Mildred rose and came to her. “Why
do you suppose he never told us he went there?
Do you think he’s—do you think he’s
pleased with her, and yet ashamed of it? Why
do you suppose he’s never spoken of it?”
“Ah, that,” Mrs. Palmer said,—“that
might possibly be her own doing. If it is, she’s
well paid by what your father and I said, because
we wouldn’t have said it if we’d known
that Arthur——” She checked
herself quickly. Looking over her daughter’s
shoulder, she saw the two gentlemen coming from the
corridor toward the wide doorway of the room; and
she greeted them cheerfully. “If you’ve
finished with each other for a while,” she added,
“Arthur may find it a relief to put his thoughts
on something prettier than a trust company—and
more fragrant.”
Arthur came to Mildred.
“Your mother said at lunch that perhaps you’d——”
“I didn’t say ‘perhaps,’ Arthur,”
Mrs. Palmer interrupted, to correct him. “I
said she would. If you care to see and smell
those lovely things out yonder, she’ll show them
to you. Run along, children!”
Half an hour later, glancing from a window, she saw
them come from the hothouses and slowly cross the
lawn. Arthur had a fine rose in his buttonhole
and looked profoundly thoughtful.
That morning and noon had been warm, though the stirrings
of a feeble breeze made weather not flagrantly intemperate;
but at about three o’clock in the afternoon
there came out of the southwest a heat like an affliction
sent upon an accursed people, and the air was soon
dead of it. Dripping negro ditch-diggers whooped
with satires praising hell and hot weather, as the
tossing shovels flickered up to the street level, where
sluggish male pedestrians carried coats upon hot arms,
and fanned themselves with straw hats, or, remaining
covered, wore soaked handkerchiefs between scalp and
straw. Clerks drooped in silent, big department
stores, stenographers in offices kept as close to
electric fans as the intervening bulk of their employers
would let them; guests in hotels left the lobbies
and went to lie unclad upon their beds; while in hospitals
the patients murmured querulously against the heat,
and perhaps against some noisy motorist who strove
to feel the air by splitting it, not troubled by any
foreboding that he, too, that hour next week, might
need quiet near a hospital. The “hot spell”
was a true spell, one upon men’s spirits; for
it was so hot that, in suburban outskirts, golfers
crept slowly back over the low undulations of their
club lands, abandoning their matches and returning
to shelter.
Even on such a day, sizzling work had to be done,
as in winter. There were glowing furnaces to
be stoked, liquid metals to be poured; but such tasks
found seasoned men standing to them; and in all the
city probably no brave soul challenged the heat more
gamely than Mrs. Adams did, when, in a corner of her
small and fiery kitchen, where all day long her hired
African immune cooked fiercely, she pressed her husband’s
evening clothes with a hot iron. No doubt she
risked her life, but she risked it cheerfully in so
good and necessary a service for him. She would
have given her life for him at any time, and both
his and her own for her children.
