HENRY, deciding to look Miss Boland over before involving himself in introductions, adroitly separated from his companions and maneuvered into the loitering fringes about the dance floor. Just as an unexpected easing of the press precipitated him into the front line, the music stopped, leaving dancers in shoals upon the floor, and Charlie Clayton from the center of these spied him and made a dive in his direction.
"Come on over, old-timer; I want to introduce you," he bubbled. "Billie, allow me to present Mr. Henry Harrington, a late-comer to our town—a war-cynic, war-jaded, thousand year old man, who has scaled all the heights, sounded all the depths and has henceforth nothing left to live for."
"Nothing!" A crisp, musical voice had pounced instantly upon Charlie's phrase, and Harrington found himself gazing at very close range into the light-filled eyes and experiencing the delightful proximity of a very charming young woman. He was smiling of course. He always smiled when he met a lady; and this lady—well, he found her presence immediately stimulating and felt a natural impulse to appear at his very best, wherefore he was instantly provoked at Clayton.
"Oh, I hope, Miss Boland," he said quickly, "you will feel that friend Charlie has misrepresented me."
Miss Boland contemplated with frankly estimating glance the lithe figure and the now alert countenance of Mr. Henry Harrington, and then allowed her blue eyes to kindle and her long red lips to assume curves of humor. "He certainly has slandered you, else my eyes deceive me," she assured, her clear orbs looking at the moment as if they could never have deceived her in all her life. "I see no sign of decrepit age at all. Don't mind; Charlie always was a dumbbell."
Somehow it did Henry a ridiculous amount of good to hear Charlie called a dumbbell by this beautiful creature—yes, she was beautiful; he conceded that—and himself by inference an alert and intelligent person. Her fingers had clasped his in a perfectly cordial American handshake and he was taking in the details of the picture, noting especially a certain exquisite taste which manifested itself in the perfect harmony of her sport rig.
Very chic, she was, all in white, from the dashing brim of the silk sport hat to the sheen of sculptured ankles and the dainty toes of spotless kid. A peaches-and-cream complexion contrasted rather joyously with masses of wavy dark hair exhibiting a faint bronze tinge.
The next observation Harrington recorded was the perfection of detail within this ensemble; not a glossy hair awry, that fetching hat not one degree aslant from its most insouciant angle; not a hint of disharmony anywhere in that immaculate exterior which Miss Billie Boland presented to him—so completely gratifying to his every sense of the esthetic that the skeptical young man was rather knocked out over having encountered it so unexpectedly.
Yet, humorously, the real knock-out was that Miss Boland's appearance did not actually present that exquisite perfection which Henry Harrington's surprised eyes thought they saw. Men are always secing in women's faces things that are not there. Henry Harrington had begun to see such things in his second glance at Billie Boland.
"I may have been war-jaded, a cynic even—all those things Clayton called me," he was moved to flatter boldly, "when I talked to him this morning, but most certainly I am not now."
Miss Boland's smile brightened further and she began to view the young man with signs of more than passing interest.
"Henry is by way of being a struggling lawyer," bantered Charlie; but the gracious Miss Boland frowned at the banter. She seemed by now instinctively to have sensed in the lined face and deeply illumined eyes of Harrington that here was no twin of Charlie Clayton's to talk nothings to, but a man to be serious with and to whom it was worth revealing that she could be serious also.
"It is nice to struggle," she declared, gravely tactful, the violet blue eyes steady in their approving—approving, then searching. "You are ambitious, Mr. Harrington—or,"—she lifted her brows and smiled intimately—"you do not need to be?"
