The Streets of Ascalon: Episodes in the Unfinished Career of Richard Quarren, Esqre.
by Robert W. Chambers · English · Gutenberg #35233 · 654,223 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Streets of Ascalon: Episodes in the Unfinished Career of Richard Quarren, Esqre.
Author: Robert W. Chambers
Illustrator: Charles Dana Gibson
Release date: February 10, 2011 [eBook #35233]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35233
Credits: Produced by Hunter Monroe, Suzanne Shell and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STREETS OF ASCALON: EPISODES IN THE UNFINISHED CAREER OF RICHARD QUARREN, ESQRE. ***
Produced by Hunter Monroe, Suzanne Shell and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
THE STREETS OF ASCALON
Works of Robert W. Chambers
The Streets of Ascalon
Blue-Bird Weather
Japonette
The Adventures of a Modest Man
The Danger Mark
Special Messenger
The Firing Line
The Younger Set
The Fighting Chance
Some Ladies in Haste
The Tree of Heaven
The Tracer of Lost Persons
A Young Man in a Hurry
Lorraine
Maids of Paradise
Ashes of Empire
The Red Republic
Outsiders
The Common Law
Ailsa Paige
The Green Mouse
Iole
The Reckoning
The Maid-at-Arms
Cardigan
The Haunts of Men
The Mystery of Choice
The Cambric Mask
The Maker of Moons
The King in Yellow
In Search of the Unknown
The Conspirators
A King and a Few Dukes
In the Quarter
For Children
Garden-Land
Forest-Land
River-Land
Mountain-Land
Orchard-Land
Outdoor-Land
Hide and Seek in Forest-Land
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, NEW YORK
[Illustration: "She excused the witness and turned her back to the
looking-glass."]
_The_ STREETS
OF ASCALON
_Episodes in the Unfinished Career of
Richard Quarren, Esq._
BY
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
CHARLES DANA GIBSON
NEW YORK AND LONDON
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1912
COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS
Copyright, 1912, by The International Magazine Company
_Published, September, 1912_
Printed in the United States of America
TO
EULALIE ASHMORE
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
BETWEEN
PAGES
"She excused the witness and turned her back
to the looking-glass" _Frontispiece_
"Westguard, colossal in his armour, gazed
gloomily around at the gorgeous spectacle" 24-25
"Jingling, fluttering, gems clashing musically,
the Byzantine dancer, besieged by adorers,
deftly evaded their pressing gallantries" 30-31
"'To our new friendship, Monsieur Harlequin!'
she said lightly" 52-53
"Strelsa, propped on her pillows, was still intent
on her newspapers" 60-61
"'A perfect scandal, child. The suppers those
young men give there!'" 78-79
"'Is--Mrs. Leeds--well?' he ventured at length,
reddening again" 86-87
"'I write,' said Westguard, furious, 'because
I have a message to deliver--'" 98-99
"'Never mind geography, child; tell me about
the men!'" 116-117
"Strelsa, curled up on a divan ... listened to
his departure with quiet satisfaction" 126-127
"'Do you remember our first toast?' he asked,
smiling" 128-129
"Once more, according to the newspapers, her
engagement to Sir Charles was expected
to be announced" 172-173
"All stacked up pell-mell in the back yard and
regarded in amazement by the neighbors" 178-179
"A fortnight later Strelsa wrote to Quarren for
the first time in nearly two months" 190-191
"'I say, Quarren--does this old lady hang next
to the battered party in black?'" 194-195
"'I didn't tell Strelsa that you were coming,'
she whispered" 210-211
"So he took the lake path and presently
rounded a sharp curve" 214-215
"'The old ones are the best,' she commented" 228-229
"Strelsa in the library, pulling on her gloves,
was silent witness to a pantomime unmistakable" 246-247
"A high and soulful tenor voice was singing
'Perfumes of Araby'" 272-273
"She came about noon--a pale young girl, very
slim in her limp black gown" 280-281
Jessie Vining 290-291
"'In the evenings sometimes Miss Vining remains
and dines with Dankmere and myself
at some near restaurant'" 302-303
"'If you'll let me, I'll stand by you, darling'" 328-329
"'Is it to be Sir Charles after all, darling?' she
asked caressingly" 346-347
"'And it is to be your last breakfast'" 374-375
Strelsa Leeds 380-381
"'Let him loose, Quarren,' said Sprowl" 416-417
"'I wanted to surprise you,' he explained
feebly" 424-425
"_Tell it not in Gath, publish it not
in the streets of Ascalon._"
THE STREETS OF ASCALON
CHAPTER I
It being rent day, and Saturday, the staff of the "Irish Legation," with
the exception of Westguard, began to migrate uptown for the monthly
conference, returning one by one from that mysterious financial jungle
popularly known as "Downtown." As for Westguard, he had been in his
apartment all day as usual. He worked where he resided.
A little before five o'clock John Desmond Lacy, Jr., came in, went
directly to his rooms on the top floor, fished out a check-book, and
tried to persuade himself that he had a pleasing balance at the
bank--not because he was likely to have any balance either there or in
his youthful brain, but because he _had_ to have one somewhere. God
being good to the Irish he found he had not overdrawn his account.
Roger O'Hara knocked on his door, later, and receiving no response
called out: "Are you in there, Jack?"
"No," said Lacy, scratching away with his pen in passionate hopes of
discovering a still bigger balance.
"Sportin' your oak, old Skeezicks?" inquired O'Hara, affectionately,
delivering a kick at the door.
"Let me alone, you wild Irishman!" shouted Lacy. "If I can't dig out an
extra hundred somewhere the State Superintendent is likely to sport my
oak for keeps!"
A big, lumbering, broad-shouldered young fellow was coming up the stairs
behind O'Hara, a blank book and some papers tucked under his arm, and
O'Hara nodded to him and opened Mr. Lacy's door without further
parleying.
"Here's Westguard, now," he said; "and as we can't shoot landlords in
the close season we'll have to make arrangements to pay for bed and
board, Jack."
Lacy glanced up from the sheet of figures before him, then waved his
guests to seats and lighted a cigarette.
"Hooray," he remarked to Westguard; "I can draw you a check, Karl, and
live to tell the tale." And he rose and gave his place at the desk to
the man addressed, who seated himself heavily, as though tired.
"Before we go over the accounts," he began, "I want to say a word or
two----"
"Hadn't you better wait till Quarren comes in?" interrupted O'Hara,
smoking and stretching out his long legs.
"No; I want to talk to you two fellows first. And I'll tell you at once
what's the matter: Quarren's check came back marked 'no funds.' This is
the third time; and one of us ought to talk to him."
"It's only a slip," said Lacy--"it's the tendency in him that considers
the lilies of the field----"
"It isn't square," said Westguard doggedly.
"Nonsense, Karl, Rix means to be square----"
"That's all right, too, but he isn't succeeding. It humiliates me; it
hurts like hell to have to call his attention to such oversights."
"Oh, he's the gay tra-la-la," said O'Hara, indulgently; "do you think he
bothers his elegant noddle about such trifles as checks? Besides he's
almost as Irish as I am--God bless his mother and damn all landlords,
Lester Caldera included."
"What does Quarren do with all his money, then?" mused Lacy--"soaking
the public in Tappan-Zee Park and sitting up so close and snug to the
rich and great!"
"It's his business," said Westguard, "to see that any check he draws is
properly covered. Overdrafts may be funny in a woman, and in novels, but
once is too often for any man. And this makes three times for Rix."
"Ah, thin, lave the poor la-ad be! ye could-blooded Sassenach!" said
Lacy, pretending to the brogue. "Phwat the divil!--'tis the cashier ye
should blame whin Rix tells him to pay, an' he refuses to projuice the
long-green wad!"
But Westguard, unsmiling, consulted his memoranda, then, holding up his
sheet of figures:
"There's a quorum here," he said. "Rix can read this over when he comes
in, if he likes. Here's the situation." And he read off the items of
liabilities and assets, showing exactly, and to a penny, how the house
had been run for the past month.
Everything was there, rent, servants' wages, repairs, provisions, bills
for heating and lighting, extras, incidentals--all disbursements and
receipts; then, pausing for comments, and hearing none, he closed the
ledger with a sharp slap.
"The roof's leakin'," observed O'Hara without particular interest.
"Write to the landlord," said Lacy--"the stingy millionaire."
"He won't fix it," returned the other. "Did you ever hear of Lester
Caldera spendin' a cent?"
"On himself, yes."
"That's not spendin'; it all goes inside or outside of him somewhere."
He stretched his legs, crossed them, sucked on his empty pipe, and
looked around at Westguard, who was still fussing over the figures.
"Are you goin' to the Wycherlys', Karl?"
"I think so."
"What costume?"
"None of your business," retorted Westguard pleasantly.
"I'm going as the family Banshee," observed Lacy.
"Did you ever hear me screech, Karl?" And, pointing his nose skyward and
ruffling up his auburn hair he emitted a yell so unendurable that it
brought Westguard to his feet, protesting.
"Shut up!" he said. "Do you want to have this house pinched, you crazy
Milesian?"
"Get out of my rooms if you don't like it," said Lacy. "If I'm going to
a masked dance as a Banshee I've got to practice screaming, haven't I?"
"I," said O'Hara, "am goin' as a bingle."
"What's a bingle?"
"Nobody knows. Neither do I; and it's killin' me to think up a
costume.... Dick Quarren's goin', isn't he?"
"Does he ever miss anything?" said Lacy.
"He's missing most of his life," said Westguard so sharply that the
others opened their eyes.
A flush had settled under Westguard's cheek-bones; he was still jotting
down figures with a flat silver pencil, but presently he looked up.
"It's the cold and uncomplimentary truth about Ricky," he said. "That
set he runs with is making an utter fool of him."
"That set," repeated Lacy, grinning. "Why, we all have wealthy relatives
in it--wealthy, charming, and respectable--h'm!"
"Which is why we're at liberty to curse it out," observed O'Hara,
complacently. "We all know what it is. Karl is right. If a man is goin'
to make anythin' of himself he can't run with that expensive pack. One
may venture to visit the kennels now and then, and look over the new
litters--perhaps do a little huntin' once in a while--just enough--so
that the M. F. H. recognises your coat tails when you come a cropper.
But nix for wire or water! Me for the gate, please. Ah, do you think a
_man_ can stand what the papers call 'the realm of society' very long?"
"Rix is doing well."
Westguard said: "They've gradually been getting a strangle-hold on him.
Women are crazy about that sort of man--with his good looks and good
humour and his infernally easy way of obliging a hundred people at
once.... Look back a few years! Before he joined that whipper-snapper
junior club he was full of decent ambition, full of go, unspoiled, fresh
from college and as promising a youngster as anybody ever met. Where is
his ambition now? What future has he?--except possibly to marry a
million at forty-five and settle down with a comfortable grunt in the
trough. It's coming, I tell you. Look what he was four years ago--a boy
with clear eyes and a clear skin, frank, clean set, clean minded. Look
at him now--sallow, wiry, unprofitably wise, rangé, disillusioned--oh,
hell! they've mauled him to a shadow of a rag!"
Lacy lighted another cigarette and winked at O'Hara. "Karl's off again,"
he said. "Now we're going to get the Bible and the Sword for fair!"
"Doesn't everybody need them both!" said Westguard, smiling. Then his
heavy features altered: "I care a good deal for Dick Quarren," he said.
"That's why his loose and careless financial methods make me mad--that's
why this loose and careless transformation of a decent, sincere,
innocent boy into an experienced, easy-going, cynical man makes me
tired. I've got to stand for it, I suppose, but I don't want to. He's a
gifted, clever, lovable fellow, but he hasn't any money and any right to
leisure, and these people are turning him into one of those dancing
things that leads cotillions and arranges tableaux, and plays social
diplomat and forgets secrets and has his pockets full of boudoir
keys--good Lord! I hate to say it, but they're making a tame cat of
him--they're using him ignobly, I tell you--and that's the truth--if he
had a friend with courage enough to tell him! I've tried, but I can't
talk this way to him."
There was a silence: then O'Hara crossed one lank leg over the other,
gingerly, and contemplated his left shoe.
"Karl," he said, "character never really changes; it only develops.
What's born in the cradle is lowered into the grave, as some Russian guy
said. You're a writer, and you know what I say is true."
"Granted. But Quarren's character isn't developing; it's being stifled,
strangled. He could have been a professional man--a lawyer, and a
brilliant one--or an engineer, or a physician--any old thing. He's in
real estate--if you can call it that. All right; why doesn't he _do_
something in it? I'll tell you why," he added, angrily answering his own
question; "these silly women are turning Quarren's ambition into
laziness, his ideals into mockery, his convictions into cynicism----"
He stopped short. The door opened, and Quarren sauntered in.
"Couldn't help hearing part of your sermon, Karl," he said laughing. "Go
ahead; I don't mind the Bible and the Sword--it's good for Jack Lacy,
too--and that scoundrel O'Hara. Hit us again, old Ironsides. We're no
good." And he sat down on the edge of Lacy's bed, and presently
stretched out on it, gracefully, arms under his blond head.
"You've been catchin' it, Ricky," said O'Hara with a grin. "Karl says
that fashionable society is a bally wampire a-gorgin' of hisself at the
expense of bright young men like you. What's the come-back to that,
sonny?"
"Thanks old fellow," said Quarren laughing and slightly lifting his head
to look across at Westguard. "Go ahead and talk hell and brimstone. A
fight is the only free luxury in the Irish Legation. I'll swat you with
a pillow when I get mad enough."
Westguard bent his heavy head and looked down at the yellow check on the
table.
"Rix," he said, "I've got to tell you that you have forgotten to make a
deposit at your bank."
"Oh, Lord!" exclaimed Quarren with weary but amiable vexation--"that is
the third time. What are you fellows going to do? Put me out of the
Legation?"
"Why the devil are you so careless?" growled Westguard.
"I honestly don't know. I didn't suppose I was so short. I thought I had
a balance."
"Rot! The minute a man begins to _think_ he has a balance he knows damn
well that he hasn't! I don't care, Rix--but, take it from me, you'll
have a mortifying experience one of these days."
"I guess that's right," said Quarren with a kind of careless contrition.
"I never seem to be more than a lap or two ahead of old lady Ruin. And I
break the speed-laws, too."
"No youngster ever beat that old woman in a foot-race," observed Lacy.
"Pay up and give her enough carfare to travel the other way; that's your
only chance, Ricky."
"Oh, certainly. No fellow need be in debt if he pays up, you Hibernian
idiot!"
"Do you want some money?" asked Westguard bluntly.
"Sure, Karl, oodles of it! But not from you, old chap."
"You know you can have it from me, too, don't you?" said O'Hara.
Quarren nodded cordially: "I'll get it; no fear. I'm terribly sorry
about that check. But it will be all right to-morrow, Karl."
Lacy thought to himself with a grin: "He'll kill somebody at Auction to
square himself--that's what Ricky means to do. God be good to the
wealthy this winter night!"
O'Hara, lank, carefully scrubbed, carefully turned out as one of his own
hunters, stood up with a yawn and glanced at his watch.
"Didn't somebody say somebody was comin' in to tea?" he asked generally.
"My cousin, Mrs. Wycherly," said Westguard--"and a friend of hers--I've
forgotten----"
"Mrs. Leeds," observed Lacy. "And she is reputed to be a radiant peach.
Did any of you fellows ever meet her in the old days?"
Nobody there had ever seen her.
"Did Mrs. Wycherly say she is a looker?" asked O'Hara, sceptically.
Westguard shrugged: "You know what to expect when one woman tells you
that another woman is good-looking. Probably she has a face that would
kill a caterpillar."
Quarren laughed lazily from the bed:
"I hear she's pretty. She's come out of the West. You know, of course,
who she was."
"Reggie Leeds's wife," said O'Hara, slowly.
There was a silence. Perhaps the men were thinking of the late Reginald
Leeds, and of the deep damnation of his taking off.
"Have you never seen her?" asked Lacy.
"Nobody ever has. She's never before been here," said Quarren, yawning.
"Then come down and set the kettle on, Ricky. She may be the peachiest
kind of a peach in a special crate directed to your address and marked
'Perishable! Rush! With care!' So we'll have to be very careful in
rushing her----"
"Oh, for Heaven's sake stop that lady-patter," protested O'Hara,
linking his arm in Lacy's and sauntering toward the door. "That sort of
conversation is Ricky's line of tea-talk. You'll reduce him to a
pitiable silence if you take away his only asset."
Westguard gathered up his papers, pausing a moment at the doorway:
"Coming?" he asked briefly of Quarren who was laughing.
"Certainly he's coming," said Lacy returning and attempting to drag him
from the bed. "Come on, you tea-cup-rattling, macaroon-crunching,
caste-smitten, fashion-bitten Arbiter Elegantiarum!"
They fought for a moment, then Lacy staggered back under repeated
wallops from one of his own pillows, and presently retired to his
bath-room to brush his thick red hair. This hair was his pride and
sorrow: it defied him in a brilliant cowlick until plastered flat with
water. However, well soaked, his hair darkened to what he considered a
chestnut colour. And that made him very proud.
When he had soaked and subdued his ruddy locks he came out to where
Westguard still stood.
"Are you coming, Rix?" demanded the latter again.
"Not unless you particularly want me," returned Quarren, yawning
amiably. "I could take a nap if that red-headed Mick would get out of
here."
Westguard said: "Suit yourself," and followed Lacy and O'Hara down the
stairs.
The two latter young fellows turned aside into O'Hara's apartments to
further remake a killing and deadly toilet. Westguard continued on to
the first floor which he inhabited, and where he found a Japanese
servant already preparing the tea paraphernalia. A few minutes later
Mrs. Wycherly arrived with Mrs. Leeds.
All women, experienced or otherwise, never quite lose their curiosity
concerning a bachelor's quarters. The haunts of men interest woman,
fascinating the married as well as the unwedded. Deep in their gentle
souls they know that the most luxurious masculine abode could easily be
made twice as comfortable by the kindly advice of any woman. Toleration,
curiosity, sympathy are the emotions which stir feminine hearts when
inspecting the solitary lair of the human male.
"So these are the new rooms," said Molly Wycherly, patronisingly, after
O'Hara and Lacy had appeared and everybody had been presented to
everybody else. "Strelsa, do look at those early Edwards prints! It's
utterly impossible to find any of them now for sale anywhere."
Strelsa Leeds looked up at the Botticelli Madonna and at Madame Royale;
and the three men looked at her as though hypnotised.
So this was Reginald Leeds's wife--this distractingly pretty woman--even
yet scarcely more than a girl--with her delicate colour and vivid lips
and unspoiled eyes--dark eyes--a kind of purplish gray, very purely and
exquisitely shaped. But in their grayish-violet depths there was murder.
And the assassination of Lacy and O'Hara had already been accomplished.
Her hat, gown, gloves, furs were black--as though the tragic shadow of
two years ago still fell across her slender body.
She looked around at the room; Molly Wycherly, pouring tea, nodded to
Westguard, and he handed the cup to Mrs. Leeds.
She said, smilingly: "And--do you three unprotected men live in this big
house all by yourselves?"
"There are four of us in the Legation," said Lacy, "and several servants
to beat off the suffragettes who become enamoured of us."
"The--_legation_?" she repeated, amused at the term.
"Our friends call this house the Irish Legation," he explained. "We're
all Irish by descent except Westguard who's a Sassenach--and Dick
Quarren, who is only half Irish.'
"And who is Dick Quarren?" she asked innocently.
"Oh, Strelsa!" cautioned Molly Wycherly--"you really mustn't argue
yourself unknown."
"But I am unknown," insisted the girl, laughing and looking at the men
in turn with an engaging candour that bowled them over again, one by
one. "I _don't_ know who Mr. Quarren is, so why not admit it? _Is_ he
such a very wonderful personage, Mr. Lacy?"
"Not at all, Mrs. Leeds. He and I share the top floor of the Legation.
We are, as a matter of record, the two financial wrecks of this
establishment, so naturally we go to the garret. Poverty is my only
distinction; Mr. Quarren, however, also leads the grand march at Lyric
Hall now and then I believe----"
"What is Lyric Hall? Ought I to know?"
Everybody was laughing, and Molly Wycherly said:
"Richard Quarren, known variously as Rix, Ricky, and Dick Quarren, is an
exceedingly popular and indispensable young man in this town. You'll
meet him, Strelsa, and probably adore him. We all do."
"Must I wait very long?" asked Strelsa, laughing. "I'd like to have the
adoration begin."
Lacy said to O'Hara: "Go up and pull that pitiable dub off the bed,
Roger. The lady wishes to inspect him."
"That's not very civil of Rix," said Mrs. Wycherly; "but I fancy I know
why he requires slumber." She added, glancing around mischievously at
the three men who were all looking languishingly at Mrs. Leeds: "He'll
be sorry when you three gentlemen describe Strelsa to him. I can
prophesy that much."
"Certainly," said Lacy, airily; "we're all at Mrs. Leeds's feet! Even
the blind bat of Drumgool could see that! So why deny it?"
"You're not denying it, Mr. Lacy," said Strelsa, laughing. "But I
realise perfectly that I am in the Irish Legation. So I shall carefully
salt everything you say to me."
"If you think _I've_ kissed the blessed pebble you ought to listen to
that other bankrupt upstairs," said Lacy.
"As far as pretty speeches are concerned you seem to be perfectly
solvent," said Strelsa gaily, looking around her at the various
adornments of this masculine abode. "I wonder where you dine," she added
with curiosity unabashed.
"We've a fine dining-room below," he said proudly, "haven't we, Roger?
And as soon as Dick Quarren and I are sufficiently solvent to warrant
it, the Legation is going to give a series of brilliant banquets; will
you come, Mrs. Leeds?"
"When you are solvent, perhaps," said Strelsa, smiling.
"Westguard and I will give you a banquet at an hour's notice," said
O'Hara, eagerly. "Will you accept?"
"Such overwhelming offers of hospitality!" she protested. "I had
believed the contrary about New Yorkers. You see I've just emerged from
the West, and I don't really know what to think of such bewildering
cordiality."
