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The happiest time of their lives

by Alice Duer Miller · English · Gutenberg #11325 · 373,060 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The happiest time of their lives

Author: Alice Duer Miller


        
Release date: February 1, 2004 [eBook #11325]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HAPPIEST TIME OF THEIR LIVES ***
THE HAPPIEST TIME OF THEIR LIVES

BY ALICE DUER MILLER

Author of “Come Out of the Kitchen,” “Ladies Must Live,” “Wings in the
Night,” etc.

1918






TO CLARENCE DAY, JR.


... and then he added in a less satisfied tone: “But friendship is so
uncertain. You don’t make any announcement to your friends or vows to
each other, unless you’re at an age when you cut your initials in the
bark of a tree. That’s what I’d like to do.”




THE HAPPIEST TIME OF THEIR LIVES




CHAPTER I


Little Miss Severance sat with her hands as cold as ice. The stage
of her coming adventure was beautifully set--the conventional stage
for the adventure of a young girl, her mother’s drawing-room. Her
mother had the art of setting stages. The room was not large,--a New
York brownstone front in the upper Sixties even though altered as to
entrance, and allowed to sprawl backward over yards not originally
intended for its use, is not a palace,--but it was a room and not a
corridor; you had the comfortable sense of four walls about you when
its one small door was once shut. It was filled, perhaps a little too
much filled, with objects which seemed to have nothing in common except
beauty; but propinquity, propinquity of older date than the house in
which they now were, had given them harmony. Nothing in the room was
modern except some uncommonly comfortable sofas and chairs, and the
pink and yellow roses that stood about in Chinese bowls.

Miss Severance herself was hardly aware of the charm of the room. On
the third floor she had her own room, which she liked much better.
There was a great deal of bright chintz in it, and maple furniture of
a late colonial date, inherited from her mother’s family, the Lanleys,
and discarded by her mother, who described the taste of that time as
“pure, but provincial.” Crystal and ivories and carved wood and Italian
embroideries did not please Miss Severance half so well as the austere
lines of those work-tables and high-boys.

It was after five, almost half-past, and he had said “about five.” Miss
Severance, impatient to begin the delicious experience of anticipation,
had allowed herself to be ready at a quarter before the hour. Not that
she had been entirely without some form of anticipation since she woke
up; not, perhaps, since she had parted from him under the windy awning
the night before. They had held up a long line of restless motors as
she stood huddled in her fur-trimmed cloak, and he stamped and jigged
to keep warm, bareheaded, in his thin pumps and shining shirt-front,
with his shoulders drawn up and his hands in his pockets, while they
almost awkwardly arranged this meeting for the next day.

Several times during the preceding evening she had thought he was going
to say something of the kind, for they had danced together a great
deal; but they had always danced in silence. At the time, with his
arm about her, silence had seemed enough; but in separation there is
something wonderfully solid and comforting in the memory of a spoken
word; it is like a coin in the pocket. And after Miss Severance had
bidden him good night at the long glass door of the paneled ball-room
without his saying anything of a future meeting, she had gone up-stairs
with a heavy heart to find her maid and her wrap. She knew as soon
as she reached the dressing-room that she had actually hurried her
departure for the sake of the parting; for the hope, as their time
together grew short, of having some certainty to look forward to. But
he had said nothing, and she had been ashamed to find that she was
waiting, leaving her hand in his too long; so that at last she snatched
it away, and was gone up-stairs in an instant, fearing he might have
guessed what was going on in her mind.

She had thought it just an accident that he was in the hall when she
came down again, and he hadn’t much choice, she said to herself, about
helping her into her motor. Then at the very last moment he had asked
if he mightn’t come and see her the next afternoon. Miss Severance, who
was usually sensitive to inconveniencing other people, had not cared at
all about the motor behind hers that was tooting its horn or for the
elderly lady in feathers and diamonds who was waiting to get into it.
She had cared only about arranging the hour and impressing the address
upon him. He had given her back the pleasure of her whole evening like
a parting gift.

As she drove home she couldn’t bring herself to doubt, though she tried
to be rational about the whole experience, that it had meant as much
to him as it had to her, perhaps more. Her lips curved a little at the
thought, and she glanced quickly at her maid to see if the smile had
been visible in the glare of the tall, double lamps of Fifth Avenue.

To say she had not slept would be untrue, but she had slept close
to the surface of consciousness, as if a bright light were shining
somewhere near, and she had waked with the definite knowledge that this
light was the certainty of seeing him that very day. The morning had
gone very well; she had even forgotten once or twice for a few seconds,
and then remembered with a start of joy that was almost painful:
but, after lunch, time had begun to drag like the last day of a long
sea-voyage.

About three she had gone out with her mother in the motor, with the
understanding that she was to be left at home at four; her mother was
going on to tea with an elderly relation. Fifth Avenue had seemed
unusually crowded even for Fifth Avenue, and the girl had fretted
and wondered at the perversity of the police, who held them up just
at the moment most promising for slipping through; and why Andrews,
the chauffeur, could not see that he would do better by going to
Madison Avenue. She did not speak these thoughts aloud, for she had
not told her mother, not from any natural love of concealment, but
because any announcement of her plans for the afternoon would have
made them seem less certain of fulfilment. Perhaps, too, she had felt
an unacknowledged fear of certain of her mother’s phrases that could
delicately puncture delight.

She had been dropped at the house by ten minutes after four, and
exactly at a quarter before five she had been in the drawing-room, in
her favorite dress, with her best slippers, her hands cold, but her
heart warm with the knowledge that he would soon be there.

Only after forty-five minutes of waiting did that faith begin to grow
dim. She was too inexperienced in such matters to know that this was
the inevitable consequence of being ready too early. She had had time
to run through the whole cycle of certainty, eagerness, doubt, and she
was now rapidly approaching despair. He was not coming. Perhaps he
had never meant to come. Possibly he had merely yielded to a polite
impulse; possibly her manner had betrayed her wishes so plainly that a
clever, older person, two or three years out of college, had only too
clearly read her in the moment when she had detained his hand at the
door of the ball-room.

There was a ring at the bell. Her heart stood perfectly still, and then
began beating with a terrible force, as if it gathered itself into
a hard, weighty lump again and again. Several minutes went by, too
long for a man to give to taking off his coat. At last she got up and
cautiously opened the door; a servant was carrying a striped cardboard
box to her mother’s room. Miss Severance went back and sat down. She
took a long breath; her heart returned to its normal movement.

Yet, for some unexplained reason, the fact that the door-bell had rung
once made it more possible that it would ring again, and she began to
feel a slight return of confidence.

A servant opened the door, and in the instant before she turned her
head she had time to debate the possibility of a visitor having come in
without ringing while the messenger with the striped box was going out.
But, no; Pringle was alone.

Pringle had been with the family since her mother was a girl, but, like
many red-haired men, he retained an appearance of youth. He wanted to
know if he should take away the tea.

She knew perfectly why he asked. He liked to have the tea-things put
away before he had his own supper and began his arrangements for the
family dinner. She felt that the crisis had come.

If she said yes, she knew that her visitor would come just as tea had
disappeared. If she said no, she would sit there alone, waiting for
another half-hour, and when she finally did ring and tell Pringle he
could take away the tea-things, he would look wise and reproachful.
Nevertheless, she did say no, and Pringle with admirable self-control,
withdrew.

The afternoon seemed very quiet. Miss Severance became aware of all
sorts of bells that she had never heard before--other door-bells,
telephone-bells in the adjacent houses, loud, hideous bells on motor
delivery-wagons, but not her own front door-bell.

Her heart felt like lead. Things would never be the same now. Probably
there was some explanation of his not coming, but it could never be
really atoned for. The wild romance and confidence in this first visit
could never be regained.

And then there was a loud, quick ring at the bell, and at once he was
in the room, breathing rapidly, as if he had run up-stairs or even from
the corner. She could do nothing but stare at him. She had tried in
the last ten minutes to remember what he looked like, and now she was
astonished to find how exactly he looked as she remembered him.

To her horror, the change between her late despair and her present
joy was so extreme that she wanted to cry. The best she knew how to
do was to pucker her face into a smile and to offer him those chilly
finger-tips.

He hardly took them, but said, as if announcing a black, but
incontrovertible, fact:

“You’re not a bit glad to see me.”

“Oh, yes, I am,” she returned, with an attempt at an easy social
manner. “Will you have some tea?”

“But why aren’t you glad?”

Miss Severance clasped her hands on the edge of the tea-tray and looked
down. She pressed her palms together; she set her teeth, but the
muscles in her throat went on contracting; and the heroic struggle was
lost.

“I thought you weren’t coming,” she said, and making no further effort
to conceal the fact that her eyes were full of tears she looked
straight up at him.

He sat down beside her on the small, low sofa and put his hand on hers.

“But I was perfectly certain to come,” he said very gently, “because,
you see, I think I love you.”

“Do you think I love you?” she asked, seeking information.

“I can’t tell,” he answered. “Your being sorry I did not come doesn’t
prove anything. We’ll see. You’re so wonderfully young, my dear!”

“I don’t think eighteen is so young. My mother was married before she
was twenty.”

He sat silent for a few seconds, and she felt his hand shut more firmly
on hers. Then he got up, and, pulling a chair to the opposite side of
the table, said briskly:

“And now give me some tea. I haven’t had any lunch.”

“Oh, why not?” She blew her nose, tucked away her handkerchief, and
began her operations on the tea-tray.

“I work very hard,” he returned. “You don’t know what at, do you? I’m a
statistician.”

“What’s that?”

“I make reports on properties, on financial ventures, for the firm
I’m with, Benson & Honaton. They’re brokers. When they are asked to
underwrite a scheme--”

“Underwrite? I never heard that word.”

The boy laughed.

“You’ll hear it a good many times if our acquaintance continues.” Then
more gravely, but quite parenthetically, he added: “If a firm puts up
money for a business, they want to know all about it, of course. I tell
them. I’ve just been doing a report this afternoon, a wonder; it’s what
made me late. Shall I tell you about it?”

She nodded with the same eagerness with which ten years before she
might have answered an inquiry as to whether he should tell her a
fairy-story.

“Well, it was on a coal-mine in Pennsylvania. I’m afraid my report is
going to be a disappointment to the firm. The mine’s good, a sound,
rich vein, and the labor conditions aren’t bad; but there’s one fatal
defect--a car shortage on the only railroad that reaches it. They can’t
make a penny on their old mine until that’s met, and that can’t be
straightened out for a year, anyhow; and so I shall report against it.”

“Car shortage,” said Miss Severance. “I never should have thought of
that. I think you must be wonderful.”

He laughed.

“I wish the firm thought so,” he said. “In a way they do; they pay
attention to what I say, but they give me an awfully small salary. In
fact,” he added briskly, “I have almost no money at all.” There was
a pause, and he went on, “I suppose you know that when I was sitting
beside you just now I wanted most terribly to kiss you.”

“Oh, no!”

“Oh, no? Oh, yes. I wanted to, but I didn’t. Don’t worry. I won’t for a
long time, perhaps never.”

“Never?” said Miss Severance, and she smiled.

“I said _perhaps_ never. You can’t tell. Life turns up some awfully
queer tricks now and then. Last night, for example. I walked into that
ballroom thinking of nothing, and there you were--all the rest of the
room like a sort of shrine for you. I said to a man I was with, ‘I
want to meet the girl who looks like cream in a gold saucer,’ and he
introduced us. What could be stranger than that? Not, as a matter of
fact, that I ever thought love at first sight impossible, as so many
people do.”

“But if you don’t know the very first thing about a person--” Miss
Severance began, but he interrupted:

“You have to begin some time. Every pair of lovers have to have a first
meeting, and those who fall in love at once are just that much further
ahead.” He smiled. “I don’t even know your first name.”

It seemed miraculous good fortune to have a first name.

“Mathilde.”

“Mathilde,” he repeated in a lower tone, and his eyes shone
extraordinarily.

Both of them took some time to recover from the intensity of this
moment. She wanted to ask him his, but foreseeing that she would
immediately be required to use it, and feeling unequal to such an
adventure, she decided it would be wiser to wait. It was he who
presently went on:

“Isn’t it strange to know so little about each other? I rather like
it. It’s so mad--like opening a chest of buried treasure. You don’t
know what’s going to be in it, but you know it’s certain to be rare and
desirable. What do you do, Mathilde? Live here with your father and
mother?”

She sat looking at him. The truth was that she found everything he said
so unexpected and thrilling that now and then she lost all sense of
being expected to answer.

“Oh, yes,” she said, suddenly remembering. “I live here with my mother
and stepfather. My mother has married again. She is Mrs. Vincent
Farron.”

“Didn’t I tell you life played strange tricks?” he exclaimed. He sprang
up, and took a position on the hearth-rug. “I know all about him.
I once reported on the Electric Equipment Company. That’s the same
Farron, isn’t it? I believe that that company is the most efficient for
its size in this country, in the world, perhaps. And Farron is your
stepfather! He must be a wonder.”

“Yes, I think he is.”

“You don’t like him?”

“I like him very much. I don’t _love_ him.”

“The poor devil!”

“I don’t believe he wants people to love him. It would bore him. No,
that’s not quite just. He’s kind, wonderfully kind, but he has no
little pleasantnesses. He says things in a very quiet way that make you
feel he’s laughing at you, though he never does laugh. He said to me
this morning at breakfast, ‘Well, Mathilde, was it a marvelous party?’
That made me feel as if I used the word ‘marvelous’ all the time, not
a bit as if he really wanted to know whether I had enjoyed myself last
night.”

“And did you?”

She gave him a rapid smile and went on:

“Now, my grandfather, my mother’s father--his name is Lanley--(Mr.
Lanley evidently was not in active business, for it was plain that
Wayne, searching his memory, found nothing)--my grandfather often
scolds me terribly for my English,--says I talk like a barmaid,
although I tell him he ought not to know how barmaids talk,--but
he never makes me feel small. Sometimes Mr. Farron repeats, weeks
afterward, something I’ve said, word for word, the way I said it. It
makes it sound so foolish. I’d rather he said straight out that he
thought I was a goose.”

“Perhaps you wouldn’t if he did.”

“I like people to be human. Mr. Farron’s not human.”

“Doesn’t your mother think so?”

“Mama thinks he’s perfect.”

“How long have they been married?”

“Ages! Five years!”

“And they’re just as much in love?”

Miss Severance looked at him.

“In love?” she said. “At their age?” He laughed at her, and she added:
“I don’t mean they are not fond of each other, but Mr. Farron must be
forty-five. What I mean by love--” she hesitated.

“Don’t stop.”

But she did stop, for her quick ears told her that some one was coming,
and, Pringle opening the door, Mrs. Farron came in.

She was a very beautiful person. In her hat and veil, lit by the
friendly light of her own drawing-room, she seemed so young as to be
actually girlish, except that she was too stately and finished for
such a word. Mathilde did not inherit her blondness from her mother.
Mrs. Farron’s hair was a dark brown, with a shade of red in it where
it curved behind her ears. She had the white skin that often goes with
such hair, and a high, delicate color in her cheeks. Her eyebrows were
fine and excessively dark--penciled, many people thought.

“Mama, this is Mr. Wayne,” said Mathilde. Here was another tremendous
moment crowding upon her--the introduction of her beautiful mother to
this new friend, but even more, the introduction to her mother of this
wonderful new friend, whose flavor of romance and interest no one,
she supposed, could miss. Yet Mrs. Farron seemed to be taking it all
very calmly, greeting him, taking his chair as being a trifle more
comfortable than the others, trying to cover the doubt in her own mind
whether she ought to recognize him as an old acquaintance. Was he new
or one of the ones she had seen a dozen times before?

There was nothing exactly artificial in Mrs. Farron’s manner, but, like
a great singer who has learned perfect enunciation even in the most
trivial sentences of every-day matters, she, as a great beauty, had
learned the perfection of self-presentation, which probably did not
wholly desert her even in the dentist’s chair.

She drew off her long, pale, spotless gloves.

“No tea, my dear,” she said. “I’ve just had it,” she added to Wayne,
“with an old aunt of mine. Aunt Alberta,” she threw over her shoulder
to Mathilde. “I am very unfortunate, Mr. Wayne; this town is full
of my relations, tucked away in forgotten oases, and I’m their only
connection with the vulgar, modern world. My aunt’s favorite excitement
is disapproving of me. She was particularly trying to-day.” Mrs. Farron
seemed to debate whether or not it would be tiresome to go thoroughly
into the problem of Aunt Alberta, and to decide that it would; for she
said, with an abrupt change, “Were you at this party last night that
Mathilde enjoyed so much?”

“Yes,” said Wayne. “Why weren’t you?”

“I wasn’t asked. It isn’t the fashion to ask mothers and daughters to
the same parties any more. We dance so much better than they do.” She
leaned over, and rang the little enamel bell that dangled at the arm of
her daughter’s sofa. “You can’t imagine, Mr. Wayne, how much better I
dance than Mathilde.”

“I hope it needn’t be left to the imagination.”

“Oh, I’m not sure. That was the subject of Aunt Alberta’s talk this
afternoon--my still dancing. She says she put on caps at thirty-five.”
Mrs. Farron ran her eyebrows whimsically together and looked up at her
daughter’s visitor.

Mathilde was immensely grateful to her mother for taking so much
trouble to be charming; only now she rather spoiled it by interrupting
Wayne in the midst of a sentence, as if she had never been as much
interested as she had seemed. Pringle had appeared in answer to her
ring, and she asked him sharply:

“Is Mr. Farron in?”

“Mr. Farron’s in his room, Madam.”

At this she appeared to give her attention wholly back to Wayne, but
Mathilde knew that she was really busy composing an escape. She seemed
to settle back, to encourage her visitor to talk indefinitely; but when
the moment came for her to answer, she rose to her feet in the midst of
her sentence, and, still talking, wandered to the door and disappeared.

As the door shut firmly behind her Wayne said, as if there had been no
interruption:

“It was love you were speaking of, you know.”

“But don’t you think my mother is marvelous?” she asked, not content to
take up even the absorbing topic until this other matter had received
due attention.

“I should say so! But one isn’t, of course, overwhelmed to find that
your mother is beautiful.”

“And she’s so good!” Mathilde went on. “She’s always thinking of things
to do for me and my grandfather and Mr. Farron and all these old, old
relations. She went away just now only because she knows that as soon
as Mr. Farron comes in he asks for her. She’s perfect to every one.”

He came and sat down beside her again.

“It’s going to be much easier for her daughter,” he said: “you have to
be perfect only to one person. Now, what was it you were going to say
about love?”

Again they looked at each other; again Miss Severance had the sensation
of drowning, of being submerged in some strange elixir.

She was rescued by Pringle’s opening the door and announcing:

“Mr. Lanley.”

Wayne stood up.

“I suppose I must go,” he said.

“No, no,” she returned a little wildly, and added, as if this were the
reason why she opposed his departure. “This is my grandfather. You must
see him.”

Wayne sat down again, in the chair on the other side of the tea-table.




CHAPTER II


Mathilde had been wrong in telling Wayne that her mother had gone
upstairs in obedience to an impulse of kindness. She had gone to
quiet a small, gnawing anxiety that had been with her all the day,
a haunting, elusive, persistent impression that something was wrong
between her and her husband.

All the day, as she had gone about from one thing to another, her mind
had been diligently seeking in some event of the outside world an
explanation of a slight obscuration of his spirit; but her heart, more
egotistical, had stoutly insisted that the cause must lie in her. Did
he love her less? Was she losing her charm for him? Were five years the
limit of a human relation like theirs? Was she to watch the dying down
of his flame, and try to shelter and fan it back to life as she had
seen so many other women do?

Or was the trouble only that she had done something to wound his aloof
and sensitive spirit, seldom aloof to her? Their intimate life had
never been a calm one. Farron’s interests were concentrated, and his
temperament was jealous. A woman couldn’t, as Adelaide sometimes had
occasion to say to herself, keep men from making love to her; she did
not always want to. Farron could be relentless, and she was not without
a certain contemptuous obstinacy. Yet such conflicts as these she had
learned not to dread, but sometimes deliberately to precipitate, for
they ended always in a deeper sense of unity, and, on her part, in a
fresh sense of his supremacy.

If he had been like most of the men she knew, she would have assumed
that something had gone wrong in business. With her first husband she
had always been able to read in his face as he entered the house the
full history of his business day. Sometimes she had felt that there was
something insulting in the promptness of her inquiry, “Has anything
gone wrong, Joe?” But Severance had never appeared to feel the insult;
only as time went on, had grown more and more ready, as her interest
became more and more lackadaisical, to pour out the troubles and,
much more rarely, the joys of his day. One of the things she secretly
admired most about Farron was his independence of her in such matters.
No half-contemptuous question would elicit confidence from him, so that
she had come to think it a great honor if by any chance he did drop
her a hint as to the mood that his day’s work had occasioned. But for
the most part he was unaffected by such matters. Newspaper attacks and
business successes did not seem to reach the area where he suffered or
rejoiced. They were to be dealt with or ignored, but they could neither
shadow or elate him.

So that not only egotism, but experience, bade her look to her own
conduct for some explanation of the chilly little mist that had been
between them for twenty-four hours.

