ORCHARD LANE
After the interim of quiet that Lent always brings in Clarkson, the spring came swiftly. There was a renewal of social activities which ran from dances and teas into outdoor gatherings. Evelyn had enjoyed to the full her experience of home. She had plunged into the frivolities of the town with a zest that was a trifle emphasized through her wish to escape any charge of being pedantic or literary. She was glad that she had gone to college, but she did not wish this fact of her life to be the haunting ghost of her days; and by the end of the winter she felt that she had pretty effectually laid it.
In June Mr. Porter began discussing summer plans with Evelyn. He eliminated himself from them; he could not get away, he said. But there was Grant to be considered. The boy was at school in New Hampshire, and Evelyn protested that it was not wise to subject him to the intense heat of a Clarkson summer. The first hot wave sent Porter to bed with a trifling illness, and his doctor took the opportunity to look him over and tell him that it was imperative for him to rest. Thompson came home from Arizona to spend the summer. He and Wheaton were certainly equal to the care of the bank, so they urged upon Porter, and he finally yielded. Evelyn found a hotel on the Massachusetts North Shore which sounded well in the circulars, and her father agreed to it. When they reached Orchard Lane he liked it better than he had expected; the hotel was one of those vast caravansaries where all sorts and conditions assemble; and he was reassured by the click of the telegraph instrument and the presence of the long distance telephone booth in the office. He was a cockney of the rankest kind and it dulled the edge of his isolation to know that he was not entirely cut off from the world. Every night he sat down with cipher telegrams, and constructed from Thompson's statistics the day's business in the bank. He received daily from New York the closing quotations on the shares he was interested in, and as he walked the long hotel verandas he effected a transmigration of spirit which put him back in his swivel chair in the Clarkson National.
Evelyn made him drive with her and Grant, and dragged him to the golf course, where she was the star player, and where Grant was learning the game.
A college friend of Evelyn's, in one of the near-by cottages, asked her neighbors to call on the Porters. The fact that the cottagers thus set the mark of their approval upon the Westerners, gave them distinction at the hotel. Several men of Porter's age took him to their quieter porches and found him interesting; they liked his stories, though they hardly excused his ignorance of whist; in their hearts they accused him of poker, of which he was guiltless. Incidentally they got a good deal of information from him touching their Western interests; it was worth while to know a man that received the crop news ahead of the newspapers. He liked the praise of Evelyn which was constantly reaching him; she was the prettiest girl in the place; her golf was certainly better than any other girl's. When she won a cup in the tournament he waited anxiously to see what the Boston papers said about it, and he surreptitiously mailed the cuttings home to the Clarkson Gazette.
In August Warry Raridan appeared suddenly and threw himself into the gaieties of the place for a fortnight. Mr. Porter asked him to sit at their table and marveled at the way Evelyn snubbed him, even to the extent of running away for three days with some friends who had a yacht and who carried her to Newport for a dance. During her absence Warry made all the other girls about the place happy; they were sure that "that Miss Porter" was treating him shabbily and their hearts went out to him. Warry sulked when Evelyn returned and they had an interview between dances at a Saturday night hop.
He sought again for recognition as a lover; she had not praised the efforts he had been making to win her approval by diligence at his office; he took care to call her attention to his changed habits.
"But, Evelyn, I am doing differently. I know that I wasted myself for years so that I'm a kind of joke and everybody laughs about me. But I want to know—I want to feel that I'm doing it for you! Don't you know how that would help me and steady me? Won't you let it be for you?" He came close to her and stood with his arms folded, but she drew away from him with a despairing gesture.
"Oh, Warry," she cried, wearily, "you poor, foolish boy! Don't you know that you must do all things for yourself?"
"Yes," he returned eagerly. "I know that; I understand perfectly; but if you'd only let me feel that you wanted it—"
"I want you to succeed, but you will never do it for any one, if you don't do it for yourself."
He went home by an early train next morning to receive Saxton's consolation and to turn again to his law books. Margrave, on behalf of the Transcontinental, had offered to compromise the case of the poor widow whose clothes lines had been interfered with; but Raridan rejected this tender. He needed something on which to vent his bad spirits, and he gave his thought to devising means of transferring the widow's cause to the federal court. The removal of causes from state to federal courts was, Warry frequently said, one of the best things he did.