There were two girls in evening dress and two young men in the illuminated chariot.  It flashed by like a Leonid, but left a gay impression of flower-tinted velvet cloaks and ermine and waved hair with a glitter of diamonds and oval white shirtfronts and black coats.  Also a pair of eyes seemed to look for the twentieth part of a second into Winifred’s.

“I don’t believe it was he!” she said to herself when the motor had gone by.

CHAPTER XII

BLUE PETER

Peter Rolls, Sr., and Peter junior were both unhappy in vastly different ways.  One difference was that Peter junior knew he was unhappy and suspected why.  Peter senior had no idea that what he suffered from was unhappiness.  He thought that it was indigestion, and he supposed that feeling as he felt was the normal state of men passing beyond middle age.  When you were growing old you could not expect to keep much zest or personal interest in life or to enjoy things, so he had always been told; and dully, resignedly, he believed what “they” said.

If any one had told him that he was a miserable man he would have been angry, and also surprised.  Why the dickens should he be miserable?  He considered himself one of the most successful men in New York, and his greatest pleasure was in recalling his successes, step by step, from the time before he got his foot on the first rung of the ladder all the way up to the top.

Often he lay awake at night pondering on those first days and first ambitions.  If he began to think of them when he went to bed it was fatal.  He became so pleasantly excited, and the past built itself up so realistically all about him, that he could not go to sleep for hours.  What a sensational “bed book” is to some tired brains, that was his past to the head of the Hands.  Besides, he had everything in the world that he or anybody else (it seemed to him) could possibly want.  Perhaps it was a little irritating when you could have all you wanted not to know what to want.  But, he consoled himself, that must be so with all rich people.  The best thing was not to think about it.

He was convinced that he loved mother as dearly as ever a husband had loved a wife.  They were uncomfortable together, but wretched apart.  That was marriage.  There was nothing more in it.

They hadn’t much to say to each other.  But you never saw husbands and wives chatting together like love birds after the honeymoon.  You wanted a bright-cheeked, laughing girl, and you got her.  If you were faithful to each other, and didn’t have rows, it was an ideal match, especially if there were children.

Peter Rolls was very fond of his children.  When they were little they had been the joy of his life; the thought of them had been the only one that warmed his heart and gave him almost superhuman energy to take the future by the horns like a bull and force a ring through its bleeding nose that it might be ready for them to ride when they grew up.