Part 6

"Are they shut--tight--tight?"

"Yes, but I don't--"

"Now, don't talk, Papa, but listen like a good little railroad president, and I'll tell you what I think of J. Whitlock Pastor, and that is he's unbearable! No, no, I'm not joking--I mean it, I mean it! He's unbearable, and his mother's unbearable, and the forty yards around them is unbearable, and I wouldn't marry him for anything under the sun, no, not if he was the only man in the world except the clergyman who would do it; and Papa, I'm so mortified and ashamed and miserable that I don't know what to do. Didn't you notice me to-night, and how shy and crushed I was, sitting there like a little Judas, and feeling, oh, horribly wicked and treacherous? It was all I could do not to scream out that I hated him, just as loud as I could: I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!--I was trying to tell you that when we started, but I didn't have the courage. I wanted you to see him for yourself; to realize how unendurable he is; I--I--wanted you not to blame me too much, Papa."

To Mr. Ladd it was like a reprieve at the gallows' foot. Blame her? Why, elation ran to his head like wine; he caught her in his arms and hugged her; had he saved her from drowning he could not have been more passionately thankful. His opinion of the young man came out in a torrent of unvarnished Anglo-Saxon. To every epithet he applied to him, Phyllis added a worse. In their wild humor, and bubbling over with a laughter that verged on the hysterical, they vied with each other in tearing J. Whitlock to pieces.

"But, Phyllis, Phyllis, how did you ever come to do it?"

"I don't know, Papa."

"But you must have liked him?"

"I thought I did."

"Was it the attraction of his position--his name--and all that kind of thing?"

"No, I thought I loved him."

"How could you have thought such a thing?"

"It's incredible, but I did, Papa. I loved him right up to the moment when he kissed me. And how could I stop him after having looked down at my toes, and said 'Yes.' He's been kissing me for five days--and, Papa, I hate him."

The fierceness she put into these three words was vitriolic. Disgust, revulsion, outraged pride flooded her cheek with carmine.

"Papa, I can't make any excuses for myself. It's not prudery; it's not that; but somehow the real me didn't like the real him, and that's all I can say about it!"

"You'll have to write to him, and break it off."

"But what am I to tell him, Papa? It's so awful and humiliating for him. I guess I'll just put it down to insanity in my family."

"But, good Lord, we haven't any--we've a very decent record."

"Oh, Papa, I simply must have been insane to have got engaged to him.--I'll write him a beautiful letter of regret, and inclose a doctor's certificate!"

Her incorrigible humor was again asserting itself. She outlined the letter, her eyes dancing with merriment. Mr. Ladd, in no mood to criticize these swift transitions, joined in whole-heartedly. They laughed and laughed till the tears came, and arrived home like noisy children from a party.

Mrs. Fensham, in a very decollete gown, and looking like a sylph of twenty-five, was waiting for the carriage to take her to a ball. She swam up in front of Bob, and raised her two little hands to his shoulders--a graceful gesture, and one she was very fond of.

"And you found him a perfect dear, didn't you?" she murmured ecstatically.

"Well, I don't know that I did," faltered Brother Bob, placing a kiss on the top of her head. "The fact is, Sally, we've decided to call it off!"

"Bob, you haven't broken the engagement!"

Her lisping voice turned suddenly metallic. She stared from her brother to her niece, a sylph no longer, but a woman of forty-five, pale with apprehension and anger.

"Phyllis has made a mistake, that's all," he said. "He looked very nice in the show-window, but now we are going to take him back, and get a credit-slip for something we want more."

"A new automobile coat for Papa," put in Phyllis mischievously.

"And you can both laugh about it!" exclaimed Aunt Sarah in appalled accents. "Laugh at throwing over J. Whitlock Pastor! Oh, you little Carthage nobodies--haven't you any sense at all--don't you know what you are doing--isn't he as much a duke with us as any Marlborough or Newcastle in England? He was too good; he was too nice; he wasn't enough of a snob to blow and brag--and that's what he gets for it, the 'No' of a silly girl, who'd prefer a barber's block clerk to the greatest gentleman in America!"

She tottered to the mantelpiece and burst into tears--the first tears she had shed in twenty worldly and scheming years--and the only tears that did attend the rupture of the Pastor-Ladd engagement.