National Avenue by Booth Tarkington (book recommendations website .txt) 📕

relation not uncommon among those she had spoken of as “leftovers”: a relation that becomes a habit⁠—a habit that in turn becomes a relation. She “went everywhere” with him; and continued to go everywhere with him; and so, after a while, their contemporaries, all married, never sent an invitation to one without including the other. Then, as time went on, and the habit continued and continued, it became common stock in the prattle of more dashing and precipitous younger people. When talk languished and even weather stencils failed to cover a blank, those who felt such covering a necessity could always fall back on this, and wonder why the two didn’t “get married and be done with it.”

In that manner a worn woman-of-the-world, aged twenty, complained to Frederic Oliphant one evening at the Country Club, as he sat with her after unsuccessfully attempting an imported dance he found himself too old to learn. “You aren’t too old to learn it, if you wouldn’t insist on being too polite to hold a girl as tight as these boys do,” the woman-of-the-world informed him with the new frankness then becoming fashionable. “You aren’t as old as your cousin Harlan. Why on earth don’t he and Miss Shelby get married and be done with it? They’ve certainly been just the same as engaged for almost as long as I can remember. Everybody says they must be engaged⁠—by this time! They say she used to be in love with his brother. I don’t see how anybody could be in love with him!”

She glanced through an archway, near by, to where Dan and his wife and Martha and Harlan and a dozen other people were gravely straggling out of the dining-room; all of this party having the air of concluding a festival that had not proved too hilarious. Dan, in particular, appeared to have thought the occasion a solemn one. He had been placed next to Martha; and she remarked cheerfully that it was the first time he had been so near her “in ages.” After that, however, she found little more to say to him, since he seemed to encounter certain definite difficulties in saying anything to her in return.

“I am coming in to⁠—to call, some evening,” he stammered, laughing uncomfortably to express his cordiality. “I’d have been to see you⁠—I’d have been over oftener, except⁠—” He paused, then concluded his ill-fated excuses hurriedly⁠—“except I’m so busy these days.” And he glanced uneasily across the table to where Lena sat smiling mysteriously at him.

Martha thought it tactful, and the part of a true friend, to talk to Harlan, who sat next to her on the other side.

XXIII

“How in the world did that cunning little wife of his ever fall in love with him?” Frederic’s companion inquired, watching the emerging procession of the dining party. “He always looks as if he had something else on his mind when he’s with women⁠—as if he didn’t think they’re worth talkin’ to. She looks about half his age. Of course you can’t tell, though; everybody uses so much makeup nowadays. They say she belongs to awf’ly important people in New York and never liked it here because she couldn’t get enough music. You didn’t answer my question: Aren’t they ever goin’ to get married? I mean your cousin Harlan and that big Miss Shelby. How in the world do they find anything to say to each other? Gosh, if I kept a man hangin’ on that long I’d certainly be talked out! How in the world can two people stand seein’ each other all the time like that?”

“I can comprehend the gentleman’s half of it,” said the gallant Frederic. “I believe Miss Shelby goes abroad for a few months now and then to make her own share of the association more endurable.”

Martha had been at home only a week, in fact, after one of these excursions; though she did not make them for the reason set forth by Frederic Oliphant, who was now much given to the reading of eighteenth-century French memoirs and the polishing of his diction. She went, she airily explained to Harlan, to gather materials that would enable her to defend the Renaissance; but as he drove home with her from the dinner at the Country Club, this evening, he observed that the materials she had gathered impressed him as “about as deep into the twentieth century as mechanics and upholsterers were able to go.” His allusion was to the expensive closed car she had brought from Paris;⁠—her old bit of hickory, impossible to be bent an atom’s width in business, yielded with no more than a faint squeak when his daughter was lavish with herself. “Spend what you plague-taken want to,” he said, “so long as you don’t ask me to ride in the devilish contrapshun!”

“He says he’ll stick to his horses and our old carriage until they’re ‘chased off the road,’ ” Martha told Harlan, on this homeward drive. “It doesn’t seem to me that’s so far ahead. Why hasn’t Dan ever done anything about the motorcar factory he was going to build?”

“He has,” Harlan said, and laughed. “In talk he has, that is! He’s been talking about it for years, almost as much as he has about Ornaby.”

“Then why doesn’t he⁠—”

“Still dancing on the tightrope!” Harlan laughed. “He’s got his car line through the Addition⁠—I understand your father explodes completely whenever it’s mentioned to him⁠—but Dan’s spending fortunes on new streets and sewers and whatnot. He’s actually trying to open a big tract still farther out, north of Ornaby; and I don’t believe he’s able to keep money in his hands long enough to go into building cars. You’d think he’s building them though, if you’d listen to him! He talks about the ‘Ornaby Car’ to everybody; I suppose he believes it’s a lucky name. He has got his Addition booming though⁠—no question. He’s making the countryside more and more horrible every day. It’s much worse than