felt at least that she was beginning to understand what Miss Barstow had meant when she said that June’s family background left much to be desired. Then, the next instant, a young man in white flannels appeared on the terrace, and in her surprise and pleasure this malicious sparring seemed all at once unimportant. He was a solid straight young man, with chestnut hair, a brown skin, and deep-set brown eyes. His features were large; his eyebrows were almost ferociously dark and thick; but the general impression one gathered from his face was that of a somewhat detached and distinctly patient kindness. It was Ralph Green! There could be no doubt of it. What fun that he should be here! She remembered now that Felix had mentioned a Mr. Green, and of course Mavis had referred to ‘Ralph’; but it had not occurred to Kate to put the two names together. She had not seen Ralph for five years and she thought of him always in connection with the summer she had spent in Maine. She had been only fifteen years old and Ralph must have been twenty-one or two; but he had taken her sailing, he had coached her in tennis; he had been kind, even affectionate, never in the least condescending; and Kate during the last month of her stay had been more nearly in love with him than she had ever been with anyone since that faraway summer.
Of course, to him, she had been just a rather big little girl; he had liked her very much; she could realize that he must sometimes have been amused by her. She would always be grateful to him because she felt that he had given her a standard of comparison by which she could judge the series of younger boys who had begun that very winter to fall in love with her. She could hardly wait now to speak to him. She wondered if he, too, would be surprised; she even wondered if he would remember her. Then like a chill it came over her that Ralph was engaged to marry this awful Clotilde.
‘I couldn’t find the last ball’, he said, and there was an edge to his voice, suggesting that even his patience had its limits. ‘I’m not going to waste any more time looking for it.’
‘Now really, Ralph!’ Clotilde exclaimed. ‘They were very special ones. It’s almost impossible to get them.’
Ralph looked at her with a fixed and quite unrevealing smile. ‘You like things that are hard to get, don’t you?’ he said. ‘You like things made to order. I wonder if there’s anything you’d enjoy, if you thought that the average person, the common run-of-the-mill individual, could get it just as easily as you could.’
Ralph was standing very straight and yet he seemed quite relaxed; he had the surprising light stance and poise that you notice sometimes in even the most dignified and massive dogs. Kate watched him with keen curiosity. He was not so handsome as she remembered him; no actual young man could be that. In fact, she had to confess, he was not handsome at all; and yet it seemed to her that she liked his face more than ever. Its present impatience or irony, or even scorn, seemed only to emphasize what must be its habitual gentleness. You felt that he had learned not to expect too much either from himself or others, but that he was more inclined to be tolerant of others than of himself. Clotilde met his eyes.
‘I haven’t given the matter much thought’, she said coolly.
‘No, I expect not’, he said. ‘Well, I’m going up to take a shower. See you at dinner.’
He stepped out of sight toward the front of the house, and Kate felt with pleasure that he had snubbed Clotilde; already she had the sense that she was watching some kind of game and that the side she was cheering had just won a point. A moment later she could hear him opening the front door and running upstairs. She had almost gone out into the hall to waylay him; but then she thought it would be more fun to surprise him at dinner, and she would have hated to do anything that might have seemed like thrusting herself on his attention before he noticed her.
A faint noise made her look around, and she saw a large dark man in a Palm Beach suit, with a rose in his buttonhole – a man whom she thought she had seen somewhere before – coming toward her across the watery expanse of carpet.
‘Were the girls out there putting on one of their little shows?’ he asked in a deep voice with a slightly sardonic intonation.
Kate blushed. She felt like a child caught in a preserve closet. ‘Well, I don’t know’, she said. ‘They were talking and I’m afraid I couldn’t help —’
The man grinned, and his teeth looked younger and more vigorous than the rest of his face. ‘Of course you couldn’t and why should you? I only hope they kept the script clean.’
He held out an enormous hairy hand, and as she took it she realized why he seemed familiar: in spite of the pouches beneath his eyes, the sag of his jowls, his nearly bald head, he reminded her of June. He had the same oblong face with its heavy chin and small rounded nose, the same swarthiness of skin, the same dark glance; and yet his face, at any rate when he spoke, had a kind of concentration, of liveliness, in spite of its air of fatigue, which June’s had always lacked. He was an ugly man, but she could imagine that he might be interesting, even attractive.
‘I’m sorry I kept you waiting’, he went on. ‘All the more so, now that I’ve seen you. The fact is I was napping in my underwear, and I didn’t feel I knew you quite well enough to appear as I was. June told me you were beautiful, but I knew she had a crush on you – in a perfectly nice way, of course – so I made considerable allowance. But my word!’ – He looked her up and down with embarrassingly direct admiration beneath his bantering air. ‘It was really an understatement.’
Once more she saw his lopsided grin. ‘You may give quite a jolt to Clotilde,’ he went on, ‘and poor old Mavis will be sick; but what a treat for Ralph and Jo, not to speak of my aged self! And I mustn’t forget Felix. Felix was quite a lady’s man in his prime, the rascal. Don’t let that respectful manner fool you. I bet Felix was licking his lips!’
Kate felt that Mr. Gladstone spoke as if she were a choice morsel to be served up at dinner. She suspected that he was trying to tease her and determined to show no sign that she noticed it.
‘I’m looking forward to seeing June again’, she said. ‘She must have changed a good deal in the last four years.’
Mr. Gladstone sent her a sharp glance. ‘The more, the better, eh?’
If she hadn’t prepared herself against confusion, Kate might have blushed. ‘I didn’t mean that at all,’ she said, ‘and I think you talk horridly for a father. I noticed it in your letter too.’
He looked at her quizzically and as she met his gaze she had the feeling that he liked her all the more for her sharp retort.
‘I know my appearance suggests one of the larger anthropoid apes,’ he said after an instant, ‘but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a father’s heart. But wait a minute —’
He walked past her over to the window that opened on to the terrace. ‘You see, the theatre had reversed itself’, he explained. ‘We had become the stage in here, and Mavis and Clotilde had become the audience.’ He raised the blind and closed the casement window. ‘That’s better,’ he said, ‘and now please sit down. I don’t know why I didn’t suggest it before. Let’s say it was because I was dazzled.’
Kate sat down in one of the big leather chairs near the fireplace; it gave her the same feeling of super-comfort that the seat in the car had done. Mr. Gladstone seated himself in an even larger chair on the other side of the hearth, leaned back and crossed one ankle over his knee.
‘Seriously, Miss Archer, I’m damn glad you’re here’, he said. ‘But I’m not going to call you that. Katherine? Kate? Kate’s what they call you, isn’t it?’
‘Most of my friends call me Kate’, she admitted.
