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The beauty

by Mrs. Wilson Woodrow · English · Gutenberg #37549 · 349,971 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The beauty

Author: Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

Illustrator: Will Grefé


        
Release date: September 26, 2011 [eBook #37549]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37549

Credits: Produced by Roland Schlenker, Mary Meehan and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BEAUTY ***




Produced by Roland Schlenker, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net











                               THE BEAUTY

                        _By_ MRS. WILSON WOODROW

                 _Author of_ The Silver Butterfly, etc.


    WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
    WILL GREFE

    INDIANAPOLIS
    THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
    PUBLISHERS

    COPYRIGHT 1910
    THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY


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




[Illustration: Perdita]




CONTENTS


       I A BACHELOR'S BRIDE                               1

      II A FAR WORLD OF DREAMING                         14

     III PINK AND WHITE EXISTENCE                        35

      IV OUR LOVING FRIENDS                              55

       V PERDITA'S TALISMAN                              64

      VI SIROCCO                                         75

     VII THE GIFT OF FREEDOM                             84

    VIII FOOLS' LAUGHTER                                 98

      IX A TELEPHONE CALL                               114

       X OUT OF THE GILDED CAGE                         125

      XI A DOLL OR A BOX OF CANDY                       137

     XII FUSCHIA FLEMING                                150

    XIII SHOCKING THE HEWSTONS                          165

     XIV PUBLICITY                                      175

      XV A WIDOW'S SMILE                                192

     XVI FATHER AND DAUGHTER                            206

    XVII DO YOU LOVE ME?                                219

   XVIII PLAYING THE GAME                               231

     XIX HE CALLS ON HIS WIFE                           243

      XX THE MAGIC WORD                                 256

     XXI TWO ANNOUNCEMENTS                              268

    XXII HEPWORTH MISUNDERSTANDS                        278

   XXIII ITS ANCIENT CHARM                              289

    XXIV WAITING FOR PERDITA                            305

     XXV WITH MY HEART'S LOVE                           316




THE BEAUTY




CHAPTER I

A BACHELOR'S BRIDE


If the proper statistics of bachelorhood were accurately tabulated they
would show that at certain fixed and recurring periods, a confirmed old
bachelor, say one in every ten, casts his dearly-bought experience, his
hard-won knowledge of the world and women to the four winds of heaven,
and chooses for himself a wife; and, as his friends and relatives
invariably protest, a bungling job he makes of it. He may, before the
world, walk soberly, discreetly, advisedly and in the fear of God in
every other respect, but when it comes to selecting a companion for the
rest of his life, he follows, apparently, a predestined leading, some
errant and tricksy impulse, and from a world of desirable and waiting
helpmates, eminently suitable, he will, in nine cases out of ten, fix
his heart upon the one inevitable She who can keep the pot of trouble
ever boiling for him.

This, according to Mr. Cresswell Hepworth's old and intimate friends,
was exactly the course which he had followed; nor was even one voice
upraised in dissent from this opinion, as they frankly discussed the
matter over their champagne and truffled sweetbreads at the breakfast
following the wedding.

It was but natural that they who were rarely in complete agreement on
any subject which commended itself for discussion among them, should
hold a unanimous opinion on this matter which involved the happiness of
their lifelong friend. But although the opinion was unanimous, it was
not unprejudiced. Hepworth had had his distinct niche in their homes and
hearts for many years, and now as they gazed metaphorically at the empty
space, it struck a chill to their affections.

Nevertheless they did not, could not fail to join in the little gasp of
admiration which breathed through the church as the bride swept up the
aisle on the arm of Mr. Willoughby Hewston, the well-known banker and
intimate friend of the bride-groom. She had been stopping, it was
understood, with Mrs. Wilstead, another friend of Hepworth's, for
several weeks.

There were those in the large audience who saw a certain pathos in the
fact that she was given away by one of Hepworth's friends, thus exposing
the lack of either relatives or friends of her own, but there was
nothing in her bearing to indicate that she was conscious of her
isolated position as she advanced, leaning lightly on Mr. Hewston's arm.

The world, Hepworth's world, and it was a large one, was tingling with
curiosity. He was a great figure, looming immense upon the financial
horizon; but no one had ever heard of the bride. The invitations to the
wedding were the first intimation of his impending marriage, and the
bride's name, Perdita Carey, conveyed nothing to anybody. By dint of
careful collection of scraps of information, it gradually became known
that she was young, of southern birth and extremely pretty. Bare facts.
No more.

It was also considered rather an odd reading of the customary
conventions on Hepworth's part, this crowded church wedding exposing the
bride's poverty in relatives, the breakfast to follow, at his town
house, thus making equally plain her homeless state; but when this view
was set before him, sighingly, by Isabel Hewston, and vivaciously by
Alice Wilstead, he became obstinate in the insistence of his plans. He
seemed possessed of some masculine idea of getting things over, of
having all his friends meet his wife en masse, so to speak, and having
the matter settled.

And so it was, "Nice customs curtsy to great kings"--or millionaires.
The audience then of his friends--there was none of hers present, if
indeed she possessed any--sat with heads turned at an aching angle and
awaited, with concealed impatience, the choice of Cresswell Hepworth.

The weight of opinion leaned to a sunburst of a woman, darkly splendid,
opulently graceful, and instead, when the stately strains of the
wedding-march echoed through the church, the guests lifted their
astonished eyes to a brown and slender girl; but no matter what the
expectation had been, each realized that he gazed on a more poetic
loveliness than he had dreamed.

Another unhesitating mental admission. Obscure, unknown she might have
been, but she could never be considered ordinary. It had taken
generations of cultivation to give that pose of the head and shoulders,
that arch of the instep, that taper to her slender wrist. And what
intimation of individuality! Few women could have borne more regally the
weight of heavy and lusterless satin or a diadem of flashing jewels; but
this girlish bride of a millionaire had insisted on being married in the
white muslin her own scanty purse had furnished; and wore as if it were
a crown of diamonds the wreath of white jasmine flowers which held her
long tulle veil close about the cloudy masses of her hair.

For once the entire interest of any occasion which he happened to grace
was not centered on Hepworth, who, with his usual invincible composure,
awaited the bride at the altar, fortified by his best man, Wallace
Martin.

But the owner of millions--unctuous sound--is worth more than a mere
dismissing word. Let the bride continue to advance, he to await her,
while he is presented in a lightning sketch.

Cresswell Hepworth was far from old, not fifty. He had more than three
generations of cultivated ancestry behind him. In type he was American,
approaching the Indian; tall, slightly aquiline of feature, somewhat
granitic and imperturbable. His hair, which had been brown, was almost
white, his eyes were gray, trained to express nothing, but startlingly
penetrating when he chose to lift rather heavy lids with a peculiarly
long droop at the corners.

Emerson says somewhere that "a feeble man can see the farms that are
fenced and tilled, the houses that are built. The strong man sees the
possible houses and farms. His eye makes estates as fast as the sun
breeds clouds."

Hepworth was a strong man. He saw possible houses and farms,
externalized them and became the acquirer of vast and profitable
tracts of land--a fair map blackly dotted with mines and scrawled
with the angular lines of intersecting railroads. In this yellow
triangle, a great wheat farm. Here, in this square of living green,
irrigated and profitable ranches. He stood, this "Colossus of
Finance"--journalese--with his feet planted firmly on this solid
map-basis, and, with a golden rake, drew toward him from countless
clutching hands securities, stocks, bonds, curios, pictures (he was an
ardent collector), loot of every description, and, it was even whispered
through the church, his young and lovely bride.

But now he stepped forward to meet her with a smile that enlivened his
whole face, even his eyes. The service flowed on. With that air of sulky
geniality which represented his most urbane manner, Willoughby Hewston
gave away the bride. The responses were duly made, and Mr. and Mrs.
Cresswell Hepworth turned to walk through an aisle of smiling and
nodding friends.

At that moment the mellow October sunlight fell through the stained
windows enwrapping Perdita in a regal and impalpable vesture of scarlet
and gold; and again a murmur of admiration rippled and echoed at this
fresh revelation of her beauty. She had been pale as she walked up the
aisle, but now her color had risen and the crimson on her brown cheek
was the hue of a jacqueminot rose. Her hair, a deep chestnut at the
temples, flowed into copper, dark in the hollows, gold where it caught
the light. Her coloring was a harmony of all soft, warm, dusky shades,
and one looked to the eyes to focus these tints in light or darkly rich
topaz; but Perdita's eyes were gray, handed down perhaps from those
Irish kings to whom her father had laughingly traced his descent.

"Lucky girl!" murmured Alice Wilstead an hour later to the group of
Hepworth's intimate friends who sat together at one table during the
breakfast that followed the wedding. "Just think of it. He has no family
encumbrances. Never an 'in-law' will she have to cope with."

It never struck her that Hepworth's little circle of close friends had
gradually assumed about all of the intrusive and proprietary
prerogatives of the nearest and most affectionate relatives.

Alice Wilstead was a widow, dark, slender, piquant, versed in the
secrets of grace and the art of wearing her jewels so that they
accentuated her sparkling eyes and her one precious dimple without
eclipsing them. Warmly sympathetic and impulsive, she had been overcome
by the vision of Perdita's isolation as the girl walked up the aisle on
the grudging arm of Willoughby Hewston; and had pressed her
handkerchief lightly to her eyes, a moment of emotion viewed with
callous interest by a misinterpreting world which regarded it as a last
tear shed for a lost opportunity, a shattered hope.

"Well," said Hewston, finishing his sweetbreads and preparing to begin
on the next course, "it went off very well. I was all right, wasn't I?"

"You were perfect, dear," his wife hastened to assure him, "and it was a
beautiful wedding."

Mrs. Hewston was gray and pink and plump like her husband; and this
morning her grayness and pinkness and plumpness were underlined, thrown
into high relief by a violet gauze gown, heavily spangled in silver.
Isabel Hewston resembled nothing so much as a comfortable, placid,
fireside cat, purry and complacent. If she possessed claws, which is
doubtful, they were always well concealed.

"Yes, a beautiful wedding and a beautiful bride," she murmured, with a
little sighing inflection habitual to her, "so young, so--"

"Humph!" interrupted her husband, with as much of a snort as a mouthful
of game would permit, "I tell you it's a pretty tough thing for all of
us to see old Hepworth looking so happy." He thrust out his lower lip
and wrinkled up his eyes until he bore a grotesque likeness to a baby
about to cry. "Hepworth's my best friend, and to see that look of almost
boyish joy on his face was pretty hard. There are some things you can do
and some you can't; now one of these things that no man can afford to do
is to marry outside his own class. I could have told Cress so."

The other members of this intimate little coterie of friends, five in
all, looked at one another and burst into involuntary laughter.

Wallace Martin, an old young man, a magazine writer, who would fain be a
playwright, gave the single bark of mirth which served him for an
explosion of laughter. It sounded particularly derisive now.

"I would give my little all to have the new Mrs. Hepworth hear you say
that," he chuckled. "Dear old Hewston, she would not in a thousand years
consider any of us in her class. She belonged, let me inform you, to one
of the oldest of southern families. Her mother was a cotton princess of
the loveliest and haughtiest variety. One of the famous belles of her
day. Her father, too, was of the old South."

"Why, what are you talking about?" growled Hewston irascibly. "She
hadn't a dime--was a beautiful cloak model or something of that kind."

"She painted dinky things for a living, if you mean that," said Martin
carelessly, "lamp-shades and menu cards and such."

"If she only had some friends, even one relative," deplored Mrs.
Hewston, "it would look so much--er--nicer, you know. Relatives do add a
background." She shook her head regretfully.

"We'll have to be her relatives," said Maud Carmine, a niece of Mrs.
Hewston and a plain rather faded young woman of pale and indefinite
tints and many angles. Her claim to distinction rested on the fact that
she was a drawing-room musician of--strange anomaly--real musical
feeling. It was her misfortune always to be explained by those who found
her tact, good nature and practical common sense useful, and who drew
heavily on them, as, "not attractive looking, you know; but pure gold,
and one of the most dependable persons," and this damning tribute of
friendship served as an admirable check to further curiosity concerning
her. "Yes, we must be her background." Her glance lingered for a moment
on Wallace Martin, but he returned it briefly and indifferently.

"A young woman who has just married millions needs no family group,"
remarked Alice Wilstead lightly. "The most effective background is her
husband."

"Gad!" Mr. Hewston put down his knife and fork to glare at her. "The
idea of looking at Hepworth as a background. He who has always been in
the front of everything. A background! And for a snub-nosed chit of a
girl!"

"Oh, Willoughby, dear, not snub-nosed," expostulated his wife mildly.

"Snub-nosed, I said," insisted Willoughby. "Didn't I walk up the aisle
with her?"

"Hush, dear, hush," murmured his wife. "Here she comes now."

The bride was leaving. Passing through the handsome, stiff apartments
like a white cloud, to make ready for the journey before her, she
stopped a moment for a word or two with Maud Carmine as she paused at
that table.

Hewston rose reluctantly to his feet. "I once heard of a wedding," he
said confidentially and hopefully to Wallace Martin, "where the bride
went up to change her gown, and never showed up again."

"Where did she go?" asked Wallace with interest.

"Dunno," returned Willoughby. "Old lover. Fourth dimension.
Unexplainable, but fact, I assure you."




CHAPTER II

A FAR WORLD OF DREAMING


The bride had passed through the admiring groups with a smile here, a
word there and was already half up the stairway, above the voices, the
heavy flower scents, the sentimental melodies which stole from the
musicians' bower. On, a white, mystic figure, her veil floating behind
her; on, without undue haste, but most eagerly, as if she climbed some
mount which led from the world to a desired solitude.

