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"Who does understand what it is to live, then the man who has all his work and worry done for him by some one else?" Truesdale smiled, serene and unabashed. "The world is wide," he said, with an exquisite tolerance. "It is a very comprehensive subject. You must take it up one of these days you've hardly made a beginning on it yet."
"My name is Ashby. Ashby Truesdale. We come from an old English family. What is your name, and what kind of family do you come from, Mister?" "And where do you live?" The lad wheeled, and strode to the edge of the rock, the path along there is blasted out of solid rock, and looking downward, he pointed to the first row of buildings in the distant flats. "We live down there.
"Not the least in the world. Why, if I were to die to-morrow nobody would care but pa and ma and Roger and Truesdale and Alice; well and Rosy; yes, perhaps Rosy would care for me if I was dead. But nobody else; oh, dear, no!" She stared at Mrs. Bates with a hard, wide brightness. Mrs. Bates considerately shifted her gaze to the front of the bureau.
About the costumes, you know." "Nonsense. How could that have reached him?" "Those things do get around. Do you know what he's going to do? He's going to cut your comb. My aunt she cried like anything." To Truesdale the girl's tone seemed preposterously confidential. "You were in the wrong," she seemed to imply; "but I am on your side for all that."
If it hadn't been for me we should never have left our old home and given up our old life, and Rosy wouldn't have cut all our friends and gone to England to live; and Truesdale wouldn't be talking about starting off across the Pacific for somewhere or other, and we should never have made enemies of those Beldens, and poor pa wouldn't have lost his business, and wouldn't be going off to die inch by inch in that big cold place out on the prairie.
And there's one more thing, too." "What?" "There was a young man present on this same occasion," Bingham proceeded; "a decorative, diffusive young man with a badge. Richard Truesdale Marshall was that his name? Any son of yours?" Marshall nodded again, but his smile was distinctly less complacent. "I am beginning to meet his name in print quite frequently," pursued Bingham, serenely.
He was mindful of the house-building, but looked upon it, with Roger, as an investment. He knew of the thousands extorted through Truesdale, but made the loss less than might have resulted from a maladroit barter in real estate, for example.
Rosamund Marshall had eclipsed his own daughter at a dozen dances; Truesdale Marshall, thanks to the half-jocular patronage of the press, was becoming in his way a celebrity, while his own son merely led a dubious existence which oscillated between the bar of the Metropole and the billiard-room of the Lexington, and conferred little distinction upon himself of anybody else; and even dusty old Eliza Marshall, almost despite herself, was being dragged up into a circle to which his own wife, notwithstanding all her lavish and industrious endeavor, remained as alien as at the beginning.
"So little taste," sighed Truesdale; "so little training, so little education, so total an absence of any collective sense of the fit and the proper! Who could believe, here, that there are cities elsewhere which fashioned themselves rightly almost by intuition which took shape and reached harmony by an unreasoned instinct, as you might say?"
Truesdale drifted into the tea-room, and Jane presently saw him lounging in a chair alongside Bertie Patterson. The table was officered after the fashion that Mrs. Bates had suggested by Mrs. Belden, who, in the absence of her own daughter, kept away by illness, had brought, instead, another girl, her daughter's friend, a visitor from New York. Truesdale failed to catch her name. Mrs.
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