Page:The Relentless City.djvu/208

198 for both of them had begun arriving, and were still doing so in shoals, and every day he was occupied for several hours in writing letters of gratitude. He soon got a certain facility at this, but one morning there arrived for him a present which astonished him. The present itself was a charming dressing-bag (there was nothing surprising in this, for it was the eleventh he had received), and the donor was Mrs. Emsworth. She wrote with it a characteristic little note, saying that she was unable to come to the ceremony, as she was at Chicago, and begging him to forget her and not acknowledge the gift. She was making a great success with her tour, and was getting quite rich. Considering what had happened, this seemed to him one of the most superb pieces of impertinence ever perpetrated. Quite so; she had made a considerable sum lately apart from her theatrical business; she could well afford to give him a dressing-bag.

But the impertinence of it, the irresistible impertinence! How like the gamin who puts his tongue in his cheek and says He almost laughed when he thought of it. But the laughter died at the memory of those sickening hours in London on the day he had received the blackmailing letter, and in a sudden spasm of anger against her, not pausing to consider whether it was wise or not, he gave orders that the bag should be packed up again and sent back to her at Chicago, without word of any kind. She would understand quite well.

This incident, small though it was in itself, served to increase a certain depression and uneasiness that beset him during this fortnight. The appalling apparatus and display which was to be made over the wedding was intolerable to him; never before, as he read and re-read the instructions which had been sent him as to the timing of his own movements in what he mentally termed had the huge, preposterous vulgarity of the American mind