The Land of Content. Edith Barnard Delano
mind a—a—an alliance with—with the millions of a Benson Flood!"
Rosamund sighed impatiently. "Oh, dear, Cecilia," she said, "I do wish it were in my power to give you half my money!"
Mrs. Maxwell smiled with pursed lips. "So do I," she declared. "I'd take it in a minute! But you can't! You can't do one single thing with it until you're twenty-five, except spend the income; and you've got six months more before your birthday. And even then you won't want to give me half of it, because now you don't even want me to spend the income! Gracious! I wish I had a chance at it!"
"I do give you half of my income, Cecilia!"
"No, you don't," Mrs. Maxwell contradicted, in a voice that echoed an old complaint. "You only give me half of the sum you think two people ought to spend! As if it isn't right and one's duty to spend all one can! I know there's something about keeping money in circulation, and all that, if only I could remember it! But nothing would move you! Poor dear Mamma used to say that Colonel Randall was obstinate—most obstinate, Rosamund; and I must say that you don't take after the Stanfields at all, not at all!"
Mrs. Maxwell's grievances, thus expressed, began to be too much for her; she spoke through tears. "I am sure I have tried to do my very best by you, Rosamund, since Mamma died! The accounts the Trust Company made me keep all those years were dreadful, perfectly dreadful! But I used to struggle through them somehow, because I was sustained by the thought that when you were twenty-five we could just spend and spend and spend and never have to bother about keeping accounts or being economical or anything! But it will be just the same then! I know it will! Why, you haven't even one automobile!"
Her sister's tears and the fatuity of her arguments were as unfailing an appeal to Rosamund as they would have been to a man; she got up and put her arms around Cecilia.
"You silly old darling!" she laughed. "You shall have an automobile! You may have two if you want them, and I will give you every penny of my income that we haven't spent in the last three years! But for goodness sake, don't cry!"
Mrs. Maxwell followed up her victory. "Will you go to Oakleigh?" she asked.
Rosamund capitulated. "Oh, I suppose so!" she said, and shrugged. Then she added, with a somewhat malicious little smile, "It goes without saying that Marshall goes, too?"
Mrs. Maxwell lifted her chin. The line of her throat was still very pretty. She smiled at her reflection in the mirror over the mantel.
"Don't be absurd," she said. "Why shouldn't he?"
IV
"The Battlefield Hotel," Marshall Pendleton said, when the question of luncheon was brought up, "is a wonderful place, Benny; better take us there. Stopped there with the Willings last summer, and had eleven kinds of jam and about a hundred kinds of cake on the table at the same time. Great!"
"Heavens, Marshall!" Mrs. Maxwell exclaimed. "You know I can't eat sweets! I'd put on half a pound after such a meal as that!"
Pendleton grinned. "That was not all, Cecilia," he said. "I'd meant to keep it a secret, and surprise Benny with it. He's always out for gastronomic rarities. They give you cold cucumbers, cut thick, with warmish cream poured over them—real cream, lumpy, kind you used to have on grandfather's farm, and all that, you know! You feel green when you first see it. Then you wonder what it's like, but remember that your cousin somebody-or-other, the one you're not on speaking terms with, would inherit all you'd leave if you died. Then you begin to reason that other people must have dared and survived, and then you taste it and—consume! It's truly wonderful, Benny; better take us there!"
"Are you inviting us to a suicide pact, Marshall?" Flood asked.
The others laughed, and Flood and Mrs. Maxwell exchanged memories of queer dishes while Pendleton pointed out to the chauffeur the intricate way through the narrow streets. Only Rosamund was silent, leaning back in the cushioned corner, looking abstractedly at the quaint doorways and gardens they passed. During the preceding fortnight, with Oakleigh crowded with guests, it had been easy enough to avoid Flood's companionship, which was beginning to make her more and more uneasy, in spite of his earnest effort to keep it for the present on the level of the commonplace. But, now that they were alone there, a party of four, and with Cecilia and Marshall in one of their intervals of mutual absorption, there was nothing to do but submit to the situation. She had welcomed Flood's suggestion of the day before that they should motor up to Bluemont; with Eleanor at the Summit, and with the others in the motor car, Flood's company could be endured for the day. So they had left Oakleigh early, and in Flood's big shining car swung down through the mountains, out upon the plain, and into the quaint little town of Battlesburg. Rosamund's imagination peopled again the streets and fields with soldiers in blue and gray. She knew where her father had fought and lain wounded. As they passed swiftly between the innumerable monuments her heart throbbed. From the vast field of graves the spirit of the past arose and spoke to her—spoke of the men who had fought and died there, spoke of the greater man who had led and forgiven.
But during all the journey she had been intensely bored; more, she was deeply provoked, and in that state of mind where everything jars and trifles loom as mountains. Pendleton's silly chatter seemed unendurable; she resented his nonsense almost as if it were an insult thrown at the sacredness of the battlefield. She hated his story of the cucumbers and cream. When the landlord told them they would have half an hour to wait before luncheon, she walked to the farthest end of the veranda, and stood, looking down the little narrow street. Mrs. Maxwell threw herself into a large yellow rocking chair, and Flood leaned against the veranda railing, facing her. Pendleton was entering their names in the office, and wonderingly inspecting the landlord's showcase of battlefield relics. Flood lighted a cigarette, and as he blew out the smoke, turned towards the end of the veranda where Rosamund stood. Cecilia watched his face for a moment or two; then she said:
"You must not be offended with Rosamund's ways, you know! She is not like anybody else."
Flood turned his head and smiled into her eyes. He waited a full half-minute before he replied. "No," he said, slowly. "No, she is not like anyone else!" He took several deep breaths of his cigarette, then spoke with little pauses between each phrase, as if he were thinking out what he had to say. "She's—she's a dream-woman come true! She's the lady of one's imagination!"
"Dear me!" Mrs. Maxwell remarked, with sisterly lack of enthusiasm. Flood threw back his head with a little laugh.
"I wonder which surprises you most," he said, "to hear that said of your sister, or to find out that I have an imagination?"
Mrs. Maxwell had had time to become an adept at begging the question. "Well," she said, "one doesn't usually associate imagination and—dream-women, you know, with your type. I mean, with business men!"
"Oh, pray don't mind saying 'my type'! It's good for me to hear it, because it is just there that I lose. I am of a different type—or class—from you and your sister; even from our friend Pendleton. Miss Randall sees that, and she will not try to look beyond it. She will not let herself know me better, because she doesn't want to; and she doesn't want to because I am not—I suppose she'd call it her 'sort.'"
He spoke without a trace of bitterness, and smiled again at Mrs. Maxwell's well-executed manner of protest.
"Why, no one knows that better than I do," he went on. "She's five or six generations ahead of me in civilization, you know; her grandmother left off where my grand-daughter would have to begin. That's why I want her. I'm naturally impatient, and I want to see my wife doing and feeling and thinking a lot of things that are quite beyond my apprehension. She's just what I've always imagined a woman ought to be, and I want her."
"I don't think she'd credit you with any such imagination," Mrs. Maxwell said, adding, somewhat dryly, "with any imagination at all!"
"That is just my difficulty," Flood replied. "She will not give herself