about the sea?"
"I dislike this man Milbank very much, Winfield. I think Ruth sees too
much of him."
Kirk stiffened. His eyebrows rose the fraction of an inch.
"Oh?" he said.
It seemed to Bailey for an instant that he had been talking all his
life to people who raised their eyebrows and said "Oh!" but he
continued manfully.
"I do not think that Ruth should know him, Winfield."
"Wouldn't Ruth be rather a good judge of that?"
His tone nettled Bailey, but the man conscious of doing his duty
acquires an artificial thickness of skin, and he controlled himself.
But he had lost that feeling of friendliness, of sympathy with a
brother in misfortune which he had brought in with him.
"I disagree with you entirely," he said.
"Another thing," went on Kirk. "If this man Milbank, I still can't
place him, is such a thug, or whatever it is that he happens to be, how
did he come to be at your house the night you say I met him?"
Bailey winced. He wished the world was not perpetually reminding him
that Basil and Sybil were on speaking terms.
"Sybil invited him. I may say he has asked Sybil to make one of the
yacht party. I absolutely forbade it."
"But, Heavens! What's wrong with the man?"
"He has a bad reputation."
"Has he, indeed!"
"And I wish my wife to associate with him as little as possible. And I
should advise you to forbid Ruth to see more of him than she can help."
Kirk laughed. The idea struck him as comic.
"My good man, I don't forbid Ruth to do things."
Bailey, objecting to being called any one's good man, especially
Kirk's, permitted his temper to get the better of him.
"Then you should," he snapped. "I have no wish to quarrel with you. I
came in here in a friendly spirit to warn you; but I must say that for
a man who married a girl, as you married Ruth, in direct opposition to
the wishes of her family, you take a curious view of your obligations.
Ruth has always been a headstrong, impulsive girl, and it is for you to
see that she is protected from herself. If you are indifferent to her
welfare, then all I can say is that you should not have married her.
You appear to think otherwise. Good afternoon."
He stalked out of the studio, leaving Kirk uncomfortably conscious that
he had had the worst of the argument. Bailey had been officious, no
doubt, and his pompous mode of expression was not soothing, but there
was no doubt that he had had right on his side.
Marrying Ruth did not involve obligations. He had never considered her
in that light, but perhaps she was a girl who had to be protected from
herself. She was certainly impulsive. Bailey had been right there, if
nowhere else.
Who was this fellow Milbank who had sprung suddenly from nowhere into
the position of a menace? What were Ruth's feelings toward him? Kirk
threw his mind back to the dinner-party at Bailey's and tried to place
him.
Was it the man, yes, he had it now. It was the man with the wave of
hair over his forehead, the fellow who looked like a poet. Memory came
to him with a rush. He recalled his instinctive dislike for the fellow.
So that was Milbank, was it? He got up and put away his brushes. There
would be no more work for him that afternoon.
He walked slowly home. The heat of the day had grown steadily more
oppressive. It was one of those airless, stifling afternoons which
afflict New York in the summer. He remembered seeing something about a
record in the evening paper which he had bought on his way to the
studio, a whole column about heat and humidity. It certainly felt
unusually warm even for New York.
It was one of those days when nerves are strained, when molehills
become mountains, and mountains are all Everests. He had felt it when
he talked with Ruth about Bill and the squirrels, and he felt it now.
He was conscious of being extraordinarily irritated, not so much with
any particular person as with the world in general. The very vagueness
of Bailey's insinuations against Basil Milbank increased his
resentment.
What a pompous ass Bailey was! What a fool he had been to give Bailey
such a chance of snubbing him! What an extraordinarily futile and
unpleasant world it was altogether!
He braced himself with an effort. It was this heat which was making him
magnify trifles. Bailey was a fool. Probably there was nothing whatever
wrong with this fellow Milbank. Probably he had some personal objection
to the man, and that was all.
And yet the image of Basil which had come back to his mind was not
reassuring. He had mistrusted him that night, and he mistrusted him
now.
What should he do? Ruth was not Sybil. She was not the sort of woman a
man could forbid to do things. It would require tact to induce her to
refuse Basil's invitation.
As he reached the door an idea came to him, so simple that he wondered
that it had not occurred to him before. It was, perhaps, an echo of his
conversation with Steve.
He would get Ruth to come away with him to the shack in the Connecticut
woods. As he dwelt on the idea the heat of the day seemed to become
less oppressive and his heart leaped. How cool and pleasant it would be
out there! They would take Bill with them and live the simple life
again, in the country this time instead of in town. Perhaps out there,
far away from the over-crowded city, he and Ruth would be able to come
to an understanding and bridge over that ghastly gulf.
As for his work, he could do that as well in the woods as in New York.
And, anyhow, he had earned a vacation. For days Mr. Penway had been
hinting that the time had arrived for a folding of the hands.
Mr. Penway's views on New York and its record humidity were strong and
crisply expressed. His idea, he told Kirk, was that some sport with a
heart should loan him a couple of hundred bucks and let him beat it to
the seashore before he melted.
In the drawing-room Ruth was playing the piano softly, as she had done
so often at the studio. Kirk went to her and kissed her. A marked
coolness in her reception of the kiss increased the feeling of
nervousness which he had felt at the sight of her. It came back to him
that they had parted that afternoon, for the first time, on definitely
hostile terms.
He decided to ignore the fact. Something told him that Ruth had not
forgotten, but it might be that cheerfulness now would blot out the
resentment of past irritability.
But in his embarrassment he was more than cheerful. As Steve had been
on the occasion of his visit to old John Bannister, he was breezy,
breezy with an effort that was as painful to Ruth as it was to himself,
breezy with a horrible musical comedy breeziness.
He could have adopted no more fatal tone with Ruth at that moment. All
the afternoon she had been a complicated tangle of fretted nerves. Her
quarrel with Kirk, Bailey's visit, a conscience that would not lie down
and go to sleep at her orders, but insisted on running riot, all these
things had unfitted her to bear up amiably under sudden, self-conscious
breeziness.
And the heat of the day, charged now with the oppressiveness of
long-overdue thunder, completed her mood. When Kirk came in and began
to speak, the softest notes of the human voice would have jarred upon
her. And Kirk, in his nervousness, was almost shouting.
His voice rang through the room, and Ruth winced away from it like a
stricken thing. From out of the hell of nerves and heat and interfering
brothers there materialized itself, as she sat there, a very vivid
hatred of Kirk.