"So much for your woman"s intuition," he laughed. "Speaking of idlers, there is your man to the dotting of the "i"; a dilettante raised to the _nth_ power."
Miss Carteret"s short upper lip curled in undisguised scorn.
"I like men who do things," she a.s.serted with pointed emphasis; whereupon the talk drifted eastward to Boston, and Winton was ignored until Virginia, having exhausted the reminiscent vein, said, "You are going on through to Denver?"
"To Denver and beyond," was the reply. "Winton has a notion of hibernating in the mountains--fancy it; in the dead of winter!--and he has persuaded me to go along. He sketches a little, you know."
"Oh, so he is an artist?" said Virginia, with interest newly aroused.
"No," said Adams gloomily, "he isn"t an artist--isn"t much of anything, I"m sorry to say. Worse than all, he doesn"t know his grandfather"s middle name. Told me so himself."
"That is inexcusable--in a dilettante," said Miss Virginia mockingly.
"Don"t you think so?"
"It is inexcusable in anyone," said the Technologian, rising to take his leave. Then, as a parting word: "Does the Rosemary set its own table? or do you dine in the dining-car?"
"In the dining-car, if we have one. Uncle Somerville lets us dodge the Rosemary"s cook whenever we can," was the answer; and with this bit of information Adams went his way to the Denver sleeper.
Finding Winton in his section, poring over a blue-print map and making notes thereon after the manner of a man hard at work, Adams turned back to the smoking-compartment.
Now for Mr. Morton P. Adams the salt of life was a joke, harmless or otherwise, as the tree might fall. So, during the long afternoon which he wore out in solitude, there grew up in him a keen desire to see what would befall if these two whom he had so grotesquely misrepresented each to the other should come together in the pathway of acquaintanceship.
But how to bring them together was a problem which refused to be solved until chance pointed the way. Since the Limited had lost another hour during the day there was a rush for the dining-car as soon as the announcement of its taking-on had gone through the train.
Adams and Winton were of this rush, and so were the members of Mr.
Somerville Darrah"s party. In the seating the party was separated, as room at the crowded tables could be found; and Miss Virginia"s fate gave her the unoccupied seat at one of the duet tables, opposite a young man with steadfast gray eyes and a firm jaw.
Winton was equal to the emergency, or thought he was. Adams was still within call and he beckoned him, meaning to propose an exchange of seats. But the Bostonian misunderstood wilfully.
"Most happy, I"m sure," he said, coming instantly to the rescue. "Miss Carteret, my friend signals his dilemma. May I present him?"
Virginia smiled and gave the required permission in a word. But for Winton self-possession fled shrieking.
"Ah--er--I hope you know Mr. Adams well enough to make allowances for his--for his--" He broke down helplessly and she had to come to his a.s.sistance.
"For his imagination?" she suggested. "I do, indeed; we are quite old friends."
Here was "well enough," but Winton was a man and could not let it alone.
"I should be very sorry to have you think for a moment that I would--er--so far forget myself," he went on fatuously. "What I had in mind was an exchange of seats with him. I thought it would be pleasanter for you; that is, I mean, pleasanter for--" He stopped short, seeing nothing but a more hopeless involvement ahead; also because he saw signals of distress or of mirth flying in the brown eyes.
"Oh, please!" she protested in mock humility. "Do leave my vanity just the tiniest little cranny to creep out of, Mr. Winton. I"ll promise to be good and not bore you too desperately."
At this, as you would imagine, the pit of utter self-abas.e.m.e.nt yawned for Winton, and he plunged headlong, holding the bill of fare wrong side up when the waiter asked for his dinner order, and otherwise demeaning himself like a man taken at a hopeless disadvantage. She took pity on him.
"But let"s ignore Mr. Adams," she went on sweetly. "I am much more interested in this," touching the bill of fare. "Will you order for me, please? I like--"
When she had finished the list of her likings, Winton was able to smile at his lapse into the primitive, and gave the dinner order for two with a fair degree of coherence. After that they got on better.
