Love? He had not thought about love very much. A married man of
forty-five certainly had no business thinking about love. No, he
certainly did not want love. He felt rather absurd, even thinking about
it. And yet, in the same flash, came a thought of the violent passions
of his early twenties. There had been a time when he had suffered
horribly because Natalie had not wanted to marry him. He was glad all
that was over. No, he certainly did not want love.
He drew a long breath and straightened up.
"How about those plans, Rodney?" he inquired genially. "Natalie says you
have them ready to look over."
"I'll bring them round, any time you say."
"To-morrow, then. Better not lose any time. Building is going to be a
slow matter, at the best."
"Slow and expensive," Page added. He smiled at his host, but Clayton
Spencer remained grave.
"I've been away," he said, "and I don't know what Natalie and you have
cooked up between you. But just remember this: I want a comfortable
country house. I don't want a public library."
Page looked uncomfortable. The move into the drawing-room covered his
uneasiness, but he found a moment later on to revert to the subject.
"I have tried to carry out Natalie's ideas, Clay," he said. "She wanted
a sizeable place, you know. A wing for house-parties, and--that sort of
thing."
Clayton's eyes roamed about the room, where portly Mrs. Haverford was
still knitting placidly, where the Chris Valentines were quarreling
under pretense of raillery, where Toots Hayden was smoking a cigaret
in a corner and smiling up at Graham, and where Natalie, exquisite and
precise, was supervising the laying out of a bridge table.
"She would, of course," he observed, rather curtly, and, moving through
a French window, went out onto a small balcony into the night.
He was irritated with himself. What had come over him? He shook himself,
and drew a long breath of the sweet night air. His tall, boyishly
straight figure dominated the little place. In the half-light he looked,
indeed, like an overgrown boy. He always looked like Graham's brother,
anyhow; it was one of Natalie's complaints against him. But he put the
thought of Natalie away, along with his new discontent. By George, it
was something to feel that, if a man could not fight in this war, at
least he could make shells to help end it. Oblivious to the laughter in
the room behind him, the clink of glass as whiskey-and-soda was
brought in, he planned there in the darkness, new organization, new
expansions--and found in it a great content.