CHAPTER V

THE SECOND ENCOUNTER

Portia Stanton was late for lunch; so, after stripping off her jacket

and gloves, rolling up her veil and scowling at herself in an oblong

mahogany-framed mirror in the hall, she walked into the dining-room with

her hat on. Seeing her mother sitting alone at the lunch table, she

asked, "Where is Rose?"

"She'll be down presently, I think," her mother said. "She called out to

me that she'd only be a minute, when I passed her door. Does your hat

mean you're going back to the shop this afternoon?"

Portia nodded, pulled back her chair abruptly and sat down. "Oh, don't

ring for Inga," she said. "What's here's all right, and she takes

forever."

"I thought that on Saturday ..." her mother began.

"Oh, I know," said Portia, "but Anne Loomis telephoned she's going to

bring Dora Wild around to pick out which of my three kidney sofas she

wants for a wedding present. That girl I've got isn't much good, and

besides, I think there's a chance that Dora may give me her house to do.

Her man's stupidly rich, they say, and richly stupid, so the job ought

to be worth eating a cold egg for."

You'd have known them for mother and daughter anywhere, and you'd have

had trouble finding any point of resemblance in either of them to the

Amazonian young thing who had so nearly thrown a street-car conductor

into the street the night before. Their foreheads were both narrow and

rather high, their noses small and slightly aquiline, and both of them

had slender fastidious hands.

The mother's hair was very soft and white, and the care with which it

was arranged indicated a certain harmless vanity in it. There was

something a little conscious, too, about her dress--an effect difficult

to describe without exaggeration. It was not bizarre nor "artistic," but

you would have understood at once that its departures from the

prevailing mode were made on principle. If you took it in connection

with a certain resolute amiability about her smile, you would be

entirely prepared to hear her tell Portia that she was reading a paper

on Modern Tendencies before the Pierian Club this afternoon.

A very real person, nevertheless, you couldn't doubt that. The marks of

passionately held beliefs and eagerly given sacrifices were etched with

undeniable authenticity in her face.

Once you got beyond a catalogue of features, Portia presented rather a

striking contrast to this. Her hair was done--you could hardly say

arranged--with a severity that was fairly hostile. Her clothes were

bruskly cut and bruskly worn, their very smartness seeming an impatient

concession to necessity. Her smile, if not ill-natured--it wasn't

that--was distinctly ironic. A very competent, good-looking young woman,

you'd have said, if you'd seen her with her shoulder-blades flattened

down and her chest up. Seeing her to-day, drooping a little over the

cold lunch, you'd have left out the adjective young.

"So Rose didn't come down this morning at all," Portia observed, when

she had done her duty by the egg. "You took her breakfast up to her, I

suppose."

Mrs. Stanton flushed a little. "She didn't want me to; but I thought

she'd better keep quiet."

"Nothing particular the matter with her, is there?" asked Portia.

There was enough real concern in her voice to save the question from

sounding satirical, but her mother's manner was still a little

apologetic when she answered it.

"No, I think not," she said. "I think the mustard foot-bath and the

quinine probably averted serious consequences. But she was in such a

state when she came home last night--literally wet through to the skin,

and blue with cold. So I thought it wouldn't do any harm ..."

"Of course not," said Portia. "You're entitled to one baby anyway,

mother, dear. Life was such a strenuous thing for you when the rest of

us were little, that you hadn't a chance to have any fun with us. And

Rose is all right. She won't spoil badly."

"I'm a little bit worried about the loss of the poor child's

note-books," said her mother. "I rather hoped they'd come in by the noon

mail. But they didn't."

"I don't believe Rose is worrying her head off about them." said Portia.

The flush in her mother's cheeks deepened a little, but it was no longer

apologetic.

"I don't think you're quite fair to Rose, about her studies," she said.

"The child may not be making a brilliant record, but really, considering

the number of her occupations, it seems to me she does very well. And if

she doesn't seem always to appreciate her privilege in getting a college

education, as seriously as she should, you should remember her youth."

"She's twenty," said Portia bluntly. "You graduated at that age, and you

took it seriously enough."

"It's very different," her mother insisted. "And I'm sure you understand

the difference quite well. Higher education was still an experiment for

women then--one of the things they were fighting for. And those of us by

whom the success of the experiment was to be judged ..."

"I'm sorry, mother," Portia interrupted contritely. "I'm tired and ugly

to-day, and I didn't mean any harm, anyway. Of course Rose is all right,

just as I said. And she'll probably get her note-books back Monday."

Then, "Didn't she say the man's name was Rodney Aldrich?"

"I think so," her mother agreed. "Something like that."

"It's rather funny," said Portia. "It's hardly likely to have been the

real Rodney Aldrich. Yet, it's not a common name."

"The _real_ Rodney Aldrich?" questioned her mother. But, without waiting

for her daughter's elucidation of the phrase, she added, "Oh, there's

Rose!"

The girl came shuffling into the room in a pair of old bedroom slippers.

