Marjorie Dean, Marvelous Manager

CHAPTER VIII

TWO THINGS SHE KNEW ABOUT LOVE

This time the blue and brown eyes met squarely. Marjorie’s expression was a mixture of tolerance, vexation and resignation.

“I said it.” Jerry read the glance aright. “I’ll say it for myself, too. Nothing would please me better. You know the rest. It’s the first, last and only appearance of Jeremiah as a buttinski. I knew that someday, somehow, somewhere I’d say something about you and Hal. ’Scuse me, Bean, ’scuse me.” Jerry’s apology was half joking, half earnest.

“Why – I – why – Jerry!” Marjorie stammered. She grew rosy from white throat to the roots of her curly hair. Concerning Hal’s avowal of love, her captain had been her only confidant. Even Constance did not know the circumstances of that bright summer afternoon which she had spent with Hal aboard the Oriole. “Why – Jurry-miar!” She used Danny Seabrooke’s nickname for Jerry, with a rather tremulous laugh. “Who – I never – ”

“Nope; of course not.” Jerry’s reply was comfortingly positive. “Both you and Hal belong to the high inner order of the tight-shell clam. I can only guess how you stand with each other. I know he loves you. Never think he told me that. I knew it almost as soon as we first met you. It’s the same true love, broadened and deepened, that he’s giving you today. I wish you cared about him even one-half as much as he cares about you. You’d be loving him some. But I’m afraid you don’t. And that’s flat.”

“No, Jerry I don’t, and it is a relief to be able to say it frankly to you.” Marjorie’s recent confusion was clearing away. Her grave serenity of tone robbed her candid confession of all harshness.

“I’ve always hated to believe you didn’t for Hal’s sake. I was pretty sure of it last summer at the beach,” was Jerry’s sober answer.

“I’m never going to marry, Jeremiah,” Marjorie informed her room-mate with a kind of pessimistic solemnity. “If I couldn’t love Hal enough to be his wife, knowing how splendid he is, surely I couldn’t marry any other man. Don’t think me selfish because I put my work at Hamilton above love. It is life to me – my highest, most complete ideal.”

Jerry surveyed her chum’s lovely, but very dignified features for an instant. She was divided between a desire to admire Marjorie’s lofty purpose in life and shake her soundly for her deliberate repudiation of Hal and his warm true love.

“I – I’m not sorry you spoke to me of Hal. I’d like you to know that – that we’re not betrothed – nor never will be.” Marjorie’s voice dropped on the last four words. “Only Captain and General know. Not even Connie. I don’t think I have the right to tell her. If Hal tells Laurie, he may ask Laurie to tell Connie. I hope so.”

“I know old Hal wouldn’t tell me.” Jerry’s voiced conviction was emphatic. Jerry was more disturbed than she then realized by the “wallop” which Marjorie had managed to “hand” old Hal somewhere along the road of time from the date of Connie’s wedding. She was inwardly convinced that the “turn-down” had come at the beach.

“I shall tell him that I have told you, Jerry,” Marjorie quietly announced. “It is Hal’s privilege to tell Laurie and your father and mother. It was mine to tell either you or Connie as my closest girl friend. I have chosen to tell you. You are as dear to me as Connie; but not dearer. Only – in this you have the first right to know.”

Marjorie smiled very tenderly on Jerry. Her plump, but not over-plump, partner in the journey through the land of college sat abstractedly scribbling on the back of one of her envelopes, head bent low. She was not far from tears. Jerry loathed tears when, on rare occasions, she had been what she termed “cry-baby” enough to shed them.

“Much obliged.” She now spoke gruffly to hide her threatened flow of emotion. “I – I wish you felt differently about Hal, Marjorie. I – I – always looked forward to having you for my sister in that way.” Jerry absently turned the envelope over and continued to write on its under side.

“Oh, Jeremiah, you’re just as much my sister now as you would be if I were – ” Marjorie suddenly checked her impulsive assurance. Her honest nature compelled her to desist. No; it was not the same. She knew that no declaration of sisterhood to Jerry on her part could compare with the delight which would be her chum’s were they to become sisters through her marriage with Hal.

“Not the same, Bean; not the same.” Jerry shook a positive head.

“I know it isn’t. I knew it almost as soon as I said it,” Marjorie admitted rather humbly. “I love you a lot, Jerry. Most of all because you have always loved me and wanted me for your sister. I’m glad you spoke to me about Hal. There’s one thing I can do for him. Go to Sanford and help you give him a jolly Thanksgiving. We owe it to him to please him; more than we do to please the dormitory girls. He’s the one most in need of good cheer this Thanksgiving.”

