and he had long since determined that only a high-priced chef was worth
while. They had found an old cordon bleu, Louis Berdot, who had served
in the house of one of the great dry goods princes, and this man he
engaged. He cost Lester a hundred dollars a week, but his reply to any
question was that he only had one life to live.
The trouble with this attitude was that it adjusted nothing, improved
nothing, left everything to drift on toward an indefinite end. If Lester had married Jennie and accepted the comparatively meagre income of ten
thousand a year he would have maintained the same attitude to the end. It would have led him to a stolid indifference to the social world of which
now necessarily he was a part. He would have drifted on with a few
mentally compatible cronies who would have accepted him for what he
was—a good fellow— and Jennie in the end would not have been so
much better off than she was now.
One of the changes which was interesting was that the Kanes transferred
their residence to New York. Mrs. Kane had become very intimate with a
group of clever women in the Eastern four hundred, or nine hundred, and
had been advised and urged to transfer the scene of her activities to New York. She finally did so, leasing a house in Seventy-eighth Street, near
Madison Avenue. She installed a novelty for her, a complete staff of
liveried servants, after the English fashion, and had the rooms of her
house done in correlative periods. Lester smiled at her vanity and love of show.
"You talk about your democracy," he grunted one day. "You have as much democracy as I have religion, and that's none at all."
"Why, how you talk!" she denied. "I am democratic. We all run in classes.
You do. I'm merely accepting the logic of the situation."
"The logic of your grandmother! Do you call a butler and doorman in red velvet a part of the necessity of the occasion?"
"I certainly do," she replied. "Maybe not the necessity exactly, but the spirit surely. Why should you quarrel? You're the first one to insist on
perfection—to quarrel if there is any flaw in the order of things."
"You never heard me quarrel."
"Oh, I don't mean that literally. But you demand perfection—the exact spirit of the occasion, and you know it."
"Maybe I do, but what has that to do with your democracy?"
"I am democratic. I insist on it. I'm as democratic in spirit as any woman.
Only I see things as they are, and conform as much as possible for
comfort's sake, and so do you. Don't you throw rocks at my glass house,
Mister Master. Yours is so transparent I can see every move you make
inside."
"I'm democratic and you're not," he teased; but he approved thoroughly of everything she did. She was, he sometimes fancied, a better executive in
her world than he was in his.
Drifting in this fashion, wining, dining, drinking the waters of this
curative spring and that, travelling in luxurious ease and taking no
physical exercise, finally altered his body from a vigorous, quick-moving, well-balanced organism into one where plethora of substance was
clogging every essential function. His liver, kidneys, spleen, pancreas—
every organ, in fact—had been overtaxed for some time to keep up the
process of digestion and elimination. In the past seven years he had
become uncomfortably heavy. His kidneys were weak, and so were the
arteries of his brain. By dieting, proper exercise, the right mental attitude, he might have lived to be eighty or ninety. As a matter of fact, he was
allowing himself to drift into a physical state in which even a slight
malady might prove dangerous. The result was inevitable, and it came.
It so happened that he and Letty had gone to the North Cape on a cruise
with a party of friends. Lester, in order to attend to some important
business, decided to return to Chicago late in November; he arranged to
have his wife meet him in New York just before the Christmas holidays.
He wrote Watson to expect him, and engaged rooms at the Auditorium,
for he had sold the Chicago residence some two years before and was
now living permanently in New York.
One late November day, after having attended to a number of details and
cleared up his affairs very materially, Lester was seized with what the
doctor who was called to attend him described as a cold in the intestines
—a disturbance usually symptomatic of some other weakness, either of
the blood or of some organ. He suffered great pain, and the usual
remedies in that case were applied. There were bandages of red flannel
with a mustard dressing, and specifics were also administered. He
experienced some relief, but he was troubled with a sense of impending
disaster. He had Watson cable his wife— there was nothing serious about
it, but he was ill. A trained nurse was in attendance and his valet stood guard at the door to prevent annoyance of any kind. It was plain that
Letty could not reach Chicago under three weeks. He had the feeling that
he would not see her again.
Curiously enough, not only because he was in Chicago, but because he
had never been spiritually separated from Jennie, he was thinking about
her constantly at this time. He had intended to go out and see her just as soon as he was through with his business engagements and before he left
the city. He had asked Watson how she was getting along, and had been
informed that everything was well with her. She was living quietly and
looking in good health, so Watson said. Lester wished he could see her.
This thought grew as the days passed and he grew no better. He was
suffering from time to time with severe attacks of griping pains that
seemed to tie his viscera into knots and left him very weak. Several times the physician administered cocaine with a needle in order to relieve him
of useless pain.
After one of the severe attacks he called Watson to his side, told him to send the nurse away, and then said: "Watson, I'd like to have you do me a favour. Ask Mrs. Stover if she won't come here to see me. You'd better go and get her. Just send the nurse and Kozo (the valet) away for the
afternoon, or while she's here. If she comes at any other time I'd like to have her admitted."
Watson understood. He liked this expression of sentiment. He was sorry
for Jennie. He was sorry for Lester. He wondered what the world would
think if it could know of this bit of romance in connection with so
prominent a man. Lester was decent. He had made Watson prosperous.
The latter was only too glad to serve him in any way.
He called a carriage and rode out to Jennie's residence. He found her
watering some plants; her face expressed her surprise at his unusual
presence.
"I come on a rather troublesome errand, Mrs. Stover," he said, using her assumed name. "Your—that is, Mr. Kane is quite sick at the Auditorium.
His wife is in Europe, and he wanted to know if I wouldn't come out here
and ask you to come and see him. He wanted me to bring you, if possible.
Could you come with me now?"
"Why yes," said Jennie, her face a study. The children were in school. An old Swedish housekeeper was in the kitchen. She could go as well as not.
But there was coming back to her in detail a dream she had had several