They drove about,but they went to places without knowing why,except that the carriage man took them,and they had all the privileges of a proud exclusivism without desiring them.Once a motherly matron seemed to perceive their isolation,and made overtures to them,but then desisted,as if repelled by Christine's suspicion,or by Mela's too instant and hilarious good-fellowship,which expressed itself in hoarse laughter and in a flow of talk full of topical and syntactical freedom.
From time to time she offered to bet Christine that if Mr.Fulkerson was only there they would have a good time;she wondered what they were all doing in New York,where she wished herself;she rallied her sister about Beaton,and asked her why she did not write and tell him to come up there.
Mela knew that Christine had expected Beaton to follow them.Some banter had passed between them to this effect;he said he should take them in on his way home to Syracuse.Christine would not have hesitated to write to him and remind him of his promise;but she had learned to distrust her literature with Beaton since he had laughed at the spelling in a scrap of writing which dropped out of her music-book one night.She believed that he would not have laughed if he had known it was hers;but she felt that she could hide better the deficiencies which were not committed to paper;she could manage with him in talking;she was too ignorant of her ignorance to recognize the mistakes she made then.Through her own passion she perceived that she had some kind of fascination for him;she was graceful,and she thought it must be that;she did not understand that there was a kind of beauty in her small,irregular features that piqued and haunted his artistic sense,and a look in her black eyes beyond her intelligence and intention.Once he sketched her as they sat together,and flattered the portrait without getting what he wanted in it;he said he must try her some time in color;and he said things which,when she made Mela repeat them,could only mean that he admired her more than anybody else.He came fitfully,but he came often,and she rested content in a girl's indefiniteness concerning the affair;if her thought went beyond lovemaking to marriage,she believed that she could have him if she wanted him.Her father's money counted in this;she divined that Beaton was poor;but that made no difference;she would have enough for both;the money would have counted as an irresistible attraction if there had been no other.
The affair had gone on in spite of the sidelong looks of restless dislike with which Dryfoos regarded it;but now when Beaton did not come to Saratoga it necessarily dropped,and Christine's content with it.She bore the trial as long as she could;she used pride and resentment against it;but at last she could not bear it,and with Mela's help she wrote a letter,bantering Beaton on his stay in New York,and playfully boasting of Saratoga.It seemed to them both that it was a very bright letter,and would be sure to bring him;they would have had no scruple about sending it but for the doubt they had whether they had got some of the words right.Mela offered to bet Christine anything she dared that they were right,and she said,Send it anyway;it was no difference if they were wrong.But Christine could not endure to think of that laugh of Beaton's,and there remained only Mrs.Mandel as authority on the spelling.Christine dreaded her authority on other points,but Mela said she knew she would not interfere,and she undertook to get round her.
Mrs.Mandel pronounced the spelling bad,and the taste worse;she forbade them to send the letter;and Mela failed to get round her,though she threatened,if Mrs.Mandel would not tell her how to spell the wrong words,that she would send the letter as it was;then Mrs.Mandel said that if Mr.Beaton appeared in Saratoga she would instantly take them both home.When Mela reported this result,Christine accused her of having mismanaged the whole business;she quarrelled with her,and they called each other names.Christine declared that she would not stay in Saratoga,and that if Mrs.Mandel did not go back to New York with her she should go alone.They returned the first week in September;but by that time Beaton had gone to see his people in Syracuse.
Conrad Dryfoos remained at home with his mother after his father went West.He had already taken such a vacation as he had been willing to allow himself,and had spent it on a charity farm near the city,where the fathers with whom he worked among the poor on the East Side in the winter had sent some of their wards for the summer.It was not possible to keep his recreation a secret at the office,and Fulkerson found a pleasure in figuring the jolly time Brother Conrad must have teaching farm work among those paupers and potential reprobates.He invented details of his experience among them,and March could not always help joining in the laugh at Conrad's humorless helplessness under Fulkerson's burlesque denunciation of a summer outing spent in such dissipation.
They had time for a great deal of joking at the office during the season of leisure which penetrates in August to the very heart of business,and they all got on terms of greater intimacy if not greater friendliness than before.Fulkerson had not had so long to do with the advertising side of human nature without developing a vein of cynicism,of no great depth,perhaps,but broad,and underlying his whole point of view;he made light of Beaton's solemnity,as he made light of Conrad's humanity.
