Again she made the little gesture of petulant impatience.

"You are continually placing me in a false position. Can't you leave me out of it entirely?"

It is one of the prime requisites of successful mastership to know when to press the point home, and when to recede gracefully. Ormsby abruptly shut the door upon sentiment and came down to things practical.

"It is your every-day comfort that concerns me chiefly. I am going to take all three of you in charge, giving the dependable young person a well-earned holiday--a little journey in which she won't have to chaffer with the transit people. Have you chosen your route to the western somewhere?"

Miss Brentwood had the fair, transparent skin that tells tales, and the blue-gray eyes were apt to confirm them. David Kent's letter was hidden in the folds of her loose-waisted morning gown, and she fancied it stirred like a thing alive to remind her of its message. Ormsby was looking past her to the old-fashioned ormolu clock on the high mantel, comparing the time with his watch, but he was not oblivious of the telltale flush.

"There is nothing embarra.s.sing about the choosing of a route, is there?"

he queried.

"Oh, no; being true Americans, we don't know one route from another in our own country," she confessed. "But at the western end of it we want to go over the Western Pacific."

Ormsby knew the West by rail routes as one who travels much for time-killing purposes.

"It's a rather roundabout cow-path," he objected. "The Overland Short Line is a good bit more direct; not to mention the service, which is a lot better."

But Elinor had made her small concession to David Kent's letter, and she would not withdraw it.

"Probably you don't own any Western Pacific stock," she suggested. "We do; and we mean to be loyal to our salt."

Ormsby laughed.

"I see Western Pacific has gone down a few points since the election of Governor Bucks. If I had any, I'd wire my broker to sell."

"We are not so easily frightened," she a.s.serted; adding, with a touch of the austerity which was her Puritan birthright: "Nor quite so conscienceless as you men."

"Conscience," he repeated half absently; "is there any room for such an out-of-date thing in a nation of successfulists? But seriously; you ought to get rid of Western Pacific. There can be no possible question of conscience involved."

"I don't agree with you," she retorted with prompt decision. "If we were to sell now it would be because we were afraid it might prove to be a bad investment. Therefore, for the sake of a presumably ignorant buyer, we have no right to sell."

He smiled leniently.

"All of which goes to prove that you three lone women need a guardian. But I mustn't keep you any longer from Abigail and the trunks. What time shall I send the expediters after your luggage?"

She told him, and went with him to the door.

"Please don't think me ungrateful," she said, when she had thrown the night-latch for him. "I don't mean to be."

"I don't think anything of you that I ought not to think: in that I am as conscientious as even you could wish. Good-by, until this evening. I'll meet you all at the station."

As had come to be the regular order of things, Elinor found herself under fire when she went above stairs to rejoin her mother and sister.

Mrs. Brentwood was not indifferent to the Ormsby millions; neither had she forgotten a certain sentimental summer at the foot of Old Croydon. She was a thin-lipped little person, plain-spoken to the verge of unfriendliness; a woman in whom the rugged, self-reliant, Puritan strain had become panic-acidulous. And when the Puritan stock degenerates in that direction, it is apt to lack good judgment on the business side, and also the pa.s.sivity which smooths the way for incompetence in less a.s.sertive folk.

Kent had stood something in awe, not especially of her personality, but of her tongue; and had been forced to acquiesce silently in Loring's summing-up of Elinor's mother as a woman who had taken culture and the humanizing amenities of the broader life much as the granite of her native hills takes polish--reluctantly, and without prejudice to its inner granular structure.

"Elinor, you ought to be ashamed to keep Brookes Ormsby dangling the way you do," was her comment when Elinor came back. "You are your father's daughters, both of you: there isn't a drop of the Grimkie blood in either of you, I do believe."

Elinor was sufficiently her father's daughter to hold her peace under her mother's reproaches: also, there was enough of the Grimkie blood in her veins to stiffen her in opposition when the need arose. So she said nothing.

"Since your Uncle Ichabod made such a desperate mess of that copper business in Montana, we have all been next door to poverty, and you know it," the mother went on, irritated by Elinor's silence. "I don't care so much for myself: your father and I began with nothing, and I can go back to nothing, if necessary. But you can't, and neither can Penelope; you'd both starve. I should like to know what Brookes Ormsby has done that you can't tolerate him."

"It isn't anything he has done, or failed to do," said Elinor, wearily.

"Please let's not go over it all again, mother."

Mrs. Brentwood let that gun cool while she fired another.

"I suppose he came to say good-by: what is he going to do with himself this winter?"

The temptation to equivocate for pure perversity's sake was strong upon Elinor, and she yielded to it.

"How should I know? He has the _Amphitrite_ and the Florida coast, hasn't he?"

Mrs. Brentwood groaned.

"To think of the way he squanders his money in sheer dissipation!" she exclaimed. "Of course, he will take an entire house-party with him, as usual, and the cost of that one cruise would set you up in housekeeping."

Penelope laughed with a younger daughter's license. She was a statuesque young woman with a pose, ripe lips, flashing white teeth, laughing eyes with an imp of mischief in them, and an exquisitely turned-up nose that was neither the Brentwood, which was severely cla.s.sic, nor the Grimkie, which was pure Puritan renaissance.

"Which is to intimate that he won't have money enough left to do it when he comes back," she commented. "I wish there were some way of making him believe he had to give me what remains of his income after he has spent all he can on the Florida cruise. I'd wear Worth gowns and be lapped in luxury for the next ten years at the very least."

"He isn't going to Florida this winter," said Elinor, repenting her of the small quibble. "He is going West."

Mrs. Brentwood looked up sharply.

"With us?" she queried.

"Yes."

Penelope clasped her hands and tried to look soulful.

"Oh, Ellie!" she said; "have you----"

"No," Elinor retorted; "I have not."

IV

THE FLESH-POTS OF EGYPT

The westward journey began at the appointed hour in the evening with the resourceful Ormsby in command; and when the outsetting, in which she had to sustain only the part of an obedient automaton, was a fact accomplished, Elinor settled back into the pillowed corner of her sleeping-car section to enjoy the unwonted sensation of being the one cared for instead of the caretaker.

She had traveled more or less with her mother and Penelope ever since her father's death, and was well used to taking the helm. Experience and the responsibilities had made her self-reliant, and her jesting boast that she was a dependable young woman was the simple truth. Yet to the most modern of girl bachelors there may come moments when the soul harks back to the eternal-womanly, and the desire to be petted and looked after and safe-conducted is stronger than the bachelor conventions.