Painting by Ralph P. Coleman Illustration for "The Sightseers" THEY HAD STOOD ON THE HILLSIDE TOGETHER THAT AFTERNOON UCHANAN doesn't attempt to exHow could he? He merely relates it as one of those queer incidents, not to be defined, examples of which every man over forty has in the limbo of his mind. A door opens; you see something; then the door closes. There was Linnard-Thomas Linnardthe little, short, plump bond broker, with his toothbrush mustache and his mousecolored hair, turning thin on top, and Linnard's wife; and then there was what happened to them. B plain the story. same way that a faintly nonreligious man regards church-going; they gave him rest from the exigencies of town life and a few hours in which such is the perversity of the human mind to concentrate secretly upon the subjects he was really interested in, but for the mental digestion of which he seldom otherwise found time-politics, books, philosophical questions, a review of his own personality in regard to its environment. You gather from this that he was one of those big, black-haired, goodnatured men, a little dreamy, who go into business in this country because there's no place else to go. Long ago he had trained himself to listen to Linnard's inconsequent chatter without hearing a word of it, and yet at the same time being able to put in an appropriate "Yes" or "No" with clairvoyant accuracy. As for Mrs. Linnard, she so seldom spoke herself that there was little need to bother about her. Linnard lived in Rutley, or wherever it is that brokers live, and every morning he appeared at his office and every afternoon he left the city on the four-thirty express club car, and people playing bridge before they drop off at their respective stations. One pictured him as hurrying to the golf course, and drinking a cocktail afterward, and then sitting down to an excellent but unillumined meal, and then going on somewhere for cards. Each fortnight or so he and his At first Mrs. Linnard had puzzled wife came to the city and dined at an Buchanan greatly. She possessed the expensive restaurant-Linnard loved to initial strength of almost complete spend money largely, foolishly, and pub- passivity. You wondered what was belicly-and went to a more or less stu- hind this perpetual calm. But Buchanan pid play. Sometimes, on a Sunday, had decided that the impression of Buchanan himself took the train to power she gave was largely fictitious, was Rutley. due to the rubberlike consistency of the He regarded these visits in much the entirely simple mind. You push it in; it snaps back. In the beginning there is nothing so baffling as the lack of complexity, and Buchanan, on the whole, was distrustful of the supposed profundity of silence. He knew that most inarticulate people are inarticulate because they have nothing to be articulate about. At college he had discovered the fallacy back of those large, quiet men, usually nicknamed "Pop," who so impress the undergraduate mind. Mrs. Linnard was a small, compact, dark woman-very dark. You knew that she had a delicately rounded figure and a creamy skin. Her glossy, blueblack hair came down in a widow's peak above her eyes. Her eyes were not unremarkable; long and tawny and, so you thought at first, imaginative. Distinct eyebrows, markedly curved, gave an expression of inquiring surprise. Mrs. Linnard had proved another disappointment in Buchanan's life. A certain childlike eagerness that lay back of his outward slowness led him into these disillusionments. It seemed to him now that Mrs. Linnard was completely suited to Rutley and to Linnard. As a matter of fact, had it been otherwise, how could she have married Linnard? Or could she? Women do queer things. There was a pathetic something about Linnard which made it barely possible that he might have been selected as an object for maternal solicitude. Linnard, meanwhile, prospered. He took bigger offices; he expanded into a firm of three names; he became more than ever anxious to entertain his friends in a useless way that necessitated glittering expenditure. As for Buchanan, he hated cabarets. He could not understand how anyone of his or her free will would choose to spend time in a place of bad-mannered waiters and dubious smells watching overly fat people dance to the cacophonies of wearied negroes. He regarded these expeditions as penances and avoided them as much as possible. Sometimes he was unable to do so, and then he sat in a haze of cigarette smoke, studying the utterly quiescent Mrs. Linnard across the table. She seldom danced; they were frequently left alone together. Linnard usually had four or five others in the party, including always several thin-flanked little girls from Rutley, who followed the music with a devastating, cold persistency. One would have been in doubt as to their emotions if one hadn't known that they came from very respectable suburban families. "Why don't you dance?" asked Buchanan. Mrs. Linnard looked at him with less than no interest in her long, tawny eyes. She toyed with the stem of her cigarette holder. "Because," she said, "dancing was meant for out of doors-on a hillin the wind." "Ah!" Buchanan stared. It was one of those isolated remarks of hers that every now and then caused him to wonder if she were, after all, quite so simple as he had decided. And yet, even at that on these rare occasions, that is— there was still the feeling that what she said had very little to do with her real character; as if sometimes thoughts blew through her mind from outside outside, through, and out again-leaving no impression on their journey. One could follow the ascending curve of Linnard's fortune by means of his cars and his houses and the jewels with which he decked his wife. Sumptuousness progressed from the first modest runabout and the initial string of shy imitation pearls, through sedans and touring cars and rings, to the final glory of a chauffeured limousine and a coronet, which was never worn, of diamonds. So too, with his abodes, from the first small, pseudo-Elizabethan with stucco and half timber to the very splendid Georgian, set in ample grounds, with a sweeping arc of drive leading up to it. There was even talk of taking an apartment in town for two or three months of the winter. "It's really a nuisance during the bad weather," said Linnard. “And then— well, we want to go about more, meet |