Affinities and Other Stories Part 10

I said I liked to play round with men and have a good time and all that sort of thing, but that I thought I was naturally cold.

"You cold?" he said. "It's only that the right man has not come along."

"I've known a good many. A good many have--have----"

"Cared for you? Of course. They're not fools or blind. Look here, I'm going to ring you up now and then."

"I think you'd better not."

"If I'm not to see you and not to telephone, how's this friends.h.i.+p of ours to get on?"

"People who are real friends don't need to see each other."

"That's the first real debutante speech you've made to-night. Now, see here, I'm going to see you again, and often. And I'm going to ring you up. What's your tailor's name?"

I told him, and he put it down on his dance card.

"All right," he said. "Herschenrother is now my middle name, and if it's not convenient to talk, you can give me the high sign."

Toots Warrington came along just then with an army officer she'd taken on. They got clear round the palms and into the pantry before they saw us, and her face was funny.

Mother and I had another heart-to-heart talk that night on the way home.

Father had gone a couple of hours earlier and we had the car to ourselves. Mother was tired and irritable.

"It seemed to me, Kit," she observed, "that you danced with every hopeless ineligible there. You danced three times with Henry."

"For heaven's sake, mother," I snapped, "let poor Henry alone. Henry is the most useful person I know."

"You can't play with red-headed people and not get burned," mother said with unconscious humour. "He's very fond of you, Kit. I watched him to-night."

"The fonder the better," I said flippantly. Yes, that's what I said.

When I look back on that evening and think how little Henry entered into my plans, and the rest of it, it makes me cold.

"I want you to do one thing--just one, mother: I want you to be very cool to Russell Hill."

"Cool!"

"And I want you to forbid me to see him."

"I'm not insane, Katherine."

"Listen, mother," I said desperately. "All his life Russell Hill has had everything he wanted. He's had so much that--that he's got a sort of social indigestion. The only things he wants now are the things he can't have. So he can't have me."

Mother's not very subtle. And she was alarmed. I can still see her trying to readjust her ideas, and getting tied up in them, and coming a mental cropper, so to speak.

"If he can't have me he'll want me."

"I'm not sure of it. He----"

"Mother," I said in despair, "you've been married for twenty years, and you know less about men in a month than I do in a minute. Please forbid him the house--not in so many words, but act it."

"Why?" she said feebly.

"Anything you can think of--Toots Warrington will do."

She got out her salts and held them to her nose.

"I feel as though I'm losing my mind," she said at last. "But if you're set on it----"

That was all until we got home. Then on the stairs I thought of something.

"Oh, yes," I said. "No matter what I am doing, mother, if Herschenrother the tailor calls up I want to go to the telephone."

I can still see her staring after me with her mouth open as I went up the stairs.

Herschenrother called me up the next morning, and asked me how I was, and how the dragons were, and if there was any chance of my walking in the park at five o'clock. I said there was, and called up Henry and asked him to walk with me.

"I should say so," he said. "You've only got to ask me, Kit. I'm always ready to hang round."

There was rather a bad half hour in the park, and for a time I felt that Henry had been a wrong move. But, as it turned out he hadn't, for Russell took advantage of somebody's signalling to Henry from a machine to say:

"Just a bit afraid of me still, aren't you?"

"Why?"

"You brought Henry. I know the signs. You asked him, and he's so set up about it that he's walking on clouds."

"I am afraid."

"Of me?"

"Of myself."

He caught my arm as he helped me across a puddle, and squeezed it.

"Good girl!" he said.

And later on, when Henry was called again--he's terribly popular, Henry is--he had another chance.

"I'm going to see you alone if I have to steal you," he said.

Herschenrother called up again the next day, and Madge, who had come home for the Christmas holidays, called me.

"Gee, Kit," she said, "you must be getting a trousseau. That tailor's always on the phone."

I went.

"h.e.l.lo," said Russell's voice, "how about that fitting?"