← catalogue

The Salamander

by Owen Johnson · English · Gutenberg #36355 · 755,544 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Salamander
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Salamander

Author: Owen Johnson

Illustrator: Everett Shinn


        
Release date: June 8, 2011 [eBook #36355]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36355

Credits: Produced by David Garcia, Pat McCoy, Rick Niles and the
        Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
        (This book was produced from scanned images of public
        domain material from the Google Print project.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SALAMANDER ***




Produced by David Garcia, Pat McCoy, Rick Niles and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
(This book was produced from scanned images of public
domain material from the Google Print project.)









    THE SALAMANDER




    [Illustration: Dore]




    THE
    SALAMANDER

    _By_
    OWEN JOHNSON

    _Author of_

    THE VARMINT, STOVER AT YALE
    THE SIXTY-FIRST SECOND, ETC.

    WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
    EVERETT SHINN

    INDIANAPOLIS
    THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
    PUBLISHERS

    COPYRIGHT 1914
    THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

    PRESS OF
    BRAUNWORTH & CO.
    BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
    BROOKLYN, N. Y.




    TO MY WIFE




    FOREWORD


Precarious the lot of the author who elects to show his public what it
does not know, but doubly exposed he who in the indiscreet exploration
of customs and manners publishes what the public knows but is unwilling
to confess! In the first place incredulity tempers censure, in the
second resentment is fanned by the necessity of self-recognition. For
the public is like the defendant in matrimony, amused and tolerant when
unconvinced of the justice of a complaint, but fiercely aroused when
defending its errors.

In the present novel I am quite aware that where criticism is most
risked is at the hands of those entrenched moralists who, while
admitting certain truths as fit subjects for conversation, aggressively
resent the same when such truths are published. Many such will believe
that in the following depiction of a curious and new type of modern
young women, product of changing social forces, profoundly significant
of present unrest and prophetic of stranger developments to come, the
author, in depicting simply what does exist, is holding a brief for what
should exist.

If the type of young girls here described were an ephemeral
manifestation or even a detached fragment of our society, there might be
a theoretical justification for this policy of censure by silence. But
the Salamanders are neither irrelevant nor the product of unrelated
forces. The rebellious ideas that sway them are the same ideas that are
profoundly at work in the new generation of women, and while for this
present work I have limited my field, be sure that the young girl of
to-day, from the age of eighteen to twenty-five, whether facing the
world alone or peering out at it from the safety of the family, whether
in the palaces of New York, the homesteads of New England, the manors of
the South or the throbbing cities and villages of the West, whatever her
station or her opportunity, has in her undisciplined and roving
imagination a little touch of the Salamander.

That there exists a type of young girl that heedlessly will affront
every appearance of evil and can yet remain innocent; that this
innocence, never relinquished, can yet be tumultuously curious and
determined on the exploration of the hitherto forbidden sides of life,
especially when such reconnoitering is rendered enticing by the presence
of danger--here are two apparent contradictions difficult of belief. Yet
in the case of the Salamander's brother, society finds no such
difficulty--it terms that masculine process, "seeing the world," a study
rather to be recommended for the sake of satisfied future tranquillity.

That the same can be true of the opposite sex, that a young girl without
physical temptation may be urged by a mental curiosity to see life
through whatever windows, that she may feel the same impetuous frenzy of
youth as her brother, the same impulse to sample each new excitement,
and that in this curiosity may be included the safe and the dangerous,
the obvious and the complex, the casual and the strange, that she may
arrogate to herself the right to examine everything, question
everything, peep into everything--tentatively to project herself into
every possibility and after a few years of this frenzy of excited
curiosity can suddenly be translated into a formal and discreet mode of
life--here is an exposition which may well appear incredible on the
printed page. I say on the printed page because few men are there who
will not recognize the justice of the type of Salamander here portrayed.
Only as their experience has been necessarily individual they do not
proceed to the recognition of a general type. They know them well as
accidents in the phantasmagoria of New York but they do not comprehend
them in the least.

The Salamander in the last analysis is a little atom possessed of a
brain, thrown against the great tragic luxury of New York, which has
impelled her to it as the flame the moth.

She comes roving from somewhere out of the immense reaches of the
nation, revolting against the commonplace of an inherited narrowness,
passionately adventurous, eager and unafraid, neither sure of what she
seeks nor conscious of what forces impel or check her. She remains a
Salamander only so long as she has not taken a decision to enter life by
one of the thousand avenues down which in her running course she has
caught an instant vista. Her name disappears under a new self-baptism.
She needs but a little money and so occasionally does a little work. She
brings no letters of introduction, but she comes resolved to know whom
she chooses. She meets them all, the men of New York, the mediocre, the
interesting, the powerful, the flesh hunters, the brutes and those who
seek only an amused mental relaxation. She attracts them by hook or
crook, in defiance of etiquette, compelling their attention in ways that
at the start hopelessly mystify them and lead to mistakes. Then she
calmly sets them to rights and forgives them. If she runs recklessly in
the paths of danger, it is because to her obsessed curiosity it is
imperative for her to try to comprehend what this danger can mean.

She has no salon to receive her guests--she turns her bedroom at noon
into a drawing-room, not inviting every one, but to those to whom she
extends the privilege fiercely regulating the proprieties. She may have
a regular occupation or an occasional one, neither must interfere with
her liberty of pleasure. She needs money--she acquires it indirectly, by
ways that bear no offense to her delightfully illogical but keen
sensibilities. With one man she will ride in his automobile, far into
the night--to another she will hardly accord the tips of her gloves. She
makes no mistakes. Her head is never dizzy. Her mind is in control and
she knows at every moment what she is doing. She will dare only so far
as she knows she is safe.

She runs the gamut of the city, its high lights and its still shadows.
She enters by right behind its varied scenes. She breakfasts on one egg
and a cup of coffee, takes her luncheon from a high-legged stool in a
cellar restaurant, reluctantly counting out the change, and the same
night, with supreme indolence, descends from a luxurious automobile,
before the flaring portals of the restaurant most in fashion, giving her
fingers to those who rank among the masters of the city.

This curiosity that leads her to flit from window to window has in it no
vice. It is fed only by the zest of life. Her passion is to know, to
leave no cranny unexplored, to see, not to experience, to flit
miraculously through the flames--never to be consumed!

That her standard of conduct is marvelous, that her ideas of what is
permitted and what is forbidden are mystifying, is true. So too is it
difficult to comprehend, in the society of men of the world, what is
fair and what is unfair, what is "done" and what is not "done." To
understand the Salamander, to appreciate her significance as a criticism
of our present social forms, one must first halt and consider what
changes are operating in our social system.

       *       *       *       *       *

If one were privileged to have the great metropolis of New York reduced
to microcosm at his feet, to be studied as man may study the marvelous
organism of the anthill or the hive, two curious truths would become
evident. First that those whom the metropolis engenders seldom succeed
their fathers, that they move in circles as it were, endlessly revolving
about a fixed idea, apparently stupefied by the colossal shadows under
which they have been born; secondly that daily, hourly even, a stream of
energetic young men constantly arrives from the unknown provinces, to
reinvigorate the city, rescue it from stagnation, ascending abruptly to
its posts of command, assuming direction of its manifold
activities--ruling it.

Further, one would perceive that the history of the city is the result
of these two constantly opposed forces, one striving to conserve, the
other to acquire. The inheritors constantly seek to define the city's
forms, encase its society, limit its opportunities, transform its young
activities into inheritable institutions; while the young and ardent
adventurers who come with no other baggage than their portmanteaux of
audacity and sublime disdain, are constantly firing it with their
inflaming enthusiasm, purifying it with their new health, forcing the
doors of reluctant sets, storming its giant privileges, modernizing its
laws, vitalizing its arts, capturing its financial hierarchies, opposing
to the solidifying force of attempted systems their liberating
corrective of opportunity and individualism. Of the two forces, only the
conqueror from without is important.

This phenomenon of immigration is neither new nor peculiar to our
civilization. It is indeed the living principle of a metropolis which,
as it requires food, water, fire for its material existence, must also
hourly levy, Minotaur-like, its toll on foreign youth. Woman has had no
counterpart to this life-giving fermentation of young men. The toll of
the metropolis has been the toll of corruption, spreading corruption,
and this continuous flow of the two sexes through the gates of the city
has been like the warring passage through the arteries of red
life-defending corpuscles and disease-bearing germs.

Now suddenly to one who thus profoundly meditates this giant scheme, a
new phenomenon has appeared. All at once amid the long stretching lines
of young men that seek the city from the far horizon appear the figures
of young women, not by hundreds but by the thousands, following in the
steps of their brothers, wage-earners animated by the same desire for
independence, eager and determined for a larger view of life, urged
outward by the same imperative revolt against stagnation, driven by the
same unrest for the larger horizon. This culminative movement, begun in
the decline of the nineteenth century, may well be destined to mark the
twentieth century as the great era of social readjustment.

In the past the great block to woman's complete and equal communion with
man has been her economic dependence on him; while she has not been
necessary to man, man has been necessary to her. Hence her forced
acceptation of his standard of her position and her duties. In one
generation, by this portentous achievement of economic independence,
woman in a night, like Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham, has suddenly
elevated herself to a position of aggressive equality. Those who see in
the feminine movement no further than a question of political expediency
perceive no more than a relatively unimportant manifestation. What has
happened is that the purely masculine conception of society has been
suddenly put to the challenge. Man's conception of religion, of marriage
and the family, of property rights versus sentimental rights, of
standards of conduct and political expediency, imperfect and groping as
they have been, will, in the future, progress according to a new
alliance between man and woman. And this world revolution has come, day
by day, month after month, in the spectacle of young women, bundles in
arms, light of purse, rebel in heart, moving in silent thousands toward
the great cities. In this new army of women who have now intrenched
themselves in the strongholds of economic independence, there are two
distinct but related divisions, the great mass who must work and the
relatively smaller class, socially more significant, who must live,
those, of whom the Salamanders are the impatient outstripping advance,
who are determined to liberate their lives and claim the same rights of
judgment as their brothers.

What has brought this great emigration to pass? Several causes, some
actively impelling, others merely passively liberating--the taking down
of weakened bars.

       *       *       *       *       *

The causes which have actively impelled this liberating emigration are
more clearly perceived, the causes which have passively permitted this
removal of the bars are less obvious. We are a society of
passage--between two ports. Scarcely can we recall the thin shores we
have departed, nor can any one foretell what outlines, at the end of
the voyage, will rise out of the sea of experiment. In every social
revolution there are three distinct generations, the first of intrenched
traditions, the second of violent reaction and the third of
reconstruction. And if it seem a law of nature's tireless action and
reaction that fathers and sons should be ever set against one another,
ever misunderstanding one another, the true measure of human progress
lies in that degree of change which results between the first and the
third generations. Between this old generation of authority and this
present generation of logic has come a feminine revolution startling in
the shock of its abruptness. Yet a social revolution that obliterates in
an hour the landmarks of ages, frequently resembles a cataclysm of
nature--the gathering torrent only becomes possible with the last six
inches of earth. What has broken out in these last half a dozen years
has been accumulating without beginning--for ideas can have no
beginnings. They have existed in the unconscious human soul as the germ
of physical evolution has lain among the glaciers and the wilderness.

What then was the position of women under the old order? That generation
of authority was intrenched in the great social domination of the
church. What in effect did religion say to women? It said:

"Remember always that this life is of no moment. It is given you that
you may inherit eternity. Reckon not the present, aspire to the next.
Abnegation is glorious, suffering is to be prized, sacrifices patiently
made bring you by so much nearer to Heaven. Subordinate yourself, bear
everything, accept all burdens gladly. Live for others; forgive,
inspire. If this life seem to you narrow and motherhood staggering,
bleak, joyless, think not on the fatigue but on the awakening."

With the turning of men's minds to the dormant truths of science came a
great agnostic revolt that brought a scientific questioning of all facts
and a demand that everything should fall or stand by the test of the
reason. In this new enthusiasm for logic, which has overturned so many
rooted institutions with its militant individualism, the authority of
the home has been shattered, divorce has been multiplied in the protest
against the old unreasoning tyranny of marriage, and the Puritan
domination of the church has too often become a social institution for
the better ordering of the masses and an outward form of polite
respectability. In this complete breaking down of authority the voice of
the church that spoke to women has been lost.

Another troubling phase began simultaneously, the period of miraculous
material opportunity, the fungus growth of fortunes great and little.
The suddenly prosperous parents began to plan for their children those
opportunities which had been denied them, seeking to educate them beyond
what they had known--a process ever linked with tragedy and
disillusionment. What now results, with the thousands of young girls who
have learned of magazines and novels or who have gone out from the
confining narrowness of little homes to a broader education--not simply
in books but in the experience of life, of a certain independency, of
the opportunities beyond?

       *       *       *       *       *

At about the age of eighteen the Salamander returns to town or village,
to the mediocrity of the home from which she has escaped, and at once
the great choice of life presents itself to her. What she has learned,
what she has absorbed from every newspaper has awakened her curiosity
and given her a hunger of the great life which is throbbing somewhere,
far away, in great cities, in a thousand fascinating forms.

To remain, to take up a mild drudgery in the home, means closing the
door on this curiosity. Marriage to such men as remain means at best the
renunciation of that romance which is stirring in her imagination. Why
should she have been educated, if but to return to a distasteful
existence? The parents by the very education which has thrust their
daughter so far above their simple needs have destroyed their old
authority. No other voice of authority commands her in credible tones to
renounce the follies of this life--to consult only the future.

In fact she is none too certain of what is beyond, but she is certain of
what she wants to-day. She spurns the doctrine that it is woman's
position to abnegate and to immolate herself. New ideas are stirring
within her, logical revolts--equality of burden with men, equality of
opportunity and of pleasure. She is sure of one life only and that one
she passionately desires. She wants to live that life to its fullest,
now, in the glory of her youth. She wants to breathe, not to stifle. She
wants adventure. She wants excitement and mystery. She wants to see, to
know, to experience....

And one fine day, inevitably, she packs her valise as her brothers may
have done before her, and despite commands, entreaties, tears, she
stands at last on the platform of a shivering creaking train, waving the
inevitable farewell to the old people, who stand bewildered, straining
their eyes after the fast-fading handkerchief, feebly fluttered by the
daughter whom they have educated for this. She will come back soon. She
will return in a few months--in a year, surely. She never returns.

Sometimes the home has been disrupted by divorce, by death or by
indifference; in which case her departure is the sooner. Sooner or later
if she is clever or attractive she reaches New York. New York is the
troubling light whose rays penetrate to her wherever she may start. At
last, one fine day, she crowds impatiently forward to the front of the
choked ferry-boat, beholds the play of a million lights starting against
the twilight, vast shapes crowding to the water's edge like mythological
monsters, towers flinging up new stars among the constellations--and the
battle has begun.

       *       *       *       *       *

What will she become? In six months she has learned the anatomy of the
complex struggling city, flinging herself into a ceaseless whirl of
excitement. She usually finds a facile occupation which gives her the
defense and the little ready money she needs. She goes into journalism,
stenography or the office of a magazine. Sometimes she has already been
trained to nursing, which opens many avenues of acquaintance to her deft
planning. Sometimes she has a trick with pen or pencil and plays at art.
More often she touches the stage in one of a dozen ways. But all this is
beside the mark. Her real occupation is exploration--how do they act,
these men, clever or stupid, rich, poor, mediocre, dangerous or
provokingly easy to manage? What is the extent of the power that she can
exert over them?

Her education has been quickly formed. The great fraternity of the
Salamanders has taught her of their curious devious understanding. Her
acquaintance with women is necessarily limited, but she can meet what
men she wishes, men of every station, men drawn to her by the lure of
her laughter and tantalizing arts, men who simply wish to amuse
themselves, or somber hunters who have passed beyond the common stuff of
adventuresses and seek with a renewal of excitement this corruption of
innocence. She has no fear of these last, matching her wits against
their appetites, paying them back cruelly in snare and disillusion. She
lives in automobiles and taxi-cabs, dines in a new restaurant every
night--and with difficulty, each week, scrapes up the necessary dollars
to pay her board. She knows the insides of pawn-shops, has secret
treaties with tradesmen and by a hundred stratagems procures herself
presents which may be converted into cash. She is fascinated by
"dangerous" men. She adores perilous adventures and somehow or other,
miraculously, she never fails in saving her skirts from the contagion of
the flames.

The period in which she whirls in this frantic existence--the day of the
Salamander--is between eighteen and twenty-five. She does not make the
mistake of prolonging, beyond her youth and her charm, this period
fascinating though it be. By twenty-five, often sooner, she comes to
some decision. Frequently she marries, and marries well, for the
opportunities at her disposal are innumerable. Then what she becomes
must depend on the invisible hazards that sport with all marriages.
Sometimes she selects a career--few women, indeed, are there in the
professions who have not known their years among the Salamanders--but as
she is always ruled by her brain, she does not often deceive herself;
she sees clearly the road ahead and seldom ventures unless she is
convinced. Sometimes she prefers her single existence, resigning herself
to a steady occupation, slipping back into Salamanderland occasionally.
Sometimes--more rarely than it would seem--she takes the open step
beyond the social pale, conquered at length by the antagonists she has
so long eluded--but then she has betrayed the faith of a Salamander.

       *       *       *       *       *

To a European, the Salamanders are incomprehensible. He meets them often
en voyage, often to the cost of his pride, and for his vanity's sake he
denies their innocence. In his civilization they could not exist Even
the New Yorker, who analyzes her surface manners, recounts her tricks
and evasions, her deceptive advances, is still ignorant of the great
currents beneath, and of how profound is their unrest.

For, capricious, inconsistent, harum-scarum, dabbling with fire--yet is
she not the free agent she so ardently believes? Back of all the
passionate revolt against the commonplace in life, back of all the
defiantly proclaimed scorn of conventions, there are the hushed echoes
of the retreating first generation, there are old memories, whispers of
childhood faith, hesitations and doubts that return and return, and
these quiet suspended sounds constantly turn her aside, make of her a
being constantly at war with herself, where will and instinct are ever
opposed without she perceives or comprehends the where-for.

       *       *       *       *       *

We see clearly two generations, the old order of broken authority
passing sadly away, the new which is bravely seeking a logical standard
of conduct beyond that of blind obedience--if yet the time be arrived
when humanity be ready. The third--that coming generation in which woman
will count for so much, where for the first time she will construct and
order--where will it go? Backward a little or forward? Will those who
have been Salamanders to-day, turned mothers to-morrow, still teach what
they have proclaimed, that what is wrong for the woman is wrong for the
man and that if man may experience woman may explore?




    THE SALAMANDER




    THE SALAMANDER




    CHAPTER I


The day was Thursday; the month, October, rushing to its close; and the
battered alarm-clock on the red mantel stood at precisely one o'clock.
The room was enormous, high and generally dim, the third floor front of
Miss Pim's boarding-house on lower Madison Avenue. Of its four windows,
two, those at the side, had been blinded by the uprising of an ugly
brick wall, which seemed to impend over the room, crowding into it,
depriving it of air. The two windows fronting on the avenue let in two
shafts of oblique sunlight. The musty violet paper on the walls,
blistered in spots, was capped by a frieze of atrocious pink and blue
roses. The window-shades, which had been pulled down to shut out the
view of the wall, failed to reach the bottom. The curtain-rods were
distorted, the globes on the gas fixtures bitten and smoked. At the
back, an alcove held a small bed, concealed under a covering of painted
eastern material. An elongated gilt mirror, twelve feet in height,
leaned against the corner. Trunks were scattered about, two open and
newly ransacked. A folding-bed transformed into a couch, heaped with
cushions, was between the blind windows: opposite, a ponderous rococo
dressing-table, the mirror stuffed with visiting-cards, photographs and
mementoes. Half a dozen vases of flowers--brilliant chrysanthemums,
heavily scented violets, American Beauty roses, slender and
nodding--fought bravely against the pervading dinginess. On the large
central table stood a basket of champagne, newly arrived, a case of
assorted perfumes, a box of white evening gloves and two five-pound
boxes of candy in fancy baskets.

Before the mirrored dressing-table, tiptoe on a trunk, a slender girlish
figure was studying solicitously the effect of gold stockings and low
russet shoes with buckles of green enamel. She was in a short skirt and
Russian blouse, rich and velvety in material, of a creamy rose-gold
luster. The sunlight which struck at her ankles seemed to rise about her
body, suffusing it with the glow of joy and youth. The neck was bare;
the low, broad, rolling silk collar, which followed the graceful lines
of the shoulders beneath, was softened by a full trailing bow of black
silk at the throat. A mass of tumbling, tomboy, golden hair, breaking in
luxuriant tangles over the clear temples, crowned the head with a
garland. Just past twenty-two, her figure was the figure of eighteen, by
every descending line, even to the little ankles and feet, finely
molded.

[Illustration: "What do you really think?"]

She had elected to call herself, according to the custom of the
Salamanders, Dore Baxter. The two names, incongruously opposed, were
like the past and the present of her wandering history: the first,
brilliant, daring, alive with the imperious zest and surprise of
youth; the second baldly realistic, bleak, like a distant threatening
uprise of mountains.

On the couch, languidly lost among the cushions, Winona Horning
(likewise a nom de guerre) was abandoned in lazy attention. In the
embrasure of one window, camped tailor fashion in a large armchair, a
woman was studying a role, beating time with one finger, mumbling
occasionally:

    "Tum-tum-ti-tumpety-tum-tum-tum!
    I breakfast in diamonds, I bathe in cream.
    What's the use? What's the use?"

Snyder--she called herself Miss, but passed for being divorced--was not
of the fraternity of the Salamanders. Dore Baxter had found her in ill
health, out of a position, discouraged and desperate; and in a
characteristic impulse, against all remonstrances, had opened her room
to her until better days. The other Salamanders did not notice her
presence or admit her equality. She seemed not to perceive their
hostility, never joining in their conversation, going and coming
silently.

The sharp shaft of the sun, bearing down like a spot-light, brought into
half relief the mature lines of the body and the agreeable, if serious,
features. The brown head, with a defiance of coquetry, was simply
dressed, braided about with stiff rapid coils. The dress was black, the
waist unrelieved--the costume of the woman who works. What made the
effect seem all the more severe was that there was more than a trace of
beauty in the face and form--a prettiness evidently disdained and
repressed. One shoe, projecting into the light, was noticeably worn at
the heel.

All at once, without turning, the girl on the trunk, twisting anxiously
before the mirror, exclaimed:

"Winona, what do you really think?"

"It doesn't show from here."

"How can you see from there? Come over nearer!"

Winona Horning, taller, more thoughtful in her movements, rose
reluctantly, fixing a strand of jet-black hair which had strayed, and
seated herself according to the command of a little finger. Her
complexion was very pale against the black of her hair, her eyes were
very large, given to violent and sudden contrasts, more intense and more
restless than her companion's.

"And now?" said Dore, lifting the glowing skirt the fraction of an inch.

"Still all right."

"Really?"

"Really!"

"And now?"

"Um-m--yes, now it shows!"

On the golden ankle a mischievous streak of white had appeared--a seam
outrageously rent.

"Heavens, what a fix! I've just got to wear them!" said Dore, dropping
her skirts with a movement of impatience.

"Estelle has a pair--"

"She needs them at three. We can't connect!"

"Bah! Dazzle with the left leg, then, Dodo," replied Winona, giving her
her pet name.

Dore accepted the suggestion with a burst of laughter, and springing
lightly down, seated herself on the trunk.

"Yes--yes, it can be done," she said presently, after a moment's
practising. "If I don't forget!"

"You won't," said Winona, with a smile.

Snyder rose from her seat, and without paying the slightest attention to
this serious comedy, crossed the room and returned to her post, bringing
a pencil, with which she began eagerly to jot down a few notes.

"Like the effect?" said Dore, leaving the mirror with a last glance, the
tip of her tongue appearing a moment through the sharp white rows of
teeth, in the abstraction of her gaze.

She turned, and for the first time her eyes raised themselves
expectantly. They were of a deep ultramarine blue, an unusual cloudy
shade which gave an unexpected accent of perplexity to the fugitive
white and pink of the cheek.

"Perfectly dandy, Dodo; but--"

At this moment from the little ante-chamber outside the door came the
irritable silvery ring of the telephone.

"See who it is," said Dore quickly. "Remember! you don't know if I'm
in--find out first."

As Winona crossed toward the back, Dore turned with a mute interrogation
toward the figure in the window, and extending her arms, pirouetted
slowly twice. Lottie Snyder responded with a sudden smile that lighted
up her features with a flash of beauty. She nodded twice emphatically,
continuing to gaze with kindness and affection. Then she took up her
role bruskly as Winona returned.

"It's a Mr. Chester--Cheshire? What shall I say?"

"Chesterton," said Dore. "I'll go."

She consumed a moment searching among the overflow of gloves on the
trunk-tray, and went to the telephone, without closing the door. Winona,
not to speak to Snyder, began to manicure her hands. From the hall came
the sounds of broken conversation:

"Hello? Who is it?... Yes, this is Miss Baxter.... Who?...
Huntington?... Oh, yes, Chesterton ... of course I remember.... How do
you do?... I'm just up.... Yes, splendid dance!... What?... To-night?...
No-o.... Who else is in the party?... Just us two?... No, I guess
not!... Aren't you a little sudden, Mr. Chesterton?... Not with you
alone.... Oh, yes; but I'm very formal! That's where you make your
mistake.... Certainly, I'd go with a good many men, but not with you....
Not till I really know you.... Now, I'm going to tell you something, Mr.
Chesterton. I'm not like other girls, I play fair. I expect men to make
mistakes--one mistake. I always forgive once, and I always give one
warning--just one! You understand? All right! I won't say any more!...
No, I'm not offended.... I'm quite used to such mistakes: they sort of
follow dances, don't they?... Well, that's nice; I'm glad you understand
me.... Some men don't, you know!... That's very flattering!... If
what?... If it's made a party of four?... That would be different,
yes.... Try--telephone me about six and I'll let you know.... No, I
couldn't say definitely now; I'll have to try and get out of another
party.... No, I haven't seen that play yet.... Phone at six.... Oh, dear
me! How easily you repeat that!... Why, yes, I liked you; I thought you
danced the Hesitation perfectly dandy...." (A laugh.) "Well, that's
enough.... I can't promise.... Phone, anyhow.... Good-by.... Yes, oh,
yes.... Good-by.... Not offended! Oh, no!... Good-by!"

She came back, and extending her fingers above her head, said:

"So high!" She brought her hands close together: "So thin! A
monocle--badly tamed--a ladylike mustache--all I remember! Oh, yes, he
said he had two automobiles--most important!" She shrugged her shoulders
and added maliciously: "We'll put him down, anyhow--last call for
dinner!... So you don't like my costume?"

"That isn't it!" said Winona. She turned, hesitating: "Only, for an orgy
of old Sassoon's."

"Orgy," in the lexicon of the Salamanders, is a banquet in the
superlative of lavishness; on the other hand, a dinner or a luncheon
that has the slightest taint of economy is derogatorily known as a
"tea-party."

"It's my style--it's me!" said Dore, with a confident bob of her head.

"Those girls will come all Gussied up for Sassoon," persisted Winona.
"Staggering, under the war-paint!"

"Let me alone," said Dodo; "I know what I'm doing!"

She knew she had made no blunder. The costume exhaled a perfume of
freshness and artless charm, from the daintiness with which the throat
was revealed, from the slight youthful bust delicately defined under the
informality of the blouse, to the long descending clinging of the coat,
which followed, half-way to the knee, lines of young and slender grace
which can not be counterfeited.

"It's individual--it's me," she repeated, running her little hands
caressingly down the slim undulation of the waist, caught in by the trim
green belt.

The telephone rang a second time.

"Joe Gilday," said Winona presently, covering the mouthpiece with her
hand.

"Say I'm in," said Dore hastily, in a half whisper. "Now go back and say
I'm out!"

"What's wrong?" said Winona, opening her eyes.

"Needs disciplining."

"He knows you're here--says he must speak to you," said the emissary,
reappearing.

"Tell him I am, and won't," said Dore mercilessly.

Snyder, with a sudden recognition of the clock, rose, and going to a
trunk, pounced on a sailor hat, slapping it on her head without looking
in the mirror. She came and planted herself before Dore, who had watched
her, laughing.

"Beating it up to Blainey's," she said. The voice was low, but with a
slur that accused ordinary antecedents. "Say, he's dipped on you; got a
fat part salted away--if you ever turn up! Why don't you see him?"

"I will--I will."

"Look here. You're not going to let everything slip this season, too,
are you?"

"How do I know what I'll do to-morrow?" said Dore, laughing.

"Aren't you ever going to settle down?"

"Yes, indeed; in a year!"

"It's a real fat part; you're crazy to lose the chance!"

"Tell Blainey to be patient; I'm going to be serious--soon!"

"See him!"

"I will--I will!"

"When?"

"To-morrow--perhaps."

She took Snyder by the shoulders, readjusting the hat.

"Aren't you ashamed to treat yourself this way! You can be real pretty,
if you want to."

"When I want to, I am," said Snyder, shrugging her shoulders, but
opposing no resistance to the rearrangement of her costume.

"Snyder, you _do_ it on purpose!" said Dore, vexed at the hang of the
skirt, which resisted her efforts.

Winona reentered. She had heard the conversation with one ear, while
extending comfort to the frantic Gilday in disgrace. Snyder, with the
entree to Blainey, manager for the Lipswitch and Berger Circuit, aroused
her respect with her envy.

"Snyder, what do you do all the time?" she said in a conciliatory tone.

"Meaning what?"

"You never go out--never amuse yourself!"

"I amuse myself much more than you!"

"What!" exclaimed Winona.

"Much more. I work!"

Saying which, she flung into her jacket like a schoolboy, and went out
without further adieus.

"Pleasant creature!" said Winona acidly.

"It's you who are wrong," said Dore warmly. "Why patronize her?"

"There _is_ a difference between us, I think," said Winona coldly.
"Really, Dodo, I don't understand how you can--"

"Let Snyder alone," said Dore, with a flash of anger. "No harm comes
from being decent to some one who's down. Don't be so hard--you never
know what may happen to you!" Seeing the flush on Winona's face, she
softened her tone and, her habitual good humor returning, added: "If you
knew her struggle--There! Let's drop it!"

Fortunately, the telephone broke in on the tension. Another followed,
even before she had left the anteroom. The first was an invitation from
Roderigo Sanderson, one of Broadway's favorite leading men, to a dress
rehearsal of a new comic opera that promised to be the rage of the
season. While secretly delighted at the prospect, Dore answered, in a
tone of subdued suffering, that she was in bed with a frightful
head-ache--that, though it seemed to be improving, she couldn't tell how
she would feel later, and adjourned a decision until six, at which hour
he was to telephone. She gave the same reply to the second invitation, a
proposition from Donald Bacon, a broker, who was organizing a party for
a cabaret dance later in the evening.

"Hurray! Now I can have a choice," she said, tripping gaily back and
pirouetting twice on her left foot. Suddenly she stopped, folding her
arms savagely.

"Winona!"

"What?"

"I'm bored!"

"Since when?"

"Don't laugh! Really, I am unhappy! If something exciting would
happen--if I could fall in love!"

"You will be when you come back!"

"Yes--that's the trouble!" said Dore, laughing. "But it never lasts!"

"And day before yesterday?"

"What about it?"

"That wonderful Italian you came home raving about?"

"Ah, yes! that was a great disappointment!" She repeated, in a tone of
discouragement: "A great disappointment! It's the second meeting that's
so awful! Men are so stupid, it's no fun any more!" All at once she
noticed her friend's attitude. "What's the matter? You're not angry!"

"No, not that!" Winona rose, flinging down the manicuring sticks,
drawing a deep breath. "Only, when I see you throwing over a chance like
that from Blainey--"

"What! You want the job?" exclaimed Dore, struck by the thought.

"Want it?" cried the girl bitterly. "I'd go up Broadway on my knees to
get it!"

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Ah! this has got to end sometime," said the girl, locking and unlocking
her fingers. "Snyder was right. It's work--work! She's lucky!"

Dore became suddenly thoughtful. Between Salamanders real confidences
are rare. She knew nothing of the girl who was separated from her but by
a wall, but there was no mistaking the pain in her voice.

"I'm sorry!" she said.

"Yes, I've come to the end of my rope," said Winona. "I'm older than
you--I've played too long!"

"You shall have the job!"

"Oh, it's easy to--"

"I'll go to-morrow. I'll make Blainey give it to you."

"He won't!"

"He? Of course he will! That old walrus? He'll do anything I tell him!
That's settled! I'll see him to-morrow!"

Winona turned, composing her passion.

"I'm a fool!" she said.

"Hard up?"

"Busted!"

"The deuce! So'm I! Never mind; we'll find some way--"

"Why don't you take the job yourself?"

"I? Never! I couldn't! It's too soon to be serious!" exclaimed Dore,
laughing in order to relieve the tension. "When I'm twenty-three--in six
months--not before! It's all decided."

"First time you've been to one of Sassoon's parties?" asked Winona
abruptly.

"First time! I'm quite excited!"

"You've met him, then?"

"No, not yet! I'm going as a chorus girl."

"What?"

"He's entertaining the sextette of the _Gay Prince_--I'm to replace one.
I got the bid through Adele Vickers--you remember her? She's in the
sextette."

"Adele Vickers," said Winona, with a frown.

"It's on the quiet, naturally," said Dore, not noticing the expression.
"I'm to be taken for a chorus girl, by old Sassoon too--complications,
heaps of fun!"

"You're crazy! Some one'll recognize you!"

"Bah!"

"Sassoon doesn't play fair!" said Winona abruptly.

"Dangerous?"

"He doesn't play the game fair!" repeated Winona, with more insistence.

"I like precipices!" said Dore, smiling.

"How you express things, Dodo!"

"Why? Don't you like 'em?"

"Yes, naturally. But with Sassoon--"

"It's such fun!" said Dore, shaking her curls.

Her companion crossed her fingers and held them up in warning.

"Dodo, be careful!"

"I'll take care of myself!" said Dore scornfully, and a flash of
excitement began to show in the dark blue shadows of her eyes.

"Different! Sassoon is on the black list, Dodo!"

Albert Edward Sassoon, whom two little Salamanders were thus discussing
in a great barn of a room, third floor front of Miss Pim's
boarding-house, was the head of the great family of Sassoon, which for
three generations had stood, socially and financially, among the first
powers of the city.

"Thanks for the warning. When you know, you know what to do!" said Dore
carelessly. "Just let him try!"

The admonition troubled her not at all. She had met and scored others
before who in the secret code of the Salamanders were written down
unfair. The prospect of such an antagonist brought to her a little more
animation. She bolted into a snug-fitting fur toque, brightened by a
flight of feathers at the side, green with a touch of red.

"There!" she exclaimed merrily. "A bit of the throat, a bit of the
ankle, and a slash of red--that's Dodo! What's the time?"

"Twenty past. Who's your prop?"

"Stacey."

"Prop," in the lexicon of the Salamanders, is a term obviously converted
from the theatrical "property." A "prop," in Salamanderland, is a youth
not too long out of the nest to be rebellious, possessed of an
automobile--a _sine qua non_--and agitated by a patriotic craving to
counteract the evil effects of the hoarding of gold. Each Salamander of
good standing counts from three to a dozen props, carefully broken, kept
in a state of expectant gratitude, genii of the telephone waiting a
summons to fetch and carry, purchase tickets of all descriptions, lead
the way to theater or opera, and, above all, to fill in those blank
dates, or deferred engagements, which otherwise might become items of
personal expense.

At this moment the curly brown head of Ida Summers, of the second floor
back, bobbed in and out, saying in a stage whisper:

"Black Friday! Beware! The cat's loose--rampaging!"

It was a warning that Miss Pim, in a periodic spasm of alarm, was
spreading dismay through the two houses in her progress in search of
long-deferred rents.

"Horrors!" exclaimed Winona Horning. She sprang to the door which gave
into her room, ready to use it as an escape from either attack.

"Twice this week. Um-m--means business!" said Dore solemnly. "I'm three
weeks behind. How are you?"

"Five!"

"We must get busy," said Dore pensively. "I have just two dollars in
sight!"

"Two? You're a millionaire!"

"The champagne will bring something," said Dore, fingering the basket,
"but I can't let it go until Mr. Peavey--If he'd only call up for
to-night! Zip might take the perfume, but I need it so! Worse luck, the
flowers have all come from the wrong places. There's twenty dollars
there, if it were only Pouffe. And look at this!"

She went to her bureau, and opening a little drawer, held up a
bank-note.

"Fifty dollars!" exclaimed Winona, amazed.

"Ridiculous, isn't it?" said Dore, with a laugh, shutting it up again.
"Joe Gilday had the impertinence to slip it in there, after I had
refused a loan!"

"What! Angry for that?" said Winona, carried away by the famine the
money had awakened in her.

"Certainly I am!" said Dore energetically. "Do you think I'd allow a man
to give me money--like that?"

This ethical point might have been discussed, but at the moment a knock
broke in upon the conversation. The two girls started, half expecting to
behold Miss Pim's military figure advancing into the room.

"Who is it?" said Dore anxiously.

"It's Stacey," said a docile voice.

"Shall I go?" inquired Winona, with a gesture.

"No, no--stay! Always stay!" said Dore, hastily stuffing back the
overflowing contents of a trunk and signaling Winona to close the lid
nearest her.

Stacey Van Loan crowded into the room. He was a splendid grenadier type
of man, with the smiling vacant face of a boy. He wore shoes for which
he paid thirty dollars, a suit that cost a hundred, a great fur coat
that cost eight times more, enormous fur gloves, and a large pearl pin
in his cravat. On entering, he always blushed twice, the first as an
apology and the second for having blushed before. The most captious
Salamander would have accepted him at a glance as the beau ideal of a
prop--a perfect blend of radiating expensiveness and docile timidity.
Van Loan Senior, of the steel nobility of Pennsylvania, had insisted on
his acquiring a profession after two unfortunate attempts at collegiate
culture, and had exiled him to New York to study law, allotting him
twenty thousand dollars a year to defray necessary expenses.

"Bingo! what a knock-out!" said Stacey, gazing open-mouthed, heels
together, at the glowing figure that greeted him.

Dore, who had certain expectations as to his arrival, perceiving that he
held one hand concealed behind his back, broke into smiles.

"You sly fellow, what are you hiding there?"

"All right?" said Van Loan, with an anxious gulp. "How about it?"

He thrust out an enormous bouquet of orchids, which, in his fear of
appearing parsimonious, he had doubled beyond all reason. The sight of
these flowers of luxury, the price of which would have gone a long way
toward placating Miss Pim, brought a quick telegraphic glance of irony
between the two girls.

"Isn't he a darling?" said Dore, taking the huge floral display and
stealing a glance at the ribbon, which, alas, did not bear the legend
Pouffe, who was approachable in time of need. "Stacey is really the most
thoughtful boy, and everything he gets is in perfect taste. He never
does anything by halves!"

As she said this in a careless manner, which made the young fellow
redden to the ears with delight, she was secretly smothering a desire to
laugh, and wondering how on earth she was to divide the monstrous
display without discouraging future exhibitions of lavishness. She moved
presently toward the back of the room, saying carelessly:

"Look at my last photographs, Stacey."

Then she quickly slipped a third of the bouquet behind a trunk,
signaling Winona, and turning before the long mirror, affixed the
orchids, spreading them loosely to conceal the defection.

"Quarter of. You'll be late!" said Winona, masking the trunk with her
skirts.

"I want to be! I'm not going to have a lot of society women find me on
the door-step!" said Dore, for the benefit of the prop. "Come on,
Stacey; you can look at the photos another day!" She flung about her
shoulders a white stole from the floor below, and buried her hands in a
muff of the same provenance. "Good-by, dear. Back late. Go ahead,
Stacey!"

A moment later she reentered hurriedly.

"Give me the others, quick!" she said, detaching those at her waist.
"These are from Granard's. Take them there--tell them Estelle sent you;
she has an arrangement with them. See what you can get. Tell them we'll
send 'em custom."

She completed the transfer of the smaller bunch, carefully arranging the
wide stole, which she pinned against accidents.

"Listen. If Joe telephones again, make him call me up at six--don't say
I said it! It's possible Blainey may get it in his head to call up. I'll
go with him, unless--unless Peavey wants me for dinner. I must see him
before I dispose of the champagne--understand? You know what to answer
the rest." She hesitated, looking at the orchids: "We ought to get
fifteen out of them. Remember, promise them our custom; use Pouffe on
them. Good-by, dear!"

"Be careful!"

"Yes--yes--yes!"

"Dangerous!"

"Bah! If they only were--but they're not!"

She rejoined Stacey, whose nose was sublimely at the wheel, crying:

"Let her go, Stacey. Up to Tenafly's. Break the speed law!"

She started to spring in, but suddenly remembering the offending
stocking, stopped and ascended quietly--on the left foot.




    CHAPTER II


At this time, it happened that the highest democratic circles of New
York were thrown into a turmoil of intrigue and social carnage by the
visit of representatives of one of the royal houses of Europe, traveling
under the title of the Comte and Comtesse de Joncy. A banquet had been
respectfully tendered these rare manifestations of the principle of
divine right. The list of guests, directed by the autocratic hand of
Mrs. Albert Edward Sassoon, tore New York society to shreds, and
reconstituted that social map which had been so opportunely established
by the visit of the lamented Grand Duke and Royal Imperial Highness
Alexis. Twenty-five young gentlemen of irreproachable standing had flung
themselves enthusiastically at the distinguished honor of offering soup
to such exalted personages, and the press of New York scrupulously
published the list of honorary waiters high among the important details
of the probable cost per plate of this extraordinary banquet.

Now, the Comte de Joncy, being profoundly bored by such amateur
exhibitions, had remarked to Sassoon that, in his quality of traveler
and student of important social manifestations, what had impressed him
most was the superior equipment, physically and mentally, of the
American chorus girl.

It was a remark that Sassoon was eminently fitted to comprehend--having,
indeed, received the same confidential observation from the Comte de
Joncy's last royal predecessor. The present luncheon was the prompt
response, and to insure the necessary freedom from publicity, Harrigan
Blood, editor of the _New York Free Press_, was invited.

They waited in the brilliant Louis XVI salon of that private suite which
Tenafly reserved for his choicest patrons, patiently prepared for that
extra half-hour of delay which the ladies of the chorus would be sure to
take in their desire to show themselves ladies of the highest fashion.
The curtains were open on the cozy dining-room, on the spectacle of
shining linen, the spark of silver and the gay color of fragrant
bouquets. Two or three waiters were giving the last touches under the
personal supervision of Tenafly himself, who accorded this mark of
respect only to the master who had raised him from head waiter in a
popular roadside inn to the management of a restaurant capitalized in
millions.