Winton knew Boston, and, next to the weather, Boston was the safest and most fruitful of the commonplaces. Nevertheless, it was not immortal; and Winton was just beginning to cast about for some other safe riding road for the shallop of small talk when Miss Carteret sent it adrift with malice aforethought.
It was somewhere between the entrees and the fruit, and the point of departure was Boston art.
"Speaking of art, Mr. Winton, will you tell me how you came to think of sketching in the mountains of Colorado at this time of year? I should think the cold would be positively prohibitive of anything like that."
Winton stared--open-mouthed, it is to be feared.
"I--I beg your pardon," he stammered, with the inflection which takes its pitch from blank bewilderment.
Miss Virginia was happy. Dilettante he might be, and an unhumbled man of the world as well; but, to use the Reverend Billy"s phrase, she could make him "sit up."
"I beg yours, I"m sure," she said demurely. "I didn"t know it was a craft secret."
Winton looked across the aisle to the table where the Technologian was sitting opposite a square-shouldered, ruddy-faced gentleman with fiery eyes and fierce white mustaches, and shook a figurative fist.
"I"d like to know what Adams has been telling you," he said.
"Sketching in the mountains in midwinter! that would be decidedly original, to say the least of it. And I think I have never done an original thing in all my life."
For a single instant the brown eyes looked their pity for him; generic pity it was, of the kind that mounting souls bestow upon the stagnant.
But the subconscious lover in Winton made it personal to him, and it was the lover who spoke when he went on.
"That is a damaging admission, is it not? I am sorry to have to make it--to have to confirm your poor opinion of me."
"Did I say anything like that?" she protested.
"Not in words; but your eyes said it, and I know you have been thinking it all along. Don"t ask me how I know it: I couldn"t explain it if I should try. But you have been pitying me, in a way--you know you have."
The brown eyes were downcast. Frank and free-hearted after her kind as she was, Virginia Carteret was finding it a new and singular experience to have a man tell her baldly at their first meeting that he had read her inmost thought of him. Yet she would not flinch or go back.
"There is so much to be done in the world, and so few to do the work,"
she pleaded in extenuation.
"And Adams has told you that I am not one of the few? It is true enough to hurt."
She looked him fairly in the eyes. "What is lacking, Mr. Winton--the spur?"
"Possibly," he rejoined. "There is no one near enough to care, or to say "Well done!""
"How can you tell?" she questioned musingly. "It is not always permitted to us to hear the plaudits or the hisses--happily, I think.
Yet there are always those standing by who are ready to cry "_Io triumphe_!" and mean it, when one approves himself a good soldier."
The coffee had been served, and Winton sat thoughtfully stirring the lump of sugar in his cup. Miss Carteret was not having a monopoly of the new experiences. For instance, it had never before happened to John Winton to have a woman, young, charming, and altogether lovable, read him a lesson out of the book of the overcomers.
He smiled inwardly and wondered what she would say if she could know to what battlefield the drumming wheels of the Limited were speeding him. Would she be loyal to her mentorship and tell him he must win, at whatever the cost to Mr. Somerville Darrah and his business a.s.sociates? Or would she, womanlike, be her uncle"s partizan and write one John Winton down in her blackest book for daring to oppose the Rajah?
He a.s.sured himself it would make no jot of difference if he knew. He had a thing to do, and he was purposed to do it strenuously, inflexibly. Yet in the inmost chamber of his heart, where the barbarian ego stands unabashed and isolate and recklessly contemptuous of the moralities minor and major, he saw the birth of an influence which inevitably must henceforth be desperately reckoned with.
Given a name, this new-born life-factor was love; love barely awakened, and as yet no more than a masterful desire to stand well in the eyes of one woman. None the less, he saw the possibilities: that a time might come when this woman would have the power to intervene; would make him hold his hand in the business affair at the very moment, mayhap, when he should strike the hardest.
It was a rather unnerving thought, and when he considered it he was glad that their ways, coinciding for the moment, would presently go apart, leaving him free to do battle as an honest soldier in any cause must.