The Longview party stopped at the Waldorf for supper, and Frothingham, calmer and a little embarrassed, joined them. Catherine received him as if nothing had taken place, and the next night they appeared together at the Garden as usual.
Late in the evening she said to him: “I’ve told mother of our engagement. Do you mind, dear?”
“She wishes you to come down to the country with us on Sunday to stay a week or two. It is beautiful there, and we shall be very quiet. Shall you like that?”
“And I may speak to your father?” he asked. “In my country it wouldn’t be regarded as honourable for me to act as I’ve been acting with you. I can’t help feeling uncomfortable because I’ve said nothing to your father.”
“I’ll speak to him first, Arthur. He lets me do as I please. And he’ll be contented with whatever makes me happy. He’s _such_ a dear!”
Frothingham looked faintly annoyed. It was not in his plan to include “father” in their romance. Romance with daughter, business with father--that was the proper and discreet distribution of the preliminaries to the formal engagement. He had, deep down, a horrible, nervous fear that he might be drawn into matrimony without definite settlements--the father might be as difficult to pin down in his way as was the daughter in her way. “I must take this business in hand,” he said to himself, “or I’ll be in a ghastly mess.”
Catherine, her mother, and he went down on the one-o’clock train. The Hollister country place--Lake-in-the-Wood--was a great pile of brick and stone, impressive for size rather than for beauty, filled with expensive furnishings and swarming servants in showy livery, and surrounded by a handsome, well-ordered park, with winding walks and drives, and romantically bridged streams flowing to and from a large lake. They lived with more ceremony than did Surrey at Heath Hall--but there was an air of newness and stiffness and prodigal profusion about it all, a suggestion of a creation of yesterday that might find a grave to-morrow. This impression, which had often come to him in the palaces of New York, began to form as the porter opened the huge gates between the park and the highway. It grew stronger and stronger as he penetrated into the gaudy, if tasteful, establishment. Everything was too new, too grand, too fine. The daughter alone was at her ease; the mother was not quite at her ease; the father was distinctly, if self-mockingly, ill at ease.