Joan and Co.

The New York social season in which Miss Joan Fairburne made her début was not more than half finished before the quizzical smile in the dark eyes, half closed above a slightly upturned, dainty nose, which gave her an air of amused boredom at first so fascinating to Dicky Burnett, became, instead of an occasional expression, rather more frequent than befitted a young woman of twenty. Also it was rather too inclusive to be complimentary. As long as it was directed merely in a general way at the assembled company at thé dansant or box party or cards or dance, Dicky fell in with it, and, his long legs crossed before him and his arms folded over his chest, he assumed an air of weary submission which he was sure established between him and Miss Fairburne a bond of common lack of interest. But when those same dark eyes with their long lashes began to turn also in his direction, as he made his gay comments intended to cause her to nod sympathetically, but which did nothing of the sort, he grew uncomfortable. It was as if she brushed him into the pile with the others.

It was the more humiliating because he realized that the girl was sincere. She was startlingly and delightfully sincere. He had known her now for two years; first as one of twenty girls at Wellesley when he was a junior at Harvard; then, when he was a senior, as one of a half-dozen; then, in these last few months after graduation, when he was not anything in particular, as one of two or three girls; and finally, within a week, as the girl.

She did not know this yet, and every time he made up his mind to tell her he hesitated. This was not because he lacked courage or experience. He had never actually asked any one to marry him, but he had come so near it once or twice on especial occasions—such as certain moonlight nights on that yachting trip he had taken two summers before with Haywood, and again on a week-end with Benton when he met the fascinating widow—that he realized that only abstention from the easily spoken words had saved him. And always by the next morning he was congratulating himself.

This time, however, it was different; the next morning he was blaming himself. Reviewing the evening before in the luxurious quiet of the suite of rooms which ever since he was seventeen had been set apart for him in his father’s home, he thought of all the things he might have said to her and had not said, and damned himself for one who had not made the most of a rare opportunity.

Last night the Devereaux ballroom had been close with the crush that filled it—it was like a room overcrowded with flowers—and she had begged for a breath of fresh air. It was January, but Burnett remembered the way to the little courtyard, and, finding her wrap and overshoes, had led her to the tiny snow-dusted inclosure beneath the white stars. He had taken her arm, and they walked back and forth in the frosty night with the music coming to them muffled. It was a pretty scene—a niche from another world, bounded by a high wall, with the subdued light from the big windows cutting yellow across the snow, and above them the illimitable purple. He had seen her lift her face—her earnest, eager face, her beautiful half girl, half woman face; her tender yet haughty face with its keen black eyes and its fine mouth. She had stood so for a moment very erect like a princess challenging the stars themselves, and breathing deep of some clearer air above. He should have seized her then in his arms. He should have made her listen to his words of love. He should have told her how, with everything else in the world a man could crave, not having her he had nothing. He should have told her how now she stood out among all the women in the world as the woman. And yet he had said nothing. He had watched her in awe and said nothing. His heart beating in his throat, he had been as tongue-tied as any freshman. Ass that he was!

Dicky Burnett continued, with variations, to libel himself in this fashion all the while he dressed. To tell the truth, however, he by no means looked the part he assigned to himself. He was rather good-looking from either a man’s or a woman’s point of view. Tall, lean, clean-cut, with an intelligent and good-humored face suggesting in the nose and mouth elements of real strength, he was distinguished in appearance above the average of his fellows. Offhand one would have said he would make a good soldier. Men would not hesitate to follow him because he would not hesitate to lead, given a goal he considered worth reaching. Well, he had one now. Then why the devil—

Burnett was shaving himself with a safety razor and yet he managed to cut himself slightly just below the left temple. He touched the scratch with a bit of caustic and enjoyed the smart of it.

At half-past eight he went downstairs to breakfast, which he took alone because his mother always joined his father, who left promptly at eight for the offices of the Burnett Manufacturing Company. There was no need of this early departure, as Dicky regularly informed him; but the latter only affected to scorn this evident truth. He made a sort of hobby of keeping to the old habits that had made his business to-day what it was—the leader in the manufacture of a certain type of patent-leather finish. His idea since he was forty had been, as he informed his traveling men at the end of each fiscal year, “to make the next twelve months the greatest in the history of the company.”

“That’s all very well,” his son observed whenever he found the opportunity; “but when are you going to get off?”

“About the time I begin to smoke cigarettes,” Burnett senior answered once, as he lighted a stogie.

Dicky waved responsibility aside with a motion of the hand containing a fresh cigarette.

“Of course, if you’re going to be stubborn and not take advice—”

“Advice from who?” the elder demanded, utterly disregarding the rule governing prepositions.

“From me. Hang it, you are putting on weight.”

“What of it?”

“Mullen used to say—”

“Who’s Mullen?”

“Mullen is the ’varsity trainer,” Dicky replied imperturbably. “As I was observing, when interrupted, Mullen said that any man who took on weight after forty was running a chance.”

“All right; I’ll take the chance,” Burnett answered grimly.

It was a fact, however, that Dicky really was worried about his father. He had a genuine love for him and an honest respect for his opinion on every other subject except work and health. On the latter subject Dicky actually was qualified to speak with some authority; for although he had never distinguished himself in athletics he had been under Mullen for three years as a member of the second baseball team.

After finishing a breakfast of eggs and toast, Burnett enjoyed his usual walk from his home on Sixty-first Street to the Harvard Club. Here he dropped in to glance at the morning papers, and then took a taxi for the factory, reaching there at about half-past ten.

