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Updated: May 15, 2025
He frankly admired the strength and the stature of the only man in the room who was taller and more robust than himself, as well as the intent sobriety of his glance and the laconic gravity of his speech. "An admirable young fellow!" he had exclaimed to Edith Whyland, upon Abner's leaving them to cross over to Medora. "Oh yes, yes!" she had returned with conviction. "So serious."
Whyland meant to be cordial, but Abner found him patronizing. He could not endure to be patronized by anybody, least of all by a person of mental calibre inferior to his own. "I should be glad if you could lunch with me at the club," said Whyland in the friendliest fashion possible. "I am on my way there now." "Club" fatal word; it chilled Abner in a second. He knew about clubs!
"You will stay, of course," said Edith Whyland; "I have hardly had a word with you. And when you do go, it must be in a cab." Abner succumbed. He was snared, as he felt. Other rooms, still more handsomely, more lavishly appointed, seemed to yawn for him. And then came crystal and silver and porcelain and exquisite napery and the rare smack of new and nameless dishes to help bind him hard and fast.
"I shall know just what to do as soon as I get home " He clutched at his breast again. "You will not go home to-night," said Whyland. Abner did not go home that night, nor the next, nor the next. He was put to bed in an upper chamber and remained there. Outside was the gray welter of the lake.
And indeed Abner faced Mrs. Whyland's little circle, when the time finally came round, with much less sense of irksomeness and repugnance than he had expected. Some twenty or thirty people assembled in the Whyland drawing-room on one mid-March evening, and he soon perceived, with a great relief, that they meant to respect both him and their hostess.
"What now?" he wondered, with a sidelong glance at Edith Whyland. Mrs. Whyland, herself half-risen, was looking toward the door, like everybody else. "Finally!" she said, with a pleased smile, and sank back into her place. A tall, stalwart figure came through the crowd amidst a storm of hand-clapping and of cheers.
"Wine!" cried Whyland. "You want something different from wine. You want a good hot whisky " "No," said Abner. "No." The male guests were mostly professional men and representatives of great corporate interests. They talked together in low undertones about familiar concerns during their half-hour or so of grace. "I see you have begun stringing your wires," said one of them to Whyland.
McElroy's Christmas sermon, and it presently transpired that, whether in town or country, she made it a point to attend services. Abner, who for some dim reason of his own had expected little from the wife of Leverett Whyland, put down as mere calumnies the reports that made her "fashionable."
"Soon it will be simply dog eat dog," said Whyland. "No course will be left, even for the best-disposed of us, but to fight the devil with fire. From the assessor and all his works " "Good Lord deliver us," intoned Bond, who fully shared Whyland's ideas. Abner frowned. His religious sensibilities were affronted by this response. "And from all his followers," added Whyland.
What were the paid services of menials, however deft and practised, compared with the intimate, personal exertions, the the yes, the ministrations of a woman like Medora Giles? "She was probably just waiting for the chance," said Whyland heartily. "You don't often find talent and real practicality combined in one girl as they are in Miss Giles. Even little Clytie Summers "
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