“Ha-a-a-a!” Jerry sat up very straight and drew a long relieved breath. “You’re the best little sport, Marjorie Dean! I was afraid you might not care to see poor old Hallelujah on account of having turned him down.”

“I sha’n’t mind seeing Hal,” Marjorie said slowly, “for truly, Jerry, in my own way I like him as well as ever. I haven’t changed toward Hal. My attitude toward him is purely that of friendship. But he has changed. We’re like two persons, standing on opposite banks of a broad river, trying to call across to each other. Neither of us can understand the other. I wonder why true friendship can’t content Hal. He wonders why I can’t understand love.” She cast an almost mournful glance toward Jerry which Jerry did not forget for many days afterward.

“I only know two things surely about love,” Marjorie continued after a brief silence. “One is that I have never been in love. The other is that without love no marriage can be happy. And now let’s not talk of love any more, ever again, Jeremiah,” she ended in a whimsical tone which made Jerry smile.

“All right. Anything to please you, Bean,” she replied. She was secretly elated over Marjorie’s decision concerning Thanksgiving. Nothing could please Hal more she was sure. “It’s midnight, anyway. Time we put a curb on our talk fest.” She rose to begin preparations for sleep. She would have liked to assure Marjorie of how glad “old Hal” would be, but had agreed to Marjorie’s taboo.

Marjorie gathered up her handful of letters from the table, a contented little smile showing at the corners of her red mouth. She was glad that she and Jerry were going home; that the momentous decision had been made. Picking up the last envelope left on the table she saw it was not one of hers, but Jerry’s. A fresh flood of scarlet flew to her cheeks as she saw scribbled across the envelope in Jerry’s hand: “Marjorie Dean Macy.”

CHAPTER IX

MEETING HER MATCH

“Why won’t you go to New York over Thanksgiving, Leslie?” Doris Monroe’s accustomed indifferent drawl quickened to longing exasperation, all but ready to burst bounds.

“Don’t choose to,” came with laconic self-will from Leslie Cairns. She cast an insolent, inquiring glance toward Doris who was busy driving the white car which Leslie had named the Dazzler and loaned Doris for her own use. The pretty sophomore’s injured expression brought a faintly mocking smile to Leslie’s loose-lipped mouth.

“Oh, I know you don’t choose to,” declared Doris in a purposely weary tone. She continued to keep her eyes steadily on the road ahead. “Why don’t you choose to?” she questioned, growing more pointed.

“You ought to know without asking,” Leslie grumbled. “You are just like Natalie Weyman, my New York pal. You can’t remember, or be taught to remember, that business is business. Nat is as crazy to have me go to the Weyman’s New York house for Thanksgiving as you are to have me go with you to New York. I can’t see either of you when I have so much at stake here.”

“I beg your pardon.” Doris turned politely chilling. “I had no intention of breaking in upon yours and Miss Weyman’s plans.” Her coolness arose not from jealousy. Leslie’s rebuff had hurt her pride. She had more than once suspected that Leslie’s frequent allusions to “my pal, Nat,” were made simply to arouse her jealousy.

Doris was too comfortably wrapped up in self to be jealous-hearted. She had a private conviction that a girl who might prefer the friendship of another girl above her own was of small consequence.

Frowning, Leslie shot a second glance at Doris. Her shrewd dark eyes read mainly in Doris’s lovely blonde profile supreme discontent at not being able to have her own way.

“You didn’t break into anything,” Leslie gruffly assured. “That is what you and Nat Weyman seem possessed to try to do, though.”

“What do you mean, Leslie?” Doris turned offended eyes for a brief second on her companion.

“I mean you two seem determined to wreck the promising business career of Leslie Adoré Cairns,” Leslie retorted with grim humor.

“Adoré!” Doris exclaimed irrelevantly. “What a darling name!”

“Just suits me, doesn’t it?” Leslie threw back her head and indulged in her silent hob-goblin laugh.

“No, it doesn’t,” Doris said with amazing candor; “but it might.”

“What?” For once Leslie’s pet monosyllable burst involuntarily from her lips.

“I said it might suit you,” calmly returned Doris, “if you would try to make it suit you. You’ve loads of personality, Leslie; the kind that would make people like you a lot if you cared to have them like you.”

“I’m not keen on having people like me, even if I do happen to have a foolish middle name.” From interest Leslie’s tone had quickly changed to one of mild derision. “I mean I wouldn’t lift my finger in order to stand well with a gang of girls. That’s the way Bean made herself popular on the campus; pretending to be so kind and helpful; setting up goody-goody standards and poking her inquisitive nose into a lot of things that didn’t concern her. Then there was the Beauty contest. She won that. It gave her a strong pull with the upper class girls. All except the Sans.” Leslie’s displeasure against Marjorie rose with the recital of past troubles. “They knew the judges at the contest hadn’t played fairly. Nat Weyman should have won the contest. Wish you’d been a freshie that year. Bean wouldn’t have had a look-in.”

