She bent down and picked up a handful of the discarded papers on the floor, thrust them into Monk Whitney’s hand and stood watching him as he read them aloud. The first paragraph Myron had written over half a dozen times. The version he’d got farthest along with said:
Like most people who deal successfully with other people’s domestic and parental relations in problem form, Judge Whitney has been unsuccessful in his own, sometimes to the point of melodrama. He and his sister, who lives next door to him in Rittenhouse Square, have not spoken to each other for some eight years. His children have been a steady disappointment. His batting average on them was fattened, however, when the war gave his son Monk—short for Monckton—an outlet for energies admirably adapted to the South Pacific, but not to the staid moribundity of the Quaker City. His——
Myron had crumpled up the sheet at that point. The next one was on the same general tack:
While not obtrusive or vulgar about it, the judge is nevertheless aware of the eminent fitness of the fate that arranged for him to be born in Philadelphia and a Whitney. His daughter’s marriage to a man who as a boy carried his father’s lunch in a tin box to the coal mine was a breach, never entirely healed by the fact that his son-in-law can write a check for the judge’s gross earnings over a lifetime of serious legal and juristic effort without dipping into his current income enough to notice it. In the ordinary course of events in Philadelphia, Elsie Whitney might have been—and apparently was—expected to marry the socially acceptable son of a close friend of the family. The judge’s present secretary was the unwitting cause of the tragedy that put an end to that, as the young man took over his father’s financial obligations, and in so doing obligated the beautiful young secretary to the point that a movie finish is expected any——
That was as far as Myron had got with that one. Monk Whitney stood looking down at it steadily for a moment after he’d finished reading it. Then he crumpled it up with the others and tossed them back into Myron’s wastebasket. He turned to Laurel with a sardonic grin.
“Being nice to Kane didn’t net you much, Miss Frazier. You are marrying the young man, aren’t you?”
The two red spots I’d seen in her cheeks at the Broad Street Station were burning there again.
“I certainly am.”
He looked at her silently for an instant, the grin disappearing slowly. “You know, I wouldn’t, if I were you.”
Her eyes widened with astonishment. I thought as much at the sudden change in his tone as at what he’d said.
“You’ve never been in love with the guy,” he added.
“I suppose you think I’m being grateful too?”
“As a matter of fact, it wasn’t you I was thinking about. It’s Travis. He’s too good a guy——”
“You mean he’s not in love with me? He’s just marrying me because——” She stopped, her eyes incredulous, her breath coming quickly.
“I think you’re both all mixed up with a lot of feeling grateful and sorry and this is what’s expected of you, and neither of you has ever been in love with anybody.” He stopped short, looking at her. “I guess I ought to keep my trap shut. I’m sorry, Laurel. I didn’t——”
“You just don’t know what you’re talking about, that’s all,” she said quickly.
The words were blurred and scarcely audible as she made an abrupt move toward the door and was gone down the stairs.
Monk Whitney stood staring after her for an instant. He turned back slowly and looked at me. “I guess we’re all wet,” he said. “She is in love with the guy, after all.”
He went on looking at me, so I said, probably acidly, “It looks like it. And what are you trying to do?”
He looked for an instant then as if he thought it was none of my business, which, heaven knows, was true. But he said curtly, “Aunt Abby’s worried. She doesn’t think Laurel’s in love with Travis, or Travis with her, and Laurel’d marry Kane if she had an out. She asked me to talk to her—and now, because she didn’t know she was up here. I came up to see if Kane was in. I guess I wasn’t——”
I drew a deep breath. “Look,” I said. “You talk about your aunt as if she were God. She’s not. She’s a scheming, worldly old woman, a lot smarter than all the rest of you put together.”
I was more than a little annoyed, for some reason, or I expect I’d have used more tact.
“She knows perfectly well Laurel Frazier isn’t in love with Myron Kane, but she’s perfectly willing to sell her down the river just to stop him from writing that profile or to get back that document, whatever it is—one or both. I’ll be willing to bet anything she and Myron have made a deal. She wrote me yesterday and said Laurel ought to be terribly grateful to Travis Elliot and she thought they’d be married soon. Now she’s made a complete about-face. She’s counting on all of you to make Laurel so unhappy she’ll marry Myron. If that doesn’t work, she’ll probably put it to her, on the grounds that it’ll save your father, because she knows the girl adores him and thinks this is all her fault. And if I were you, I’d be ashamed to have any part in it.”
I stopped, rather appalled at my own temerity, and also startled at the towering structure I’d built up on the patch of quicksand of fact I’d overheard in the Broad Street Station.
“Well, of course I may be entirely wrong,” I added hastily. “I haven’t—I mean I guess I said that because I think you’re being a little rough on her.”
He stood there silently, thinking it over. “I wonder,” he said. “Could be.” He looked around the room. “Did she do all this?”
He indicated the hastily pushed-in drawers and littered papers. I nodded. He went around methodically straightening things up, still pretty sober-faced, picked up one or two of Myron’s unfinished paragraphs lying on the floor, glanced at them and dropped them into the wastebasket.
“You think she’s really in love with Travis?” he asked, looking at me. “And don’t get me wrong, lady.” His grin completely changed his whole face. “When I fall in love it’s going to be with a gentle cow creature, so there’ll be peace in the home. And Travis is my best friend. I just wondered, that’s all.”
“I wouldn’t know, really,” I said. “I never saw her till today.”
“You never saw Aunt Abby till today, either, did you?”
We both laughed, and then we looked quickly at each other. Myron Kane was coming in. I could hear his voice booming up the stair well as he tried to make the old butler hear it was a nasty day out. It was, and not a lot better in, I thought as I hurried along to my room in the front and Monk Whitney went down the stairs. I could see him in the mirror there, going into his aunt’s room. In a minute, I heard Myron whistling as he came up, and the door of his room close. It opened again shortly, and I waited about ten minutes before I followed him downstairs.
4
Mrs. Whitney and Myron were in her room. I could see her in the mirror just inside the door, but not him. She must have given him some signal, because his voice rose suddenly, expansively anecdotal with something about an Eastern ambassador. “. . . and I said, ‘Effendi——’ ”
He stopped so abruptly, seeing me, that I saw while he knew someone was coming he didn’t know it was to be his unwitting sponsor in the house. And it must have taken him all of a second to rally himself.
“Why, Grade!” he exclaimed cordially, and I hate to be called “Grade.” “How very nice!”
He came toward me and gave me an affectionate kiss on the cheek. I hadn’t, I guess, realized what close friends we were, and I don’t think Mrs. Whitney was fooled either.
“Yes, isn’t it Pleasant?” she