But you know more about that than I do. Do you think they will make white places on the lawn, Mr. Fenelby?"
"I don"t know," he said, abstractedly. "I mean, yes, of course they will. But they will get rained on. You don"t want your trunks rained on, you know. Trunks aren"t meant to be rained on. It isn"t good for them." A thought came to him suddenly. "You and Laura haven"t quarreled, have you?" he asked, for he thought that perhaps that was why Kitty would not have her trunks carried up.
"Indeed not!" cried Kitty, putting her arm affectionately around Laura"s waist.
"I--I thought perhaps you had," faltered Mr. Fenelby. "I thought--that is to say--I was afraid perhaps you were going away again. I thought you were going to make us a good, long visit--"
"Indeed I am," said Kitty, cheerfully. "I am going to stay weeks, and weeks, and weeks. I am going to stay until you are all tired to death of me, and beg me to begone."
"That is good," said Mr. Fenelby, with an attempt at pleasure. "But don"t you think, since you are going to do what we want you to do, and stay for weeks, and weeks, and weeks, that you had better let your trunks be taken up to your room? Or--I"ll tell you what we"ll do! Suppose we just take the trunks into the lower hall?"
He felt pretty certainly, now, that Kitty must have had a little touch of, say, sunstroke, or something of that kind, and he went on in a gently argumentative tone.
"Just into the lower hall," he said. "That would be different from having them in your room, and it would save my gra.s.s. I worked hard to get this lawn looking as it does now, Kitty, and I cannot deny that big trunks like these will not do it any good. Let us say we will put the trunks in the lower hall. Then they will be safe, too.
No one can steal them there. A front lawn is a rather conspicuous place for trunks. And what will the neighbors say, too, if we leave the trunks on the lawn? Why shouldn"t we put the trunks in the lower hall?"
"Well," said Kitty, "I can"t afford it, that is why. Really, Mr.
Fenelby, I can"t afford to have those three trunks brought into the house."
"And yet," said Mr. Fenelby, with just the slightest hint of impatience, "you girls could afford to give the man a dollar _not_ to take them in! That is woman"s logic!"
"Oh! a dollar!" said Kitty. "If it was only a matter of a dollar! I hope you don"t think, Mr. Fenelby, that I travel with only ten dollars" worth of baggage! No, indeed! I simply cannot afford to pay ten per cent. duty on what is in those trunks, and so I prefer to let them remain on the lawn. I wrote Laura that I expected to be treated as one of the family while I was visiting her, and if the Domestic Tariff is part of the way the family is treated I certainly expect to live up to it. Now, don"t blame Laura, for she was not only willing to have the trunks come in without paying duty, but insisted that they should."
Mr. Fenelby looked very grave. He was in a perplexing situation. He certainly did not wish to appear inhospitable, and yet Laura had had no right to say that the trunks could enter the house duty free. The only way such an unusual alteration in the Domestic Tariff could be made was by act of the Family Congress, and he very well knew that if once the matter of revising the tariff was taken up it was beyond the ken of man where it would end. He preferred to stand pat on the tariff as it had been originally adopted.
"I told her," said Kitty, "that she had no right to throw off the duty on my trunks, at all, and that I wouldn"t have it, and I didn"t."
"Well, Tom," said Mrs. Fenelby, "you know perfectly well that we can"t leave those trunks out on the lawn. It would not only be absolutely foolish to do that, but cruel to Kitty. A girl simply can"t visit away from home without trunks, and it is absolutely necessary that Kitty should have her trunks."
""Necessities, ten per cent.,"" quoted Kitty.
"But, my dear," said Mr. Fenelby, softly, "we really can"t break all our household rules just because Kitty has brought three trunks, can we? Kitty does not expect us to do that, and I think she looks at it in a very rational manner. I like the spirit she has evinced."
"Very well, then," said Mrs. Fenelby, "you must find some way to take care of those trunks, for we cannot leave them on the lawn."
"Why can"t we take them to some neighbor"s house?" asked Kitty. "I am sure some neighbor would be glad to store them for me for awhile.
Aren"t you on good terms with your neighbors, Laura?"
"The Rankins might take them," said Laura, thoughtfully. "They have that vacant room, you know, Tom. They might not mind letting us put them in there."
"I don"t know the Rankins," said Kitty, "but I am sure they are perfectly lovely people, and that they would not mind in the least."
"I know they wouldn"t," said Mr. Fenelby. "Rankin would be glad to do something of that sort to repay me for the number of times he has borrowed my lawn-mower. I will step over after dinner and ask him."
"Are you sure, very sure, that you do not mind, Kitty?" asked Mrs.
Fenelby. "You will not feel hurt, or anything?"
"Oh, no!" said Kitty, lightly. "It will be a lark. I never in my life went visiting with three trunks, and then had them stored in another house. It will be quite like being shipwrecked on a desert island, to get along with one shirt-waist and one handkerchief."
