“You must be a great help to your father,” said Bessie Wynne.
“Thank you. And you’ll be here all summer?”
“Yes, we have the cottage till the middle of September, then Cousin Tom Wynne keeps it open for his friends that go gunning. He has friends come from New York and Philadelphia and they stay till they all get a deer. One brought down a bear five or six years ago.”
George Lockwood’s undefined hope that Agnes Wynne might show her gratitude—”extremely grateful,” she had said in her letter—in an extreme gesture was, he now realized, foolishly romantic thinking on his part. Extremely and grateful were words without meaning to her; she might more truthfully have said, “I will thank you very much.” But she was a puzzling girl, therefore an unusual one, and he had developed a theory (that had not, it is true, been tested) that an unusual girl could be seduced without matrimonial obligations. So far in his experience he had not achieved a seduction of a girl of good family. They were too well protected from seducers and from their own instincts. Lalie Fenstermacher had several times been only minutes away from giving in, and he had heard of one case of a Princeton acquaintance who had seduced a girl with the connivance of her brother. But when George Lockwood saw the girl in the flesh he ceased to regard his acquaintance as either a dashing or a lucky man, but rather as a fellow with a strong stomach. It was not then merely a question of seducing a girl of good family, but an attractive girl of good family. And Agnes Wynne was all of that. She was desirable, and it would be a real triumph to seduce her and then to abandon her to her rather haughty, somewhat intellectual independence.
Agnes was nineteen years old, notably slender among her contemporaries, so much so that George Lockwood would not ordinarily have singled her out for seduction. Her lack of voluptuousness in fact indicated to him that the eventual possession of her body was not the only pleasure he anticipated. He wanted to take her down a few pegs. He had found out her exact position in the Wynne dynasty, which would discourage fortune-hunters, but he had also seen that his own contemporaries liked her, enjoyed her company, and actually competed for her approval, and so at nineteen she probably would not stay single very long. As to her position among the Wynnes, although it was discouraging to the more impatient fortune-hunters, he had heard that she was the favorite female relative of old Tom Wynne and consequently had some prospects. On the other hand, there were many young men whom he had seen being attentive to Agnes and who would not have to marry for money. Any one of them might marry her in a year or two, and George Lockwood was not interested in being second. Love was nowhere in his arrangements.
Luck had provided the excuse and opportunity for his renewal of acquaintance with her, but now he would not trust to luck. It was not necessary. The invitation to revisit the cottage on the lake had come spontaneously from Theron and Bessie Wynne, and George Lockwood guessed that Agnes would not oppose her parents. Family cordiality existed, but not equality; it would have been unthinkable for her seriously to assert herself by that kind of independence—and he suspected that all her independence really amounted to nothing more than some originality of thinking. She was not deep, but only a little different from the others, as a Southern girl’s accent made her seem different at a party in the North. He argued for and against her unusualness; was fascinated by it and repelled by it and denied its existence. But he found that whether she was deep or not, different or unusual or not, she occupied his thoughts as no girl had been able to since the parting with Lalie.
On his second overnight visit to the cottage on the lake she pointedly had taken off to visit friends in the northern part of the Commonwealth, near the New York line. He revealed no annoyance, but made himself charming with her father and mother and improved the shining hours by tapping Theron Wynne for information on the Wynne Company coal and timber resources. Coal leases and the mining of coal required special knowledge and considerable financial resources, and neither George Lockwood nor Abraham had any intention of investing in anthracite, but Lockwood & Company owned two small lumber and planing mills and their timber leases would soon be worthless, when the stands of timber were exhausted. New land would have to be found, and if there was no available acreage, the next best thing was to get a good price for the milling equipment. The visit was also an opportunity to collect information on the status of the Hofmans and Stokeses. Mostly by implication Abraham Lockwood had indoctrinated his elder son to be ready to take full advantage of any situation that would be profitable to the Lockwoods and costly to the Hofmans and Stokeses. There was nothing he could put his finger on, but George Lockwood accepted it as fact that his father hated his Gibbsville cousins. On George’s part the feeling was not so intense, but when Theron Wynne, unaware of the kinship, remarked that the Stokes boys were somewhat less shrewd than Old Man Hofman, George Lockwood had an unprejudiced opinion that might some day be useful.
He timed his next visit for a month later, correctly assuming that Theron and Bessie Wynne would insist on Agnes’s presence in order to avoid the appearance of rudeness. Transparently, as a protection, she had invited another girl to be a house guest. Ruth Hagenbeck was not a good choice for Agnes Wynne’s purpose; she promptly developed a crush on George Lockwood, blushed when he spoke directly to her, and made non-sequitur interjections in the general conversation when she was at the table. At supper, for instance, Theron Wynne was saying: “. . . and the next year we moved to Hilltop.”
“I think so too,” said Ruth Hagenbeck.
“Beg pardon, Ruth?” said Theron Wynne.
Ruth Hagenbeck was staring at George Lockwood.
“What did you think, Miss Hagenbeck?” said George Lockwood.
“Oh, she wasn’t thinking. She just wanted to have something to say,” said Agnes Wynne.
“I don’t think that’s very nice, Agnes,” said Bessie Wynne.
“Well, if she had something to say, nobody’s stopping her. What were you going to say, Ruth?” said Agnes.
“Just for that I won’t tell you,” said Ruth Hagenbeck.
Theron Wynne resumed his story, and without warning Ruth got up and left the table.
“You hurt her feelings, Agnes. You go right in and tell her you’re sorry,” said Bessie Wynne.
Agnes Wynne was gone more than ten minutes. When she returned she said, “Ruth asks to be excused. She has a headache.”
“From not eating, no wonder she has a headache,” said Theron Wynne. “Take her in something on a tray, Agnes. Maybe some chicken broth.”
“She wants to be left alone, Father.”
“Oh. Well, too bad,” said Theron Wynne.
“I’ll go in see how she is after supper,” said Bessie Wynne. She did so, and reported that Ruth was sound asleep and that it was likewise bedtime for herself and her husband. Once again Agnes was left alone with George Lockwood.
“You’d never be like Miss Hagenbeck, would you?”
“If you’re going to say anything against her, she’s one of my closest friends.”
“I’m not going to say anything against her. It’s against you. You’re such a cold fish that you’d never get all flustered the way she did.”
“I don’t know what you mean by all flustered, and as far as your personal remarks are concerned, Mr. Lockwood, the less said the better.”
“Miss Hagenbeck was very sweet. Very young and unsophisticated—”
“We’re both the same age,” said Agnes. “In fact she’s nearly a year older than I am, if you must know.”