There were six: Sassoon, slight, waxen, bored, with a wandering,
fatigued glance, oriental in the length of his head and the deep setting
of the eyes; the Comte de Joncy, short, round-bellied, hair transparent
and polished, parted from the forehead to the neck, with nothing of
dignity except in his gesture and the agreeable modulation of his voice;
Judge Massingale of the magistrates court, urbane, slightly stooped in
shoulders, high in forehead, set in glance, an onlooker keenly
observant, and observing with a relish that showed in the tolerant
humor of the thin ever-smiling lips; Tom Busby, leader of cotillions and
social prescriber to a bored and desperate world, active as a young
girl, bald at thirty, but with a radiating charm, disliking no one,
never failing in zest, animating the surface of gaiety, blind to
ugliness below, well born and indispensable; Garret Lindaberry, known
better as "Garry" Lindaberry, not yet thirty, framed like a
frontiersman, with a head molded for a statesman, endowed with every
mental energy except necessity, burning up his superb vitality in
insignificant supremacies, a magnificent man-of-war sailing without a
rudder, supremely elegant; never, in the wildest orgies, relaxing the
control of absolute courtesy; finally, Harrigan Blood, interloper, last
to arrive, abrupt and on the rush, in gray cheviot, which he had assumed
as a flaunting of his independence before those whose motive for
inviting him he perfectly understood. Neck and shoulders massive, head
capacious and already beginning to show the stealing in of the gray, jaw
strong and undershot like a bulldog's, cropped mustache, forehead seamed
with wrinkles, incapable of silence or attention except when in the
sudden contemplative pursuit of an idea, disdaining men, and women more
than men on account of the distraction they flung him into, passionately
devoted to ideas, he bided his time, knowing no morality but
achievement.

The group formed an interesting commentary on American society of the
day, which parallels that of modern France, with its Bourbon, its
Napoleonic and its Orleanist strata of nobility. Sassoon and Massingale
were of the old legitimists, offshoots of families that had never
relaxed their supremacy from colonial days; Lindaberry and Busby were
inheritors in the third generation of that first period of industrial
adventure, the period of the gold-fields of 1845, while Harrigan Blood
was of the present era of volcanic opportunity, that creates in a day
its marshals of the Grand Army of Industry, ennobles its soldiers of
yesterday, and forces the portals of established sets with the golden
knocking of new giants, who cast on the steps the soiled garments of the
factory, the mining camp and the construction gang.

Past and present have given the American two distinct types. The
characteristics of the first are aristocratic, the thinly elongated
head, the curved skull balancing on a slender neck, nose and forehead
advancing, the jaw less and less accentuated. Of the second, the type of
the roughly arriving adventurer, Harrigan Blood was the ideal. His was
the solid, crust-breaking, boulder type of head, embedded on shoulders
capable of propelling it upward through the multitude, the democrat who
places his chair roughly in the overcrowded front rank, whose wife and
daughters will crown, by way of Europe, the foundation which he flings
down.

"_Mon cher_ Sassoon," said the Comte de Joncy, studying Blood,--who, in
another group, was discussing the coming political campaign with
Massingale,--"I'll give you a bit of advice. The animal is dangerous! I
know the kind!"

"Words--words!" said Sassoon, his wandering eye flitting a moment to
the group. "We manage him very well."

"If you could dangle the prospect of a title before his eyes," said the
count, with a sardonic smile. "But you--what have you to offer him?"

"Money!" said Sassoon indifferently. "We make him a partner in our
operations. He won't attack us!"

"He will use you!" said De Joncy shrewdly. "That type doesn't love
money! When he gets as much as he wants, beware! Do you receive him?"

"Oh, we invite him to half a dozen of these affairs," said Sassoon,
without looking at his companion and speaking as if his mind were
elsewhere. "That keeps him to generalizations!"

This word, which was afterward repeated, and reaching the ears of
Harrigan Blood, made of him an overt enemy, made the Comte de Joncy
smile.

"I see you, too, have your diplomacy," he said, studying Sassoon with
more interest.

"Yes. Generalizations are blank cartridges: they can be aimed at any
one," Sassoon said, without animation. He ran a thin forefinger over the
scarce mustache that mounted in a W from the full upper lip. Then,
raising his voice a little, he called Busby:

"I say, Buzzy, hurry things up a bit!"

Busby, like Ganymede at a frown from Jove, departed lightly in the
direction of the ladies' dressing-room.

"It's Buzzy, my darlings," he said, sticking in his beaky nose and wide
grinning mouth. "You've prinked enough; I'm coming in!"

He was immediately surrounded and assailed with exclamations:

"Oh, Buzzy! why didn't you tell us!"

"A Royal Highness!"

"Mean thing!--not to warn us!"

"What d'ye call His Nibs?"

"We're tickled to death!"

"Don't suffocate me, sweethearts," said Busby, defending himself. "I
didn't tell you for a damn good reason. No press-agent stunts before or
after. Understand? Besides, the papers are bottled up--democratic
respect for His Highness."

"I've a mind to have appendicitis," said one in a whisper to a
companion. "Gee! What a chance!"

"If you do, Consuelo, dear," said Busby urbanely, "we'll ship you down
in a service elevator, and see you get the operation, too. Now, no
nonsense, girls. You know what that means."

"What we've got to keep it out of the poipers? What, no publicity? Gee!"

"None, now or after," said Busby firmly.

All at once he looked up, astonished, perceiving Dore, who floated in at
this moment like a golden bird.

"Gwendolyn had the sneezes," said Adele Vickers hastily. "This is her
sister."

"What's her name?" said Busby suspiciously, while the chorus girls, with
their mountainous hats and sweeping feathers, their overloaded bodices
and jeweled necks, studied with some concern the simple daring of this
new arrival, uncertain and apprehensive.

"Miss Baxter," said Miss Vickers in a low voice.

"She's not a reporter?" said Busby, hesitating.

"Honest to God, Buzzy," said Adele Vickers vehemently. "She's on the
stage, the legitimate--Dore Baxter, a friend of mine!"

"I know her!" said Busby, suddenly enlightened by the full name, and
going to her, he said: "Met you at a party of Bruce Gunther's, I
believe, Miss Baxter."

Dore, who thus found herself, to her vexation, sailing under her own
colors, said, with a pleading look:

"Don't give me away, will you? It's just a lark, and," she added lower,
"don't call me Miss Baxter!"

"A stage name, eh?"

"Splendid one--Trixie Tennyson. Doesn't that sound like a head-liner?"
she added confidentially, in the low tone in which the conversation had
been conducted.

Busby repeated the name, chuckling to himself, yielding to his sense of
humor. "All right! Now, girls, come on!"

"But what shall we call him?"

"Call him anything you like ... after the soup!" said Busby, laughing.
"Remember! he's here to be amused!... Have any of you girls changed your
names since I saw you last?... No?... Then I know them!..." He told them
off, counting with his fingers: "Adele Vickers, Georgie Gwynne--it used
to be Bronson last year--"

"It never was!" exclaimed a petite Irish brunette, with a saucy smile
and a roguish eye: "Baron--"

"I'll give you a better one: Georgie Washington!" continued Busby. "Why
not? Fine!... A press-agent would charge for that!... I see an inch of
nose, a gray eye and a brown cheek under an avalanche of hat--must be
Viola Pax!"

"Violetta, please!" said a southern type with soft consonants.

"To be sure!... to be sure!... Both are up-to-date, though!... Trixie
Tennyson ... ah, there's a name!... Do you know who Tennyson was, little
dears?... A great scientist who discovered the reason why brooks go on
forever!" Adele and Dore smiled, but the rest accepted the information.
"Paula Stuart and Consuelo ... dear me! I never did know your last name,
Consuelo, darling!"

"Vincent! and cut out the guying!" said a fair buxom type, child of the
Rialto. "Let's get a move on!"

"Quite right!" said Busby, offering an arm to Adele Vickers and Violetta
Pax. "Follow me ... always!"

The dressing-room emptied itself, with a last struggle for the mirror, a
few hurried applications of rouge, and a loosening of perfumes, while,
above the pleasant rustle of skirts, the voice of Georgie Gwynne was
heard in a stage whisper:

"Remember, girls! Act refined!"

Consuelo Vincent, under pretext of a cold, insisted on keeping a
magnificent sable cape, which she shifted constantly the better to
display it.

On perceiving Busby arriving with this bouquet of vermilion smiles,
polished teeth and flashing eyes, the Comte de Joncy, who had begun to
be restless under the strain of serious conversation, brightened
visibly, and holding out both hands, exclaimed with the practised
familiarity of a patron of all the arts:

"Why you make me wait so long? _Jolis petits amours!_ Ah, she is
charming, this one. What a naughty little eye! Oho! something
Spanish--do you dance the Bolero? Ah, but each is perfect--adorable! I
could eat every one of them!"

But to this royal affability the ladies of the chorus, very stiff, very
correct, lisping a little, made answer:

"Pleased to meet you, I'm sure!"

"It's quite an unexpected pleasure!"

"Indeed, most glad to meet you!"

The introductions continued, and presently the room resounded with such
phrases as these:

"I hope we're not terribly late!... New York streets are so crowded!"

"Delightful weather, don't you think?"

"What a charming view!... I dote on views, don't you?"

"Have you seen _Peleas and Melisande_?"

And Georgie Gwynne, picking her words with difficulty, was remarking to
Harrigan Blood:

"You're such a celebrity, Mr. Blood!... I'm tick ... I'm delighted to
know you!"

The Comte de Joncy, overcome by this flood of manners, said to his host:

"The devil, _mon cher_ Sassoon, they overawe me! You are sure it is no
mistake? It is not some of your dreadful wives?"

"Wait!" said Sassoon, raising a finger.

Busby, who knew their ways, arrived with a tray of cocktails, scolding
them like a stage-manager:

"Now, girls--girls! Unbend! Warm up, or His Highness will catch a cold!
Come on, Consuelo, you've aired your furs enough; send them back--you
give us a chill! This will never do! Now perk up, girls, do perk up!"

Dore took the cocktail offered, and profiting by the stir, emptied it
quickly behind her in the roots of a glowing orange tree. She raised her
eyes suddenly to Massingale's. He had detected the movement, and was
smiling. She made a quick, half-checked gesture of her arm, imploring
his confidence, as, amused, he came to her side.

"What a charming name, Miss Tennyson," he said, without reference to
what he had seen. "Are you related?"

She understood that he would not betray her.

"Alfred's a sort of distant cousin," she said with a lisp, affecting a
mannerism of the shoulders. "Of course, I haven't kept my full name--my
full name is Rowena Robsart Tennyson; but that wouldn't do for the
stage, would it? Trixie--Trixie Tennyson is chicker, don't you think?"

"Is what?"

"Chicker--French, you know!"

"Ah, more _chic_," he said, looking at her steadily with a little
lurking mockery in the corners of his eyes.

"I'm not fooling him," she said to herself, impressed by the steadiness
of his judicial look, half inquisitorial, half amused. Nevertheless, she
continued with a mincing imitation of Violetta Pax, who could be heard
discoursing on art.

"What charming weather! Do you like our show? Have you seen it?"

"Yes--have you?" he said, with malice in his eyes.

"What do you mean by that? I'm sure I don't know!"

"I understood you came in place of your sister. Did you forget?"

She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, knowing the comedy
useless, but continuing it. She was easily impressed, especially at a
first meeting, and she had a feeling that to be a judge one must know
all, see through every subterfuge.

"'Course I've only been in the sextette a couple of nights."

"And what is your ambition? Tragedy?"

"Oh, no!" she said, with an important seriousness. "I don't think
tragedy's in my complexion, do you? I dote on comedy, though; I'd like
to be a Maude Adams s-some day."

"So you are serious?" he said gravely.

"Oh, much so--'course, I don't know. I haven't any prejudices against
marriage," she continued, allowing her great blue troubling eyes to
remain on his. "I sometimes think I'd like to go to London and marry
into the English aristocracy."

He bit his lips to keep from laughing.

"Society is so narrow here--there's more opportunity abroad, don't you
think?"

He did not answer, considering her fixedly, plainly intrigued.

She moved into the embrasure of a window with a defensive movement.

"The view's quite wonderful, isn't it?"

They were on the fifteenth floor, with a clear sweep of the lower city.
He moved to her side, looking out gravely, impressed as one who reads
beneath the surface of things. From the window the spectacle of the city
below them irrevocably rooted to the soil, caged in the full tide of
labor, gave an exquisite sense of luxury to this banquet among the
clouds. To the south a light bank of fog, low and spreading, was eating
up the horizon of water and distant shore, magnifying the checkered
chart of the city as it closed about it. It seemed as if the whole world
were there, the world of toil, marching endlessly, regimented into
squares, chained to the bitter gods of necessity and the commonplace.

"It gives you the true feeling of splendor," he said. "The world does
not change. We might be on the Hanging Gardens of Babylon." He
continued, his eyes lit up by a flash of imagination that revealed the
youth still in his features: "It is Babylon, Assyria, Egypt. The
Pyramids were raised thus, man in terms of a thousand, harnessed and
whipped, while a few looked down and enjoyed."

She forgot the part she had assumed, keenly responsive. Her mind, still
neglected, was not without perceptions, ready to be awakened to
imagination. She saw as he saw, feeling more deeply.

She extended her hand toward the Egyptian hordes beneath them, looking
at him curiously.

"And that interests you?"

"Both interest me. That and this. Everything is interesting," he said,
with a smile that comprehended her. "Especially you and your motive."

"You know I'm not one of--" she began abruptly.

He shrugged his shoulders good-humoredly, and in his eyes was the same
look of delighted malice that had brought him to her.

"You needn't explain. Your manner was perfect. I quite understand
you--much better than you believe."

He moved forward, joining the movement into the dining-room. She
followed, watching him covertly, enveloped still by his unusual
personality.

As the chorus girls still persisted in their display of mannered
stateliness, the men listened to Harrigan Blood, who had begun to coin
ideas.

"Count, here you have America in a thimble." He elevated his second
cocktail, speaking in the slightly raised tone of one who is accustomed
to the attention of all listeners. "Your Frenchman takes an afternoon
sipping himself into gaiety; your German begins to sing only when he
has drunk up a river of beer; but your American--he's different! What do
we do? We've won or we've lost--we've got to rejoice or forget--it's all
the same. We bolt to a bar and cry: 'Tom, throw something into me
that'll explode!' And he hands us a cocktail! Here's America: a hundred
millions in a generation, a century's progress in a decade--the future
to-morrow, and a change of mood in a second!"

He ended, swallowing his drink in a gulp. Like most mad geniuses of the
press, he drank enormously, feeding thus the brain that he punished
without mercy.

Busby, who peddled epigrams, murmured to himself with a view to future
authorship, "A cocktail is an explosion of spirits; a cocktail...."

The chorus girls, who regarded Harrigan Blood as a sort of demigod who
could make a reputation with a stroke of his pen, acclaimed this sally
with exaggerated delight. The party crowded into the dining-room,
seeking their places.




    CHAPTER III


Dore found herself between Judge Massingale and Lindaberry, Harrigan
Blood opposite between Georgie Gwynne and Violetta Pax. Sassoon was at
the farther end, opposite Lindaberry, with Adele Vickers and Busby to
his right, and Paula Stuart and the Comte de Joncy on his left, Consuelo
Vincent sharing the noble guest, with Massingale next to her.

Beside each feminine plate a bouquet of orchids and yellow pansies,
daintily blended, was waiting, and from the loosely bound stems the edge
of a bank-note showed--a slit of indecipherable green.

Immediately there was a murmur of voices, a quick outstretching of
hands, and a sudden careful pinning on to waists, while each glance
affected unconsciousness of what it had detected. Dore did not imitate
the others. Her eye, too, had immediately caught the disclosed corner.
She contrived, while folding her gloves, to turn the bouquet slightly,
so that no trace of what it contained showed. Then, when the opportunity
came, she examined the faces of the men. So quickly had the flowers been
transferred to the bodices that the male portion remained in ignorance.
Massingale was too close to her to be sure of. Had his quick eye
detected what the others had missed? To refuse the bouquet meant to
bring down on her head a torrent of explanations; ignorance were better.

At this moment there was a hollow pause. The caviar had just been
served, and the chorus girls, watching for a precedent, were in a
quandary between a fork which inclined to a knife, and a fork that was a
tortured spoon. But Georgie Gwynne, too long repressed, exclaimed:

"Oh, hell! Buzzy, tell us the club."

This remark, and the roar with which is was greeted, dispelled at once
the gloom that had settled about the Royal Observer. The chorus girls,
unbending, began to talk American--all at once, chattering, gesturing.
Dore profited by the moment to affix the bouquet among the orchids she
already wore. The success of Georgie Gwynne's ice-breaking was such that
the Comte de Joncy, charmed by such naturalness, wished to invite her to
his side; but, amid protests, it was decided, on a happy motion of
Busby's, that the guests should rotate after each course.

"Sorry it's so," said Massingale, turning; "I shall lose you!"

"Oh, now you know I'm a counterfeit," Dodo said maliciously, "I shall
spoil your fun. Never mind; I promise to go early!"

"Who are you?" he said, by way of answer.

"Trixie Tennyson!"

"I've half a mind to denounce you!"

"Oh, Your Honor, you wouldn't do that!"

"So you won't tell me who you are?"

"It'll be so much more fun for you to find out!"

She listened to him with her head set a little to one side. She rarely
gave the full of her face, keeping always about her a subtle touch of
evasion.

"I know her kind well," he had said to himself. But he continued to
watch her intently, interested in that innate sense of the shades of
coquetry she displayed in the lingering slanted glances, and the eerie
smile which gathered from the malicious corners of her eyes, slipping
down the curved cheek to play a moment about her lips.

"Why did you come?" he said, wishing that she would turn toward him.

"Curiosity!"

"Precipices?"

She turned to him, genuine surprise in the blue clouded eyes, her rosy
lips parted in amazement.

"How did you know?"

"It wasn't difficult!"

"You're uncanny!"

[Illustration: The chorus girls began to talk]

His sense of divination had so startled her that she turned from him a
moment, wondering what attitude to assume. While feigning to listen to
the declaiming of Harrigan Blood, she took every opportunity to study
him. Massingale, scarcely forty, had an intellectual aristocracy about
him that lay in the impersonality of his amused study of others. Yet in
this scrutiny there was no accent of criticism. His lips were relaxed in
a tolerant humor, and this smile puzzled her. Was he also of this
company who sought amusement in a descent to other levels, or was he
simply an observer, a man who had ended a phase of life, but who
still delighted in the contemplation of the ridiculous, the grotesque
and the absurdity of these petty contests of wits? She was aware that he
had attacked her imagination in a way no man had tried before, and this
presumption awoke an instant spirit of resistance. She stole a glance
from time to time in the mirror, but she avoided opportunities for
conversation.

From the farther end of the table she beheld the guest of the day
radiating happiness under a storm of questions from the chorus girls:

"Perfectly horrid of you to call yourself count!"

"Count, lord, I've got a string of 'em!"

"Barons."

"Dukes, too. I know Duke of What's-His-Name Biscay. He's a nice boy! Do
you know him?"

And Georgie Gwynne, flushed with her first success, said to Harrigan
Blood, in a permeating aside:

"When I get to His Nibs, watch what I'll hand him!"

But Harrigan Blood, absorbed in an idea, answered her:

"Be quiet now, Georgie--gorge yourself!"

"Composing an editorial on luxury, Harrigan?" said Lindaberry, speaking
for the first time.

Harrigan Blood admitted the patness of the guess with a wave of his
hand, leaning heavily on the table with his elbows. He had always an air
of being in his shirt-sleeves.

"See the _Free Press_ to-morrow," he said, moving his large hand over
his face and frowning spasmodically. His eye ran quickly over the menu,
calculating the cost per plate, the value of the rare wines, the
decorations, the presents and the tips. "Two thousand dollars at the
least--four thousand dinners below Fourteenth Street, five years abroad
for a genius who is stifling, twenty thousand tired laborers to a
moving-picture show. And with what we turn over with our fork and
regret, the waste that will be thrown away, a family could live a year!
This is civilization and Christianity!"

"Appetite good, Harrigan?" said Lindaberry, with an impertinence that
few would have ventured.

"Better than yours," said Blood impatiently. "Ideas and personalities
have no connection. Ends are one thing, instruments another. Who was the
greatest of the disciples? St. Paul. He had experienced!
Shakespeare--Tolstoy. The caviar is delicious!"

In his attitude he felt no hypocrisy. He looked upon himself as a
machine, to be fed and to be kept in order by sensations--experiences: a
privileged nature dedicated passionately to ideal ends. For the rest,
his contempt for mankind in the present was profound. He had conquered
success early, but he retained an abiding bitterness against the world
which had misunderstood him and forced him a short period to wait.

"And this is Harrigan Blood!" Dore thought, wondering. Another day
flashed before her--two years old--when, just arrived, a despairing
claimant, she had pleaded in vain for opportunity in the great
soul-crushing offices of the _Free Press_. The sport of fate had flung
her a chance, and watching Harrigan Blood from the malicious corners of
her busy eyes, she planned her revenge.

Lindaberry had not as yet addressed a single word to her. He had
gradually come out of the stolid dull intensity that had lain on him
with the weight of last night's dissipation, but one felt in the
awakening vivacity of his eye, the impatient opening and shutting of his
hand, the quick smile that followed each outburst of laughter, a
struggle to reach the extreme of gaiety which such a company brought him
to relieve him from that depression which closed over him when condemned
to be alone.

For her part, she had scarcely noticed him--having a horror of men who
drank. At this moment a butler, under orders from Busby, placed before
him a bottle of champagne for his special use. He turned courteously but
impersonally, without that masculine impertinence in the eye which is
still a compliment.

"May I freshen up your glass?"

