Alice turned eyes of reproach upon him:
"She'll kill us if she finds us together. Isn't there some other way out?"
"I could go down the stairs the waiters come up," said Stowe; "but how will you get home?"
"Oh, Mother will get me home all right, never fear!" said Alice. "Run for your life, honey. I'll have my maid call you on the 'phone later."
The young man gave her one long sad look fairly reeking with desperate kisses and embraces. Then he vanished into the crowd.
Alice must have remarked the comments in Forbes' eyes, for she turned to him:
"You mustn't misunderstand the poor boy, Mr. Forbes. Mr. Webb is as brave as a lion, but he runs away on my account. He knows that my mother will give me no rest if she finds it out."
"I understand perfectly," said Forbes. "There are times when the better a soldier is the faster he runs!"
"Mr. Forbes is a soldier," Persis explained.
"Oh, thank you, twice as much!" said Alice, "for appreciating the situation." Then she turned to Persis, and clenched her arm as if she were about to implore some unheard-of mercy: "And, Oh, Miss Cabot, will you do me one terribly great favor? I'll remember it to my dying day, if you only will."
"Of course, my dear," Persis answered, with her usual serenity. "What is it? Do you want me to tell your mother that I met you somewhere and dragged you here against your will to meet her?"
Alice's wide eyes widened to the danger-point:
"Aren't you simply wonderful! How on earth could you possibly have ever ever guessed it?"
Persis cast a sidelong glance at Forbes; it had all the effect of a wink without being so violent.
"I'm a mind-reader," she said.
Alice caught the glance but not the irony of it, and exclaimed:
"Indeed she is, Mr. Forbes. She really is."
"I know she is," said Forbes, with a quiet conviction that was almost more noisy than the violent emphasis of Alice.
Persis gave Forbes another sidelong glance; this time with a meek wonderment in place of irony. Once more the man had shown a kind of awe of her. Unwittingly he was attacking her on her most defenseless wall; for a woman who is always hearing praise of her beauty or her vivacity, so hungers and thirsts after some recognition of her intellectual existence that she is usually quite helpless before a tribute to it.
Persis knew that there was no importance in her guess at what Alice was about to ask; but there was importance in the high rating Forbes gave it. The comfort she found in this homage was put to flight by Alice's nails nipping her arm.
"Before mother comes we must rehearse what we're to say. She thinks I went to one of those lectures on Current Topics. They're so very improving that Mother can't bear to go herself. She sends me and then forgets to ask me what it was all about. So I sneaked it to-day and met Stowe."
Persis could not resist a motherly question: "Is this an ideal trysting-place, do you think?"
"Where's the harm? We couldn't go to the Park very well. Everybody's always going by and looking on."
"Why don't you receive Mr. Webb at home?"
"Oh, why don't I, indeed! Mother won't allow him within a mile of the place. Didn't you know that?"
Persis shook her head and turned to Forbes: "Doesn't it sound old-fashioned, a young girl afraid of her parents?"
"Quite medieval," Forbes agreed.
"Oh, but you are quaint, Alice," Persis laughed. "I thought it only happened in books and plays, but here's Alice actually obeying a cruel order like that. I'd like to see my father try to boss me. I'd really enjoy it as a change."
Alice broke in: "Oh, fathers—they're different! My poor Daddelums was the sweetest thing on earth. I wrapped him round my little finger. But mother—umm, she gets her own way, I can tell you—at least she thinks she does. I wouldn't let any earthly power tear me away from my darling Stowe, but I don't dare face her down."
"I thought she always liked Mr. Webb?" Persis said.
"Oh, she did till his father's will was probated. His insurance was immense, but his debts were immenser. So poor Stowe is dumped upon the world with hardly a cent. Of course, I love him all the more; but mother has turned against him. I wouldn't mind starving with Stowe, but mother is so materialistic! She wants to marry me off to that dreadful old Senator Tait."
"Dreadful?" snorted Winifred, who had listened in silence. "Old? Senator Tait is neither dreadful nor old. He is a cavalier, and in the prime of his powers."
"You can have him!" snapped Alice, with a flare of temper that she regretted instantly, and the more sincerely since she knew that Winifred had long been angling vainly and desperately for the Senator. There was a bitterer sarcasm in her retort than she meant, but Winifred knew what Alice was thinking, and canceled it by meeting it frankly:
"I wish I could have him. God knows I'd prefer him to any of these half-baked whippersnappers that—"
"Winifred!" Persis murmured, subduingly; and Miss Mather subsided like a retreating thunder-storm. "The Senator is one of the—"
"I know he is, my dear," Alice broke in, in her most soothing tone. "He's far, far too splendid a man for a fool like me. But can't I admit how splendid he would be in the Senate Chamber without wanting him in my boudoir?"
"Alice!" gasped Persis. "Remember that there are young men present."
Forbes spoke very solemnly: "Pardon my asking, but do you really mean that Senator Tait is—is proposing for your hand?"
"So my awful mother says."
"It doesn't sound like the Senator Tait I used to know."
"You knew him well?" Persis asked, with a quick eagerness that did not quite conceal a note of surprise.
Forbes caught it, and answered somewhat icily: "I had that privilege. He and my father used to ride to the hounds together. In fact, they were together when my father's horse threw him and fell on him, and crushed him to death. Senator Tait brought the body home to my poor mother. He was very dear to us all."
Persis looked what sympathy she could for such remote suffering. And Forbes was something less of a stranger. Also he had moved one step closer to her degree.
He had appeared first under the auspices of Murray Ten Eyck, who guaranteed him as an officer in the army. He had demonstrated his own dignity and magnetism. And now his family was sponsored by an old-time friendship with Senator Tait, a very Warwick of American royalty.
CHAPTER XIV
PERSIS was not of the period or the set that thinks much of family. In fact, the whole world and its aristocracies have been shaken by too many earthquakes of late to leave walls standing high enough to keep youth from overlooking and overstepping them. Few speak of caste nowadays except novelists, editors, and the very old. What aristocracies we have are clubs or cliques gathered by a community of tastes, and recruited individually.
In any case, the Persis that was willing to go out into the byways and highways and public dancing-places would have made no bones of granting her smiles and her hospitality to anybody that entertained her, mountebank or mummer, tradesman or riding-master.
And yet it did Forbes no harm in her eyes to be established as of high lineage and important acquaintance. If only now he were rich, he would be graduated quite into the inner circle of those who were eligible