“Oh, I’m not so sure of that,” disagreed Doris, with intent to be provoking. “Miss Dean is really beautiful, Leslie. I’d hate to believe that she is more beautiful than I. Sometimes I’m not sure but that she is,” Doris gave a self-conscious, half rueful laugh.

“What ails you?” Leslie demanded darkly. “I thought you said you had no use for Bean and her crowd. Look where you’re going. You almost zipped us into that limousine.”

Doris’s honest, if reluctant, opinion of Marjorie fanned the flame of Leslie’s too-ready ill humor. She immediately vented it upon Doris’s driving.

“No, I did not almost run the car into that limousine,” was the other girl’s flat contradiction. “What is the use in growing peevish with me, Leslie? You know I detest Miss Dean and that Sanford crowd. The only one of them who appears in the least interesting is Miss Harding. She’s a barbarian, but she has individuality. I can’t forget she’s on earth, you know, since I have her as a room-mate.”

As she spoke Doris had slowed the speed of the car for a stop before the Lotus, the tea room where they had decided to go for a Saturday afternoon luncheon.

“She’s a savage; so is Macy.” Leslie invariably referred to Muriel and Jerry as “those two savages.” “She’s clever, too, that Muriel Harding. The Sans would have taken up with her and Macy and Lynde when they came to Hamilton if they hadn’t been so crazy about Bean. Macy’s father’s a millionaire and Lynde’s father is a multi-million man. Harding would have got across on her nerve. All three rallied round the Bean standard and lost out with the Sans.”

It was on Doris’s tongue to say: “Then they were lucky, after all, since the Sans were expelled from college.” Instead she held her peace. She intended to try once more to coax Leslie to re-consider her decision not to go to New York. Such a remark from her now about the Sans would only stir Leslie into fresh irritation.

Doris sent a backward, lingering glance toward the shining white car as the two girls started up the wide cement walk to the tea room.

“Don’t worry. It’ll be there when we come back,” Leslie said with a half mollified smile. Doris’s proud anxiety concerning the white car was not lost on her. It suited Leslie to pose as a benefactor.

“It’s such a dream,” sighed Doris. Her color heightened; her blue eyes shone starry triumph of the smart white roadster.

“I’ve engaged a Thanksgiving table already at the Colonial,” Leslie announced, tucking her arm inside one of Doris’s. “I tried to get one at Baretti’s but the dago is sore at me. His tables are always engaged beforehand if I happen to want one on a holiday.”

“Couldn’t we go to New York the day before Thanksgiving and come back to Hamilton the day after?” Doris once more pleaded. “You won’t transact any business here on Thanksgiving Day.”

“That’s what you say,” Leslie made instant rejoinder. She laughed as though she was in possession of a rich joke. “I’ve a special business stunt to put over here on Thanksgiving Day. Get it straight this time, Goldie. I am not going to New York.”

“Then I shall go there alone.” Doris stopped on the threshold of the Lotus. She faced Leslie angrily as she made the stubborn announcement. For an instant the two girls fairly glared at each other.

“Go on inside, for goodness sake,” Leslie roughly requested. She had turned incensed eyes from Doris in time to spy three Hamilton students coming up the walk. Luckily their attention was focussed on the white car. Two of them glanced back at it. It was apparently the topic they were discussing.

“I meant what I said,” Doris began haughtily the moment they had seated themselves at a table. “You are so very queer. You seem to forget that I know London and Paris. What is New York to me?” Doris snapped contemptuous fingers. “Merely another large city.”

“You’ll find it a handful, if you try to tackle it all by your lonesome,” was Leslie’s satiric prediction.

“I don’t need, necessarily, to go there alone. I know two sophs who would be glad – ”

“Forget it,” Leslie interrupted with a gesture of dismissal. “The three of you would have nothing on ‘Babes in the Wood,’ or any other of those lost nursery kids. In New York, unless you’ve been born and brought up there, you have to know the right sort of people, or you can’t have a good time. I could give you a letter of introduction to Nat Weyman, if I wanted to, but it wouldn’t do. She’d not like you, and you’d not like her.”

“I fail to understand why New York should be so – so different from London and Paris.” Doris was still haughty, though she was somewhat impressed by what Leslie had just said. “I don’t wish to meet Miss Weyman.”