"It will not be quite that bad, you know," said Mr. Fenelby, with the air of a man stating a great discovery, "because, don"t you see, you can open your trunks at the Rankins", and bring over just as many things as you think you can afford to pay on."
For some reason that Mr. Fenelby could not fathom Kitty laughed merrily at this, and then they all went in to dinner. It was a very good dinner, of the kind that Bridget could prepare when she was in the humor, and they sat rather longer over it than usual, and then Mr. Fenelby proposed that he should step over to the Rankins" and arrange about the storage of Kitty"s trunks, and on thinking it over he decided that he had better step down to the station and see if he could not get a man to carry the trunks across the street and up the Rankins" stairs. As they filed out of the house upon the porch, Kitty suddenly decided that it was a beautiful evening for a little walk, and that nothing would please her so much as to walk to the station with Mr. Fenelby, if Laura would be one of the party, and after running up to see that Bobberts was all right, Laura said that she would go, and they started. As they were crossing the street to the Rankins" Kitty suddenly turned back.
[Ill.u.s.tration: "Never in the history of trunks was the act of unpacking done so quickly or so recklessly"]
"You two go ahead," she said. "The air will do you good, Laura. I have something I want to do," and she ran back.
She entered the house, and looked out of the window until she saw the Fenelbys go into the Rankins" and come out again, and saw them start to the station, but as soon as they were out of sight she dashed down the porch steps and threw open the lids of her trunks.
Never in the history of trunks was the act of unpacking done so quickly or so recklessly. She dived into the ma.s.ses of fluffiness and emerged with great armfuls, and hurried them into the house, up the stairs, and into her closet, and was down again for another load. If she had been looting the trunks she could not have worked more hurriedly, or more energetically, and when the last armful had been carried up she slammed the lids and turned the keys, and sank in a graceful position on the lower porch step.
Mr. and Mrs. Fenelby returned with leisurely slowness of pace, the station loafer and man-of-little-work slouching along at a respectful distance behind them. Kitty greeted them with a cheerful frankness of face. The man-of-little-work looked at the three big trunks as if their size was in some way a personal insult to him. He tried to a.s.sume the look of a man who had been cozened away from his needed rest on false pretences.
"I didn"t know as the trunks was as big as them," he drawled. "If I"d knowed they was, I wouldn"t of walked all the way over here.
Fifty cents ain"t no fair price for carryin" three trunks, the size and heft of them, across--well, say this is a sixty foot street--say, eighty feet, and up a flight of stairs. I don"t say nothin", but I"ll leave it to the ladies."
"Fifty cents!" cried Kitty. "I should think not! Why, I didn"t imagine you would do it for less than a dollar. I mean to pay you a dollar."
"That"s right," said the man. "You see I have to walk all the way back to the station when I git through, too. My time goin" and comin" is worth something."
[Ill.u.s.tration: "With all the grace of a Sandow"]
He bent down and took the largest trunk by one handle, to heave it to his back, and as he touched the handle the trunk almost arose into the air of its own accord. The man straightened up and looked at it, and a strange look pa.s.sed across his face, but he closed his mouth and said nothing.
"Would you like a lift?" asked Mr. Fenelby.
"No," said the man shortly. "I know _how_ to handle trunks, I do,"
and it certainly seemed that he did, for he swung it to his back with all the grace of a Sandow, and started off with it. Mr. Fenelby looked at him with surprise.
"Now, isn"t that one of the oddities of nature?" said Mr. Fenelby.
"That fellow looks as if he had no strength at all, and see how he carries off that trunk as if there was not a thing in it. I suppose it is a knack he has. Now, see how hard it is for me merely to lift one end of this smallest one."
But before he could touch it Kitty had grasped him by the arm.
"Oh, don"t try it!" she cried. "Please don"t! You might hurt your back."
IV
BILLY
A few minutes before noon the next day Billy Fenelby dropped into Mr. Fenelby"s office in the city and the two men went out to lunch together. It would be hard to imagine two brothers more unlike than Thomas and William Fenelby, for if Thomas Fenelby was inclined to be small in stature and precise in his manner, William was all that his nickname of Billy implied, and was not so many years out of his college foot-ball eleven, where he had won a place because of his size and strength. Billy Fenelby, after having been heroized by innumerable girls during his college years, had become definitely a man"s man, and was in the habit of saying that his girly-girl days were over, and that he would walk around a block any day to escape meeting a girl. He was not afraid of girls, and he did not hate them, but he simply held that they were not worth while. The truth was that he had been so petted and worshiped by them as a star foot-ball player that the attention they paid him, as an ordinary young man not unlike many other young men out of college, seemed tame by comparison. No doubt he had come to believe, during his college days, that the only interesting thing a girl could do was to admire a man heartily, and in the manner that only foot-ball players and matinee idols are admired, so that now, when he had no particular claim to admiration, girls had become, so far as he was concerned, useless affairs.
"Now, about this girl-person that you have over at your house," he said to his brother, when they were seated at their lunch, "what about her?"
"About her?" asked Mr. Fenelby. "How do you mean?"