On the first landing she paused, leaning for a moment, Juliet-like as
from a balcony, and looked down on the moving mosaic of color beneath,
the gay, light tones of the women's gowns thrown into relief by the dark
coats of the men. The gazers paid her the tribute of involuntary "Ohs,"
and barely restrained themselves from applause as if at the appearance
of their favorite actress. As usual Perdita had made a picture of
herself, an involuntary and unpremeditated picture; but in effect beyond
the calculations of the most vigilant stage manager.

She stood with one arm lightly upraised holding her bouquet of white
jasmine above her laughing face. Behind her, a stained glass window,
before her the marble balustrade. Then the bouquet, its white ribbons
waving and circling, whirled through the air, over the sea of upturned
faces and white clutching hands and straight into Alice Wilstead's arms.

With the laughter and clamor of voices ringing in her ears, Perdita,
hidden from sight now by a turn of the staircase, followed, with
unconcealed haste, the crimson velvet pathway which led to solitude.

At the top of the stairs she hesitated briefly, glancing right and left.
She had been in the house but twice before, both times under the
chaperonage of Mrs. Hewston, and she was not sure of the exact
geographical position of her own suite of apartments.

At this moment her maid, engaged from that morning, stepped forward and
threw open a door. Perdita smiled approval. It would have been
difficult to withhold it. Olga, a paragon of maids, if references and
experience count, showed no signs of the wear and tear of previous
mistresses. She was delightful in appearance, rosy-cheeked, amiable,
immaculate, with that air of trained capability which invites
confidence.

Perdita paused before entering. "Are all my traveling things out?" she
asked.

"Yes, madame."

"Very well, I shall not need you for a few moments. Remain here and when
I want you I will ring."

"Yes, madame."

Perdita drew a breath of relief as the door was closed gently behind
her. At last she was alone, away from eyes, eyes that were everywhere.
She had felt all morning as if she were encompassed by them, appraising
eyes, envious eyes, unfamiliar, inquisitive eyes.

She looked slowly about her. And these were her own apartments, these
beautiful, cold, unlived-in rooms, as empty of life or individuality as
a shell.

Yesterday she had walked through them with Isabel Hewston, pleased,
admiring, but a little overawed. She had not realized before what a
wizard's wand Cresswell wielded. He had but waved it and great
architects and decorators, their disciplined and cultivated imaginations
stimulated by the prospect of unlimited expenditure had devised for her,
penniless Perdita Carey, all this beauty and luxury. She had only
stipulated timidly that she might be environed in her favorite rose
color, a mere suggestion for those who had the matter in charge. It was
enough. Her bed chamber bloomed with the pale but vivid flush of pink
roses, La France, accentuated with cool, suave, silver notes, like the
delicate, contrasted phrasing of a musical theme. The result of color
and arrangement was youthful, joyous, spacious. Beyond a softly falling
curtain, she caught a glimpse of her sitting-room. American beauty, a
radiant spot with delicious water colors on the walls, bowls of roses,
the sunshine falling through the windows, and shelves of books, each
volume bound in creamy vellum.

In one of the long mirrors which reflected her graceful figure from
every angle she saw through an opposite door her dressing-room and
bath, with its elaborate appointments, more inviting and luxurious than
any of which the proudest Roman beauty could have dreamed. She looked
about her with a faint, strange smile. What a contrast were these cold
and splendid rooms, not yet animated by her personality, to that little
apartment with its two or three tiny chambers, high up under the roof,
where she had lived and worked!

Then she turned back to her reflection in the mirror. It was extremely
becoming to her, all this background of rose and silver. Perdita
realized that as she unfastened the white flowers from her hair and let
her long veil fall like a cloud about her. With a deft movement she
caught it and tossed it on a chair for Olga to fold later. She slipped
out of her wedding-gown next and laid it more carelessly still upon a
couch. Then she leaned forward, her elbow on the dressing-table, her
chin on her hand, and regarded herself steadily, that faint, strange
smile still on her lips.

Well, she had fulfilled her destiny, justified Eugene Gresham's
prophecy. She heard his words to her, spoken the last time she had seen
him, three months before, as plainly as if his voice still rang in her
ears.

"Perdita, your destiny is written on your face. It includes marrying a
millionaire and having your portrait painted by me."

Fateful words! She had just married the millionaire, but even here, upon
the threshold of this new life, she was constrained to halt a moment and
cast one backward glance, "just for the old love's sake."

It was the night before Eugene Gresham sailed for Europe to paint the
portraits of "Princessin, Contessin and high Altessin." Again she
awaited him. Again she heard his step on the stair without, a quick,
light step with an odd halt in it.

He was coming, and her heart beat. How it beat as she stood there
breathless beside the window!

"Perdita!" Eugene's voice. He was across the room in a flash, both her
hands in his. "Here, let me see you in the light." He drew her toward a
lamp. "Two years, two years since we have met, and me wasting time
painting in the desert places when I might have been with you. Time is
not in the Far East. Ah, my cousin!" (the relationship was remote) he
sighed. "Why, as I live," with a quick change of tone, "you've got
another dimple, and that makes you a new and lovelier Perdita."

She flushed adorably. "How nice and southern," she cried with an attempt
at lightness, "and how exactly like you, just like the old 'Gene."

"The old 'Gene," his eyes still holding hers, "has never changed."

"How--how--are the pictures going?" withdrawing her hands from his.

"Beautifully!" he said carelessly. "The glassy eyes of the millionaires
are all turning toward me, and I have more commissions to make beautiful
on canvas their pug-nosed, fat-faced wives than I care to accept. Those
ladies hail me as a great psychological artist. Their mirrors are so
cruel to them that when my brushes flatter them they say that I paint
their souls; strip away the husk of the flesh and reveal enduring
loveliness."

He struck a match to light a cigarette and then hastily shielded it with
his cupped hand from the breeze which blew through the open window. The
light flared into his down-bent face, bringing out its dissonances
almost grotesquely in that small, momentary flash. Pick Gresham to
pieces and he was incontrovertibly convicted of sheer ugliness, but the
fact bothered him not at all. He knew that few ever arrived at the cool,
dispassionate frame of mind regarding him where they were capable of
that exhaustive analysis known as picking to pieces. He was slender and
rather small of stature, not more than medium height. One shoulder was
noticeably higher than the other and he walked with a slight limp, the
result of an injury received in boyhood. Coarse, blue-black hair with a
sort of crinkle in it stood out from his head like a cloud. His skin was
swarthy, his features irregular, even his eyes, dark eyes, were only
occasionally brilliant. But he might have been appreciably uglier,
almost as hideous as the Yellow Dwarf or Beauty's Beast,--it would have
mattered no more than his present lack of beauty, and well he knew it.
His was the magic gift of glamour, and all the dissonances and
inharmonies of appearance as well as of character seemed but the
italics emphasizing his charm. His mind was supple and flexible, his
wits nimble, even subtle. He was as vivid, as veering, as fascinating as
flame.

His match, the third he had struck, blew out before it had lighted his
cigarette, and he threw it away with a petulant gesture. He did not
answer her, as he was again attempting to light his cigarette, this time
with success. Then he began to saunter about the room.

In spite of her penury Perdita had yet managed to invest her little
workshop with both daintiness and charm. The walls were hung with pink
and white chintz and here and there were bits of fragile china and rare
old silver on claw-legged mahogany tables, while from dim canvases in
tarnished silver frames smiled the sweet, dark eyes of haughty southern
beauties of a generation unused to life's struggles.

"You really saved some of the best things from that hideous auction,
didn't you?" picking up a bit of china to scrutinize it more carefully.
"I was horrified when I heard of it across the world, several months
after it was all over. If I'd only been there to buy the whole lot in.
Plucky little girl you were, Perdita, to come on here and manage to keep
the gaunt, gray wolf at bay."

"What else was there for me to do?" she asked without turning her head.
"Aunt died, the place had to go. As for the wolf, if you look sharp,
Eugene, you may see his paws thrusting under this door."

In the center of the room was a large table covered with paint brushes,
colors, a litter of candle shades, cotillion favors and cards in various
stages of completion. Eugene carefully cleared a space on that edge of
the table nearest Perdita's chair, and perched upon it, looking down at
her with a smile.

"My stars, Dita!" he cried with the truest conviction, "you are a
beauty! The moment I return, I mean to paint you again. And this time
I'll set the world afire. Do you remember how many portraits I have made
of you? Why, just to see you brings back my boyhood,--the hopes, the
struggles, the effort, the haunted days, the feverish nights. I used to
think, 'If I can just learn how to get this effect, I'll know the whole
secret.' I've got past that now. There's always a new and more
difficult riddle every day. But Dita, Dita, the dreams of my youth you
recall!"

The smile died from her face. Her eyes grew wistful. "The dreams of our
youth," she repeated. "I'm young yet; but they haunt me. They were
beautiful dreams down there on that gray, old river. Can't you shut your
eyes, Eugene, and see the terraces sloping down to the water, the
lovely, neglected garden with its tangle of roses and jasmine?"

"Do I remember?" His eyes looked deep into hers. "I swear I never smell
jasmine without thinking of the old place and you. Perdita, do you ever
think what life might have been for us if it hadn't been for our
accursed poverty? If we'd only had just a little between us. It's a
question of courage. If we'd only had the courage to face things hand in
hand we'd have got along somehow, I dare say. But we didn't have that
quality, did we? We didn't believe enough in our dreams. That's the
worst of life. She won't let you."

"Oh, the dreams!" she scoffed. Her color remained high, her eyes
glittered, but with irritation, not tears. She suffered from an old
laceration of the heart, the more wounding in that, for pride's sake,
she must ever deny it expression. Eugene always took the attitude as if
they together had renounced a mutual love, and often implied, without
rancor, but with a forgiving, almost understanding tenderness, that the
responsibility of their marred lives lay on her shoulders.

Perdita was of the twentieth century, but she was also a southern woman
of many traditions, and she could not say the words which rose to her
defensive lips: "Eugene, you have never asked me to face life hand in
hand with you." He would with a glance, she could see it, feel it,
convict her of blunted intuitions, of an inability to discern exquisite
shades of emotion; and then he would express his love for her in
glowing, passionate phrases, confusingly evasive, elusive beyond
definition, committing himself to nothing.

And if this shifting of responsibility on her, this ardent skirting of a
definite issue were premeditated or his unavoidable, temperamental way
of viewing the matter, she could not tell. Conjecture was idle. Her
knowledge of his character, her ready mental accusations and equally
ready excuses, these comprising the sole weight of evidence, merely held
the scales steady.

Eugene began to pick up, first one, then another, of the favors on the
table, a smile, tender yet humorous, about his lips.

"By Jove, these are not so bad! They are rather stunning. You always did
have a lot of feeling for form and color, Dita, but you wouldn't work.
You weren't willing to drudge and to starve if necessary. That was
because you lacked the clear vision. It wasn't always before you, a
pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night." None might doubt
his sincerity or conviction now. It was mounting as flame. "Artistic and
appreciative you are, Dita. All this trash shows it, but you lack the
creative impulse. You were never meant to be a barefooted, tattered
follower of the vision, a lodger in a new palace of dreams each night.
You should build your house on the rock of substantial things,
bread-and-butter facts.

"Oh, do not toss up your head in that wounded-stag manner. Good Lord!
Isn't it enough that you are beautiful? And how beautiful! I'm almost
tempted to cancel my passage and, instead of sailing to-morrow morning,
stop here and paint you again. Really, I am. But what would it profit
me? I'd just be sowing the seed for a new harvest of heartaches.
Perdita, your destiny is written on your face." It was as if he willed
to speak lightly. "It includes marrying a millionaire, and having your
portrait painted by me. You'll never have an international reputation as
a beauty until you do both." But in spite of his smile and his flippant
words there was bitterness in his eyes.

She did not see that, but the lightness of his words and tone pricked
her to an immediate decision, a decision which she had, unconsciously,
postponed until she had seen him. Her face paled, her lips folded in a
tight line.

"I am going to marry the millionaire," she said firmly enough, although
there was a slight tremor in her voice. "It depends on you whether or
not there is a portrait of Mrs. Cresswell Hepworth by Gresham." There
was triumph in her eyes and voice as thus she lifted her pride from the
dust.

"Cresswell Hepworth!" His astonishment was unbounded. "Perdita! I throw
my hat at your feet. Cresswell Hepworth! The pick of the bunch.
Wonderful! But," looking at her curiously, "how on earth did you meet
him?"

"He heard of my amulet through a man I met at old Mrs. Huff's, Mr.
Martin. He has a wonderful collection of amulets, and he wanted to buy
it of me."

"But you didn't sell it?" he said quickly. "No, of course not. H'm-m.
That old amulet. You laugh at my superstitions, Dita, but you must admit
that it's queer the way it's interwoven with the history of our family."

He began to roll cigarettes and lay them with neat and exquisite
regularity on the table beside him. His eyebrows were raised, his mouth
twisted in a sort of rueful yet whimsical grimace. When he had finished
rolling the sixth cigarette, he laid it in line with the others, an
exact line, his eye was so true. Then at last he looked at her, and his
cynical, earnest, mocking, enthusiastic face softened. His eyes
enveloped her with tenderness. There was a heart-break in his smile.

"Ah, star-eyed Perdita, how shall I give you up? The only woman!" He
mused a moment, and then repeated: "The only woman! If we had but had
the courage to take the bitter with the sweet, Perdita."

Unwitting goad! It struck too deep for her to conceal the wound.

"You do not say 'can,' I observe, Eugene," she said laughingly, but
there was an edge to her voice like that on finely tempered steel.

