of starting he thought that he should have the compartment to himself, when two young women appeared, both a trifle short of breath. So impressionable a tourist as himself could not fail to notice that the one who entered first was strikingly good-looking, a girl with a quality of manner and dress which he a.s.sociated with the Continent, though he had never been there.
”We caught it, at any rate!” she gasped, dropping into a seat.
”Just about!” said the other, who was as distinctly plain at first glance as the other was attractive. ”But your run has given you a lovely colour!” she added admiringly. If the one wished to be shown up by contrast for her beauty and the other for her plainness, they had an object in travelling together.
”My hair must be in a shocking state, though,” said the beautiful one, as Phil already designated her in his mind.
She drew a mirror from her bag, not to look at her colouring, of course, but to arrange a few strands of hair. Turning her head this way and that, she attended to the disarray due to her haste in dressing perhaps, as well as to her rush for the train. If a woman's hand and arm and the particular way she holds her fingers when she shepherds strands of hair were more awkward, possibly fewer strands would need attention in public. There is something confidential in these quick fondling movements which have drawn a reader's eyelashes above the margin of a newspaper many millions of times. This girl made it an unusually graceful and leisurely function; and once, when her glance met Phil's, it seemed not to see that any person was opposite to her, yet it said: ”I know that others are not displeased with what I see in the mirror; then why should I be?”
The plain girl also had some riotously stray strands of hair, but they did not concern her. It was not for her to find friendliness in mirrors.