"Thank you, no!" she said icily. "I'm afraid I don't appreciate your
special brand of conversation!"

He looked at her, startled--her meaning gradually dawning on him. But,
before he could reply, Busby had risen, sounding his knife against his
plate.

"Next course, ladies will please chasse! Gentlemen, make sure of your
jewelry!"

Dore rose, and, as she did so, addressing the butler who drew out her
chair, said:

"In order that Mr. Lindaberry may feel quite at home, do please place a
bottle on _each_ side of him!"

She made him an abrupt mocking bow, and went to her place past
Massingale, next to the Comte de Joncy, while Lindaberry, flushing, was
left as best he could to face the laughter and clapping of hands that
greeted her sally.

The Comte de Joncy had risen courteously, studying her keenly from his
pocketed, watery blue eyes, seating her with marked ceremony, too keen
an amateur of the sex not to feel a difference in her.

"Bravo!" he said, laughing, and in a confidential tone: "Madame de Stael
could not have answered better!"

The allusion was not in her ken, but she felt the compliment.

"Are you what? Wolf in sheep's clothing, or sheep--"

"Beware!" she said maliciously, converting a fork into a weapon of
attack. "I am a desperate adventuress who has taken this way to meet
Your Highness!"

"If it were only true!" he said, looking questions.

"Why not?" The game amused her, and besides, something perversely
incited her to recklessness. Massingale was on the other side of
her--Massingale, who, after the impudence of having comprehended her,
treated her with only tepid interest. "Where shall I follow you? Paris
or Dresden?"

He stared at her with squinting eyes, not quite deceived, not quite
convinced. At the end he laughed.

"Pretty good--almost you fool me!"

"You don't believe me?" she said, raising her eyes a moment to his.

"Mademoiselle, your eyes have a million in each of them!" he said, after
a moment, but not quite so calmly. "Will you give me your address?"

"Why not?" she said, opening her hands in a gesture of surprise.

"I will come!" he said, yet not entirely the dupe of her game.

"Poor Count!" she said, with a quick change of manner. "You don't know
what a dangerous animal we have here. Beware!"

"What?"

"The great American teaser!" she said, laughing.

"Teaser--teaser! What is that?"

She entered into an elaborate explanation, glancing into the mirror,
striving from there to catch Massingale's look.

"I say, angels!" said Buzzy, bubbling over with mischief. "I've got an
idea!"

"Buzzy has an idea!"

"Good for Buzzy!"

"We want to amuse the Count, don't we?" said Busby artfully.

"Sure!..."

"You bet!..."

"Well, then, let's tell our real names!"

Violetta Pax gave a scream of horror and retired blushing under her
napkin at the storm of laughter her scream of confession had aroused.

"Real name's Lou Burgstadter!" said Consuelo Vincent in a whisper to De
Joncy, who had forgot her.

Violetta Pax was on her feet in an instant.

"Consuelo Vincent, I like your nerve!... Consuelo, indeed! Cassie
Hagan!" she cried furiously. "Yes, and Carrie Slater, too, needn't put
on airs!"

The rest was lost in an uproar; the chorus girls were on their feet,
protesting vigorously, all chattering at once, the men applauding and
fomenting the tumult, Busby secretly enjoying the mischief he had
exploded, running from one to the other, pleading, provoking, adding
fuel to the burning.

"Ladies!... Ladies! Remember there are gentlemen present!... Georgie,
Violetta's giving you away!... Girls! Girls! Remember His Highness!...
Paula, dear, you ought to hear what Georgie said, of you! Awful ...
awful.... Now, dearies, behave!... remember your manners!"

At the end of a moment, overcome with laughter, he capsized on a sofa in
weak hysterics. Blood exclaimed that Busby had a fit, and thus procured
a diversion which restored calm. Nevertheless, the storm had been so
sudden that the wreckage was strewn about the room; Busby gathered them
together again, conciliated every one and brought them back to their
seats.

Dore was excited by this outburst. At last the party promised something
to her curiosity. She waited eagerly, her eyes dancing, her fingers
thrumming on the cloth, curious to see these men, of whom she had heard
so much, unmask.

While continuing her banter with De Joncy, she had turned her attention
to Sassoon, who, in the midst of the hilarity, preserved the fatigue and
listlessness of his first appearance, a smile more contemptuous than
amused lurking about the long oriental nose and burnt-out eyes without
abiding quite anywhere. He paid no attention to the girls at either
side, peering restlessly at those farther away, dissatisfied, unamused.

His reputation was of the worst, his name bandied about in big places
and in small; nor, as is usually the case, did gossip bear unmerited
reproaches. Neither a fool, as most believed, nor of originating
imagination, as a few credited who witnessed from the inside the shrewd
and infallible success of his colossal schemes, Sassoon at bottom was a
prey to an obsession that stung him like a gadfly to restless seeking,
eternally tormented by the fever of the hunter, eternally disillusioned.
For thirty years, following the exigencies of a maladive heredity, he
had raked the city with his craving eye, always alert, always
disappointed, running into dark side streets, ringing obscure bells,
pursuing a shadow that had awakened a spark of hope. And at the end it
was always the same--emptiness! To-day he sat moodily, fiercely
resentful at a fresh deception.

A certain disdainful defiance, a trick of Violetta Pax, fleeing,
bacchante-like, in the sextette, had stirred in him a flash of
expectancy, a hungering hope, which had died in hollowness now that she
was at his side, unresisting, too ready. So he sat, brooding,
heavy-lidded, already turning to other fugitive forms that he might
follow in a vague impulse--of all the millions in the city the one most
enslaved. When, in her turn, Dore came to take her place beside him,
after the first listless acknowledgment he spoke no word to her. She
responded by turning her back to him at once, with a complete ignoring.
This attitude, so different from the challenging eyes of the others,
struck him--he who craved opposition, resistance. All at once, as she
was leaving him to take her place between Busby and Harrigan Blood, he
said, his soft hand on her arm, in his low, rather melodious feminine
voice:

"You haven't paid much attention to me, pretty thing!"

"Your own fault, Pasha!" she said impertinently. "Men run after me!"

And she was aware that his eye, dead as a cold lantern, followed her
now, running over her neck and shoulders, aroused as from its lethargy.
Satisfied that her instinct had not failed, she took her seat. Then, all
at once, she felt a new annoyance: Massingale, the observer, was smiling
to himself.

The hilarity began to freshen. Consuelo Vincent, who had magnificent
hair, was heard exclaiming:

"I say, girls! we're stiff as a bunch of undertakers. Let's slip our
roofs!"

Amid general acclaim, the top-lofty, overburdened hats were consigned to
a butler. Every one began to chatter on a higher key, across the
constant rise of laughter. Georgie Gwynne, installed by the Royal
Observer, saucy and unabashed, was saying:

"Well, Kink, how do you like us?"

In another moment the Comte de Joncy, sublimely content, was being
initiated into the art of eating brandied cherries from the ripe lips of
Violetta Pax and Georgie Gwynne.

From the moment Dore had taken off her toque, Sassoon and Harrigan Blood
had not ceased to stare at her.

"A hat is not becoming to me," she said to Harrigan Blood, and added:
"Besides, I have nothing to conceal."

Amid the pyramided and confectioned head-dresses, the simplicity of her
own, playing about her forehead like a golden cloud, stood out. For the
first time, her youth and naturalness appeared, depending on no
artifice.

Harrigan Blood did not go to what attracted him by four ways, or around
a hill.

"You don't belong to this crowd," he said pointblank. "Don't lie to me!
What are you?"

"The story of my life?" she said. "It's getting to the time, isn't it?"

"You know what I mean," he said roughly. "People don't often interest
me. You do! I've been watching you. Do you want backing?"

She was surprised--genuinely so. She had felt that Blood was
different--too powerful, too merciless, to be caught as other men were
caught. She did not look up at him, as others would have, but remained
smiling down at the cloth, running her mischievous fingers through the
low dish of yellow pansies before her. And, with the same averted look,
which brought her a complete understanding of the impetuousness of his
attack, she felt Sassoon's awakened stare and the scrutiny of Judge
Massingale, who, while he pretended to talk to Paula Stuart, was
listening with a concentrated interest. She was pleased, quite satisfied
with herself. Only Lindaberry remained.

"You are very impulsive, aren't you?" she said slowly.

"On the stage? A beginner?"

She nodded.

"Come to me--at my office, any afternoon, after five." And he added,
without lowering his voice: "If you're after a career, don't waste your
time on this sort. I can put you in a day where you want."

She rose to take her seat on his right, next to Lindaberry.

"Will you come?" he said, detaining her.

"Why not?" she said, lifting her eyes, with a little affectation of
surprise at so simple a question.

During her progress about the table she had kept Lindaberry in mind,
with a lurking sense of antagonism, a desire to return to the attack, to
punish him further. A certain grace that he had, which appealed to her
instinct, the quality of instinctive elegance, only increased her
resentment. At the bottom, the intensity of this resentment surprised
her--without her being able to analyze it.

He had risen with a bow that was neither exaggerated nor curt. There was
undeniable power in his face, boyish and weak as it was in its
unrestraint, like a flame spurting fiercely on a trembling wick. He
brought to men a little sense of fear--never to women. To-day this
intensity seemed clouded, not fully awake as if there were still dinning
in his ears the echoes of the night before. The dullest observer,
looking on his face, would have seen where he was riding. In his own
club (where he was adored) bets were up that he would not last the year.

Presently he leaned toward her and said, protected by the shrieks of
laughter that surrounded De Joncy:

"Don't you think you were in the wrong? What right had you to come
here?"

She understood that Busby had betrayed her to him and to Harrigan Blood.

"Even if I were a--" she gave a glance up the table, "you should make a
difference between a woman and a--bottle!"

"You are quite right," he said, after a moment. "Will you accept my
apologies? I am seldom discourteous to a woman--never intentionally."

She looked at him, and saw with what an effort he spoke, his brain on
fire, yet making no mistake in the precision of his words. She nodded,
and turned again to Harrigan Blood, all her nature aroused to opposition
at this weakness in such a man. Yet ordinarily her sympathies were
quick.

"You are too hard on him," said Harrigan Blood, who had listened. "It's
gone too far; he can't help it. He's got his coffin strapped to his
back."

"Why doesn't some one help him?" she said irritably.

Blood shrugged his shoulders, answering with the superiority of the
self-made man before the misfortune of the friend who has thrown
everything away:

"Help him? There's your feminism again! The world's turned crazy on
sentimentalized charity! Charity is nothing but a confession of failure!
Build up! Let derelicts go! Save him? For what? In New York? We are too
busy. The best that can be said is, he's drinking himself to death like
a gentleman--doing it royally! His self-control's a miracle--some day
there'll be an explosion! If you knew his history--"

"What is his story?"

As Blood was about to begin it, he was interrupted by a general pushing
back of chairs. Busby, at the piano, flung out the chords of the
sextette that had made a mediocre opera famous.

Half the party crowded, laughing and bantering, to render the chorus,
the Comte de Joncy insisting on being taught the latest curious American
dance. Tenafly entered to see to the clearing of the room.

He was the type of the valet ennobled, a mask of incomparable vacuity, a
secret smile that missed nothing, internal rather than outward, yet
still chained to the servant's habit of picking up his feet.

Sassoon summoned him with a nod which Tenafly perceived instantly across
the room.

"The little girl in yellow--who is she?"

The eye of the restaurateur passed vaguely over the company, but the
instant sufficed to photograph each detail.

"She's new," he said, without moving his lips.

"She's not of the sextette?"

Tenafly shook his head.

"She's dined here--below--I've seen her!"

"Know her name?"

Tenafly searched the pigeonholes of his memory.

"I don't know her."

"Find out what you can--soon!"

"I will, sir!"

He spoke a moment in low tones with the master, who had no evasions with
him. At the end Sassoon said impatiently:

"Can't be bothered ... see her for me and get a receipt."

Every one wished to dance, whirling and bumping, none too restrained in
their movements, the Royal Observer awkwardly enthusiastic, enjoying
himself immoderately. Dore, a little apart, Harrigan Blood at her side,
watched with eyes keen with curiosity. Busby, De Joncy, Lindaberry
amused themselves hugely, caricaturing the eccentricities of the dance,
their arms about their partners, clinging, bacchanalian, in their
movements. Dore followed Lindaberry, frowning, feeling a blast of anger
that set her sensitive little nostrils to quivering with scorn. The
feeling was unreasonable. She did not know why he should disturb her
more than another, and yet he did. He seemed so incongruous there; she
could not associate his refinement, his courtesy, with Georgie Gwynne,
who held him pressed in her arms, her head thrown back, her throat
bared, laughing provokingly. She had come to see behind the scenes, and
yet this one roused her fury. Besides, there was in his attitude a
scornful note--a contemptuous valuation of the woman, of women in
general, she felt, as if he were thus proclaiming: "See, this is all
they are worth!"

She began to glance at the door, counting the minutes. Judge Massingale
came to her side.

"Dance?"

"I turned my ankle this morning."

"You don't want to!"

"No!"

He began to dance with Adele Vickers, but not as the others, not with
the same immoderate abandon. She noted this swiftly.

At last, in a pause between the dances, to Dore's relief, a footman,
entering, announced:

"Miss Baxter's car is waiting."

It was an effect she had carefully planned, taking a full half-hour to
lead Stacey Van Loan to an innocent participation. A group came up,
protesting, acclaiming the discovery of her name--as she had wished.

"Oho! Miss Baxter, is it?"

"We won't let you go!"

"The fun's just beginning!"

"My chauffeur can wait!" said Dore superbly, perceiving the danger of an
open retreat before this over-excited group. Her curiosity was
satisfied. She began to foresee what she did not wish to witness,
ugliness appearing from behind the carnival mask of laughter. She began
to glance apprehensively at Harrigan Blood, who clung to her side,
wondering how she could elude him. Then, as the group of protestants
broke up, Sassoon, advancing deliberately, in that silken effeminate
voice that expected no refusal, said abruptly: "Miss Baxter, where do
you live?"

She was on the point of an indignant answer, but suddenly checked
herself. She gave the address, but in a sharp muffled tone, boiling with
anger within, with a quick resolve to punish him later.

"When are you in?"

Before she could answer, Harrigan Blood pushed forward, determined and
insolent.

"Too late, Sassoon, my boy; nothing here for you!"

"I fail to understand you," said Sassoon.

"Don't you? Well, I'll make it plainer!"

"You'll kindly not interfere."

"And I'll thank you not to trespass!"

"What?"

"Don't trespass!"

Sassoon responded angrily; Harrigan Blood retorted with equal heat. In a
moment the room was in an uproar.

Dore seized the confusion of the hubbub to slip from the group which
rushed in to separate these two men whom a glance from a little
Salamander had turned back into the raw.

She went quickly, frightened by the sounds of anger and the increasing
uproar, flung into her furs, and stole toward the door.

All at once it opened before her, and in the hall was Lindaberry,
roguishly ambushed.

"No, no--not so fast!" he cried.

He flung out his arm, barring the way. For a moment she was frightened,
seeing what was in his eyes, hearing the tumult in the salon behind.
Then, without drawing back, she raised her hand gently, and put his arm
away.

"Please, Mr. Lindaberry, protect me! I need it! I ought not to be here."

"What?" he said, staring at her.

"I'm a crazy little fool!" she said frantically. "Help me to get away!"

"Crazy little child!" he said, after staring a moment as if suddenly
recognizing her. "Get away, then--quickly!"

She felt no more resentment, only a great pity, such as one feels before
a magnificent ruin. She wished to stop to speak to him--but she was
afraid.

"Thank you," she said, with a look that appealed to him not to judge
her. "I am crazy--out of my mind! Come and see me--do!"




    CHAPTER IV


The faithful Stacey was below, lounging at the door of the grill-room,
as she came tripping down, the sensation of escape sparkling on her
delicate features. She was so delighted at the effect he had achieved
for her that she gave him an affectionate squeeze of the arm.

"Stacey, you're a darling! When the footman announced 'Miss Baxter's
car' you could have heard a pin drop among the squillionairesses!"

Stacey had been told, and dutifully believed, that the luncheon was a
heavy affair, very formal, very correct.

"I say, you didn't bore yourself, did you?" he said, noticing the
excitement still on her cheeks.

"No, no!"

"Fifth Avenue, or Broadway?"

"Fifth first."

"Bundle up; it's turning cold!"

The next moment the car had found a wedge in the avenue, and Stacey,
solicitous, relapsed into gratifying silence.

She was all aquiver with excitement. Her little feet, exhilarated by the
memories of music, continued tapping against the floor, and had Stacey
turned he would have been surprised at the mischievous, gay little
smile that constantly rippled and broke about her lips. Indeed, she was
delighted with her success, with the discord she had flung between
Sassoon and Harrigan Blood. She could scarcely believe that it could be
true.

"What! I, little Dodo, have done that!" she said, addressing herself
caressingly, overjoyed at the idea of two men of such power descending
to a quarrel over a little imp like herself.

She had no illusions about these flesh hunters. If she had given Sassoon
her address instead of hotly refusing, it was from a swift vindictive
resolve to punish him unmercifully, to entice him into fruitless alleys,
to entangle and mock him, with an imperative desire to match her wits
against his power, and teach him respect through discomfiture and
humiliation. Sassoon did not impress her with any sense of danger. She
rather scoffed at him, remembering his silken voice, the slight feminine
touch of his hand, the haunted dreamy discontent in his heavy eyes.

Harrigan Blood was different. In her profound education of a Salamander,
she knew his type, too: the man without preliminaries, who put abrupt
questions, brushing aside the artifices and subtleties that arrest
others. She would make no mistake with him--knowing just how little to
venture. And yet, always prepared, she might try her fingers across such
hungry flames. Strangely enough, she did not resent Harrigan Blood as
she did Sassoon; for men of force she made many allowances.

[Illustration: "No, no, not so fast!"]

She thought of Lindaberry and Judge Massingale: of Lindaberry
rapidly, with a beginning of pity, but still inflamed with an irritation
at this magnificent spectacle of a man going to destruction so
purposelessly. He, of all, had been the most indifferent, too absorbed
to lift his eyes and study what sat by his side. She did not know all
the reasons why he so antagonized her, nor whence these reasons came ...
yet the feeling persisted, already mingled with a desire to know what
was the history that Harrigan Blood had started to tell. Perhaps, after
all, there may have been a tragic love-affair. She reflected on this
idea, and it seemed to her that if it were so, then in his present
madness there might be something noble ... magnificent.

"How stupid a man is to drink!" she said angrily.

"Eh? What's that, Dodo?" said Stacey.

She perceived that, in her absorption, she had spoken half aloud.

"Go down Forty-second and run up Broadway!" she said hastily.

Massingale she could not place. She comprehended the others, even the
Comte de Joncy, whom she had left with a feeling of defrauded
expectation. But Massingale she did not comprehend, nor did she see him
quite clearly. Why was he there? To observe simply, with that tolerant
baffling smile of his? What did he want in life? Of her? He had been
interested; he had even tried to arouse her own curiosity. She was
certain that the effort had been conscious. Then there had come a
change--a quiet defensive turn to impersonality. Tactics, or what?

What impression had she left? Would he call, or pass on? She did not
understand him at all; yet he excited her strangely. She had a feeling
that he would be too strong for her. She had felt in him, each time his
glance lay in hers, the reading eye that saw through her, knew
beforehand what was turning in her runaway imagination, and that before
him her tricks would not avail.

Then she ceased to remember individuals, lost in a confused, satisfied
feeling of an experience. It seemed to her as if she had taken a great
step--that opportunity had strangely served her, that she had at last
entered a world which was worthy of her curiosity.

She had met few real men. She had played with idlers, boys of twenty or
boys of forty, interested in nothing but an indolent floating voyage
through life. For the first time, she had come into contact with a new
type, felt the shock of masculine vitality. Whatever their cynical ideas
of conduct, she felt a difference here. They were men of power, with an
object, who did not fill their days with trifling, but who sought
pleasure to fling off for a moment the obsession of ambitions, to relax
from the tyranny of effort, or to win back a new strength in a moment of
discouragement. Perhaps if she continued her career she might turn them
into friends--loyal friends. It would be difficult but very useful. The
men she met usually, at first, misunderstood her.

"Perhaps one of them will change my whole life! Why not? I have a
feeling--" she said solemnly to herself, nodding and biting her little
under lip.

The truth was, she felt the same after every encounter, dramatizing each
man, and flinging herself romantically on a sea of her imagining. But
to-day it was a little different. The feeling was more profound, calmer,
more penetrating. She felt, indeed, under the influence of a new
emotion, a restlessness in the air, an unease in the crowded streets.

Since morning, the glowing warmth of the last summery stillness had
slipped away unperceived. The wind in an hour had gone round to the
north, and from each whipping banner threaded against the sky one felt
the whistling onrush of winter. In the air there was something
suspended, a melancholy resounding profoundly, penetrating the soul of
the multitude. The gray sluggish currents in the thoroughfare quickened,
stirring more restlessly, apprehensive, caught unawares. Little gusts of
wind, scouts heralding the chill battalions piling up on the horizon,
drove through the city clefts, sporting stray bits of paper to the
rooftops, in turbulent dusty, swooping flight, uncovering heads and
rolling hats like saucers down the blinded streets. Then suddenly the
gusts flattened out. A stillness succeeded, but grim, permeating,
monstrous; and above the winter continued to advance.