"No," he returned, his fingers busy with a rearrangement of the
cigarettes; "you see it involves you and me. Not John Jones and Jane
Smith, but you and me. Do you know what that means? Well, it means that
it involves the inheritance and training of a good many generations. Do
you think I do not know how you loathe all this?" He flicked with his
fingers the dainty trifles on the table. "I know well the craving of
your nature for splendor and beauty, how necessary they are to you, and
how dinkiness and makeshifts irritate and depress you, take the heart
out of you. That is one you, one Perdita. There is another. I saw her
when I came in to-night. God, I wish I hadn't!" His voice dropped on
this exclamation and she did not hear it. "She is young. Her beautiful,
dark eyes ask love and give it. Her heart dreams of it. It is in every
tone of her voice. These two are at war, the natural woman and the woman
with her inherited love of ease and luxury and cultivated, artificial
desires. Which is the stronger? Why, to-night"--he picked up one of the
cigarettes and prepared to light it; his hands trembled, his face was
white--"the woman who is ready to love. She would listen to
me--to-night. I would hold her. Oh, what's the use?" He twisted his
shoulders impatiently. Then he bent forward and tapped the table lightly
but emphatically, as if to add weight to his words. "You'd listen to me
to-night, I know that; but as sure as to-morrow's dawn I'd get a little
note from you saying that the morn had brought wisdom. But, oh, I am
glad I'm sailing to-morrow."

"So am I," she flashed out. "You think--you take too much for granted,
Eugene."

"I dare say." His voice sounded flat. "No one ever appreciates
renunciation. Well, it's out into the night in more senses than one." He
rose and looked at her as she sat with downcast eyes, and half stretched
out his arms toward her. Then as she too rose, he clasped his fingers
about the back of her head and drew her face toward him, although she
strove to avert it from him. "Good-by, sweetheart." Even she must
believe in the ardor and sincerity of his tones. "Good-by, Perdita of
the South." He kissed her lightly on one cheek and then the other.
"Good-by, my jasmine flower."

He hesitated a moment in leaving the room, as if to turn and clasp her
to him and bear her away; then he shut the door gently behind him and
she heard his halting, hurried step upon the stair. She sat listening
until its last echoes had died away, and then, casting her outstretched
arms on the table, sending the favors and menus and candle-shades in a
shower to the floor, she burst into a storm of tears.

There was a low, discreet, respectful knock, Olga's knock on the door
leading into Mrs. Cresswell Hepworth's splendid apartments. Perdita
started violently and came back to the present from her far world of
dreaming. She had not even begun to dress, but still was sitting, chin
on hand, gazing with apparent intentness at her image in the mirror.

"It is almost time for Madame to start," Olga smiled from the doorway,
"so I ventured to remind."

"Yes," Perdita spoke hurriedly, rising at the same time. "Get me into my
gown quickly, please, and tie my shoes."

Olga was deft and practised, and Perdita's dressing was the work of a
few minutes.

"My veil now," said the new Mrs. Hepworth, "and--oh, I almost forgot."
She turned to lift from her dressing-table an exceedingly quaint and
striking ornament, depending from a long, thin chain. It was a square of
crystal about an inch and a half in diameter, set curiously in strands
of silver and gold, twisted and beaten together, and, as must be
apparent to even the casual observer, was of ancient and unique
workmanship. This was Perdita's amulet, the old charm, which Eugene with
his superstitious fancies had always longed to possess, and which had
excited also the desire of the collector in Hepworth; but in spite of
many temptations to part with it, Dita had always retained possession of
it. It was her one link with the past, a personal link, but also a
traditional and hereditary one. She wound the chain several times about
her neck, and the crystal pendant gleamed dully against the dark blue
cloth of her gown.

"You also are ready, Olga?" she said as she passed through the door.

"Yes, Madame."

Hepworth was waiting for Perdita at the head of the stairs. He was in
his heavy motoring coat, his cap in hand.

He smiled as he saw her. "Just in time," he said. "I'm afraid we will
have to make haste, rather. Ah," as his eye caught the talisman, "you
are wearing the amulet, are you not? Blessed old thing. If it had not
been for that, I should never have met you."

"I believe you only married me to get it," she replied with an answering
smile, "you are such an insatiable collector."

"Do you believe that? Do you?" he asked. "Because if you do, you are as
stupid as you are pretty, and you have no idea what that implies."




CHAPTER III

PINK AND WHITE EXISTENCE


So Mr. and Mrs. Cresswell Hepworth whirled away in the big motor and for
the next few months wandered about the globe. Perdita, who had seen
nothing but an old southern plantation and New York, the latter from the
curb, as it were, must see everything; so in pursuit of this aim, the
Hepworths were constantly stepping from huge, magnificent boats to huge,
magnificent motors, thence to huge, magnificent hotels. And cities, the
open country, villages, mountain peaks, strange peoples, were as debris
strewing the pathway of Perdita's avid flight through new experiences.
It was tremendously stimulating, even heady, she found, to hold the
world between one's thumb and finger, and turn it this way and that to
catch the light. Headier still to discover that to wish is to realize,
but proportionately a shock to find that the life of infinite variety
may only be lived within circumscribed boundaries. What is more
disillusionizing than to learn that money has its limitations? It can
merely buy the very best of things, the superlatives of the commonplace,
but these, in the last analysis, remain food, lodgings, clothes,
conveyances, ornaments, no more. Money can not buy stars or dreams, or
love or happiness.

Perdita's soaring youth resented it. But she was adaptable, enormously
interested and the ground within the boundaries was new, affording daily
opportunities for fresh exploration. And she, quick to observe and
compare, had profited by her new experiences. Money became to her merely
the medium of exchange for any beautiful thing she might want. Speedily
she lost her first, fresh pleasure in making it flutter its little
golden wings and fly; but her love of art deepened and strengthened, and
at many famous shrines she offered her heart's homage. She took up the
study of designing, and worked at it systematically with an ardor and
intensity which at first amused and then puzzled her husband.

On their return from their travels Perdita occupied herself in
altering, refurnishing and redecorating one or two of Hepworth's country
places and his town house. She worked in consultation with a great firm,
and succeeded in changing the weary acquiescence of "our Mr. So and So"
to interest and an astonishment bordering on enthusiasm. She was not the
average rich woman who had gone in for being artistic, with a head full
of glaringly impossible ideas and a flow of helpful suggestions which
set the professional teeth on edge.

On the contrary, this girl, Mrs. Hepworth, really knew a few things and
was willing to learn more. She was a student. "The only woman," murmured
dazedly "our Mr. Smith-Jones," "the only woman I ever met who realizes
that decoration must conform to architecture, not defy it. You usually
have to fracture their skulls to make them understand that pompadour
prettinesses are not suitable in a Gothic chapel."

But when she had finished the houses, and designed more costumes than
she could wear, she looked about her for fresh worlds to conquer, and
discovered that she was up against the boundaries. Walls everywhere!
She could do anything she chose, travel, buy clothes, motors, an
aeroplane if she wanted it, only she did not. She next went through a
phase when she decided that the people with whom she was thrown were
intolerable, representing a frivolous and empty-headed society. Her
imagination dwelt on the class who "did things," "the dreamers," she
called them to herself, who adorned a brilliant, picturesque,
delightfully haphazard Bohemia, where, at feasts, principally of red
wine and bloomy, purple grapes, laughter pealed to the rafters, and the
conversation sparkled as if sprinkled with stardust. She strove to enter
this Olympian vagabondia, and found herself entangled in the nets of
many fowlers, sycophantic, impecunious, and, unsated of their many
banquets, physically hungry.

