The Essential Booth Tarkington Collection. Booth Tarkington
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Yes, he would like to, the rat! But he's consoled when he can get any one to listen to his awful chatter. He makes up to himself among women for the way he gets sat on at the club. But he has his use: he shows off the other men so, by contrast. Oh, Laura!" She lifted both hands to her cheeks, which were beautiful with a quick suffusion of high colour. "Isn't he gorgeous!"
"Yes," said Laura gently, "I've always thought so."
"Now what's the use of that?" asked Cora peevishly, "with _me_? I didn't mean Richard Lindley. You _know_ what I mean."
"Yes--of course--I do," Laura said.
Cora gave her a long look in which a childlike pleading mingled with a faint, strange trouble; then this glance wandered moodily from the face of her sister to her own slippers, which she elevated to meet her descending line of vision.
"And you know I can't help it," she said, shifting quickly to the role of accuser. "So what's the use of behaving like the Pest?" She let her feet drop to the floor again, and her voice trembled a little as she went on: "Laura, you don't know what I had to endure from him to-night. I really don't think I can stand it to live in the same house any longer with that frightful little devil. He's been throwing Ray Vilas's name at me until--oh, it was ghastly to-night! And then--then----" Her tremulousness increased. "I haven't said anything about it all day, but I _met_ him on the street downtown, this morning----"
"You met Vilas?" Laura looked startled. "Did he speak to you?"
"`Speak to me!'" Cora's exclamation shook with a half-laugh of hysteria. "He made an awful _scene_! He came out of the Richfield Hotel barroom on Main Street just as I was going into the jeweller's next door, and he stopped and bowed like a monkey, square in front of me, and--and he took off his hat and set it on the pavement at my feet and told me to kick it into the gutter! Everybody stopped and stared; and I couldn't get by him. And he said--he said I'd kicked his heart into the gutter and he didn't want it to catch cold without a hat! And wouldn't I please be so kind as to kick----" She choked with angry mortification. "It was horrible! People were stopping and laughing, and a rowdy began to make fun of Ray, and pushed him, and they got into a scuffle, and I ran into the jeweller's and almost fainted."
"He is insane!" said Laura, aghast.
"He's nothing of the kind; he's just a brute. He does it to make people say I'm the cause of his drinking; and everybody in this gossipy old town _does_ say it--just because I got bored to death with his everlasting do-you-love-me-to-day-as-well-as-yesterday style of torment, and couldn't help liking Richard better. Yes, every old cat in town says I ruined him, and that's what he wants them to say. It's so unmanly! I wish he'd die! Yes, I _do_ wish he would! Why doesn't he kill himself?"
"Ah, don't say that," protested Laura.
"Why not? He's threatened to enough. And I'm afraid to go out of the house because I can't tell when I'll meet him or what he'll do. I was almost sick in that jeweller's shop, this morning, and so upset I came away without getting my pendant. There's _another_ thing I've got to go through, I suppose!" She pounded the yielding pillow desperately. "Oh, oh, oh! Life isn't worth living--it seems to me sometimes as if everybody in the world spent his time trying to think up ways to make it harder for me! I couldn't have worn the pendant, though, even if I'd got it," she went on, becoming thoughtful. "It's Richard's silly old engagement ring, you know," she explained, lightly. "I had it made up into a pendant, and heaven knows how I'm going to get Richard to see it the right way. He was so unreasonable tonight."
"Was he cross about Mr. Corliss monopolizing you?"
"Oh, you know how he is," said Cora. "He didn't speak of it exactly. But after you'd gone, he asked me----" She stopped with a little gulp, an expression of keen distaste about her mouth.
"Oh, he wants me to wear my ring," she continued, with sudden rapidity: "and how the dickens _can_ I when I can't even tell him it's been made into a pendant! He wants to speak to father; he wants to _announce_ it. He's sold out his business for what he thinks is a good deal of money, and he wants me to marry him next month and take some miserable little trip, I don't know where, for a few weeks, before he invests what he's made in another business. Oh!" she cried. "It's a _horrible_ thing to ask a girl to do: to settle down--just housekeeping, housekeeping, housekeeping forever in this stupid, stupid town! It's so unfair! Men are just possessive; they think it's loving you to want to possess you themselves. A beautiful `love'! It's so mean! Men!" She sprang up and threw out both arms in a vehement gesture of revolt. "Damn 'em, I wish they'd let me _alone_!"
Laura's eyes had lost their quiet; they showed a glint of tears, and she was breathing quickly. In this crisis of emotion the two girls went to each other silently; Cora turned, and Laura began to unfasten Cora's dress in the back.
"Poor Richard!" said Laura presently, putting into her mouth a tiny pearl button which had detached itself at her touch. "This was his first evening in the overflow. No wonder he was troubled!"
"Pooh!" said Cora. "As if you and mamma weren't good enough for him to talk to! He's spoiled. He's so used to being called `the most popular man in town' and knowing that every girl on Corliss Street wanted to marry him----" She broke off, and exclaimed sharply: "I wish they would!"
"Cora!"
"Oh, I suppose you mean that's the reason _I_ went in for him?"
"No, no," explained Laura hurriedly. "I only meant, stand still."
"Well, it was!" And Cora's abrupt laugh had the glad, free ring fancy attaches to the merry confidences of a buccaneer in trusted company.
Laura knelt to continue unfastening the dress; and when it was finished she extended three of the tiny buttons in her hand. "They're always loose on a new dress," she said. "I'll sew them all on tight, to-morrow."
Cora smiled lovingly. "You good old thing," she said. "You looked pretty to-night."
"That's nice!" Laura laughed, as she dropped the buttons into a little drawer of her bureau. It was an ugly, cheap, old bureau, its veneer loosened and peeling, the mirror small and flawed--a piece of furniture in keeping with the room, which was small, plain and hot, its only ornamental adjunct being a silver-framed photograph of Mrs. Madison, with Cora, as a child of seven or eight, upon her lap.
"You really do look ever so pretty," asserted Cora.
"I wonder if I look as well as I did the last time I heard I was pretty," said the other. "That was at the Assembly in March. Coming down the stairs, I heard a man from out of town say, `That black-haired Miss Madison is a pretty girl.' And some one with him said, `Yes; you'll think so until you meet her sister!'"
"You are an old dear!" Cora enfolded her delightedly; then, drawing back, exclaimed: "You _know_ he's gorgeous!" And with a feverish little ripple of laughter, caught her dress together in the back and sped through the hall to her own room.
This was a very different affair from Laura's, much cooler and larger; occupying half the width of the house; and a rather expensive struggle had made it pretty and even luxurious. The window curtains and the wall-paper were fresh, and of a quiet blue; there was a large divan of the same colour; a light desk, prettily equipped, occupied a corner; and between two gilt gas-brackets, whose patent burners were shielded by fringed silk shades, stood a cheval-glass six feet high. The door of a very large clothes-pantry stood open, showing a fine company of dresses, suspended from forms in an orderly manner; near by, a rosewood cabinet exhibited a delicate collection of shoes and slippers upon its four shelves. A dressing-table, charmingly littered with everything, took the place of a bureau; and upon it, in a massive silver frame, was a large photograph of Mr. Richard Lindley. The frame was handsome, but somewhat battered: it had seen service. However, the photograph was quite new.
There were photographs everywhere--photographs framed and unframed; photographs large and photographs small, the fresh and the faded; tintypes, kodaks, "full lengths," "cabinets," groups--every kind of photograph; and among them were several of Cora herself,