Part 33

“How charming your daughter is looking, Mrs. Mavick!” Mr. Van Cortlandt began, by way of being agreeable. Mrs. Mavick inclined her head. “That young Burnett seems to be a nice sort of chap; Mrs. Van Cortlandt says he is very clever.”

“Yes?”

“I haven't read his book. They say he is a lawyer.”

“Lawyer's clerk, I believe,” said Mrs. Mavick, indifferently.

“Authors are pretty plenty nowadays.”

“That's a fact. Everybody writes. I don't see how all the poor devils live.” Mr. Van Cortlandt had now caught the proper tone, and the conversation drifted away from personalities.

It was a very brilliant dinner, but Philip could not have given much account of it. He made an effort to be civil to his left-hand neighbor, and he affected an ease in replying to cross-table remarks. He fancied that he carried himself very well, and so he did for a man unexpectedly elevated to the seventh heaven, seated for two hours beside the girl whose near presence filled him with indescribable happiness. Every look, every tone of her voice thrilled him. How dear she was! how adorable she was! How radiantly happy she seemed to be whenever she turned her face towards him to ask a question or to make a reply!

At moments his passion seemed so overmastering that he could hardly restrain himself from whispering, “Evelyn, I love you.” In a hundred ways he was telling her so. And she must understand. She must know that this was not an affair of the moment, but that there was condensed in it all the constant devotion of months and months.

A woman, even any girl with the least social experience, would have seen this. Was Evelyn's sympathetic attention, her evident enjoyment in talking with him, any evidence of a personal interest, or only a young girl's enjoyment of her new position in the world? That she liked him he was sure. Did she, was she beginning in any degree to return his passion? He could not tell, for guilelessness in a woman is as impenetrable as coquetry.

Of what did they talk? A stenographer would have made a meagre report of it, for the most significant part of this conversation of two fresh, honest natures was not in words. One thing, however, Philip could bring away with him that was not a mere haze of delicious impressions. She had been longing, she said, to talk to him about his story. She told him how eagerly she had read it, and in talking about its meaning she revealed to him her inner thought more completely than she could have done in any other way, her sympathy with his mind, her interest in his work.

“Have you begun another?” she asked, at last.

“No, not on paper.”

“But you must. It must be such a world to you. I can't imagine anything so fine as that. There is so much about life to be said. To make people see it as it is; yes, and as it ought to be. Will you?”

“You forget that I am a lawyer.”

“And you prefer to be that, a lawyer, rather than an author?”

“It is not exactly what I prefer, Miss Mavick.”

“Why not? Does anybody do anything well if his heart is not in it?”

“But circumstances sometimes compel a man.”

“I like better for men to compel circumstances,” the girl exclaimed, with that disposition to look at things in the abstract that Philip so well remembered.

“Perhaps I do not make myself understood. One must have a career.”

“A career?” And Evelyn looked puzzled for a moment. “You mean for himself, for his own self?” There is a lawyer who comes to see papa. I've been in the room sometimes, when they don't mind. Such talk about schemes, and how to do this and that, and twisting about. And not a word about anything any of the time. And one day when he was waiting for papa I talked with him. You would have been surprised.

“I told papa that I could not find anything to interest him. Papa laughed and said it was my fault, he was one of the sharpest lawyers in the city. Would you rather be that than to write?”

“Oh, all lawyers are not like that. And, don't you know, literature doesn't pay.”

“Yes, I have heard that.” And then she thought a minute and with a quizzical look continued: “That is such a queer word, 'pay.' McDonald says that it pays to be good. Do you think, Mr. Burnett, that law would pay you?”

Evidently the girl had a standard of judging people that was not much in use.

Before they rose from the table, Philip asked, speaking low, “Miss Mavick, won't you give me a violet from your bunch in memory of this evening?”

Evelyn hesitated an instant, and then, without looking up, disengaged three, and shyly laid them at her left hand. “I like the number three better.”

Philip covered the flowers with his hand, and said, “I will keep them always.”