She felt something in all this--something ominous, prophetic, vaguely
troubling, and being troubled, sought to put it from her. She began to
dramatize another mood. About her she felt the city she adored: the
restaurants, the theaters, the great hotels, the rocket-rise of the
white _Times_ building, towering like a pillar of salt in accursed
Sodom. But her mind did not penetrate to ugliness. The febrile activity,
the glistening surface of pleasure, the sensation of easy luxurious
flight awoke in her the intoxication of enjoyment. She adored it, this
city whom so many curse, whose luxuries and pleasures opened so facilely
to her nod, whose conquest had borne so little difficulty.

She forgot the unease that lay in the air at the sight of the feverish
restaurants where so often she had dipped in for adventure of the
afternoon. The sight of the theaters, even, with their cold white globes
above the outpouring matinee crowds, brought an impatience for the
garlanded night, when elegant shadows would come, slipping into flaming
portals, amid the flash of ankles, the scent of perfume, glances of
women challenging the envy of the crowd.

The multitude churned about her, roaring down into the confusion of many
currents: the multitude--the others--whom she felt so distant, so far
below her. They were there, white of face, troubled, frowning, harassed,
swelling onward to clamoring tasks, spying her with thousand-eyed envy;
and everywhere darting in and out, dodging the gray contact of the mass,
alert, light, skimming on like sea-gulls trailing their wings across the
chafing ocean, the luxurious women of the city sped in rolling careless
flight. She felt herself one of them, admiring and admired, glancing
eagerly into tonneaus bright with laughter and fashion, deliciously
registering the sudden analytical stare of women, or the disloyal
tribute boldly telegraphed of men.

She had lunched with Sassoon, De Joncy, Massingale. She was a part of
all this--of the Brahmin caste; and her little body rocking to the
swooping turns, deliciously cradled, her eyes half closed, her nostrils
drawing in this frantic air as if it were the breath of an enchanting
perfume, she let her imagination go: already there by right, married to
Massingale or Lindaberry--she saw not which quite clearly. Nor did it
matter. Only she herself mattered.

"Riverside or park, Dodo?"

"Through the park," she said; and roused from her castle-building, she
laughed at herself with a tolerant amused confusion.

"Good spirits, eh?"

"So-so!"

In the park there were fewer automobiles. She no longer had the feeling
of the crowd pressing about her, claiming her for its own. There were no
restaurants or climbing facades. There was the earth, bare, shivering,
and the sky filled with the invader.

She had a horror of change, and suffered with a profound and
uncomprehended trouble when, each year, she saw summer go into the
mystery of winter, and again when came the awakening miracle. Yesterday,
when she had passed, the splendor of the trees, it is true, lay shorn
upon the ground; but the earth was warm, pleasant, with a fragrant odor,
the air soft and the evening descended in a glow. Now there was a
difference. Over all was the dread sense of change. Each tree stood
alone, aghast, against the sky, the ground bleak, bare, the leaves
wandering with a little moaning, driven restlessness. Even against the
gray banks piling up against the north there was something vacant and
horribly endless. From tree, sky and empty earth a spirit had suddenly
withdrawn, and all this change had come within an hour, in a
twinkling--without warning.

Now she could no longer put it from her, this resistless verity that
laid its chill fingers across her heart. It was not of the change in
nature she thought--no; but of that specter which some day, inexorably,
would rise from a distant horizon, even as the wind in an hour goes
round to the north and winter rushes in. She was twenty-two and she had
a horror of this thief, who came soft-footed and unreal, to steal the
meager years.

She stiffened suddenly, clutching her stole to her throat.

"Too cold?"

"Yes!"

"I've got a coat for you."

"No; go back!"

"Already?"

"Yes!"

"Tea?"

"No! Go back!"

She closed her eyes, not to see, but the thing was there, everywhere, in
the air that came to her, in the sad tiny sounds that rose about them.
Yes, she herself would change inexorably, as all things filled their
appointed time. What she had was given but for a day--all her fragile
armament was but for a day. Not much longer could she go blithely along
the summery paths of summer. She thought of Winona Horning, who had
played too long. She thought of thirty as a sort of sepulcher, an end of
all things! She felt something new impelling her on--a haste and a
warning.

"It can't go on always!" she said to herself, in her turn using the very
words that Winona had uttered. "Not much longer. A year, only a year,
then I must make up my mind!"

"Blue, Dodo?" said Stacey.

"Horribly!"

The word seemed so incongruously ridiculous, after what she had felt,
that she burst into exaggerating laughter.

"Going to change your mind?"

"No, no! I'm out of sorts--a cold! Get me back!"

They reentered the city as the first owlish lights were peeping out,
futile, brave little rebels against the spreading night. Below, high in
the air, suspended above the ghostly town whose sides had faded, the
great illumined eye of the Metropolitan tower shone forth. Then all at
once long sentinel files of lights rose on the avenue and down the
fleeting side streets, miraculous electric signs burst out against the
night, a myriad windows caught fire, and the city, which a moment ago
had seemed flat, climbed blazing into the air. They were again nearing
the great artery, which changes its name with the coming of the
artificial night, no longer Broadway, but the Rialto, with its mysteries
of entangled beams and profound pools of darkness, its laughter free or
suspect, its mingled virtue and vice, elbowing and staring at each
other, its joy and its despair treading in each other's steps.

But the dread reminder was still above, hurling its black engulfing
storm across the bombardment of a million lights, that painted it with a
strange red glare, but could not destroy its menace. A few cold drops of
rain, wind driven, dashed against their faces, as they went with the
crowd, scuttling on. There was something unreal now in all this,
something artificial in the glimpse of vacant restaurants setting their
candles for the guests who went fleeing home. Of plunging temperament,
she had a horror of these rare depressions, striving frantically against
the realization of what must be, and striving thus, always suffering the
more keenly. In seeing all this fugitive world, flat shadows driven
restlessly as the shorn splendor of the streets, she asked herself of
what use it was after all, to be young, to be attractive, to go laughing
and dancing, to dare, to conquer ... why, indeed, childhood, maturity
and old age should stretch so far, and youth, the exultant brilliant
hour she clung to, should be allotted only the few, the fingered years!
She felt a sense of loneliness, of terrified isolation, the need of some
one to come and talk to her, to interpose himself between her and these
unanswerable questions, to close her eyes and stop her ears.

When they reached Miss Pim's the rain was beginning in little flurries.
She ran in and up-stairs hurriedly. She had hoped that she would find
her room lighted, that Snyder or Winona would be home. No one was there,
and when she opened the door she entered a region of obscure shadowy
forms, faintly lighted by the reflection of a street lamp below. Across
the windows on the avenue was the cyclopean eye of the Metropolitan
tower, which she saw always every night with her last peeping glance
from her covers--enormous eye, bulging, swollen with curiosity. At the
other side was the wall of brick pressing against the window-pane, this
wall she hated as she hated the idea of the commonplace in life.

She stood in the luminous pathway, gazing outward.

"What is the matter with me?" she thought. "Am I like Winona? Am I
getting tired of it all? Or is it--what?"

The metallic summons of the telephone broke upon her mood. She lighted
the gas quickly. The telephone continued to clamor, but she took no step
toward it. All that she had planned as a choice for the evening no
longer interested her. She was in another mood. She flung down her
things rapidly. Then, remembering the bouquet of Sassoon's, she took it
off, pricking her fingers. Inclosed was a bank-note for a hundred
dollars!

Then she began to laugh--a bitter incongruous note. She understood now
why he had gone so abruptly to his questions, confident in the test he
had prepared among the fragile stems of orchids and dainty yellow
pansies.

All at once her eye went to her pin-cushion, caught by the white note of
visiting-cards left there by Josephus, the colored chore-boy. She
crossed quickly, stretching out her finger impatiently. Which of the
four had come, as she had determined? The first bore the name of
Harrigan Blood, the second Albert Edward Sassoon. She stood staring at
the last, the hundred-dollar bill still wrapped in her fingers....
Sassoon and Harrigan Blood! She let the cards drop, profoundly
disappointed, prey to a sudden heavy return of disillusionment.

The telephone, querulous, impatient, again called her, but she turned
her shoulder impatiently. Now the thought of an evening of gaiety
revolted her. She changed quickly, wrapped herself up in an ulster, took
an umbrella and went out, though by the wide-faced clock in the skies it
was scarcely six. Before, she had sought to break away, to escape
recklessly from the depression that claimed her: now she sought it out,
surrendering to this tristesse that whirled her on with its exquisite
benumbing melancholy.

She supped at a lunch-room in Lexington Avenue, paying out a precious
thirty cents for a cup of coffee, a bowl of crackers and milk, a baked
potato. Not many were there yet. A young fellow without an overcoat,
stooping already, pinched by struggle, came and sat at her table,
seeking an opportunity to offer her the sugar. But, seeing her so silent
and inwardly tortured, he did not persist.

[Illustration: She did not notice him]

She did not notice him. She was thinking always of Massingale, and a
little of Lindaberry. Why had she succeeded with Sassoon and Blood only
to fail where she wanted to win?

"He carries a coffin on his back!" she found herself repeating, in the
cynical words of Harrigan Blood. He would not seek her out; nor would
Massingale. All her castles in the air had collapsed. It was only to the
others, then, that she could appeal--the flesh hunters!

She returned, swaying against the wind, holding her umbrella with
difficulty against the spattering rain-drops, that seemed to rise from
the glistening sidewalks. The young man, who had no umbrella, remained
in the shelter of a doorway, watching her undecidedly.

"Ah, yes! I must be getting tired of it!" she said suddenly, as she
reached her steps. A taxicab was turning in the avenue, having just
drawn away. As she went slowly up the interminable, impenetrable, dark
flights to her room, she said, revolting against an injustice:

"Well, if he doesn't come, I'll go and find him!"

She entered her room, lagging and depressed, knowing not how to spend
the hours until sleep arrived. She had no feeling of reticence in
seeking out Massingale and Lindaberry, since they appealed to her and
would not come, any more than she felt the slightest diminution of her
self-respect in situations labeled with the appearance of suspicion. Her
ideas of morality and conduct were not even formulated. They existed as
the sense of danger exists to a pretty animal. For, ardently as she
desired it, there had not come into her soul the awakening breath of
love, which, in despite of old traditions and lost heritages, alone
would be to her rebellious little Salamander soul the supreme law of
conduct.

Suddenly she saw that on her pin-cushion another card had been placed
while she had been absent. She went to it without expectation. It was
from Massingale--Massingale, who must have left in the taxicab even as
she returned hopelessly.

Then it seemed to her as if a thousand tons had slipped from her. She
felt an extraordinary joy and confidence, the alertness of a young
animal, a need of light and laughter, a longing to plunge into a rush of
excitement.

The telephone rang. Donald Bacon was clamoring to take her to the
cabaret party. She disliked him cordially. She accepted with wild
delight.




    CHAPTER V


The morning was well spent when Dore awoke, after a gray return from the
cabaret party where, in a revulsion of emotions, she had flirted
scandalously. But the men with whom she had danced, laughed and fenced,
provokingly were lost in a mist. They had only served to eat up the
intervening time; she had not even a thought for them.

The busy bubbling whistle of a coffee-pot in fragrant operation sounded
from the table. She opened one eye with difficulty, peering out the
window at her friend, the clock. It was already thirty-five minutes past
ten--what might be called a dawn breakfast in Salamanderland.

Snyder, moving about the table with a watchful eye, came to her
immediately.

"Take it easy, Petty! Don't wake up unless you feel like it!"

She stood at the foot of the bed, and the smile of fond solicitude with
which she bent over Dodo, lightly touching her hair, seemed like another
soul looking through the tired mask of Lottie Snyder.

"You're an angel, Snyder! You spoil me!" said Dodo, rubbing her eyes and
twisting her body in lazy feline stretches.

"Me an angel? Huh!" said Snyder, grinding on her heel.

She went to the improvised kitchen with the free gliding grace of the
trained dancer, and lifting the top of the coffee-pot, dropped in two
eggs.

Breakfast at Miss Pim's was an inviolable institution ending at
eight-thirty sharp. Wherefore, as the Salamanders would as soon have
thought of getting up to see the sun rise, coffee was always an
improvisation and eggs a visitation of Providence. Besides, the
Salamanders, for the most part, made their arrangements for lodgings
only, trusting in the faithful legion of props, but supplementing that
trust by an economical planning of the schedule ahead. In a week, it was
rare that a Salamander was forced to a recourse on her purse for more
than one luncheon--dinner never.

"Did you hear me come in?" said Dore, raising her gleaming white arms in
the air and letting the silken sleeves slip rustling to her shoulders.

"Me? No!" said Snyder, who had not closed her eyes until the return.
"Here's the mail."

Dore raised herself eagerly on one elbow.

"How many? What! only four?" she said, taking the letters from Snyder.

She frowned at the instant perception of Miss Pim's familiar straight up
and down, sharp and thin writing, concealing the dreaded summons quickly
below the others, that Snyder, who paid nothing, might not see.

Two she recognized; the third was unfamiliar. She turned it over,
studying it, characteristically reserving the mystery until the last.
But, as she put it down on the white counterpane, she had a feeling of
expectant certitude that it was from Massingale.

"Well, let's see what my dear old patriarch says!" she said, settling
back in the pillows and taking up a stamped envelope, typewritten, with
a business address in the corner.

     "_Dear Miss Baxter_:

     "Will be in town to-morrow, Friday, the twenty-second. It would
     give me great pleasure if you could lunch with me at
     twelve-thirty. Will send my car for you at twelve-twenty. I trust
     you are following my advice and giving attention to your health.

                                   "Very sincerely yours,
                                                   "ORLANDO B. PEAVEY.

     "P. S. Am called to important business appointment at one-thirty
     sharp, but take this brief opportunity to see you again.
     Telephone my office only in case you _can not_ come.

                                                            "O. B. P."

"Sweetest old thing!" she said, smiling at the postscript
characteristically initialed. "So thoughtful--kindest person in the
world!"

Snyder brought her coffee and an egg broken and seasoned in a tooth-mug.
Dore glanced at it suspiciously, seeking to discover if the division had
been fair.

"My! Eggs are a luxury," she said, applying the tip of her tongue to the
tip of the spoon; and she added meditatively: "I wish Stacey went in for
chickens!"

She took up the unknown letter, turned it over once more, and laid it
slowly aside in favor of the second, a fat envelope covered with the
boyish scrawl of the prop in disgrace. She spread the letter, frowning
determinedly. Joe Gilday was difficult to manage, too alert to be long
kept in the prop squad. It began without preliminaries and a fine
independence of punctuation:

     "Look here, Do--what's the use of rubbing it in on a fellow?
     You've made me miserable as an Esquimo in Africa, and why? What
     have I done? Supposing I did slip fifty in your bureau honest to
     God Do you don't think I'd do anything to jar your feelings do
     you? Lord, I'll lay down and let you use me for a door mat for a
     week if it'll help any. Kid you've got me going bad. I'm
     miserable. I'm all shot to pieces--insult you, why Do, I'd Turkey
     Trot on my Granny's grave first. Won't you let up--see a fellow
     won't you? I'll be around at noon if you don't see me I swear
     I'll warm the door-step until the neighbors come out and feed me
     for charity: _that's_ straight too! Now be a good sort Do and
     give me a chance to explain.

                                   "Down in the dumps,
                                                   "J. J. (Just Joe.)"

This note, inspired with the slang of Broadway, would have made Dore
laugh the day before, but the experiences of the last twenty-four hours
had given her a standard of comparison. Between Joseph Gilday, Junior,
and the men she had met there was a whole social voyage. Nevertheless,
props were necessary, and undecided, she laid the scrawl on Mr. Peavey's
neat invitation, postponing decisions. She opened the third, drawing out
a neat oblong card, neatly inscribed in a minuscule graceful
handwriting, slightly scented:

    "_My dear Miss Baxter_:

     "I shall call this afternoon at two o'clock.

                                                      "A. E. SASSOON."

She was not surprised at the signature nor the pasha-like brevity.

"Harrigan Blood won't take chances; he'll telephone," she thought. At
the bottom she was pleased at this insistence of Sassoon's; it worked
well with the plan she had determined on for his disciplining. "You're
sure that's all?" she said aloud, wondering what Massingale would do.

"Yes."

"Wonder why he called so soon?" she thought pensively; and then,
remembering the warring cards of Blood and Sassoon, added: "To warn me,
perhaps?"

She smiled at this possibility, sure of herself, knowing well how weak
the strongest man is before the weakest of her sex, when he comes with a
certain challenge in his eyes.

"So Sassoon is coming, is he? Good!" she said musingly, a little far-off
mockery in her smile; and to herself she rehearsed again the scene she
had prepared, coddling her cheek against her bare soft arm, dreamily
awake.

She would receive him with carefully simulated cordiality there below in
the dusky boarding-house parlor; she could even lead him to believe that
he might dare anything; and suddenly, when she had led him to
indiscretions, she would say suddenly, as if the thought had just
suggested itself:

"What! you have no flowers. You shall wear mine!"

She smiled a little more maliciously at the thought of the look that
would come into those heavy foolish eyes at this. Then, taking a few
violets from her corsage, she would fix them in his buttonhole, saying:

"No, no; look up at the ceiling while I fix them nicely--so!"

And, when she had coaxed him into a ridiculous craning of his neck, she
would deftly pin the hundred-dollar bill on the lapel under the little
cluster of purple, and turning him toward the mirror, say, with a
mocking farewell courtesy:

"Mr. Albert Edward Sassoon, I have the pleasure of returning your
visiting-card!"

She was so content with this bit of romance that she laughed aloud.

"Hello! what's up?" said Snyder, taking away the tooth-mug.

Dodo could not restrain her admiration.

"You know, Snyder," she said seriously, "I am really very clever!"

But she did not particularize. She had a feeling that Snyder, who
watched over her in a faithful, adoring, dog-like way, might not quite
approve. She did not know quite what made her feel this, for they had
not exchanged intimacies; yet she felt occasionally in Snyder's glance,
when she met it unawares, a dormant uneasy apprehension.

"Now for it!" she thought, and taking up the last note, unstamped, she
tore it open.

    "Miss Dore Baxter, Dr.

    "To Miss Evangelica Pim

     "Four weeks' lodging, third floor double room front at $10 per
     week ...............................................$40

     "Kindly call to see me as to above account."

"Four--impossible!" exclaimed Dore, bolt upright, now thoroughly awake.
But instantly she repressed her emotions, lest Snyder might guess the
cause. She made a rapid calculation, and discovered that in fact she had
to face four deficiencies instead of three. But finances never long
dismayed her.

"Anyhow," she thought, "I can turn over the champagne. If only Winona
raised something on the orchids! There are a dozen ways, but I must give
it some attention!"

Suddenly she remembered Harrigan Blood's estimate of the cost of
yesterday's luncheon, and of what she had herself turned over with her
fork. She thought of what Sassoon spent so carelessly, and of what he
might squander were he once awakened, really interested.... Not that
there was the slightest temptation,--no--but it did amuse her to
consider thus the irony of her present dilemma. Well, there certainly
were funny things in life!

Snyder had silently cleared away breakfast, and seated herself with a
book by the window. Now, glancing at the clock, she rose.

"Ready for tub, Petty? I'll start it up."

"Snyder, you're too good to me!" said Dore, rousing herself from her
reveries.

"Huh! Wish I could! Hot or cold?"

But Dore, catching her wrist, detained her, her curiosity excited.

"You're the queerest thing I ever knew!" she said, looking at her
fixedly.

"That's right, too!"

"Why do you insist upon my calling you Snyder?"

"Don't like to get fond of people," said the other shortly.

"Why not?"

"Too long a story."

She sought to detach her wrist, but Dore held it firmly.

"And aren't you fond of me?"

Snyder hesitated, frowning at thus being forced to talk.

"Sure! Couldn't help it, could I?"

Dore smiled, pleased at this admission.

"And yet, you have such a funny way of watching me!"

"Me? How so?"

"Yes, you have! I often wonder what's back of a certain queer look you
get--"

"What I'm thinking?"

"Yes!"

"I want to see you married and settled, girlie!"

No more unexpected answer could have been given.

"Heaven forbid!" said Dore, sitting up in astonishment. For this
commonplace solution to all the romantic possibilities she imagined
always infuriated her. But at this moment Ida Summers came, after a
little rippling knock, a grapefruit in hand.

The new arrival was in bedroom slippers and pink peignoir, her
disordered hair concealed under a tasseled negligee cap. She was a bit
roly-poly, but piquant, merry, still new to Salamanderland, hugely
enjoying each little excitement.

"Breakfasted already?" she said in astonishment. "Heavens! Dodo, how
_do_ you get up in the middle of the night?"

She began to laugh before she finished the sentence, she laughed so hard
as she said it that it was almost incomprehensible, and she continued
laughing long after Dore had ceased. She could hardly ever relate an
incident without being overcome with laughter, but the sound was
pleasantly musical, infectious even, and the blue devils went out the
window as she came in the door.

"Heavens!... thought I had a swap for a cup of coffee," she said,
beginning to laugh again at the thought of her exploded stratagem.

"There ought to be some left," said Dore, venturing one rosy foot from
under the covers in search of a warm slipper. She was still thinking of
Snyder's strange speech.

Having teased from the coffee-pot a bare cup of coffee, Ida camped down
on the couch, and while waiting for the coffee to cool, applied the end
of her forefinger to the tip of her nose in the way to uplift it
contrary to the gift of nature.

"Ida, do leave that nose alone," said Dore.

"I must have a retrousse nose," said the girl merrily. "This doesn't go
with my style of laughter. All the artist-men tell me so. Ah, this
nose!" And she gave it a vicious jolt, in her indignation. Her coloring
was gorgeous, her lines were delicate, her expressions vivacious and
quick with natural coquetry. Wherefore she was in great demand among the
illustrators, who had reproduced her tomboy smile on the covers of a
million magazines. She was in great demand, but she was capricious in
her engagements--like all Salamanders, sacrificing everything to
pleasure.

