"He wanted to go, Mr. Fenholtz," she declared. "But he felt, as I did, that our first duty was here. Captain and Mrs. Dott are old friends of ours. We meet them every year at the Cape; we have a summer home there, you know."
Fenholtz seemed interested. "That is so," he said. "I forgot. Dott, are you one of those Cape Cod skippers they tell me about? I am glad of it.
I have got a boat myself down in Narragansett Bay. One of those gruisin"
launches, they call them. But this one is like the women, it will gruise only where and when it wants to, and not where I want to at all. There is something the matter with the engine always. I have had egsperts--ah, those egsperts!--they are egsperts only in getting the money. When they are there it will go beautifully; but when they have left it will not go at all. I wish you could see it."
Captain Dan was interested, too.
"Well," he said, "I"d like to, first rate. I"ve got a boat of my own back home; that is, I used to have her. She was a twenty-five foot cat and she had a five-horsepower auxiliary in her. I had consider"ble experience with that engine. Course, I ain"t what you"d call an expert."
"I am glad of that. Now I will explain about this drouble of mine."
He went on to explain. In five minutes he and the captain were head over heels in spark plugs and batteries and valves and cylinders. Mr.
Black endeavored to help out with quotations from his experience as a motorist, but his suggestions, not being of a nautical nature, were ignored for the most part. After a time he lost interest and settled back in his chair.
Meanwhile the three ladies were engrossed in other matters. Mrs.
Fenholtz asked to be shown the house; she had not seen it for a long time, she said, and was much interested. Annette suddenly remembered that, she also was "mad" to see it. So Serena led a tour of inspection, in which Mr. Hapgood officiated as a.s.sistant pilot and superintendent of lighting.
After the tour was at an end, and just before the party descended to the drawing-room, Mrs. Fenholtz turned to Serena and said:
"Mrs. Dott, are you interested in club matters; in women"s clubs, I mean?"
Serena"s answer was a prompt one.
"Indeed I am," she said. "I have always been interested in them. In fact, I am president of the Trumet Chapter; that is, I was; of course, I resigned when I came here."
Mrs. Fenholtz looked puzzled.
"Trumet Chapter?" she repeated.
"Why, yes, the Chapter of the Guild of the Ladies of Honor. The order Mrs. Black belongs to."
"Oh!" in a slightly different tone. "Oh, yes, I see."
"I"m terribly interested in THAT," declared Serena enthusiastically. "If you knew the hours and hours I have put in working for the Guild. It is a splendid movement; don"t you think so?"
"Why--why, I have no doubt it is. I don"t belong to it myself. I was thinking of our local club, our Scarford women"s club, when I spoke. I thought perhaps you might care to attend a meeting of that with me."
"I should love--" began Serena, and stopped.
Mrs. Black, who was standing behind Mrs. Fenholtz, was shaking her head.
The last-named lady noticed her hostess" hesitation.
"But of course," she went on, "if you are interested in the Ladies of Honor you would no doubt prefer visiting a meeting of theirs. In that case Mrs. Black could help you more than I. She is vice-president of the Scarford Branch, I think. You are vice-president, aren"t you, Mrs.
Black?"
Annette colored slightly.
"Why--why, yes," she admitted; "I am."
Serena was surprised.
"Vice-president?" she repeated. "Vice-president--I--I--must have made a dreadful mistake. I introduced you as president at that Trumet meeting.
I certainly thought you were president."
Now, as a matter of fact, if Mrs. Black had not specifically said that she was president of the Scarford Chapter, she had led her acquaintances in Trumet to infer that she was; at all events, she had not corrected Serena"s misapprehension on the night of the meeting. She hastened to do so now.
"Oh, no!" she said. "I noticed that you made a mistake when you introduced me, but, of course, I could hardly correct you publicly, and, when it was all over, I forgot. I am only vice-president, just as Mrs.
Fenholtz says."
Mrs. Fenholtz smiled. "Well, I am not even an officeholder in our club,"
she said, "although I was at one time. I have no doubt you will prefer to be introduced by a vice-president rather than a mere member; and I am sure Mrs. Black is planning for you to attend one of the Guild meetings, so I mustn"t interfere."