As soon as the drawing-room door closed behind her she ran up-stairs
like a girl. There was no light in his study, and she went on into
his bedroom. He was lying on the sofa; he had taken off his coat, and
his arms were clasped under his head; he was smoking a long cigar. To
find him idle was unusual. His was not a contemplative nature; a trade
journal or a detective novel were the customary solace of odd moments
like this.

He did not move as she entered, but he turned his eyes slowly and
seriously upon her. His eyes were black. He was a very dark man, with
a smooth, brown skin and thick, fine hair, which clung closely to his
broad, rather massive head. He was clean shaven, so that, as Adelaide
loved to remember a friend of his had once suggested, his business
competitors might take note of the stern lines of his mouth and chin.

She came in quickly, and shut the door behind her, and then dropping on
her knees beside him, she laid her head against his heart. He put out
his hand, touched her face, and said:

“Take off this veil.”

The taking off of Adelaide’s veil was not a process to be accomplished
ill-advisedly or lightly. Lucie, her maid, had put it on, with much
gathering together and looking into the glass over her mistress’s
shoulder, and it was held in place with shining pins and hair-pins. She
lifted her head, sank back upon her heels, and raised her arms to the
offending cobweb of black meshes, while her husband went on in a tone
not absolutely denuded of reproach:

“You’ve been in some time.”

“Yes,”--she stuck the first pin into the upholstery of the sofa,--“but
Pringle told me Mathilde had a visitor, and I thought it was my duty to
stop and be a little parental.”

“A young man?”

“Yes. I forget his name--just like all these young men nowadays, alert
and a little too much at his ease, but amusing in his way. He said,
among other things--”

But Farron, it appeared, was not exclusively interested in the words
of Mathilde’s visitor; for at this instant, perceiving that his wife
had disengaged herself from her veil, he sat up, caught her to him, and
pressed his lips to hers.

“O Adelaide!” he said, and it seemed to her he spoke with a sort of
agony.

She held him away from her.

“Vincent, what is it?” she asked.

“What is what?”

“Is anything wrong?”

“Between us?”

Oh, she knew that method of his, to lead her on to make definite
statements about impressions of which nothing definite could be
accurately said.

“No, I won’t be pinned down,” she said; “but I feel it, the way a
rheumatic feels it, when the wind goes into the east.”

He continued to look at her gravely; she thought he was going to speak
when a knock came at the door. It was Pringle announcing the visit of
Mr. Lanley.

Adelaide rose slowly to her feet, and, walking to her husband’s
dressing-table, repinned her hat, and caught up the little stray locks
which grew in deep, sharp points at the back of her head.

“You’ll come down, too?” she said.

Farron was looking about for his coat, and as he put it on he observed
dryly:

“The young man is seeing all the family.”

“Oh, he won’t mind,” she answered. “He probably hasn’t the slightest
wish to see Mathilde alone. They both struck me as sorry when I left
them; they were running down. You can’t imagine, Vin, how little
romance there is among all these young people.”

“They leave it to us,” he answered. This was exactly in his accustomed
manner, and as they went down-stairs together her heart felt lighter,
though the long, black, shiny pin stuck harmlessly into the upholstery
of the sofa was like a mile-stone, for afterward she remembered that
her questions had gone unanswered.

Wayne was still in the drawing-room, and Mathilde, who loved her
grandfather, was making a gentle fuss over him, a process which
consisted largely in saying: “O Grandfather! Oh, you didn’t! O
_Grandfather_!”

Mr. Lanley, though a small man and now over sixty, had a distinct
presence. He wore excellent gray clothes of the same shade as his hair,
and out of this neutrality of tint his bright, brown eyes sparkled
piercingly.

He had begun life with the assumption that to be a New York Lanley was
in itself enough, a comfortable creed in which many of his relations
had obscurely lived and died. But before he was graduated from Columbia
College he began to doubt whether the profession of being an aristocrat
in a democracy was a man’s job. At no time in his life did he deny
the value of birth and breeding; but he came to regard them as a
responsibility solemn and often irritating to those who did not possess
them, though he was no longer content with the current views of his
family that they were a sufficient attainment in themselves.

He was graduated from college in 1873, and after a summer at the family
place on the Hudson, hot, fertile, and inaccessible, which his sister
Alberta was at that time occupying, he had arranged a trip round the
world. September of that year brought the great panic, and swept away
many larger and solider fortunes than the Lanleys’. Mr. Lanley decided
that he must go to work, though he abandoned his traditions no further
than to study law. His ancestors, like many of the aristocrats of the
early days, had allowed their opinions of fashion to influence too much
their selection of real estate. All through the late seventies, while
his brothers and sisters were clinging sentimentally to brownstone
fronts in Stuyvesant Square or red-brick facades in Great Jones Street,
Mr. Lanley himself, unaffected by recollections of Uncle Joel’s
death or grandma’s marriage, had been parting with his share in such
properties, and investing along the east side of the park.

By the time he was forty he was once more a fairly rich man. He
had left the practice of law to become the president of the Peter
Stuyvesant Trust Company, for which he had been counsel. After fifteen
years he had retired from this, too, and had become, what he insisted
nature had always intended him to be, a gentleman of leisure. He
retained a directorship in the trust company, was a trustee of his
university, and was a thorny and inquiring member of many charitable
boards.

He prided himself on having emancipated himself from the ideas of
his own generation. It bored him to listen to his cousins lamenting
the vulgarities of modern life, the lack of elegance in present-day
English, or to hear them explain as they borrowed money from him the
sort of thing a gentleman could or could not do for a living. But on
the subject of what a lady might do he still held fixed and unalterable
notions; nor did he ever find it tiresome to hear his own daughter
expound the axioms of this subject with a finality he had taught her
in her youth. Having freed himself from fine-gentlemanism, he had
quite unconsciously fallen the more easily a prey to fine-ladyism; all
his conservatism had gone into that, as a man, forced to give up his
garden, might cherish one lovely potted plant.

At a time when private schools were beginning to flourish once more he
had been careful to educate Adelaide entirely at home with governesses.
Every summer he took her abroad, and showed her, and talked with
her about, books, pictures, and buildings; he inoculated her with
such fundamentals as that a lady never wears imitation lace on her
underclothes, and the past of the verb to “eat” is pronounced to rhyme
with “bet.” She spoke French and German fluently, and could read
Italian. He considered her a perfectly educated woman. She knew nothing
of business, political economy, politics, or science. He himself had
never been deeply interested in American politics, though very familiar
with the lives of English statesmen. He was a great reader of memoirs
and of the novels of Disraeli and Trollope. Of late he had taken to
motoring.

He kissed his daughter and nodded--a real New York nod--to his
son-in-law.

“I’ve come to tell you, Adelaide,” he began.

“Such a thing!” murmured Mathilde, shaking her golden head above the
cup of tea she was making for him, making in just the way he liked; for
she was a little person who remembered people’s tastes.

“I thought you’d rather hear it than read it in the papers.”

“Goodness, Papa, you talk as if you had been getting married!”

“No.” Mr. Lanley hesitated, and looked up at her brightly. “No; but I
think I did have a proposal the other day.”

“From Mrs. Baxter?” asked Adelaide. This was almost war. Mrs. Baxter
was a regal and possessive widow from Baltimore whose long and regular
visits to Mr. Lanley had once occasioned his family some alarm, though
time had now given them a certain institutional safety.

Her father was not flurried by the reference.

“No,” he said; “though she writes me, I’m glad to say, that she is
coming soon.”

“You don’t tell me!” said Adelaide. The cream of the winter season was
usually the time Mrs. Baxter selected for her visit.

Her father did not notice her.

“If Mrs. Baxter should ever propose to me,” he went on thoughtfully, “I
shouldn’t refuse. I don’t think I should have the--”

“The chance?” said his daughter.

“I was going to say the fortitude. But this,” he went on, “was an
elderly cousin, who expressed a wish to come and be my housekeeper.
Perhaps matrimony was not intended. Mathilde, my dear, how does one
tell nowadays whether one is being proposed to or not?”

In this poignant and unexpected crisis Mathilde turned slowly and
painfully crimson. How _did_ one tell? It was a question which at the
moment was anything but clear to her.

“I should always assume it in doubtful cases, sir,” said Wayne, very
distinctly. He and Mathilde did not even glance at each other.

“It wasn’t your proposal that you came to announce to us, though, was
it, Papa?” said Adelaide.

“No,” answered Mr. Lanley. “The fact is, I’ve been arrested.”

“Again?”

“Yes; most unjustly, most unjustly.” His brows contracted, and then
relaxed at a happy memory. “It’s the long, low build of the car. It
looks so powerful that the police won’t give you a chance. It was
nosing through the park--”

“At about thirty miles an hour,” said Farron.

“Well, not a bit over thirty-five. A lovely morning, no one in sight,
I may have let her out a little. All of a sudden one of these mounted
fellows jumped out from the bushes along the bridle-path. They’re a
fine-looking lot, Vincent.”

Farron asked who the judge was, and, Mr. Lanley named him--named him
slightly wrong, and Farron corrected him.

“I’ll get you off,” he said.

Adelaide looked up at her husband admiringly. This was the aspect of
him that she loved best. It seemed to her like magic what Vincent could
do. Her father, she thought, took it very calmly. What would have
happened to him if she had not brought Farron into the family to rescue
and protect? The visiting boy, she noticed, was properly impressed. She
saw him give Farron quite a dog-like look as he took his departure.
To Mathilde he only bowed. No arrangements had been made for a future
meeting. Mathilde tried to convey to him in a prolonged look that if he
would wait only five minutes all would be well, that her grandfather
never paid long visits; but the door closed behind him. She became
immediately overwhelmed by the fear, which had an element of desire in
it, too, that her family would fall to discussing him, would question
her as to how long she had known him, and why she liked him, and what
they talked about, and whether she had been expecting a visit, sitting
there in her best dress. Then slowly she took in the fact that they
were going to talk about nothing but Mr. Lanley’s arrest. She marveled
at the obtuseness of older people--to have stood at the red-hot center
of youth and love and not even to know it! She drew her shoulders
together, feeling very lonely and strong. As they talked, she allowed
her eyes to rest first on one speaker and then on the other, as if she
were following each word of the discussion. As a matter of fact she was
rehearsing with an inner voice the tone of Wayne’s voice when he had
said that he loved her.

Then suddenly she decided that she would be much happier alone in
her own room. She rose, patted her grandfather on the shoulder, and
prepared to escape. He, not wishing to be interrupted at the moment,
patted her hand in return.

“Hello!” he exclaimed. “Hands are cold, my dear.”

She caught Farron’s cool, black eyes, and surprised herself by
answering:

“Yes; but, then, they always are.” This was quite untrue, but every one
was perfectly satisfied with it.

As she left the room Mr. Lanley was saying:

“Yes, I don’t want to go to Blackwell’s Island. Lovely spot, of course.
My grandfather used to tell me he remembered it when the Blackwell
family still lived there. But I shouldn’t care to wear stripes--except
for the pleasure of telling Alberta about it. It would give her a
year’s occupation, her suffering over my disgrace, wouldn’t it,
Adelaide?”

“She’d scold me,” said Adelaide, looking beautifully martyred. Then
turning to her husband, she asked. “Will it be very difficult, Vincent,
getting papa off?” She wanted it to be difficult, she wanted him to
give her material out of which she could form a picture of him as a
savior; but he only shook his head and said:

“That young man is in love with Mathilde.”

“O Vin! Those children?”

Mr. Lanley pricked up his ears like a terrier.

“In love?” he exclaimed. “And who is he? Not one of the East Sussex
Waynes, I hope. Vulgar people. They always were; began life as
auctioneers in my father’s time. Is he one of those, Adelaide?”

“I have no idea who he is, if any one,” said Adelaide. “I never saw or
heard of him before this afternoon.”

“And may I ask,” said her father, “if you intend to let your daughter
become engaged to a young man of whom you know nothing whatsoever?”

Adelaide looked extremely languid, one of her methods of showing
annoyance.

“Really, Papa,” she said, “the fact that he has come once to pay
an afternoon visit to Mathilde does not, it seems to me, make an
engagement inevitable. My child is not absolutely repellent, you know,
and a good many young men come to the house.” Then suddenly remembering
that her oracle had already spoken on this subject, she asked more
humbly, “What was it made you say he was in love, Vin?”

“Just an impression,” said Farron.

Mr. Lanley had been thinking it over.

“It was not the custom in my day,” he began, and then remembering that
this was one of his sister Alberta’s favorite openings, he changed the
form of his sentence. “I never allowed you to see stray young men--”

His daughter interrupted him.

“But I always saw them, Papa. I used to let them come early in the
afternoon before you came in.”

In his heart Mr. Lanley doubted that this had been a regular custom,
but he knew it would be unwise to argue the point; so he started fresh.

“When a young man is attentive to a girl like Mathilde--”

“But he isn’t,” said Adelaide. “At least not what I should have called
attentive when I was a girl.”

“Your experience was not long, my dear. You were married at Mathilde’s
age.”

“You may be sure of one thing, Papa, that I don’t desire an early
marriage for my daughter.”

“Very likely,” returned her father, getting up, and buttoning the last
button of his coat; “but you may have noticed that we can’t always get
just what we most desire for our children.”

When he had gone, Vincent looked at his wife and smiled, but smiled
without approval. She twisted her shoulders.

“Oh, I suppose so,” she said; “but I do so hate to be scolded about the
way I bring up Mathilde.”

“Or about anything else, my dear.”

“I don’t hate to be scolded by you,” she returned. “In fact, I
sometimes get a sort of servile enjoyment from it. Besides,” she went
on, “as a matter of fact, I bring Mathilde up particularly well, quite
unlike these wild young women I see everywhere else. She tells me
everything, and I have perfectly the power of making her hate any one I
disapprove of. But you’ll try and find out something about this young
man, won’t you, Vin?”

“We’ll have a full report on him to-morrow. Do you know what his first
name is?”

“At the moment I don’t recall his last. Oh, yes--Wayne. I’ll ask
Mathilde when we go up-stairs.”

From her own bedroom door she called up.

“Mathilde, what is the name of your young friend?”

There was a little pause before Mathilde answered that she was sorry,
but she didn’t know.

Mrs. Farron turned to her husband and made a little gesture to indicate
that this ignorance on the girl’s part did not bear out his theory;
but she saw that he did not admit it, that he clung still to his
impression. “And Vincent’s impressions--” she said to herself as she
went in to dress.




CHAPTER III


Mr. Lanley was ruffled as he left his daughter’s drawing-room.

“As if I had wanted her to marry at eighteen,” he said to himself; and
he took his hat crossly from Pringle and set it hard on his head at
the slight angle which he preferred. Then reflecting that Pringle was
not in any way involved, he unbent slightly, and said something that
sounded like:

“Haryer, Pringle?”

Pringle, despite his stalwart masculine appearance, had in speaking a
surprisingly high, squeaky voice.

“I keep my health, thank you, sir,” he said. “Anna has been somewhat
ailing.” Anna was his wife, to whom he usually referred as “Mrs.
Pringle”; but he made an exception in speaking to Mr. Lanley, for she
had once been the Lanleys’ kitchen-maid. “Your car, sir?”

No, Mr. Lanley was walking--walking, indeed, more quickly than usual
under the stimulus of annoyance.

Nothing had ever happened that made him suffer as he had suffered
through his daughter’s divorce. Divorce was one of the modern ideas
which he had imagined he had accepted. As a lawyer he had expressed
himself as willing always to take the lady’s side; but in the cases
which he actually took he liked to believe that the wife was perfect
and the husband inexcusable. He could not comfort himself with any such
belief in his daughter’s case.

Adelaide’s conduct had been, as far as he could see, irreproachable;
but, then, so had Severance’s. This was what had made the gossip,
almost the scandal, of the thing. Even his sister Alberta had whispered
to him that if Severance had been unfaithful to Adelaide--But poor
Severance had not been unfaithful; he had not even become indifferent.
He loved his wife, he said, as much as on the day he married her. He
was extremely unhappy. Mr. Lanley grew to dread the visits of his huge,
blond son-in-law, who used actually to sob in the library, and ask
for explanations of something which Mr. Lanley had never been able to
understand.

And how obstinate Adelaide had been! She, who had been such a docile
girl, and then for many years so completely under the thumb of her
splendid-looking husband, had suddenly become utterly intractable. She
would listen to no reason and brook no delay. She had been willing
enough to explain; she had explained repeatedly, but the trouble was he
could not understand the explanation. She did not love her husband any
more, she said. Mr. Lanley pointed out to her that this was no legal
grounds for a divorce.

“Yes, but I look down upon him,” she went on.

“On poor Joe?” her father had asked innocently, and had then discovered
that this was the wrong thing to say. She had burst out, “Poor Joe!
poor Joe!” That was the way every one considered him. Was it her fault
if he excited pity and contempt instead of love and respect? Her love,
she intimated, had been of a peculiarly eternal sort; Severance himself
was to blame for its extinction. Mr. Lanley discovered that in some way
she considered the intemperance of Severance’s habits to be involved.
But this was absurd. It was true that for a year or two Severance
had taken to drinking rather more than was wise; but, Mr. Lanley had
thought at the time, the poor young man had not needed any artificial
stimulant in the days when Adelaide had fully and constantly admired
him. He had seen Severance come home several times not exactly drunk,
but rather more boyishly boastful and hilarious than usual. Even Mr.
Lanley, a naturally temperate man, had not found Joe repellent in the
circumstances. Afterward he had been thankful for this weakness: it
gave him the only foundation on which he could build a case not for the
courts, of course, but for the world. Unfortunately, however, Severance
had pulled up before there was any question of divorce.

That was another confusing fact. Adelaide had managed him so
beautifully. Her father had not known her wonderful powers until he saw
the skill and patience with which she had dealt with Joe Severance’s
drinking. Joe himself was eager to own that he owed his cure entirely
to her. Mr. Lanley had been proud of her; she had turned out, he
thought, just what a woman ought to be; and then, on top of it, she had
come to him one day and announced that she would never live with Joe
again.

“But why not?” he had asked.

“Because I don’t love him,” she had said.

Then Mr. Lanley knew how little his acceptance of the idea of divorce
in general had reconciled him to the idea of the divorce of his own
daughter--a Lanley--Mrs. Adelaide Lanley, Mrs. Adelaide Severance. His
sense of fitness was shocked, though he pleaded with her first on the
ground of duty, and then under the threat of scandal. With her beauty
and Severance’s popularity, for from his college days he had been
extremely popular with men, the divorce excited uncommon interest.
Severance’s unconcealed grief, a rather large circle of devoted friends
in whom he confided, and the fact that Adelaide had to go to Nevada to
get her divorce, led most people to believe that she had simply found
some one she liked better. Mr. Lanley would have believed it himself,
but he couldn’t. Farron had not appeared until she had been divorced
for several years.

Lanley still cherished an affection for Severance, who had very soon
married again, a local belle in the Massachusetts manufacturing town
where he now lived. She was said to resemble Adelaide.

No, Mr. Lanley could not see that he had had anything to reproach
himself with in regard to his daughter’s first marriage. They had been
young, of course; all the better. He had known the Severances for
years; and Joe was handsome, hard working, had rowed on his crew, and
every one spoke well of him. Certainly they had been in love--more in
love than he liked to see two people, at least when one of them was
his own daughter. He had suggested their waiting a year or two, but no
one had backed him up. The Severances had been eager for the marriage,
naturally. Mr. Lanley could still see the young couple as they turned
from the altar, young, beautiful, and confident.

He had missed his daughter terribly, not only her physical presence in
the house, but the exercise of his influence over her, which in old
times had been perhaps a trifle autocratic. He had hated being told
what Joe thought and said; yet he could hardly object to her docility.
That was the way he had brought her up. He did not reckon pliancy in
a woman as a weakness; or if he had had any temptation to do so, it
had vanished in the period when Joe Severance had taken to drink. In
that crisis Adelaide had been anything but weak. Every one had been so
grateful to her,--he and Joe and the Severances,--and then immediately
afterward the crash came.

Women! Mr. Lanley shook his head, still moving briskly northward with
that quick jaunty walk of his. And this second marriage--what about
that? They seemed happy. Farron was a fine fellow, but not, it seemed
to him, so attractive to a woman as Severance. Could he hold a woman
like Adelaide? He wasn’t a man to stand any nonsense, though, and Mr.
Lanley nodded; then, as it were, withdrew the nod on remembering that
poor Joe had not wanted to stand any nonsense either. What in similar
circumstances could Farron do? Adelaide always resented his asking how
things were going, but how could he help being anxious? How could any
one rest content on a hillside who had once been blown up by a volcano?

He might not have been any more content if he had stayed to dinner at
his son-in-law’s, as he had been asked to do. The Farrons were alone.
Mathilde was going to a dinner, with a dance after. She came into the
dining-room to say good night and to promise to be home early, not to
stay and dance. She was not allowed two parties on successive nights,
not because her health was anything but robust, but rather because her
mother considered her too young for such vulgar excess.

When she had gone, Farron observed:

“That child has a will of iron.”

“Vincent!” said his wife. “She does everything I suggest to her.”

“Her will just now is to please you in everything. Wait until she
rebels.”

“But women don’t rebel against the people they love. I don’t have to
tell you that, do I? I never have to manœuver the child, never have to
coax or charm her to do what I want.”

He smiled at her across the table.

“You have great faith in those methods, haven’t you?”

“They work, Vin.”

He nodded as if no one knew that better than he.

Soon after dinner he went up-stairs to write some letters. She followed
him about ten o’clock. She came and leaned one hand on his shoulder and
one on his desk.

“Still working?” she said. She had been aware of no desire to see what
he was writing, but she was instantly aware that his blotting-paper had
fallen across the sheet, that the sheet was not a piece of note-paper,
but one of a large pad on which he had been apparently making notes.

Her diamond bracelet had slipped down her wrist and lay upon the
blotting-paper; he slowly and carefully pushed it up her slim, round
arm until it once more clung in place.

“I’ve nearly finished,” he said; and to her ears there was some under
sound of pain or of constraint in his tone.

A little later he strolled, still dressed, into her room. She was
already in bed, and he came and sat on the foot of the bed, with one
foot tucked under him and his arms folded.

Her mind during the interval had been exclusively occupied with the
position of that piece of blotting-paper. Could it be there was some
other woman whose ghost-like presence she was just beginning to feel
haunting their relation? The impersonality of Vincent’s manner was an
armor against such attacks, but this armor, as Adelaide knew, was more
apparent than real. If one could get beyond that, one was at the very
heart of the man. If some fortuitous circumstance had brought a sudden
accidental intimacy between him and another woman--What woman loving
strength and power could resist the sight of Vincent in action, Vincent
as she saw him?

Yet with a good capacity for believing the worst of her
fellow-creatures, Adelaide did not really believe in the other woman.
That, she knew, would bring a change in the fundamentals of her
relationship with her husband. This was only a barrier that left the
relation itself untouched.

Before very long she began to think the situation was all in her own
imagination. He was so amused, so eager to talk. Silent as he was apt
to be with the rest of the world, with her he sometimes showed a love
of gossip that enchanted her. And now it seemed to her that he was
leading her on from subject to subject through a childish dislike to
going to bed. They were actually giggling over Mr. Lanley’s adventure
when a motor-brake squeaked in the silence of the night, a motor-door
slammed. For the first time Adelaide remembered her daughter. It
was after twelve o’clock. A knock came at her door. She wrapped her
swan’s-down garment about her and went to the door.

“O Mama, have you been worried?” the girl asked. She was standing in
the narrow corridor, with her arms full of shining favors; there could
be no question whatever that she had stayed for the dance. “Are you
angry? Have I been keeping you awake?”

“I thought you would have been home an hour ago.”

“I know. I want to tell you about it. Mama, how lovely you look in that
blue thing! Won’t you come up-stairs with me while I undress?”

Adelaide shook her head.

“Not to-night,” she answered.

“You are angry with me,” the girl went on. “But if you will come, I
will explain. I have something to tell you, Mama.”

Mrs. Farron’s heart stood still. The phrase could mean only one thing.
She went up-stairs with her daughter, sent the maid away, and herself
began to undo the soft, pink silk.

“It needs an extra hook,” she murmured. “I told her it did.”

Mathilde craned her neck over her shoulder, as if she had ever been
able to see the middle of her back.

“But it doesn’t show, does it?” she asked.

“It perfectly well might.”

Mathilde stepped out of her dress, and flung it over a chair. In her
short petticoat, with her ankles showing and her arms bare, she looked
like a very young girl, and when she put up her hands and took the pins
out of her hair, so that it fell over her shoulders, she might have
been a child.

The silence began to grow awkward. Mathilde put on her dressing-gown;
it was perfectly straight, and made her look like a little white
column. A glass of milk and some biscuits were waiting for her. She
pushed a chair near her fire for her mother, and herself remained
standing, with her glass of milk in her hand.

“Mama,” she said suddenly, “I suppose I’m what you’d call engaged.”

“O Mathilde! not to that boy who was here to-day?”

“Why not to him?”

“I know nothing about him.”

“I don’t know very much myself. Yes, it’s Pete Wayne. Pierson his name
is, but every one calls him Pete. How strange it was that I did not
even know his first name when you asked me!”

A single ray pierced Mrs. Farron’s depression: Vincent had known,
Vincent’s infallibility was confirmed. She did not know what to say.
She sat looking sadly, obliquely at the floor like a person who has
been aggrieved. She was wondering whether she should be to her daughter
a comrade or a ruler, a confederate or a policeman. Of course in all
probability the thing would be better stopped. But could this be
accomplished by immediate action, or could she invite confidences and
yet commit herself to nothing?

She raised her eyes.

“I do not approve of youthful marriages,” she said.

“O Mama! And you were only eighteen yourself.”

“That is why.”

Mathilde was frightened not only by the intense bitterness of her
mother’s tone, but also by the obvious fact that she was face to face
with the explanation of the separation of her parents. She had been
only nine years old at the time. She had loved her father, had found
him a better playfellow than her mother, had wept bitterly at parting
with him, and had missed him. And then gradually her mother, who had
before seemed like a beautiful, but remote, princess, had begun to make
of her an intimate and grown-up friend, to consult her and read with
her and arrange happinesses in her life, to win, to, if the truth must
be told, reconquer her. Perhaps even Adelaide would not have succeeded
so easily in effacing Severance’s image had not he himself so quickly
remarried. Mathilde went several times to stay with the new household
after Adelaide in secret, tearful conference with her father had been
forced to consent.

To Mathilde these visits had been an unacknowledged torture. She never
knew quite what to mention and what to leave untouched. There was
always a constraint between the three of them. Her father, when alone
with her, would question her, with strange, eager pauses, as to how
her mother looked. Her mother’s successor, whom she could not really
like, would question her more searchingly, more embarrassingly, with
an ill-concealed note of jealousy in every word. Even at twelve years
Mathilde was shocked by the strain of hatred in her father’s new wife,
who seemed to reproach her for fashion and fineness and fastidiousness,
qualities of which the girl was utterly unaware. She could have loved
her little half-brother when he appeared upon the scene, but Mrs.
Severance did not encourage the bond, and gradually Mathilde’s visits
to her father ceased.

As a child she had been curious about the reasons for the parting, but
as she grew older it had seemed mere loyalty to accept the fact without
asking why; she had perhaps not wanted to know why. But now, she saw,
she was to hear.

“Mathilde, do you still love your father?”

“I think I do, Mama. I feel very sorry for him.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know why. I dare say he is happy.”

“I dare say he is, poor Joe.” Adelaide paused. “Well, my dear, that
was the reason of our parting. One can pity a son or a brother, but
not a husband. Weakness kills love. A woman cannot be the leader, the
guide, and keep any romance. O Mathilde, I never want you to feel the
humiliation of finding yourself stronger than the man you love. That is
why I left your father, and my justification is his present happiness.
This inferior little person he has married, she does as well. Any one
would have done as well.”

Mathilde was puzzled by her mother’s evident conviction that the
explanation was complete. She asked after a moment:

“But what was it that made you think at first that you did love him,
Mama?”

“Just what makes you think you love this boy--youth, flattery, desire
to love. He was magnificently handsome, your father. I saw him admired
by other men, apparently a master; I was too young to judge, my dear.
You shan’t be allowed to make that mistake; you shall have time to
consider.”

Mathilde smiled.

“I don’t want time,” she said.

“I did not know I did.”

“I don’t think I feel about love as you do,” said the girl, slowly.

“Every woman does.”

Mathilde shook her head.

“It’s just Pete as he is that I love. I don’t care which of us leads.”

“But you will.”

The girl had not yet reached a point where she could describe the very
essence of her passion; she had to let this go. After a moment she said:

“I see now why you chose Mr. Farron.”

“You mean you have never seen before?”

“Not so clearly.”

Mrs. Farron bit her lips. To have missed understanding this seemed a
sufficient proof of immaturity. She rose.

“Well, my darling,” she said in a tone of extreme reasonableness, “we
shall decide nothing to-night. I know nothing against Mr. Wayne. He may
be just the right person. We must see more of him. Do you know anything
about his family?”

Mathilde shook her head. “He lives alone with his mother. His father is
dead. She’s very good and interested in drunkards.”

“In _drunkards_?” Mrs. Farron just shut her eyes a second.

“She has a mission that reforms them.”

“Is that his profession, too?”

“Oh, no. He’s in Wall Street--quite a good firm. O Mama, don’t sigh
like that! We know we can’t be married at once. We are reasonable. You
think not, because this has all happened so suddenly; but great things
do happen suddenly. We love each other. That’s all I wanted to tell
you.”

“Love!” Adelaide looked at the little person before her, tried to
recall the fading image of the young man, and then thought of the
dominating figure in her own life. “My dear, you have no idea what love
is.”

She took no notice of the queer, steady look the girl gave her in
return. She went down-stairs. She had been gone more than an hour, and
she knew that Vincent would have been long since asleep. He had, and
prided himself on having, a great capacity for sleep. She tiptoed past
his door, stole into her own room, and then, glancing in the direction
of his, was startled to see that a light was burning. She went in; he
was reading, and once again, as his eyes turned toward her, she thought
she saw the same tragic appeal that she had felt that afternoon in his
kiss. Trembling, she threw herself down beside him, clasping him to her.

“O Vincent! oh, my dear!” she whispered, and began to cry. He did not
ask her why she was crying; she wished that he would; his silence
admitted that he knew of some adequate reason.

“I feel that there is something wrong,” she sobbed, “something terribly
wrong.”

“Nothing could go wrong between you and me, my darling,” he answered.
His tone comforted, his touch was a comfort. Perhaps she was a coward,
she said to herself, but she questioned him no further.




CHAPTER IV


Wayne was not so prompt as Mathilde in making the announcement of their
engagement. He and his mother breakfasted together rather hastily, for
she was going to court that morning to testify in favor of one of her
backsliding inebriates, and Wayne had not found the moment to introduce
his own affairs.

That afternoon he came home earlier than usual; it was not five o’clock.
He passed Dr. Parret’s flat on the first floor--Dr. Lily MacComb Parret.
She was a great friend of his, and he felt a decided temptation to go in
and tell her the news first; but reflecting that no one ought to hear it
before his mother, he went on up-stairs. He lived on the fifth floor.

He opened the door of the flat and went into the sitting-room. It was
empty. He lighted the gas, which flared up, squeaking like a bagpipe. The
room was square and crowded. Shelves ran all the way round it, tightly
filled with books. In the center was a large writing-table, littered with
papers, and on each side of the fireplace stood two worn, but
comfortable, arm-chairs, each with a reading-lamp at its side. There was
nothing beautiful in the furniture, and yet the room had its own charm.
The house was a corner house and had once been a single dwelling. The
shape of the room, its woodwork, its doors, its flat, white marble
mantelpiece, belonged to an era of simple taste and good workmanship; but
the greatest charm of the room was the view from the windows, of which it
had four, two that looked east and two south, and gave a glimpse of the
East River and its bridges.

Wayne was not sorry his mother was out. He had begun to dread the
announcement he had to make. At first he had thought only of her keen
interest in his affairs, but later he had come to consider what this
particular piece of news would mean to her. Say what you will, he
thought, to tell your mother of your engagement is a little like casting
off an old love.

Ever since he could remember, he and his mother had lived in the
happiest comradeship. His father, a promising young doctor, had died
within a few years of his marriage. Pete had been brought up by his
mother, but he had very little remembrance of any process of molding. It
seemed to him as if they had lived in a sort of partnership since he had
been able to walk and talk. It had been as natural for him to spend his
hours after school in stamping and sealing her large correspondence as it
had been for her to pinch and arrange for years so as to send him to the
university from which his father had been graduated. She would have been
glad, he knew, if he had decided to follow his father in the study of
medicine, but he recoiled from so long a period of dependence; he liked
to think that he brought to his financial reports something of a
scientific inheritance.

She had, he thought, every virtue that a mother could have, and she
combined them with a gaiety of spirit that made her take her virtues as
if they were the most delightful amusements. It was of this gaiety that
he had first thought until Mathilde had pointed out to him that there was
tragedy in the situation. “What will your mother do without you?” the
girl kept saying. There was indeed nothing in his mother’s life that
could fill the vacancy he would leave. She had few intimate
relationships. For all her devotion to her drunkards, he was the only
personal happiness in her life.

He went into the kitchen in search of her. This was evidently one of
their servant’s uncounted hours. While he was making himself some tea he
heard his mother’s key in the door. He called to her, and she appeared.

“Why my hat, Mother dear?” he asked gently as he kissed her.

Mrs. Wayne smiled absently, and put up her hand to the soft felt hat she
was wearing.

“I just went out to post some letters,” she said, as if this were a
complete explanation; then she removed a mackintosh that she happened to
have on, though the day was fine. She was then seen to be wearing a dark
skirt and a neat plain shirt that was open at the throat. Though no
longer young, she somehow suggested a boy--a boy rather overtrained; she
was far more boyish than Wayne. She had a certain queer beauty, too;
not beauty of Adelaide’s type, of structure and coloring and elegance,
but beauty of expression. Life itself had written some fine lines of
humor and resolve upon her face, and her blue-gray eyes seemed actually
to flare with hope and intention. Her hair was of that light-brown shade
in which plentiful gray made little change of shade; it was wound in a
knot at the back of her head and gave her trouble. She was always
pushing it up and repinning it into place, as if it were too heavy for
her small head.

“I wonder if there’s anything to eat in the house,” her son said.

“I wonder.” They moved together toward the ice-box.

“Mother,” said Pete, “that piece of pie has been in the ice-box at least
three days. Let’s throw it away.”

She took the saucer thoughtfully.

“I like it so much,” she said.

“Then why don’t you eat it?”

“It’s not good for me.” She let Wayne take the saucer. “What do you
know?” she asked.

She had adopted slang as she adopted most labor-saving devices.

“Well, I do know something new,” said Wayne. He sat down on the kitchen
table and poured out his tea. “New as the garden of Eden. I’m in love.”

“O Pete!” his mother cried, and the purest, most conventional maternal
agony was in the tone. For an instant, crushed and terrified, she looked
at him; and then something gay and impish appeared in her eyes, and she
asked with a grin:

“Is it some one perfectly awful?”

“I’m afraid you’ll think so. She’s a sheltered, young, luxurious child,
with birth, breeding, and money, everything you hate most.”

“O Pete!” she said again, but this time with a sort of sad resignation.
Then shaking her head as if to say that she wasn’t, after all, as narrow
as he thought, she hitched her chair nearer the table and said eagerly,
“Well, tell me all about it.”

Wayne looked down at his mother as she sat opposite him, with her elbows
on the table, as keen as a child and as lively as a cricket. He asked
himself if he had not drifted into a needlessly sentimental state of mind
about her. He even asked himself, as he had done once or twice before in
his life, whether her love for him implied the slightest dependence upon
his society. Wasn’t it perfectly possible that his going would free her
life, would make it easier instead of harder? Every man, he knew, felt
the element of freedom beneath the despair of breaking even the tenderest
of ties. Some women, he supposed, might feel the same way about their
love-affairs. But could they feel the same about their maternal
relations? Could it be that his mother, that pure, heroic,
self-sacrificing soul, was now thinking more about her liberty than her
loss? Had not their relation always been peculiarly free? he found
himself thinking reproachfully. Once, he remembered, when he had been
working unusually hard he had welcomed her absence at one of her
conferences on inebriety. Never before had he imagined that she could
feel anything but regret at his absences. “Everybody is just alike,” he
found himself rather bitterly thinking.

“What do you want to know about it?” he said aloud.

“Why, everything,” she returned.

“I met her,” he said, “two evenings ago at a dance. I never expected to
fall in love at a dance.”

“Isn’t it funny? No one ever really expects to fall in love at all, and
everybody does.”

He glanced at her. He had been prepared to explain to her about love; and
now it occurred to him for the first time that she knew all about it. He
decided to ask her the great question which had been occupying his mind
as a lover of a scientific habit of thought.

“Mother,” he said, “how much dependence is to be placed on love--one’s
own, I mean?”

“Goodness, Pete! What a question to ask!”

“Well, you might take a chance and tell me what you think. I have no
doubts. My whole nature goes out to this girl; but I can’t help knowing
that if we go on feeling like this till we die, we shall be the
exception. Love’s a miracle. How much can one trust to it?”

The moment he had spoken he knew that he was asking a great deal. It was
torture to his mother to express an opinion on an abstract question. She
did not lack decision of conduct. She could resolve in an instant to send
a drunkard to an institution or take a trip round the world; but on a
matter of philosophy of life it was as difficult to get her to commit
herself as if she had been upon the witness-stand. Yet it was just in
this realm that he particularly valued her opinion.

“Oh,” she said at last, “I don’t believe that it’s possible to play safe
in love. It’s a risk, but it’s one of those risks you haven’t much choice
about taking. Life and death are like that, too. I don’t think it pays to
be always thinking about avoiding risks. Nothing, you know,” she added,
as if she were letting him in to rather a horrid little secret, “is
really safe.” And evidently glad to change the subject, she went on,
“What will her family say?”

“I can’t think they will be pleased.”

“I suppose not. Who are they?”

Wayne explained the family connections, but woke no associations in his
mother’s mind until he mentioned the name of Farron. Then he was
astonished at the violence of her interest. She sprang to her feet; her
eyes lighted up.

“Why,” she cried, “that’s the man, that’s the company, that Marty Burke
works for! O Pete, don’t you think you could get Mr. Farron to use his
influence over Marty about Anita?”

“Dear mother, do you think you can get him to use his influence over Mrs.
Farron for me?”

Marty Burke was the leader of the district and was reckoned a bad man.
He and Mrs. Wayne had been waging a bitter war for some time over a
young inebriate who had seduced a girl of the neighborhood. Mrs. Wayne
was sternly trying to prosecute the inebriate; Burke was determined to
protect him, first, by smirching the girl’s name, and, next, by
getting the girl’s family to consent to a marriage, a solution that
Mrs. Wayne considered most undesirable in view of the character of the
prospective husband.

Pete felt her interest sweep away from his affairs, and it had not
returned when the telephone rang. He came back from answering it to tell
his mother that Mr. Lanley, the grandfather of his love, was asking if
she would see him for a few minutes that afternoon or evening. A visit
was arranged for nine o’clock.

“What’s he like?” asked Mrs. Wayne, wrinkling her nose and looking
very impish.

“He seemed like a nice old boy; hasn’t had a new idea, I should say,
since 1880. And, Mother dear, you’re going to dress, aren’t you?”

She resented the implication.

“I shall be wonderful,” she answered with emphasis. “And while he’s here,
I think you might go down and tell this news to Lily, yourself. Oh, I
don’t say she’s in love with you--”

“Lily,” said Pete, “is leading far too exciting a life to be in love
with any one.”

Punctually at nine, Mr. Lanley rang the bell of the flat. He had paused a
few minutes before doing so, not wishing to weaken the effect of his
mission by arriving out of breath. Adelaide had come to see him just
before lunch. She pretended to minimize the importance of her news, but
he knew she did so to evade reproach for the culpable irresponsibility of
her attitude toward the young man’s first visit.

“And do you know anything more about him than you did yesterday?” he
asked.

She did. It appeared that Vincent had telephoned her from down town just
before she came out.

“Tiresome young man,” she said, twisting her shoulders. “It seems there’s
nothing against him. His father was a doctor, his mother comes of decent
people and is a respected reformer, the young man works for an ambitious
new firm of brokers, who speak highly of him and give him a salary of
$5000 a year.”

“The whole thing must be put a stop to,” said Mr. Lanley.

“Of course, of course,” said his daughter. “But how? I can’t forbid him
the house because he’s just an average young man.”

“I don’t see why not, or at least on the ground that he’s not the husband
you would choose for her.”

“I think the best way will be to let him come to the house,”--she spoke
with a sort of imperishable sweetness,--“but to turn Mathilde gradually
against him.”

“But how can you turn her against him?”

Adelaide looked very wistful.

“You don’t trust me,” she moaned.

“I only ask you how it can be done.”

“Oh, there are ways. I made her perfectly hate one of them because he
always said, ‘if you know what I mean.’ ‘It’s a very fine day, Mrs.
Farron, if you know what I mean.’ This young man must have some horrid
trick like that, only I haven’t studied him yet. Give me time.”

“It’s risky.”

Adelaide shook her head.

“Not really,” she said. “These young fancies go as quickly as they come.
Do you remember the time you took me to West Point? I had a passion for
the adjutant. I forgot him in a week.”

“You were only fifteen.”

“Mathilde is immature for her age.”

It was agreed between them, however, that Mr. Lanley, without authority,
should go and look the situation over. He had been trying to get the
Waynes’ telephone since one o’clock. He had been told at intervals of
fifteen minutes by a resolutely cheerful central that their number did
not answer. Mr. Lanley hated people who did not answer their telephone.
Nor was he agreeably impressed by the four flights of stairs, or by the
appearance of the servant who answered his ring.

“Won’t do, won’t do,” he kept repeating in his own mind.

He was shown into the sitting-room. It was in shadow, for only a shaded
reading-lamp was lighted, and his first impression was of four windows;
they appeared like four square panels of dark blue, patterned with
stars. Then a figure rose to meet him--a figure in blue draperies, with
heavy braids wound around the head, and a low, resonant voice said, “I
am Mrs. Wayne.”

As soon as he could he walked to the windows and looked out to the river
and the long, lighted curves of the bridges, and beyond to Long Island,
to just the ground where the Battle of Long Island had been fought--a
battle in which an ancestor of his had particularly distinguished
himself. He said something polite about the view.

“Let us sit here where we can look out,” she said, and sank down on a
low sofa drawn under the windows. As she did so she came within the
circle of light from the lamp. She sat with her head leaned back against
the window-frame, and he saw the fine line of her jaw, the hollows in her
cheek, the delicate modeling about her brows, not obscured by much
eyebrow, and her long, stretched throat. She was not quite maternal
enough to look like a Madonna, but she did look like a saint, he thought.

He knelt with one knee on the couch and peered out.

“Dear me,” he said, “I fancy I used to skate as a boy on a pond just
about where that factory is now.”

He found she knew very little about the history of New York. She had
been brought up abroad, she said; her father had been a consul in
France. It was a subject which he liked to expound. He loved his native
city, which he with his own eyes had seen once as hardly more than a
village. He and his ancestors--and Mr. Lanley’s sense of identification
with his ancestors was almost Chinese--had watched and had a little
shaped the growth.

“I suppose you had Dutch ancestry, then,” she said, trying to take
an interest.

“Dutch.” Mr. Lanley shut his eyes, resolving, since he had no idea what
her own descent might be, that he would not explain to her the superior
attitude of the English settlers of the eighteenth century toward their
Dutch predecessors. However, perhaps he did not entirely conceal his
feeling, for he said: “No, I have no Dutch blood--not a drop. Very good
people in their way, industrious--peasants.” He hurried on to the great
fire of 1835. “Swept between Wall Street and Coenties Slip,” he said,
with a splendid gesture, and then discovered that she had never heard of
“Quenches Slip,” or worse, she had pronounced it as it was spelled. He
gently set her right there. His father had often told him that he had
seen with his own eyes a note of hand which had been blown, during the
course of the conflagration, as far as Flatbush. And the second fire of
1845. His father had been a man then, married, a prominent citizen, old
enough, as Mr. Lanley said, with a faint smile, to have lost heavily. He
could himself remember the New York of the Civil War, the bitter family
quarrels, the forced resignations from clubs, the duels, the draft riots.

But, oddly enough, when it came to contemporary New York, it was Mrs.
Wayne who turned out to be most at home. Had he ever walked across the
Blackwell’s Island Bridge? (This was in the days before it bore the
elevated trains.) No, he had driven. Ah, she said, that was wholly
different. Above, where one walked, there was nothing to shut out the
view of the river. Just to show that he was not a feeble old antiquarian,
he suggested their taking a walk there at once. She held out her trailing
garments and thin, blue slippers. And then she went on:

“There’s another beautiful place I don’t believe you know, for all you’re
such an old New-Yorker--a pier at the foot of East Eighty-something
Street, where you can almost touch great seagoing vessels as they pass.”

“Well, there at least we can go,” said Mr. Lanley, and he stood up. “I
have a car here, but it’s open. Is it too cold? Have you a fur coat? I’ll
send back to the house for an extra one.” He paused, brisk as he was; the
thought of those four flights a second time dismayed him.

The servant had gone out, and Pete was still absent, presumably breaking
the news of his engagement to Dr. Parret.

Mrs. Wayne had an idea. She went to a window on the south side of the
room, opened it, and looked out. If he had good lungs, she told him, he
could make his man hear.

Mr. Lanley did not visibly recoil. He leaned out and shouted. The
chauffeur looked up, made a motion to jump out, fearing that his employer
was being murdered in these unfamiliar surroundings; then he caught the
order to go home for an extra coat.

Lanley drew his shoulder back into the room and shut the window; as he
did so he saw a trace of something impish in the smile of his hostess.

“Why do you smile?” he asked quickly.

She did not make the mistake of trying to arrest her smile; she let
it broaden.

“I don’t suppose you have ever done such a thing before.”

“Now, that does annoy me.”

“Calling down five stories?”

“No; your thinking I minded.”

“Well, I did think so.”

“You were mistaken, utterly mistaken.”

“I’m glad. If you mind doing such things, you give so much time to
arranging not to do them.”

Mr. Lanley was silent. He was deciding that he should rearrange some of
the details of his life. Not that he contemplated giving all his orders
from the fifth story, but he saw he had always devoted too much attention
to preventing unimportant catastrophes.

Under her direction he was presently driving north; then he turned
sharply east down a little hill, and came out on a low, flat pier. He put
out the motor’s lights. They were only a few feet above the water, which
was as black as liquid jet, with flat silver and gold patches on it from
white and yellow lights. Opposite to them the lighthouse at the north end
of Blackwell’s Island glowed like a hot coal. Then a great steamer
obscured it.

“Isn’t this nice?” Mrs. Wayne asked, and he saw that she wanted her
discovery praised. He never lost the impression that she enjoyed
being praised.

Such a spot, within sight of half a dozen historic sites, was a
temptation to Mr. Lanley, and he would have unresistingly yielded to it
if Mrs. Wayne had not said:

“But we haven’t said a word yet about our children.”

“True,” answered Mr. Lanley. His heart sank. It is not easy, he thought,
to explain to a person for whom you have just conceived a liking that her
son had aspired above his station. He tapped his long, middle finger on
the steering-wheel, just as at directors’ meetings he tapped the table
before he spoke, and began, “In a society somewhat artificially formed as
ours is, Mrs. Wayne, it has always been my experience that--” Do what he
would, it kept turning into a speech, and the essence of the speech was
that while democracy did very well for men, a strictly aristocratic
system was the only thing possible for girls--one’s own girls, of
course. In the dim light he could see that she had pushed all her hair
back from her brows. She was trying to follow him exactly, so exactly
that she confused him a little. He became more general. “In many ways,”
he concluded, “the advantages of character and experience are with the
lower classes.” He had not meant to use the word, but when it slipped
out, he did not regret it.

“In all ways,” she answered.

He was not sure he had heard.

“All the advantages?” he said.

“All the advantages of character.”

He had to ask her to explain. One reason, perhaps, why Mrs. Wayne
habitually avoided a direct question was that, when once started, her
candor had no bounds. Now she began to speak. She spoke more eagerly and
more fluently than he, and it took him several minutes to see that quite
unconsciously she was making him a strange, distorted complement to his
speech, that in her mouth such words as “the leisure classes, your
sheltered girls,” were terms of the deepest reproach. He must understand,
she said, that as she did not know Miss Severance, there was nothing
personal, nothing at all personal, in her feeling,--she was as careful
not to hurt his feelings as he had tried to be not to hurt hers,--but she
did own to a prejudice--at least Pete told her it was a prejudice--

Against what, in Heaven’s name, Lanley at first wondered; and then it
came to him.

“Oh, you have a prejudice against divorce?” he said.

Mrs. Wayne looked at him reproachfully.

“Oh, no,” she answered. “How could you think that? But what has divorce
to do with it? Your granddaughter hasn’t been divorced.”

A sound of disgust at the mere suggestion escaped him, and he said
coldly:

“My daughter divorced her first husband.”

“Oh, I did not know.”

“Against what, then, is this unconquerable prejudice of yours?”

“Against the daughters of the leisure class.”

He was still quite at sea.

“You dislike them?”

“I fear them.”

If she had said that she considered roses a menace, he could not have
been more puzzled. He repeated her words aloud, as if he hoped that
they might have some meaning for him if he heard his own lips
pronouncing them:

“You fear them.”

“Yes,” she went on, now interested only in expressing her belief, “I fear
their ignorance and idleness and irresponsibility and self-indulgence,
and, all the more because it is so delicate and attractive and
unconscious; and their belief that the world owes them luxury and
happiness without their lifting a finger. I fear their cowardice and lack
of character--”

“Cowardice!” he cried, catching at the first word he could. “My dear Mrs.
Wayne, the aristocrats in the French Revolution, the British officer--”

“Oh, yes, they know how to die,” she answered; “but do they know how to
live when the horrible, sordid little strain of every-day life begins to
make demands upon them, their futile education, the moral feebleness that
comes with perfect safety! I know something can be made of such girls,
but I don’t want my son sacrificed in the process.”

There was a long, dark silence; then Mr. Lanley said with a particularly
careful and exact enunciation:

“I think, my dear madam, that you cannot have known very many of the
young women you are describing. It may be that there are some like
that--daughters of our mushroom finance; but I can assure you that the
children of ladies and gentlemen are not at all as you seem to imagine.”

It was characteristic of Mrs. Wayne that, still absorbed by her own
convictions, she did not notice the insult of hearing ladies and
gentlemen described to her as if they were beings wholly alien to her
experience; but the tone of his speech startled her, and she woke, like a
person coming out of a trance, to all the harm she had done.

“I may be old-fashioned--” he began and then threw the phrase from him;
it was thus that Alberta, his sister, began her most offensive
pronouncements. “It has always appeared to me that we shelter our more
favored women as we shelter our planted trees, so that they may attain a
stronger maturity.”

“But do they, are they--are sheltered women the strongest in a crisis?”

Fiend in human shape, he thought, she was making him question his
bringing up of Adelaide. He would not bear that. His foot stole out to
the self-starter.

For the few minutes that remained of the interview she tried to undo her
work, but the injury was too deep. His life was too near its end for
criticism to be anything but destructive; having no time to collect new
treasure, he simply could not listen to her suggestion that those he
most valued were imitation. He hated her for holding such opinion. Her
soft tones, her eager concessions, her flattering sentences, could now
make no impression upon a man whom half an hour before they would have
completely won.

He bade her a cold good night, hardly more than bent his head, the
chauffeur took the heavy coat from her, and the car had wheeled away
before she was well inside her own doorway.

Pete’s brown head was visible over the banisters.

“Hello, Mother!” he said. “Did the old boy kidnap you?”

Mrs. Wayne came up slowly, stumbling over her long, blue draperies in her
weariness and depression.

“Oh, Pete, my darling,” she said, “I think I’ve spoiled everything.”

His heart stood still. He knew better than most people that his mother
could either make or mar.

“They won’t hear of it?”

She nodded distractedly.

“I do make such a mess of things sometimes!”

He put his arm about her.

“So you do, Mother,” he said; “but then think how magnificently you
sometimes pull them out again.”




CHAPTER V


Mr. Lanley had not reported the result of his interview immediately. He
told himself that it was too late; but it was only a quarter before
eleven when he was back safe in his own library, feeling somehow not so
safe as usual. He felt attacked, insulted; and yet he also felt vivified
and encouraged. He felt as he might have felt if some one, unbidden, had
cut a vista on the Lanley estates, first outraged in his sense of
property, but afterward delighted with the widened view and the fresher
breeze. It was awkward, though, that he didn’t want Adelaide to go into
details as to his visit; he did not think that the expedition to the pier
could be given the judicial, grandfatherly tone that he wanted to give.
So he did not communicate at all with his daughter that night.

The next morning about nine, however, when she was sitting up in bed,
with her tray on her knees, and on her feet a white satin coverlet sown
as thickly with bright little flowers as the Milky Way with stars, her
last words to Vincent, who was standing by the fire, with his newspaper
folded in his hands, ready to go down-town, were interrupted, as they
nearly always were, by the burr of the telephone.

She took it up from the table by her bed, and as she did so she fixed her
eyes on her husband and looked steadily at him all the time that central
was making the connection; she was trying to answer that unsolved problem
as to whether or not a mist hung between them. Then she got her
connection.

“Yes, Papa; it is Adelaide.” “Yes?” “Did she appear like a lady?” “A
lady?” “You don’t know what I mean by that? Why, Papa!” “Well, did she
appear respectable?” “How cross you are to me!” “I’m glad to hear it. You
did not sound cheerful.”

She hung up the receiver and turned to Vincent, making eyes of surprise.

“Really, papa is too strange. Why should he be cross to me because he has
had an unsatisfactory interview with the Wayne boy’s mother? I never
wanted him to go, anyhow, Vin. I wanted to send _you_.”

“It would probably be better for you to go yourself.”

He left the room as if he had said nothing remarkable. But it was
remarkable, in Adelaide’s experience, that he should avoid any
responsibility, and even more so that he should shift it to her
shoulders. For an instant she faced the possibility, the most terrible of
any that had occurred to her, that the balance was changing between them;
that she, so willing to be led, was to be forced to guide. She had seen
it happen so often between married couples--the weight of character begin
on one side of the scale, and then slowly the beam would shift. Once it
had happened to her. Was it to happen again? No, she told herself; never
with Farron. He would command or die, lead her or leave her.

Mathilde knocked at her door, as she did every morning as soon as her
stepfather had gone down town. She had had an earlier account of Mr.
Lanley’s interview. It had read:

  DEAREST GIRL:

  The great discussion did not go very well, apparently. The opinion
  prevails at the moment that no engagement can be allowed to exist
  between us. I feel as if they were all meeting to discuss whether or
  not the sun is to rise to-morrow morning. You and I, my love, have
  special information that it will.

After this it needed no courage to go down and hear her mother’s account
of the interview. Adelaide was still in bed, but one long, pointed
fingertip, pressed continuously upon the dangling bell, a summons that
had long since lost its poignancy for the temperamental Lucie, indicated
that she was about to get up.

“My dear,” she said in answer to Mathilde’s question, “your grandfather’s
principal interest seems to be to tell me nothing at all, and he has been
wonderfully successful. I can get nothing from him, so I’m going myself.”

The girl’s heart sank at hearing this. Her mother saw things clearly and
definitely, and had a talent for expressing her impressions in
unforgetable words. Mathilde could still remember with a pang certain
books, poems, pictures, and even people whose charms her mother had
destroyed in one poisonous phrase. Adelaide was too careful of her
personal dignity to indulge in mimicry, but she had a way of catching and
repeating the exact phrasing of some foolish sentence that was almost
better--or worse--than mimicry. Mathilde remembered a governess, a kind
and patient person of whom Adelaide had greatly wearied, who had a habit
of beginning many observations, “It may strike you as strange, but I am
the sort of person who--” Mathilde was present at luncheon one day when
Adelaide was repeating one of these sentences. “It may strike you as
strange, but I like to feel myself in good health.” Mathilde resented the
laughter that followed, and sprang to her governess’s defense, yet
sickeningly soon she came to see the innocent egotism that directed the
choice of the phrase.

She felt as if she could not bear this process to be turned against
Pete’s mother, not because it would alter the respectful love she was
prepared to offer this unknown figure, but because it might very slightly
alter her attitude toward her own mother. That was one of the
characteristics of this great emotion: all her old beliefs had to be
revised to accord with new discoveries.

This was what lay behind the shrinking of her soul as she watched her
mother dress for the visit to Mrs. Wayne. For the first time in her life
Mathilde wished that her mother was not so elaborate. Hitherto she had
always gloried in Adelaide’s elegance as a part of her beauty; but now,
as she watched the ritual of ribbons and laces and perfumes and jewels,
she felt vaguely that there was in it all a covert insult to Pete’s
mother, who, she knew, would not be a bit like that.

“How young you are, Mama!” she exclaimed as, the whole long process
complete, Adelaide stood holding out her hand for her gloves, like a
little girl ready for a party.

Her mother smiled.

“It’s well I am,” she said, “if you go on trying to get yourself involved
with young men who live up four flights of stairs. I have always avoided
even dressmakers who lived above the second story,” she added wistfully.

The wistful tone was repeated when her car stopped at the Wayne door and
she stepped out.

“Are you sure this is the number, Andrews?” she asked. She and the
chauffeur looked slowly up at the house and up and down the street. They
were at one in their feeling about it. Then Adelaide gave a very gentle
little sigh and started the ascent.

The flat did not look as well by day. Though the eastern sun poured in
cheerfully, it revealed worn places on the backs of the arm-chairs and
one fearful calamity with an ink-bottle that Pete had once had on the
rug. Even Mrs. Wayne, who sprang up from behind her writing-table, had
not the saint-like mystery that her blue draperies had given her the
evening before.

Though slim, and in excellent condition for thirty-nine, Adelaide could
not conceal that four flights were an exertion. Her fine nostrils were
dilated and her breath not perfectly under control as she said:

“How delightful this is!” a statement that was no more untrue than to say
good-morning on a rainy day.

Most women in Mrs. Wayne’s situation would at the moment have been
acutely aware of the ink-spot. That was one of Adelaide’s assets, on
which she perhaps unconsciously counted, that her mere appearance made
nine people out of ten aware of their own physical imperfections. But
Mrs. Wayne was aware of nothing but Adelaide’s great beauty as she sank
into one of the armchairs with hardly a hint of exhaustion.

“Your son is a very charming person, Mrs. Wayne,” she said.

Mrs. Wayne was standing by the mantelpiece, looking boyish and friendly;
but now she suddenly grew grave, as if something serious had been said.

“Pete has something more unusual than charm,” she said.

“But what could be more unusual?” cried Adelaide, who wanted to add, “The
only question is, does your wretched son possess it?” But she didn’t; she
asked instead, with a tone of disarming sweetness, “Shall we be perfectly
candid with each other?”

A quick gleam came into Mrs. Wayne’s eyes. “Not much,” she seemed to say.
She had learned to distrust nothing so much as her own candor, and her
interview with Mr. Lanley had put her specially on her guard.

“I hope you will be candid, Mrs. Farron,” she said aloud, and for her
this was the depth of dissimulation.

“Well, then,” said Adelaide, “you and I are in about the same position,
aren’t we? We are both willing that our children should marry, and we
have no objection to offer to their choice except our own ignorance. We
both want time to judge. But how can we get time, Mrs. Wayne? If we do
not take definite action _against_ an engagement, we are giving our
consent to it. I want a little reasonable delay, but we can get delay
only by refusing to hear of an engagement. Do you see what I mean? Will
you help me by pretending to be a very stern parent, just so that these
young people may have a few months to think it over without being too
definitely committed?”

Mrs. Wayne shrank back. She liked neither diplomacy nor coercion.

“But I have really no control over Pete,” she said.

“Surely, if he isn’t in a position to support a wife--”

“He is, if she would live as he does.”

Such an idea had never crossed Mrs. Farron’s mind. She looked round her
wonderingly, and said without a trace of wilful insolence in her tone:

“Live here, you mean?”

“Yes, or somewhere like it.”

Mrs. Farron looked down, and smoothed the delicate dark fur of her muff.
She hardly knew how to begin at the very beginning like this. She did not
want to hurt any one’s feelings. How could she tell this childlike,
optimistic creature that to put Mathilde to living in surroundings like
these would be like exposing a naked baby on a mountaintop? It wasn’t
love of luxury, at least not if luxury meant physical self-indulgence.
She could imagine suffering privations very happily in a Venetian palace
or on a tropical island. It was an esthetic, not a moral, problem; it was
a question of that profound and essential thing in the life of any woman
who was a woman--her charm. She wished to tell Mrs. Wayne that her son
wouldn’t really like it, that he would hate to see Mathilde going out in
overshoes; that the background that she, Adelaide, had so expertly
provided for her child was part of the very attraction that made him want
to take her out of it. There was no use in saying that most poor mortals
were forced to get on without this magic atmosphere. They had never been
goddesses; they did not know what they were going without. But her child,
who had been, as it were, born a fairy, would miss tragically the
delicate beauty of her every-day life, would fade under the ugly monotony
of poverty.

But how could she say this to Mrs. Wayne, in her flat-heeled shoes and
simple, boyish shirt and that twelfth-century saint’s profile, of which
so much might have been made by a clever woman?

At last she began, still smoothing her muff:

“Mrs. Wayne, I have brought up my daughter very simply. I don’t at all
approve of the extravagances of these modern girls, with their own motors
and their own bills. Still, she has had a certain background. We must
admit that marriage with your son on his income alone would mean a
decrease in her material comforts.”

Mrs. Wayne laughed.

“More than you know, probably.”

This was candid, and Adelaide pressed on.

“Well is it wise or kind to make such a demand on a young creature when
we know marriage is difficult at the best?” she asked.

Mrs. Wayne hesitated.

“You see, I have never seen your daughter, and I don’t know what her
feeling for Pete may be.”

“I’ll answer both questions. She has a pleasant, romantic sentiment for
Mr. Wayne--you know how one feels to one’s first lover. She is a sweet,
kind, unformed little girl, not heroic. But think of your own spirited
son. Do you want this persistent, cruel responsibility for him?”

The question was an oratorical one, and Adelaide was astonished to find
that Mrs. Wayne was answering it.

“Oh, yes,” she said; “I want responsibility for Pete. It’s exactly what
he needs.”

Adelaide stared at her in horror; she seemed the most unnatural mother
in the world. She herself would fight to protect her daughter from the
passive wear and tear of poverty; but she would have died to keep a son,
if she had had one, from being driven into the active warfare of the
support of a family.

In the pause that followed there was a ring at the bell, an argument with
the servant, something that sounded like a scuffle, and then a young man
strolled into the room. He was tall and beautifully dressed,--at least
that was the first impression,--though, as a matter of fact, the clothes
were of the cheapest ready-made variety. But nothing could look cheap or
ill made on those splendid muscles. He wore a silk shirt, a flower in his
buttonhole, a gray tie in which was a pearl as big as a pea, long
patent-leather shoes with elaborate buff-colored tops; he carried a thin
stick and a pair of new gloves in one hand, but the most conspicuous
object in his dress was a brand-new, gray felt hat, with a rather wide
brim, which he wore at an angle greater than Mr. Lanley attempted even at
his jauntiest. His face was long and rather dark, and his eyes were a
bright gray blue, under dark brows. He was scowling.

He strode into the middle of the room, and stood there, with his feet
wide apart and his elbows slightly swaying. His hat was still on.

“Your servant said you couldn’t see me,” he said, with his back teeth set
together, a method of enunciation that seemed to be habitual.

“Didn’t want to would be truer, Marty,” answered Mrs. Wayne, with the
utmost good temper. “Still, as long as you’re here, what do you want?”

Marty Burke didn’t answer at once. He stood looking at Mrs. Wayne under
his lowering brows; he had stopped swinging his elbows, and was now very
slightly twitching his cane, as an evilly disposed cat will twitch the
end of its tail.

Mrs. Farron watched him almost breathlessly. She was a little frightened,
but the sensation was pleasurable. He was, she knew, the finest specimen
of the human animal that she had ever seen.

“What do I want?” he said at length in a deep, rich voice, shot here and
there with strange nasal tones, and here and there with the remains of a
brogue. “Well, I want that you should stop persecuting those poor kids.”

“I persecuting them? Don’t be absurd, Marty,” answered Mrs. Wayne.

“Persecuting them; what else?” retorted Marty, fiercely. “What else is
it? They wanting to get married, and you determined to send the boy up
the river.”

“I don’t think we’ll go over that again. I have a lady here on business.”

“Oh, please don’t mind me,” said Mrs. Farron, settling back, and
wriggling her hands contentedly into her muff. She rather expected the
frivolous courage of her tone to draw the ire of Burke’s glance upon her,
but it did not.

“Cruel is what I call it,” he went on. “She wants it, and he wants it,
and her family wants it, and only you and the judge that you put up to
opposing--”

“Her family do not want it. Her brother--”

“Her brother agrees with me. I was talking to him yesterday.”

“Oh, that’s why he has a black eye, is it?” said Mrs. Wayne.

“Black eyes or blue,” said Marty, with a horizontal gesture of his
hands, “her brother wants to see her married.”

“Well, I don’t,” replied Mrs. Wayne, “at least not to this boy. I will
never give my consent to putting a child of her age in the power of a
degenerate little drunkard like that.”

Mrs. Farron listened with all her ears. She did not think herself a
prude, and only a moment before she had been accusing Mrs. Wayne of
ignorance of the world; but never in all her life had she heard such
words as were now freely exchanged between Burke and his hostess on the
subject of the degree of consent that the girl in question had given to
the advances of Burke’s protégé. She would have been as embarrassed as a
girl if either of the disputants had been in the least aware of her
presence. Once, she thought, Mrs. Wayne, for the sake of good manners,
was on the point of turning to her and explaining the whole situation;
but fortunately the exigencies of the dispute swept her on too fast.
Adelaide was shocked, physically rather than morally, by the nakedness of
their talk; but she did not want them to stop. She was fascinated by the
spectacle of Marty Burke in action. She recognized at once that he was a
dangerous man, not dangerous to female virtue, like all the other men to
whom she had heard the term applied, but actually dangerous to life and
property. She was not in the least afraid of him, but she knew he was a
real danger. She enjoyed the knowledge. In most ways she was a woman
timid in the face of physical danger, but she had never imagined being
afraid of another human being. That much, perhaps, her sheltered training
had done for her. “If she goes on irritating him like this he may murder
us both,” she thought. What she really meant was that he might murder
Mrs. Wayne, but that, when he came to her and began to twist her neck,
she would just say, “My dear man, don’t be silly!” and he would stop.

In the meantime Burke was not so angry as he was affecting to be. Like
most leaders of men, he had a strong dramatic instinct, and he had just
led Mrs. Wayne to the climax of her just violence when his manner
suddenly completely changed, and he said with the utmost good temper:

“And what do you think of my get-up, Mrs. Wayne? It’s a new suit I have
on, and a boutonniere.” The change was so sudden that no one answered,
and he went on, “It’s clothes almost fit for a wedding that I’m wearing.”

Mrs. Wayne understood him in a flash. She sprang to her feet.

“Marty Burke,” she cried, “you don’t mean to say you’ve got those two
children married!”

“Not fifteen minutes ago, and I standing up with the groom.” He smiled a
smile of the wildest, most piercing sweetness--a smile so free and
intense that it seemed impossible to connect it with anything but the
consciousness of a pure heart. Mrs. Farron had never seen such a smile.
“I thought I’d just drop around and give you the news,” he said, and now
for the first time took off his hat, displaying his crisp, black hair and
round, pugnacious head. “Good morning, ladies.” He bowed, and for an
instant his glance rested on Mrs. Farron with an admiration too frank to
be exactly offensive. He put his hat on his head, turned away, and made
his exit, whistling.

He left behind him one person at least who had thoroughly enjoyed his
triumph. To do her justice, however, Mrs. Farron was ashamed of her
sympathy, and she said gently to Mrs. Wayne:

“You think this marriage a very bad thing.”

Mrs. Wayne pushed all her hair away from her temples.

“Oh, yes,” she said, “it’s a bad thing for the girl; but the worst is
having Marty Burke put anything over. The district is absolutely under
his thumb. I do wish, Mrs. Farron, you would get your husband to put the
fear of God into him.”

“My husband?”

“Yes; he works for your husband. He has charge of the loading and
unloading of the trucks. He’s proud of his job, and it gives him power
over the laborers. He wouldn’t want to lose his place. If your husband
would send for him and say--” Mrs. Wayne hastily outlined the things Mr.
Farron might say.

“He works for Vincent,” Adelaide repeated. It seemed to her an absolutely
stupendous coincidence, and her imagination pictured the clash between
them--the effort of Vincent to put the fear of God into this man. Would
he be able to? Which one would win? Never before had she doubted the
superior power of her husband; now she did. “I think it would be hard to
put the fear of God into that young man,” she said aloud.

“I do wish Mr. Farron would try.”

“Try,” thought Adelaide, “and fail?” Could she stand that? Was her
whole relation to Vincent about to be put to the test? What weapons had
he against Marty Burke? And if he had none, how stripped he would
appear in her eyes!

“Won’t you ask him, Mrs. Farron?”

Adelaide recoiled. She did not want to be the one to throw her glove
among the lions.

“I don’t think I understand well enough what it is you want. Why don’t
you ask him yourself?” She hesitated, knowing that no opportunity for
this would offer unless she herself arranged it. “Why don’t you come and
dine with us to-night, and,” she added more slowly, “bring your son?”

She had made the bait very attractive, and Mrs. Wayne did not refuse.




CHAPTER VI


As she drove home, Adelaide’s whole being was stirred by the prospect of
that conflict between Burke and her husband, and it was not until she saw
Mathilde, pale with an hour of waiting, that she recalled the real object
of her recent visit. Not, of course, that Adelaide was more interested in
Marty Burke than in her daughter’s future, but a titanic struggle fired
her imagination more than a pitiful little romance. She felt a pang of
self-reproach when she saw that Mr. Lanley had come to share the child’s
vigil, that he seemed to be suffering under an anxiety almost as keen as
Mathilde’s.

They did not have to question her; she threw out her hands, casting her
muff from her as she did so.

“Oh,” she said, “I’m a weak, soft-hearted creature! I’ve asked them both
to dine tonight.”

Mathilde flung herself into her mother’s arms.

“O Mama, how marvelous you are!” she exclaimed.

Over her daughter’s shoulder Adelaide noted her father’s expression, a
stiffening of the mouth and a brightening of the eyes.

“Your grandfather disapproves of me, Mathilde,” she said.

“He couldn’t be so unkind,” returned the girl.

“After all,” said Mr. Lanley, trying to induce a slight scowl, “if we are
not going to consent to an engagement--”

“But you are,” said Mathilde.

“We are not,” said her mother; “but there is no reason why we should
not meet and talk it over like sensible creatures--talk it over
here”--Adelaide looked lovingly around her own subdued room--“instead
of five stories up. For really--” She stopped, running her eyebrows
together at the recollection.

“But the flat is rather--rather comfortable when you get there,” said Mr.
Lanley, suddenly becoming embarrassed over his choice of an adjective.

Adelaide looked at him sharply.

“Dear Papa,” she asked, “since when have you become an admirer of
painted shelves and dirty rugs? And I don’t doubt,” she added very
gently, “that for the same money they could have found something quite
tolerable in the country.”

“Perhaps they don’t want to live in the country,” said Mr. Lanley, rather
sharply: “I’m sure there is nothing that you’d hate more, Adelaide.”

She opened her dark eyes.

“But I don’t have to choose between squalor here or--”

“Squalor!” said Mr. Lanley. “Don’t be ridiculous!”

Mathilde broke in gently at this point:

“I think you must have liked Mrs. Wayne, Mama, to ask her to dine.”

Adelaide saw an opportunity to exercise one of her important talents.

“Yes,” she said. “She has a certain naïve friendliness. Of course I don’t
advocate, after fifty, dressing like an Eton boy; I always think an
elderly face above a turned-down collar--”

“Mama,” broke in Mathilde, quietly, “would you mind not talking of Mrs.
Wayne like that? You know, she’s Pete’s mother.”

Adelaide was really surprised.

“Why, my love,” she answered, “I haven’t said half the things I might
say. I rather thought I was sparing your feelings. After all, when you
see her, you will admit that she _does_ dress like an Eton boy.”

“She didn’t when I saw her,” said Mr. Lanley.

Adelaide turned to her father.

“Papa, I leave it to you. Did I say anything that should have wounded
anybody’s susceptibilities?”

Mr. Lanley hesitated.

“It was the tone Mathilde did not like, I think.”

Adelaide raised her shoulders and looked beautifully hurt.

“My tone?” she wailed.

“It hurt me,” said Mathilde, laying her little hand on her heart.

Mr. Lanley smiled at her, and then, springing up, kissed her tenderly on
the forehead. He said it was time for him to be going on.

“You’ll come to dinner to-night, Papa?”

Rather hastily, Mr. Lanley said no, he couldn’t; he had an engagement.
But his daughter did not let him get to the door.

“What are you going to do to-night, Papa?” she asked, firmly.

“There is a governor’s meeting--”

“Two in a week, Papa?”

Suddenly Mr. Lanley dropped all pretense of not coming, and said he would
be there at eight.

During the rest of the day Mathilde’s heart never wholly regained its
normal beat. Not only was she to see Pete again, and see him under the
gaze of her united family, but she was to see this mother of his, whom he
loved and admired so much. She pictured her as white-haired, benignant,
brooding, the essential mother, with all her own mother’s grace and charm
left out, yet with these qualities not ill replaced by others which
Mathilde sometimes dimly apprehended were lacking in her own beautiful
parent. She looked at herself in the glass. “My son’s wife,” was the
phrase in her mind.

On her way up-stairs to dress for dinner she tried to confide her
anxieties to her mother.

“Mama,” she said, “if you had a son, how would you feel toward the girl
he wanted to marry?”

“Oh, I should think her a cat, of course,” Adelaide answered; and
added an instant later, “and I should probably be able to make him
think so, too.”

Mathilde sighed and went on up-stairs. Here she decided on an act of some
insubordination. She would wear her best dress that evening, the dress
which her mother considered too old for her. She did not want Pete’s
mother to think he had chosen a perfect baby.

Mr. Lanley, too, was a trifle nervous during the afternoon. He tried to
say to himself that it was because the future of his darling little
Mathilde was about to be settled. He shook his head, indicating that to
settle the future of the young was a risky business; and then in a burst
of self-knowledge he suddenly admitted that what was really making him
nervous was the incident of the pier. If Mrs. Wayne referred to it, and
of course there was no possible reason why she should not refer to it,
Adelaide would never let him hear the last of it. It would be natural for
Adelaide to think it queer that he hadn’t told her about it. And the
reason he hadn’t told was perfectly clear: it was on that infernal pier
that he had formed such an adverse opinion of Mrs. Wayne. But of course
he did not wish to prejudice Adelaide; he wanted to leave her free to
form her own opinions, and he was glad, excessively glad, that she had
formed so favorable a one as to ask the woman to dinner. There was no
question about his being glad; he surprised his servant by whistling as
he put on his white waistcoat, and fastened the buckle rather more snugly
than usual. Self-knowledge for the moment was not on hand.

He arrived at exactly the hour at which he always arrived, five minutes
after eight, a moment not too early to embarrass the hostess and not too
late to endanger the dinner.

No one was in the drawing-room but Mathilde and Farron. Adelaide, for one
who had been almost perfectly brought up, did sometimes commit the fault
of allowing her guests to wait for her.

“’Lo, my dear,” said Mr. Lanley, kissing Mathilde. “What’s that you have
on? Never saw it before. Not so becoming as the dress you were wearing
the last time I was here.”

Mathilde felt that it would be almost easier to die immediately, and was
revived only when she heard Farron saying:

“Oh, don’t you like this? I was just thinking I had never seen Mathilde
looking so well, in her rather more mature and subtle vein.”

It was just as she wished to appear, but she glanced at her stepfather,
disturbed by her constant suspicion that he read her heart more clearly
than any one else, more clearly than she liked.

“How shockingly late they are!” said Adelaide, suddenly appearing in
the utmost splendor. She moved about, kissing her father and arranging
the chairs. “Do you know, Vin, why it is that Pringle likes to make the
room look as if it were arranged for a funeral? Why do you suppose they
don’t come?”

“Any one who arrives after Adelaide is apt to be in wrong,” observed
her husband.

“Well, I think it’s awfully incompetent always to be waiting for other
people,” she returned, just laying her hand an instant on his shoulder to
indicate that he alone was privileged to make fun of her.

“That perhaps is what the Waynes think,” he answered.

Mathilde’s heart sank a little at this. She knew her mother did not like
to be kept waiting for dinner.

“When I was a young man--” began Mr. Lanley.

“It was the custom,” interrupted Adelaide in exactly the same tone, “for
a hostess to be in her drawing-room at least five minutes before the hour
set for the arrival of the guests.”

“Adelaide,” her father pleaded, “I don’t talk like that; at least
not often.”

“You would, though, if you didn’t have me to correct you,” she retorted.
“There’s the bell at last; but it always takes people like that forever
to get their wraps off.”

“It’s only ten minutes past eight,” said Farron, and Mathilde blessed
him with a look.

Mrs. Wayne came quickly into the room, so fast that her dress floated
behind her; she was in black and very grand. No one would have supposed
that she had murmured to Pete just before the drawing-room door was
opened, “I hope they haven’t run in any old relations on us.”

“I’m afraid I’m late,” she began.

“She always is,” Pete murmured to Mathilde as he took her hand and quite
openly squeezed it, and then, before Adelaide had time for the rather
casual introduction she had planned, he himself put the hand he was
holding into his mother’s. “This is my girl, Mother,” he said. They
smiled at each other. Mathilde tried to say something. Mrs. Wayne stooped
and kissed her. Mr. Lanley was obviously affected. Adelaide wasn’t going
to have any scene like that.

“Late?” she said, as if not an instant had passed since Mrs. Wayne’s
entrance. “Oh, no, you’re not late; exactly on time, I think. I’m only
just down myself. Isn’t that true, Vincent?”

Vincent was studying Mrs. Wayne, and withdrew his eyes slowly. But
Adelaide’s object was accomplished: no public betrothal had taken place.

Pringle announced dinner. Mr. Lanley, rather to his own surprise, found
that he was insisting on giving Mrs. Wayne his arm; he was not so angry
at her as he had supposed. He did not think her offensive or unfeminine
or half baked or socialistic or any of the things he had been saying to
himself at lengthening intervals for the last twenty-four hours.

Pete saw an opportunity, and tucked Mathilde’s hand within his own arm,
nipping it closely to his heart.

The very instant they were at table Adelaide looked down the alley
between the candles, for the low, golden dish of hot-house fruit did not
obstruct her view of Vincent, and said:

“Why have you never told me about Marty Burke?”

“Who’s he?” asked Mr. Lanley, quickly, for he had been trying to start a
little conversational hare of his own, just to keep the conversation away
from the water-front.

“He’s a splendid young super-tough in my employ,” said Vincent. “What do
you know about him, Adelaide?”

The guarded surprise in his tone stimulated her.

“Oh, I know all about him--as much, that is, as one ever can of a
stupendous natural phenomenon.”

“Where did you hear of him?”

“Hear of him? I’ve seen him. I saw him this morning at Mrs. Wayne’s. He
just dropped in while I was there and, metaphorically speaking, dragged
us about by the hair of our heads.”

“Some women, I believe, confess to enjoying that sensation,”
Vincent observed.

“Yes, it’s exciting,” answered his wife.

“It’s an easy excitement to attain.”

“Oh, one wants it done in good style.”

Something so stimulating that it was almost hostile flashed through the
interchange.

Mathilde murmured to Pete:

“Who are they talking about?”

“A mixture of Alcibiades and _Bill Sykes_,” said Adelaide, catching the
low tone, as she always did.

“He’s the district leader and a very bad influence,” said Mrs. Wayne.

“He’s a champion middle-weight boxer,” said Pete.

“He’s the head of my stevedores,” said Farron.

“O Mr. Farron,” Mrs. Wayne exclaimed, “I do wish you would use your
influence over him.”

“My influence? It consists of paying him eighty-five dollars a month and
giving him a box of cigars at Christmas.”

“Don’t you think you could tone him down?” pleaded Mrs. Wayne. “He does
so much harm.”

“But I don’t want him toned down. His value to me is his being just as he
is. He’s a myth, a hero, a power on the water-front, and I employ him.”

“You employ him, but do you control him?” asked Adelaide, languidly, and
yet with a certain emphasis.

Her husband glanced at her.

“What is it you want, Adelaide?” he said.

She gave a little laugh.

“Oh, I want nothing. It’s Mrs. Wayne who wants you to do
something--rather difficult, too, I should imagine.”

He turned gravely to their guest.

“What is it you want, Mrs. Wayne?”

Mrs. Wayne considered an instant, and as she was about to find words for
her request her son spoke:

“She’ll tell you after dinner.”

“Pete, I wasn’t going to tell the story,” his mother put in protestingly.
“You really do me injustice at times.”

Adelaide, remembering the conversation of the morning, wondered whether
he did. She felt grateful to him for wishing to spare Mathilde the
hearing of such a story, and she turned to him with a caressing
graciousness in which she was extremely at her ease. Mathilde,
recognizing that her mother was pleased, though not being very clear why,
could not resist joining in their conversation; and Mrs. Wayne was thus
given an opportunity of murmuring the unfortunate Anita’s story into
Vincent’s ear.

Adelaide, holding Pete with a flattering gaze, seeming to drink in every
word he was saying, heard Mrs. Wayne finish and heard Vincent say:

“And you think you can get it annulled if only Burke doesn’t interfere?”

“Yes, if he doesn’t get hold of the boy and tell him that his dignity as
a man is involved.”

Adelaide withdrew her gaze from Pete and fixed it on Vincent. Was he
going to accept that challenge? She wanted him to, and yet she thought he
would be defeated, and she did not want him to be defeated. She waited
almost breathless.

“Well, I’ll see what I can do,” he said. This was an acceptance.
This from Vincent meant that the matter, as far as he was concerned,
was settled.

“You two plotters!” exclaimed Adelaide. “For my part, I’m on Marty
Burke’s side. I hate to see wild creatures in cages.”

“Dangerous to side with wild beasts,” observed Vincent.

“Why?”

“They get the worst of it in the long run.”

Adelaide dropped her eyes. It was exactly the right answer. For a moment
she felt his complete supremacy. Then another thought shot through her
mind: it was exactly the right answer if he could make it good.

In the meantime Mr. Lanley began to grow dissatisfied with the prolonged
role of spectator. He preferred danger to oblivion; and turning to Mrs.
Wayne, he said, with his politest smile:

“How are the bridges?”

“Oh, dear,” she answered, “I must have been terribly tactless--to make
you so angry.”

Mr. Lanley drew himself up.

“I was not angry,” he said.

She looked at him with a sort of gentle wonder.

“You gave me the impression of being.”

The very temperateness of the reply made him see that he had been
inaccurate.

“Of course I was angry,” he said. “What I mean is that I don’t understand
why I was.”

Meantime, on the opposite side of the table, Mathilde and Pete were
equally immersed, murmuring sentences of the profoundest meaning behind
faces which they felt were mask-like.

Farron looked down the table at his wife. Why, he wondered, did she want
to tease him to-night, of all nights in his life?

When they came out of the dining-room Pete said to Mathilde with the
utmost clearness:

“And what was that magazine you spoke of?”

She had spoken of no magazine, but she caught the idea, the clever,
rather wicked idea. He made her work her mind almost too fast sometimes,
but she enjoyed it.

“Wasn’t it this?” she asked, with a beating heart.

They sat down on the sofa and bent their heads over it with student-like
absorption.

“I haven’t any idea what it is,” she whispered.

“Oh, well, I suppose there’s something or other in it.”

“I think your mother is perfectly wonderful--wonderful.”

“I love you so.”

The older people took a little longer to settle down. Mr. Lanley stood on
the hearth-rug, with a cigar in his mouth and his head thrown very far
back. Adelaide sank into a chair, looking, as she often did, as if she
had just been brilliantly well posed for a photograph. Farron was
silent. Mrs. Wayne sat, as she had a bad habit of doing, on one foot. The
two groups were sufficiently separated for distinct conversations.

“Is this a conference?” asked Farron.

Mrs. Wayne made it so by her reply.

“The whole question is, Are they really in love? At least, that’s my
view.”

“In love!” Adelaide twisted her shoulders. “What can they know of it for
another ten years? You must have some character, some knowledge to fall
in love. And these babes--”

“No,” said Mr. Lanley, stoutly; “you’re all wrong, Adelaide. It’s first
love that matters--_Romeo_ and _Juliet_, you know. Afterward we all get
hardened and world-worn and cynical and material.” He stopped short in
his eloquence at the thought that Mrs. Wayne was quite obviously not
hardened or world-worn or cynical or material. “By Jove!” he thought to
himself, “that’s it. The woman’s spirit is as fresh as a girl’s.” He had
by this time utterly forgotten what he had meant to say.

Adelaide turned to her husband.

“Do you think they are in love, Vin?”

Vincent looked at her for a second, and then he nodded two or
three times.

Though no one at once recognized the fact, the engagement was settled at
that moment.

It seemed obvious that Mr. Lanley should take the Waynes home in his car.
Mrs. Wayne, who had prepared for walking with overshoes and with pins for
her trailing skirt, did not seem too enthusiastic at the suggestion. She
stood a moment on the step and looked at the sky, where Orion, like a
banner, was hung across the easterly opening of the side street.

“It’s a lovely night,” she said.

It was Pete who drew her into the car. Her reluctance deprived Mr.
Lanley of the delight of bestowing a benefit, but gave him a faint sense
of capture.

In the drawing-room Mathilde was looking from one to the other of her
natural guardians, like a well-trained puppy who wants to be fed. She
wanted Pete praised. Instead, Adelaide said:

“Really, papa is growing too secretive! Do you know, Vin, he and Mrs.
Wayne quarreled like mad last evening, and he never told me a word
about it!”

“How do you know?”

“Oh, I heard them trying to smooth it out at dinner.”

“O Mama,” wailed Mathilde, between admiration and complaint, “you hear
everything!”

“Certainly, I do,” Adelaide returned lightly. “Yes, and I heard you, too,
and understood everything that you meant.”

Vincent couldn’t help smiling at his stepdaughter’s horrified look.

“What a brute you are, Adelaide!” he said.

“Oh, my dear, you’re much worse,” she retorted. “You don’t have to
overhear. You just read the human heart by some black magic of your own.
That’s really more cruel than my gross methods.”

“Well, Mathilde,” said Farron, “as a reader of the human heart, I want to
tell you that I approve of the young man. He has a fine, delicate touch
on life, which, I am inclined to think, goes only with a good deal of
strength.”

Mathilde blinked her eyes. Gratitude and delight had brought
tears to them.

“He thinks you’re wonderful, Mr. Farron,” she answered a little huskily.

“Better and better,” answered Vincent, and he held out his hand for a
letter that Pringle was bringing to him on a tray.

“What’s that?” asked Adelaide. One of the first things she had impressed
on Joe Severance was that he must never inquire about her mail; but she
always asked Farron about his.

He seemed to be thinking and didn’t answer her.

Mathilde, now simply insatiable, pressed nearer to him and asked:

“And what do you think of Mrs. Wayne?”

He raised his eyes from the envelope, and answered with a certain
absence of tone:

“I thought she was an elderly wood-nymph.”

Adelaide glanced over his shoulder, and, seeing that the letter had a
printed address in the corner, lost interest.

“You may shut the house, Pringle,” she said.




CHAPTER VII


Pringle, the last servant up, was soon heard discreetly drawing bolts and
turning out electric lights. Mathilde went straight up-stairs without
even an attempt at drawing her mother into an evening gossip. She was
aware of being tired after two nights rendered almost sleepless by her
awareness of joy. She went to her room and shut the door. Her bed was
piled high with extra covers, soft, light blankets and a down coverlet
covered with pink silk. She took a certain hygienic pride in the extent
to which she always opened her bedroom windows even when, as at present,
the night was bitterly cold. In the morning she ran, huddling on her
dressing-gown, into a heated bathroom, and when she emerged from this,
the maid had always lighted her fire, and laid her breakfast-tray close
to the blaze. To-night, when she went to open her window, she noticed
that the houses opposite had lost courage and showed only cracks. She
stood a second looking up at the stars, twinkling with tiny blue rays
through the clear air. By turning her head to the west she could look
down on the park, with its surface of bare, blurred tree-branches pierced
by rows of lights. The familiar sight suddenly seemed to her almost
intolerably beautiful. “Oh, I love him so much!” she said to herself, and
her lips actually whispered the words, “so much! so much!”

She threw the window high as a reproof of those shivers across the way,
and, jumping into bed, hastily sandwiched her small body between the warm
bedclothes. She was almost instantly asleep.

Overhead the faint, but heavy, footfall of Pringle ceased. The house was
silent; the city had become so. An occasional Madison Avenue car could be
heard ringing along the cold rails, or rhythmically bounding down hill on
a flat wheel. Once some distance away came the long, continuous complaint
of the siren of a fire-engine and the bells and gongs of its comrades;
and then a young man went past, whistling with the purest accuracy of
time and tune the air to which he had just been dancing.

At half-past five the kitchen-maid, a young Swede who feared not God,
neither regarded man, but lived in absolute subjection to the cook, to
whom, unknown to any one else, she every morning carried up breakfast,
was stealing down with a candle in her hand. Her senses were alert, for a
friend of hers had been strangled by burglars in similar circumstances,
and she had never overcome her own terror of the cold, dark house in
these early hours of a winter morning.

She went down not the back stairs, for Mr. Pringle objected that she woke
him as she passed, whereas the carpet on the front stairs was so thick
that there wasn’t the least chance of waking the family. As she passed
Mrs. Farron’s room she was surprised to see a fine crack of light coming
from under it. She paused, wondering if she was going to be caught, and
if she had better run back and take to the back stairs despite Pringle’s
well-earned rest; and as she hesitated she heard a sob, then
another--wild, hysterical sobs. The girl looked startled and then went
on, shaking her head. What people like that had to cry about beat her.
But she was glad, because she knew such a splendid bit of news would
soften the heart of the cook when she took up her breakfast.

By five o’clock it seemed to Adelaide that a whole eternity had passed
and that another was ahead of her, that this night would never end.

When they went up-stairs, while she was brushing her hair--her hair
rewarded brushing, for it was fine and long and took a polish like
bronze--she had wandered into Vincent’s room to discuss with him the
question of her father’s secretiveness about Mrs. Wayne. It was not, she
explained, standing in front of his fire, that she suspected anything,
but that it was so unfriendly: it deprived one of so much legitimate
amusement if one’s own family practised that kind of reserve. Her just
anger kept her from observing Farron very closely. As she talked she laid
her brush on the mantelpiece, and as she did so she knocked down the
letter that had come for him just before they went up-stairs. She
stooped, and picked it up without attention, and stood holding it; she
gesticulated a little with it as she repeated, for her own amusement
rather than for Vincent’s, phrases she had caught at dinner.

The horror to Farron of seeing her standing there chattering, with that
death-dealing letter in her hand, suddenly and illogically broke down his
resolution of silence. It was cruel, and though he might have denied
himself her help, he could not endure cruelty.

“Adelaide,” he said in a tone that drove every other sensation
away--“Adelaide, that letter. No, don’t read it.” He took it from her
and laid it on his dressing-table. “My dear love, it has very bad
news in it.”

“There _has_ been something, then?”

“Yes. I have been worried about my health for some time. This letter
tells me the worst is true. Well, my dear, we did not enter matrimony
with the idea that either of us was immortal.”

But that was his last effort to be superior to the crisis, to pretend
that the bitterness of death was any less to him than to any other human
creature, to conceal that he needed help, all the help that he could get.

And Adelaide gave him help. Artificial as she often was in daily
contact, in a moment like this she was splendidly, almost primitively
real. She did not conceal her own passionate despair, her conviction that
her life couldn’t go on without his; she did not curb her desire to know
every detail on which his opinion and his doctor’s had been founded; she
clung to him and wept, refusing to let him discuss business arrangements,
in which for some reason he seemed to find a certain respite; and yet
with it all, she gave him strength, the sense that he had an indissoluble
and loyal companion in the losing fight that lay before him.

Once she was aware of thinking: “Oh, why did he tell me to-night? Things
are so terrible by night,” but it was only a second before she put such a
thought away from her. What had these nights been to him? The night when
she had found his light burning so late, and other nights when he had
probably denied himself the consolation of reading for fear of rousing
her suspicions. She did not attempt to pity or advise him, she did not
treat him as a mixture of child and idiot, as affection so often treats
illness. She simply gave him her love.

Toward morning he fell asleep in her arms, and then she stole back to
her own room. There everything was unchanged, the light still burning,
her satin slippers stepping on each other just as she had left them. She
looked at herself in the glass; she did not look so very different. A
headache had often ravaged her appearance more.

She had always thought herself a coward, she feared death with a terrible
repugnance; but now she found, to her surprise, that she would have
light-heartedly changed places with her husband. She had much more
courage to die than to watch him die--to watch Vincent die, to see him
day by day grow weak and pitiful. That was what was intolerable. If he
would only die now, to-night, or if she could! It was at this moment that
the kitchen maid had heard her sobbing.

Because there was nothing else to do, she got into bed, and lay there
staring at the electric light, which she had forgotten to put out. Toward
seven she got up and gave orders that Mr. Farron was not to be disturbed,
that the house was to be kept quiet. Strange, she thought, that he could
sleep like an exhausted child, while she, awake, was a mass of pain. Her
heart ached, her eyes burned, her very body felt sore. She arranged for
his sleep, but she wanted him to wake up; she begrudged every moment of
his absence. Alas! she thought, how long would she continue to do so?

Yet with her suffering came a wonderful ease, an ability to deal with the
details of life. When at eight o’clock her maid came in and, pulling the
curtains, exclaimed with Gallic candor, “Oh, comme madame a mauvaise mine
ce matin!” she smiled at her with unusual gentleness. Later, when
Mathilde came down at her accustomed hour, and lying across the foot of
her mother’s bed, began to read her scraps of the morning paper, Adelaide
felt a rush of tenderness for the child, who was so unaware of the
hideous bargain life really was. Surprising as it was, she found she
could talk more easily than usual and with a more undivided attention,
though everything they said was trivial enough.

Then suddenly her heart stood still, for the door opened, and Vincent, in
his dressing-gown, came in. He had evidently had his bath, for his hair
was wet and shiny. Thank God! he showed no signs of defeat!

“Oh,” cried Mathilde, jumping up, “I thought Mr. Farron had gone
down-town ages ago.”

“He overslept,” said Adelaide.

“I had an excellent night,” he answered, and she knew he looked at her to
discover that she had not.

“I’ll go,” said Mathilde; but with unusual sharpness they both turned to
her and said simultaneously, “No, no; stay.” They knew no better than she
did why they were so eager to keep her.

“Are you going down-town, Vin?” Adelaide asked, and her voice shook a
little on the question; she was so eager that he should not institute any
change in his routine so soon.

“Of course,” he answered.

They looked at each other, yet their look said nothing in particular.
Presently he said:

“I wonder if I might have breakfast in here. I’ll go and shave if you’ll
order it; and don’t let Mathilde go. I have something to say to her.”

When he was gone, Mathilde went and stood at the window, looking out, and
tying knots in the window-shade’s cord. It was a trick Adelaide had
always objected to, and she was quite surprised to hear herself saying
now, just as usual:

“Mathilde, don’t tie knots in that cord.”

Mathilde threw it from her as one whose mind was engaged on higher
things.

“You know,” she observed, “I believe I’m only just beginning to
appreciate Mr. Farron. He’s so wise. I see what you meant about his being
strong, and he’s so clever. He knows just what you’re thinking all the
time. Isn’t it nice that he likes Pete? Did he say anything more about
him after you went up-stairs? I mean, he really does like him, doesn’t
he? He doesn’t say that just to please me?”

Presently Vincent came back fully dressed and sat down to his breakfast.
Oddly enough, there was a spirit of real gaiety in the air.

“What was it you were going to say to me?” Mathilde asked greedily.
Farron looked at her blankly. Adelaide knew that he had quite forgotten
the phrase, but he concealed the fact by not allowing the least
illumination of his expression as he remembered.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “I wish to correct myself. I told you that Mrs.
Wayne was an elderly wood-nymph; but I was wrong. Of course the truth is
that she’s a very young witch.”

Mathilde laughed, but not whole-heartedly. She had already identified
herself so much with the Waynes that she could not take them quite in
this tone of impersonality.

Farron threw down his napkin, stood up, pulled down his waistcoat.

“I must be off,” he said. He went and kissed his wife. Both had to nerve
themselves for that.

She held his arm in both her hands, feeling it solid, real, and as
hard as iron.

“You’ll be up-town early?”

“I’ve a busy day.”

“By four?”

“I’ll telephone.” She loved him for refusing to yield to her just at this
moment of all moments. Some men, she thought, would have hidden their own
self-pity under the excuse of the necessity of being kind to her.

She was to lunch out with a few critical contemporaries. She was
horrified when she looked at herself by morning light. Her skin had an
ivory hue, and there were many fine wrinkles about her eyes. She began to
repair these damages with the utmost frankness, talking meantime to
Mathilde and the maid. She swept her whole face with a white lotion,
rouged lightly, but to her very eyelids, touched a red pencil to her
lips, all with discretion. The result was satisfactory. The improvement
in her appearance made her feel braver. She couldn’t have faced these
people--she did not know whether to think of them as intimate enemies or
hostile friends--if she had been looking anything but her best.

But they were just what she needed; they would be hard and amusing and
keep her at some tension. She thought rather crossly that she could not
sit through a meal at home and listen to Mathilde rambling on about love
and Mr. Farron.

She was inexcusably late, and they had sat down to luncheon--three men
and two women--by the time she arrived. They had all been, or had wanted
to go, to an auction sale of _objets d’art_ that had taken place the
night before. They were discussing it, praising their own purchases, and
decrying the value of everybody else’s when Adelaide came in.

“Oh, Adelaide,” said her hostess, “we were just wondering what you paid
originally for your tapestry.”

“The one in the hall?”

“No, the one with the Turk in it.”

“I haven’t an idea,--” Adelaide was distinctly languid,--“I got it from
my grandfather.”

“Wouldn’t you know she’d say that?” exclaimed one of the women. “Not that
I deny it’s true; only, you know, Adelaide, whenever you do want to throw
a veil over one of your pieces, you always call on the prestige of your
ancestors.”

Adelaide raised her eyebrows.

“Really,” she answered, “there isn’t anything so very conspicuous about
having had a grandfather.”

“No,” her hostess echoed, “even I, so well and favorably known for my
vulgarity--even _I_ had a grandfather.”

“But he wasn’t a connoisseur in tapestries, Minnie darling.”

“No, but he was in pigs, the dear vulgarian.”

“True vulgarity,” said one of the men, “vulgarity in the best sense, I
mean, should betray no consciousness of its own existence. Only thus can
it be really great.”

“Oh, Minnie’s vulgarity is just artificial, assumed because she found it
worked so well.”

“Surely you accord her some natural talent along those lines.”

“I suspect her secret mind is refined.”

“Oh, that’s not fair. Vulgar is as vulgar does.”

Adelaide stood up, pushing back her chair. She found them utterly
intolerable. Besides, as they talked she had suddenly seen clearly that
she must herself speak to Vincent’s doctor without an instant’s delay. “I
have to telephone, Minnie,” she said, and swept out of the room. She
never returned.

“Not one of the perfect lady’s golden days, I should say,” said one of
the men, raising his eyebrows. “I wonder what’s gone wrong?”

“Can Vincent have been straying from the straight and narrow?”

“Something wrong. I could tell by her looks.”

“Ah, my dear, I’m afraid her looks is what’s wrong.”

Adelaide meantime was in her motor on her way to the doctor’s office. He
had given up his sacred lunch-hour in response to her imperious demand
and to his own intense pity for her sorrow.

He did not know her, but he had had her pointed out to him, and though
he recognized the unreason of such an attitude, he was aware that her
great beauty dramatized her suffering, so that his pity for her was
uncommonly alive.

He was a young man, with a finely cut face and a blond complexion. His
pity was visible, quivering a little under his mask of impassivity.
Adelaide’s first thought on seeing him was, “Good Heavens! another man to
be emotionally calmed before I can get at the truth!” She had to be
tactful, to let him see that she was not going to make a scene. She knew
that he felt it himself, but she was not grateful to him. What business
had he to feel it? His feeling was an added burden, and she felt that she
had enough to carry.

He did not make the mistake, however, of expressing his sympathy
verbally. His answers were as cold and clear as she could wish. She
questioned him on the chances of an operation. He could not reduce his
judgment to a mathematical one; he was inclined to advocate an operation
on psychological grounds, he said.

“It keeps up the patient’s courage to know something is being done.” He
added, “That will be your work, Mrs. Farron, to keep his courage up.”

Most women like to know they had their part to play, but Adelaide shook
her head quickly.

“I would so much rather go through it myself!” she cried.

“Naturally, naturally,” he agreed, without getting the full passion
of her cry.

She stood up.

“Oh,” she said, “if it could only be kill or cure!”

He glanced at her.

“We have hardly reached that point yet,” he answered.

She went away dissatisfied. He had answered every question, he had even
encouraged her to hope a little more than her interpretation of what
Vincent said had allowed her; but as she drove away she knew he had
failed her. For she had gone to him in order to have Vincent presented to
her as a hero, as a man who had looked upon the face of death without a
quiver. Instead, he had been presented to her as a patient, just one of
the long procession that passed through that office. The doctor had said
nothing to contradict the heroic picture, but he had said nothing to
contribute to it. And surely, if Farron had stood out in his calmness and
courage above all other men, the doctor would have mentioned it, couldn’t
have helped doing so; he certainly would not have spent so much time in
telling her how she was to guard and encourage him. To the doctor he was
only a patient, a pitiful human being, a victim of mortality. Was that
what he was going to become in her eyes, too?

At four she drove down-town to his office. He came out with another man;
they stood a moment on the steps talking and smiling. Then he drew his
friend to the car window and introduced him to Adelaide. The man took
off his hat.

“I was just telling your husband, Mrs. Farron, that I’ve been looking at
offices in this building. By the spring he and I will be neighbors.”

Adelaide just shut her eyes, and did not open them again until Vincent
had got in beside her and she felt his arm about her shoulder.

“My poor darling!” he said. “What you need is to go home and get some
sleep.” It was said in his old, cherishing tone, and she, leaning back,
with her head against the point of his shoulder, felt that, black as it
was, life for the first time since the night before had assumed its
normal aspect again.




CHAPTER VIII


The morning after their drive up-town Vincent told his wife that all
his arrangements were made to go to the hospital that night, and to be
operated upon the next day. She reproached him for having made his
decision without consulting her, but she loved him for his proud
independence.

Somehow this second day under the shadow of death was less terrible than
the first. Vincent stayed up-town, and was very natural and very busy. He
saw a few people,--men who owed him money, his lawyer, his partner,--but
most of the time he and Adelaide sat together in his study, as they had
sat on many other holidays. He insisted on going alone to the hospital,
although she was to be in the building during the operation.

Mathilde had been told, and inexperienced in disaster, she had felt
convinced that the outcome couldn’t be fatal, yet despite her conviction
that people did not really die, she was aware of a shyness and
awkwardness in the tragic situation.

Mr. Lanley had been told, and his attitude was just the opposite. To
him it seemed absolutely certain that Farron would die,--every one
did,--but he had for some time been aware of a growing hardness on his
part toward the death of other people, as if he were thus preparing
himself for his own.

“Poor Vincent!” he said to himself. “Hard luck at his age, when an old
man like me is left.” But this was not quite honest. In his heart he
felt there was nothing unnatural in Vincent’s being taken or in his
being left.

As usual in a crisis, Adelaide’s behavior was perfect. She contrived to
make her husband feel every instant the depth, the strength, the passion
of her love for him without allowing it to add to the weight he was
already carrying. Alone together, he and she had flashes of real gaiety,
sometimes not very far from tears.

To Mathilde the brisk naturalness of her mother’s manner was a source of
comfort. All the day the girl suffered from a sense of strangeness and
isolation, and a fear of doing or saying something unsuitable--something
either too special or too every-day. She longed to evince sympathy for
Mr. Farron, but was afraid that, if she did, it would be like intimating
that he was as good as dead. She was caught between the negative danger
of seeming indifferent and the positive one of being tactless.

As soon as Vincent had left the house, Adelaide’s thought turned to her
daughter. He had gone about six o’clock. He and she had been sitting by
his study fire when Pringle announced that the motor was waiting. Vincent
got up quietly, and so did she. They stood with their arms about each
other, as if they meant never to forget the sense of that contact; and
then without any protest they went down-stairs together.

In the hall he had shaken hands with Mr. Lanley and had kissed Mathilde,
who, do what she would, couldn’t help choking a little. All this time
Adelaide stood on the stairs, very erect, with one hand on the stair-rail
and one on the wall, not only her eyes, but her whole face, radiating an
uplifted peace. So angelic and majestic did she seem that Mathilde,
looking up at her, would hardly have been surprised if she had floated
out into space from her vantage-ground on the staircase.

Then Farron lit a last cigar, gave a quick, steady glance at his wife,
and went out. The front door ended the incident as sharply as a shot
would have done.

It was then that Mathilde expected to see her mother break down. Under
all her sympathy there was a faint human curiosity as to how people
contrived to live through such crises. If Pete were on the brink of
death, she thought that she would go mad: but, then, she and Pete were
not a middle-aged married couple; they were young, and new to love.

They all went into the drawing-room, Adelaide the calmest of the three.

“I wonder,” she said, “if you two would mind dining a little earlier than
usual. I might sleep if I could get to bed early, and I must be at the
hospital before eight.”

Mr. Lanley agreed a little more quickly than it was his habit to speak.

“O Mama, I think you’re so marvelous!” said Mathilde, and touched at her
own words, she burst into tears. Her mother put her arm about her, and
Mr. Lanley patted her shoulder--his sovereign care.

“There, there, my dear,” he murmured, “you must not cry. You know Vincent
has a very good chance, a very good chance.”

The assumption that he hadn’t was just the one Mathilde did not want to
appear to make. Her mother saw this and said gently:

“She’s overstrained, that’s all.”

The girl wiped her eyes.

“I’m ashamed, when you are so calm and wonderful.”

“I’m not wonderful,” said her mother. “I have no wish to cry. I’m beyond
it. Other people’s trouble often makes us behave more emotionally than
our own. If it were your Pete, I should be in tears.” She smiled, and
looked across the girl’s head at Mr. Lanley. “She would like to see him,
Papa. Telephone Pete Wayne, will you, and ask him to come and see her
this evening? You’ll be here, won’t you?”

Mr. Lanley nodded without cordiality; he did not approve of encouraging
the affair unnecessarily.

“How kind you are, Mama!” exclaimed Mathilde, almost inaudibly. It was
just what she wanted, just what she had been wanting all day, to see her
own man, to assure herself, since death was seen to be hot on the trail
of all mortals, that he and she were not wasting their brief time in
separation.

“We might take a turn in the motor,” said Mr. Lanley, thinking that Mrs.
Wayne might enjoy that.

“It would do you both good.”

“And leave you alone, Mama?”

“It’s what I really want, dear.”

The plan did not fulfil itself quite as Mr. Lanley had imagined. Mrs.
Wayne was out at some sort of meeting. They waited a moment for Pete.
Mathilde fixed her eyes on the lighted doorway, and said to herself that
in a few seconds the thing of all others that she desired would
happen--he would come through it. And almost at once he did, looking
particularly young and alive; so that, as he jumped in beside her on the
back seat, both her hands went out and caught his arm and clung to him.
Her realization of mortality had been so acute that she felt as if he had
been restored to her from the dead. She told him the horrors of the day.
Particularly, she wanted to share with him her gratitude for her mother’s
almost magic kindness.

“I wanted you so much, Pete,” she whispered; “but I thought it would be
heartless even to suggest my having wishes at such a time. And then for
her to think of it herself--”

“It means they are not really going to oppose our marriage.”

They talked about their marriage and the twenty or thirty years of joy
which they might reasonably hope to snatch from life.

“Think of it,” he said--“twenty or thirty years, longer than either of us
have lived.”

“If I could have five years, even one year, with you, I think I could
bear to die; but not now, Pete.”

In the meantime Mr. Lanley, alone on the front seat, for he had left
his chauffeur at home, was driving north along the Hudson and saying
to himself:

“Sixty-four. Well, I may be able to knock out ten or twelve pretty
satisfactory years. On the other hand, might die to-morrow; hope I
don’t, though. As long as I can drive a car and everything goes well
with Adelaide and this child, I’d be content to live my full time--and a
little bit more. Not many men are healthier than I am. Poor Vincent! A
good deal more to live for than I have, most people would say; but I
don’t know that he enjoys it any more than I do.” Turning his head a
little, he shouted over his shoulder to Pete, “Sorry your mother
couldn’t come.”

Mathilde made a hasty effort to withdraw her hands; but Wayne, more
practical, understanding better the limits put upon a driver, held
them tightly as he answered in a civil tone: “Yes, she would have
enjoyed this.”

“She must come some other time,” shouted Mr. Lanley, and reflected that
it was not always necessary to bring the young people with you.

“You know, he could not possibly have turned enough to see,” Pete
whispered reprovingly to Mathilde.

“I suppose not; and yet it seemed so queer to be talking to my
grandfather with--”

“You must try and adapt yourself to your environment,” he returned, and
put his arm about her.

The cold of the last few days had given place to a thaw. The melting ice
in the river was streaked in strange curves, and the bare trees along the
straight heights of the Palisades were blurred by a faint bluish mist,
out of which white lights and yellow ones peered like eyes.

“Doesn’t it seem cruel to be so happy when Mama and poor Mr. Farron--”
Mathilde began.

“It’s the only lesson to learn,” he answered--“to be happy while we are
young and together.”

About ten o’clock Mr. Lanley left her at home, and she tiptoed up-stairs
and hardly dared to draw breath as she undressed for fear she might wake
her unhappy mother on the floor below her.

She had resolved to wake early, to breakfast with her mother, to ask to
be allowed to accompany her to the hospital; but it was nine o’clock when
she was awakened by her maid’s coming in with her breakfast and the
announcement not only that Mrs. Farron had been gone for more than an
hour, but that there had already been good news from the hospital.

“Il paraît que monsieur est très fort,” she said, with that absolute
neutrality of accent that sounds in Anglo-Saxon ears almost like a
complaint.

Adelaide had been in no need of companionship. She was perfectly able
to go through her day. It seemed as if her soul, with a soul’s
capacity for suffering, had suddenly withdrawn from her body, had
retreated into some unknown fortress, and left in its place a hard,
trivial, practical intelligence which tossed off plan after plan for
the future detail of life. As she drove from her house to the hospital
she arranged how she would apportion the household in case of a
prolonged illness, where she would put the nurses. Nor was she less
clear as to what should be done in case of Vincent’s death. The whole
thing unrolled before her like a panorama.

At the hospital, after a little delay, she was guided to Vincent’s own
room, recently deserted. A nurse came to tell her that all was going
well; Mr. Farron had had a good night, and was taking the anesthetic
nicely. Adelaide found the young woman’s manner offensively encouraging,
and received the news with an insolent reserve.

“That girl is too wildly, spiritually bright,” she said to herself. But
no manner would have pleased her.

Left alone, she sat down in a rocking-chair near the window. Vincent’s
bag stood in the corner, his brushes were on the dressing-table, his tie
hung on the electric light. Immortal trifles, she thought, that might be
in existence for years.

She began poignantly to regret that she had not insisted on seeing him
again that morning. She had thought only of what was easiest for him. She
ought to have thought of herself, of what would make it possible for her
to go on living without him. If she could have seen him again, he might
have given her some precept, some master word, by which she could have
guided her life. She would have welcomed something imprisoning and safe.
It was cruel of him, she thought, to toss her out like this, rudderless
and alone. She wondered what he would have given her as a commandment,
and remembered suddenly the apocryphal last words which Vincent was fond
of attributing to George Washington, “Never trust a nigger with a gun.”
She found herself smiling over them. Vincent was more likely to have
quoted the apparition’s advice to Macbeth: “Be bloody, bold, and
resolute.” That would have been his motto for himself, but not for her.
What was the principle by which he infallibly guided her?

How could he have left her so spiritually unprovided for? She felt
imposed upon, deserted. The busily planning little mind that had suddenly
taken possession of her could not help her in the larger aspects of her
existence. It would be much simpler, she thought, to die than to attempt
life again without Vincent.

She went to the window and looked out at the roofs of neighboring
houses, a disordered conglomeration of water-tanks and skylights and
chimney-pots. Then nearer, almost under her feet, she looked into a
courtyard of the hospital and saw a pale, emaciated man in a wheel-chair.
She drew back as if it were something indecent. Would Vincent ever become
like that? she thought. If so, she would rather he died now under the
anesthetic.

A little while later the nurse came in, and said almost sternly that Dr.
Crew had sent her to tell Mrs. Farron that the conditions seemed
extremely favorable, and that all immediate danger was over.

“You mean,” said Adelaide, fiercely, “that Mr. Farron will live?”

“I certainly inferred that to be the doctor’s meaning,” answered the
nurse. “But here is the assistant, Dr. Withers.”

Dr. Withers, bringing with him an intolerable smell of disinfectants and
chloroform, hurried in, with his hair mussed from the haste with which he
had removed his operating-garments. He had small, bright, brown eyes,
with little lines about them that seemed to suggest humor, but actually
indicated that he buoyed up his life not by exaltation of himself, but by
half-laughing depreciation of every one else.

“I thought you’d be glad to know, Mrs. Farron,” he said, “that any danger
that may have existed is now over. Your husband--”

“That _may_ have existed,” cried Adelaide. “Do you mean to say there
hasn’t been any real danger?”

The young doctor’s eyes twinkled.

“An operation even in the best hands is always a danger,” he replied.

“But you mean there was no other?” Adelaide asked, aware of a growing
coldness about her hands and feet.

Withers looked as just as Aristides.

“It was probably wise to operate,” he said. “Your husband ought to be up
and about in three weeks.”

Everything grew black and rotatory before Adelaide’s eyes, and she sank
slowly forward into the young doctor’s arms.

As he laid her on the bed, he glanced whimsically at the nurse and
shook his head.

But she made no response, an omission which may not have meant loyalty to
Dr. Crew so much as unwillingness to support Dr. Withers.

Adelaide returned to consciousness only in time to be hurried away to
make room for Vincent. His long, limp figure was carried past her in the
corridor. She was told that in a few hours she might see him. But she
wasn’t, as a matter of fact, very eager to see him. The knowledge that he
was to live, the lifting of the weight of dread, was enough. The maternal
strain did not mingle with her love for him; she saw no possible reward,
no increased sense of possession, in his illness. On the contrary, she
wanted him to stride back in one day from death to his old powerful,
dominating self.

She grew to hate the hospital routine, the fixed hours, the regulated
food. “These rules, these hovering women,” she exclaimed, “these
trays--they make me think of the nursery.” But what she really hated was
Vincent’s submission to it all. In her heart she would have been glad to
see him breaking the rules, defying the doctors, and bullying his nurses.

Before long a strong, silent antagonism grew up between her and the
bright-eyed, cheerful nurse, Miss Gregory. It irritated Adelaide to gain
access to her husband through other people’s consent; it irritated her to
see the girl’s understanding of the case, and her competent arrangements
for her patient’s comfort. If Vincent had showed any disposition to
revolt, Adelaide would have pleaded with him to submit; but as it was,
she watched his docility with a scornful eye.

“That girl rules you with a rod of iron,” she said one day. But even then
Vincent did not rouse himself.

“She knows her business,” he said admiringly.

To any other invalid Adelaide could have been a soothing visitor, could
have adapted the quick turns of her mind to the relaxed attention of
the sick; but, honestly enough, there seemed to her an impertinence,
almost an insult, in treating Vincent in such a way. The result was
that her visits were exhausting, and she knew it. And yet, she said to
herself, he was ill, not insane; how could she conceal from him the
happenings of every day? Vincent would be the last person to be
grateful to her for that.

She saw him one day grow pale; his eyes began to close. She had made up
her mind to leave him when Miss Gregory came in, and with a quicker eye
and a more active habit of mind, said at once:

“I think Mr. Farron has had enough excitement for one day.”

Adelaide smiled up at the girl almost insolently.

“Is a visit from a wife an excitement?” she asked. Miss Gregory was
perfectly grave.

“The greatest,” she said.

Adelaide yielded to her own irritation.

“Well,” she said, “I shan’t stay much longer.”

“It would be better if you went now, I think, Mrs. Farron.”

Adelaide looked at Vincent. It was silly of him, she thought, to pretend
he didn’t hear. She bent over him.

“Your nurse is driving me away from you, dearest,” she murmured.

He opened his eyes and took her hand.

“Come back to-morrow early--as early as you can,” he said.

She never remembered his siding against her before, and she swept out
into the hallway, saying to herself that it was childish to be annoyed at
the whims of an invalid.

Miss Gregory had followed her.

“Mrs. Farron,” she said, “do you mind my suggesting that for the present
it would be better not to talk to Mr. Farron about anything that might
worry him, even trifles?”

Adelaide laughed.

“You know very little of Mr. Farron,” she said, “if you think he worries
over trifles.”

“Any one worries over trifles when he is in a nervous state.”

Adelaide passed by without answering, passed by as if she had not heard.
The suggestion of Vincent nervously worrying over trifles was one of the
most repellent pictures that had ever been presented to her imagination.




CHAPTER IX


The firm for which Wayne worked was young and small--Benson & Honaton.
They made a specialty of circularization in connection with the bond
issues in which they were interested, and Wayne had charge of their
“literature,” as they described it. He often felt, after he had finished
a report, that his work deserved the title. A certain number of people in
Wall Street disapproved of the firm’s methods. Sometimes Pete thought
this was because, for a young firm, they had succeeded too quickly to
please the more deliberate; but sometimes in darker moments he thought
there might be some justice in the idea.

During the weeks that Farron was in the hospital Pete, despite his
constant availability to Mathilde, had been at work on his report on a
coal property in Pennsylvania. He was extremely pleased with the
thoroughness with which he had done the job. His report was not
favorable. The day after it was finished, a little after three, he
received word that the firm wanted to see him. He was always annoyed with
himself that these messages caused his heart to beat a trifle faster. He
couldn’t help associating them with former hours with his head-master or
in the dean’s office. Only he had respected his head-master and even the
dean, whereas he was not at all sure he respected Mr. Benson and he was
quite sure he did not respect Mr. Honaton.

He rose slowly from his desk, exchanging with the office boy who brought
the message a long, severe look, under which something very comic lurked,
though neither knew what.

“And don’t miss J.B.’s socks,” said the boy.

Mr. Honaton--J.B.--was considered in his office a very beautiful dresser,
as indeed in some ways he was. He was a tall young man, built like a
greyhound, with a small, pointed head, a long waist, and a very long
throat, from which, however, the strongest, loudest voice could issue
when he so desired. This was his priceless asset. He was the board
member, and generally admitted to be an excellent broker. It always
seemed to Pete that he was a broker exactly as a beaver is a
dam-builder, because nature had adapted him to that task. But outside of
this one instinctive capacity he had no sense whatsoever. He rarely
appeared in the office. He was met at the Broad Street entrance of the
exchange at one minute to ten by a boy with the morning’s orders, and
sometimes he came in for a few minutes after the closing; but usually by
three-fifteen he had disappeared from financial circles, and was
understood to be relaxing in the higher social spheres to which he
belonged. So when Pete, entering Mr. Benson’s private office, saw Honaton
leaning against the window-frame, with his hat-brim held against his
thigh exactly like a fashion-plate, he knew that something of importance
must be pending.

Benson, the senior member, was a very different person. He looked like a
fat, white, pugnacious cat. His hair, which had turned white early, had a
tendency to grow in a bang; his arms were short--so short that when he
put his hands on the arms of his swing-chair he hardly bent his elbows.
He had them there now as Pete entered, and was swinging through short
arcs in rather a nervous rhythm. He was of Irish parentage, and was
understood to have political influence.

“Wayne,” said Benson, “how would you like to go to China?”

And Honaton repeated portentously, “China,” as if Benson might have made
a mistake in the name of the country if he had not been at his elbow to
correct him.

Wayne laughed.

“Well,” he said, “I have nothing against China.”

Benson outlined the situation quickly. The firm had acquired property in
China not entirely through their own choice, and they wanted a thorough,
clear report on it; they knew of no one--_no one_, Benson emphasized--who
could do that as impartially and as well as Wayne. They would pay him a
good sum and his expenses. It would take him a year, perhaps a year and a
half. They named the figure. It was one that made marriage possible. They
talked of the situation and the property and the demand for copper until
Honaton began to look at his watch, a flat platinum watch, perfectly
plain, you might have thought, until you caught a glimpse of a narrow
line of brilliants along its almost imperceptible rim. His usual working
day was over in half an hour.

“And when I come back, Mr. Benson?” said Wayne.

“Your place will be open for you here.”

There was a pause.

“Well, what do you say?” said Honaton.

“I feel very grateful for the offer,” said Pete, “but of course I can’t
give you an answer now.”

“Why not, why not?” returned Honaton, who felt that he had given up half
an hour for nothing if the thing couldn’t be settled on the spot; and
even Benson, Wayne noticed, began to glower.

“You could probably give us as good an answer to-day as to-morrow,”
he said.

Nothing roused Pete’s spirit like feeling a tremor in his own soul, and
so he now answered with great firmness:

“I cannot give you an answer to-day _or_ to-morrow.”

“It’s all off, then, all off,” said Honaton, moving to the door.

“When do the Chinese boats sail, Mr. Honaton?” said Pete, with the
innocence of manner that an employee should use when putting his superior
in a hole.

“I don’t see what difference that makes to you, Wayne, if you’re not
taking them,” said Honaton, as if he were triumphantly concealing the
fact that he didn’t know.

“Don’t feel you have to wait, Jack, if you’re in a hurry,” said his
partner, and when the other had slid out of the office Benson turned to
Wayne and went on: “You wouldn’t have to go until a week from Saturday.
You would have to get off then, and we should have to know in time to
find some one else in case you don’t care for it.”

Pete asked for three days, and presently left the office.

He had a friend, one of his mother’s reformed drunkards, who as janitor
lived on the top floor of a tall building. He and his wife offered Wayne
the hospitality of their balcony, and now and then, in moments like this,
he availed himself of it. Not, indeed, that there had ever been a moment
quite like this; for he knew that he was facing the most important
decision he had ever been forced to make.

In the elevator he met the janitor’s cat Susan going home after an
afternoon visit to the restaurant on the sixteenth floor. The elevator
boy loved to tell how she never made a mistake in the floor.

“Do you think she’d get off at the fifteenth or the seventeenth? Not she.
Sometimes she puts her nose out and smells at the other floors, but she
won’t get off until I stop at the right one. Sometimes she has to ride up
and down three or four times before any one wants the sixteenth. Eh,
Susan?” he added in caressing tones; but Susan was watching the floors
flash past and paid no attention until, arrived at the top, she and Pete
stepped off together.

It was a cool, clear day, for the wind was from the north, but on the
southern balcony the sun was warm. Pete sat down in the kitchen-chair
set for him, tilted back, and looked out over the Statue of Liberty,
which stood like a stunted baby, to the blue Narrows. He saw one
thing clearly, and that was that he would not go if Mathilde would not
go with him.

He envied people who could make up their minds by thinking. At least
sometimes he envied them and sometimes he thought they lied. He could
only think _about_ a subject and wait for the unknown gods to bring him a
decision. And this is what he now did, with his eyes fixed on the towers
and tanks and tenements, on the pale winter sky, and, when he got up and
leaned his elbows on the parapet, on the crowds that looked like a flood
of purple insects in the streets.

He thought of Mathilde’s youth and his own untried capacities for
success, of poverty and children, of the probable opposition of
Mathilde’s family and of a strange, sinister, disintegrating power he
felt or suspected in Mrs. Farron. He felt that it was a terrible risk to
ask a young girl to take and that it was almost an insult to be afraid to
ask her to take it. That was what his mother had always said about these
cherished, protected creatures: they were not prepared to meet any strain
in life. He knew he would not have hesitated to ask a girl differently
brought up. Ought he to ask Mathilde or ought he not even to hesitate
about asking her? In his own future he had confidence. He had an unusual
power of getting his facts together so that they meant something. In a
small way his work was recognized. A report of his had some weight. He
felt certain that if on his return he wanted another position he could
get it unless he made a terrible fiasco in China. Should he consult any
one? He knew beforehand what they would all think about it. Mr. Lanley
would think that it was sheer impertinence to want to marry his
granddaughter on less than fifteen thousand dollars a year; Mrs. Farron
would think that there were lots of equally agreeable young men in the
world who would not take a girl to China; and his mother, whom he could
not help considering the wisest of the three, would think that Mathilde
lacked discipline and strength of will for such an adventure. And on this
he found he made up his mind. “After all,” he said to himself as he put
the chair back against the wall, “everything else would be failure, and
this may be success.”

It was the afternoon that Farron was brought back from the hospital, and
he and Mathilde were sure of having the drawing-room to themselves. He
told her the situation slowly and with a great deal of detail,
chronologically, introducing the Chinese trip at the very end. But she
did not at once understand.

“O Pete, you would not go away from me!” she said. “I could not
face that.”

“Couldn’t you? Remember that everything you say is going to be used
against you.”

“Would you be willing to go, Pete?”

“Only if you will go with me.”

“Oh!” she clasped her hands to her breast, shrinking back to look at
him. So that was what he had meant, this stranger whom she had known for
such a short time. As she looked she half expected that he would smile,
and say it was all a joke; but his eyes were steadily and seriously
fixed on hers. It was very queer, she thought. Their meeting, their
first kiss, their engagement, had all seemed so inevitable, so natural,
there had not been a hint of doubt or decision about it; but now all of
a sudden she found herself faced by a situation in which it was
impossible to say yes or no.

“It would be wonderful, of course,” she said, after a minute, but her
tone showed she was not considering it as a possibility.

Wayne’s heart sank; he saw that he had thought it possible that he would
not allow her to go, but that he had never seriously faced the chance of
her refusing.

“Mathilde,” he said, “it’s far and sudden, and we shall be poor, and I
can’t promise that I shall succeed more than other fellows; and yet
against all that--”

She looked at him.

“You don’t think I care for those things? I don’t care if you succeed or
fail, or live all your life in Siam.”

“What is it, then?”