"Karl," said Mrs. Wycherly, "are you going to show us over the house? If
you are we must hurry, as Strelsa and I are to decorate the Calderas'
box this evening, and it takes me an hour to paint my face." She turned
a fresh, winsome countenance to Westguard, who laughed, rose, and took
his pretty cousin by the hand.
Under triple escort Mrs. Wycherly and Mrs. Leeds examined the Legation
from kitchen to garret--and Strelsa, inadvertently glancing in at a room
just as Westguard started to close the door, caught sight of a recumbent
shape on a bed--just a glimpse of a blond, symmetrical head and a
well-coupled figure, graceful even in the careless relaxation of sleep.
Westguard asked her pardon: "That's Quarren. He was probably up till
daylight."
"He was," said Molly Wycherly; "and by the same token so was I. Thank
you so much, Karl.... Thank you, Mr. O'Hara--and you, too,
Jack!"--offering her hand--"We've had a splendid party.... Strelsa, we
really ought to go at once----"
"Will you come again?"
"We will come again if you ask us," said Strelsa; "we're perfectly
fascinated by the Legation."
"And its personnel?" hinted Lacy. "Do you like us, Mrs. Leeds?"
"I've only seen three of you," parried Strelsa, much amused.
"We refuse to commit ourselves," said Molly. "Good-bye. I suppose you
all are coming to my house-warming."
They all looked at Mrs. Leeds and said that they were coming--said so
fervently.
Molly laughed: she had no envy in her make-up, perhaps because she was
too pretty herself.
"Oh, yes," she said, replying to their unasked questions, "Mrs. Leeds
will be there--and I plainly see _my_ miserable fate. But what can a
wretched woman expect from the Irish? Not constancy. Strelsa, take
warning. They loved me once!"
* * * * *
After Westguard had put them in their limousine, he came back to find
Quarren in his sitting-room, wearing a dressing-gown, and Lacy madly
detailing to him the charms of Strelsa Leeds:
"Take it from me, Dicky, she's some queen! You didn't miss a thing but
the prettiest woman in town! And there's a _something_ about her--a kind
of a sort of a something----"
"You appear to be in love, dear friend," observed Quarren kindly.
"I am. So's every man here who met her. We don't deny it! We glory in
our fall! What was that costume of hers, Karl? Mourning?"
"Fancy a glorious creature like her wearin' black for that nasty little
cad," observed O'Hara disgustedly.
"It's probably fashion, not grief," remarked Westguard.
"I guess it's nix for the weeps," said O'Hara--"after all she probably
went through with Reggie Leeds, I fancy she had no tears left over."
"I want to talk," cried Lacy; "I want to tell Rix what he missed. I'd
got as far as her gown, I think----"
"Go on," smiled Quarren.
"Anyway," said Lacy, "she wore a sort of mourning as far as her veil
went, and her furs and gown and gloves were black, and her purse was
gun-metal and black opals--rather brisk? Yes?--And all the dingles on
her were gun-metal--everything black and sober--and that ruddy gold
head--and--those eyes!--a kind of a purple-gray, Ricky, slanting a
little, with long black lashes--I noticed 'em--and her lips were very
vivid--not paint, but a kind of noticeably healthy scarlet--and that
straight nose--and the fresh fragrant youth of her----"
"For Heaven's sake, Jack----"
"Sure. I'm through with 'em all. I'm wise to the sex. That was merely a
word picture. I'm talking like a writer, that's all. That's how you
boobs talk, isn't it, Karl?"
"Always," said Westguard gravely.
"Me for Mrs. Leeds," remarked O'Hara frankly. "I'd ask her to marry me
on the drop of a hat."
"Well, I'll drop no hat for _you_!" said Lacy. "And there'll be plenty
of lunatics in this town who'll go madder than you or me before they
forget Mrs. Leeds. Wait! Town is going to sit up and take notice when
this new planet swims into its social ken. How's that epigram, Karl?"
Westguard said thoughtfully: "There'll be notoriety, too, I'm afraid. If
nobody knows her everybody knows about that wretched boy she married."
Quarren added: "I have always understood that the girl did not want to
marry him. It was her mother's doings."
O'Hara scowled. "I also have heard that the mother engineered it....
What was Mrs. Leeds's name? I forget----"
"Strelsa Lanark," said Quarren who never forgot anything.
"Ugh," grunted Westguard. "Fancy a mother throwing her daughter at the
head of a boy like Reggie Leeds!--as vicious and unclean a little whelp
as ever--Oh, what's the use?--and _de mortius nihil_--et cetera,
cock-a-doodle-do!"
"That poor girl had two entire years of him," observed Lacy. "She
doesn't look more than twenty now--and he's been in--been dead two
years. Good Heavens! What a child she must have been when she married
him!"
Westguard nodded: "She had two years of him--and I suppose he seldom
drew a perfectly sober breath.... He dragged her all over the world with
him--she standing for his rotten behaviour, trying to play the game with
the cards hopelessly stacked against her. Vincent Wier met them in
Naples; Mallison ran across them in Egypt; so did Lydon in Vienna.
They said it was heartbreaking to see her trying to keep up
appearances--trying to smile under his nagging or his drunken insults
in public places. Lydon told me that she behaved like a brick--stuck to
Reggie, tried to shield him, excuse him, make something out of the
miserable pup who was doing his best to drag her to his own level and
deprave her. But I guess she was too young or too unhappy or something,
because there's no depravity in the girl who was here a few minutes ago.
I'll swear to that."
After a moment Lacy said: "Well, he got his at last!"
"What was comin' to him," added O'Hara, with satisfaction.
Lacy added, curiously: "_How_ can a man misbehave when he has such a
woman for a wife?"
"I wonder," observed Quarren, "how many solid citizens read the account
in the papers and remained scared longer than six weeks?"
"Lord help the wives of men," growled Westguard.... "If any of you
fellows are dressing for dinner you'd better be about it.... Wait a
moment, Rix!"--as Quarren, the last to leave, was already passing the
threshold.
The young fellow turned, smiling: the others went on; Westguard stood
silent for a moment, then:
"You're about the only man I care for very much," he said bluntly. "If I
am continually giving you the Bible and the Sword it's the best I have
to give."
Quarren replied laughingly.
"Don't worry, old fellow. I take what you say all right. And I really
mean to cut out a lot of fussing and begin to hustle.... Only, isn't it
a wise thing to keep next to possible clients?"
"The people you train with don't buy lots in Tappan-Zee Park."
"But I may induce them to go into more fashionable enterprises----"
"Not they! The eagle yells on every dollar they finger. If there's any
bleeding to be done they'll do it, my son."
"Lester Caldera has already asked me about acreage in Westchester."
"Did he do more than ask?"
"No."
"Did you charge him for the consultation?"
"Of course not."
"Then he got your professional opinion for nothing."
"But he, or others, may try to assemble several farms----"
"Why don't they then?--instead of dragging you about at their heels from
house to house, from card-room to ball-room, from café to opera, from
one week-end to the next!--robbing you of time, of leisure, of
opportunity, of ambition--spoiling you--making a bally monkey of you!
You're always in some fat woman's opera box or on some fat man's yacht
or coach, or doing some damn thing--with your name figuring in
everything from Newport to Hot Springs--and--and how can you ever turn
into anything except a tame cat!"
Quarren's face reddened slightly.
"I'd be perfectly willing to sit in an office all day and all night if
anybody would give me any business. But what's the use of chewing
pencils and watching traffic on Forty-second Street?"
"Then go into another business!"
"I haven't any money."
"I'll lend it to you!"
"I can't risk _your_ money, Karl. I'm too uncertain of myself. If
anybody else offered to stake me I'd try the gamble." ... He looked up
at Westguard, ashamed, troubled, and showing it like a boy. "I'm afraid
I don't amount to anything, Karl. I'm afraid I'm no good except in the
kind of thing I seem to have a talent for."
"Fetching and carrying for the fashionable and wealthy," sneered
Westguard.
Quarren's face flushed again: "I suppose that's it."
Westguard glared at him: "I wish I could shake it out of you!"
"I guess the poison's there," said Quarren in a low voice. "The worst of
it is I like it--except when I understand your contempt."
"You _like_ to fetch and carry and go about with your pocket full of
boudoir keys!"
"People give me as much as I give them."
"They don't!" said the other angrily. "They've taken a decent fellow and
put him in livery!"
Quarren bit his lip as the blood leaped to his face.
"Don't talk that way, Karl," he said quietly. "Even you have no business
to take that tone with me."
There was a silence. After a few moments Westguard came over and held
out his hand. Quarren took it, looked at him.
"I tell you," he said, "there's nothing to me. It's your kindness, Karl,
that sees in me possibilities that never were."
"They're there. I'll do my duty almost to the point of breaking our
friendship. But--I'll have to stop short of that point."
A quick smile came over Quarren's face, gay, affectionate:
"You couldn't do that, Karl.... And don't worry. I'll cut out a lot of
frills and try to do things that are worth while. I mean it, really.
Don't worry, old fellow."
"All right," said Westguard, smiling.
CHAPTER II
A masked dance, which for so long has been out of fashion in the world
that pretends to it, was the experiment selected by Molly Wycherly for
the warming up of her new house on Park Avenue.
The snowy avenue for blocks was a mass of motors and carriages; a
platoon of police took charge of the vehicular mess. Outside of the
storm-coated lines the penniless world of shreds and patches craned a
thousand necks as the glittering costumes passed from brougham and
limousine under the awnings into the great house.
Already in the new ball-room, along the edges of the whirl, masqueraders
in tumultuous throngs were crowding forward to watch the dancers or
drifting into the eddies and set-backs where ranks of overloaded gilt
chairs creaked under jewelled dowagers, and where rickety old beaux
impersonated tinselled courtiers on wavering but devoted legs.
Aloft in their rococo sky gallery a popular orchestra fiddled
frenziedly; the great curtains of living green set with thousands of
gardenias swayed in the air currents like Chinese tapestries; a
harmonious tumult swept the big new ball-room from end to end--a
composite uproar in which were mingled the rushing noise of silk,
clatter of sole and heel, laughter and cries of capering maskers
gathered from the four quarters of fashionable Gath to grace the
opening of the House of Wycherly. They were all there, dowager, matron,
débutante, old beaux, young gallant, dancing, laughing, coquetting,
flirting. Young eyes mocked the masked eyes that wooed them; adolescence
tormented maturity; the toothless ogled the toothsome. Unmasking alone
could set right this topsy-turvy world of carnival.
A sinuous Harlequin, his skin-tight lozenge-patterned dress shimmering
like the red and gold skin of a Malay snake, came weaving his way
through the edges of the maelstrom, his eyes under the black half-mask
glittering maliciously at the victims of his lathe-sword. With it he
recklessly slapped whatever tempted him, patting gently the rounded arms
and shoulders of nymph and shepherdess, using more vigour on the plump
contours of fat and elderly courtiers, spinning on the points of his
pump-toes, his limber lathe-sword curved in both hands above his head,
leaping lithely over a chair here and there, and landing always as
lightly as a cat on silent feet--a wiry, symmetrical figure under the
rakish bi-corne, instinct with mischief and grace infernal.
Encountering a burly masker dressed like one of Cromwell's ponderous
Ironsides, he hit him a resounding whack over his aluminum cuirass, and
whispered:
"That Ironside rig doesn't conceal you: it reveals you, Karl! Out with
your Bible and your Sword and preach the wrath to come!"
"It will come all right," said Westguard. "Do you know how many hundred
thousand dollars are wasted here to-night?... And yesterday a woman died
of hunger in Carmine Street. Don't worry about the wrath of God as long
as people die of cold and hunger in the streets of Ascalon."
"That's not as bad as dying of inanition--which would happen to the
majority here if they didn't have things like this to amuse 'em. For
decency's sake, Karl, pity the perplexities of the rich for a change!"
Westguard grunted something under his casque; then, adjusting his
aluminum mask:
"Are you having a good time, Dicky? I suppose you are."
"Oh, _I'm_ gay enough," returned the Harlequin airily--"but there's
never much genuine gaiety among the overfed." And he slapped a passing
gallant with his wooden sword, spun around on his toes, bent over
gracefully and stood on his hands, legs twinkling above him in the air.
Then, with a bound he was on his nimble feet again, and, linking his arm
in the arm of the Cromwellian trooper, strolled along the ranks of
fanning dowagers, glancing amiably into their masked faces.
"Same old battle-line," he observed to his companion--"their jewels give
them away. Same old tiaras, same old ladies--all fat, all fifty, all
fanning away like the damned. Your aunt has on about a ton of emeralds.
I think she does it for the purpose of banting, don't you, Karl----"
The uproar drowned his voice: Westguard, colossal in his armour, gazed
gloomily around at the gorgeous spectacle for which his cousin Molly
Wycherly was responsible.
"It's monkey-shines like this that breed anarchists," he growled. "Did
you notice that rubbering crowd outside the police lines in the snow?
Molly and Jim ought to see it."
[Illustration: "Westguard, colossal in his armour, gazed gloomily around
at the gorgeous spectacle."]
"Oh, cut it out, Karl," retorted the Harlequin gaily; "there'll be rich
and poor in the world as long as the bally old show runs--there'll be
reserved seats and gallery seats and standing room only, and ninety-nine
percent of the world cooling its shabby heels outside."
"I don't care to discuss the problem with _you_," observed Westguard.
After a moment he added: "I'm going to dance once or twice and get
out.... I suppose you'll flit about doing the agreeable and fashionable
until daylight."
"I suppose so," said the Harlequin, tranquilly. "Why not? Also _you_
ought to find material here for one of your novels."
"A man doesn't have to hunt for material. It's in his bedroom when he
wakes; it's all around him all day long. There's no more here than there
is outside in the snow; and no less.... But dancing all night isn't
going to help _your_ business, Ricky."
"It won't hurt any business I'm likely to do."
"Isn't your Tappan-Zee Park panning out?"
"Fizzling out. Nobody's bought any building sites."
"Why not?"
"How the deuce do I know, Karl! I don't want to talk business, here----"
He ceased speaking as three or four white masked Bacchantes in
fluttering raiment came dancing by to the wild music of Philemon and
Baucis. Shaking their be-ribboned tambourines, flowery garlands and
lynx-skins flying from their shoulders, they sped away on fleet little
feet, hotly pursued by adorers.
"Come on," said the Harlequin briskly; "I think one of those skylarkers
ought to prove amusing! Shall I catch you one?"
But he found no encouragement in the swift courtship he attempted; for
the Bacchantes, loudly protesting at his interference, banged him over
his head and shoulders with their resounding tambourines and danced away
unheeding his blandishments.
"Flappers," observed a painted and powdered clown whose voice betrayed
him as O'Hara; "this town is overstocked with fudge-fed broilers.
They're always playin' about under foot, spoilin' your huntin'; and if
you touch 'em they ki-yi no end."
"I suppose you're looking for Mrs. Leeds," said Westguard, smiling.
"I fancy every man here is doin' the same thing," replied the clown.
"What's her costume? Do you know, Ironsides?"
"I wouldn't tell you if I did," said Westguard frankly.
The Harlequin shrugged.
"This world," he remarked, "is principally encumbered with women, and
naturally a man supposes the choice is unlimited. But as you live to
drift from girl to girl you'll discover that there are just two kinds;
the kind you can kiss and the kind you can't. So finally you marry the
latter. Does Mrs. Leeds flirt?"
"Will a fish swim?" rejoined the clown. "You bet she will flirt. Haven't
you met her?"
"I? No," said the Harlequin carelessly. Which secretly amused both
Westguard and O'Hara, for it had been whispered about that the new
beauty not only had taken no pains to meet Quarren, but had pointedly
ignored an opportunity when the choice lay with her, remarking that
dancing men were one of the social necessities which everybody took for
granted--like flowers and champagne. And the comment had been carried
straight to Quarren, who had laughed at the time--and had never
forgotten it, nor the apparently causeless contempt that evidently had
inspired it.
The clown brandished his bunch of toy balloons, and gazed about him:
"Anybody who likes can go and tell Mrs. Leeds that I'm her declared
suitor. I don't care who knows it. I'm foolish about her. She's
different from any woman I ever saw. And if I don't find her pretty soon
I'll smash every balloon over your head, Ricky!"
The Harlequin laughed. "Women," he said, "are cut out in various and
amusing patterns like animal crackers, but the fundamental paste never
varies, and the same pastry cook seasoned it."
"That's a sickly and degenerate sentiment," observed Westguard.
"You might say that about the unfledged," added O'Hara--"like those
kittenish Bacchantes. Winifred Miller and the youngest Vernon girl were
two of those Flappers, I think. But there's no real jollity among the
satiated," he added despondently. "A mask, a hungry stomach, and empty
pockets are the proper ingredients for gaiety--take it from me, Karl."
And he wandered off, beating everybody with his bunch of toy balloons.
Quarren leaped to the seat of a chair and squatted there drawing his
shimmering legs up under him like a great jewelled spider.
"Bet you ten that the voluminous domino yonder envelops my aunt, Mrs.
Sprowl," whispered Westguard.
"You're betting on a certainty and a fat ankle."
"Sure. I've seen her ankles going upstairs too often.... What the devil
is the old lady wearing under that domino?"
"Wait till you see her later," said Quarren, delightedly. "She has come
as Brunhilda."
"I don't want to see three hundred pounds of relative as Brunhilda,"
growled Westguard.
"You will, to-morrow. She's given her photograph to a _Herald_ man."
"What did you let her do it for?" demanded Westguard wrathfully.
"Could I help it?"
"You could have stopped her. She thinks your opinion is the last lisp in
fashionable art problems."
"There are some things you can't tell a woman," said Quarren. "One of
'em concerns her weight."
"Are you afraid of Mrs. Sprowl?"
The Harlequin laughed:
"Where would I be if I incurred your aunt's displeasure, dear friend?"
"Out of the monkey house for good I suppose," admitted Westguard. "Lord,
Ricky, what a lot you have had to swallow for the sake of staying put
among these people!"
Quarren sat meditating under his mask, cross-legged, twirling his
sword, the crash of the floor orchestra dinning in his close-set ears.
"Yes," he said without resentment, "I've endured my share. That's one
reason why I don't want to let several years of humiliation go for
nothing. I've earned whatever place I have. And I mean to keep it."
Westguard turned on him half angrily, hesitated, then remained silent.
What was the use? If Quarren had not been guilty of actually fawning,
toadying, currying favour, he had certainly permitted himself to be
rudely used. He had learned very thoroughly his art in the school of the
courtier--learned how and when to be blind, silent, deaf; how to offer,
how to yield, when and how to demand and exact. Which, to Westguard,
meant the prostitution of intelligence. And he loathed the game like a
man who is free to play it if he cares to. Of those who are denied
participation, few really hate it.
But he said nothing more; and the Harlequin, indolently stretching his
glittering limbs, dropped a light hand on Westguard's cuirassed
shoulder:
"Don't be forever spoiling things for me, Karl. I really do enjoy the
game as it lies."
"It _does_ lie--that is the trouble, Rix."
"I can't afford to criticise it.... Listen; I'm a mediocre man; I'd
never count among real men. I count in the set which I amuse and which
accepts me. Let me enjoy it, can't you?"
An aged dandy, masked, painted, wizened, and dressed like Henri II,
tottered by with a young girl on his arm, his shrill, falsetto giggle
piercing the racket around them.
"Do you wish to live to be like that?" asked Westguard sharply.
"Oh, I'll die long before that," said Quarren cheerfully, and leaped
lightly to his feet. "I shall now accomplish a little dancing," he said,
pointing with his wooden sword at the tossing throng. "Venus send me a
pretty married woman who really loves her husband.... By Bacchus! Those
dancers are going it! Come on, Karl. Leave us foot it!"
Many maskers were throwing confetti now: multi-tinted serpents shot out
across the clamorous gulf; bunches of roses flung high, rising in swift
arcs of flight, crossed and recrossed. All along the edges of the dance,
like froth and autumn leaves cast up from a whirlpool, fluffy feminine
derelicts and gorgeous masculine escorts were flung pell-mell out of the
maelstrom and left stranded or drifting breathless among the eddies
setting in toward the supper-room.
Suddenly, as the Harlequin bent forward to plunge into the crush, the
very centre of the whirlpool parted, and out of it floated a fluttering,
jingling, dazzling figure all gold--slender, bare-armed and bare of
throat and shoulders, auriferous, scintillating from crown to ankle--for
her sleeveless tabard was cloth-of-gold, and her mask was gold; so were
her jewelled shoes and the gemmed fillet that bound her locks; and her
thick hair clustering against her cheeks had the lustre of precious
metal.
Jingling, fluttering, gems clashing musically, the Byzantine dancer,
besieged by adorers, deftly evaded their pressing gallantries--evaded
the Harlequin, too, with laughing mockery, skilfully disengaging herself
from the throng of suitors stumbling around her, crowded and buffeted on
every side.
After her like a flash sped Harlequin: for an instant, just ahead of
him, she appeared in plain sight, glimmering brightly against the green
and swaying tapestry of living leaves and flowers, then even as her
pursuers looked at her, she vanished before their very eyes.
[Illustration: "Jingling, fluttering, gems clashing musically, the
Byzantine dancer, besieged by adorers, deftly evaded their pressing
gallantries."]
They ran about distractedly hunting for her, Turk, Drum Major, Indian
Chief, and Charles the First, then reluctantly gave up the quest and
drifted off to seek for another ideal. All women are ideal under the
piquant promise of the mask.
A pretty shepherdess, lingering near, whispered close to Quarren's
shoulder behind her fan:
"Check to you, Harlequin! That golden dancer was the only girl in town
who hasn't taken any pains to meet you!"
He turned his head, warily, divining Molly Wycherly under the disguise,
realising, too, that she recognised him.
"You'll never find her now," laughed the shepherdess. "Besides she does
not care a rap about meeting a mere Harlequin. It's refreshing to see
you so thoroughly snubbed once in a while." And she danced gaily away,
arms akimbo, her garlanded crook over her shoulder; and her taunting
laughter floated back to him where he stood irresolute, wondering how
the golden dancer could have so completely vanished.
Suddenly he recollected going over the house before its completion with
Jim Wycherly, who had been his own architect, and the memory of a
certain peculiarity in the construction of the ball-room flashed into
his mind. The only possible explanation for her disappearance was that
somebody had pointed out to her the low door behind the third pillar,
and she was now in the gilded swallow's-nest aloft.
It was a whim of Wycherly--this concealed stair--he recalled it
perfectly now--and, parting the living tapestry of blossoms, he laid
his hand on the ivory and gilded paneling, pressing the heart of one
carved rose after another, until with a click! a tiny door swung inward,
revealing a narrow spiral of stairs, lighted rosily by electricity.
He stepped inside, closed the door, and listened, then mounted
noiselessly. Half way up he caught the aroma of a cigarette; and, a
second later he stepped out onto a tiny latticed balcony, completely
screened.
The golden dancer, who evidently had been gazing down on the carnival
scene below from behind the lattice, whirled around to confront him in a
little flurry of cigarette smoke.
For a moment they faced each other, then:
"How did you know where to find me, Harlequin?"
"I'd have died if I hadn't found you, fairest, loveliest----"
"That is no answer! Answer me!"
"Why did you flee?" he asked. "Answer that, first."
She glanced at her cigarette and shrugged her shoulders:
"You see why I fled, don't you? Now answer me."
The Harlequin presented the hilt of his sword which was set with a tiny
mirror.
"You see why I fled after you," he said, "don't you?"
"All the same," she insisted, smilingly, "I have been informed on
excellent authority that I am the only one, except the family, who knows
of this balcony. And here comes a Harlequin blundering in! _You_ are not
Mr. Wycherly; and you're certainly not Molly."
"Alas! My ultimate ends are not as shapely."
"Then who are you?" She added, laughing: "They're shapely enough, too."
"I am only a poor wandering, love-smitten Harlequin--" he said,
"scorned, despised, and mocked by beauty----"
"Love-smitten?" she repeated.
"Can you doubt it, now?"
She laughed gaily and leaned back against the balcony's velvet rail:
"You lose no time in declaring yourself, do you, Harlequin?--that is, if
you are hinting that _I_ have smitten you with the pretty passion."
"Through and through, beautiful dancer----"
"How do you know that I am beautiful under this mask?"
"I know many things. That's my compensation for being only a poor
mountebank of a Harlequin--magic penetration--the clairvoyance of
radium."
"Did you expect to find _me_ at the top of those cork-screw stairs?"
"I did."
"Why?"
"Inference. Every toad hides a jewel in its head. So I argued that
somewhere in the ugliness of darkest Philistia a gem must be hidden; and
I've searched for years--up and down throughout the haunts of men from
Gath to Ascalon. And--behold! My quest is ended at your pretty
feet!--Rose-Diamond of the World!"
He sank lithely on one knee; she laughed deliciously, looking down at
his masked face.
"Who are you, Harlequin?--whose wits and legs seem to be equally supple
and symmetrical?"
"Tell it not in Gath; Publish it not in the streets of Ascalon; I am
that man for whom you were destined before either you or I were born.
Are you frightened?"
The Byzantine dancer laughed and shook her head till all the golden
metal on her was set chiming.
He said, still on one knee at her feet:
"Exquisite phantom of an Empire dead, from what emblazoned sarcophagus
have you danced forth across our modern oceans to bewitch the Philistia
of to-day? Who clothed you in scarlet delicately? Who put ornaments of
gold upon your apparel----"
"You court me with Scripture as smoothly as Heaven's great Enemy," she
said--"and to your own ends, as does he. Are you leagued with him, O
agile and intrusive Harlequin, to steal away my peace of mind?"
Lithely, silently he leaped up to the balustrade and, gathering his
ankles under him, squatted there, cross-legged, peering sideways at her
through the slanting eye-holes.
"If that screen behind you gives way," she warned him, "you will have
accomplished your last harlequinade."
He glanced coolly over his shoulder:
"How far is it to the floor below, do you suppose?"
"Far enough to make a good harlequin out of a live one," she said....
"Please be careful; I really mean it."
"Child," he said solemnly, "do you suppose that I mind falling a hundred
feet or so on my head? I've already fallen infinitely farther than that
this evening."
"And it didn't kill you?" she exclaimed, clasping her hands,
dramatically.
"No. Because our destiny must first be accomplished before I die."
"Ours?"
"Yours and mine, pretty dancer! I've already fulfilled _my_ destiny by
falling in love with you at first sight. That was a long fall, wasn't
it?"
"Very. Am I to fulfil mine in a similar manner?"
"You are."
"Will it--kill me, do you think?"
"I don't think so. Try it."
"Will it hurt?--this terrible fall? And how far must I descend to fall
in love with you?"
"Sometimes falling in love does hurt," he said gravely, "when the fall
is a long one."
"Is this to be a long one?"
"You may think so."
"Then I decline to tumble. Please go somewhere about your business,
Master Harlequin. I'm inclined to like you."
"Dancer, my life's business is wherever you happen to be."
"Why are you so sure?"
"Magic," he said seriously. "I deal in it."
"Wonderful! Your accomplishments overwhelm me. Perhaps, through the aid
of magic, you can even tell me who I am!"
"I think I can."
"Is that another threat of magic?"
"It's a bet, too, if you like."
"Are you offering to bet me that, before I unmask, you will be able to
discover who I am?"
"Yes. Will you make it a wager?" She stood, silent, irresolute,
cautious but curious; then:
"Do you mean that you can find out who _I am_? Now? Here in this
balcony?"
"Certainly."
"That is sheer nonsense," she said with decision. "I'll bet you anything
you like."
"What stakes?"
"Why there's nothing to bet except the usual, is there?"
"You mean flowers, gloves, stockings, bon-bons?"
"Yes."
The Harlequin, smiling at her askance, drew from the hilt of his
lathe-sword a fresh cigarette, lighted it, looked across at the level
chandelier, and sent a ring of smoke toward the twinkling wilderness of
prisms hanging in mid-air.
"Let's be original or perish," he said. "I'll bet you a day out of my
life against a day out of yours that I discover who you are in ten
minutes."
"I won't accept such a silly wager! What would you do with me for a
day?"
The Harlequin bent his masked head. Over his body the lozenges of
scarlet and gold slid crinkling as though with suppressed and serpentine
mirth.
"_What_ are you laughing at?" she demanded half vexed, half amused.
"Your fears, pretty dancer."
"I am _not_ afraid!"
"Very well. Prove it! I have offered to bet you a day out of my life
that I'll tell you who you are. Are you afraid to wager a day out of
yours that I can't do it?"
She shook her head so that the burnished locks clustered against her
cheeks, and all over her slim figure the jingling gold rang melodiously.
"I haven't long to live," she observed. "A day out of life is too much
to risk."
"Why don't you think that you have long to live?"
"I haven't. I know it."
"_How_ do you know?"
"I just know.... Besides, I don't wish to live very long."
"You don't wish to live long?"
"Only as long as I'm young enough to be forgetful. Old age is a
horror--in some cases. I don't desire ever to be forty. After forty they
say one lives on memory. I don't wish to."
Through the slits of his mask his curious eyes watched her steadily.
"You're not yet twenty-four," he said.
"Not quite. That is a good guess, Harlequin."
"And you don't want to live to be old?"
"No, I don't wish to."
"But you are rather keen on living while you're young."
"I've never thought much about it. If I live, it's all right; if I die,
I don't think I'll mind it.... I'm sure I shouldn't."
Her cigarette had gone out. She tossed it aside and daintily consented
to exchange cigarettes with him, offering her little gold case.
"You're carefully inspecting my initials, aren't you?" she observed,
amused. "But that monogram will not help you, Master Harlequin."
"Marriage alters only the final initial. Are you, by any unhappy
chance----"
"That's for you to find out! I didn't say I was! I believe you _are_
making me tell you things!"
She threw back the lustrous hair that shadowed her cheeks and leaned
forward, her shadowed eyes fixed intently upon him through the apertures
of her golden mask.
"I'm beginning to wonder uneasily who _you_ may be, Monsieur Harlequin!
You alarm me a little."
"Aha!" he said. "I've told you I deal in magic! That you don't know who
I am, even after that confession, makes me reasonably certain who _you_
are."
"You're trying to scare me," she said, disdainfully.
"I'll do it, yet."
"I wonder."
"You'll wonder more than ever in a few moments.... I'm going to tell you
who you are. But first of all I want you to fix the forfeit----"
"Why--I don't know.... What do you want of me?" she asked, mockingly.
"Whatever you care to risk."
"Then you'll have to name it. Because I don't particularly care to offer
you anything.... And please hasten--I'll be missed presently----"
"Won't you bet one day out of your life?"
"No, I won't. I told you I wouldn't."
"Then--one hour. Just a single hour?"
"An hour?"
"Yes, sixty minutes, payable on demand: If I win, you will place at my
disposal one entire hour out of your life. Will you dare that much,
pretty dancer?"
She laughed, looked up at him; then readjusting her mask, she nodded
disdainfully. "Because," she observed, "it is quite impossible for you
ever to guess who I am. So do your very worst."
He sprang from the balustrade, landing lightly, his left hand spread
over his heart, his bi-corne flourished in the other.
"You are Strelsa Leeds!" he said in a low voice.
The golden dancer straightened up to her full height, astounded, and a
bright flood of colour stained her cheeks under the mask's curved edge.
"It--it is impossible that you should know--" she began, exasperated.
"How _could_ you? Only one person knew what I was to wear to-night!
I came by myself with my maid. It--it _is_ magic! It is
infernal--abominable magic----"
She checked herself, still standing very straight, the gorgeous,
blossom-woven cloth-of-gold rippling; the jewels shooting light from the
fillet that bound her hair.
After a silence:
"How did you know?" she asked, striving to smile through the flushed
chagrin. "It is perfectly horrid of you--anyhow----"
Curiosity checked her again; she stood gazing at him in silence,
striving to pierce the eye-slits of that black skin-mask--trying to
interpret the expression of the mischievous mobile mouth below it--or,
perhaps the malice was all in those slanting slits behind which two
strange eyes sparkled steadily out at her from the shadow.
"Strelsa Leeds," he repeated, and flourished one hand in graceful
emphasis as she coloured hotly again. And he saw the teeth catch at her
under lip.
"It is outrageous," she declared. "Tell me instantly who you are!"
"First," he insisted, mischievously, "I claim the forfeit."
"The--the forfeit!" she faltered.
"Did you not lose your wager?"
She nodded reluctantly, searching the disguised features before her in
vain for a clew to his identity. Then, a trifle uneasily:
"Yes, of course I lost my wager. But--I did not clearly understand what
you meant by an hour out of my life."
"It is to be an hour at my disposal," he explained with another
grotesque bow. "I think that was the wager?"
"Y-yes."
"Unless," he remarked carelessly, "you desire the--ah--privilege and
indisputable prerogative of your delightful sex."
"The privilege of my sex? What is that?" she asked, dangerously polite.
"Why, to change your divine mind--repudiate the obligation----"
"Harlequin!"
"Madame?" with an elaborate and wriggling bow.
"I pay what I owe--always.... _Always!_ Do you understand?"
The Harlequin bowed again in arabesques, very low, yet with a singular
and almost devilish grace:
"Madame concedes that the poor Harlequin has won his wager?"
"Yes, I do--and you don't appear to be particularly humble, either."
"Madame insists on paying?" he inquired suavely.
"Yes, of course I do!" she said, uneasily. "I promised you an hour out
of my life. Am I to pay it now?"
"You pay by the minute--one minute a day for sixty days. I am going to
take the first minute now. _Perhaps_ I may ask for the other fifty-nine,
also."
"How?"
"Shall I show you how?"
"Very well."
"A magic pass or two, first," he said gaily, crooking one spangled knee
and spinning around. Then he whipped out his lathe-sword, held it above
his head, coolly passed a glittering arm around her waist, and looked
down into her flushed face.
"You will have to count out the sixty seconds," he said. "I shall be
otherwise occupied, and I can't trust myself to do two things at once."
"_What_ are you about to do? Sink through a trap-door with me?"
"I am about to salute you with the magic kiss. After that you'll be my
Columbine forever."
"That is not included in the bet! Is it?" she asked in real
consternation.
"I may do as I please with my hour, may I not?"
"Was it the bet that you were to be at liberty to--to kiss me?"
"I control absolutely an hour out of your life, do I not? I may use it
as I please. You had better count out sixty seconds."
She looked down, biting her lip, and touched one hand against her
cheeks, alternately, as though to cool them with the snowy contact.
He waited in silence for her reply.
"Very well," she said resolutely, "if you elect to use the first minute
of your hour as frivolously as that, I must submit, I suppose."
And she began to count aloud, rapidly: "One, two, three, four, five,
six, seven, eight, ni----"
Her face was averted; he could see the tip of one small ear all aflame.
Presently she ventured a swift glance around at him and saw that he was
laughing.
"Ten, eleven, twelve," she counted nervously, still watching him;
"thirteen, fourteen, fifteen--" panic threatened her; she doubled both
hands in the effort of self-control and timed her counting as though the
rapid beating of the tempo could hasten her immunity--"sixteen,
seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, one, two, three----"
"Play fair!" he exclaimed.
"I am trying to. Can't I say it that way up to ten, and then say
thirty?"
"Oh, certainly. I've still half a minute. You'd better hurry! I may
begin at any moment."
"Four--five--six--seven--m-m-m--thirty!" she cried, and the swift
numbers fled from her lips fairly stumbling over one another, tumbling
the sequence of hurrying numerals into one breathless gasp of: "Forty!"
His arm slid away from her waist; he stepped backward, and stood,
watching her, one finger crooked, supporting his chin, the ironical
smile hovering ever on his lips.
"Fifty!" she counted excitedly, her hands beating time to the counting;
"--fifty-one--two--three--four--m-m-m--sixty!"--and she whirled around
to face him with an impulsively triumphant gesture which terminated in
a swift curtsey, arms flung wide apart.
"_Voila!_" she said, breathlessly, "I've paid my bet! Am I not a good
sport, Harlequin? Own that I am and I will forgive your outrageous
impudence!"
"You are a most excellent sport, madame!" he conceded, grinning.
Relief from the tension cooled her cheeks; she laughed bewitchingly and
looked at him, exultant, unafraid.
"I frightened you well with my desperate counting, didn't I? You
completely forgot to do--anything, didn't you? Voyons! Admit it!"
"You completely terrorized me," he admitted.
"Besides," she said, "while I was so busily counting the seconds aloud
you couldn't very well have kissed me, could you? _That_ was strategy.
You couldn't have managed it, could you?"
"Not very easily."
"I really _did_ nonplus you, didn't I?" she insisted, aware of his
amusement.
"Oh, entirely," he said. "I became an abject idiot."
She stood breathing more evenly now, the pretty colour coming and going
in her cheeks. Considering him, looking alternately at his masked eyes
and at his expressive lips where a kind of silent and infernal mirth
still flickered, a sudden doubt assailed her. And presently, with a
dainty shrug, she turned and glanced down through the gilt lattice
toward the floor below.
"I suppose," she said, tauntingly, "you hope I'll believe that you
refrained from kissing me out of some belated consideration for decency.
But I know perfectly well that I perplexed you, and confused you and
intimidated you."
"This is, of course, the true solution of my motives in not kissing
you."
She turned toward him:
"What motive?"
"My motive for not kissing you. My only motive was consideration for
you, and for the sacred conventions of Sainte Grundy."
"I believe," she said scornfully, "you are really trying to make me
think that you _could_ have done it, and didn't!"
"You are too clever to believe me a martyr to principle, madame!"
She looked at him, stamped her foot till the bangles clashed.
"Why _didn't_ you kiss me, then?--if you wish to spoil my victory?"
"You yourself have told me why."
"Am I wrong? Could you--didn't I surprise you--in fact, paralyse
you--with astonishment?"
He laughed delighted; and she stamped her ringing foot again.
"I see," she said; "I am supposed to be doubly in your debt, now. I'd
rather you _had_ kissed me and we were quits!"
"It isn't too late you know."
"It _is_ too late. It's all over."
"Madame, I have fifty-nine other minutes in which to meet your kindly
expressed wishes. Did you forget?"
"What!" she exclaimed, aghast.
"One hour less one minute is still coming to me."
"Am I--have I--is this ridiculous performance going to happen again?"
she asked, appalled.
"Fifty-nine times," he laughed, doubling one spangled leg under the
other and whirling on his toe till he resembled a kaleidoscopic
teetotum. Then he drew his sword, cut right and left, slapped it back
into its sheath, and bowed his wriggling bow, one hand over his heart.
"Don't look so troubled, madame," he said. "I release you from your
debt. You need never pay me what you owe me."
Up went her small head, fiercely, under its flashing hair:
"Thank you. I pay my debts!" she said crisply.
"You decline to accept your release?"
"Yes, I do!--from _you!"_
"You'll see this thing through!--if it takes all winter?"
"Of course;" trying to smile, and not succeeding.
He touched her arm and pointed out across the hot, perfumed gulf to the
gilded clock on high:
"You _have_ seen it through! It is now one minute to midnight. We have
been here exactly one hour, lacking a minute, since our bet was on....
And I've wanted to kiss you all the while."
Confused, she looked at the clock under its elaborate azure and ormolu
foliations, then turned toward him, still uncertain of her immunity.
"Do you mean that you have really used the hour as you saw fit?" she
asked. "Have I done my part honestly?--Like a good sportsman? Have I
really?"
He bowed, laughingly:
"I cheerfully concede it. You are a good sport."
"And--all that time--" she began--"all that time----"
"I had my chances--sixty of them."
"And didn't take them?"
"Only wanted to--but didn't."
"You think that I----"
"A woman never forgets a man who has kissed her. I took the rather
hopeless chance that you might remember me without that. But it's a long
shot. I expect that you'll forget me."
"Do you _want_ me to remember you?" she asked, curiously.
"Yes. But you won't."
"How do you know?"
"I know--from the expression of your mouth, perhaps. You are too pretty,
too popular to remember a poor Harlequin."
"But you never have seen my face? Have you?"
"No."
"Then why do you continually say that I am pretty?"
"I can divine what you must be."
"Then--how--why did you refrain from--" She laughed lightly, and looked
up at him, mockingly. "Really, Harlequin, you _are_ funny. Do you
realise it?"
She laughed again and the slight flush came back into her cheeks.
"But you're nice, anyway.... Perhaps if you _had_ seen my face you might
have let me go unkissed all the quicker.... Masks cover horrible
surprises.... And, then again, if you _had_ seen it, _perhaps_ you might
_never_ have let me go at all!" she added, audaciously.
In the gilded balcony opposite, the orchestra had now ceased playing;
the whirl and noise of the dancers filled the immense momentary quiet.
Then soft chimes from the great clock sounded midnight amid cries of,
"Unmask! masks off, everybody!"
The Harlequin turned and drawing the black vizard from his face, bent
low and saluted her hand; and she, responding gaily with a curtsey,
looked up into the features of an utter stranger.
She stood silent a moment, the surprised smile stamped on her lips;
then, in her turn, she slipped the mask from her eyes.
"_Voila!_" she cried. "_C'est moi!_"
After a moment he said, half to himself;
"I knew well enough that you must be unusual. But I hadn't any
idea--any--idea----"
"Then--you are _not_ disappointed in me, monsieur?"
"My only regret is that I had my hour, and wasted it. Those hours never
sound twice for wandering harlequins."
"Poor Harlequin!" she said saucily--"I'm sorry, but even _your_ magic
can't recall a vanished hour! Poor, poor Harlequin! You were too
generous to me!"
"And now you are going to forget me," he said. "That is to be my
reward."
"Why--I don't think--I don't expect to forget you. I suppose I am likely
to know you some day.... _Who_ are you, please? Somebody very grand in
New York?"
"My name is Quarren."
There was a silence; she glanced down at the ball-room floor through
the lattice screen, then slowly turned around to look at him again.
"Have you ever heard of me?" he asked, smiling.
"Yes."
"Are you disappointed?"
"Y-es. Pleasantly.... I supposed you to be--different."
He laughed:
"Has the world been knocking me very dreadfully to you, Mrs. Leeds?"
"No.... One's impressions form without any reason--and
vaguely--from--nothing in particular.--I thought you were a very
different sort of man.--I am glad you are not."
"That is charming of you."
"It's honest. I had no desire to meet the type of man I supposed you to
be. Am I too frank?"
"No, indeed," he said, laughing, "but I'm horribly afraid that I really
am the kind of man you imagined me."
"You are not."
"How do you know?"
"No," she said, shaking her pretty head, "you can't be."
He said, quoting her own words amiably: "I'm merely one of the necessary
incidents of any social environment--like flowers and champagne----"
"Mr. Quarren!"
In her distress she laid an impulsive hand on his sleeve; he lifted it,
laid it across the back of his own hand, and bowing, saluted it lightly,
gaily.
"I am not offended," he said; "--I am what you supposed me."
"Please don't say it! You are not. I didn't know you; I
was--prejudiced----"
"You'll find me out sooner or later," he said laughing, "so I might as
well admit that your cap fitted me."
"It doesn't fit!" she retorted; "I was a perfect fool to say that!"
"As long as you like me," he returned, "does it make any difference what
I am?"
"Of course it does! I'm not likely to find a man agreeable unless he's
worth noticing."
"Am I?"
"Oh, gentle angler, I refuse to nibble. Be content that an hour out of
my life has sped very swiftly in your company!"
She turned and laid her hand on the little gilt door. He opened it for
her.
"You've been very nice to me," she said. "I won't forget you."
"You'll certainly forget me for that very reason. If I hadn't been nice
I'd have been the exception. And you would have remembered."
She said with an odd smile:
"Do you suppose that pleasant things have been so common in my life that
only the unpleasant episode makes any impression on my memory?"
"To really remember me as I want you to, you ought to have had something
unpardonable to forgive me."
"Perhaps I have!" she said, daringly; and slipped past him and down the
narrow stairs, her loup-mask fluttering from her elbow.
At the foot of the stairs she turned, looking back at him over her bare
shoulder:
"I've mortally offended at least three important men by hiding up there
with you. That is conceding _something_ to your attractions, isn't it?"
"Everything. Will you let me find you some supper--and let the mortally
offended suitors sit and whistle a bit longer?"
"Poor suitors--they've probably been performing heel-tattoos for an
hour.... Very well, then--I feel unusually shameless to-night--and I'll
go with you. But don't be disagreeable to me if a neglected and
glowering young man rushes up and drags me away by the back hair."
"Who for example?"
"Barent Van Dyne, for instance."
"Oh, we'll side-step that youthful Knickerbocker," said Quarren, gaily.
"Leave it to me, Mrs. Leeds."
"To behave so outrageously to Mr. Van Dyne is peculiarly horrid and
wicked of me," she said. "But you don't realise that--and--the fact
remains that you did _not_ take your forfeit. And I've a lot to make up
for that, haven't I?" she added so naïvely that they both gave way to
laughter unrestrained.
The light touch of her arm on his, now guiding him amid the noisy,
rollicking throngs, now yielding to his guidance, ceased as he threaded
a way through the crush to a corner, and seated her at a table for two.
In a few moments he came back with all kinds of delectable things; went
for more, returned laden, shamelessly pulled several palms between them
and the noisy outer world, and seated himself beside her.
With napkin and plate on the low table beside her, she permitted him to
serve her. As he filled her champagne glass she lifted it and looked
across it at him:
"How did you discover my identity?" she asked. "I'm devoured by
curiosity."
"Shall I tell you?"
"Please."
"I'll take a tumble in your estimation if I tell you."
"I don't think you will. Try it anyway."
"Very well then. Somebody told me."
"And you let me bet with you! And _you_ bet on a _certainty!_"
"I did."
"Oh!" she exclaimed reproachfully, "is that good sportsmanship, Mr.
Quarren?"
"No; very bad. And _that_ was why I didn't take the forfeit. Now you
understand."
She sat considering him, the champagne breaking in her glass.
"Yes, I do understand now. A good sportsman couldn't take a forfeit
which he won betting on a certainty.... That wasn't a real wager, was
it?"
"No, it wasn't."
"If it had been, I--I don't suppose you'd have let me go."
"Indeed not!"
They laughed, watching each other, curiously.
"Which ought to teach me never again to make any such highly original
and sporting wagers," she said. "Anyway, you were perfectly nice about
it. Of course you couldn't very well have been otherwise. Tell me, did
you really suppose me to be attractive? You couldn't judge. How could
you--under that mask?"
"Do you think that your mouth could have possibly belonged to any other
kind of a face except your own?" he said coolly.
"Is my mouth unusual?"
"Very."
"How is it unusual?"
"I haven't analysed the matter, but it is somehow so indescribable that
I guessed very easily what the other features must be."
"Oh, flattery! Oh, impudence! Do you remember when Falstaff said that
the lion could always recognise the true prince? Shame on you, Mr.
Quarren. You are not only a very adroit flatterer but a perfectly good
sportsman after all--and the most gifted tormentor I ever knew in all my
life. And I like you fine!" She laughed, and made a quick little
gesture, partly arrested as he met her more than half way, touching the
rim of his glass to hers. "To our friendship," he said.
"Our friendship," she repeated, gaily, "if the gods speed it."
"--And--its consequences," he added. "Don't forget those."
"What are they likely to be?"
"Who knows? That's the gamble! But let us recognise all kinds of
possibilities, and drink to them, too. Shall we?"
"What do you mean by the consequences of friendship?" she repeated,
hesitating.
"That is the interesting thing about a new friendship," he explained.
"Nobody can ever predict what the consequences are to be. Are you afraid
to drink to the sporting chances, hazards, accidents, and possibilities
of our new friendship, Mrs. Leeds? _That_ is a perfectly good sporting
proposition."
She considered him, interested, her eyes full of smiling curiosity,
perfectly conscious of the swift challenge of his lifted glass.
[Illustration: "'To our new friendship, Monsieur Harlequin!' she said
lightly."]
After a few seconds' hesitation she struck the ringing rim of her glass
against his:
"To our new friendship, Monsieur Harlequin!" she said lightly--"with
every sporting chance, worldly hazard, and heavenly possibility in it!"
For the first time the smile faded from his face, and something in his
altered features arrested her glass at her very lips.
"How suddenly serious you seem," she said. "Have I said anything?"
He drained his glass; after a second she tasted hers, looked at him,
finished it, still watching him.
"Really," she said; "you made me feel for a moment as though you and I
were performing a solemn rite. That was a new phase of you to me--that
exceedingly sudden and youthful gravity."
He remained silent. Into his mind, just for a second, and while in the
act of setting the glass to his lips, there had flashed a flicker of
pale clairvoyance. It seemed to illumine something within him which he
had never believed in--another self.
For that single instant he caught a glimpse of it, then it faded like a
spark in a confused dream.
He raised his head and looked gravely across at Strelsa Leeds; and
level-eyed, smiling, inquisitive, she returned his gaze.
Could this brief contact with her have evoked in him a far-buried
something which had never before given sign of existence? And could it
have been anything resembling aspiration that had glimmered so palely
out of an ordered and sordid commonplace personality which, with all
its talent for frivolity, he had accepted as his own?
Without reason a slight flush came into his cheeks.
"Why do you regard me so owlishly?" she asked, amused. "I repeat that
you made me feel as though we were performing a sort of solemn rite when
we drank our toast."
"You couldn't feel that way with such a thoroughly frivolous man as I
am. Could you?"
"I'm rather frivolous myself," she admitted, laughing. "I really can't
imagine why you made me feel so serious--or why you looked as though you
were. I've no talent for solemnity. Have you?"
"I don't think so," he said. "What a terrible din everybody is making!
How hot and stifling it is here--with all those cloying gardenias.... A
man said, this evening, that this sort of thing makes for anarchy....
It's rather beastly of me to sit here criticising my host's
magnificence.... Do you know--it's curious, too--but I wish that, for
the next hour or two, you and I were somewhere alone under a good wide
sky--where there was no noise. It's an odd idea, isn't it, Mrs. Leeds.
And probably you don't share it with me."
She remained silent, thoughtful, her violet-gray eyes humorously
considering him.
"How do you know I don't?" she said at last. "I'm not enamoured of
noise, either."
"There's another thing," he went on, smiling--"it's rather curious,
too--but somehow I've a sort of a vague idea that I've a lot of things
to talk to you about. It's odd, isn't it?"
"Well you know," she reminded him, "you couldn't very well have a lot
of things to talk to me about considering the fact that we've known each
other only an hour or so."
"It doesn't seem logical.... And yet, there's that inexplicable
sensation of being on the verge of fairly bursting into millions of
words for your benefit--words which all my life have been bottled up in
me, accumulating, waiting for this opportunity."
They both were laughing, yet already a slight tension threatened
both--had menaced them, vaguely, from the very first. It seemed to
impend ever so slightly, like a margin of faintest shadow edging
sunlight; yet it was always there.
"I haven't time for millions of words this evening," she said. "Won't
some remain fresh and sparkling and epigrammatic until--until----"
"To-morrow? They'll possibly keep that long."
"I didn't say to-morrow."
"I did."
"I'm perfectly aware of the subtle suggestion and subtler flattery, Mr.
Quarren."
"Then, may I see you to-morrow?"
"Utterly impossible--pitiably hopeless. You see I am frank about the
heart-rending disappointment it is to me--and must be to you. But after
I am awake I am in the hands of Mrs. Lannis. And there's no room for you
in that pretty cradle."
"The next day, then?"
"We're going to Florida for three weeks."
"You?"
"Molly and Jim and I."
"Palm Beach?"
"Ultimately."
"And then?"
"Oh! Have you the effrontery to tell me to my face that you'll be in the
same mind about me three weeks hence?"
"I have."
"Do you expect me to believe you?"
"I don't know--what to expect--of you, of myself," he said so quietly
that she looked up quickly.
"Mr. Quarren! _Are_ you a sentimental man? I had mentally absolved you
from _that_ preconception of mine--among other apparently unmerited
ideas concerning you."
"I suppose you'll arise and flee if I tell you that you're different
from other women," he said.
"You wouldn't be such an idiot as to tell me that, would you?"
"I might be. I'm just beginning to realise my capacity for imbecility.
You're different in this way anyhow; no woman ever before induced me to
pull a solemn countenance."
"I _don't_ induce you! I ask you not to."
"I _try_ not to; but, somehow, there's something so--so real about
_you_----"
"Are you accustomed to foregather with the disembodied?"
"I'm beginning to think that my world is rather thickly populated with
ghosts--phantoms of a more real world."
He looked at her soberly; she had thought him younger than he now
seemed. A slight irritation silenced her for a moment, then,
impatiently:
"You speak cynically and I dislike it. What reason have you to express
world-weary sentiments?--you who are young, who probably have never
known real sorrow, deep unhappiness! I have little patience with a
morbid view of anything, Mr. Quarren. I merely warn you--in the event of
your ever desiring to obtain my good graces."
"I do desire them."
"Then be yourself."
"I don't know what I am. I thought I knew. Your advent has disorganised
both my complacency and my resignation."
"What do you mean?"
"Must I answer?"
"Of course!" she said, laughing.
"Then--the Harlequin who followed you up those stairs, never came down
again."
"Oh!" she said, unenlightened.
"I'm wondering who it was who came down out of that balcony in the wake
of the golden dancer," he added.
"You and I--you very absurd young man. What are you trying to say?"
"I--wonder," he said, smiling, "what I am trying to say."
CHAPTER III
Sunshine illuminated the rose-silk curtains of Mrs. Leeds's bedroom with
parallel slats of light and cast a frail and tremulous net of gold
across her bed. The sparrows in the Japanese ivy seemed to be unusually
boisterous, and their persistent metallic chatter disturbed Strelsa who
presently unclosed her gray eyes upon her own reflected features in the
wall-glass opposite.
Face still flushed with slumber, she lay there considering her mirrored
features with humorous, sleepy eyes; then she sat up, stretched her
arms, yawned, patted her red lips with her palm, pressed her knuckles
over her eyelids, and presently slipped out of bed. Her bath was ready;
so was her maid.
A little later, cross-legged on the bed once more, she sat sipping her
chocolate and studying the morning papers with an interest and
satisfaction unjaded.
Coupled with the naïve curiosity of a kitten remained her unspoiled
capacity for pleasure, and the interest of a child in a world unfolding
daily in a sequence of miracles under her intent and delighted eyes.
Bare of throat and arm and shoulder, the lustrous hair shadowing her
face, she now appeared unexpectedly frail, even thin, as though the
fuller curves of the mould in which she was being formed had not yet
been filled up.
Fully dressed, gown and furs lent to her something of a youthful
maturity which was entirely deceptive; for here, in bed, the golden
daylight revealed childish contours accented so delicately that they
seemed almost sexless. And in her intent gray eyes and in her
undeveloped mind was all that completed the bodily and mental
harmony--youth unawakened as yet except to a confused memory of
pain--and the dreamy and passionless unconsciousness of an unusually
late adolescence.
At twenty-four Strelsa still looked upon her morning chocolate with a
healthy appetite; and the excitement of seeing her own name and picture
in the daily press had as yet lost none of its delightful thrill.
All the morning papers reported the Wycherlys' house-warming with
cloying detail. And she adored it. What paragraphs particularly
concerned herself, her capable maid had enclosed in inky brackets. These
Strelsa read first of all, warm with pleasure at every stereotyped
tribute to her loveliness.
The comments she perused were of all sorts, even the ungrammatical sort,
but she read them all with profound interest, and loved every one, even
the most fulsome. For life, and its kinder experience, was just
beginning for her after a shabby childhood, a lonely girlhood, and a
marriage unspeakable, the memory of which already had become to her as
vaguely poignant as the dull recollection of a nightmare.
So her appetite for kindness, even the newspaper variety, was keen and
not at all discriminating; and the reaction from two years'
solitude--two years of endurance, of shrinking from public comment--had
developed in her a fierce longing for pleasure and for play-fellows.
Her fellow-men had responded with an enthusiasm which still surprised
her delightfully at moments.
* * * * *
The clever Swedish maid now removed the four-legged tray from her knees;
Strelsa, propped on her pillows, was still intent on her newspapers,
satisfying a natural curiosity concerning what the world thought about
her costume of the night before, her beauty, herself, and the people she
knew. At last, agreeably satiated, she lowered the newspaper and lay
back, dreamy-eyed, faintly smiling, lost in pleasant retrospection.
Had she really appeared as charming last night as these exceedingly kind
New York newspapers pretended? Did this jolly world really consider her
so beautiful? She wished to believe it. She tried to. Perhaps it was
really true--because all these daily paragraphs, which had begun with
her advent into certain New York sets, must really have been founded on
something unusual about her.
And it could not be her fortune which continued to inspire such
journalistic loyalty and devotion, because she had none--scarcely enough
money in fact to manage with, dress with, pay her servants, and maintain
her pretty little house in the East Eighties.
It could not be her wit; she had no more than the average American girl.
Nor was there anything else in her--neither her cultivation,
attainments, nor talents--to entitle her to distinction. So apparently
it must be her beauty that evoked paragraphs which had already made her
a fashion in the metropolis--was making her a cult--even perhaps a
notoriety.
[Illustration: "Strelsa, propped on her pillows, was still intent on her
newspapers."]
Because those people who had personally known Reginald Leeds, were
exceedingly curious concerning this young girl who had been a nobody, as
far as New York was concerned, until her name became legally coupled
with the name of one of the richest and most dissipated scions of an old
and honourable New York family.
The public which had read with characteristic eagerness all about the
miserable finish of Reginald Leeds, found its abominable curiosity
piqued by his youthful widow's appearance in town.
It is the newspapers' business to give the public what it wants--at
least that appears to be the popular impression; and so they gave the
public all it wanted about Strelsa Leeds, in daily chunks. And then
some. Which, in the beginning, she shrank from, horrified, frightened,
astonished--because, in the beginning, every mention of her name was
coupled with a glossary in full explanation of who she was, entailing a
condensed review of a sordid story which, for two years, she had striven
to obliterate from her mind. But these post-mortems lasted only a week
or so. Except for a sporadic eruption of the case in a provincial paper
now and then, which somebody always thoughtfully sent to her, the press
finally let the tragedy alone, contenting its intellectual public with
daily chronicles of young Mrs. Leeds's social activities.
A million boarding houses throughout the land, read about her beauty
with avidity; and fat old women in soiled pink wrappers began to mention
her intimately to each other as "Strelsa Leeds"--the first hall-mark of
social fame--and there was loud discussion, in a million humble homes,
about the fashionable men who were paying her marked attention; and the
chances she had for bagging earls and dukes were maintained and
combated, below stairs and above, with an eagerness, envy, and
back-stairs knowledge truly and profoundly democratic.
* * * * *
Her morning mail had begun to assume almost fashionable proportions, but
she could not yet reconcile herself to the idea of even such a clever
maid as her own assuming power of social secretary. So she still read
and answered all her letters--or rather neglected to notice the
majority, which invested her with a kind of awe to some and made others
furious and unwillingly respectful.
Letters, bills, notes, invitations, advertisements were scattered over
the bedclothes as she lay there, thinking over the pleasures and
excitement of last night's folly--thinking of Quarren, among others, and
of the swift intimacy that had sprung up between them--like a
witch-flower over night--thinking of her imprudence, and of the cold
displeasure of Barent Van Dyne who, toward daylight, had found her
almost nose to nose with Quarren, absorbed in exchanging with that young
man ideas and perfectly futile notions about everything on top, inside,
and underneath the habitable globe.
She blushed as she remembered her flimsy excuses to Van Dyne--she had
the grace to blush over that memory--and how any of the dignity incident
to the occasion had been all Van Dyne's--and how, as she took his
irreproachable arm and parted ceremoniously with Quarren, she had
imprudently extended her hand behind her as her escort bore her away--a
childish impulse--the innocent coquetry of a village belle--she
flushed again at the recollection--and at the memory of Quarren's lips
on her finger-tips--and how her hand had closed on the gardenia he
pressed into it----
She turned her head on the pillow; the flower she had taken from him lay
beside her on her night table, limp, discoloured, malodorous; and she
picked it up, daintily, and flung it into the fireplace.
At the same moment the telephone rang downstairs in the library.
Presently her maid knocked, announcing Mr. Quarren on the wire.
"I'm not at home," said Strelsa, surprised, or rather trying to feel a
certain astonishment. What really surprised her was that she felt none.
Her maid was already closing the door behind her when Strelsa said:
"Wait a moment, Freda." And, after thinking, she smiled to herself and
added: "You may set my transmitter on the table beside me, and hang up
the receiver in the library.... Be sure to hang it up at once."
Then, sitting up in bed, she unhooked the receiver and set it to her
ear.
"Mr. Quarren," she began coldly, and without preliminary amenities,
"have you any possible excuse for awaking me at such an unearthly hour
as mid-day?"
"Good Lord," he exclaimed contritely, "did I do that?"
She had no more passion for the exact truth than the average woman, and
she quibbled:
"Do you think I would say so if it were not true?" she demanded.
"No, of course not----"
"Well, then!" An indignant pause. "But," she added honestly, "I was not
exactly what you might call asleep, although it practically amounts to
the same thing. I was reposing.... Are _you_ feeling quite fit this
morning?" she added demurely.
"I'd be all right if I could see you----"
"You can't! What an idea!"
"Why not? What are you going to do?"
"There's no particular reason why I should detail my daily duties,
obligations, and engagements to you; is there?--But I'm an unusually
kind-hearted person, and not easily offended by people's
inquisitiveness. So I'll overlook your bad manners. First, then, I am
lunching at the Province Club, then I am going to a matinée at the
Casino, afterward dropping in for tea at the Sprowls, dining at the
Calderas, going to the Opera with the Vernons, and afterward, with them,
to a dance at the Van Dynes.... So, will you kindly inform me where
_you_ enter the scene?"
She could hear him laugh over the telephone.
"What are you doing just now?" he asked.
"I am seated upon my innocent nocturnal couch, draped in exceedingly
intimate attire, conversing over the telephone with the original Paul
Pry."
"Could anything induce you to array yourself more conventionally,
receive me, and let me take you to your luncheon at the Province Club?"
"But I don't _wish_ to see you."
"Is that perfectly true?"
"Perfectly. I've just thrown your gardenia into the fireplace. Doesn't
that prove it?"
"Oh, no. Because it's too early, yet, for either of us to treasure such
things----"
"What horrid impertinence!"
"Isn't it! But your heavenly gift of humour will transform my impudence
into a harmless and diverting sincerity. Please let me see you, Mrs.
Leeds--just for a few moments."
"Why?"
"Because you are going South and there are three restless weeks ahead of
me----"
This time he could hear her clear, far laughter:
"What has _my_ going to Florida to do with _your_ restlessness?"
"Your very question irrevocably links cause and effect----"
"Don't be absurd, Mr. Quarren!"
"Absurdity is the badge of all our Guild----"
"What Guild do _you_ belong to?"
"The associated order of ardent suitors----"
"Mr. Quarren! You are becoming ridiculous; do you know it?"
"No, _I_ don't realise it, but they say all the rest of the world
considers suitors ridiculous----"
"Do you expect me to listen to such nonsense at such an hour in the
morning?"
"It's half past twelve; and my weak solution of nonsense is suitable to
the time of day----"
"Am I to understand that the solution becomes stronger as the day
advances?"
"Exactly; the solution becomes so concentrated and powerful that traces
of common-sense begin to appear----"
"I didn't notice any last night."
"Van Dyne interfered."
"Poor Mr. Van Dyne. If you'd been civil to him he might have asked you
to the dance to-night--if I had suggested it. But you were horridly
rude."
"I? Rude?"
"You're not going to be rude enough to say it was I who behaved badly to
him, are you? Oh, the shocking vanity of man! No doubt you are thinking
that it was I who, serpent-like, whispered temptation into your innocent
ear, and drew you away into a corner, and shoved palms in front of us,
and brought silver and fine linen, and rare fruits and sparkling wines;
and paid shameless court with an intelligent weather-eye always on the
watch for a flouted and justly indignant cavalier!"
"Yes," he said, "you did all those things. And now you're trying to
evade the results."
"What are the results?"
"A partly demented young man clamouring to see you at high-noon while
the cold cruel cause of his lunacy looks on and laughs."
"I'm afraid that young man must continue to clamour," she said,
immensely amused at the picture he drew. "How far away is he at this
moment?"
"In the Legation, a blithering wreck."
"Why not in his office frantically immersed in vast business enterprises
and cataclysmic speculations?"
"I'm rather afraid that if business immerses him too completely he will
be found drowned some day."
"You promised--_said_ that you were going to begin a vigorous campaign,"
she reminded him reproachfully. "I asked it of you; and you agreed."
"I am beginning life anew--or trying to--by seeking the perennial source
of daily spiritual and mundane inspiration----"
"Why won't you be serious?"
"I am. Were you not the source of my new inspiration? Last night did
something or other to me--I am not yet perfectly sure what it was. I
want to see you to be sure--if only for a--moment--merely to satisfy
myself that you are real----"
"Will one moment be enough?"
"Certainly."
"One second--or half a one?"
"Plenty."
"Very well--if you promise not to expect or ask for more than that----"
"That is terribly nice of you!"
"It is, overwhelmingly. But really I don't know whether I am nice or
merely weak-minded. Because I've lingered here gossiping so long with
you that I've simply got to fly like a mad creature about my dressing.
Good-bye----"
"Shall I come up immediately?"
"Of course not! I expect to be dressing for hours and
hours--figuratively speaking.... Perhaps you might start in ten minutes
if you are coming in a taxi."
"You are an angel----"
"That is not telephone vernacular.... And perhaps you had better be
prompt, because Mrs. Lannis is coming for me--that is, if you have
anything to--to say--that----"
She flushed up, annoyed at her own stupidity, then felt grateful to him
as he answered lightly:
"Of course; she might misunderstand our informality. Shall I see you in
half an hour?"
"If I can manage it," she said.
She managed it, somehow. At first, really indifferent, and not very
much amused, the talk with him had gradually aroused in her the same
interest and pleasurable curiosity that she had experienced in
exchanging badinage with him the night before. Now she really wanted to
see him, and she took enough trouble about it to set her deft maid
flying about her offices.
First a fragrant precursor of his advent arrived in the shape of a great
bunch of winter violets; and her maid fastened them to her black fox
muff. Then the distant door-bell sounded; and in an extraordinarily
short space of time, wearing her pretty fur hat, her boa, and carrying a
muff that matched both, with his violets pinned to it, she entered the
dim drawing-room, halting just beyond the threshold.
"Are you not ashamed," she said, severely, "to come battering at my door
at this hour of the day?"
"Abjectly."
They exchanged a brief handshake; she seated herself on the arm of a
sofa; he stood before the unlighted fireplace, looking at her with a
half smiling half curious air which made her laugh outright.
"Bien! C'est moi, monsieur," she said. "Me voici! C'est moi-même!"
"I believe you _are_ real after all," he admitted.
"Do I seem different?"
"Yes--and no."
"How am I different?"
"Well, somehow, last night, I got the notion that you were younger,
thinner--and not very real----"
"Are you presuming to criticise my appearance last night?" she asked
with mock indignation. "Because if you are, I proudly refer you to the
enlightened metropolitan morning press."
"I read all about you," he said, smiling.
"I am glad you did. You will doubtless now be inclined to treat me with
the respect due to my years and experience."
"I believe," he said, "that your gown and hat and furs make a charming
difference----"
"How perfectly horrid of you! I thought you admired my costume last
night!"
"Oh, Lord," he said--"you were sufficiently charming last night. But
now, in your fluffy furs, you seem rather taller--less slender
perhaps--and tremendously fetching----"
"Say that my clothes improve me, and that in reality I'm a horrid, thin
little beast!" she exclaimed, laughing. "I know I am, but I haven't
finished growing yet. Really that's the truth, Mr. Quarren. Would you
believe that I have grown an inch since last spring?"
"I believe it," he said, "but would you mind stopping now? You are
exactly right."
"You _know_ I'm thin and flat as a board!"
"You're perfect!"
"It's too late to say that to me----"
"It is too early to say more."
"Let's don't talk about myself, please."
"It has become the only subject in the world that interests me----"
"Please, Mr. Quarren! Are you actually attempting to be silly at this
hour of the day? The wise inanities of midnight sound perilously flat in
the sunshine--flatter than the flattest champagne, which no
bread-crumbs can galvanise into a single bubble. Tell me, why did you
wish to see me this morning. I mean the real reason? Was it merely to
find out whether I was weak-minded enough to receive you?"
He looked at her, smiling:
"I wanted to see whether you were as real and genuine and wholesome and
unspoiled and--and friendly as I thought you were last night."
"Am I?"
"More so."
"Are you so sure about my friendliness?"
"I want to believe in it," he said. "It means a lot to me already."
"Believe in it then, you very badly spoiled young man," she said,
stretching out her hand to him impulsively. "I do like you.... And now I
think you had better go--unless you want to see Mrs. Lannis."
Retaining her hand for a second he said:
"Before you leave town will you let me ask you a question?"
"I am leaving to-morrow. You'll have to ask it now."
Their hands fell apart; he seemed doubtful, and she awaited his
question, smilingly. And as he made no sign of asking she said:
"You have my permission to ask it. Is it a very impertinent question?"
"Very."
"How impertinent is it?" she inquired curiously.
"Unpardonably personal."
After a silence she laughed.
"Last night," she said, "you told me that I would probably forget you
unless I had something unpardonable to forgive you. Isn't this a good
opportunity to leave your unpardonable imprint upon my insulted
memory?"
"Excellent," he said. "This is my outrageous question: are you engaged
to be married?"
For a full minute she remained silent in her intense displeasure. After
the first swift glance of surprise her gray eyes had dropped, and she
sat on the gilded arm of the sofa, studying the floor covering--an
ancient Saraband rug, with the inevitable and monotonous river-loop
symbol covering its old-rose ground in uninteresting repetition. After a
while she lifted her head and met his gaze, quietly.
"I am trying to believe that you did not mean to be offensive," she
said. "And now that I have a shadow of a reason to pardon you, I shall
probably do so, ultimately."
"But you won't answer me?" he said, reddening.
"Of course not. Are we on any such footing of intimacy--even of
friendship, Mr. Quarren?"
"No. But you are going away--and my reason for speaking--" He checked
himself; his reasons were impossible; there was no extenuation to be
found in them, no adequate explanation for them, or for his attitude
toward this young girl which had crystallised over night--over a
sleepless, thrilling night--dazzling him with its wonder and its truth
and its purity in the clean rays of the morning sun.
She watched his expression as it changed, troubled, uncertain how to
regard him, now.
"It isn't very much like you, to ask me such a question," she said.
"Before I met you, you thought me one kind of a man; after I met you,
you thought me another. Have I turned out to be a third kind?"
"N-no."
"Would I turn into the first kind if I ask you again to answer my
question?"
She gave him a swift, expressionless glance:
"I want to like you; I'm trying to, Mr. Quarren. Won't you let me?"
"I want to have the right to like _you_, too--perhaps more than you will
care to have me----"
"Please don't speak that way--I don't know what you mean, anyway----"
"That is why I asked you the question--to find out whether I had a right
to----"
"Right!" she repeated. "What right? What do you mean? What have you
misinterpreted in me that has given you any rights as far as I am
concerned? Did you misunderstand our few hours of masked acquaintance--a
few moments of perfectly innocent imprudence?--my overlooking certain
conventions and listening to you at the telephone this morning--my
receiving you here at this silly hour? What has given you any right to
say anything to me, Mr. Quarren--to hint of the possibility of anything
serious--for the future--or at any time whatever?"
"I have no right," he said, wincing.
"Indeed you have not!" she rejoined warmly, flushed and affronted. "I am
glad that is perfectly clear to you."
"No right at all," he repeated--"except the personal privilege of
recognising what is cleanest and sweetest and most admirable and most
unspoiled in life; the right to care for it without knowing exactly
why--the desire to be part of it--as have all men who are awakened
out of trivial dreams when such a woman as you crosses their limited and
foolish horizon."
She sat staring at him, struggling to comprehend what he was saying,
perfectly unable to believe, nor even wishing to, yet painfully
attentive to his every word.
"Mr. Quarren," she said, "I was hurt. I imagined presumption where there
was none. But I am afraid you are romantic and impulsive to an amazing
degree. Yet, both romance and impulse have a place and a reason, not
undignified, in human intercourse."--She felt rather superior in turning
this phrase, and looked on him a little more kindly----
"If the compliment which you have left me to infer is purely a romantic
one, it is nevertheless unwarranted--and, forgive me, unacceptable. The
trouble is----"
She paused to recover her wits and her breath; but he took the latter
away again as he said:
"I am in love with you; that is the trouble, Mrs. Leeds. And I really
have no business to say so until I amount to something."
"You have no business to say so anyway after one single evening's
acquaintance!" she retorted hotly.
"Oh, that! If love were a matter of time and convention--like five
o'clock tea!--but it isn't, you know. It isn't the brevity of our
acquaintance that worries me; it's what _I_ am--and what _you_
are--and--and the long, long road I have to travel before I am worth
your lightest consideration--I never was in love before. Forgive my
crudeness. I'm only conscious of the--hopelessness of it all."
Breathless, confused, incredulous, she sat there staring at
him--listening to and watching this tall, quiet, cool young fellow who
was telling her such incomprehensible things in a manner that began to
fascinate her. With an effort she collected herself, shook off the
almost eerie interest that was already beginning to obsess her, and
stood up, flushed but composed.
"Shall we not say any more about it?" she said quietly. "Because there
is nothing more to say, Mr. Quarren--except--thank you for--for feeling
so amiably toward me--for believing me more than I really am.... And I
would like to have your friendship still, if I may----"
"You have it."
"Even yet?"
"Why not?... It's selfish of me to say it--but I wish you--could have
saved me," he said almost carelessly.
"From what, Mr. Quarren? I really do not understand you."
"From being what I am--the sort of man you first divined me to be."
"What do you mean by 'saving' you?" she asked, coldly.
"I don't know!--giving me a glimmer of hope I suppose--something to
strive for."
"One saves one's self," she said.
He turned an altered face toward her: and she looked at him intently.
"I guess you are right," he said with a short laugh. "If there is
anything worth saving, one saves one's self."
"I think that is true," she said.... "And--if my friendship--if you
really care for it----"
He met her gaze:
"I honestly don't know. I've been carried off my feet by you,
completely. A man, under such conditions, doesn't know anything--not
even enough to hold his tongue--as you may have noticed. I am in love
with you. As I am to-day, my love for you would do you no good--I don't
know whether yours would do me any good--or your friendship, either. It
ought to if I amounted to anything; but I don't--and I don't know."
"I wish you would not speak so bitterly--please----"
"All right. It wasn't bitterness; it was just whine. ... I'll go, now.
You will comprehend, after you think it over, that there is at least
nothing of impertinence in my loving you--only a blind unreason--a
deadly fear lest the other man in me, suddenly revealed, vanish before I
could understand him. Because when I saw you, life's meaning broke out
suddenly--like a star--and that's another stale simile. But one has to
climb very far before one can touch even the nearest of the stars.... So
forgive my one lucid interval.... I shall probably never have
another.... May I take you to your carriage?"
"Mrs. Lannis is calling for me."
"Then--I will take my leave--and the tatters of my reputation--any song
can buy it, now----"
"Mr. Quarren!"
"Yes?"
"I don't want you to go--like this. I want you to go away knowing in
your heart that you have been very--nice--agreeable--to a young girl who
hasn't perhaps had as much experience as you think----"
"Thank God," he said, smiling.
"I want you to like me, always," she said. "Will you?"
"I promise," he replied so blithely that for a moment his light irony
deceived her. Then something in his eyes left her silent, concerned,
unresponsive--only her heart seemed to repeat persistently in childish
reiteration, the endless question, Why? Why? Why? And she heard it but
found no answer where love was not, and had never been.
"I--am sorry," she said in a low voice. "I--I try to understand you--but
I don't seem to.... I am so _very_ sorry that you--care for me."
He took her gloved hand, and she let him.
"I guess I'm nothing but a harlequin after all," he said, "and they're
legitimate objects for pity. Good-bye, Mrs. Leeds. You've been very
patient and sweet with a blithering lunatic.... I've committed only
another harlequinade of a brand-new sort. But the fall from that balcony
would have been less destructive."
She looked at him out of her gray eyes.
"One thing," she said, with a tremulous smile, "you may be certain that
I am not going to forget you very easily."
"Another thing," he said, "I shall never forget you as long as I live;
and--you have my violets, I see. Are they to follow the gardenia?"
"Only when their time comes," she said, trying to laugh.
So he wished her a happy trip and sojourn in the South, and went away
into the city--downtown, by the way to drop into an office chair in an
empty office and listen to the click of a typewriter in the outer room,
and sit there hour after hour with his chin in his hand staring at
nothing out of the clear blue eyes of a boy.
And she went away to her luncheon at the Province Club with Susanne
Lannis who wished her to meet some of the governors--very grand
ladies--upon whose good will depended Strelsa's election to the most
aristocratic, comfortable, wisely managed, and thriftiest of all
metropolitan clubs.
After luncheon she, with Mrs. Lannis and Chrysos Lacy--a pretty
red-haired edition of her brother--went to see "Sumurun."
And after they had tea at the redoubtable Mrs. Sprowl's, where there
were more footmen than guests, more magnificence than comfort, and more
wickedness in the gossip than lemon in the tea or Irish in the more
popular high-ball.
The old lady, fat, pink, enormous, looked about her out of her little
glittering green eyes with a pleased conviction that everybody on earth
was mortally afraid of her. And everybody, who happened to be anybody in
New York, was exactly that--with a few eccentric exceptions like her
nephew, Karl Westguard, and half a dozen heavily upholstered matrons
whose social altitude left them nothing to be afraid of except lack of
deference and death.
Mrs. Sprowl had a fat, wheezy, and misleading laugh; and it took time
for Strelsa to understand that there was anything really venomous in the
old lady; but the gossip there that afternoon, and the wheezy delight in
driving a last nail into the coffin of some moribund reputation, made
plain to her why her hostess was held in such respectful terror.
The talk finally swerved from Molly Wycherly's ball to the Irish
Legation, and Mrs. Sprowl leaned toward Strelsa, and panted behind her
fan:
"A perfect scandal, child. The suppers those young men give there!
Orgies, I understand! No pretty actress in town is kept sighing long for
invitations. Even"--she whispered the name of a lovely and respectable
prima-donna with a perfectly good husband and progeny--and nodded so
violently that it set her coughing.
"Oh," cried Strelsa, distressed, "surely you have been misinformed!"
"Not in the least," wheezed the old lady. "She is no better than the
rest of 'em! And I sent for my nephew Karl, and I brought him up
roundly. 'Karl!' said I, 'what the devil do you mean! Do you want that
husband of hers dragging you all into court?' And, do you know, my dear,
he appeared perfectly astounded--said it wasn't so--just as you said a
moment ago. But I can put two and two together, yet; I'm not too old and
witless to do that! And I warrant you I gave him a tongue trouncing
which he won't forget. ... Probably he retailed it to that O'Hara man,
and to young Quarren, too. If he did it won't hurt 'em, either."
She was speaking now so generally that everybody heard her, and Cyrille
Caldera said:
"Ricky is certainly innocuous, anyway."
"Oh, _is_ he!" said Mrs. Sprowl with another wheezy laugh. "I fancy I
know that boy. Did you say 'harmless,' Susanne? Well, _you_ ought to
know, of course----"
Cyrille Caldera blushed brightly although her affair with Quarren had
been of the most innocent description.
[Illustration: "'A perfect scandal, child. The suppers those young men
give there!'"]
"There's probably as much ground for indicting Ricky as there is for
indicting me," she protested. "He's merely a nice, useful boy----"
"Rather vapid, don't you think?" observed a thin young woman in sables
and an abundance of front teeth.
"Who expects anything serious from Ricky? He possesses good manners, and
a sweet alacrity," said Chrysos Lacy, "and that's a rare combination."
"He's clever enough to be wicked, anyway," said Mrs. Sprowl. "Don't tell
me that every one of his sentimental affairs have been perfectly
harmless."
"Has he had many?" asked Strelsa before she meant to.
"Thousands, child. There was Betty Clyde--whose husband must have been
an idiot--and Cynthia Challis--she married Prince Sarnoff, you
remember----"
"The Sarnoffs are coming in February," observed Chrysos Lacy.
"I wonder if the Prince has had a tub since he left," said Mrs. Sprowl.
"How on earth Cynthia can endure that dried up yellow Tartar----"
"Cynthia was in love with Ricky I think," said Susanne Lannis.
"Most girls are when they come out, but their mothers won't let 'em
marry him. Poor Ricky."
"Poor Ricky," sighed Chrysos; "he is _so_ nice, and nobody is likely to
marry him."
"Why?" asked Strelsa.
"Because he's--why he's just Ricky. He has no money, you know. Didn't
you know it?"
"No," said Strelsa.
"That's the trouble--partly. Then there's no social advantage for any
girl in this set marrying him. He'll have to take a lame duck or go out
of his circle for a wife. And that means good-bye Ricky--unless he
marries a lame duck."
"Some unattractive person of uncertain age and a million," explained
Mrs. Lannis as Strelsa turned to her, perplexed.
"Ricky," said the lady with abundant teeth, "is a lightweight."
"The lightness, I think, is in his heels," said Strelsa. "He's
intelligent otherwise I fancy."
"Yes, but not intellectual."
"I think you are possibly mistaken."
The profusely dentate lady looked sharply at Strelsa; Susanne Lannis
laughed.
"Are _you_ his champion, Strelsa? I thought you had met him last night
for the first time."
"Mrs. Leeds is probably going the way of all women when they first meet
Dicky Quarren," observed Mrs. Sprowl with malicious satisfaction. "But
you must hurry and get over it, child, before Sir Charles Mallison
arrives." At which sally everybody laughed.
Strelsa's colour was high, but she merely smiled, not only at the
coupling of her name with Quarren's but at the hint of the British
officer's arrival.
Major Sir Charles Mallison had been over before, why, nobody knew,
because he was one of the wealthiest bachelors in England. Now it was
understood that he was coming again; and a great many well-meaning
people saw that agreeable gentleman's fate in the new beauty, Strelsa
Leeds; and did not hesitate to tell her so with the freedom of
fashionable banter.
"Yes," sighed Chrysos Lacy, sentimentally, "when you see Sir Charles
you'll forget Ricky."
"Doubtless," said Strelsa, still laughing. "But tell me, Mrs. Sprowl,
why does everybody wish to marry me to somebody? I'm very happy."
"It's our feminine sense of fitness and proportion that protests. In the
eternal balance of things material you ought to be as wealthy as you are
pretty."
"I have enough--almost----"
"Ah! the 'almost' betrays the canker feeding on that damask cheek!"
laughed Mrs. Lannis. "No, you must marry millions, Strelsa--you'll need
them."
"You are mistaken. I _have_ enough. I'd like to be happy for a while."
The naïve inference concerning the incompatibility of marriage and
happiness made them laugh again, forgetting perhaps the tragic shadow of
the past which had unconsciously evoked it.
After Strelsa and Mrs. Lannis had gone, a pair of old cats dropped in,
one in ermine, the other in sea-otter; and the inevitable discussion of
Strelsa Leeds began with a brutality and frankness paralleled only in
kennel parlance.
To a criticism of the girl's slenderness of physique Mrs. Sprowl laughed
loud and long.
"That's what's setting all the men crazy. The world's as full of curves
as I am; plumpness to the verge of redundancy is supposed to be popular
among men; a well-filled stocking behind the footlights sets the gaby
agape. But your man of the world has other tastes."
"Jaded tastes," said somebody.
"Maybe they're jaded and vicious--but they're his. And maybe that girl
has a body and limbs which are little more accented than a boy's. But
it's the last shriek among people who know."
"Not such a late one, either," said somebody. "Who was the French
sculptor who did the Merode?"
"Before that Lippo fixed the type," observed somebody else.
"Personally," remarked a third, "I don't fancy pipe-stems. Mrs. Leeds
needs padding--to suit my notions."
"Wait a year," said Mrs. Sprowl, significantly. "The beauty of that girl
will be scandalous when she fills out a little more.... If she only had
the wits to match what she is going to be!--But there's a streak of
something silly in her--I suspect latent sentiment--which is likely to
finish her if she doesn't look sharp. Fancy her taking up the cudgels
for Ricky, now!--a boy whose wits would be of no earthly account except
in doing what he is doing. And he's apparently persuaded that little
minx that he's intellectual! I'll have to talk to Ricky."
"You'd better talk to your nephew, too," said somebody, laughing.
"Who? Karl!" exclaimed the old lady, her little green eyes mere sparks
in the broad expanse of face. "Let me catch him mooning around that
girl! Let me catch Ricky philandering in earnest! I've made up my mind
about Strelsa Leeds, and"--she glared around her, fanning vigorously--"I
_think_ nobody is likely to interfere."
* * * * *
That evening, at the opera, Westguard came into her box, and she laid
down the law of limits to him so decisively that, taken aback,
astonished and chagrined, he found nothing to say for the moment.
When he did recover his voice and temper he informed her very decidedly
that he'd follow his own fancy as far as any woman was concerned.
But she only laughed derisively and sent him off to bring Quarren who
had entered the Vernons' box and was bending over Strelsa's shoulders.
When Quarren obeyed, which he did not do with the alacrity she had
taught him, she informed him with a brevity almost contemptuous that his
conduct with Strelsa at the Wycherlys had displeased her.
He said, surprised: "Why does it concern you? Mrs. Wycherly is standing
sponsor for Mrs. Leeds----"
"I shall relieve Molly Wycherly of any responsibility," said the old
lady. "I like that girl. Can Molly do as much as I can for her?"
He remained silent, disturbed, looking out across the glitter at
Strelsa.
Men crowded the Vernons' box, arriving in shoals and departing with very
bad grace when it became necessary to give place to new arrivals.
"Do you see?" said the old lady, tendering him her opera glass.
"What?" he asked sullenly.
"A new planet. Use your telescope, Rix--and also amass a little
common-sense. Yonder sits a future duchess, or a countess, if I care to
start things for her. Which I shan't--in that direction."
"There are no poor duchesses or countesses, of course," he remarked with
an unpleasant laugh.
Mrs. Sprowl looked at him, ironically.
"I understand the Earl of Dankmere, perfectly," she said--"also other
people, including young, and sulky boys. So if you clearly understand my
wishes, and the girl doesn't make a fool of herself over you or any
other callow ineligible, her future will give me something agreeable to
occupy me."
The blood stung his face as he stood up--a tall graceful figure among
the others in the box--a clean-cut, wholesome boy to all appearances,
with that easy and amiable presence which is not distinction but which
sometimes is even more agreeable.
Lips compressed, the flush still hot on his face, he stood silent,
tasting all the bitterness that his career had stored up for him--sick
with contempt for a self that could accept and swallow such things. For
he had been well schooled, but scarcely to that contemptible point.
"Of course," he said, pleasantly, "you understand that I shall do as I
please."
Mrs. Sprowl laughed:
"I'll see to that, too, Ricky."
Chrysos Lacy leaned forward and began to talk to him, and his training
reacted mechanically, for he seemed at once to become his gay and
engaging self.
He did not return to the Vernons' box nor did he see Strelsa again
before she went South.
The next night a note was delivered to him, written from the Wycherlys'
car, "Wind-Flower."
"MY DEAR MR. QUARREN:
"Why did you not come back to say good-bye? You spoke of doing so.
I'm afraid Chrysos Lacy is responsible.
"The dance at the Van Dynes was very jolly. I am exceedingly sorry
you were not there. Thank you for the flowers and bon-bons that
were delivered to me in my state-room. My violets are not yet
entirely faded, so they have not yet joined your gardenia in the
limbo of useless things.
"Mr. Westguard came to the train. He _is_ nice.
"Mr. O'Hara and Chrysos and Jack Lacy were there, so in spite of
your conspicuous absence the Legation maintained its gay reputation
and covered itself with immortal blarney.
"This letter was started as a note to thank you for your gifts, but
it is becoming a serial as Molly and Jim and I sit here watching
the North Carolina landscape fly past our windows like streaks of
brown lightened only by the occasional delicious and sunny green of
some long-leafed pine.
"There's nothing to see from horizon to horizon except the
monotonous repetition of mules and niggers and evil-looking cypress
swamps and a few razor-backs and a buzzard flying very high in the
blue.
"Thank you again for my flowers.... I wonder if you understand that
my instinct is to be friends with you?
"It was from the very beginning.
"And please don't be absurd enough to think that I am going to
forget you--or our jolly escapade at the Wycherly ball. You behaved
very handsomely once. I know I can count on your kindness to me.
"Good-bye, and many many thanks--as Jack Lacy says--'f'r the manny
booggy-rides, an' th' goom-candy, an' the boonches av malagy
grrapes'!
"Sincerely your friend,
"STRELSA LEEDS."
That same day Sir Charles Mallison arrived in New York and went directly
to Mrs. Sprowl's house. Their interview was rather brief but loudly
cordial on the old lady's part:
"How's my sister and Foxy?" she asked--meaning Sir Renard and Lady
Spinney.
Sir Charles regretted he had not seen them.
"And you?"
"Quite fit, thanks." And he gravely trusted that her own health was
satisfactory.
"You haven't changed your mind?" she asked with a smile which the
profane might consider more like a grin.
Sir Charles said he had not, and a healthy colour showed under the tan.
"All these years," commented the old lady, ironically.
"Four," said Sir Charles.
"Was it four years ago when you saw her in Egypt?"
"Four years--last month--the tenth."
"And never saw her again?"
"Never."
Mrs. Sprowl shook with asthmatic mirth:
"Such story-book constancy! Why didn't you ask your friend the late
Sirdar to have Leeds pitched into the Nile. It would have saved you
those four years' waiting? You know you haven't many years to waste, Sir
Charles."
"I'm forty-five," he said, colouring painfully.
"Four years gone to hell," said the old lady with that delicate candour
which sometimes characterised her.... "And now what do you propose to do
with the rest of 'em? Dawdle away your time?"
[Illustration: "'Is--Mrs. Leeds--well?' he ventured at length, reddening
again."]
"Face my fate," he admitted touching his moustache and fearfully
embarrassed.
"Well, if you're in a hurry, you'll have to go down South to face it.
She's at Palm Beach for the next three weeks."
"Thank you," he said.
She looked up at him, her little opaque green eyes a trifle softened.
"I am trying to get you the prettiest woman in America," she said. "I'm
ready to fight off everybody else--beat 'em to death," she added, her
eyes snapping, then suddenly kind again--"because, Sir Charles, I like
you. And for no other reason on earth!"
Which was not the exact truth. It was for another man's sake she was
kind to him. And the other man had been dead many years.
Sir Charles thanked her, awkwardly, and fell silent again, pulling his
moustache.
"Is--Mrs. Leeds--well?" he ventured, at length, reddening again.
"Perfectly. She's a bit wiry just now--thin--leggy, y' know. Some
fanciers prefer 'em weedy. But she'll plump up. I know the breed."
He shrank from her loud voice and the vulgarity of her comments, and she
was aware of it and didn't care a rap. There were plenty of noble ladies
as vulgar as she, and more so--and anyway it was not this well-built,
sober-faced man of forty-five whom she was serving with all the craft
and insolence and brutality and generosity that was in her--it was the
son of a dead man who had been much to her. How much nobody in these
days gossiped about any longer, for it was a long time ago, a long, long
time ago that she had made her curtsey to a young queen and a prince
consort. And Sir Charles's father had died at Majuba Hill.
"There's a wretched little knock-kneed peer on the cards," she observed;
"Dankmere. He seems to think she has money or something. If he comes
over here, as my sister writes, I'll set him straighter than his own
legs. And I've written Foxy to tell him so."
"Dankmere is a very good chap," said Sir Charles, terribly embarrassed.
"But not good enough. His level is the Quartier d'Europe. He'll find it;
no fear.... When do you go South?"
"To-morrow," he said, so honestly that she grinned again.
"Then I'll give you a letter to Molly Wycherly. Her husband is Jim
Wycherly--one of your sort--eternally lumbering after something to kill.
He has a bungalow on some lagoon where he murders ducks, and no doubt
he'll go there. But his wife will be stopping at Palm Beach. I'll send
you a letter to her in the morning."
"Many thanks," said Sir Charles, shyly.
CHAPTER IV
Strelsa remained South longer than she had expected to remain, and at
the end of the third week Quarren wrote her.
"DEAR MRS. LEEDS:
"Will you accept from me a copy of Karl's new book? And are you
ever coming back? You are missing an unusually diverting winter;
the opera is exceptional, there are some really interesting plays
in town and several new and amusing people--Prince and Princess
Sarnoff for example; and the Earl of Dankmere, an anxious, and
perplexed little man, sadly hard up, and simple-minded enough to
say so; which amuses everybody immensely.
"He's pathetically original; plebeian on his mother's side; very
good-natured; nothing at all of a sportsman; and painfully short of
both intellect and cash--a funny, harmless, distracted little man
who runs about asking everybody the best and quickest methods of
amassing a comfortable fortune in America. And I must say that
people have jollied him rather cruelly.
"The Sarnoffs on the other hand are modest and nice people--the
Prince is a yellow, dried-up Asiatic who is making a collection of
parasites--a shrewd, kindly, and clever little scientist. His wife
is a charming girl, intellectual but deliciously feminine. She was
Cynthia Challis before her marriage, and always a most attractive
and engaging personality. They dined with us at the Legation on
Thursday.
"Afterward there was a dance at Mrs. Sprowl's. I led from one end,
Lester Caldera from the other. One or two newspapers criticised the
decorations and favours as vulgarly expensive; spoke of a 'monkey
figure'--purely imaginary--which they said I introduced into the
cotillion, and that the favours were marmosets!--who probably were
the intellectual peers of anybody present.
"The old lady is in a terrific temper. I'm afraid some poor
scribblers are going to catch it. I thought it very funny.
"Speaking of scribblers and temper reminds me that Karl Westguard's
new book is stirring up a toy tempest. He has succeeded in
offending a dozen people who pretend to recognise themselves or
their relatives among the various characters. I don't know whether
the novel is really any good, or not. We, who know Karl so
intimately, find it hard to realise that perhaps he may be a writer
of some importance.
"There appears to be considerable excitement about this new book.
People seem inclined to discuss it at dinners; Karl's publishers
are delighted. Karl, on the contrary, is not at all flattered by
the kind of a success that menaces him. He is mad all through, but
not as mad as his redoubtable aunt, who tells everybody that he's a
scribbling lunatic who doesn't know what he's writing, and that she
washes her fat and gem-laden hands of him henceforth.
"Poor Karl! He's already thirty-seven; he's written fifteen books,
no one of which, he tells me, ever before stirred up anybody's
interest. But this newest novel, 'The Real Thing,' has already gone
into three editions in two weeks--whatever that actually means--and
still the re-orders are pouring in, and his publishers are madly
booming it, and several indignant people are threatening Karl with
the law of libel, and Karl is partly furious, partly amused, and
entirely astonished at the whole affair.
"Because you see, the people who think they recognise portraits of
themselves or their friends in several of the unattractive
characters in the story--are as usual, in error. Karl's people are
always purely and synthetically composite. Besides everybody who
knows Karl Westguard ought to know that he's too decent a fellow,
and too good a workman to use models stupidly. Anybody can copy;
anybody can reproduce the obvious. Even photographers are artists
in these days. Good work is a synthesis founded on truth, and
carried logically to a conclusion.
"But it's useless to try to convince the Philistines. Once
possessed with the idea that they or their friends are 'meant,' as
they say, Archimedes's lever could not pry them loose from their
agreeably painful obsession.
"Then there are other sorts of humans who are already bothering
Karl. This species recognise in every 'hero' or 'heroine' a minute
mental and physical analysis of themselves and their own
particular, specific, and petty emotions. Proud, happy, flattered,
they permit nobody to mistake the supposed tribute which they are
entirely self-persuaded that the novelist has offered to them.
"And these phases of 'The Real Thing' are fretting and mortifying
Karl to the verge of distraction. He awakes to find himself not
famous but notorious--not criticised for his workmanship, good or
bad, but gabbled about because some ludicrous old Uncle Foozle
pretends to discover a similarity between Karl's episodes and
characters and certain doings of which Uncle F. is personally
cognisant.
"The great resource of stupidity is and has always been the
anagram; and as stupidity is almost invariably suspicious, the hunt
for hidden meanings preoccupies the majority of mankind.
* * * * *
"Because I have ventured to send you Karl's new book is no reason
why I also should have presumed to write you a treatise in several
volumes.
"But I miss you, oddly enough--miss everything I never had of
you--your opinions on what interests us both; the delightful
discussions of things important, which have never taken place
between us. It's odd, isn't it, Mrs. Leeds, that I miss, long for,
and even remember so much that has never been?
"Molly Wycherly wrote to Mrs. Lannis that you were having a gay
time in Florida; that Sir Charles Mallison had joined your party;
that you'd had luncheons and dinners given you at the Club, at the
Inlet, at the Wiers's place, 'Coquina Castle'; and that Jim and Sir
Charles had bravely slain many ducks. Which is certainly glory
enough to go round. In a friendly little note to me you were good
enough to ask what I am doing, and to emphasise your request for an
answer by underlining your request.
"Proud and flattered by your generous interest I hasten to inform
you that I am leading the same useful, serious, profitable,
purposeful, ambitious, and ennobling life which I was leading when
I first met you. Such a laudable existence makes for one's
self-respect; and, happy in that consciousness, undisturbed by
journalistic accusations concerning marmosets and vulgarity, I
concentrate my entire intellectual efforts upon keeping my job,
which is to remain deaf, dumb, and blind, and at the same time be
ornamental, resourceful, good-tempered, and amusing to those who
are not invariably all of these things at the same time.
"Is it too much to expect another note from you?
"Sincerely yours,
"RICHARD STANLEY QUARREN."
She answered him on the fourth week of her absence.
"MY DEAR MR. QUARREN:
"Your letter interested me, but there was all through it an
undertone of cynicism which rang false--almost a dissonance to an
ear which has heard you strike a truer chord.
"I do not like what you say of yourself, or of your life. I have
talked very seriously with Molly, who adores you; and she evidently
thinks you capable of achieving anything you care to undertake.
Which is my own opinion--based on twenty-four hours of
acquaintance.
"I have read Mr. Westguard's novel. Everybody here is reading it.
I'd like to talk to you about it, some day. Mr. Westguard's intense
bitterness confuses me a little, and seems almost to paralyse any
critical judgment I may possess. A crusade in fiction has always
seemed to me but a sterile effort. To do a thing is fine; to talk
about it in fiction a far less admirable performance--like the
small boy, safe in the window, who defies his enemy with out-thrust
tongue.
"When I was young--a somewhat lonely child, with only a very few
books to companion me--I pored over Carlyle's 'French Revolution,'
and hated Philip Egalité. But that youthful hatred was a little
modified because Egalité did actually become personally active. If
he had only talked, my hatred would have become contempt for a
renegade who did not possess the courage of his convictions. But he
voted death to his own caste, facing the tribunal. He talked, but
he also acted.
"I do not mean this as a parallel between Mr. Westguard and the
sanguinary French iconoclast. Mr. Westguard, also, has the courage
of his convictions; he lives, I understand, the life which he
considers a proper one. It is the life which he preaches in 'The
Real Thing'--a somewhat solemn, self-respecting, self-supporting
existence, devoted to self-development; a life of upright thinking,
and the fulfilment of duty, civil and religious, incident to
dignified citizenship. Such a life may be a blameless one; I don't
know.
"Also it might even be admirable within its limits if Mr. Westguard
did not also appoint himself critic, disciplinarian, and prophet of
that particular section of society into which accident of birth has
dumped him.
"Probably there is no section of human society that does not need a
wholesome scourging now and then, but somehow, it seems to me, that
it could be done less bitterly and with better grace than Mr.
Westguard does it in his book. The lash, swung from within, and
applied with judgment and discrimination, ought to do a more
thorough and convincing piece of work than a knout allied with the
clubs of the proletariat, hitting at every head in sight.
"Let the prophets and sybils, the augurs and oracles of the _Hoi
polloi_ address themselves to them; and let ours talk to us, not
_about_ us to the world at large.
"A renegade from either side makes an unholy alliance, and, with
his first shout from the public pulpit, tightens the master knot
which he is trying to untie to the glory of God and for the sake of
peace and good will on earth. And the result is Donnybrook Fair.
"I hate to speak this way to you of your friend, and about a man I
like and, in a measure, really respect. But this is what I think.
And my inclination is to tell you the truth, always.
"Concerning the artistic value of Mr. Westguard's literary
performance, I know little. The simplicity of his language
recommends the pages to me. The book is easy to read. Perhaps
therein lies his art; I do not know.
"Now, as I am in an unaccountably serious mood amid all the
frivolity of this semi-tropical place, may I not say to you
something about yourself? How are you going to silence me?
"Well, then; you seem to reason illogically. You make little of
yourself, yet you offer me your friendship, by implication, every
time you write to me. You seek my society mentally. Do you really
believe that my mind is so easily satisfied with intellectual
rubbish, or that I am flattered by letters from a nobody?
"What do you suppose there is attractive about you, Mr. Quarren--if
you really do amount to as little as you pretend? I've seen
handsomer men, monsieur, wealthier men, more intelligent men; men
more experienced, men of far greater talents and attainments.
"Why do you suppose that I sit here in the Southern sunshine
writing to you when there are dozens of men perfectly ready to
amuse me?--and qualified to do it, too!
"For the sake of your _beaux-yeux_? _Non pas!_
"But there is a _something_ which the world recognises as a subtle
and nameless sympathy. And it stretches an invisible filament
between you and the girl who is writing to you.
"That tie is not founded on sentiment; I think you know that. And,
of things spiritual, you and I have never yet spoken.
"Therefore I conclude that the tie must be purely intellectual;
that mind calls to mind and finds contentment in the far response.
"So, when you pretend to me that you are of no intellectual
account, you pay me a scurvy compliment. _Quod erat demonstrandum._
"With this gentle reproof I seal my long, long letter, and go where
the jasmine twineth and the orchestra playeth; for it is tea-time,
my friend, and the Park of Peacocks is all a-glitter with plumage.
Soft eyes look wealth to eyes that ask again; and all is brazen as
a dinner bell!
"O friend! do you know that since I have been here I might have
attained to fortune, had I cared to select any one of several
generous gentlemen who have been good enough to thrust that
commodity at me?
"To be asked to marry a man no longer distresses me. I am all over
the romantic idea of being sorry for wealthy amateurs who make me a
plain business proposition, offering to invest a fortune in my
good looks. To amateurs, connoisseurs, and collectors, there is no
such thing as a fixed market value to anything. An object of art is
worth what it can be bought for. I don't yet know how much I am
worth. I may yet find out.
"There are nice men here, odious men, harmless men, colourless men,
worthy men, and the ever-present fool. He is really the happiest, I
suppose.
"Then, all in a class by himself, is an Englishman, one Sir Charles
Mallison. I don't know what to tell you about him except that I
feel exceedingly safe and comfortable when I am with him.
"He says very little; I say even less. But it is agreeable to be
with him.
"He is middle-aged, and, I imagine, very wise. Perhaps his
reticence makes me think so. He and Mr. Wycherly shoot ducks on the
lagoon--and politics into each other.
"I must go. You are not here to persuade me to stay and talk
nonsense to you against my better judgment. You're quite helpless,
you see. So I'm off.
"Will you write to me again?
"STRELSA LEEDS."
A week after Quarren had answered her letter O'Hara called his attention
to a paragraph in a morning paper which hinted at an engagement between
Sir Charles Mallison and Mrs. Leeds.
Next day's paper denied it on excellent authority; so, naturally, the
world at large believed the contrary.
Southern news also revealed the interesting item that the yacht,
_Yulan_, belonging to Mrs. Sprowl's hatchet-faced nephew, Langly Sprowl,
had sailed from Miami for the West Indies with the owner and Mrs. Leeds
and Sir Charles Mallison among the guests.
The _Yulan_ had not as fragrant a reputation as its exotic name might
signify, respectable parties being in the minority aboard her, but
Langly Sprowl was Langly Sprowl, and few people declined any invitation
of his.
He was rather a remarkable young man, thin as a blade, with a voracious
appetite and no morals. Nor did he care whether anybody else had any.
What he wanted he went after with a cold and unsensitive directness that
no newspapers had been courageous enough to characterise. He wouldn't
have cared if they had.
Among other things that he had wanted, recently, was another man's wife.
The other man being of his own caste made no difference to him; he
simply forced him to let his wife divorce him; which, it was understood,
that pretty young matron was now doing as rapidly as the laws of Nevada
allowed.
Meanwhile Langly Sprowl had met Strelsa Leeds.
* * * * *
The sailing of the _Yulan_ for the West Indies became the topic of
dinner and dance gossip; and Quarren heard every interpretation that
curiosity and malice could put upon the episode.
He had been feeling rather cheerful that day; a misguided man from
Jersey City had suddenly developed a mania for a country home. Quarren
personally conducted him all over Tappan-Zee Park on the Hudson, through
mud and slush in a skidding touring car, with the result that the man
had become a pioneer and had promised to purchase a building site.
So Quarren came back to the Legation that afternoon feeling almost
buoyant, and discovered Westguard in all kinds of temper, smoking a huge
faïence pipe which he always did when angry, and which had become known
as "The Weather-breeder."
[Illustration: "'I write,' said Westguard, furious, 'because I have a
message to deliv--'"]
"Jetzt geht das Wetter los!" quoted Quarren, dropping into a seat by the
fire. "Where is this particular area of low depression centred, Karl?"
"Over my damn book. The papers insist it's a _livre-à-clef_; and I am
certain the thing is selling on that account! I tell you it's
humiliating. I've done my best as honestly as I know how, and not one
critic even mentions the philosophy of the thing; all they notice is the
mere story and the supposed resemblance between my characters and living
people! I'm cursed if I ever----"
"Oh, shut up!" said Quarren tranquilly. "If you're a novelist you write
to amuse people, and you ought to be thankful that you've succeeded."
"Confound it!" roared Westguard, "I write to _instruct_ people! not to
keep 'em from yawning!"
"Then you've made a jolly fluke of it, that's all--because you have
accidentally written a corking good story--good enough and interesting
enough to make people stand for the cold chunks of philosophical
admonition with which you've spread your sandwich--thinly, Heaven be
praised!"
"I write," said Westguard, furious, "because I've a message to
deliv----"
"Help!" moaned Quarren. "You write because it's in you to do it; because
you've nothing more interesting to do; and because it enables you to
make a decent and honourable living!"
"Do those reasons prevent my having a message to deliver?" roared
Westguard.
"No, they exist in spite of it. You'd write anyway, whether or not you
believed you had a message to deliver. You've written some fifteen
novels, and fifteen times you have smothered your story with your
message. This time, by accident, the story got its second breath, and
romped home, with 'Message' a bad second, and that selling plater,
'Philosophy,' left at the post----"
"Go on!--you irreverent tout!" growled Westguard; "I want my novels
read, of course. Any author does. But I wish to Heaven somebody would
try to interpret the important lessons which I----"
"Oh, preciousness and splash! Tell your story as well as you can, and if
it's well done there'll be latent lessons enough in it."
"Are you perhaps instructing me in my own profession?" asked the other,
smiling.
"Heaven knows I'm not venturing----"
"Heaven knows you _are_! Also there is something In what you say--" He
sat smoking, thoughtfully, eyes narrowing in the fire--"if I only
_could_ manage that!--to arrest the public's attention by the rather
cheap medium of the story, and then, cleverly, shoot a few moral pills
into 'em.... That's one way, of course----"
"Like the drums of the Salvation Army."
Westguard looked around at him, suspiciously, but Quarren seemed to be
serious enough.
"I suppose it doesn't matter much how a fellow collects an audience, so
that he does collect one."
"Exactly," nodded Quarren. "Get your people, then keep 'em interested
and unsuspecting while you inject 'em full of thinks."
Westguard smoked and pondered; but presently his lips became stern and
compressed.
"I don't intend to trifle with my convictions or make any truce or any
compromise with 'em," he announced. "I'm afraid that this last story of
mine ran away with me."
"It sure did, old Ironsides. Heaven protected her own this time. And in
'The Real Thing' you have ridden farther out among the people with your
Bible and your Sword than you ever have penetrated by brandishing both
from the immemorial but immobile battlements of righteousness. Truth
_is_ a citadel, old fellow; but its garrison should be raiders, not
defenders. And they should ride far afield to carry its message. For few
journey to that far citadel; you must go to them. And does it make any
difference what vehicle you employ in the cause of Truth--so that the
message arrives somewhere before your vehicle breaks down of its own
heaviness? Novel or poem, sermon or holy writ--it's all one, Karl, so
that they get there with their burden."
Westguard sat silent a moment, then thumped the table, emphatically.
"If I had your wasted talents," he said, "I could write anything!"
"Rot!"
"As you please. You use your ability rottenly--that's true enough."
"My ability," mimicked Quarren.
"Yes, your many, many talents, Rix. God knows why He gave them to you; I
don't--for you use them ignobly, when you do not utterly neglect
them----"
"I've a light and superficial talent for entertaining people; I've
nimble legs, and possess a low order of intelligence known as 'tact.'
What more have I?"
"You're the best amateur actor in New York, for example."
"An _amateur_," sneered Quarren. "That is to say, a man who has the
inclinations, but neither the courage, the self-respect, nor the
ambition of the professional.... Well, I admit that. I lack
something--courage, I think. I prefer what is easy. And I'm doing it."
"What's your reward?" said Westguard bluntly.
"Reward? Oh, I don't know. The inner temple. I have the run of the
premises. People like me, trust me, depend upon me more or less. The
intrigues and politics of my little world amuse me; now and then I act
as ambassador, as envoy of peace, as herald, as secret diplomatic
agent.... Reward? Oh, yes--you didn't suppose that my real-estate
operations clothed and fed me, did you, Karl?"
"What does?"
"Diplomacy," explained Quarren gaily. "A successful embassy is rewarded.
How? Why, now and then a pretty woman's husband makes an investment for
me at his own risk; now and then, when my office is successfully
accomplished, I have my fee as social attorney or arbiter
elegantiarum.... There are, perhaps, fewer separations and divorces on
account of me; fewer scandals.
"I am sometimes called into consultation, _in extremis_; I listen, I
advise--sometimes I plan and execute; even take the initiative and
interfere--as when a foolish boy at the Cataract Club, last week, locked
himself into the bath-room with an automatic revolver and a case of
half-drunken fright. I had to be very careful; I expected to hear that
drumming fusillade at any moment.
"But I talked to him, through the keyhole: and at last he opened the
door--to take a shot at me, first."
Quarren shrugged and lighted a cigarette.
"Of course," he added, "his father was only too glad to pay his debts.
But boys don't always see things in their true proportions. Neither do
women."
Westguard, silent, scowling, pulled at his pipe for a while, then:
"Why should you play surgeon and nurse in such a loathsome hospital?"
"Somebody must. I seem better fitted to do it than the next man."
"Yes," said Westguard with a wry face, "I fancy somebody must do
unpleasant things--even among the lepers of Molokai. But I'd prefer real
lepers."
"The social sort are sometimes sicker," laughed Quarren.
"I don't agree with you.... By the way, it's all off between my aunt and
me."
"I'm sorry, Karl----"
"I'm not! I don't want her money. She told me to go to the devil, and I
said something similar. Do you know what she wants me to do?" he added
angrily. "Give up writing, live on an allowance from her, and marry
Chrysos Lacy! What do you think of that for a cold-blooded and
impertinent proposition! We had a fearful family row," he continued with
satisfaction--"my aunt bellowing so that her footmen actually fled, and
I doing the cool and haughty, and letting her bellow her bally head
off."
"You and she have exchanged civilities before," said Quarren, smiling.
"Yes, but this is really serious. I'm damned if I give up writing."
"Or marry Chrysos Lacy?"
"Or that, either. Do you think I want a red-headed wife? And I've never
spoken a dozen words to her, either. And I'll pick out my own wife. What
does my aunt think I am? I wish I were in love with somebody's
parlour-maid. B'jinks! I'd marry her, just to see my aunt's
expression----"
"Oh, stop your fulminations," said Quarren, laughing. "That's the way
with you artistic people; you're a passionate pack of pups!"
"I'm not as passionate as my aunt!" retorted Westguard wrathfully. "Do
you consider her artistic? She's a meddlesome, malicious, domineering,
insolent, evil old woman, and I told her so."
Quarren managed to stifle his laughter for a moment, but his sense of
the ludicrous was keen, and the scene his fancy evoked sent him off into
mirth uncontrollable.
Westguard eyed him gloomily; ominous clouds poured from "The
Weather-breeder."
"Perhaps it's funny," he said, "but she and I cannot stand each other,
and this time it's all off for keeps. I told her if she sent me another
check I'd send it back. That settles it, doesn't it?"
"You're foolish, Karl----"
"Never mind. If I can't keep myself alive in an untrammelled and
self-respecting exercise of my profession--" His voice ended in a
gurgling growl. Then, as though the recollections of his injuries at the
hands of his aunt still stung him, he reared up in his chair:
"Chrysos Lacy," he roared, "is a sweet, innocent girl--not a bale of
fashionable merchandise! Besides," he added in a modified tone, "I was
rather taken by--by Mrs. Leeds."
Quarren slowly raised his eyes.
"I was," insisted Westguard sulkily; "and I proved myself an ass by
saying so to my aunt. Why in Heaven's name I was idiot enough to go and
tell her, I don't know. Perhaps I had a vague idea that she would be so
delighted that she'd give me several tons of helpful advice."
"Did she?"
"_Did_ she! She came back at me with Chrysos Lacy, I tell you! And when
I merely smiled and attempted to waive away the suggestion, she flew
into a passion, called me down, cursed me out--you know her language
isn't always in good taste--and then she ordered me to keep away from
Mrs. Leeds--as though I ever hung around any woman's skirts! I'm no
Squire of Dames. I tell you, Rix, I was mad clear through. So I told her
that I'd marry Mrs. Leeds the first chance I got----"
"Don't talk about her that way," remonstrated Quarren pleasantly.
"About who? My aunt?"
"I didn't mean your aunt?"
"Oh. About Mrs. Leeds. Why not? She's the most attractive woman I ever
met----"
"Very well. But don't talk about marrying her--as though you had merely
to suggest it to her. You know, after all, Mrs. Leeds may have ideas of
her own."
"Probably she has," admitted Westguard, sulkily. "I don't imagine she'd
care for a man of my sort. Why do you suppose she went off on that
cruise with Langly Sprowl?"
Quarren said, gravely: "I have no idea what reasons Mrs. Leeds has for
doing anything."
"You correspond."
"Who said so?"
"My aunt."
Quarren flushed up, but said nothing.
Westguard, oblivious of his annoyance, and enveloped in a spreading
cloud of tobacco, went on:
"Of course if _you_ don't know, _I_ don't. But, by the same token, my
aunt was in a towering rage when she heard that Langly had Mrs. Leeds
aboard the _Yulan_."
"What!" said the other, sharply.
"She swore like a trooper, and called Langly all kinds of impolite
names. Said she'd trim him if he ever tried any of his tricks around
Mrs. Leeds----"
"What tricks? What does she mean by tricks?"
"Oh, I suppose she meant any of his blackguardly philandering. There
isn't a woman living on whom he is afraid to try his hatchet-faced
blandishments."
Quarren dropped back into the depths of his arm-chair. Presently his
rigid muscles relaxed. He said coolly:
"I don't think Langly Sprowl is likely to misunderstand Mrs. Leeds."
"That depends," said Westguard. "He's a rotten specimen, even if he is
my cousin. And he knows I think so."
A few minutes later O'Hara sauntered in. He had been riding in the Park
and his boots and spurs were shockingly muddy.
"Who is this Sir Charles Mallison, anyway?" he asked, using the decanter
and then squirting his glass full of carbonic. "Is it true that he's
goin' to marry that charmin' Mrs. Leeds? I'll break his bally Sassenach
head for him! I'll----"
"The rumour was contradicted in this morning's paper," said Quarren
coldly.
O'Hara drank pensively: "I see that Langly Sprowl is messin' about, too.
Mrs. Ledwith had better hurry up out there in Reno--or wherever she's
gettin' her divorce. I saw Chet Ledwith ridin' in the Park. Dankmere was
with him. Funny he doesn't seem to lose any caste by sellin' his wife to
Sprowl."
"The whole thing is a filthy mess," growled Westguard; "let it alone."
"Why don't you make a novel about it?" inquired O'Hara.
"Because, you dub! I don't use real episodes or living people!" roared
Westguard; "newspapers and a few chumps to the contrary!"
"So!--so-o!" said O'Hara, soothingly--"whoa--steady, boy!" And he
pretended to rub down Westguard, hissing the while as do grooms when
currying.
"Anybody who tells the truth about social conditions in any section of
human society is always regarded as a liar," said Westguard. "Not that I
have any desire to do it, but if I _should_ ever write a novel dealing
with social conditions in any fashionable set, I'd be disbelieved."
"You would be if you devoted your attention to fashionable scandals
only," said Quarren.
"Why? Aren't there plenty of scandalous----"
"Plenty. But no more than in any other set or coterie; not as many as
there are among more ignorant people. Virtue far outbalances vice among
us: a novel, properly proportioned, ought to show that. If it doesn't,
it's misleading."
"Supposing," said Westguard, "that I were indecent enough to show up my
aunt in fiction. Nobody would believe her possible."
"I sometimes doubt her even now," observed O'Hara, grinning.
Quarren said: "Count up the unpleasant characters in your own social
vicinity, Karl--just to prove to yourself that there are really very
few."
"There is Langly--and my aunt--and the Lester Calderas--and the
Ledwiths----"
"Go on!"
Westguard laughed: "I guess that ends the list," he said.
"It does. Also I dispute the list," said Quarren.
"Cyrille Caldera is a pippin," remarked O'Hara, sentimentally.
"What about Mary Ledwith? Is anybody here inclined to sit in judgment?"
"I," said Westguard grimly.
"Why?"
"Divorce is a dirty business."
"Oh. You'd rather she put up with Chester?--the sort of man who was weak
enough to let her go?"
"Yes!"
"Get out, you old Roundhead!" said Quarren, laughing. He rose, laid his
hand lightly on Westguard's shoulder in passing, and went upstairs to
his room, where he wrote a long letter to Strelsa; and then destroyed
it. Then he lay down, covering his boyish head with his arms.
When Lacy came in he saw him lying on the bed, and thought he was
asleep.
CHAPTER V
Toward the end of March Strelsa, with the Wycherlys, returned to New
York, dead tired. She had been flattered, run after, courted from Palm
Beach to Havana; the perpetual social activity, the unbroken fever of
change and excitement had already made firmer the soft lineaments of the
girl's features, had slightly altered the expression of the mouth.
By daylight the fatigues of pleasure were faintly visible--that
unmistakable imprint which may perhaps leave the eyes clear and calm,
but which edges the hardened contour of the cheek under them with deeper
violet shadow.
Not that hers was as yet the battered beauty of exhaustion; she had
merely lived every minute to the full all winter long, and had overtaxed
her capacity; and the fire had consumed something of her freshness.
Not yet inured, not yet crystallised to that experienced hardness which
withstands the fierce flame of living too fast in a world where every
minute is demanded and where sleep becomes a forgotten art, the girl was
completely tired out, and while she herself did not realise it, her
features showed it.
But nervous exhaustion alone could not account for the subtle change in
her expression. Eyes and lips were still sweet, even in repose, but
there was now a jaded charm about them--something unspoiled had
disappeared from them--something of that fearlessness which vanishes
after too close and too constant contact with the world of men.
Evidently her mind was quite as weary as her body, though even to
herself she had not admitted fatigue; and a tired mind no longer defends
itself. Hers had not; and the defence had been, day by day,
imperceptibly weakening. So that things to which once she had been able
at will to close her mind, and, mentally deaf, let pass unheard, she had
heard, and had even thought about. And the effort to defend her ears and
mind became less vigorous, less instinctive--partly through sheer
weariness.
The wisdom of woman and of man, and of what is called the world, the
girl was now learning--unconsciously in the beginning and then with a
kind of shamed indifference--but the creation of an artificial interest
in anything is a subtle matter; and the ceaseless repetition of things
unworthy at last awake that ignoble curiosity always latent in man.
Because intelligence was born with it; and unwearied intelligence alone
completely suppresses it.
At first she had kept her head fairly level in the whirlwind of
adulation. To glimpses of laxity she closed her eyes. Sir Charles was
always refreshing to her; but she could see little more of him than of
other men--less than she saw of Langly Sprowl, however that
happened--and it probably happened through the cleverness of Langly
Sprowl.
Again and again she found herself with him separated from the
others--sometimes alone with him on deck--and never quite understood how
it came about so constantly.
As for Sprowl he made love to her from the first; and he was a trim,
carefully groomed and volubly animated young man, full of information,
and with a restless, ceaseless range of intelligence which at first
dazzled with its false brilliancy.
But it was only a kind of flash-light intelligence. It seemed to miss,
occasionally; some cog, some screw somewhere was either absent or badly
adjusted or over-strained.
At first Strelsa found the young fellow fascinating. He had been
everywhere and had seen everything; his mind was kaleidoscopic; his
thought shifted, flashed, jerked, leaped like erratic lightning from one
subject to another--from Japanese aeroplanes to a scheme for filling in
the East River; from a plan to reconcile church and state in France to
an idea for indefinitely prolonging human life. He had written several
books about all kinds of things. Nobody read them.
The first time he spoke to her of love was on a magnificent star-set
night off Martinique; and she coolly reminded him of the gossip
connecting him with a pretty woman in Reno. She could not have done it a
month ago.
He denied it so pleasantly, so frankly, that, astonished, she could
scarcely choose but believe him.
After that he made ardent, headlong love to her at every opportunity,
with a flighty recklessness which began by amusing her. At first, also,
she found wholesome laughter a good defence; but there was an
under-current of intelligent, relentless vigour in his attack which
presently sobered her. And she vaguely realised that he was a man who
knew what he wanted. A talk with Molly Wycherly sobered her still more;
and she avoided him as politely as she could. But, being her host, it
was impossible to keep clear of him. Besides there was about him a
certain unwholesome fascination, even for her. No matter how bad a man's
record may be, few women doubt their ability to make it a better one.
"You little goose," said Molly Wycherly, "everybody knows the kind of
man he is. Could anything be more brazen than his attentions to you
while Mary Ledwith is in Reno?"
"He says that her being there has nothing to do with him."
"Then he lies," said Molly, shrugging her shoulders.
"He doesn't speak as though he were trying to deceive anybody, Molly. He
is perfectly frank to me. I can't believe that scandal. Besides he is
quite open and manly about his unsavoury reputation; makes no excuses;
simply says that there's good in every man, and that there is always one
woman in the world who can bring it out----"
"Oh, mushy! What an out-of-date whine! He's bad all through I tell
you----"
"No man is!" insisted Strelsa.
"What?"
"No man is. The great masters of fiction always ascribe at least one
virtue to their most infamous creations----"
"Oh, Strelsa, you talk like a pan of fudge! _I_ tell you that Langly
Sprowl is no good at all. I hope you won't have to marry him to find
out."
"I don't intend to.... How inconsistent you are, Molly. You--and
everybody else--believe him to be the most magnificent match in----"
"If position and wealth is all you care for, yes. I didn't suppose you'd
come to that."
Strelsa said candidly: "I care for both--I don't know how much."
"As much as that?"
"No; not enough to marry him. And if he is what you say, it's hopeless
of course.... I don't think he is. Be decent, Molly; everybody is very
horrid about him, and--and that is always a matter of sympathetic
interest to a generous woman. When the whole world condemns a man it
makes him interesting!"
"That's a piffling and emotional thing to say! He may be attractive in
an uncanny way, because he's agreeable to look at, amusing, and very
dangerous--a perfectly cold-blooded, and I think, slightly unbalanced
social marauder. And that's the fact about Langly Sprowl. And I wish we
were on land, the _Yulan_ and her owner in--well, in the Erie Basin,
perhaps."
Whether or not Strelsa believed these things, there still remained in
her that curious sense of fascination in Sprowl's presence, partly
arising, no doubt, from an instinctive sympathy for a young man so
universally damned; partly, because she thought that perhaps he really
was damned. Therefore, deep in her heart she felt that he must be
dangerous; and there is, in that one belief, every element of
unwholesome fascination. And a mind fatigued is no longer wholesome.
Then, too, there was always Sir Charles Mallison to turn to for a
refreshing moral bath. Safety of soul lay in his vicinity; she felt
confidence in the world wherever he traversed it. With him she relaxed
and rested; there was repose for her in his silences; strength for her
when he spoke; and a serene comradeship which no hint of sentiment had
ever vexed.
Perhaps only a few people realised how thoroughly a single winter was
equipping Strelsa for the part she seemed destined to play in that
narrow world with which she was already identified; and few realised how
fast she was learning. Laxity of precept, easy morals, looseness of
thought, idle and good-natured acquiescence in social conditions where
all standards seemed alike, all ideals merely a matter of personal
taste--this was the atmosphere into which she had stepped from two years
of Western solitude after a nightmare of violence, cruelty, and
depravity unutterable. And naturally it seemed heavenly to her; and each
revelation inconsistent with her own fastidious instincts left her less
and less surprised, less and less uneasy. And after a while she began to
assimilate all that she saw and heard.
A few unworldly instincts remained in her--gratitude for and quick
response to any kindness offered from anybody; an inclination to make
friends with stray wanderers into her circle, and to cultivate the
socially useless.
Taking four o'clock tea alone with Mrs. Sprowl the afternoon of her
return to town--an honour vouchsafed to few--Strelsa was relating, at
that masterful woman's request, her various exotic experiences. Mrs.
Sprowl had commanded her attendance early. There were reasons. And now
partly vexed, partly in unwilling admiration, the old lady sat smiling
and all the while thinking to herself impatiently; "Baby! Fool! Little
ninny! Imbecile!" while she listened, fat bejewelled hands folded, small
green eyes shining in the expanse of powdered and painted fat.
After a while she could endure it no longer, and she said with a wheeze
of good-natured disdain:
"It's like a school-girl's diary--all those rhapsodies over volcanoes,
palm trees, and the colour of the Spanish Main. Never mind geography,
child; tell me about the men!"
"Men?" repeated Strelsa, laughingly--"why there were shoals and shoals
of them, of every description!"
"I mean the _one_ man?" insisted Mrs. Sprowl encouragingly.
"Which, please?"
"Nonsense! There _was_ one, I suppose."
"Oh, I don't think so.... Your nephew, Langly, was exceedingly
amiable----"
"He's a plain beast," said his aunt, bluntly. "I didn't mean him."
"He was very civil to me," insisted Strelsa, colouring.
"Probably he didn't have a chance to be otherwise. He's a rotter, child.
Ask anybody. I know perfectly well what he's been up to. I'm sorry you
went on the _Yulan_. He had no business to ask you--or any other nice
girl--or anybody at all until that Reno scandal is officially made
respectable. If it were not for his money--" She stopped a moment,
adding cynically--"and if it were not for mine--certain people wouldn't
be tolerated anywhere, I suppose.... How did you like Sir Charles?"
"Oh, he is charming!" she said warmly.
"You like him?"
"I almost adore him."
"Why not adore him entirely?"
[Illustration: "'Never mind geography, child; tell me about the
men!'"]
Strelsa laughed frankly: "He hasn't asked me to, for one reason.
Besides----"
"No doubt he'll do it."
The girl shook her head, still smiling:
"You don't understand at all. There isn't the slightest sentiment
between us. He's only thoroughly nice and agreeable, and he and I are
most companionable. I hope nobody will be silly enough to hint anything
of that sort to him. It would embarrass him dreadfully."
Mrs. Sprowl's smile was blandly tolerant:
"The man's in love with you. Didn't you know it?"
"But you are mistaken, dear Mrs. Sprowl. If it were true I would know
it, I think."
"Nonsense! He told me so."
"Oh," said Strelsa in amazed consternation. She added: "If it _is_ so
I'd rather not speak of it, please."
Mrs. Sprowl eyed her with shifty but keen intelligence. "Little idiot,"
she thought; but her smile remained bland and calmly patronising.
For a second or two longer she studied the girl cautiously, trying to
make up her mind whether there was really any character in Strelsa's
soft beauty--anything firmer than material fastidiousness; anything more
real than a natural and dainty reticence. Mrs. Sprowl could ride
rough-shod over such details. But she was too wise to ride if there was
any chance of a check from higher sources.
"If you married him it would be very gratifying to me," she said
pleasantly. "Come; let's discuss the matter like sensible women. Shall
we?"
Many people would not have disregarded such a wish. Strelsa flushed and
lifted her purple-gray eyes to meet the little green ones scanning her
slyly.
"I am sorry," she said, "but I couldn't discuss such a thing, you see.
Don't you see I can't, dear Mrs. Sprowl?"
"Pooh! Rubbish! Anybody can discuss anything," rejoined the old lady
with impersonal and boisterous informality. "I'm fond of you. Everybody
knows it. I'm fond of Sir Charles. He's a fine figure of a man. You
match him in everything, except wealth. It's an ideal marriage----"
"Please don't!--I simply cannot----"
"Ideal," repeated Mrs. Sprowl loudly--"an ideal marriage----"
"But when there is no love----"
"Plenty! Loads of it! He's mad about you--crazy!----"
"I--meant--on my part----"
"Good God!" shouted the old lady, beating the air with pudgy
hands--"isn't it luck enough to have love on one side? What does the
present generation want! I tell you it's ideal, perfect. He's a good man
as men go, and a devilish handsome----"
"I know--but----"
"And he's got money!" shouted the old lady--"plenty of it I
tell you! And he has the entrée everywhere on the Continent--in
England--everywhere!--which Dankmere has not!--if you're considering
that little whelp!"
Stunned, shrinking from the dreadful asthmatic noises in Mrs. Sprowl's
voice, Strelsa sat dumb, wincing under the blows of sound, not knowing
how to escape.
"I'm fond of you!" shrieked the old lady--"I can be of use to you and I
want to be. That's why I asked you to tea! I want to make you happy--and
Sir Charles, too! What the devil do you suppose there is in it for me
except to oblige hi--you both?"
"Th-thank you, but----"
"I'll bet a shilling that Molly Wycherly let you go about with any
little spindle-shanked pill who came hanging around!--And I told her
what were my wishes----"
"Please--oh, _please_, Mrs. Sprowl----"
"Yes, I did! It's a good match! I want you to consider it!--I insist
that----"
"Mrs. Sprowl!" exclaimed Strelsa, pink with confusion and resentment, "I
am obliged to you for the interest you display, but it is a matter----"
"What!"
"I am really--grateful--but----"
"Answer me, child. Has that cursed nephew of mine made any impression on
you? Answer me!"
"Not the kind you evidently mean!" said Strelsa, helplessly.
"Is there anybody else?"
The outrageous question silenced the girl for a moment. Angry, she still
tried to be gentle; tried to remember the age, and the excellent
intentions of this excited old lady; and she answered in a low voice:
"I care for no man in particular, unless it be Sir Charles--and----"
"And who?"
"Mr. Quarren, I think," she said.
Mrs. Sprowl's jowl grew purple with fury:
"You--has that boy had the impudence--damn him----"
Strelsa sprang to her feet.
"I really cannot remain--" she said with decision, but the old lady only
bawled:
"Sit down! Sit down!"
"I will not!"
"Sit _down_!" she roared in a passion. "What the devil----"
Strelsa, a little pale, started to pass her--then halted, astounded: for
the old lady had burst into a passion of choking gasps. Whether the
terrible sounds she made were due to impotent rage or asthma, Strelsa,
confused, shocked, embarrassed, but still angry, had no notion; and
while Mrs. Sprowl coughed fatly, she stood still, catching muffled
fragments of reproaches directed at people who flouted friendship; who
had no consideration for age, and no gratitude, no tenderness, no pity.
"I--I _am_ grateful," faltered Strelsa, "only I cannot----"
"I wanted to be a mother to you! I've tried to be," wheezed the old lady
in a fresh paroxysm; and beat the air.
For one swift instant the girl remembered what her real mother had been
to her; and her heart hardened.
"I care only for your friendship, Mrs. Sprowl; I do not wish you to do
anything for me; can we not be friends on that basis?"
Mrs. Sprowl swabbed her inflamed eyes and peered around the corner of
the handkerchief.
"Come here, my dear," she said.
Strelsa went, slowly; and Mrs. Sprowl enveloped her like a fleshy squid,
panting.
"I only wanted to be good to you, Strelsa. I'm just an old fool I
suppose----"
"Oh, please don't----"
"That's all I am, child, just a sentimental old fool. The poor man's
adoration of you touched my heart--and you do like him a little, don't
you?"
"Very much.... Thank you for--for wishing happiness to me. I really
don't mean to be ungrateful; I have a horror of ingratitude. It's only
that--the idea never occurred to me; and I am incapable of doing such a
thing for material reasons, unless--I also really cared for a man----"
"Of course, child. Maybe you will care for him some day. I won't
interfere any more.... Only--don't lose your heart to any of these young
jackals fawning around your skirts. Every set is full of 'em. They're
nothing but the capering chorus in this comic opera.... And--don't be
angry--but I am an older and wiser woman than you, and I am fond of you,
and it's my duty to tell you that any of the lesser breed--take young
Quarren for example--are of no real account, even in the society which
they amuse."
"I would scarcely class Mr. Quarren with the sort you mention----"
"Why not? He's of no importance."
"Because he is kind, considerate, and unusually intelligent and
interesting; and he is very capable of succeeding in whatever he
undertakes," said Strelsa, slowly.
"Ricky is a nice boy; but what does he undertake?" asked Mrs. Sprowl
with good-natured contempt. "He undertakes the duties, obligations, and
details of a useful man in the greater household, which make him
acceptable to us; and I'm bound to say that he does 'em very well. But
outside of that he's a nobody. And I'll tell you just what he'll turn
into; shall I? Society's third chief bottlewasher in succession. We had
one, who evolved us. He's dead. We have another. He's still talking.
When he ultimately evaporates into infinity Ricky will be his natural
successor. Do you want that kind of a husband?"
"Did you suppose----"
"Don't get angry, Strelsa? I didn't suppose anything. Ricky, like every
other man, dangles his good-looking, good-humoured self in your
vicinity. You're inclined to notice him. All I mean is that he isn't
worth your pains.... Now you won't be offended by a plain-spoken old
woman who wishes only your happiness, will you, my child?"
"No," said Strelsa, wearily, beginning to feel the fatigue of the scene.
She took her leave a few moments afterward, very unhappy because two of
the pleasantest incidents in her life had been badly, if not hopelessly,
marred. But Langly Sprowl was not one of them.
* * * * *
That hatchet-faced and immaculate gentleman, divining possibly that
Strelsa might be with his aunt, arrived shortly after her departure;
learned of it from a servant, and was turning on his heel without even
asking for Mrs. Sprowl, when the thought occurred to him that possibly
she might know Strelsa's destination.
When a servant announced him he found his aunt quite herself, grim,
ready for trouble, her small green eyes fairly snapping.
They indulged in no formalities, being alone together, and caring
nothing for servants' opinions. Their greeting was perfunctory; their
inquiries civil. Then there ensued a short silence.
"Which way did Mrs. Leeds go?" he asked, busily twisting his long
moustache.
"None of your business," rejoined his aunt.
He looked up in slight surprise, recognised a condition of things which,
on second thought, surprised him still more. Because his aunt had never
before noticed his affairs--had not even commented on the Ledwith matter
to him. He had always felt that she disliked him too thoroughly to care.
"I don't think I understood you," he said, watching her out of shifting
eyes which protruded a trifle.
"I think you will understand me before I've done with you," returned his
aunt, grimly. "It's a perfectly plain matter; you've the rest of the
female community to chase if you choose. Go and chase 'em for all I
care--hunt from here to Reno if you like!--but I have other plans for
Strelsa Leeds. Do you understand? I've put my private mark on her.
There's no room for yours."
Langly's gaze which had not met hers--and never met anybody's for more
than a fraction of a second--shifted. He continued his attentions to his
moustache; his eyes roved; he looked at but did not see a hundred things
in a second.
"You don't know where she's gone?" he inquired with characteristic
pertinacity and an indifference to what she had said, absolutely stony.
"Do you mean trouble for that girl?"
"I do not."
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing."
"Do you want to marry her?"
"I said that I was considering nothing in particular. We are friends."
"Keep away from her! Do you understand?"
"I really don't know whether I do or not. I suppose you mean Sir
Charles."
Mrs. Sprowl turned red:
"Suppose what you like, you cold-blooded cad! But by God!--if you annoy
that child I'll empty the family wash all over the sidewalk! And let the
public pick it over!"
He rested his pale, protuberant eyes on her for a brief second:
"Will any of your finery figure in it? Any relics or rags once belonging
to the late parent of Sir Charles?"
Her features were livid; her lips twisted, tortured under the flood of
injuries which choked her. Not a word came. Exhausted for a moment she
sat there grasping the gilded arms of her chair, livid as the dead save
for the hell blazing in her tiny green eyes.
"I fancy that settles the laundry question," he said, while his restless
glance ceaselessly swept the splendid room and his lean, sunburnt hand
steadily caressed his moustache. Then, as though he had forgotten
something, he rose and walked out. A footman invested him with hat and
overcoat. A moment later the great doors clicked.
In the silence of the huge house there was not a sound except the
whispers of servants; and these ceased presently.
All alone, amid the lighted magnificence of the vast room sat the old
woman hunched in her chair, bloodless, motionless as a mass of dead
flesh. Even the spark in her eyes was gone, the lids closed, the gross
lower lip pendulous. Later two maids, being summoned, accompanied her
to her boudoir, and were dismissed. Her social secretary, a pretty girl,
came and left with instructions to cancel invitations for the evening.
A maid arrived with a choice of headache remedies; then, with the aid of
another, disrobed her mistress and got her into bed.
Their offices accomplished, they were ordered to withdraw but to leave
one light burning. It glimmered over an old-fashioned photograph on the
wall--the portrait of a British officer taken in the days when whiskers,
"pill-box," and frogged frock-tunic were cultivated in Her British
Majesty's Service.
From where she lay she looked at him; and Sir Weyward Mallison stared
back at her through his monocle.
* * * * *
Strelsa at home, unpinning her hat before the mirror, received word over
the telephone that Mrs. Sprowl, being indisposed, regretfully recalled
the invitations for the evening.
The girl's first sensation was relief, then self-reproach, quite
forgetting that if Mrs. Sprowl's violent emotions had made that
redoubtable old woman ill, they had also thoroughly fatigued the victim
of her ill-temper and made her very miserable.
She wrote a perfunctory note of regret and civil inquiry and dispatched
it, then surrendered herself to the ministrations of her maid.
The luxury of dining alone for the first time in months, appealed to
her. She decided that she was not to be at home to anybody.
Langly Sprowl called about six, and was sent away. Strelsa, curled up on
a divan, could hear the staccato racket that his powerful racing-car
made in the street outside. The informality of her recent host aboard
the _Yulan_ did not entirely please her. She listened to his departure
with quiet satisfaction.
Although it was not her day, several people came and went. Flowers from
various smitten youths arrived; orchids from Sprowl; nothing from
Quarren. Then for nearly two hours she slept where she lay and awakened
laughing aloud at something Quarren had been saying in her dream. But
what it was she could not recollect.
At eight her maid came and hooked her into a comfortable and beloved
second-year gown; dinner was announced; she descended the stairway in
solitary state, still smiling to herself at Quarren's forgotten remark,
and passed by the library just as the telephone rang there.
It may have been a flash of clairvoyance--afterward she wondered exactly
what it was that made her say to her maid very confidently:
"That is Mr. Quarren. I'll speak to him."
It was Mr. Quarren. The amusing coincidence of her dream and her
clairvoyance still lingering in her mind, she went leisurely to the
telephone and said:
"I don't understand how I knew it was you. And I'm not sure why I came
to the 'phone, because I'm not at home to anybody. But _what_ was it you
said to me just now?"
"When?"
"A few minutes ago while I was asleep?"
"About eight o'clock?"
She laughed: "It happened to be a few minutes before eight. How did you
know that? I believe you did speak to me in my dream. Did you?"
[Illustration: "Strelsa, curled upon a divan ... listened to his
departure with quiet satisfaction."]
"I did."
"Really?"
"I said something aloud to you about eight o'clock."
"How odd! Did you know I was asleep? But you couldn't----"
"No, of course not. I was merely thinking of you."
"You were--you happened to be thinking of _me_? And you said something
aloud about me?"
"About you--and _to_ you."
"How delightfully interesting! What was it, please?"
"Oh, I was only talking nonsense."
"Won't it bear repetition?"
"I'm afraid not."
"Mr. Quarren! How maddening! I'm dying with curiosity. I dreamed that
you said something very amusing to me and I awoke, laughing; but now I
simply cannot recollect what it was you said."
"I'll tell you some day."
"Soon? Would you tell me this evening?"
"How can I?"
"That's true. I'm not at home to anybody. So you can't drop in, can
you?"
"You are not logical; I could drop in because I'm not anybody----"
"What!"
"I'm not anybody in particular----"
"You know if you begin to talk that way, after all these days, I'll ring
off in a rage. You are the only man in the world to whom I'm at home
even over the telephone, and if that doesn't settle your status with me,
what does?... Are you well, Mr. Quarren?"
"Thank you, perfectly. I called you up to ask you about yourself."
"I'm tired, somehow."
"Oh, we are all that. Nothing more serious threatens you than impending
slumber?"
"I said I was tired, not sleepy. I'm wide awake but horribly lazy--and
inclined to slump. Where are you; at the Legation?"
"At the Founders' Club--foundered."
"What are you doing there?"
"Absolutely nothing. Reading the _Evening Post_."
"You are dining out I suppose?"
"No."
She reflected until he spoke again, asking if she was still there.
"Oh, yes; I'm trying to think whether I want you to come around and
share a solitary dinner with me. Do I want you?"
"Just a little--don't you?"
"Do you want to come?"
"Yes."
"Very much?"
"I can't tell you how much--over the telephone."
"That sounds both humble and dangerous. Which do you mean to be?"
"Humble--and very, very grateful, dear lady. May I come?"
"I--don't know. Dinner was announced a quarter of an hour ago."
"It won't take me three minutes----"
"If it takes you more you'll ring my door-bell in vain, young man."
"I'll start now! Good----"
[Illustration: "'Do you remember our first toast?' he asked,
smiling."]
"Wait! I haven't decided. Really I'm simply stupid with the accumulated
fatigues of two months' frivolity. Do you mind my being stupid?"
"You know I don't----"
"Shame on you! That was not the answer. Think out the right one on your
way over. _À bien tôt!_"
She had been in the drawing-room only a few moments, looking at the huge
white orchids that Langly Sprowl had sent and which her butler was
arranging, when Quarren was announced; and she partly turned from the
orchids, extending her hand behind her in a greeting more confident and
intimate than she had ever before given him.
"Look at these strange, pansy-shaped Brazilian flowers," she said.
"Kindly observe that they are actually growing out of that ball of moss
and fibre."
She had retained his hand for a fraction of a second longer than
conventional acquaintance required, giving it a frank and friendly
pressure. Now, loosing it, she found her own fingers retained, and drew
them away with a little laugh of self-consciousness.
"Sentiment before dinner implies that you'll have no room for it after
dinner. Here is your cocktail."
"Do you remember our first toast?" he asked, smiling.
"No."
"The toast to friendship?"
"Yes; I remember it."
She touched her lips to her glass, not looking at him. He watched her.
After a moment she raised her eyes, met his gaze, returned it with one
quite as audacious:
"I am drinking that same toast again--after many days," she said.
"With all that it entails?"
She nodded.
"Its chances, hazards, consequences?"
She laughed, then, looking at him, deliberately sipped from her glass,
the defiant smile in her eyes still daring him and Chance and Destiny
together.
When he took her out she was saying: "I really can't account for my mood
to-night. I believe that seeing you again is reviving me. I was beastly
stupid."
"My soporific society ought to calm, not exhilarate you."
"It never did, particularly. What a long time it is since we have seen
each other. I _am_ glad you came."
Seated, she asked the butler to remove the flowers which interrupted her
view of Quarren.
"You haven't said anything about my personal appearance," she observed.
"Am I very much battered by my merry bouts with pleasure?"
"Not much."
"You wretch! Do you mean to say that I am marked at all?"
"You look rather tired, Mrs. Leeds."
"I know I do. By daylight it's particularly visible.... But--do _you_
mind?"
Her charming head was bent over her grapefruit: she lifted her gray eyes
under level brows, looking across the table at him.
"I mind anything that concerns you," he said.
"I mean--are you disappointed because I'm growing old and haggard?"
"I think you are even more beautiful than you were."
She laughed gaily and continued her dinner. "I _had_ to drag that out
of you, poor boy. But you see I'm uneasy; because imprudence _is_
stamping the horrid imprint of maturity on me very rapidly; and I'm
beginning to keep a more jealous eye on my suitors. You _were_ one. Do
you deny your guilt?"
"I do not."
"Then I shall never release you. I intend to let no guilty man escape.
_Am_ I very much changed, Mr. Quarren?" she said a trifle wistfully.
He did not answer immediately. After a few moments she glanced at him
again and met his gaze.
"Well?" she prompted him, laughing; "are you not neglecting your manners
as a declared suitor?"
"You _have_ changed."
"What a perfect pill you are!" she exclaimed, vexed--"you're casting
yourself for the rôle of the honest friend--and I simply hate it! Young
sir, do you not understand that I've breakfasted, lunched and dined too
long on flattery to endure anything more wholesome? If you can't lie to
me like a gentleman and a suitor your usefulness in my entourage is
ended."
He said: "Do you want me to talk shop with you? I get rather tired of my
trade, sometimes. It's my trade to lie, you know."
She looked up, quickly, but he was smiling.
They remained rather silent after that. Coffee was served at table; she
lighted a cigarette for him and, later, one for herself, strolling off
into the drawing-room with it between her fingers, one hand resting
lightly on her hip.
She seemed to have an inclination to wander about or linger before the
marble fireplace and blow delicate rings of smoke at her own reflection
in the mirror.
He stood a little distance behind her, watching her, and she nodded
affably to him in the glass:
"I'm quite changed; you are right. I'm not as nice as I was when I first
knew you.... I'm not as contented; I'm restless--I wasn't then....
Amusement is becoming a necessity to me; and I'm not particular about
the kind--as long as it does amuse me. Tell me something exciting."
"A cradle song is what you require."
"How impudent of you. I've a mind to punish you by retiring to that same
cradle. I'm dreadfully cross, too. Do you realise that?"
"I realise how tired you are."
"And--I'll never again be rested," she said thoughtfully, looking at her
mirrored self. "I seem to understand that, now, for the first time....
Something in me will always remain a little tired. I wonder what. Do you
know?"
"Conscience?" he suggested, laughing.
"Do you think so? I thought it was my heart."
"Have you acquired one?"
She laughed, too, then glanced at him askance in the glass, and turned
around toward him, still smiling.
"I believe I didn't have any heart when I first knew you. Did I?"
"I believe not," he said lightly. "Has one germinated?"
"I really don't know. What do you think?"
He took her cigarette from her and tossed it, with his own, into the
fire. She seated herself on a sofa and bent toward the blaze, her
dimpled elbows denting her silken knees, her chin balanced between
forefinger and thumb.
Presently she said, not looking at him: "Somehow, I've changed. I'm not
the woman you knew. I'm beginning to realise it. It seems absurd: it was
only a few weeks ago. But the world has whirled very swiftly. Each day
was a little lifetime in itself; a week a century condensed; Time became
only a concentrated essence, one drop of which contained eons of
experience.... I wonder whether my silly head _was_ turned a little....
People said too much to me: there were too many of them--and they came
too near.... And do you know--looking back at it now as I sit here
talking to you--I--it seems absurd--but I believe that I was really a
trifle lonely at times."
She interlaced her fingers and rested her chin on the back of them.
"I thought of you on various occasions," she added.
He was leaning against the mantel, one foot on the fender.
Her eyes rested on that foot, then lifted slowly until they remained
fixed on his face which was shadowed by his hand as though to shield his
eyes from the bracket light.
For a time she sat motionless, considering him, interested in his
silence and abstraction--in the set of his shoulders, and the
unconscious grace of him. Light, touching his short blond hair, made it
glossy like a boy's where his hand had disarranged it above the
forehead. Certainly it was very pleasant to see him again--agreeable to
be with him--not exactly restful, perhaps, but distinctly agreeable--for
even in the frequent silences that had crept in between them there was
no invitation to repose of mind. On the contrary, she was perfectly
conscious of a reserve force now awaking--of a growing sense of
freshness within her; of physical renewal, of unsuspected latent vigour.
"Are you attempting to go to sleep, Mr. Quarren?" she inquired at last.
He dropped his hand, smiling: she made an instinctive move--scarcely an
invitation, scarcely even perceptible. But he came over and seated
himself on the arm of the lounge beside her.
"Your letters," he said, "did a lot for me."
"I wrote very few.... Did they really interest you?"
"A lot."
"How?"
"They helped that lame old gaffer, Time, to limp along toward the back
door of Eternity."
"How do you mean?"
"Otherwise he would never have stirred a step--until to-night."
"That is very gallant of you, Mr. Quarren--but a little
sentimental--isn't it?"
"Do you think so?"
"I don't know. I'm a poor judge of real sentiment--being unaccustomed to
it."
"How many men made you declarations?"
"Oh; is _that_ real sentiment? I thought it was merely love."
He looked at her. "Don't," he said. "You mustn't harden. Don't become
like the rest."
She said, amused, or pretending to be: "You are clever; I _have_ grown
hard. To-day I can survey, unmoved, many, many things which I could not
even look at yesterday. But it makes life more interesting. Don't you
think so?"
"Do you, Mrs. Leeds?"
"I think so.... A woman might as well know the worst truths about
life--and about men."
"Not about men."
"Do you prefer her to remain a dupe?"
"Is anybody happy unless life dupes them?"
"By 'life' you mean 'men.' You have the seraglio point of view. You
probably prefer your women screened and veiled."
"We are all born veiled. God knows why we ever tear the film."
"Mr. Quarren--are you becoming misanthropic?" she exclaimed, laughing.
But under his marred eyes of a boy she saw shadows, and the pale
induration already stamped on the flesh over the cheek-bones.
"What have you been doing with yourself all these weeks?" she asked,
curiously.
"Working at my trade."
"You seem thinner."
"Fewer crumbs have fallen from the banquet, perhaps. I keep Lent when I
must."
"You are beginning to speak in a way that you know I dislike--aren't
you?" she asked, turning around in her seat to face him.
He laughed.
"You make me very angry," she said; "I like you--I'm quite happy with
you--and suddenly you try to tell me that my friendship is lavished on
an unworthy man; that my taste is low, and that you're a kind of a
social jackal--an upper servant----
"I feed on what the pack leaves--and I wash their fragile plates for
them," he said lightly.
"What else?" she asked, furious.
"I take out the unfledged for a social airing; I exercise the mature; I
smooth the plumage of the aged; I apply first aid to the socially
injured; lick the hands that feed me, as in duty bound; tell my brother
jackals which hands to lick and which to snap at; curl up and go to
sleep in sunny boudoirs without being put out into the backyard; and
give first-class vaudeville performances at a moment's notice, acting as
manager, principals, chorus, prompter, and carpenter."
He laughed so gaily into her unsmiling eyes that suddenly she lost
control of herself and her fingers closed tight.
"What are you saying!" she said, fiercely. "Are you telling me that this
is the kind of a man I care enough for to write to--to think
about--think about a great deal--care enough about to dine with in my
own house when I denied myself to everybody else! Is that all you are
after all? And am I finding my level by liking you?"
He said, slowly: "I could have been anything--I could be yet--if
you----"
"If you are not anything for your own sake you will never be for
anybody's!" she retorted.... "I refuse to believe that you are what you
say, anyway. It hurts--it hurts----"
"It only hurts me, Mrs. Leeds----"
"It hurts _me!_ I _do_ like you. I was glad to see you--you don't know
how glad. Your letters to me were--were interesting. _You_ have always
been interesting, from the very first--more so than many men--more than
most men. And now you admit to me what kind of a man you really are. If
I believe it, what am I to think of myself? Can you tell me?"
Flushed, exasperated by she k
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