a ring in it that still could and did make chauffeurs want to drive laundry wagons and cause cigarettes to fall from the fingers of urban grandsons.
She stood and sniffed. Her eyes found the cigarette upon the floor.
“What’s that?” she cried. The words were not a question—they were an entire litany of suspicion, accusation, confirmation, and decision. She tarried over them scarcely an instant. “Stand up!” she said to her grandson, “stand up and blow that nicotine out of your lungs!”
The young man looked at her in trepidation.
“Blow!” she commanded.
He pursed his lips feebly and blew into the air.
“Blow!” she repeated, more peremptorily than before.
He blew again, helplessly, ridiculously.
“Do you realize,” she went on briskly, “that you’ve forfeited five thousand dollars in five minutes?”
Merlin momentarily expected the young man to fall pleading upon his knees, but such is the nobility of human nature that he remained standing—even blew again into the air, partly from nervousness, partly, no doubt, with some vague hope of reingratiating himself.
“Young ass!” cried Caroline. “Once more, just once more and you leave college and go to work.”
This threat had such an overwhelming effect upon the young man that he took on an even paler pallor than was natural to him. But Caroline was not through.
“Do you think I don’t know what you and your brothers, yes, and your asinine father too, think of me? Well, I do. You think I’m senile. You think I’m soft. I’m not!” She struck herself with her fist as though to prove that she was a mass of muscle and sinew. “And I’ll have more brains left when you’ve got me laid out in the drawing-room some sunny day than you and the rest of them were born with.”
“But Grandmother—”
“Be quiet. You, a thin little stick of a boy, who if it weren’t for my money might have risen to be a journeyman barber out in the Bronx—Let me see your hands. Ugh! The hands of a barber—you presume to be smart with me, who once had three counts and a bona-fide duke, not to mention half a dozen papal titles pursue me from the city of Rome to the city of New York.” She paused, took breath. “Stand up! Blow’!”
The young man obediently blew. Simultaneously the door opened and an excited gentleman of middle age who wore a coat and hat trimmed with fur, and seemed, moreover, to be trimmed with the same sort of fur himself on upper lip and chin, rushed into the store and up to Caroline.
“Found you at last,” he cried. “Been looking for you all over town. Tried your house on the ’phone and your secretary told me he thought you’d gone to a bookshop called the Moonlight—”
Caroline turned to him irritably.
“Do I employ you for your reminiscences?” she snapped. “Are you my tutor or my broker?”
“Your broker,” confessed the fur-trimmed man, taken somewhat aback. “I beg your pardon. I came about that phonograph stock. I can sell for a hundred and five.”
“Then do it.”
“Very well. I thought I’d better—”
“Go sell it. I’m talking to my grandson.”
“Very well. I—”
“Good-by.”
“Good-by, Madame.” The fur-trimmed man made a slight bow and hurried in some confusion from the shop.
“As for you,” said Caroline, turning to her grandson, “you stay just where you are and be quiet.”
She turned to Merlin and included his entire length in a not unfriendly survey. Then she smiled and he found himself smiling too. In an instant they had both broken into a cracked but none the less spontaneous chuckle. She seized his arm and hurried him to the other side of the store. There they stopped, faced each other, and gave vent to another long fit of senile glee.
“It’s the only way,” she gasped in a sort of triumphant malignity. “The only thing that keeps old folks like me happy is the sense that they can make other people step around. To be old and rich and have poor descendants is almost as much fun as to be young and beautiful and have ugly sisters.”
“Oh, yes,” chuckled Merlin. “I know. I envy you.”
She nodded, blinking.
“The last time I was in here, forty years ago,” she said, “you were a young man very anxious to kick up your heels.”
“I was,” he confessed.
“My visit must have meant a good deal to you.”
“You have all along,” he exclaimed. “I thought—I used to think at first that you were a real person—human, I mean.”
She laughed.
“Many men have thought me inhuman.”
“But now,” continued Merlin excitedly, “I understand. Understanding is allowed to us old people—after nothing much matters. I see now that on a certain night when you danced upon a tabletop you were nothing but my romantic yearning for a beautiful and perverse woman.”
Her old eyes were far away, her voice no more than the echo of a forgotten dream.
“How I danced that night! I remember.”
“You were making an attempt at me. Olive’s arms were closing about me and you warned me to be free and keep my measure of youth and irresponsibility. But it seemed like an effect gotten up at the last moment. It came too late.”
“You are very old,” she said inscrutably. “I did not realize.”
“Also I have not forgotten what you did to me when I was thirty-five. You shook me with that traffic tie-up. It was a magnificent effort. The beauty and power you radiated! You became personified even to my wife, and she feared you. For weeks I wanted to slip out of the house at dark and forget the stuffiness of life with music and cocktails and a girl to make me young. But then—I no longer knew how.”
“And now you are so very old.”
With a sort of awe she moved back and away from him.
“Yes, leave me!” he cried. “You are old also; the spirit withers with the skin. Have you come here only to tell me something I had best forget: that to be old and poor is perhaps more wretched than to be old and rich; to remind me that my son hurls my gray failure in my face?”
“Give me my book,” she commanded harshly. “Be quick, old man!”
Merlin looked at her once more and then patiently obeyed. He picked up the book and handed it to her, shaking his head when she offered him a bill.
“Why go through the farce of paying me? Once you made me wreck these very premises.”