Annette was visibly flurried. The Scarford Chapter was the one subject which she had carefully avoided that evening. But between it and the Woman"s Club there was a bitter rivalry, and, although she had not been at all anxious to act as sponsor for her friend from the country, now that Mrs. Fenholtz had offered to do so and had placed the responsibility squarely on her shoulders, she could not dodge.
"Why--why, of course," she said. "That was understood. We have had so many things to talk about this evening that I had really forgotten it, my dear Mrs. Dott. I had indeed! When," she hesitated, "when could you make it convenient to attend one of our meetings? Of course I know how busy you are just now in your new home, and I shall not be unreasonable.
I shouldn"t, of course, expect you to attend the NEXT meeting."
"Oh," said the unconscious Serena, "I"m not so busy as all that. I could go to the next meeting just as well as not. I should love to."
They entered the drawing-room, to find Captain Dan and the Honorable Oscar still deep in the engine discussion and Mr. Black sound asleep in his chair. Roused by his indignant wife, he drowsily inquired if it was time to get up, and then, becoming aware of the realities of the situation, hastily explained that he had been thinking about business affairs and had forgotten where he was.
"Going, Annette, are you?" he asked.
Annette tartly observed that she was going, and added that she judged it high time to do so. Mrs. Fenholtz said that she and her husband must be going, also.
"But we shall hope to see a great deal of you and Mr.--I should say Captain Dott," she said. "You must dine with us very soon. I will set an evening and you mustn"t say no."
"That is right," said Mr. Fenholtz heartily. "Captain, some of these days you and I will take a gouple of days and go down and look at that boat. If she does not go then, we will put an "egspert" in her and sink them both. What?"
Altogether, it was a wonderful evening. The only fly in the ointment was Azuba, who appeared just as the visitors were at the door, to announce that "that foolhead of a grocer"s boy" hadn"t brought the things she ordered and what they was going to do for breakfast she didn"t know.
"I could give you b"iled eggs," she added, "but Captain Dan"l made such a fuss about them we had yesterday that I didn"t dast to do it without askin" you. I wanted to have some picked-up fish, but they didn"t keep none but the hashed-up kind that comes in pasteboard boxes, and I"d just as soon eat hay as that."
On the way home Mrs. Black divided her discourse into two parts, one a scorching of her husband for falling asleep and making her ridiculous before the Fenholtzes, and the other a sort of irritated soliloquy concerning "those Dotts" and the way in which they had been loaded upon her shoulders.
"I did my best to keep the Guild out of the conversation," she said, "but that Fenholtz woman had to drag it in, and now, of course, I"ve got to take that Dott person to the next meeting and introduce her to everybody, and I suppose I shall have to see that she is made a member.
Oh, dear! I almost wish I had never seen Trumet."
B. Phelps grunted. "Humph!" he said. "If the Fenholtzes take them up I don"t see what you"ve got to kick about. You"ve been trying to get in the Fenholtz set yourself for the last three years. Maybe you can do it now."
CHAPTER VI
The Scarford Chapter of the Guild of the Ladies of Honor was not as large a body as Mrs. Black in the exuberance of her Trumet conversation had led Serena to think. In reality, its membership was less than a hundred. It was formed in the beginning by a number of seceders from the local Women"s Club, who, disappointed in their office-seeking ambitions and deeming the club old-fashioned and old-fogyish in its ideas, had elected to form an organization of their own. They had affiliated with the national order of the Ladies of Honor, chiefly because of the opportunity which such a body offered for office holding and notoriety.
The members were not drawn from the oldest families of Scarford nor from those whose social position was established. They were chiefly the wives and daughters of men who had made money rather suddenly; would-be geniuses whose genius had not been recognized as yet; women to whom public speaking and publicity were as the breath of their nostrils; extravagants and social climbers of all sorts.
The purposes of the organization, outside those specified in the const.i.tution of the parent body, were rather vague. Ex-Mayor Fenholtz expressed a rather general opinion when he said: