In fact, he thought, sitting back and crossing his legs, there was one particular eastern comfort he meant to get to as soon as he could take care of more pressing business.
The girl cried out in sheer pleasure.
“Uncle Gray! Uncle Gray! Uncle Gray,” she cried as he swung her up in the air, and straight-armed, held her so, so he could look up into her eyes.
“Woof! One more year and I swear I’ll be too old for this. Why, only just last year I could toss you like this—” he said, throwing her an inch up toward the ceiling before he caught her again. “And this,” he said as he did it again. “But now I can’t no more,” he sighed as he did it once more before he put her down, and she giggled, “I’m getting too old honey, that’s sure.”
“No. I’m getting too big,” she corrected him, because there was a trace of seriousness as well as amusement in his face. And wondering if her beloved uncle was really worried or only just funning as usual, she added, “I’m nine now, remember?”
“Nine?” Gray asked, hunkering to his knees so he could tweak her nose with perfect accuracy, “Sez who?”
“Sez you!” she countered, putting her hands on her hips in a perfect imitation of highly offended dignity, “?‘cause you was at my birthday party, and you gave menine pinches to grow nine inches—and.” she said, grinning ear to ear, as she put her arms around his neck again, “…my Lindy Lou, who is the swellest pony ever, and just like you said: smart as paint and twice as purty!”
“After you finish destroying her diction for the week,” a lovely young matron said in severe tones as she came into the room and glared at her daughter, making her giggle more, “I guess you can start on the others.”
It was awhile before Gray could be rescued from the avalanche of small children that overwhelmed him. But soon he was able to greet his sister-in-law with perfect dignity. This, despite the fact that he had to do so from beneath the pile of children who’d wriggled onto his lap in the chair he’d collapsed into. His sister-in-law began a flurry of apologies as she pried the younger ones off. But then a handsome gentleman, tall as Gray and similar looking to him, but with his nose slightly bent from an old injury; gold, rather than flaxen hair, and gray rather than blue eyes, entered the room and ordered the children away in a firm, soft voice. They instantly, if reluctantly, complied.
Gray drew some back into his arms and drawled, “Now hold on, Josh, it ain’t so bad. At least this time the dogs is locked up, usually they have to be peeled off me, too.”
The children left the room, obedient but glum, solaced by his solemn promise to visit with them in the nursery as soon as he’d finished talking to their parents. But they left cheering after he promised to take them into the park after that.
“I wonder if Delia isn’t getting a little too old to play touch football,” Lucy Dylan said worriedly.
“Well, so’s your oldest, but he promised,” Gray protested, as Lucy frowned in incomprehension, since her eldest was a girl. “Don’t mean to tell me you ain’t going to let Josh come out to play, do you?” he added worriedly.
“Just let her try it! I’ll run away from home,” Josh Dylan threatened as he hugged his wife around the waist. “Pay her no mind. Gray. It’s just that she’s jealous. Her doctor would have a fit if she played today, or any day from now till spring.”
“Lord!” Gray said, eyeing his sister-in-law’s neat waist and high blushes. Honey-haired and sherry-eyed, and so lovely that she’d carried the audiences before her even before she’d uttered a word during her brief career as an actress, itseemed to Gray that though she might have added an inch or two here and there, they were all in graceful proportion. She looked as shapely as she’d been when they’d first met, ten years before.
“Another!” Gray marveled. “Congratulations, Lucy,” he said sincerely as he planted a kiss on her cheek. “There can never be too many girls like you on this old earth, even if I’ve my doubts there’s any crying need for more like him.”
“Like me?” Josh laughed. “Delia’s your spit, if not your image, little brother. Wild as the wind and stubborn as a mule. She looks like an angel and sings like one, just like her mama. And she acts from sunrise to sunset, just like she heard her mama used to do. But though she looks like thistledown, she’s tough as tumbleweed. The only reason I don’t want her to play touch football is because she always wins. And she’s always on your team, too.”
“But you’ve got the boys, Josh. It always tickled me to see them right after they were born—looked like he was busy coining little images of himself, the stuck- up thing,” Gray confided to Lucy.
Not that there was anything wrong with that. Gray thought. A shading of ivory had begun to mix in with his brother’s wheat-colored hair; once he’d thought the classic nose that had set slightly askew after it had been broken years before regrettable, but now he saw it added interest to what would otherwise have been only bland perfection. His older brother was the handsomest man Gray knew, and it was a thing he was proud of, because, as he’d once told Josh sincerely: it was a case of form following function.
They laughed, and gossiped about the children, and then Gray talked about business, because he knew Lucy took as lively an interest in it as Josh did.
“I think he’s right,” she eventually told Josh, “too many people are getting rich on silver, and that’s a reason to start being nervous about it. The rich don’t like to be in a crowd, you know.”
“How would you know? You don’t even like to be with them,” Josh said affectionately, with a look to her that was as good as a caress. “Girl can hold her head up as high as Alva Vanderbilt and Caroline Astor,” he told his brother, “yet she don’t care to. Not very neighborly, is it? She turns down all their invitations,” he said with a look of pride that was completely at variance with his complaining tone.
“Not so!” Lucy protested. “I went to Alva’s ball when I was expecting Jarrell.”
“You would have gone if you were having him right then,” Josh laughed, “even old Gray moseyed East for that one. The world and his uncle was there to see how much money one woman could spend showing another how much she’d be missing if she didn’t accept her as an equal. It only cost as much as buying a small country, but Alva had Caroline Astor kissing her…fingertips in order to get into that affair.”
“Lord. That was a sight,” Gray reminisced. “I never saw so much money wasted, or so many rich men making fools of themselves all at once before. Cornelius Vee’s wife going as ‘Electricity’—never mind the bulb she held, her diamonds could’ve lit up Fifth Avenue. And that fool Buckminister going as Julius Caesar: with side whiskers and a beard? And Kate Turner as a puritan when everyone knows she…ah,” he stopped abruptly, and as Lucy begged him to go on, only said, “Hush, girl. I’m defending, not corrupting you.” Then he added, “Why, all that ought to have made you even happier you don’t have a social climbing wife, Josh.”
“I couldn’t be happier,” Josh said sincerely, “whatever she decided to climb. As it is, the more she snubs them, the more they want her.”
“Now, why didn’t I think of that?” Gray asked, as if intrigued. “You mean if I don’t look at a girl, and don’t ask her out with me, she’ll be beating down my door to get me?”
“As if you needed lessons in getting girls,” Lucy scoffed, as they all laughed.
But just maybe I do, Gray thought, when he left them that night with a firm promise to return for dinner on Friday. And so maybe I’ll try it for a day or two, or three, he thought, calculating that it had been exactly seven days since he’d seen her, and only the Lord could make something good in that little time.
Gray never believed there could be such a thing as too many naked women. Even now, tilting his head to the side, he decided it was that there was too much of each naked woman in sheer square yardage, rather than too many of them. What might be piquant singly, and delightful at closer range, was definitely oppressive in paint and twelve feet high and wide. Despite the green sylvan setting the ladies werecavorting in as they eternally molested a grinning satyr within their massive ornate gold frame above him, there was definitely too much pink and white surrounding him for his taste.
