OLLY BOOTHBY was worth waiting for: a nice, wholesome sort of girl, with a dimpled chin and appealing eyes that ought to have been listed under the head of "undue influence," since she had nothing to appeal from or for, having the most delightful home and as many blessings as were good for any one. The one thing about her that drove Tom Standish to frenzy was her equanimity; being a Boothby, she could hardly have escaped it, but Tom felt that to have it to the extent Molly did was little short of a crime.
The Boothby home itself, in its easygoing, delightful way, was ideal. No wonder the children never wanted to go away and "settle"; even the glimpse of it from the train window was heartening. It scrambled over the crest of a hill, commanding the best view of the valley; it had been added to and subtracted from; porches had multiplied, and the great rooms of the pre-Revolutionary period had been divided to meet the requirements of the Boothbys of three generations.
Clinton Boothby, the present head of the house, was a sculptor. The double-storied projecting "L" at the rear of the building was his special province, and here he fashioned those famous equestrian statues that have done so much to raise the standard of American art. At this particular time, the family circle had been increased by three models—an Indian, a buffalo, and a pure-bred Arabian horse rented by a Wild West Show to Boothby, who was going to use them in a heroic group illustrative of this Republic before the coming of the white man.
Tom Standish felt that he was a model, too—a model of patience—since this was his third journey from the Southwest to try and induce Molly to return with him. She was, as usual, fluent in excuses; two years ago it had been that her mother had not been well, and last year her younger brother was to graduate from Princeton in June and she must be there. This year's excuse seemed to Tom maddening in its utter banality: she had accepted the presidency of the Gentlewoman's Co-operative League and proposed to organize a series of pageants for the uplift and amusement of the villagers, who were sadly lacking in artistic influence. In addition to the fostering of esthetic tendencies, the League had a Woman's Exchange side to its character where currant jam, cross-stitch guest-towels, fluffy layer-cake, and Irish crochet might be exchanged for coin of the realm if any one stood in need of them. Tom Standish, the six-footer, who had grown up on a ranch in Texas, could have endured any kind of human rival, but when it came to arguments about forsaking gentlewomen's jam and hand-painted oatmeal sets in his favor, he was too puzzled for words.
Molly would, in all probability, have been too busy to listen. Her head was full of schemes for a new pageant that would include the Indian, the Arabian horse, and maybe the buffalo, if he could be managed. But from the beginning both the Indian and the buffalo had refused to yield to that something in the Boothby character which was wont to win the confidence of man and beast alike. They had remained sullenly indifferent to the blandishments that had been lavished on them in a vain effort to break down the wall of distrust with which they had apparently surrounded themselves.
Mrs. Boothby and her daughter did not wonder that any one as dirty as "Lo" should feel unhappy. The Indian question, they felt, could have been settled years ago by the introduction of soap and porcelain tubs on their reservations. "Treat them as you would any other fellow-creature," Molly insisted, with the finality of youth, when her father proposed installing Lo in a tent near the house, "If it were June, father, I wouldn't have a word to say, but it's nearly October—he might take cold."
Thus Lo was given a room in the attic that no one ever used or was likely to use. It was a sort of Bluebeard chamber, in which had been stored all the outgrown "house beautiful" objects of several generations. Here were the "hand-painted "milkmaid stools, the plaques, the embroidered table-covers that Mrs. Boothby had industriously wrought as a girl and abandoned later as "impossible." Globes of wax flowers and "spatter-work," handicraft of earlier ancestresses, were here kept concealed, like crimes, yet left undestroyed for sentimental reasons.