She had on a skirt that she used to go skating in, and a somewhat

tumbled middy-blouse. Her hair was wopsed around her head anyhow--it

really takes one of Rose's own words to describe it. As a toilet

representing the total accomplishment of a morning, it was nothing to

boast of. But, if you'd been sitting there, invisibly, where you could

see her, you'd have straightened up and drawn a deeper breath than you'd

indulged in lately, and felt that the world was distinctly a brighter

place to live in than it had been a moment before.

She came up behind Portia, whom she had not seen before that day, and

enveloped her in a big lazy hug.

"Back to work another Saturday afternoon, Angel?" she asked

commiseratingly. "Aren't you ever going to stop and have any fun?" Then

she slumped into a chair, heaved a yawning sigh and rubbed her eyes.

"Tired, dear?" asked her mother. She said it under her breath in the

hope that Portia wouldn't hear.

"No," said Rose. "Just sleepy." She yawned again, turned to Portia, and,

somewhat to their surprise, said: "Yes, what do you mean--the _real_

Rodney Aldrich? He looked real enough to me. And his arm felt real--the

one he was going to punch the conductor with."

"I didn't mean he was imaginary," Portia explained. "I only meant I

didn't believe it was the Rodney Aldrich--who's so awfully prominent;

either somebody else who happened to have the same name, or somebody who

just--said that was his name."

"What's the matter with the prominent one?" Rose wanted to know. "Why

couldn't it have been him?"

Portia admitted that it could, so far as that went, but insisted on an

inherent improbability. A millionaire, a member of one of the oldest

families in the city--a social swell, the brother of that Mrs. Martin

Whitney whose pictures the papers were always publishing on the

slightest excuse--wasn't likely to be found riding in street-cars, in

the first place, and the improbability reached a climax during a furious

storm like that of last night, when, if ever during the year, the real

Rodney Aldrich would be saying, "Home, James," to a liveried chauffeur,

and sinking back luxuriously among the whip-cord cushions of a palatial

limousine.

I hasten to say that these were not Portia's words; all the same, what

Portia did say, formed a basis for Rose's unspoken caricature.

"Millionaires have legs," she said aloud. "I bet they can walk around

like anybody else. However, I don't care who he is, if he'll send back

my books."

Portia went back presently to the shop, and it wasn't long after that

that her mother came down-stairs clad for the street, with her _Modern

Tendencies_ under her arm in a leather portfolio.

It had turned cold overnight, and there was a buffeting gusty wind which

shook the windows and rattled the stiff branches of the trees. Her

mother's valedictory, given with more confidence now that Portia was out

of the house, was a strong recommendation that Rose stay quietly within

doors and keep warm.

The girl might have palmed off her own inclination as an example of

filial obedience, but she didn't.

"I was going to, anyway," she said. "Home and fireside for mine to-day."

Ordinarily, the gale would have tempted her. It was such good fun to

lean up against it and force your way through, while it tugged at your

skirts and hair and slapped your face.

But to-day, the warmest corner of the sitting-room lounge, the quiet of

the house, deserted except for Inga in the kitchen, engaged in the

principal sporting event of her domestic routine--the weekly baking; the

fact that she needn't speak to a soul for three hours, a detective story

just wild enough to make little intervals in the occupation of doing

nothing at all--presented an ideal a hundred per cent. perfect.

She hadn't meant to go to sleep, having already slept away half the

morning, but the author's tactics in the detective story were so

flagrantly unfair, he was so manifestly engaged trying to make trouble

for his poor anemic characters instead of trying to solve their

perplexities, that presently she tossed the book aside and began

dreaming one of her own in which the heroine got put off a street-car in

the opening chapter.

The telephone bell roused her once or twice, far enough to observe that

Inga was attending to it, so when the front door-bell rang, she left

that to Inga, too--didn't even sit up and swing her legs off the couch

and try, with a prodigious stretch, to get herself awake, until she

heard the girl say casually:

"Her ban right in the sitting-room."

So it fell out that Rodney Aldrich had, for his second vivid picture of

her,--the first had been, you will remember, when she had seized the

conductor by both wrists, and had said in a blaze of beautiful wrath,

"Don't dare to touch me like that!"--a splendid, lazy, tousled creature,

in a chaotic glory of chestnut hair, an unlaced middy-blouse, a plaid

skirt twisted round her knees, and a pair of ridiculous red bedroom

slippers, with red pompons on the toes. The creature was stretching

herself with the grace of a big cat that has just been roused from a nap

on the hearth-rug.

If his first picture of her had been brief, his second one was

practically a snap-shot, because at sight of him, she flashed to her

feet.

So, for a moment, they confronted each other about equally aghast,

flushed up to the hair, and simultaneously and incoherently, begging

each other's pardon--neither could have said for what, the goddess out

of the machine being Inga, the maid-of-all-work. But suddenly, at a

twinkle she caught in his eye, her own big eyes narrowed and her big

mouth widened into a smile, which broke presently into her deep-throated

laugh, whereupon he laughed too, and they shook hands, and she asked him

to sit down.

[Illustration: At sight of him she flashed to her feet.]