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She wanted a monstrosity, of course, a modernized German rock-grotto sort of an affair, I can imagine. She's been so funny when I've met her at dinner. 'I understand you take a great interest in the house, Mrs. Durrett. Can't you hear her?" "Well, you did get ahead of her," I said. "I had to. I couldn't let our first citizen build a modern Rhine castle, could I? I have some public spirit left.
"Wait I've got more to tell you, that you ought to know. I shouldn't be here to-day if Nancy Durrett had consented to to get a divorce and marry me. We had agreed to that when this accident happened to Ham, and she went back to him. I have to tell you that I still love her I can't say how much, or define my feelings toward her now. I've given up all idea of her.
And when she told me we had a common acquaintance in Mrs. Hambleton Durrett whom she thought so lovely! I knew that she had taken Nancy as an ideal: Nancy, the social leader of what was to Mrs. George a metropolis. Presently the talk became general among the men, the subject being the campaign, and I the authority, bombarded with questions I strove to answer judicially.
If my mother suspected that I was anticipating marriage, and said nothing, Nancy Durrett suspected and spoke out. Life is such a curious succession of contradictions and surprises that I record here without comment the fact that I was seeing much more of Nancy since her marriage than I had in the years preceding it. A comradeship existed between us.
Ham, whose heartstrings and purse-strings were oddly intertwined, had stipulated that they were to occupy the old Durrett mansion; but when Nancy had made it "livable," as she expressed it, he is said to have remarked that he might as well have built a new house and been done with it.
The Durrett house was closed, the blinds of its many windows drawn, but Nancy was watching for me and opened the door. So used had I grown to seeing her in the simple linen dresses she had worn in the country, a costume associated with exclusive possession, that the sight of her travelling suit and hat renewed in me an agony of apprehension.
Durrett is an old friend of yours?" she asked. "I was brought up with her." "Ah!" she exclaimed, and turned her penetrating glance upon me. I was startled. Could it be that she had discerned and interpreted those renascent feelings even then stirring within me, and of which I myself was as yet scarcely conscious?
They all called him "Robert," and they made it clear by their manner that they knew they were addressing one who fulfilled his obligations and asked no favours. Crusty old Nathaniel Durrett once declared that when you bought a bill of goods from Robert Breck you did not have to check up the invoice or employ a chemist. Here was a character to mould upon.
Durrett would gimble me with a blue eye that lurked beneath grizzled brows, quite as painful a proceeding as if he used an iron tool. I almost pity myself when I think of what a forlorn stranger I was in their company. They two, indeed, were of one kind, and I of another sort who could never understand them, nor they me.
To what depths of despair they reduced me they never knew, and yet they were doing it all for my good! They only managed to convince me that my love of folly was ineradicable, and that I was on my way head first for perdition. I always looked, during these excruciating and personal moments, at the coloured glass bottle. "It grieves me to hear it, Hugh," Mr. Durrett invariably declared.
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