and motor car, a place at Marblehead, and several thousand shares of Boston and Maine.
And so it went, all up and down the line, at one of Miss Potter’s Friday afternoons. There, in her house, you could be sure that if the lion and the lamb did not lie down together their hostess would seat then in such close proximity to each other that the ensuing slaughter would be made as easy, swift, and unadorned as possible.
And as the sound of snarl and curse grew louder in the clamorous tumult of these Friday afternoons, as the face grew livid with its hate, as the eye began to glitter and the vein to swell upon the temple, Miss Potter would look about her with triumphant satisfaction, seeing that her work was good, thinking with delight:
“How stimulating! How fine it is to see so many interesting people together—people who are really doing things! To see the flash and play of wit, to watch the clash of brilliant intellects, to think of all these fine young men and women have in common, and of the mutual benefits they will derive from contact with one another!—ah-ha! What a delightful thing to see—but who is this that just came—” she would mutter, peering toward the door, for she was very near-sighted—“who? Who?—O-oh! Professor Lawes of the Art Department—oh, Professor Lawes, I’m so glad you could come. We have the most interesting young man here today—Mr. Wilder, who painted that picture everyone’s talking about—”Portrait of a Nude Falling Upon Her Neck in a Wet Bathroom“—Mr. Wilder, this is Doctor Lawes, the author of Sanity and Tradition in the Renaissance—I know you’re going to find so much in common.”
And having done her duty, she would wheeze heavily away, looking around with her strange fixed grin and bulging eyes to see if she had left anything or anyone undone or whether there was still hope of some new riot, chaos, brawl, or bitter argument.
And yet there was a kind of wisdom in her too, that few who came there to her house suspected: a kind of shrewdness in the fixed bulging stare of her old eyes that sometimes saw more than the others knew. Perhaps it was only a kind of instinct of the old woman’s warm humanity that made her speak to the fragile little man with burning eyes more gently than she spoke to others, to seat him on her right hand at the dinner table, and to say from time to time: “Give Mr. Ten Eyck some more of that roast beef. Oh, Mr. Ten Eyck, do—you’ve hardly eaten anything.”