Winona Horning, aroused by the sounds of laughter, appeared through the
connecting door, in a green and black negligee, rubbing her eyes, quite
indignant.

"Heavens, child! No one can sleep when you're round! Hello, Snyder.
Morning, Dodo!"

She said the last words in a tone that made Snyder look up at her,
surprised. There was a note of reluctance, even of apprehension.

"Ida's drunk up the coffee; make her give you a grapefruit," said Dodo,
nodding and departing.

When she darted in twenty minutes later, tingling and alert for the day,
Snyder had gone and Ida Summers, curled like an Angora cat on the couch,
was chatting to Winona, who stood in the doorway, undecidedly, turning a
cigarette in her fingers, watching Dodo from under her long eyelashes.

"You certainly made the big hit last night, Win," said Ida rapidly. "Do,
you should have seen her. She gets the men with that quiet waiting
manner of hers. I can't do it to save my life. I have to rush in,
barking like a white fluffy dog, to get noticed."

"Where were you?" said Dore, opening all the trunks and ransacking the
bureaus. When she dressed, the room had always the look of a sudden
descent by the police.

"Up at Vaughan Chandler's studio," said Ida, giving the name of one of
the popular illustrators, who catered to the sentimental yearnings of
the multitude. "Quite some party, too, celebrities and swells. I say,
Do, why don't you go in for head and shoulders? They're perfect
gentlemen, you know ... flirty, of course, ... but it pays well, and
they'd go daffy over you."

"Don't know ... hadn't thought of it," said Dore, who, having decided to
see Gilday and lunch with Peavey, was in a reverie over the subject of
the dramatic costume. "By the way, Winona, raise anything on the
orchids?"

"Only eight bones--hard enough getting that," said Winona slowly.

"Old brute! Pouffe would have given double," said Dore indignantly. "By
the way, Joe's coming at noon. I must dress the stage up for him. What
flowers have you girls got?"

"Three vases," said Ida joyfully. "Couple of southern millionaires are
getting quite demonstrative over little me. What's up?... Going to coax
the Kitty?" she added,--meaning in Salamanderish, "Are you going to
encourage him to make presents?"

"Must raise something on this confounded rent," said Dore briefly.
"Then, there are other reasons."

As Ida went tripping off, her little white ankles gleaming, Winona
entered with two jars of chrysanthemums which she placed, one on the
table and one on the mantel, slowly, frowning. Then she turned and said,
with a gesture like a blow:

"Do, I took it! I had to!"

"Took what?" Said Dore, startled.

"Joe's fifty!"

Dore sprang precipitately to the drawer and opened it.

"Winona, you--you didn't!"

"It was that or get out!" said Winona doggedly, her back against the
wall. "The Duchess made a scene. I'll pay it back--sure!"

"But, Winona, what am I to do? Joe's coming. I must--I have to return it
to him. What can I say?" said Dore in dismay, staring at the empty
drawer. "You had no right! You should have asked me. I can't--oh, you've
put me in an awful hole! It wasn't right!"

"Don't! Dodo--don't!"

The girl clasped her hands, extending them in supplication, and burst
into tears.

Dore could not resist the spectacle of this misery. She sprang to her
side, seizing her in her arms, all her anger gone.

"Never mind! I don't care! You poor child! It isn't the money--it isn't
that! I'll find some way." All at once she remembered the hundred
dollars of Sassoon's bouquet. "Stupid! Why, of course!" She recounted
hastily the incident to Winona, smoothing her hair.

"But, Do, you can't take it. How can you?" said Winona, becoming more
calm.

"Why not? It was a present to each."

"But what can you say to Sassoon?"

"Him? Let me alone; I'll invent something--he'll never know! Bah! I
shall miss a fine scene, that's all!" she added with a dramatic regret.
"Well, that's over! How much did you use?"

"Thirty-five."

"Keep the rest!"

"I'll pay."

"Bur-r--shut up! I'm not lending. Borrowing breaks up friendships. It's
yours--it's given!"

She looked at the distressed girl a moment and added apprehensively:

"Winona, you're losing your grip!"

"Losing? It's gone!"

"Decidedly, I must see Blainey this afternoon and get that job for you,"
said Dore pensively. She disliked these sudden bleak apparitions and
hated long to consider them. "You'll see in a few days, all will be
changed--all!"

Ida returned with long-stemmed chrysanthemums towering over her brown
curls, and made a second trip for some hydrangeas which she had found at
Estelle Monks' below. The room had now quite the effect of a
conservatory.

"Why don't you work the birthday gag?" said Winona helpfully.

"Can't! November's my month for Joe," said Dore reluctantly.

Birthdays, needless to say, are legitimate perquisites in
Salamanderland, and pretty certain to occur in the first or second
months of each new acquaintance.

As the three Salamanders were thoughtfully considering this possibility,
three knocks like the blow of a hammer sounded on the door, and the next
moment the dreaded form of Miss Pim, yclept the Duchess, swept, or
rather bounded, in.

"Humph! and what's this folderol mean?" she said, stopping short,
sniffing and folding her hands over her stomach. "Very fine! Plenty of
money for cabs, perfumes, silks, hats, flowers, luxuries--"

"You certainly don't object to my having plenty of money, do you, Miss
Pim?" said Dore in a caressing voice, as she went to her purse before
the landlady could make the demand direct. "You seem rather anxious
about my little bill, I believe!"

"Little!" exclaimed Miss Pim, sitting down with the motion of a
jack-knife shutting up.

Dore's calmness took away her breath, but a certain joy showed itself
eagerly over her spectacled nose. She understood that such impudence
meant pay. Nevertheless she sat stiffly and suspiciously, ready to
pounce upon the slightest evasion.

Miss Pim's face advanced in three divisions--forehead, keen nose and
sharpened chin. She wore a high false front, of a warmer brown than the
slightly grizzled hair that she piled _en turban_ on her head, a
majestic note which had earned her the sobriquet of "the Duchess." She
adhered to the toilets of the late seventies--flowing brown shotted
silks, heavy medallions, hair bracelets, and on state occasions appeared
in baby pinks, as if denying the passage of years. She had had a tragic
romance--one only, for her nature was too determined to risk another,
and at the age of fifty-four she still showed herself implacable to the
male sex, although not unwilling to let it be known that she could
choose one of three any day she selected. She carried a hand-bag, which
jingled with the warning note of silver dollars. She was horribly
avaricious, and the Salamanders who courted her favor paid her, whenever
possible, in specie. Then she would open her bag, holding it between her
knees, and drop into it, one by one, the shining round dollars,
listening eagerly to the metallic shock.

"My dear Miss Pim," said Dore, returning with her pocketbook, in a tone
of calm superiority that left the landlady dumfounded, "I've told you
frequently that I prefer my bill monthly. These weekly rounds are
exceedingly annoying. Please don't bother me again. I have nothing
smaller than a hundred; can you change it?"

And flirting the fabulous bill before the eyes of the landlady, she
nonchalantly let it flutter from the tips of her disdainful fingers.

Miss Pim, who liked to inspire terror, was so completely nonplused that,
though her lips worked spasmodically, she found nothing to say. She took
the bill furiously, and went out. A moment later Josephus appeared with
the change in an envelope. The Salamanders were still in gales of
laughter over the discomfiture of their common enemy.

Dodo, left alone, dressed in a simple dress of dull black, relieved by a
lace edging at the throat and sleeves, and a tailor hat with the
invariable splash of a red feather; for she made it a superstition never
to be without a little red flutter of audacity and daring. Then she
zealously applied the powder, to give a touch of ailing melancholy to
her young cheeks--it would never do to appear before Mr. Peavey in too
healthy a manifestation. In general, it must be noted that no Salamander
is ever in perfect health. There is always lurking in the background a
melancholy but most serviceable ailment that not only does for a
thousand excuses, but encourages concrete evidences of masculine
sympathy.

Her costume finished, she exercised her prevaricatory talents at the
telephone, soothing irate admirers, who had clamored ineffectually for
her the evening before, with plausible tales which, if they did not
entirely believe, they ended by weakly accepting, which amounted to the
same thing.

[Illustration: "Please don't bother me again."]

At noon, according to orders, Joseph Gilday, Junior, arrived with a
carefully simulated hang-dog look. He was a wiry, sharp-eyed, jingling
little fellow, just twenty, already imbued with the lawyer's mocking
smile, on the verge of being a man of the world, eager to arrive there,
but not quite emancipated. For the last month in this growing phase Dore
had found the lines of discipline difficult to maintain. She even
foresaw the time when it would be impossible. He had to be handled
carefully.

"Hello, Dodo," said Gilday in a hollow tone of misery, dragging his cane
into the room and fastening humble eyes on his yellow spats.

"Good morning," said Dore frigidly, for she perceived his maneuver was
to force a laugh.

"Thunderation! what is it?" said Gilday, lifting his head and perceiving
for the first time the floral display on the trunk tops, the bureaus and
the mantelpieces. "I say, is this your October birthday?"

"What do you mean?" said Dore blankly, shaking the water from the stems
of Sassoon's orchids.

"Never saw so many flowers in my born life!"

"Many?... do you think so?" said Dore with the air of a marquise.

"Ouch!" said Gilday; "I got it!... I got it!"

"I think you came here to...."

Gilday flushed; apologies were not easy for him.

"What's the use of kicking up a tempest about a little bill of fifty?"
he said sulkily. "You could take it as all the other girls do!"

"My dear Joe," said Dore, seizing her opportunity instantly, "other
girls do, yes--the kind that I think you see entirely too much of. The
trouble with you is, you are not man of the world enough to distinguish.
That's the trouble of letting boys play around with me; they make
mistakes--"

"Come, now," he broke in furiously, for she had touched him on the raw
of his vanity.

Dore stopped his exclamations with an abrupt gesture, and picking from
her purse a fifty-dollar bill, held it to him between two fingers.

"Take it!"

"You don't understand."

"I understand perfectly, and I understand," she added, looking him in
the whites of the eyes, "just what thoughts have been in the back of
your head for the last two weeks!"

Her plain speaking left him without answer. He reddened to his ears,
took the bank-note and thrust it in his pocket.

"Now I am going to say to you what I have to say many times," she
said, without softening her accusing glance. "I expect to be
misunderstood--often. I live independently, and as men are mostly stupid
or brutal, I expect to have to set them right. I forgive always one
mistake--one only. If you make a second, I cut your acquaintance! Now
we'll consider the matter closed!"

Gilday gulped, suddenly enlightened, overcome with mortification, and in
a sudden burst of sentimentality exclaimed:

"Dodo, if you'll take me I'll marry you to-night!"

This unexpected turn, the value of which she did not overestimate,
brought her a mad desire to burst out laughing. It was not the first
time that she had been surprised by such sudden outbursts, and not being
given to the study of psychology, had always been puzzled--with a little
disdain for the superior masculine sex.

"Neither now nor ever!" she said, with a shrug of the shoulders. "Don't
be a silly! Hand me my muff--there on the table. It's time to be going!"

She replaced the orchids, deciding it was best to appear alone and
unbefriended before Peavey. Joe, going to the table, stole a glance at
the cards of Sassoon, Harrigan Blood and Judge Massingale, apparently
carelessly thrown there, and returned with enlarged eyes.

"Damn it, Do," he said, with a new respect, "I wish you'd let me buy you
a diamond necklace or an automobile. This money burns my pocket!"

"Presents, all you wish. Send me a _little_ bouquet of orchids, if it
will make you feel better," she said, descending the stairs. "Orchids I
never get tired of. If I were rich I'd wear a new bunch every day.
Pouffe has such exquisite ones...."

The stairs were so dark that she had to feel her way: she could smile
without fear of detection.

"He will leave an order for a bouquet every day," she thought
confidently, and she began busily to calculate the advantages of her
understanding with that justly fashionable florist.




    CHAPTER VI


Of all the men Dodo met, paraded and ticketed to her own satisfaction,
Mr. Orlando B. Peavey was perhaps the one she had the most difficulty in
keeping in the _status quo_. Not that a wounding thought could ever
cross his timid imagination, but that she feared a crisis which by every
art she sought to postpone. On the day he found courage to propose, she
knew their friendship would end. This exact and vigorous man of
business, indefatigable, keen and abrupt in the conduct of affairs, was
as shy and disturbed in her presence as a wild fawn. At the age of
twelve he had been forced, by the sudden death of his father, to give up
an education and fling himself into the breach. For thirty-five years he
had worked as only an American can who is resolute, ambitious,
passionately enwrapped in work, without the distractions of a youth that
had been closed to him, or without other knowledge of women than the
solitary devotion he gave to an invalid mother, who querulously and
jealously claimed his few spare hours. All the depth of sentiment and
affection he lavished in small attentions on this invalid. Yet at her
death a great emptiness arrived--life itself seemed suddenly
incomprehensible.

For the first time he perceived that he had almost reached fifty, and
had he taken stock of his demands on life he would have found that
business had ceased to be a means, but had become the sole end, the day
and the night of his existence. Several times he had had a furtive
desire to marry, to create a home, to look upon children whom he might
shower with the enjoyments of youth, which he might thus in a reflected
way experience. But the complaining shadow at his side was a jealous
tyrant, always on the watch for such an eventuality, bitterly resisting
it with hysterical reproaches and frightened prognostications of
abandonment. But when at last, two years ago, he had found his life set
in solitary roads, he had at first said to himself that the opportunity
had come too late, that he was past the age when marriage would be safe.
The word "safe" was characteristic of the man. He had a horror of
becoming ridiculous.

Nevertheless, a life which had been conceived in sacrifice could not
endure selfishly. There were great depths of compassion, yearnings
toward the ideal in this walled-in existence, that had to be fed. He
felt imperatively the need of doing good, of generosity toward some
other human being. He thought of adopting a child, and as this idea grew
he was surprised to find that his thoughts constantly formed themselves
not in the image of his own sex, but of a young girl, fragile and
unprotected, innocent, with the dawning wonder of the world in her eyes,
light of foot, warm of voice, with the feeling of the young season of
spring in the rustle of her garments.

Then he had met Dore.

He had met her through the daughter of a western business acquaintance,
who had confided her to his care. From the first meeting, he had felt a
turbulent awakening in him at the sight of her glowing youth. At the
thought of her, so inexperienced and candid, subject to all the hard
shocks of metropolitan struggle, standing so fragile and alone amid the
perils, the temptations and the hunger of the flaring city, he had felt
an instant desire to step between her and this huddled snatching mob, to
give her everything, to make all possible to her, to watch her face
flush and her eyes sparkle at the possession of each new delight that
youth craves. But other thoughts came, and he began to suffer keenly,
afraid of fantastic perils that tossed before him in his silent hours.
If, after all, she should find him ridiculous--he an old man, and she so
fresh, so delicate! Then another horrible fear came. What did he know of
her--of any woman? If he were deceived, after all? He became suspicious,
watching her with a woman's spying for significant details, alarmed,
poised for instant flight.

This was the man who was waiting for her in the long corridor of the
Waldorf-Astoria, black coat over his arm, derby in hand, not too portly,
not too bald, square-toed, dressed in the first pepper-and-salt business
suit, ready-made, which had been presented him, low turn-down collar,
and a light purple tie, likewise made up. Small nose and aquiline, eyes
gray under bushy eyebrows, lip obscured under heavy drooping fall of the
mustache. He steadied himself on his heels, beating time with his toes,
wondering what others would think when they saw he was waiting for a
young and pretty girl.

He saw her flitting down the long hall, head shyly down, light,
graceful, scattering imaginary flowers on her way; and the sensation of
life and terror that she set leaping within him was so acute that he
pretended not to perceive her until she was at his elbow.

"It's very good of you to come," he said at last, when they had reached
their table in a discreet corner.

"It's very kind of you to think of me," she said instantly, a little
touched by the confusion in his manner. She understood the reason, and
it saddened her that it should be so--that he could not always be kept
just a devoted friend.

"I'm rushing through; wanted to know how you were!"

"Don't you think I look better?" she said, raising her eyes in heavy
melancholy. "The champagne has done wonders."

He was not able to do more than glance hastily at her.

"You don't look yet as you ought to," he said, shaking his head. "You
need air. I have a plan--I'll tell you later."

"I'm taking fresh eggs, two a day," said Dore, wondering what he had in
view. "Only it's so hard to get real fresh ones!"

"My dear girl, I'll send you the finest in the market," he said
joyfully, delighted at the opportunity of such a service.

He took out a note-book and wrote in a light curved hand, "Eggs," and
replacing it, said:

"If I send you a pint of the finest dairy cream each morning, will you
promise faithfully to make an egg-nogg of it? It's splendid--just what
you need!"

"I'll do anything you tell me," said Dore, genuinely touched by the
pleasure in his face. It was not entirely self-interest that had made
her lead up to the subject, for she could have secured a response from a
dozen quarters. It was perhaps an instinctive understanding of the man
and what it meant to him to find even a small outlet to his need of
giving.

Mr. Peavey methodically had taken out his memorandum and by the side of
"Eggs" had added "and cream."

She would have preferred that he should need no reminders; but at this
moment, on taking up her napkin, she gave a cry of pleasure. Inserted
between the folds was a package of tickets. She scanned them
hastily--groups of two for each Monday night of the opera.

"Oh, you darling!" she exclaimed, carried away with delight.

He reddened, pleased as a boy. "Want you to hear good music," he said in
self-excusation. "Shan't be here always; you'll have to take a friend."

"Oh, but I want to go with you!" said Dore, genuinely moved.

"When I'm here--can't tell," he said, in the seventh heaven of
happiness. "But I want you to go regularly; besides, my car is to call
for you."

"You are so kind," said Dore, looking at him solemnly, and forgetting
for the moment all thought of calculation. "Really, I don't think there
is another man in the world so kind!"

"Nonsense! Stuff and nonsense!" he said, resorting hastily to a glass of
water. The waiter came up. He took the menu in hand, glad for the
diversion.

"How good he is!" she thought, watching the solicitude with which he
studied the menu for the dishes she ought to take. "He would do anything
I wanted. If he were only a colonel or a judge!"

She was thinking of the ponderous mustache, and wondering in a vague way
what it would be like to be Mrs. Orlando B. Peavey. Perhaps, she could
get him to cut his mustache like Harrigan Blood. At any rate, he ought
to change his tie. Purple--light purple! and made up, too! With any
other man she would have attacked the offending tie at once, for she had
a passion for regulating the dress of her admirers; but with Mr. Peavey
it was different. A single suggestion that he could not wear such a
shade, and she fancied she could see him bolting through the shattering
window.

"Will you do me a favor--a great favor, Miss Baxter?" he said finally,
turning to her in great embarrassment.

"What is it?"

"It would make me happy--very happy," he said, hesitating.

"Of course I will," she said, wondering what it could be.

"It's not much--it really is nothing. I mean, it means nothing to me to
do it! It's this: I am away so much; my car is here--nothing to do; you
need a ride,--good air every afternoon,--and, besides, I don't like to
think of you going around alone in taxi-cabs or street-cars,
unprotected. The car is standing idle; it's bad for the chauffeur. Won't
you let me put it at your disposal for the winter--for a month, anyway?"

"Oh, but, Mr. Peavey, I couldn't! How could I?"

"You don't think it would be proper?" he said in alarm.

"No, no, not that!" she said, and a strange thought was at the back of
her head. "For the opera, yes! And occasionally in the afternoon. But
the rest--it is too much; too much! I couldn't accept it!"

He was immensely relieved that this was the only objection.

"I should feel you were protected," he said earnestly. "That worries me.
Such horrible things happen!"

"But I am a professional! I must take care of myself!" said Dore, with a
sudden assumption of seriousness.

She began to talk of her career, of her independence, her
ambitions--rapidly, feeling that there were sunken perils in the course
of his conversation.

"Really, it isn't difficult. American men are chivalrous; they always
protect a young girl--really, I've been surprised! And then, I don't
think it's quite right that I should have advantages other girls
haven't. If I'm going on the stage, I should take everything as it
comes. Besides, it teaches me what life is, doesn't it? Then, it's such
fun being independent, and making yourself respected! By the way, I feel
so much stronger now, I shouldn't wonder if I could be on the stage
again soon. Blainey wants to talk to me--I may see him this afternoon.
He's such a good kind fellow, just like you, Mr. Peavey! Really, all men
seem to try and protect me!"

But the real reason she did not wholly accept his offer she did not tell
him.

"Are you sure you want a career?" he said abruptly.

"Do I?... I don't know!" she said, eating hungrily. "But you see the
trouble is, I've got to find out! Oh, I don't want anything small! No
holding up a horse in the back row of an extravaganza, as Ida says!"

"You won't like the life!..."

"Won't I? Perhaps not!... I know some women have a bad time! But every
one looks after me!..."

She shifted the conversation to his interests, and kept it there, with
one eye on the clock. It was difficult choosing her questions, for all
would not do. For instance, she wished to ask him why he did not stop
working and enjoy his money; but that would have opened up a direct and
personal reply.

"Why do you work so hard?" she said, instead.

"I've got to do something!" he answered; "and, besides, I'm on the point
of something big--if I carry it through. In another year I'll be a rich
man--quite a rich man!"

He looked away as he said it, ashamed, knowing at heart why he had
offered it up to her thus against his fifty years! But in a moment,
chirping ahead rapidly, she had put him at his ease, and keeping the
conversation on light topics, avoided further dangers.

He left her with stiff formal bows, placing her in his automobile and
giving the chauffeur directions.

