The Heart of Rachael

Old Peter Pomeroy, who had a shrewd and disillusioned gray eye,

thought, as everyone else thought, that Mrs. Sartoris was an

empty-headed little fool, but he rarely talked to a woman who was

anything else, and no woman ever thought him anything but markedly

courteous and gallant. He was old now, rich, unmarried, quite

alone in the world. For forty years he had kept all the women of

his acquaintance speculating as to his plans; marriageable women

especially--perhaps fifty of them--had been able in all

maidenliness to indicate to him that they might easily be

persuaded to share the Pomeroy name and fortune. But Peter went on

kissing their hands, and thrilling them with an intimate casual

word now and then, and did no more.

Perhaps he smiled about it sometimes, in the privacy of his own

apartments--apartments which were variously located in a great

city hotel, an Adirondacks camp, a luxurious club, his own yacht,

and the beautiful home he had built for himself within a mile of

the spot where he was now having his tea. Sometimes it seemed

amusing to him that so many traps were laid for him. He could

appraise women quickly, and now and then he teased a woman of his

acquaintance with a delightfully worded description of his ideal

of a wife. If the woman thereafter carelessly indicated the

possession of the desired qualities in herself, Peter saw that,

too, but she never knew it, and never saw him laughing at her. She

went on for a month or two dressing brilliantly for his carefully

chaperoned little dinners, listening absorbed to his dissertations

upon Japanese prints or draperies from Peshawar, until Peter grew

tired and drew off, when she must put a brave face upon it and do

her share to show that she realized that the little game was over.

He had not been entirely without feminine companionship, however,

during the half-century of his life as a man. Everybody knew

something--and suspected a great deal more--of various friendships

of his. Even the girls knew that Peter Pomeroy was not over-

cautious in the management of his affairs, but they did not like

him the less, nor did their mothers find him less eligible, in a

matrimonial sense. Sometimes he met the older women's hints quite

seriously, with brief allusions to some "little girl" who was

always as sweet and deserving and virtuous as his own fatherly

interference in her affairs was disinterested and kind. "I did

what I could for her--risking what might or might not be said,"

Mr. Pomeroy might add, with a hero's modest smile and shrug. And

if nobody ever believed him, at least nobody ever challenged him.