“Use your brain,” Leslie impatiently advised. “London and Paris are like a couple of villages to you because you know ’em. New York would be a howling wilderness to you. Why? Because you don’t know it. Simmer down, Goldie. I’ll take you to New York with me the week after Christmas. Our town house is closed this winter but I have an apartment in New York and a chaperon whom I’ve taught to mind her own business. You can help me here a good deal on Thanksgiving Day by wearing that new costume of yours that matches the Dazzler. I want to make a splurge at the Colonial, for reasons of my own.”

“Of course I wish to help you, Leslie.” Doris was somewhat mollified by the Christmas prospect. She flushed hotly at Leslie’s pointed reminder concerning her new costume and the car. Leslie had presented her with the white fur hat and coat, an exquisite white silk gold-embroidered gown and slippers and hose which made up the “costume.”

“Then look pleasant, and listen to me,” Leslie curtly directed, her eyes fixed on the other girl’s rapidly clearing features. “Drive the Dazzler to the Hamilton House for me at exactly eleven o’clock, on Thanksgiving Day. We’ll go for a drive and stop at the Colonial at two o’clock for dinner. After dinner we’ll go for another drive. Then back to supper at the Colonial. There’s a good movie theatre in Hamilton. We might go to it in the evening. You can easily run up to the campus and put the car away before the ten-thirty bell rings.”

“Why not go to Orchard Inn for supper instead of the Colonial? Since there’s been so little snow the roads are fine.” Doris made a last desperate effort to have matters arranged partly as she wished.

“Too far away from the campus. My main idea is to be seen with you in all your glory on Gobbler Day. I shan’t tell you why. Don’t ask me. You’ve said you wanted to help me. Prove it by doing just as I tell you when I ask you to do something for me.” Leslie leaned back in her chair and surveyed Doris with the air of a dictator. She was giving a faithful imitation of a favorite pose of her father.

“Very well.” Doris relapsed into displeased silence. She allowed Leslie to order the luncheon and continued mute after the waitress had left them.

Leslie pretended not to notice Doris’s frigidity. She busied herself with the menu, hunting a dessert to her taste. When she had selected it she cast the card on the table with impatient force.

“Don’t meet me at all Thanksgiving Day, if it will be too much of a strain,” she sarcastically told Doris. She knew that Doris was too deeply obligated to her to make such a course of action probable.

Doris viewed her with the cold, measuring glance which Leslie had more than once privately admired in Goldie.

“I don’t mind meeting you and doing as you ask me Thanksgiving Day, Leslie,” she said coolly. “What I do mind is your dictatorial manner. And sometimes you’re really insulting.”

“Can’t help it. That’s the way my father is, and that’s the way I’d rather be. You said I could make people like me if I tried. I wouldn’t try. I’d rather have power; the kind that would make people do as I said because they were afraid of me; afraid to do anything different. That’s the kind my father has. He’s a great financier. Of course his money has helped him climb to where he is, but he has an iron-strong will. His father left him a fortune, but he’s made millions of dollars since then.”

Leslie’s voice vibrated with melancholy pride as she poured forth this praise of her father. She had not told Doris of her estrangement from him, nor did she purpose to tell her. She had long since arrived at the conclusion that her father was not indifferent to her welfare. Mrs. Gaylord had, in a fit of confidence, admitted to Leslie that she had been engaged by Mr. Cairns to chaperon her. Accordingly the two had come to amicable terms. Mrs. Gaylord had amiably consented to go visiting among her many friends and relatives a large share of the time, thus leaving Leslie free to her own devices. She had seen Leslie established in Hamilton at the Hamilton House, had remained with her a week and gone on to visit a friend with the usual understanding that the receipt of a telegram from Leslie would insure her immediate return.

“I should think you’d rather be in New York in business so that your father could help you, since he’s such a wonderful financier.” Doris’s practical and wholly innocent observation raised the red of embarrassment in Leslie’s dark face.

“My father is – ” Leslie fought down the confusion into which her companion’s remark had thrown her. “Didn’t you hear me say our town house was closed?” she asked grumpily. “My father’s in Europe just now. Besides, this garage business I’m in is to be a surprise for him. When he finds I’ve made good he’ll be ready to let me into some of his high finance deals.”

Leslie’s pet dream was re-instatement into her father’s favor as a result of her own daring brilliancy in business. Aside from the pleasure of “making things hum for Bean” she thought well of her garage project. It was the first step upward in the business career she had set her heart upon.

“There’s something I want you to do for me – not later than tomorrow,” Leslie dictated, regardless of Doris’s protest against her dictatorial manner.

“What is it?” Doris again turned her measuring glance upon Leslie.

“I want you to find out whether Bean’s going off the campus for Thanksgiving. I must know. Find out the same about Page, too.” Leslie’s rugged features were set with dogged purpose. Her usually loose lips were now formed into a tight line.