The car went smoothly through the crush. It was a good car,--she was a
judge!--in perfect order. Whatever Peavey did was always of the best.
The chauffeur had quite an air, too. She disturbed the heavy fur rugs
that had been so carefully wrapped about her little feet, sunk her head
gratefully against the cushions, and thought, with a long easy breath:

"Well, that's one thing I could do!"

She began to consider it from all points of view:

"I wonder what it'd be like to be Mrs. Orlando B. Peavey?"

An automobile--two or three; seats at the opera--a box in the upper row,
perhaps; a big house; big dinners. Or, better still, travel, strange
countries, curious places. Then she remembered the mustache. On a
colonel or a judge, perhaps. What a pity he wasn't either! To be the
young wife of a colonel or a judge was quite distinguished!

He was good, kind, gentle. She might even go in for charity. Perhaps,
after ten or fifteen years, she might be left a widow, with lots of
money. Fifteen was rather long--ten would be better! There was a girl
she knew who had married an old man worth ten millions, who had died
before the year was out. What luck! But then, all husbands are not so
obliging!

This reverie did not last long. She tied it up, so to speak, in a neat
package and put it in a pigeonhole. It was comforting to think of it as
a possibility! Why had he offered her his automobile every day--just for
her own? Was it pure generosity, or was there something else? She
smiled; such motives she read easily. Wasn't it, in fact, to know what
her daily life was!--whom she saw, where she went, to know absolutely,
before he took the final plunge? She smiled again. She was sure there
was something of all this in the gift, and leaning forward, she sought
to study the face of Brennon, the chauffeur, wondering if she could make
him an ally, could trust him--if he were human.

She had no time for conversation. Hardly had she arrived before Miss
Pim's than she perceived Sassoon's automobile turning the corner. She
did not wish to meet him thus, though she was not sorry that he had seen
her return. So she ran hastily up-stairs to her room, and was in the
midst of a quick change of toilet when Josephus brought the card.

"Tell him to wait!"

She took pains that this waiting should not be too short, maliciously
studying the clock for a good twenty minutes before, prepared for the
street, she went down.

"Now to be a desperate adventuress," she thought to herself; and
assuming a languid indifferent manner, she entered the room.




    CHAPTER VII


Sassoon was on his feet, moving restlessly, as she entered. He was not
accustomed to be kept waiting, and to wait half an hour after he had
seen her enter just ahead of him was interminably vexing. And yet, he
was profoundly grateful for this teasing delay. It awakened him; it made
him hope. There was a resistance, a defiance, in it that was as precious
as it was rare. He had wondered much about her as he moved with slow
irritation, stopping occasionally to catch a reflection in the foggy
mirror of his long, oriental, slightly hanging head, and the grizzled
mustache which, with its mounting W, gave to his dulled eyes a sharp
staccato quality of a blinking bird of prey.

The drawing-room, or parlor, was like ten thousand other parlors of
boarding-houses--brown, musty, with an odor of upholstery and cooking,
immense tableaux sunk into the obscurity of the walls, imitation Dresden
shepherdesses on the mantel, an album of Miss Pim's on the table and a
vase containing dried flowers, cheap furniture, a crippled sofa placed
in a shadow, and weighing down all, the heavy respectability of a Sunday
afternoon. Occasionally the front door opened to a latch-key, and a
feminine form flitted by the doorway, always pausing curiously to survey
the parlor before sorting the mail that lay displayed on the seat of
the hat-rack.

Once a couple with cheery voices came full into the room before
perceiving his tenancy. They withdrew abruptly, and he heard the girl
saying to her escort:

"Oh, well, come up to the room; there's never a chance at the old
parlor!"

This mediocrity, this quiet, these flitting forms of young women, the
cub escort who was privileged to enjoy intimacy, strangely excited him.
There was something really romantic in following a fancy into such a
lair, and the longer the plaguing clock sounded its tinny march, the
more vibrantly alert he felt, in the anticipation of her coming.

"I saw you come in!" he said directly. He did not move forward, but
stood blinking at her like a night-bird disturbed in the day. "You've
kept me waiting quite a while, young lady."

"Really?" she said indifferently. She stopped in the middle of the room.
"Well, Pasha, do you expect me to come to you?"

He roused himself, hastily advancing. In truth, waiting for others to
throw themselves at him had become such a habit that he had not noticed
the omission.

"Pardon me! I was enjoying--you are a delightful picture!" he said in
his silky voice.

She accepted the evasion with an unduped smile.

"You are lucky to catch me at all," she said. "I have an engagement
up-town at three."

"Do you always wear the national costume?" he said, indicating her
Russian blouse.

"Yes, always."

"But my flowers, Miss Baxter?" he said, standing after she had motioned
him to a seat; and the glance from under the prominent, hanging upper
lids, that half covered the irises, seemed to sift wearily down at her.

"Your flowers? What flowers? Sit down!"

"My orchids--yesterday--"

"Oh! Your orchids." She stopped suddenly, as though confused. "You won't
be angry? I know you won't when I tell you about it! I gave them away."

He took his seat, rubbed the back of one hand with long soft fingers,
and slowly raised his mocking glance to hers.

"Ah--you gave them away?"

"Yes! and you'll quite approve," she said, meeting his inquisitorial
scrutiny without confusion. "I'll tell you just how it was. I have a
protegee, an old woman who sells newspapers under the elevated
station--such an old woman! If I were rich I'd send her off to a farm
and make her happy for the rest of her life! The first day I came to New
York I hadn't any money. I didn't know what to do! I sold newspapers!"

"You?"

"Yes! You didn't hear? Oh, it made quite a fuss at the time! The
newspapers had it, 'Mysterious Society Woman Sells Papers.' And I made a
lot of money--no change, naturally! Too bad I didn't know you then; you
would have paid at least a dollar a paper!"

She laughed gaily, a little excited at the recollection.

"It was quite romantic! Well, my old woman gave me the idea. She's been
my mascot ever since. Every day I get my papers from her. Last night,
coming back after a spin, I stopped as usual. I had the orchids here at
my waist; I noticed her eying them.

"'What are you looking at? These?' I asked.

"She bobbed her head. She has only five teeth--the funniest teeth! You
ought to see them; none of them meet.

"'At these flowers?'

"She bobbed again.

"'You like flowers?'

"Then she came up close to me--the way old people do, you know--and said
in my ear:

"'When I was your age, my darling, I had flowers, like those, every
day!'

"And she drew back, nodding and bobbing, smiling her toothless smile."

Dore stopped, pressed her hand to her throat and said in a muffled
voice:

"It just took me. Something came right up in my throat--I could have
cried! I tore them off and threw them in her arms. If you could have
seen the look she gave me! She kissed them. Ah! it made me very happy, I
can tell you!"

Did he believe her? He didn't care! Perhaps he preferred that it should
have been invented.

"It will mean a _great_ deal to her," he said, his eyes on hers--his
eyes, that began to light up as lanterns showing through the fall of
night.

"It will mean a great deal!" she said, with an expression of such
beatitude that his abiding doubt began to waver. "I just couldn't have
kept them!"

"I want you to lunch with me--to-morrow," he said slowly.

"Where?"

"In my apartments. They overlook the park. It's quite delightful."

He watched her eagerly, for eagerness could occasionally show on his
face, as a sudden joy may recall a past youth to the face of a mature
woman. She considered thoughtfully:

"To-morrow? At what time?"

"At one," he said; and she noticed again the curious gesture of his
feminine fingers sliding caressingly over the back of his hand.

"One's all right. I'll be delighted to meet Mrs. Sassoon."

He raised his head with an ironical smile; but the smile fled as he
noticed that her face was blankly serious.

"I don't like that!" he said abruptly.

"What?"

"You know very well I am not inviting you to meet my wife."

"What _do_ you want with me, then, Mr. Sassoon?" she said calmly,
looking directly at him with her cloudy blue eyes of a child.

He rose, nonplused, walked to the window and slowly back. What was
she--straightforward or deep? Did she wish to come directly to a
business understanding, or--or was she truly independent and seeking
this method to terminate the acquaintance? An instinct warned him of the
danger in an answer. He returned, and said, leaning on the mantelpiece:

"Bring a friend, if you wish. I'll have in the Comte de Joncy.... You've
aroused his curiosity--"

"At your private apartments?"

"Of course!"

"No!"

"At Tenafly's, then."

"At Tenafly's--down-stairs--yes!"

"A party of four?"

"No. Come to think of it, it'll be more interesting just with you."

This unexpected answer, said in the most natural manner imaginable,
perplexed him more than ever. She noticed it, quite delighted at the
helplessness of the experienced hunter.

"You won't lunch in a party of four at my apartments, but you will lunch
with me alone at a public restaurant."

"Quite so!"

"And your reputation?"

"It isn't a question of reputation--my security! I wouldn't trust
you--that's all!"

He didn't choose to discuss this, but sought to give the conversation a
different turn.

"You are satisfied with this?" he said, with a sudden crook of his arm.

"You are delightfully direct, aren't you?" she said. "You usually don't
have so much trouble coming to an understanding with women, do you?"

"No, I don't."

"Well, what do you want to know?"

"I'm curious to see how you live--your room--"

She shook her head.

"That you'll never see."

"But--"

"Oh, yes, I make a difference. There are men you receive in your room,
and men you receive always in a parlor, and there's no trouble at all in
classifying them!" She jumped up, with a laugh. "And you, with all your
experience among my sex, can't make up your mind about me."

"You pay what? Eight--ten--fifteen a week. And you have your
automobile," he said, pursuing his idea.

"Ah, that's it! Have I an auto or not? But that's not what you want to
know! You want to know if some one gives me an automobile, and, if so,
why? Well, have I or haven't I? Find out!"

"You know," he said in his deliberate dragging way, "I don't believe
that story about the orchids!"

"What do you mean?" she said, with such a swift turn from provoking
malice to erect gravity that he hesitated.

"There was a hundred-dollar bill in that bouquet, Miss Baxter!" he said,
changing the attack slightly.

"A hundred!" she said, drawing herself up in surprise and scorn. "Ah!
now I understand--everything. So that's why you are here! To get your
value!"

"No--no," he protested, confused.

"Now I see it all!" she continued, as if suddenly enlightened. "Of
course, such presents are quite in order as mementoes when young ladies
of the chorus are entertained by you. But you weren't sure of me? You
wanted to know if I would take it! For, of course, that would simplify
things, wouldn't it?"

"Do you regret giving it away?" he said, convinced, watching her with
his connoisseur gaze.

She stopped.

"That is insulting!" she said, so simply that he never again recurred to
the subject. "Now, Mr. Sassoon, I am going to play fair with you. I
always do--at first. I am not like other girls. I do play fair. I give
one warning--one only--and then, take the consequences!"

"And what is your warning, pretty child?" he said, with a faint echo of
excitement in his voice.

"You will lose your time!" she said, dropping him a curtsy. "You wish to
know what I am? I won't give you the slightest hint! I may be a
desperate adventuress, or I may be a pretty child; but I tell you
frankly, now--once only--you had better take your hat and go! You
won't?"

He shook his head stubbornly.

"Very well! You will regret it! Only, be _very_ careful what you say to
me, and how you say it. Do you understand?"

"And you will lunch with me to-morrow?"

"Yes!"

"Why?"

"Two reasons--to tantalize you, and because I am the most curious little
body in the world! There! That's quite frank!" She glanced at the clock,
which had gone well past the hour. "Now I must be off--I shall be late,
as it is!"

He glanced, in turn, at his watch.

"And I've been keeping a board of directors cursing me for half an
hour--very important board," he said, grinning at the thought of their
exasperation if they should be privileged to see the cause of his delay.

"Really?" she exclaimed, delightfully flattered. "Then you can keep them
waiting some more! Your car's here? Very well; take me up to the Temple
Theater, stage entrance."

It was not in his plan thus publicly to accompany her. Not that he cared
about his ghost of a reputation! But to arrive thus at a stage entrance,
dancing attendance on a little Salamander, savored too much of the
debutant, the impressionable and gilded cub. To another woman he would
have refused peremptorily, with short excuse, packing her off in the
automobile, and going on foot to his destination. But with Miss Baxter
he had a feeling that she would exact it, and a fear that somehow she
was waiting an excuse to slip from him, a fear of losing her.

"I am waiting!" she said impatiently.

"What for?" he asked, coming abruptly out of his abstraction.

"For you to hand me in, Pasha!"

He gave her his hand hurriedly, capitulated and took his seat in turn.
She guessed his reasons, and watched him mockingly, sunk in her corner.
The melancholy and the weakness of yesterday were gone; she was again
the gay little Salamander, audacious and reckless, sublimely confident
in the reserves of her imagination to extricate her from any peril.

"The warning holds until to-morrow morning," she said, her eyes
sparkling, the mood dramatized in every eager and malicious expression.

He did not answer, aroused and retreating by turns, uncomfortable,
irritated and yet resolved. Had Dore known the fires she had kindled and
the ends to which he was capable of going, perhaps she would not have
felt so audaciously triumphant.

As they swung from Broadway into the crowded, narrow side street, quite
a group was before the entrance--a knot of stage-hands loafing outside
for a smoke, Blainey himself in conversation with an actress who was
speaking to him from another automobile, and three or four of the
personnel of the theater awaiting the arrival of the manager.

She forced Sassoon to descend and hand her down--Sassoon rebelling at
being thus paraded and recognized. Then, with a fractional nod, she went
through the group. All at once some one, making way for her, lifted his
hat. She looked up and recognized the one man she did not wish to see
her thus in Sassoon's company: Judge Massingale, smiling his impersonal,
tolerantly amused smile.




    CHAPTER VIII


When she had passed the familiar limping figure of the guardian of the
stage door, and had caught the sound of the helter-skelter preparations
behind the curtains--the ring of hammers, the hoarse shouts into the
rafters, the green-and-gold filmy sheen of the scenery, the groups in
costume, chattering in the wings, the busy black-hatted, coatless
stage-hands tearing about--Dore felt that tingling of the nerves that
comes to the crutched veteran when the regiment passes. She adored this
life with a keen excited zest. Its unrealities were vitally real, its
Lilliputian sultans and pashas great potentates. She adored it--but she
was not yet decided. To have been certain of succeeding would have
seemed to her the fullest of life; but she was not so blinded by the
dazzling light of success as not to perceive clearly the barrenness of
its mediocrity and the horror of its failure.

She passed into the theater, which seemed to swallow her up in its
impenetrable embrace. She stood a moment, peering into the darkness,
seeing only a great red eye above, ghostly draperies in the galleries,
and in the mysterious catacombs below a vague flitting figure stumbling
to a seat. Then, her eyes growing accustomed to the obscurity, she put
out her hand and felt her way along the empty seats, with their damp
musty shrouds.

The curtain was up on the set for the first act, which had been ended
ten minutes before. They had been rehearsing since noon; the
probabilities were they would continue long past midnight. On the stage,
O'Reilly of the "props" was swearing hoarsely at the calcium light in
the ceilings, throwing on reds and blues with a rapid succession that
blinded the eyes. Baum was cursing the scene-shifters, clamoring for
more verdure. Trimble, the stage-manager, was in the center of the
stage, rearranging a scene with the soubrette and the heavy comic. In
the house itself, back of the orchestra, in the dim lobby with its
dungeon reflections from the street, the chorus girls and men were
busily rehearsing a new step that had just been given them, humming as
they balanced on their toes, took hands and twined about their partners,
who, with a final twirl, sank on their knees to receive them. As the
step was complicated, everywhere murmurs of expostulation and protest
were heard:

"Stupid! Not that way!"

"One, two--one, two--one, two, three!"

"Catch me."

"No! I go first."

"Gee! what an ice-wagon!"

"To the left, I told ye!"

Dodo, dodging swaying bodies and arms extended in swimming gestures,
found the center aisle, and her eyes acquiring more vision, began to
explore the obscurities. Above the orchestra, Felix Brangstar, his head
crowned with a slouch hat, stripped to shirt and crossed pink
suspenders, angry, hot and on edge, was screaming to the flutes orders
to transpose certain measures. O'Reilly continued to shout:

"Blind that! Throw on the whites. Damn you, _will_ you throw on your
whites? Hold that!"

Trimble, on the stage, was taking the part of the soubrette, skipping
about the heavy comic, coquetting and dodging under his arm, while the
air was charged with electric comments:

"Lower away! More--more!"

"Is Blainey here yet?"

"Where's Benton?"

"Switch that table over!"

"Throw on your borders!"

"_B_ flat, then the chord of _A_."

"That's cut out. Yes--_yes_!"

"Try that curtain again."

"Bring it down slow. No! God! Carey, do you call that slow? Again!"

The piece was a truly fairy-like creation of a modern Offenbach,
romantic in libretto, distinguished and delicate in music, a true
operetta of the sort that ten years from now will take its just place as
a work of art, no longer subject to the mutilations and humiliations
that now attend such Americanizations into the loosely tied vaudeville
numbers justly termed _comic_ opera.

At this moment some one touched Dore on the arm, and looking up, she
beheld Roderigo Sanderson. In the shadow she perceived nothing but the
flash of a diamond stick-pin and the white sheen of his collar, while an
odor of perfume distilled itself from the handkerchief he wore in his
sleeve and the heavy curls on his forehead.

"You here?"

"T. B. wants to see me," he answered, giving Blainey, with the American
passion for intimacy, the initials under which he was known from one end
of the Rialto to the other. He took a seat back of her, leaning over her
shoulder, speaking in a guarded tone in the mezzo-Anglican accent which
he had almost acquired.

"It's uncommon good, you know. Saw it in Vienna. A gem! Trimble has
really staged it jolly well. Sada Quichy--they've imported her, you
know--really knows a bit about singing as well as dancing. If they'd put
it on as it is now, it would go big--by jove, it would be a revolution!
But they won't. The slaughter-house gets a chance at it to-day. You'll
see what's left after T. B. gets his meat-ax into it!"

"Who's in the stage-box?" said Dore curiously.

"The silent partners," said Sanderson, with a laugh. "Look at the
brutes! They're in a fog--in a panic! They already see their money
flowing in a gutter. Never mind! they'll get a bit more cheery when T.
B. begins his popularizing. It'll be quite amusing. I always get to
these executions. It's a brutal appetite, but it sort of consoles one,
you know!"

In the box, the silent partners, Guntz, Borgfeldt and Keppelman,
suddenly enriched commission agents from the Central West, new to the
dishabille of the theater, sat motionless, three black, ill-smelling
cigars on parade, three enormous bodies, tortured by tight collars,
tight vests, tight chairs, each derby set over one ear to shade the fat
folds of the jowled head. Sanderson had made no mistake: the exquisite
and melodious first act had left them absolutely petrified with horror.

Sanderson, _au courant_, continued his exposition after a preparatory
glance around the stalls.

"They say they've made millions. How the deuce did L. and B." (the
theatrical firm of Lipswitch and Berger) "ever entice them into it? They
say they're back of the firm for a third in everything! I'd give a good
deal, now, to see the contract those bandits drew up for mutual
protection! Jove! that would be a curiosity!"

At that moment, when the stage was in a bedlam, with the cross-fire of
the stage-manager coaxing on the soubrette, Brangstar furiously
reprimanding the little polyglot tenor, who sang of "lof," and was
insufferably pleased with his slender legs, Baum moving indifferently in
the confusion, giving ideas for the readjustment of the ravine and the
bridge, O'Reilly darkening the blue lights to try the effect of dawn,
despite the complaints of the dressmaker, who was defending her costumes
and endeavoring to save the hussar boots of the chorus girls by a bolder
rearrangement of the draperies--in the midst of this inferno, Blainey
came shouldering in, the reverberations of his deep bass stilling the
uproar.

"First act, now. Get at it! Don't bring me in here, O'Reilly, for a
rehearsal on lights. Ring down your curtain. Gus, want to hear that
overture! Let's get at it, boys!"

"All on stage for first curtain!"

Instantly there was a scurrying of the chorus from the lobby down the
stage aisle; the dressmaker went hurriedly over the footlights, via a
box; the curtain slowly settled; Brangstar climbed to his chair; and the
voice of O'Reilly floated out in a final curse at the calcium lights.

"Blind your blues and clear slow. Pete, bring it on slow this time! Do
you get me? _Do you get me?_"

And from above, the voice of the labor union, unruffled, neither to be
coaxed nor driven, came impudently down:

"Sure I get you!"

"Overture, now. Then go through the first act. No stops!" said Blainey,
lumbering up the aisle.

Against the firefly lights of the orchestra his figure showed like a
great barrel, short legs and short arms, with the sense of brute power
in the blocked head sunk in the shoulders. He came to where they sat,
shading his eyes. Sanderson stood up abruptly, at attention.

"Hello, kid!" he said, perceiving Dore.

"Hello, Blainey!"

"See you after first act," he said, leaning over the chairs until they
groaned, to take her hand in his enveloping grasp. "Who's that with
you--the judge? Oh, Sanderson! What are you--oh, yes, I remember. Judge,
glad you came; I want your opinion!"

At this moment Massingale came down from the lobby and took a seat
beside Dore, while Blainey, readjusting his soft black, broad-brimmed
hat with a nervous revolving motion, sauntered on, impatient at the
scraping of the violins and the preparatory pumping of the horns.
Sanderson, at a nod from Blainey, had followed him into the lobby.

"Surprised to see me here?" said Massingale, taking his seat. "You know,
I turn up everywhere. I'm one of those who circulate. I came with Sada
Quichy--she's great fun!"

In fact, in New York three classes are privileged at every
door--privileged because they have the power to make themselves feared:
the politician in office; the representative of the press; and the judge
who, at a word, can unloose the terrors of both the others.