“Pete, it’s my mother. She would never consent.”

Wayne was aware of this, but, then, as he pointed out to Mathilde with
great care, Mrs. Farron could not bear for her daughter the pain of
separation.

“Separation!” cried the girl, “But you just said you would not go if
I did not.”

“If you put your mother before me, mayn’t I put my profession
before you?”

“My dear, don’t speak in that tone.”

“Why, Mathilde,” he said, and he sprang up and stood looking down at her
from a little distance, “this is the real test. We have thought we loved
each other--”

“Thought!” she interrupted.

“But to get engaged with no immediate prospect of marriage, with all
our families and friends grouped about, that doesn’t mean such a
lot, does it?”

“It does to me,” she answered almost proudly.

“Now, one of us has to sacrifice something. I want to go on this
expedition. I want to succeed. That may be egotism or legitimate
ambition. I don’t know, but I want to go. I think I mean to go. Ought
I to give it up because you are afraid of your mother?”

“It’s love, not fear, Pete.”

“You love me, too, you say.”

“I feel an obligation to her.”

“And, good Heavens! do you feel none to me?”

“No, no. I love you too much to feel an obligation to you.”

“But you love your mother _and_ feel an obligation to her. Why, Mathilde,
that feeling of obligation _is_ love--love in its most serious form.
That’s what you don’t feel for me. That’s why you won’t go.”

“I haven’t said I wouldn’t go.”

“You never even thought of going.”

“I have, I do. But how can I help hesitating? You must know I want to
go.”

“I see very little sign of it,” he murmured. The interview had not gone
as he intended. He had not meant, he never imagined, that he would
attempt to urge and coerce her; but her very detachment seemed to set a
fire burning within him.

“I think,” he said with an effort to sound friendly, “that I had better
go and let you think this over by yourself.”

He was actually moving to the door when she sprang up and put her arms
about him.

“Weren’t you even going to kiss me, Pete?”

He stooped, and touched her cheek with his lips.

“Do you call that a kiss?”

“O Mathilde, do you think any kiss will change the facts?” he answered,
and was gone.

As soon as he had left her the desire for tears left her, too. She felt
calm and more herself, more an isolated, independent human being than
ever before in her life. She thought of all the things she ought to have
said to Pete. The reason why she felt no obligation to him was that she
was one with him. She was prepared to sacrifice him exactly as she was,
or ought to be, willing to sacrifice herself; whereas her mother--it
seemed as if her mother’s power surrounded her in every direction, as
solid as the ancients believed the dome of heaven.

Pringle appeared in the doorway in his eternal hunt for the tea-things.

“May I take the tray, miss?” he said.

She nodded, hardly glancing at the untouched tea-table. Pringle, as he
bent over it, observed that it was nice to have Mr. Farron back.
Mathilde remembered that she, too, had once been interested in her
stepfather’s return.

“Where’s my mother, Pringle?”

“Mrs. Farron’s in her room, I think, miss, and Mr. Lanley’s with her.”

Lanley had stopped as usual to ask after his son-in-law. He found his
daughter writing letters in her room. He thought her looking cross, but
in deference to her recent anxieties he called it, even in his own mind,
overstrained.

“Vincent is doing very well, I believe,” she answered in response to his
question. “He ought to be. He is in charge of two lovely young creatures
hardly Mathilde’s age who have already taken complete control of the
household.”

“You’ve seen him, of course.”

“For a few minutes; they allow me a few minutes. They communicate by
secret signals when they think I have stayed long enough.”

Mr. Lanley never knew how to treat this mood of his daughter’s, which
seemed to him as unreasonable as if it were emotional, and yet as cold as
if it were logic itself. He changed the subject and said boldly:

“Mrs. Baxter is coming to-morrow.”

Adelaide’s eyes faintly flashed.

“Oh, wouldn’t you know it!” she murmured. “Just at the most inconvenient
time--inconvenient for me, I mean. Really, lovers are the only people you
can depend on. I wish I had a lover.”

“Adelaide,” said her father with some sternness, “even in fun you should
not say such a thing. If Mathilde heard you--”

“Mathilde is the person who made me see it. Her boy is here all the
time, trying to think of something to please her. And who have I?
Vincent has his nurses; and you have your old upholstered lady. I can’t
help wishing I had a lover. They are the only people who, as the Wayne
boy would say, ‘stick around.’ But don’t worry, Papa, I have a loyal
nature.” She was interrupted by a knock at the door, and a nurse--the
same who had been too encouraging to please her at the hospital--put in
her head and said brightly:

“You may see Mr. Farron now, Mrs. Farron.”

Adelaide turned to her father and made a little bow.

“See how I am favored,” she said, and left him.

Nothing of this mood was apparent when she entered her husband’s room,
though she noticed that the arrangement of the furniture had been
changed, and, what she disliked even more, that they had brushed his hair
in a new way. This, with his pallor and thinness, made him look strange
to her. She bent over, and laid her cheek to his almost motionless lips.

“Well, dear,” she said, “have you seen the church-warden part they have
given your hair?”

He shook his head impatiently, and she saw she had made the mistake of
trying to give the tone to an interview in which she was not the leading
character.

“Who has the room above mine, Adelaide?” he asked.

“My maid.”

“Ask her not to practice the fox-trot, will you?”

“O Vincent, she is never there.”

“My mistake,” he answered, and shut his eyes.

She repented at once.

“Of course I’ll tell her. I’m sorry that you were disturbed.” But she
was thinking only of his tone. He was not an irritable man, and he had
never used such a tone to her before. All pleasure in the interview was
over. She was actually glad when one of the nurses came in and began to
move about the room in a manner that suggested dismissal.

“Of course I’m not angry,” she said to herself. “He’s so weak one must
humor him like a child.”

She derived some satisfaction, however, from the idea of sending for her
maid Lucie and making her uncomfortable; but on her way she met Mathilde
in the hall.

“May I speak to you, Mama?” she said.

Mrs. Farron laughed.

“May you speak to me?” she said. “Why, yes; you may have the unusual
privilege. What is it?”

Mathilde followed her mother into the bedroom and shut the door.

“Pete has just been here. He has been offered a position in China.”

“In China?” said Mrs. Farron. This was the first piece of luck that had
come to her in a long time, but she did not betray the least pleasure. “I
hope it is a good one.”

“Yes, he thinks it good. He sails in two weeks.”

“In two weeks?” And this time she could not prevent her eye lighting a
little. She thought how nicely that small complication had settled
itself, and how clever she had been to have the mother to dinner and
behave as if she were friendly. She did not notice that her daughter was
trembling; she couldn’t, of course, be expected to know that the girl’s
hands were like ice, and that she had waited several seconds to steady
her voice sufficiently to pronounce the fatal sentence:

“He wants me to go with him, Mama.”

She watched her mother in an agony for the effect of these words.
Mrs. Farron had suddenly detected a new burn in the hearth-rug. She
bent over it.

“This wood does snap so!” she murmured.

The rug was a beautiful old Persian carpet of roses and urns.

“Did you understand what I said, Mama?”

“Yes, dear; that Mr. Wayne was going to China in two weeks and wanted you
to go, too. Was it just a _politesse_, or does he actually imagine that
you could?”

“He thinks I can.”

Mrs. Farron laughed good-temperedly.

“Did you go and see about having your pink silk shortened?” she said.

Mathilde stared at her mother, and in the momentary silence Lucie came in
and asked what madame wanted for the evening, and Adelaide in her fluent
French began explaining that what she really desired most was that Lucie
should not make so much noise in her room that monsieur could not sleep.
In the midst of it she stopped and turned to her daughter.

“Won’t you be late for dinner, darling?” she said.

Mathilde thought it very possible, and went away to get dressed. She went
into her own room and shut the door sharply behind her.

All the time she was dressing she tried to rehearse her case--that it
was her life, her love, her chance; but all the time she had a sickening
sense that a lifted eye-brow of her mother’s would make it sound childish
and absurd even in her own ears. She had counted on a long evening, but
when she went down-stairs she found three or four friends of her mother’s
were to dine and go to the theater. The dinner was amusing, the talk,
though avowedly hampered by the presence of Mathilde, was witty and
unexpected enough; but Mathilde was not amused by it, for she
particularly dreaded her mother in such a mood of ruthless gaiety. At the
theater they were extremely critical, and though they missed almost the
whole first act, appeared, in the entr’acte, to feel no hesitation in
condemning it. They spoke of French and Italian actors by name, laughed
heartily over the playwright’s conception of social usages, and made
Mathilde feel as if her own unacknowledged enjoyment of the play was the
guiltiest of secrets.

As they drove home, she was again alone with her mother, and she said at
once the sentence she had determined on:

“I don’t think you understood, Mama, how seriously I meant what I said
this afternoon.”

Mrs. Farron was bending her long-waisted figure forward to get a good
look at a picture which, small, lonely, and brightly lighted, hung in a
picture-dealer’s window. It was a picture of an empty room. Hot summer
sunlight filtered through the lowered Venetian blinds, and fell in bands
on the golden wood of the floor. Outside the air was burned and dusty,
but inside the room all was clear, cool, and pure.

“How perfect his things are,” murmured Mrs. Farron to herself, and then
added to her daughter: “Yes, my dear, I did take in what you said. You
really think you are in love with this Wayne boy, don’t you? It’s
immensely to your credit, darling,” she went on, her tone taking on a
flattering sweetness, “to care so much about any one who has such funny,
stubby little hands--most unattractive hands,” she added almost dreamily.

There was a long pause during which an extraordinary thing happened to
Mathilde. She found that it didn’t make the very slightest difference to
her what her mother thought of Pete or his hands, that it would never
make any difference to her again. It was as if her will had suddenly
been born, and the first act of that will was to decide to go with the
man she loved. How could she have doubted for an instant? It was so
simple, and no opposition would or could mean anything to her. She was
not in the least angry; on the contrary, she felt extremely pitiful, as
if she were saying good-by to some one who did not know she was going
away, as if in a sense she had now parted from her mother forever. Tears
came into her eyes.

“Ah, Mama!” she said like a sigh.

Mrs. Farron felt she had been cruel, but without regretting it; for that,
she thought, was often a parent’s duty.

“I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Mathilde. The boy is a nice enough
little person, but really I could not let you set off for China at a
minute’s notice with any broker’s clerk who happened to fall in love with
your golden hair. When you have a little more experience you will
discriminate between the men you like to have love you and the men there
is the smallest chance of your loving. I assure you, if little Wayne were
not in love with you, you would think him a perfectly commonplace boy. If
one of your friends were engaged to him, you would be the first to say
that you wondered what it was she saw in him. That isn’t the way one
wants people to feel about one’s husband, is it? And as to going to China
with him, you know that’s impossible, don’t you?”

“It would be impossible to let him go without me.”

“Really, Mathilde!” said Mrs. Farron, gently, as if she, so willing to
play fair, were being put off with fantasies. “I don’t understand you,”
she added.

“No, Mama; you don’t.”

The motor stopped at the door, and they went in silence to Mrs. Farron’s
room, where for a bitter hour they talked, neither yielding an inch. At
last Adelaide sent the girl to bed. Mathilde was aware of profound
physical exhaustion, and yet underneath there was a high knowledge of
something unbreakable within her.

Left alone, Adelaide turned instinctively toward her husband’s door.
There were her strength and vision. Then she remembered, and drew back;
but presently, hearing a stir there, she knocked very softly. A nurse
appeared on the instant.

“Oh, _please_, Mrs. Farron! Mr. Farron has just got to sleep.”

Adelaide stood alone in the middle of the floor. Once again, she thought,
in a crisis of her life she had no one to depend on but herself. She
lifted her shoulders. No one was to blame, but there the fact was. They
urged you to cling and be guided, but when the pinch came, you had to act
for yourself. She had learned her lesson now. Henceforward she took her
own life over into her own hands.

She reviewed her past dependences. Her youth, with its dependence on her
father, particularly in matters of dress. She recalled her early
photographs with a shudder. Had she really dressed so badly or was it
only the change of fashion? And then her dependence on Joe Severance.
What could be more ridiculous than for a woman of her intelligence to
allow herself to be guided in everything by a man like Joe, who had
nothing himself but a certain shrewd masculinity? And now Vincent. She
was still under the spell of his superiority, but perhaps she would come
to judge him too. She had learned much from him. Perhaps she had learned
all he had to teach her. Her face looked as if it were carved out of some
smooth white stone.




CHAPTER X


After she had gone up-stairs, Mathilde went down again to telephone Pete
that she had made her decision. She went boldly snapping electric
switches, for her going was a sort of assertion of her right to
independent action. She would have hesitated even less if she had known
how welcome her news was, how he had suffered since their parting.

On going home from his interview with her, he found his mother dressing
to dine with Mr. Lanley, a party arranged before the unexpected arrival
of Mrs. Baxter. The only part of dressing that delayed Mrs. Wayne was her
hair, which was so long that the brushing of it took time. In this
process she was engaged when her son, in response to her answer, came
into her room.

“How is Mr. Farron?” she asked at once, and he, rather touched at the
genuineness of her interest, answered her in detail before her next
exclamation betrayed that it was entirely for the employer of Marty
Burke that she was solicitous. “Isn’t it too bad he was taken ill just
now?” she said.

The bitterness and doubt from which Wayne was suffering were not emotions
that disposed him to confidence. He did not want to tell his mother what
he was going through, for the obvious and perhaps unworthy reason that it
was just what she would have expected him to go through. At the same time
a real deceit was involved in concealing it, and so, tipping his chair
back against her wall, he said:

“The firm has asked me to go to China for them.”

His mother turned, her whole face lit up with interest.

“To China! How interesting!” she said. “China is a wonderful country. How
I should like to go to China!”

“Come along. I don’t start for two weeks.”

She shook her head.

“No, if you go, I’ll make a trip to that hypnotic clinic of Dr.
Platerbridge’s; and if I can learn the trick, I will open one here.”

The idea crossed Wayne’s mind that perhaps he had not the power of
inspiring affection.

“You don’t miss people a bit, do you, Mother?” he said.

“Yes, Pete, I do; only there is so much to be done. What does Mathilde
say to you going off like this? How long will you be gone?”

“More than a year.”

“Pete, how awful for her!”

“There is nothing to prevent her going with me.”

“You couldn’t take that child to China.”

“You may be glad to know that she is cordially of your opinion.”

The feeling behind his tone at last attracted his mother’s full
attention.

“But, my dear boy,” she said gently, “she has never been anywhere in her
life without a maid. She probably doesn’t know how to do her hair or mend
her clothes or anything practical.”

“Mother dear, you are not so awfully practical yourself,” he answered;
“but you would have gone.”

Mrs. Wayne looked impish.

“I always loved that sort of thing,” she said; and then, becoming more
maternal, she added, “and that doesn’t mean it would be sensible because
I’d do it.”

“Well,”--Wayne stood up preparatory to leaving the room,--“I mean to take
her if she’ll go.”

His mother, who had now finished winding her braid very neatly around her
head, sank into a chair.

“Oh, dear!” she said, “I almost wish I weren’t dining with Mr. Lanley.
He’ll think it’s all my fault.”

“I doubt if he knows about it.”

Mrs. Wayne’s eyes twinkled.

“May I tell him? I should like to see his face.”

“Tell him I am going, if you like. Don’t say I want to take her with me.”

Her face fell.

“That wouldn’t be much fun,” she answered, “because I suppose the truth
is they won’t be sorry to have you out of the way.”

“I suppose not,” he said, and shut the door behind him. He could not
truthfully say that his mother had been much of a comfort. He had
suddenly thought that he would go down to the first floor and get Lily
Parret to go to the theater with him. He and she had the warm friendship
for each other of two handsome, healthy young people of opposite sexes
who might have everything to give each other except time. She was
perhaps ten years older than he, extremely handsome, with dimples and
dark red hair and blue eyes. She had a large practice among the poor,
and might have made a conspicuous success of her profession if it had
not been for her intense and too widely diffused interest. She wanted to
strike a blow at every abuse that came to her attention, and as, in the
course of her work, a great many turned up, she was always striking
blows and never following them up. She went through life in a series of
springs, each one in a different direction; but the motion of her
attack was as splendid as that of a tiger. Often she was successful, and
always she enjoyed herself.

When she answered Pete’s ring, and he looked up at her magnificent
height, her dimples appeared in welcome. She really was glad to see him.

“Come out and dine with me, Lily, and go to the theater.”

“Come to a meeting at Cooper Union on capital punishment. I’m going to
speak, and I’m going to be very good.”

“No, Lily; I want to explain to you what a pitiable sex you belong to.
You have no character, no will--”

She shook her head, laughing.

“You are a personal lot, you young men,” she said. “You change your mind
about women every day, according to how one of them treats you.”

“They don’t amount to a row of pins, Lily.”

“Certainly some men select that kind, Pete.”

“O Lily,” he answered, “don’t talk to me like that! I want some one to
tell me I’m perfect, and, strangely enough, no one will.”

“I will,” she answered, with beaming good nature, “and I pretty near
think so, too. But I can’t dine with you, Pete. Wouldn’t you like to go
to my meeting?”

“I should perfectly hate to,” he answered, and went off crossly, to
dine at his college’s local club. Here he found an old friend, who most
fortunately said something derogatory of the firm of Benson & Honaton.
The opinion coincided with certain phases of Wayne’s own views, but he
contradicted it, held it up to ridicule, and ended by quoting incidents
in the history of his friend’s own firm which, as he said, were
probably among the crookedest things that had ever been put over in
Wall Street. Lily would not have distracted his mind more completely.
He felt almost cheerful when he went home about ten o’clock. His mother
was still out, and there was no letter from Mathilde. He had been
counting on finding one.

Before long his mother came in. She was looking very fine. She had on a
new gray dress that she had had made for her by a fallen woman from an
asylum, but which had turned out better than such ventures of Mrs.
Wayne’s usually did.

She had supposed she and Mr. Lanley were to dine alone, an idea which
had not struck her as revolutionary. Accustomed to strange meals in
strange company--a bowl of milk with a prison chaplain at a dairy
lunch-room, or even, on one occasion, a supper in an Owl Lunch Wagon with
a wavering drunkard,--she had thought that a quiet, perfect dinner with
Mr. Lanley sounded pleasant enough. But she was not sorry to find it had
been enlarged. She liked to meet new people. She was extremely
optimistic, and always hoped that they would prove either spiritually
rewarding, or practically useful to some of her projects. When she saw
Mrs. Baxter, with her jetty hair, jeweled collar, and eyes a trifle too
saurian for perfect beauty, she at once saw a subscription to the
working-girl’s club. The fourth person Mr. Wilsey, Lanley’s lawyer, she
knew well by reputation. She wondered if she could make him see that his
position on the eight-hour law was absolutely anti-social.

Mr. Lanley enjoyed a small triumph when she entered. He had been so
discreet in his description of her to Mrs. Baxter, he had been so careful
not to hint that she was an illuminating personality who had suddenly
come into his life, that he knew he had left his old friend with the
general impression that Mrs. Wayne was merely the mother of an
undesirable suitor of Mathilde’s who spent most of her life in the
company of drunkards. So when she came in, a little late as usual, in her
long, soft, gray dress, with a pink rose at her girdle, looking far more
feminine than Mrs. Baxter, about whom Adelaide’s offensive adjective
“upholstered” still clung, he felt the full effect of her appearance. He
even enjoyed the obviously suspicious glance which Mrs. Baxter
immediately afterward turned upon him.

At dinner things began well. They talked about people and events of which
Mrs. Wayne knew nothing, but her interest and good temper made her not an
outsider, but an audience. Anecdotes which even Mr. Lanley might have
felt were trivial gossip became, through her attention to them, incidents
of the highest human interest. Such an uncritical interest was perhaps
too stimulating.

He expected nothing dangerous when, during the game course, Mrs. Baxter
turned to him and asked how Mathilde had enjoyed what she referred to as
“her first winter.”

Mr. Lanley liked to talk about Mathilde. He described, with a little
natural exaggeration, how much she had enjoyed herself and how popular
she had been.

“I hope she hasn’t been bitten by any of those modern notions,” said
Mrs. Baxter.

Mr. Wilsey broke in.

“Oh, these modern, restless young women!” he said. “They don’t seem able
to find their natural contentment in their own homes. My daughter came to
me the other day with a wonderful scheme of working all day long with
charity organizations. I said to her, ‘My dear, charity begins at home.’
My wife, Mrs. Baxter, is an old-fashioned housekeeper. She gives out all
supplies used in my house; she knows where the servants are at every
minute of the day, and we have nine. She--”

“Oh, how is dear Mrs. Wilsey?” said Mrs. Baxter, perhaps not eager for
the full list of her activities.

“Well, at present she is in a sanatorium,” replied her husband, “from
overwork, just plain overwork.”

Mr. Lanley, catching Mrs. Wayne’s twinkling eye, could only pray that
she would not point out that a sojourn in a sanatorium was not
complete contentment in the home; but before she had a chance, Mrs.
Baxter had gone on.

“That’s so like the modern girl--anything but her obvious duty. She’ll
help any one but her mother and work anywhere but in the home. We’ve had
a very painful case at home lately. One of our most charming young girls
has suddenly developed an absolutely morbid curiosity about the things
that take place in the women’s courts. Why, as her poor father said to
me, ‘Mrs. Baxter, old as I am, I hear things in those courts so shocking
I have hard

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