"Need to be! Yes, indeed, Miss Boland; if you imply an inquiry as to whether I am possessed of boundless wealth," Henry confessed honestly, strangely anxious to follow her exact mood. "But I am neither ambitious nor industrious, and I have not felt any great need to be since"
Like the extinguishing of a light, the approval faded out of the blue searching eyes, and the perfectly arched brows were knitted slightly. "Oh, I think every one ought to be both of those things," Miss Billie interrupted earnestly. "Especially when there is so much need for them just now. I have no patience with a peace-time slacker, any more than the war-time kind. I have come home from a world half-paralyzed, and"
For a moment a shadow, as of an unpleasant memory, seemed to invade and darken her eyes, and Harrington was interested to note that the girl had not been where and doing what she had been in Europe without acquiring some serious notions herself. Clayton, he saw, had misrepresented Billie to a certain extent. She was not all frivolous, not by any means, and being John Boland's daughter, why, of course, she saw things in the large, and probably could talk of them that way. The concluding part of her observation, swiftly and spontaneously uttered, confirmed this: "And Europe," she went on, "is starving in soul because it is hungry in body! It's hungry in body because it has half lost the will to work. The need of the world today, as I see it, is for men that can put it to work—create work for it to do, I mean—revive commerce, industry—that sort of thing."
Henry was almost awed; but Charlie chaffed: "There spoke her father, Henry, Old Two Blades; no drones in his hive."
The girl mocked a frown and was just menacing Charlie with her fan when the violin emitted a preliminary squeak and Joe Morley, claiming his dance, swept the vivacious and expertly articulate Miss Boland from before Harrington's face with only time for ejaculated partings; but it seemed to Harrington that her eyes said something about hoping to see him soon again.
"Fast worker, Billie, but don't mind that," consoled Charlie blindly. "It's her way. She's got you cardindexed right now as a dud."
"For which I could murder you," growled Harrington; yet wondered if she really did have him indexed as a dud.
Clayton laughed at the mischief he thought he had made. "She'll not rest till you confess ambitions and go to work at them," he prophesied gleefully. "She'll make you run for the legislature. She'll ride you whip and spur; but she's charming about it. You can't get mad at her."
"Get mad at her!" Henry ejaculated incomprehensibly, and felt an immediate need for privacy and reanalysis.
Worming out of the club house, he made for a lonely bit of sward high upon Pigeon Point.
"The girl isn't like what I thought she'd be," he had been explaining to himself as he strode along. "That's why she's so stimulating to think about."
When he had gained the Point and flung himself breast down upon the grass, he found the solitude conducive to meditation.
He was in rather a dotty mood for him. "Her eyes were blue, weren't they?" he asked the greensward. It did not answer. "Her hair was brown and wavy, I'm sure of that," he whispered to a dandelion. "Her complexion, as I remember, was kind of pink and white, lots of pink sometimes and lots of creamy white at others." His enthusiasm grew by the bits that memory fed it. "Every feature perfect Exquisite, by George! Exquisite!" was his completed judgment.
Not a criticism occurred to him.
"If I could ever be interested in a woman again, it would be some woman like Miss Boland," he conceded, as being loftily fair with himself; and then, from remembering how she looked, he passed on to remembering things she had said.
"'Peace-time slacker!' There's a phrase for you. Ouch!" Henry sat up abruptly. "She plugged me dead center with that. Or—did she?" He paused to ponder, but presently was on the move in a sort of brown study, down over the hill, across the golf links by the most direct route and headed for the parking grounds where any number of opportunities to ride downtown would present themselves.
"There he goes now," said a voice upon the clubhouse veranda; and John Boland—Old Two Blades himself—fastidiously dressed as always, but with rugged strength in every line of him, lifted his large head with its domed forehead, its triangle face with recessed eyes, long sharp nose, clamped lips and spiked and knobbed chin and gazed, at least mildly interested, where Henry Harrington, with that free, marching stride which would be his through life, spurned the gravel under his heels.
"He's a clean-looking young man," conceded Old Two Blades. "I've always noticed that about him. Any bad habits?"
"Probably," said Judge Allen drily, "but he's got a great way with a jury or a witness!"
"Good at handling people, heh?" roused J. B., with no effort now to conceal a sudden access of interest; for "handling people" was the secret of all his achievements. He was a great manipulator of the plastic souls of men. Drivers, he could hire in job lots: but leaders! . . . why, if this Henry Harrington now were a genius at kneading and molding the human will? . . . Old Two Blades gaped and stared.
"The best I ever saw at handling a jury," affirmed Judge Allen with conviction. "He has dished Scanlon a couple of times."
Scanlon was the head of the legal department for Boland General.
