" The third
night I am painfully sure of this, and if I remain away over a fourth,
which is very rare, I cast the whole theory out to the winds of
scepticism, and am so restless and disagreeable that Evan usually
suggests that I take a morning train home and do not wait for him, which
is exactly the responsibility that I wish him to assume, thus saving me
from absolute surrender.
We always have a good time on our outings, and yet after each the
pleasure of return grows keener, so that occasionally Evan remonstrates
and says: "Sometimes I cannot understand your attitude; you appear to
enjoy every moment keenly, and yet when you go home you act as if you had
mercifully escaped from a prison that necessitated going through a sort
of thanksgiving ceremony. It seems very irrational."
But when I ask him if it would be more rational to be sorry to come home,
he does not answer,--at least not in words.
"Where do we dine to-night?" I asked Evan, as he was giving unmistakable
signs of "meditation," and I heard by the footsteps overhead that Miss
Lavinia was stirring.
"At the Art and Nature Club. You can dress as much or as little as you
please, and we can get a table in a cosey corner, and afterward sit about
upstairs for an hour, for there will be music to-night. I have asked
Martin Cortright to join us. It has its interesting side, this--a
transplanted Englishman married to a country girl introducing old
bred-in-the-bone New Yorkers to New Manhattan.
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