"I'm going in order to get away."
Marriott was sheltering in his palms a match for his cigarette. He looked up suddenly, the cigarette still between his lips.
"Away from what?"
"Oh, from--everything!" She waved her hands despairingly. Marriott did not understand.
"That's it," she said, looking him in the eyes. He saw that she was very serious. He lighted his cigarette, and flung away the match that was just beginning to burn his fingers.
"I'm going to run away; I'm going to forget for a whole summer. I'm going to have a good time. When I come back in the fall I'm going to the Charity Bureau and do some work, but until then--"
"Who's going with you?" asked Marriott. He had thought of other things to say, but decided against them.
"Mama."
"And your father?"
"Oh, he can't go. He and Dick will stay at home."
"Then you won't shut up the house?"
"No, we'll let the maids go, but we've got Gusta Koerner to come in every day and look after things. I'm glad for her sake--and ours. We can trust her."
"I should think Dick would want to go."
"No, he has this new automobile now, and he says, too, that he can't leave the bank." She smiled as she thought of the seriousness with which Dick was regarding his new duties.
"Then you'll not go to Mackinac?"
"No, we'll close the cottage this summer. Papa doesn't want to go there without us, and--"
"But Dick will miss his yacht."
"Oh, the yacht has been wholly superseded in his affections by the auto."
"Well," said Marriott, "I'll not go north myself then. I had thought of going up and hanging around, but now--"
She looked to see if he were in earnest.
"Really, I'm not as excited over the prospect of going to Europe as I should be," said Elizabeth with a little regret in her tone. "I haven't been in Europe since I graduated, and I've been looking forward to going again--"
"Oh, you'll have a great time," Marriott interrupted.
She leaned back and Marriott eyed her narrowly; he saw that her look was weary.
"Well, you need a rest. It was such a long, hard winter."
Elizabeth did not reply. She looked away across the river and Marriott followed her gaze; the sky in the west was darkening, the afternoon had grown sultry.
"Gordon," she said presently, "I want you to do something for me."
His heart leaped a little at her words.
"Anything you say," he answered.
"Won't you"--she hesitated a moment--"won't you look after Dick a little this summer? Just keep an eye on him, don't you know?"
Marriott laughed, and then he grew sober. He realized that he, perhaps, understood the seriousness that was behind her request better than she did, but he said nothing, for it was all so difficult.
"Oh, he doesn't need any watching," he said, by way of reassuring her.
"You will understand me, I'm sure." She turned her gray eyes on him.
"I think it is a critical time with him. I don't know what he does--I don't want to know; I don't mean that you are to pry about, or do anything surreptitious, or anything of that sort. You know, of course; don't you?"
"Why, certainly," he said.
"But I have felt--you see," she scarcely knew how to go about it; "I have an idea that if he could have a certain kind of influence in his life, something wholesome--I think you could supply that."
Marriott was moved by her confidence; he felt a great affection for her in that instant.
"It's good in you, Elizabeth," he said, and he lingered an instant in pronouncing the syllables of her name, "but you really overestimate.
Dick's all right, but he's young. I'm not old, to be sure; but he'd think me old."
"I can see that would be in the way," she frankly admitted. "I don't know just how it could be done; perhaps it can't be done at all."
"And then, besides all that," Marriott went on, "I don't know of any good I could do him. I don't know that there is anything he really needs more than we all need."
"Oh, yes there is," she insisted. "And there is much you could give him. Perhaps it would bore you--"
He protested.
"Oh, I know!" she said determinedly. "We can be frank with each other, Gordon. Dick is a man only in size and the clothes he wears; he's still a child--a good, kind-hearted, affectionate, thoughtless child. The whole thing perplexes me and it has perplexed papa--you might as well know that. I have tried, and I can do nothing. He doesn't care for books, and somehow when I prescribe books and they fail, or are not accepted, I'm at the end of my resources. I have been trying to think it all out, but I can't. I know that something is wrong, but I can't tell you what it is. I only know that I _feel_ it, and that it troubles me and worries me--and that I am tired." Then, as if he might misunderstand, she went on with an air of haste: "I don't mean necessarily anything wrong in Dick himself, but something wrong in--oh, I don't know what I mean!"
She lifted her hand in a little gesture of despair.
"I feel somehow that the poor boy has had no chance in the world--though he has had every advantage and opportunity." Her face lighted up instantly with a kind of pleasure. "That's it!" she exclaimed. "You see"--it was all clear to her just then, or would be if she could put the thought into words before she lost it--"there is nothing for him to do; there is no work for him, no necessity for his working at all. This new place he has in the Trust Company--he seems happy and important in it just now, but after all it doesn't seem to me real; he isn't actually needed there; he got the place just because Mr. Hunter is a friend of papa." The thought that for an instant had seemed on the point of being posited was nebulous again. "Don't you understand?" she said, turning to him for help.
"I think I do," said Marriott. His brows were contracted and he was trying to grasp her meaning.
"It's hard to express," Elizabeth went on. "I think I mean that Dick would be a great deal better off if he did not have a--rich father."
She hesitated before saying it, a little embarrassed. "If he had to work, if he had his own way to make in the world--"
"It is generally considered a great blessing to have a rich father,"
said Marriott.
"Yes," said Elizabeth, "it is. I've heard that very word used--in church, too. But with Dick"--she went back to the personal aspect of the question, which seemed easier--"what is his life? Last summer, up at the island, it was the yacht--with a hired skipper to do the real work. This summer it's the touring-car; it's always some sensation, something physical, something to kill time with--and what kind of conception of life is that?"
She turned and looked at him with' a little arch of triumph in her brows, at having attained this expression of her thought.