She began to have seasons of ennui and depression, increasing in
frequency. What was the matter with her world? Nothing, she would hasten
to assure herself, it was the best of all possible worlds, and she, a
darling of fortune--once, unforgetably, the waif of chance--was the most
contented of women. Only--what was the matter with this perversely
empty and uninteresting world?

It was not always so. It was once invested with wonderful things, and
such simple things, too. She remembered how she used to stand at the
window of her little work-room watching the day fade, marveling at the
miracle of the twilight. While the sun was high, she had seen only
commonplace, dusty streets, crowded with people, and had heard only a
crazy, creaking old piano-organ grinding away on the pavement beneath,
but in the soft indefiniteness of twilight these solid houses and
buildings would become unsubstantial, mere shadowy arabesques on the
spangled gloom of night. There were purple vistas, glittering lights and
fairy towers. She would hold her breath, almost expecting to hear a
nightingale. It was all mystery and magic, life and romance, that
eternal romance her starved youth asked. How she used to dream of the
unexpected, the dazzling unexpected!

And then Cresswell had come, and, as she thought, offered it to her. To
do Perdita justice, she had not married Hepworth merely because of his
great wealth. She was incapable of such sordid and callous calculation.
But Cophetua had met this beggar maid at her most disheartened and
despairing moment, and without difficulty had succeeded in first winning
her interest and then enchaining her imagination.

In her two years of struggle to earn her livelihood Eugene had become
more or less a memory, and, in spite of the fascination and interest he
had always had for her, she did not blind herself to certain erratic
tendencies of his. He might appear at any moment, so she judged him,
with vows of eternal love, and straightway, if the mood seized him,
begin a new picture and forget her. And so she married Hepworth largely
that life might become a successive series of introductions to an ever
varying unexpected. Instead, although her quest was feverish, she
encountered only the commonplace. She was like a mouse which has
discovered the inadequacy of cheese to quench its soul-yearnings. What
remained?

The truth of the matter was that Perdita's world, which seemed so
hopelessly askew to her, had an architectural defect. It lacked that
sure antidote to ennui--a Bluebeard's closet.

Now Perdita was young and healthy. She had great curiosity, and a
certain insatiable mental quality which would have successfully riveted
her interest to life, but for one fact, her heart was as ardent and
insatiable as her intelligence--and her husband bored her. There is no
record of Bluebeard boring any of his wives.

She became more and more conscious of a continual little plaint running
always through her consciousness, like the sad, monotonous murmur of an
ever-flowing stream, a little unceasing plaint against life in the
abstract and life in its personal application.

"There must be as many worlds as there are points of view," so ran the
stream, "but my life's like a wedding-cake, all white and sparkling and
overdecorated, and absolutely insipid. Candy! That's what it is ... my
rooms are all pink and white, and I'm crusted over with pink sugar."
Perdita always thought in color. "I'm tired of all this pink and white
and baby-blue existence. I'd welcome a little scarlet and black sin for
a change. Oh, it's just your corsets over again. You're put in them when
you're about fifteen and you never get out of them again. We women think
in corsets, breathe in them. We live in them mentally, and accept all
their constrictions and restrictions as a matter of course. We take in
drafts of air, and expand our lungs and say we're emancipated, but we
only expand as much as the corsets allow. We've put our world in
corsets, to confine us still more ... mine used to be mended, frequently
washed, with some of the bones broken; now I have many pairs, brocade,
satin--cloth of gold, if I want them--but they are the same thing,
corsets, corsets on our bodies and brains and lives.

"Look at Cresswell. He doesn't wear corsets. He has an interesting,
absorbing, unfettered life. He's using the muscles of his
brain--strengthening them on some resisting substance. He's in the thick
of it.... What fun! Planning, visioning things in his mind, and seeing
them take form in the external. He's a builder. He wears an
imperturbable mask. That's for defense; but behind it I sometimes see
keen, powerful, calculating gleams in his eyes, and I want to know about
them, but I can't.... I can't talk to him about any but surface things.
I can't show him what is in my heart.... The corsets are between us.
He's one of the great powers, and he's mine, a possession like the
Kohinoor, but I do not fancy that the Kohinoor constitutes the queen's
happiness.

"What are Cresswell and I to each other, anyway? Why, he's my Kohinoor,
a possession of great price which endows me with distinction, and runs
my credit up into the millions. He's as brilliant and cold and secretive
as his prototype. And I--I'm his doll, a very jewel of a doll. One of
the prettiest in the world, wonderfully dressed, exquisitely marceled,
faultlessly manicured. I can smile enchantingly, and open and shut my
mouth to ask for what I want and what I don't want, particularly the
latter, and lisp 'thank you' when he drops a diamond necklace or a ruby
tiara into my lap.

"I hate a man that puts me on a pedestal. Any woman does. He thinks I'm
sugar and salt and will melt and break. I wish he'd come to me, just
once, with some enthusiasm and hug me breathless. I'm tired of his
everlasting chivalry and deference.... When he begins to treat me with
reverence and guards my youth and all that, I'd like to swear at him
like the disreputable parrot of a drunken sailor.... Wouldn't I surprise
him? I wonder what he would do if I'd cut loose? Oh, dear, I wish he'd
come home drunk some night and smash up some of this junk and--what is
that phrase of Wallace Martin's--swipe me one; and then be penitent and
remorseful and ashamed and human--instead of always being like a darned
old statue of the American statesman with one hand thrust in the bosom
of his frock-coat.

"I wonder--I wonder--what kind of a husband Eugene would have made. Not
one of the amiable, benign, deferential ones, anyway. What were those
lines 'Gene used to say?

    "'Each life's unfulfilled, you see,
        And both hang patchy and scrappy.
      We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
        Starved, feasted, despaired, been happy!'

"That's it--that's it--that's life. To sigh deep--to laugh free; to
make your bed in hell, and then soar on the wings of the morning.... I'm
young, beautiful. I have everything but experience. I mean to have
it.... No wonder Eve took the apple the serpent offered, if she was as
bored in the Garden of Eden as I am. I'd have bitten more than one,
though. What is the use of living if you don't live?"

And while Perdita raged in inward rebellion, the world, viewing things
from the outside, took an entirely different view of her matter.

Popular opinion inclined to the belief that the good fairies had too
heavily dowered this young woman at her cradle, and consequently a
readjustment was inevitable, probably by the gracious means of ennobling
tribulation. The dramatic event was rather eagerly anticipated. Not that
envy had any part in it or that any of Perdita's friends or
acquaintances wished to see a fellow being punished for the liberality
of Providence. On the contrary. It was merely a sane desire to mark the
balances of the universe in faultless equilibrium and to have the
comforting assurance that the mills of the gods still ground with the
proverbial exactness.

