Junius P. Easton, popularly known on “the Street” as “old J. P.,” was sulking in his tent like a certain ancient Greek, the said tent being the Florentine library in his lake-side home. He was pacing up and down the great sombre room with its tapestried walls and its high raftered ceiling, chewing ferociously on a thick cigar, mumbling incoherently and thinking things utterly unfit for publication. Every two or three minutes he paused at the door opening into the music room and listened to the confused medley of sounds which came to him from an apartment in a far corner of the house—the light laughter of women, the clink of china tea things and the occasional echo of a man’s voice, an aggravatingly bland and urbane voice with a trace of a foreign accent in its rhythms.
Every time J. P. caught the sound of that voice his bushy and grizzled eye-brows came together over a deep perpendicular furrow in his forehead and he swore audibly and with gusto. This performance had been going on ever since a quarter to five that afternoon when he had arrived home from his office after a particularly trying day full of perplexing business problems and had been greeted by the butler with the announcement that Miss Fannie was entertaining some sort of an Indian prince and a group of friends at tea.
J. P. had tip-toed to the door of the Indian room, had cautiously peeped through the heavy curtain and had been greeted with the spectacle of Prince Rajput Singh, flanked by his be-whiskered servitors, lounging luxuriously on a divan completely surrounded by adoring females of uncertain age among whom his more or less revered sister was the central figure. Fannie was running true to form and was successfully monopolizing the attentions of the foreign visitor.
Filled with disgust J. P. had tip-toed away from the scene to the quiet serenity of the library and had begun his imitation of a caged beast of the jungle. It was one of the best things he did and he generally felt himself called upon to perform in this manner two or three times a week for there was no way of ever figuring what Fannie was going to do next or who she was going to invite into the house. One afternoon it might be an anarchist preaching the parlor variety of red revolutionary doctrine and the next it was just as likely to be the latest exponent of the simple life, tastefully attired in sandals and a robe made from Turkish towels.
As J. P. remarked once to his closest friend “there’s only one thing you can ever be certain about so far as Fannie is concerned—she’s always sure to make a damned fool out of herself.”
And J. P. spoke by the book. He had lived with her for fifty years and he knew whereof he spoke. He was always prepared for anything and yet he was never able to maintain that air of philosophic calm with which he would have liked to have greeted each new ebullition of her tempestuous temperament. He pictured himself sometimes, in moments of reflection, treating her with cold contempt and silent scorn, but when each new issue arose he greeted it with an emotional outburst which was utterly futile in its effect on her, but which gave him some slight measure of satisfaction. A psychologist would have told him that his affection for his sister found expression in that way. We can never be coldly contemptuous of those we love. However, J. P. was no psychologist.
The festivities in the other corner of the house lasted until nearly six o’clock and when the last guest had been given a gushing farewell by the arch Miss Fannie the hostess bounced into the library to meet her brother. She was attired in a short skirted pink silk afternoon gown that looked as if it might have been designed for a sixteen year old high school student, and she flounced into a sofa with an assumption of girlish ingenuousness that was really pathetic to watch.
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