"Don't forget what you told me yesterday," she said, turning to him
directly, haunted by the malice in his eyes when he had seen her handed
down from Sassoon's automobile.

"What did I tell you?"

"That you would not misunderstand me!"

"I don't!" he said, after an ineffectual attempt to see her face.
"But--are you strong enough to play the game you are playing?"

"Sassoon?"

"Yes, Sassoon!"

She thought of him, ruffled and rebellious, forced to accompany her to
the stage entrance. She held him in slight respect.

"Pooh! Sassoon!" She had a feeling that this man already had her
confidence, that she could talk freely with him. "Harrigan Blood, yes;
but not Sassoon!"

"You are wrong about Sassoon," he said quietly. "It is not the clever
man that is difficult to manage; it is the relentless one! That's
Sassoon!"

"Did you call yesterday--to warn me?" she said, turning to him.

"No; moralizing is not my forte," he said, shaking his head. "You are
unusual. I should like to watch--your progress!"

"You like to be behind the scenes?"

"Adore it!"

"I wonder just what you think of me," she said pensively. "Have you
decided what I am to become?"

"Yes."

She looked up, startled.

"What?"

"Oh, not now--later; some time when we can really talk."

She wished him to invite her, but he was one of those who had the rare
instinct of making women believe they were pursuing him. She was silent,
thinking, too, of Sada Quichy, doubly resolved to steal him from her.

"Very well," she said suddenly; "we'll dine together. They'll go on here
till midnight. We can bring back some sandwiches and cold chicken for
the prima donna." But, in her mind, she was resolved that, once they
were at dinner, she would carry him off boldly, Sada Quichy or not.

"Splendid!" he said laconically, and prepared himself for the overture,
that was being announced by a vigorous lashing of the conductor's stand.

Blainey had settled his body a short way in front of them, ears pricked
for the commercially vital waltz motif.

But in the present overture this essential did not at once appear. The
operetta, which had been given the name of _The Red Prince_, was a
fantastic romance of Hungary, strangely endowed with an intelligible
plot, and this fresh presentation of wild dancing melodies, passionate
strains of melancholy and yearning, abandoned delight and fierce
exultation, was summarized in the overture.

Massingale, who was an amateur of music, bent forward, breathing full,
murmuring his approbation. Dore too felt strangely lifted from herself,
leaping along perilous heights, striving with invisible windy shapes,
that caught her and whirled her, with closed eyes and bated lips, in
giddy whirlpools or sudden languorous calms. All the instincts that
yesterday, in the change of the year, had vibrated to melancholy, now
suddenly seemed to awake with the sufficiency of the instant. A fig
for the future! She had a need of the present, of the day, of the
hour, gloriously, deliciously stirred from blank realities. Her breath
came quick, the little nostrils quivered, and glancing at Massingale's
aristocratic forehead and jaw, she found him more than interesting--
strong, virile, fascinating in the chained-up impulses which a sudden
wild burst of the czardas brought glowing to his eyes.

The overture ceased amid a murmur of approbation; she moved a little way
from the shoulder she had instinctively approached.

"Take up that waltz again," said Blainey instantly.

Brangstar, as if warned of what was coming, rebelliously gave the
signal. The motif occurred in the middle of the overture, directly after
the czardas. It was a tum-ti-tum but undeniably catchy affair.

"Stop there!" Blainey rose and moved into the aisle. "Cut out all that
follows. No grand opera stuff--we don't want it! End with that waltz.
Fake it. Play it once pianissimo, fiddles; second time louder--bring in
your horns. Then let go with your brass. Cut loose. Soak it to 'em!
Start it up, Gus!"

Brangstar, who had given three fretful weeks to this beloved production,
musician at heart, loathing his servitude to Mammon, seeing in the
present work of art his opportunity to emerge, to do the true, the big
thing, raised his fists in horror. He had either to burst into tears or
swear. Swear he did, damning Blainey, Lipswitch, the whole gang of
Pharisees and infidels he served, calling them every name his rage flung
to his lips, vowing he never would be a party to such an atrocity.

Blainey, composed, allowed him to vent his fury, rather admiring his
manner. Brangstar was a valuable man, a blooded race-horse harnessed to
a delivery-wagon.

"You know your music, Gus; I know my public!" he said finally. "What's
going to make this opera is just one thing--what you can get under the
skin of your audience! We'll soak that waltz at 'em until every mother's
son of them goes out whistling it--till the whole town whistles it!
That's success, and I know it, and you know it! Now, get at it!"

When the overture had been repeated as he had ordered, Guntz, Borgfeldt
and Keppelman began to warm up and to slap one another with delight,
while from the recesses of the theater the shrill whistle of the ushers
was heard continuing the catchy:

                              "Tum-ti-tum-ti,
                              Tum-ti-tum-ti,
                                Tum-tum-tum!"

Blainey, not insensible to dramatic effects, indicated the box, where
joy now reigned, pursed his lips and nodded knowingly to Massingale.

The execution continued in the first act. The waltz appeared only in the
third. Blainey put it forward into the first, arranged for the comics to
give a light twist to it in the second, and built it up again in the
third, with all the resources of the chorus and repeated encores.

At each moment he stopped the progress of the act:

"Too pretty, pretty! Never go! Cut it!"

"Throw in some gags, there."

"Rush it--rush it!"

"Explode something, there."

"Trimble, got to get your chorus in here. Rush 'em in!"

"Oh, that's enough atmosphere!"

"The public wants dancing!"

"All right! Strike for the second act!"

The curtain rolled down and up, and the scene-shifters flung themselves
on the ravine. Brangstar went out to a saloon, strewing curses; Guntz,
Borgfeldt and Keppelman followed to celebrate; and Blainey, moving up to
Massingale, said, with a shrewd twinkle:

"Well, Judge, how do you like the first act?"

"Tim, if I had you before me I'd send you up for ten years!"

"Not if you had your money behind it, you wouldn't," said Blainey
good-humoredly. "Art be damned. I'm here to make money--yes, as every
one else is, in this town! I know what the public wants, and I soak it
to 'em. Why, this show wouldn't run six nights on a South Troy circuit!"

At this moment some one whispered to him that Sada Quichy was in
hysterics.

"What's the matter with Sadie, anyhow?" said Blainey, shrugging his
shoulders. "What's she kicking about? She gets twenty weeks, whether we
smash or not. I say, Judge, go and jolly her up a bit. Tell her she's
got a grand part! I want to talk business with this little girl."

And without concerning himself further, he led the way to his private
office.

Dore followed quietly. During the last two hours she had been balancing
on various emotions. The first glamour of the intoxicating overture had
been shattered. She looked on with sober eyes at this spectacle of the
theater reduced to its materialistic verities. She was too imaginative
not to perceive the outrages committed in the name of the box-office,
and too keen not to credit Blainey's logic. The fat idol-like figures of
Guntz, Borgfeldt and Keppelman were realities, too; she would have to
deal with that type, too--many of that type--if she chose to continue.
And she had remained in long periods of absorption, scarcely hearing the
remarks Massingale whispered to her, wondering, trying to see into the
future, asking herself if this were to be the solution, and, if it were,
how to play it. Musing thus, she continued to watch Blainey closely,
wondering. Blainey and Harrigan Blood were of the same tribe; they could
not be fed on sugar-plums!

The office was a comfortable, pleasantly lighted room, in the greatest
disorder possible. Blainey swept aside a litter of papers, and sank into
a huge upholstered chair, studying Dore, who vaulted to a seat on the
desk.

[Illustration: Dore vaulted to a seat on the desk]

Seen in the daylight, his head seemed to have been scraped and roughened
by the long buffeting of adversity and the rough passage upward. The
ears that leaped from the solid head, the sharp pointed nose with large
nostrils, the wide mouth of a great fish, the shaggy brows and eyes of
the fighter, the thin gray cockatoo rise of hair on the forehead as if
grasped by an invisible hand--all had about them the signs of the
battler, whose defiant motto might appropriately have been: "Don't bump
me!"

Blainey glanced at half a dozen telegrams, news from productions
scattered over the country, and raised his glance again.

"You're not mixed up with Roderigo Sanderson, are you?"

"Who?"

She had taken off her fur toque with a charming gesture of intimacy, and
was arranging her hair in the opposite mirror, her feet swinging
merrily.

"Sanderson."

"Did you see who brought me here?" she said impertinently. The answer
saved the actor an engagement. With Blainey she assumed always the
disdain of a woman of the world.

"Don't get mixed up with actors," he persisted, a note of jealousy in
his voice. "Steer clear!"

"Managers are safer, you mean!" she said, laughing at him.

That was not his meaning, but he continued:

"I don't have to tell you much, do I, kid?"

"Not much, Blainey."

"That was Sassoon with you, eh?"

"Albert Edward himself, Blainey," she answered, with an accented note of
pride. She knew the man she was dealing with. Brutal and contemptuous to
innocence, but bowing down with a sneaking admiration to the woman who
played the game and won out, not for a moment did he doubt that she was
of the shrewdest and the most unprincipled. And this conviction stood
like a shield before her in this room where other women had gone in with
a shrug.

"Sassoon, eh?" he said admiringly, and he gave vent to a long whistle.
"Well, trim 'em, kid, trim 'em!"

"That's what I'm doing, Blainey, and the finest!"

She took his accents, almost the contemptuous abruptness of his
gestures, transforming herself into his world.

"When are you going to get tired of all that?" he said, his eyes
narrowing covetously. "It's a short game. This is longer, safer."

"When? Pretty soon, Blainey."

"Why not now?"

She shook her head, laughing.

"Too soon--too soon!"

He reached over into a drawer and drew out a play.

"Do you see this? I'm keeping this for you!"

She opened her eyes.

"For me?"

"There's a fortune in it. There's a scene there"--he swore
appreciatively--"it's all in a scene, a trick; but it's a winner. And
I'm holding that for you, kid."

"Star me?" she said, laughing incredulously.

"In the third year--yes!"

"Come, now, Blainey, I'm no fool. I'm not that strong on acting!"

"Acting be damned. Personality!" he said, slapping the table. "You've
got me--you can get them!"

"Have I got you, Blainey?" she said, looking at him boldly.

"You got me from the first with your impudent way," he said abruptly.
"I'm interested in you, kid--particularly interested! You understand
what I mean?"

"It's not hard to understand you, T. B."

"I'll put you on Broadway in two years," he said. Then, bubbling over
with enthusiasm, he took up the role again. "God! there's a scene here
that'll get 'em--won't be a dry handkerchief in the house!" He
continued, his face lighting up with sentiment, for scenes of virtue
triumphant, virtue resisting, virtue rewarded, genuinely moved him--on
the stage: "End of second act, the girl learns she's an intruder--not
Lady Marjorie, heiress to millions, but a waif, substituted, see? It's a
lie, of course; all works out well in the last act; but you don't know
that. She's got an exit there beats anything in _Camill_! Runs away,
see? Leaves everything--jewels, clothes, money, nothing belongs to her.

"Proud--that's the idea; won't take a thing--nothing! Just as she's
rushing out, sees a cat, a damned, bobtailed, battered old kitten she's
picked off the streets, saved from a gang of ruffians in first act.
That's hers; in that great gorgeous palace--think of it--all that _is_
hers--all she's a right to. Runs back, grabs it, hugs it to her breast,
and goes out! What a chance! There's millions in that cat! I saw it. The
play was rotten, but the cat was there! That's the kind of stuff that
gets over, chokes you up, blinds you! I know it--I'd risk a fortune on
it!"

"Sounds good!" she said, nodding, amazed at this other side in him, not
yet comprehending inconsistencies in human nature.

He was off in raptures again, insisting on reading the final pages. She
listened without hearing, attracted and repulsed, turn about, by the
man. When he had come to earth again, she said:

"Blainey, I'm going to send a girl around to you for that part you
offered me."

"No, you're not! Work others," he said, with a snap. "Trim 'em, but
don't work me! I don't go in for charity!"

"Who said anything about charity?" she answered, knowing the
impracticability of such an appeal. "I'm sending you some one who can
act--Winona Horning, and a beauty! She was going to take a part in one
of Zeller's productions, and I told her to hold off until you saw her.
She's a friend, and I don't want her to lose time with Zeller!"

"You won't take it yourself?"

"Not now! Besides, when I get ready, you're going to place me in a good
stock company first. Look out, Blainey," she added, laughing; "if I turn
serious, it'll be frightful!"

He began, delighted, to sketch for her the course she should take,
seeking to convince her of her talents, unfolding to her the methods he
would employ. She kept her eyes on his, but she did not hear a word. The
feeling of the place possessed her; she could not shake it off. She felt
already caught.

In reality, her reckless assumption of this part was simply a trying out
of herself, an attempt to project herself into the future, to explore
with the eye where the feet must tread. Not that a career was within her
serious intentions. She retreated from coarseness, drawing her delicate
skirts about her; yet it amused her thus to dramatize herself! So, while
one Dodo was audaciously playing at acting, another Dodo was coldly
placing questions before herself.

"Would it be possible? Could I ever? Would it be worth while? And
Blainey--what would that mean?"

Then, as he turned in the glare from the window, she noticed his vest.
It was a brown upholstered vest with purple sofa buttons. Her reverie
centered on those buttons, counting them, running them up and down; and
a curious idea came to her. If by any chance she should go on with a
career, she certainly would have to make him change that vest!

The idea of a manager, a manager devoted to her, wearing a brown
upholstered vest with purple sofa buttons, offended her horribly--more
than other possibilities which did not stare her in the face. When she
went off with Massingale, after the second act, for a hasty bite, he
said to her:

"Why so solemn?"

She was still counting over that double line of purple sofa buttons.




    CHAPTER IX


They took their supper in a near-by oyster house, invaded by a
chattering throng, drummed over by an indefatigable orchestra. She had
looked forward keenly to the tete-a-tete. She was terribly
disillusioned. It was not at all exciting. Conversation was impossible,
and what they said was meaningless. She became irritable and restless,
for she had a feeling that she was being defrauded--that this man was
not like the rest, that he was one worth knowing, drawing out, an
adversary who would compel her to utilize all the light volatile
artillery of her audacious imagination.

"Listen," she broke out suddenly, "this is a horrible failure. I really
want to talk to you! Have you seen enough of the rehearsal?"

"Plenty!"

"Let's cut it, then!"

"Madame Quichy would never forgive me!"

She was silent a moment, rebuffed.

"I'm out of sorts. You can at least take me home!"

"Certainly!"

Arrived at the house, she said reluctantly:

"Well, come in for just a moment!"

And the parlor being occupied, they went to her room.

"Is Your Honor really going to spare me ten minutes from the fascinating
Sada Quichy?" she said, pouting, once arrived.

"Ten hours, if you like!" he said, taking off his coat with a gesture of
finality.

She was so delighted at this unhoped-for treason that she clapped her
hands like a child, not perceiving how he had made her ask each time for
what he really wanted.

"You're really going to stay?"

"Yes, indeed!"

"How exciting!"

She let her coat slip into his hands, and going to the mirror, raised
her hat slowly from her rebellious golden curls with one of those
indescribable, intimate, feminine gestures that have such allurement to
the gaze of men. If, with Blainey, she had resorted to abrupt and
dashing ways, with Massingale she felt herself wholly feminine, sure
that each turn of her head, line of her body, or caressing movement of
her arms would find appreciation.

She looked at him a moment over her shoulder, arching her eyebrows with
eyes that seemed brimming with caprice.

"You know, I was quite determined you should come!" she said, laughing,
and with a sudden swift passage of the room, she darted on the sofa,
curling her legs under her, hugging her knees, and resting her little
chin on them in elfish amusement. "Honor bright! Made up my mind there
in the theater!"

"So did I!" he said frankly.

"Really? And Sada Quichy?"

"She is a known quantity! It's much more amusing gambling with
possibilities!"

Since taking her coat he had remained standing, examining the room with
a keen instinct for significant details.

"Two beds?"

"This is Snyder's," she said, patting it. "She's rehearsing. Won't be
home till late."

Without asking her permission, he moved about curiously, smiling at the
trunks which stood open, and the bureaus with their gaping drawers.

"Heavens! everything is in an awful mess!" she said, with a little
ejaculation.

"Don't change it. I like it! It looks real!" he said, continuing.

She allowed him to pry into corners, watching him from the soft depths
of the couch, a little languid from the varied emotions of the day,
longing to be rid of the stiff pumps and the fatigue of her day dress.
The different dramatizations she had indulged in with Peavey, Sassoon
and Blainey had aroused her craving for sudden transpositions. If only
this should not prove disappointing! She felt an exhilarated curiosity,
more stirred than ever before. Did he really know her, divine her, as
she believed? How would he act? Was he only mentally curious, or was
that a clever mask for a more personal interest? She had a feeling that
she had known him for years, that all they could say had been said again
and again.

He was young at forty-five, and yet already gray. She liked that. Youth
and gray hair, she thought, were distinguished in a judge. There was an
air of authority about him that imposed on her. He did not ask
permission for what he did, and yet it carried no offense. He was
dressed perfectly, and that counted for much with her--so perfectly that
she did not even notice what he wore, except that the tones were soft
and gave her a sensation of pleasure, and that the cut was
irreproachable.

All the accent lay about the eyes and the fine moldings of the forehead.
The eyes were deep, hidden under the brows, Bismarckian in their set,
and not so calm, after all, she thought. She found herself studying the
lines of his mouth, strong and yet susceptible. And as she studied the
characteristic mockery of his smile, that smile which gave him the
appearance of one who projects above the crowd and sees beyond the
serried heads, it did not seem so much the man himself as an attitude
carefully assumed against the world. Was there a drama back of it all?
At any rate, her curiosity awaking her zest, she began to wonder what he
would be like in anger--that is, if anything could move him to anger, or
to anything else! This last provocative thought aroused the
danger-defying little devil within her. The languor vanished; she felt
swiftly, aggressively alert.

"And this is where we say our prayers," he said, pointing to the white
bed.

"Every night!" she answered promptly.

"Really?" he said, raising his eyebrows.

"Every night," she repeated, "I throw myself on my knees and cry, all in
a breath:

"'O Lord! give me everything I want!' Then I dive into bed, and pull the
covers over my head!"

"H'm!" he said, his chin in his hand, looking down at her as she rocked
in laughter on the couch. "After all, that's what a prayer is, isn't
it?"

"I think so. Oh!"

Suddenly on the floor, tipping from the edge of the couch, her pumps
fell with a crash. She had slipped them off surreptitiously, concealing
the operation with her skirts. She sprang on the rug in her green
stocking feet, snatching up the indiscreet pumps, and retreating to the
closet, but without confusion.

"What are you doing now?" she said, bobbing out suddenly.

He was standing by the chrysanthemums, reaching up.

"I was wondering if they were real."

"Imitation?"

"You don't know that trick," he said maliciously. "A great invention of
one girl I knew. You ought to know it! She had three vases,
chrysanthemums, roses, violets, all imitation. She said they were the
only flowers she cared for; so, when orders came in, all the florist did
was to telephone the amount he would credit to her account!"

"Was the florist Pouffe?" asked Dore, stopping short and laughing.

"One of them. But the real touch was when the admirer called. She would
place the vase of roses, say, on the mantel,--out of reach,
naturally,--blow a special perfume in the room, and say:

"'My! how wonderfully fragrant those roses are!'"

Dore felt divined; she laughed, conscious of a telltale color.

"Really, Your Honor, you know entirely too much!"

"I adore the little wretches--and their games!" he said frankly. "I'm
always on their side!"

"You don't adore anything! You couldn't!"

She had stopped before him, looking up at him with her blue eyes, which
were no longer cloudy but sparkling with provocation.

"You read character, too," he answered, smiling impersonally. "It's
true--it's safer and more amusing! Let me behind the scenes. I like
it--that's all I ask!"

"All?"

"Quite all!" he said dryly. Then: "What are you going to do with Sassoon
and Harrigan Blood?"

He asked the question without preparation, to throw her off her guard,
but she avoided it by asking another.

"Are you really just looking on?" she said, drawing her eyebrows
together. "Only curious?"

"It's as I told you," he said. "You see how I am here. Can't you tell?"

She shook her head.

"I can't tell; I can't tell anything about you!"

"You were not very nice to me at the luncheon!" he said irrelevantly.

"I know it!"

"You would hardly speak to me!"

"No."

"Why?"

"Shall I tell you? Because--because you are too strong for me!" she said
solemnly, her eyes growing curiously round and large.

He laughed.

"Now, Miss Mischief, that's too evident!"

"It's true! I felt it from the start," she said simply. "Sit down."

He credited her with being deeper than he had believed, whereas she had
only obeyed an impulse.

"Is Blainey a possibility too?" he asked suddenly.

"What! he has guessed even Blainey?" she thought, startled; but, as she
began an evasive answer, satisfied, he turned to a trunk, closed it and
installed himself, folding his arms.

"I'll tell you what I am going to do with Sassoon and Blood," she said
suddenly. She had camped on another trunk, swinging one little foot
incased within a red slipper, ten feet of the faded rug between them. "I
am going to make--oh, a lot of trouble!"

"You've started it already!"

"Tell me--was there really a terrible row?" she asked, clapping her
hands eagerly. "All over little me?"

"H'm, yes--rather! We had some difficulty in stopping it!" He looked at
her, amused, with the gaze of one who appreciates the irony of values.
"Do you know, you pretty little atom, that you are setting in motion
forces that may shake millions?"

"Oh, how lovely! Tell me!"

"Perhaps I'd better not!" he said grimly. "And suppose I told you that
if you made Sassoon and Blood enemies over your charming little person,
that Blood is capable of turning all the force of his newspapers against
the Sassoon interests, m

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/36355