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Among the Colonel's friends the magazine reporter Princhard had been considered an ignorant and malicious liar. Isabelle looked eagerly as Cairy pointed him out, a short, bespectacled man with a thin beard, who was talking to Silver. "There is the only representative of the fashionable world present, Mrs. George Bertram, just coming in the door.
Lane and Cairy stooped to pick it up. Cairy had his hands on it first, but in some way it was the husband who took possession of it and handed it to the wife. Her hand trembled as she took it from him, and she hurried to her room.
When Cairy put his hand on hers, and his lips quivered beneath his mustache, her face inevitably softened and her eyes widened like a child's eyes. For Conny, even Conny, with her robust intelligence and strong will to grasp that out of life which seemed good to her, wanted to love in a way she had never loved before.
"Yes, I have to have them specially made," replied Cairy. The toy was handed around and much admired. "But, Uncle Tom," Marian asked, "why do you carry a pistol?" "In the South gentlemen always carry pistols." "Is it very dangerous in the South?" the little girl inquired. Then the older people laughed, and Cairy looked rather foolish.
Vickers thought sadly, "If the old Colonel's ghost should haunt this terrace, he couldn't find his way about!" "But it's snug and amusing, the Farm? Isn't it?" Cairy demanded of Vickers in a consoling manner. "I shouldn't call it snug," Vickers replied, unconsciously edging away from the Southerner, "nor wholly amusing!" "You don't like my efforts!" Isabelle exclaimed wearily.
"She is good to behold," he observed, helping himself to whiskey. "Not your kind, Tommy!" Conny warned with a laugh. "The Prices are very good people. You'll find that Isabelle will keep you at the proper distance." Cairy yawned as if the topic did not touch him. "I thought you were going to Manon with the Hillyers." "I was, but I came home instead!" Conny replied softly, and their eyes met.
He talked in a large and leisurely way all through the courses, and when Cairy would interpose some objection, his judicious consideration eddied about it with a deferential sweep, then tossed it high on the shore of his buttressed conclusions.
She knew Cairy well enough to feel that the Southerner could not long endure a lonely world. And Conny had a tolerant nature; she did not despise him for going where he could find amusement and comfort; nor did she think his love less worth having. But she bit her lip as she repeated, "He will go to Isabelle."
She did not allow this condition of perplexity to appear in public, reserving her "heavy thinking," as Tom Cairy called these moments, for the early morning hours of privacy. This languid spring day while Conny turned over her mail that lay strewn in disorder on her bed, she apparently had one of her worst fits of dubitation.
"He was offered the presidency of some road of other out West. But we couldn't go out there again to live!" Of all the men and women who came and went at the Farm, Cairy was on the most familiar footing. "He likes to work here," Isabelle explained with pride, "and he amuses John more than most of them. Besides he's very useful about the place!"
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