"Um! Yes," remembered Old Two Blades; "I think Scanlon has mentioned him to me—thought we had better find something for him to do maybe." The caverned eyes began to be set covetously upon the receding figure of this young man.
"Why," ejaculated Mr. Boland suddenly, "if he has all this peculiar kind of ability, and since he's not identified very much with anything in particular, why, he might be the very man to" The eager utterance suspended itself as abruptly as if Old Two Blades had bitten his tongue.
"Yes—yes?" Judge Allen bent his impressive snowwhite head low to receive the confidence; but he never got it. The Boland lips had tightened and the Boland mind went off into executive session with itself on a project so important that he had never yet discussed it with a single soul—one of the largest projects his mind, accustomed to great visions, had ever contemplated.
Within a few minutes he turned from Judge Allen and beckoned Scanlon to him—Scanlon, huge, fat and competent, who like the rest of the cabinet of Boland General was in evidence around the country club this afternoon. In brief whispered words to his Chief Counsel, Mr. Boland set inquiry on foot with regard to the character and characteristics of Henry Harrington, inquiries the answers to which must be made known to the chief executive this very night, so urgent was his interest.
Thus rapidly were things coming on for Henry Harrington; but Henry did not know this at all. He rode downtown in the Doulton automobile and barely conscious enough of his surroundings to note with relief as he stepped out of the car that Hornblower was gone from his lumber pile and that his audience had dispersed, all except a little knot which clustered curiously about the plat on the billboard, and other scattered groups on street corners round.
Lightly Harrington bounded up the steps to his office, but once within it halted with an expression like surprise. The place looked all at once small and mean. Dust and even fly specks abounded. Little dumps of cigarette ashes appeared among the litter of legal documents upon his desk. He must have noticed these things before; but they had not offended him then. Now all at once they did.
"Little stuff," he blurted, glancing at the documentary miscellany, and began to tell himself things. "Have to get some real business in. . . . Have to make money. . . . Got to have a car. . . . Got to have a nice-looking office. . . . Got to have—oh, a lot of things!" And Henry's hands swept out in a widely inclusive gesture.
This was the first time that he had said to himself that he had to have rich clients; yet not that he began to think at the same time of his humbler ones with any sort of disdain. "No, thank God!" And he seized and thumbed those documents. Beloved cases! They represented, each one of them, a cause in which his instinctive passion for justice had been enlisted.
"Justice!" he breathed reverently and was in rather an exalted state. Yielding to this exaltation he turned to the Code and to the oath which he had taken upon his admission to the bar.
"That's it," he exclaimed, and thumped the page in his enthusiasm. "That's my job. I've been lazy; that's what's been the matter with me. I took the little cases and as few as I could. I'm going after the big ones now and as many as I can get. Not that I'll turn my back on the little fellows either. But—hooray!" He stood up and stretched himself. It was great to feel he was getting into the fight again—the really worth-while fight to make the biggest and most useful man of himself that he could.
Clayton had prophesied to him that some day he would wake up with a bump, and, lo, he had done it in that self-same day, and the feeling was wonderful! Glorious! No peace-time slacker he, from this on! If only—if only this waking up were real and as worthy as it seemed . . . for he was still unaware that he had been subtly changed, that one single touch of the personality of Miss Billie Boland had wrought a mysterious alchemy in him. He thought it was something she had said, not something that she was, which had so stimulated him.
If it had been suggested to him that he was already in love with Billie Boland, or that he would ever be, he would have jeered at the idea and at himself. Since there was no one there to suggest it, he merely stood a moment rubbing his eyes, as if to make sure that these new and glowing aspirations of his were not the fantastic colorings of a dream, when there came to his ear a shuffle of quick steps in the hall outside followed by importunate pounding upon the door.
To Henry's surprise it was Hornblower again; but an utterly different Hornblower; the bombastic egotism, the sullen resentment of the morning were both gone. The man's face was ashy, his cheeks fallen, his lips trembling and slobbering, as he staggered through the door with a look of terrible fright in his small piggish eyes.
"Henry, for God's sake!" he groaned, almost falling as he clutched at the arm of Harrington. "Those damned fools are going to croak me! Gaylord and his bunch! For God's sake, don't let 'em do it, Henry; don't!"