place before?"
"Oh, yes. In the old days she often used to talk about it. She has
written books about it."
"I thought her books were all about the selfishness of the modern young
man in not marrying."
"Not at all. Some of them are about how to look after the baby. It's no
good the modern young man marrying if he's going to murder his baby
directly afterward, is it?"
"Something in that. There's just one objection to this sterilized
nursery business, though, which she doesn't seem to have detected. How
am I going to provide these things on an income of five thousand and at
the same time live in that luxury which the artist soul demands? Bill,
my lad, you'll have to sacrifice yourself for your father's good. When
I'm a millionaire we'll see about it. Meanwhile..."
"Meanwhile," said Ruth, "come and be dried before you catch your death
of cold." She gathered William Bannister into her lap.
"I pity any germ that tries to play catch-as-catch-can with that
infant," remarked Kirk. "He'd simply flatten it out in a round. Did you
ever see such a chest on a kid of that age?"
It was after the installation of Whiskers at the studio that the
diminution of Mrs. Porter's visits became really marked. There was
something almost approaching a battle over Whiskers, who was an Irish
terrier puppy which Hank Jardine had presented to William Bannister as
a belated birthday present.
Mrs. Porter utterly excommunicated Whiskers. Nothing, she maintained,
was so notoriously supercharged with bacilli as a long-haired dog. If
this was true, William Bannister certainly gave them every chance to
get to work upon himself. It was his constant pleasure to clutch
Whiskers to him in a vice-like clinch, to bury his face in his shaggy
back, and generally to court destruction. Yet the more he clutched, the
healthier did he appear to grow, and Mrs. Porter's demand for the dog's
banishment was overruled.
Mrs. Porter retired in dudgeon. She liked to rule, and at No. 90 she
felt that she had become merely among those present. She was in the
position of a mother country whose colony has revolted. For years she
had been accustomed to look on Ruth as a disciple, a weaker spirit whom
she could mould to her will, and now Ruth was refusing to be moulded.
So Mrs. Porter's visits ceased. Ruth still saw her at the apartment
when she cared to go there, but she kept away from the studio. She
considered that in the matter of William Bannister her claim had been
jumped, that she had been deposed; and she withdrew.
"I shall bear up," said Kirk, when this fact was brought home to him.
"I mistrust your Aunt Lora as I should mistrust some great natural
force which may become active at any moment and give you yours. An
earthquake, for instance. I have no quarrel with your Aunt Lora in her
quiescent state, but I fear the developments of that giant mind. We are
better off without her."
"All the same," said Ruth loyally, "she's rather a dear. And we ought
to remember that, if it hadn't been for her, you and I would never have
met."
"I do remember it. And I'm grateful. But I can't help feeling that a
woman capable of taking other people's lives and juggling with them as
if they were india-rubber balls as she did with ours, is likely at any
moment to break out in a new place. My gratitude to her is the sort of
gratitude you would feel toward a cyclone if you were walking home late
for dinner and it caught you up and deposited you on your doorstep.
Your Aunt Lora is a human cyclone. No, on the whole, she's more like an
earthquake. She has a habit of splitting up and altering the face of
the world whenever she feels like it, and I'm too well satisfied with
my world at present to relish the idea of having it changed."
Little by little the garrison of the studio had been whittled down.
Except for Steve, the community had no regular members outside the
family itself. Hank was generally out of town. Bailey paid one more
visit, then seemed to consider that he could now absent himself
altogether. And the members of Kirk's bachelor circle stayed away to a
man.
Their isolation was rendered more complete by the fact that Ruth, when
she had ornamented New York society, had made few real friends. Most of
the girls she had known bored her. They were gushing creatures with a
passion for sharing and imparting secrets, and Ruth's cool reserve had
alienated her from them.
When she married she dropped out. The romance of her wedding gave
people something to talk about for a few days, and then she was
forgotten.
And so it came about that she had her desire and was able practically
to monopolize Kirk. He and she and William Bannister lived in a kind of
hermit's cell for three and enjoyed this highly unnatural state of
things enormously. Life had never seemed so full either to Kirk or
herself. There was always something to do, something to think about,
something to look forward to, if it was only a visit to a theatre or
the inspection of William Bannister's bath.
Chapter XI Stung to Action
It was in the third year of the White Hope's life that the placid
evenness of Kirk's existence began to be troubled. The orderly
procession of the days was broken by happenings of unusual importance,
one at least of them extraordinarily unpleasant. This was the failure
of a certain stock in which nearly half of Kirk's patrimony was
invested, that capital which had always seemed to him as solid a part
of life as the asphalt on which he walked, as unchangeable a part of
nature as the air he breathed. He had always had it, and he could
hardly bring himself to realize that he was not always to have it.
It gave him an extraordinary feeling of panic and discomfort when at
length he faced the fact squarely that his private means, on the
possession of which he had based the whole lazy scheme of his life,
were as much at the mercy of fate as the stake which a gambler flings
on the green cloth. He did not know enough of business to understand
the complicated processes by which a stock hitherto supposed to be as
impregnable as municipal bonds had been hammered into a ragged remnant
in the course of a single day; but the result of them was unpleasantly
clear and easily grasped.
His income was cut in half, and instead of being a comfortably off
young man, idly watching the pageant of life from a seat in the grand
stand, he must now plunge into the crowd and endeavour to earn a living
as others did.
For his losses did not begin and end with the ruin of this particular
stock. At intervals during the past two years he had been nibbling at
his capital, and now, forced to examine his affairs frankly and
minutely, he was astonished at the inroads he had made upon it.
There had been the upkeep of the summer shack he had bought in
Connecticut. There had been expenses in connection with William
Bannister. There had been little treats for Ruth. There had been cigars
and clothes and dinners and taxi-cabs and all the other trifles which
cost nothing but mount up and make a man wander beyond the bounds of
his legitimate income.
It was borne in upon Kirk, as he reflected upon these things, that the
only evidence he had shown of the possession of the artistic
temperament had been the joyous carelessness of his extravagance. In
that only had he been the artist. It shocked him to think how little
honest work he had done during the past two years. He had lived in a