As second vice-president of the company, he had a desk in an office with Forsythe, the actual vice-president. The latter, an aggressive man of forty, with hair brushed back in a fashion that gave one the weird impression that he was facing a strong wind, always glanced up with an abrupt “Good-morning, Mr. Burnett,” and planned to find business elsewhere the hour or so that Dicky remained. As a matter of fact, there was not much for the latter to do. The smoothly running organization had been built up of men who had learned the business from factory, to road, to office. It was so that Burnett had wished his son to learn it; but, as the latter observed, with some point:

“What’s the use, Dad?”

“The use?” snorted Burnett. “How else will you learn it?”

“I don’t want to learn it.”

“Eh?”

“I’d rather let George do it.”

“George?”

“He being any one who is obliged to do it for the sake of earning a living,” explained Dicky. “I could do it, I could go into the factory and wallow around in sticky black stuff, if it were necessary. I could go out on the road and sell and sit round between times in hotel offices. But thank the Lord it isn’t necessary. So what’s the use? You did all those things yourself, I know. But that is just the reason why no one else in the family should have to do them all over again. Besides, there are plenty of men looking for that chance. Like Forsythe; he ate up that kind of work for years, and enjoyed it. Now he eats up all this office, and enjoys it. And you—you ought to be out playing golf—that’s all.”

It was a matter of family pride that led Burnett, in spite of this attitude, to elect the boy a second vice-president; and it was merely the obligation the boy felt he owed his father that made him accept it. And Dicky let it go at that. He came down nearly every morning, and sat around until lunch-time mostly for the sake of seeing that his father did not duck into an alley somewhere and bolt a cup of coffee and a doughnut. At twelve o’clock he broke in upon the sanctity of Burnett’s private office, removed his hat and coat from the hat-rack, and stood by the roll-top desk until his father rose with a scowl and put his arms through the sleeves. Then Dicky led him round the block to a decent hotel, where he made him eat slowly and deliberately a plate of soup, an omelet, and whole wheat bread without butter. With equal insistence he refused to allow him to eat apple pie, squash pie, mince pie, cream pie, or crullers. Dicky generally postponed his own lunch until later.

“Then you’ll go and eat what you please,” his father hinted darkly as he finished.

“Yes, Dad.”

“Why in thunder, then, can’t you let me alone?”

“You aren’t as young as I am. Besides, if you’re going to work as hard as you do, you must look after yourself.”

Burnett senior bit off the end of his stogie with a vicious snap and, lighting it, sat back. He was shorter and stockier than his son. His features were less finely moulded. It was as though he had been chiseled out of oak with coarse tools, while the boy had been carefully carved with keen-bladed instruments. That was what the mother had done for him. She was a Cleaves of Portland—a fine, gentle soul who in her day had been considered a beauty. She had her days, even now.

Burnett could not help being proud of the boy. When he came into a place like this, he saw people glance at him approvingly. And nothing gave him more satisfaction than to introduce him to some old friend or new business acquaintance with a dignified:

“My son.”

But in the end he generally paid for this by being forced to listen to some such remark as:

“Ah, in business with you?”

As a rule, Dicky himself furnished the reply:

“I have the honor of being a vice-president of the company.”

And the boy did not know a vici dressing from ordinary shoe blacking!

“Look here,” his father said to him on this the 10th day of January, “you’ve been out of college some six months now.”

“Right.”

“It seems as though you ought to be doing something more than just hanging round.”

“I’m thinking of doing something,” Dicky informed him.

Burnett sat up straighter in his chair.

“Now, that sounds better.”

“I’m thinking of getting married,” went on Dicky.

“Married?” exclaimed Burnett.

“Married,” Dicky nodded seriously.

Burnett frowned.

“You haven’t got mixed up with—”

“Nothing of that sort,” Dicky cut in. “You ought to know me better.”

Burnett flushed. He did. He spoke more carefully:

“Who is it, boy?”

“I can’t tell you yet, Dad, because I haven’t asked her. I’m going to ask her to-day.”

“Any one I know?”

“Some one you’d like.”

Dicky leaned across the table and, with his arms folded, talked straight into his father’s gray eyes.

“She’s very beautiful, Dad, with a sort of beauty that—that makes you hold your breath. She’s slight and not very tall; but sometimes she looks so tall that I feel like a kid beside her. And she has dead-honest black eyes that think a good deal. And she makes you feel as though you ought to be a prince or a caliph to be worthy of her. That’s the trouble.”

Burnett had been studying his son. What he saw there now warmed his own eyes.

“What’s the trouble?” he demanded.

“She’s one of the choice things of the world, and ought to be surrounded by nothing but choice things.”

Burnett’s face hardened a trifle.

“You mean you want to buy her some jewels?”

“I wasn’t thinking of that—though she could wear jewels. I don’t remember, though, that I’ve ever seen her with many. You wouldn’t notice them, anyway, if she had them on. I don’t know what you would get her that she hasn’t already.”

Burnett threw away his stogie. He had never seen the boy so much in earnest. It put something into the lad’s eyes and mouth that he was glad to find there. He glanced around. There was no one near to observe his weakness, so he reached over and placed his big hand on his son’s.

“Dick,” he said slowly, “you know that what’s mine is yours.”

Dicky Burnett felt something squeezing his Adam’s apple.

“I wasn’t telling you this for—that,” he choked.

“I know,” Burnett put in quickly. “I know. But go after her. Get her. If she’s all you say she is, by God, I’ll make a prince of you, if that’s what she wants.”

Dicky smiled mistily.

“If you were thirty years younger you’d get her yourself,” he said.