Youth, health, wealth, beauty, happiness, all unlimited! An exasperating
spectacle! How could all be right with the world as long as Hebe
continued to pour most of the nectar into one glass, while so many
thirsty, deserving souls were denied even a sip?

And Perdita went her way and smiled alike on those who caviled and those
who applauded. She had accepted her husband's friends as her own with a
sort of careless, indifferent good nature and the relations existing
between herself and the closely cemented little group were sufficiently
harmonious under the circumstances. Maud Carmine and she had struck
"leagues of friendship" at once, and Maud's prediction that Hepworth's
friends would have to serve as Perdita's relatives would seem to have
been verified.

And Maud, through constant association, appeared to have reflected some
of Dita's beauty, for there was evidenced the most remarkable change in
the plain Miss Carmine, her name no longer prefaced by that deplorable
adjective, however. Alice Wilstead explained it by frankly giving the
credit to Perdita. It was she, Alice asserted, who had had the faith and
the courage to take Maud vigorously in hand and make of her a new
creature as far as the outward presentment was concerned. The results
had been so mutually satisfactory as to rivet the friendship between the
two; for Dita had proved by her works her belief that there was not the
faintest necessity for any such creature as an unattractive woman; and
Maud, having lost all faith in the willingness of nature to better her
original handiwork, had turned hopefully to art, with the result that
she was now one of the most talked-of women in town. By men, because she
had recently grown attractive enough for them to discover that she was
also extremely agreeable and sympathetic. By women, because they ached
to discover her secret. They remembered as easily as the men forgot that
for twenty-eight years of her life Maud had been as a weed by the wall,
a lank and sallow weed, oppressed by the sparseness of her leaves and
the entire absence of either flowers or fruit, and suddenly she had
acquired an art, an air, the trick of dress so subtle that it imparted
distinction even to her worst points.

But when Perdita proceeded to verify, a little tardily, it is true, the
hope of Mrs. Willoughby Hewston, sighingly expressed at the wedding
breakfast, and furnished herself with a relative, the coterie gasped. It
was not perhaps just the selection Mrs. Hewston would have made for her,
but, nevertheless, Perdita had produced a relative, although, it must be
confessed, of a rather dubious and indefinite nearness.

If Mrs. Hewston had been questioned on the subject she might have
confessed that the relative she had in mind, as presenting an admirable
background for a young and lovely girl, was either a silver-haired
mother with a white lace cap, and a hair brooch fastening the snowy lawn
collar of her black gown; or, in lieu of her, a maiden aunt. Indeed, had
Mrs. Hewston been given free choice, she would have inclined toward the
latter. Unquestionably, a maiden aunt is the best possible promoter of
that nice sense of the proprieties, those right feelings and carefully
graduated moral sentiments which are indispensable to a homeless,
penniless young woman scrambling for a living. But Perdita, in
presenting her relative, had almost flippantly disregarded these
considerations involving a sense of universal fitness. It was a far cry,
really an almost revolutionary distance, one felt, from the
silver-haired mother or rather acid maiden aunt to Eugene Gresham.
Eugene Gresham! Fancy!

For Eugene had returned to his native land with the recognition of Paris
and London, even their acclaim--golden bay leaves and purple cloaks.
Therefore was he thrice welcomed of New York. Therefore, the next
presumption followed as naturally as the first. It was out of the
question that Mrs. Hepworth, whose beauty was a matter of international
comment, should lack a Gresham portrait, a distinction now unattainable
save to those upon the mountain peaks of noble birth, enormous wealth,
great achievement, remarkable beauty or superlative notoriety.

As Alice Wilstead pointed out, no one could cavil at any relative Mrs.
Hepworth chose to set up, however regretable might be Perdita Carey's
claim of kinship with this particular person, and she had certainly, as
far as one knew, been discreet enough not to flaunt him during her
scrambles. Now, as Mrs. Hepworth's cousin (how many times removed,
dear?) he was one more jewel in her crown.

Mrs. Hewston sighingly acquiesced. "Yes, really. As Mrs. Hepworth's
relative, yes. But hardly as the guide, philosopher and friend of youth,
feminine youth, anyway." Only the happily married might safely claim
him, for Gresham, with his fame as a painter of beautiful women and his
almost equal reputation as a fascinating person, would not have been
commended by any maiden aunt for either right feelings, nice moral
sentiments or a discriminating taste for the proprieties.

As for Cresswell Hepworth, he looked after his vast and varied
interests, kept up his collections, especially his collection of
amulets, in which he was greatly interested, and occupied his leisure in
seeing that his wife was sufficiently entertained and amused to gratify
the requirements even of her eager youth.

Did she hint a longing for the Roc's egg? It was cabled for within the
hour. Did she breathe a desire for the moon? Orders were given that an
aeronautic expedition capable of securing it be manned at once.

And yet in spite of all this obvious contentment and happiness, Mr.
Willoughby Hewston in the role of raven had never ceased to flap his
wings and croak. He was particularly in this favorite vein of his one
afternoon when he shuffled into his wife's sitting-room, where she and
Alice Wilstead sat over their tea-cups. They heard him sighing heavily
as he came.

"No, I don't want any tea," he said, letting himself down slowly into an
easy chair, "you know I never touch it.

"Poor old Cress!" He shook his head gloomily at a spot in the carpet.
"Well, it's just as I predicted. That wife of his is the talk of the
town!"

"Oh, my dear!" exclaimed his wife. She, loyal soul, never failed him as
audience. A quick glance passed between Mrs. Wilstead and herself, as if
he had mentioned the subject uppermost in their minds, and, no doubt, in
their conversation.

"Oh, come now, Willoughby," said Alice, instinctively choosing the best
method of drawing him out, "you know it's nothing like so bad as that."

Hewston scowled heavily and laid one hand gingerly upon his rheumatic
knee, which gave him an especially sharp twinge at the moment. "It's
probably worse," he replied with even more than his customary acerbity,
"worse than we, any of us, know. Didn't I see them walking up Fifth
Avenue together this afternoon, and didn't a fellow speak of it to me?
And Cress out of town!"

"Well, let me tell something, dear," said his wife soothingly. "Cress
will very soon be in town again, for here are invitations to a dinner
the Hepworths are having next week. Quite an informal affair. Perdita
writes me, 'Just the little group of Cresswell's best friends, which I
hope I may also claim as mine,'" reading from the note she had picked up
from the table. "Very sweet of her."

"A dinner, eh," growled Hewston, "with all of us, and I suppose that
painter fellow. Well, I only hope it will not fall to me to open poor
Cresswell's eyes."

"Oh, Willoughby!"

"I'll not shirk my duty if it does. You can understand that. What
evening is this dinner? Next Thursday! Humph! Who is that?" as the
curtain before the door was pushed aside and some one entered.

"I!" said Wallace Martin, "only poor little me. They told me to come up.
What's happening next Thursday?"

"The Hepworths' dinner. There is probably an invitation awaiting you at
home."

"No, there is not," he said. "It's in my pocket now. I picked it up as I
was leaving. From what Maud Carmine has just told me, I imagine it's a
touching family group composed of ourselves and Eugene Gresham."

"Dear me," deplored Mrs. Hewston, "I do wish she would consider
Willoughby more. She must know that he can not endure the sight of Mr.
Gresham."

"It is not her fault," said Martin quickly, "as far as I can make out
from what Maud told me. Cress became imbued with the idea that he
wanted his dear old friends clustering about the board, and made out
the list himself."

"How like a man!" remarked Alice Wilstead gloomily. "But why, just now?"

"Oh, he's been adding to that pet collection of amulets of his, and he
wanted to show us his new acquisitions. That's the root of it, I fancy.
I don't imagine the lovely Perdita pined for us. She has been a creature
of moods lately. Very hotty-like with me."

"She was actually almost impertinent to Willoughby the other day." Mrs.
Hewston spoke with a hushed mournfulness. "I'm afraid all this luxury
and adulation has turned her head, and Willoughby spoke so gently to
her, too, did you not, dear?"

"Ugh! Humph!" quoth Willoughby.




CHAPTER IV

OUR LOVING FRIENDS


AS it chanced the Hepworths were not particularly fortunate in their
choice of an evening for the dinner so gloomily anticipated by their
guests. The weather was unpropitious. All day rain had threatened, and
the air had been almost sultry, a parting word flung over her shoulder
to autumn by a mischievous July who should long ago have vanished. As
the evening wore on clouds banked more densely upon the horizon,
occasionally muttering thunder, and this electric hint of storm in the
air had in some way communicated itself to the mental atmosphere. A
sense of foreboding, a consciousness of discord, seemed to swell
ominously now and again beneath the smooth and colorful surface of the
dinner. Even the dullest of the guests felt that, and to the intuitive,
the stately progress of the meal was nerve-racking.

When the hostess rose, every individual sigh of relief involuntarily
exhaled became a chorus, shocking in volume.

They winced nervously, but in spite of it, each guest stood by his guns.
They had, apparently with one mind, and certainly with one voice,
decided against bridge. The ordeal of dinner bravely borne, licensed
them, they felt, even bestowed the accolade of privilege on them, to
escape the prevalent atmosphere of unrest as quickly as possible.

In the brief time they had allotted themselves to remain, barely
skirting the limits of conventional decency, Alice Wilstead, Isabel and
Willoughby Hewston and Wallace Martin had elected to take their coffee
and cigarettes on a small balcony opening from the drawing-room by long
French windows and giving upon a garden, quite half of a city block,
with thick, close-cropped lawn, and black masses of dense shrubbery
permeating the damp and sultry air with the mingled fragrance of earth
and leaves and some late-blooming flowers. Maud Carmine, good-natured as
usual, had seated herself at the piano, across the length of the room
from the balcony, to play a ballad of Chaminade's at her host's
request.

Hepworth, who alone appeared to be oblivious of the sinister atmospheric
influences, leaned his elbows on the piano and listened, occasionally
unhesitatingly breaking the flow of the music with conversation.

With their friend and host thus comfortably within sight, yet out of
earshot, the group on the balcony felt at liberty to speak with freedom;
no danger of sudden appearances, consequent jumps and hot wonder at what
might have been overheard.

"Gad!" said Mr. Hewston, more gray and pink, puffy and heavily financial
than ever, "when will people learn to eat and drink without flowers on
the table?"

"No flowers!" repeated Alice Wilstead. "It would look dull, would it
not?" From her tone it was evident that she had paid little heed to his
words.

"What difference does that make?" he argued irritably. "You don't go to
dinner to look at the table decorations. But if they must have 'em, why
can't they have the artificial kind or those paper things. Anything but
the beastly, smelly, live ones."

"Don't you really care for them?" she asked, laughing. "I thought every
one loved flowers. To tell the truth, they were about all that made that
unending dinner bearable to me. They were so exquisitely arranged."

"Oh, that," in grudging admission, "goes without saying in this house,
but," fretfully, "they were all the loud smelling kind."

"She always arranges them herself," said Mrs. Wilstead, "she has
wonderful taste, wonderful. Her house, her clothes, even down to the
smallest detail of the table. Marvelous!"

"Humph! she doesn't show the same taste in men," grunted Hewston. "No
brains at all."

Mrs. Wilstead leaned forward to tap his arm with her fan.

"Do not make any mistake on that score," her voice was emphatic, "she
has plenty of brains."

"Humph!" more scornfully than before. "Then I wish they'd keep her from
making the fool of herself that she is doing now."

"Hs-s-sh," Alice looked as if she would like to thrust a handkerchief
into his mouth. "Ah!" glancing up with relief as Isabel and Wallace
Martin turned from their contemplation of the garden over the balcony
railing. "Sit down here," she motioned to two chairs beside her.

"Dear me, Alice," said Martin, "isn't your face tired with the effort of
keeping the corners of your mouth turned up and the sparkle in your
eyes? The only person who seems calm and serene this evening is dear old
Hepworth. What do you think it is on his part, the quintessence of pose
or simple, uncomprehending, fatuous ignorance?"

"My God!" growled Hewston explosively. His wife started nervously.

"Oh Willoughby dear, not so loud! Wallace," in what was as near a tone
of reproof as she could achieve, "I do wish you wouldn't say those
reckless things before Willoughby. You know how emotional he is."

Alice also shook her head impatiently. "Don't you think we are a lot of
old gossips magnifying matters enormously? You may expect so beautiful a
young woman as Dita Hepworth to be more or less talked about; but there
is probably a perfect understanding between herself and Cress. Lord
help her if there isn't," she added almost under her breath, "I've known
him many a year."

"'When an old bachelor marries a young wife, what is he to expect?'"
quoted Martin impressively. As a would-be playwright he had the
dramatists at his finger-tips.

"Wallace, you are too bad," expostulated Mrs. Wilstead. "No wonder you
quote from _The School for Scandal_. Here we are a lot of old wreckers
doing our best to shatter a reputation. Why Dita Hepworth and Eugene
Gresham have known each other ever since they were children. Naturally,
she shows her pleasure in his society."

"Oh pish!" scoffed Wallace Martin, "those unconcealed glances she
bestowed on him at dinner spoke not of sisterly affection, and how we
all squirmed under them and wondered miserably if Hepworth was seeing
them too."

"He always did see everything without appearing to," murmured Mrs.
Wilstead gloomily.

"Now merely as a sporting chance, which would you bet on," said Martin,
drawing his chair a bit nearer, "the rich, middle-aged husband, or the
fascinating artist, the painter of beautiful women, in the zenith of his
fame? It is the same old plot you know, and the oft-told tale may have
just two endings. First, she goes off with the artist, lives a squalid
and miserable life abroad, falls ill, and dies, holding the hand and
imploring the forgiveness of her husband, who conveniently and
miraculously appears. In the second ending, she makes all preparations
to flee and then something occurs which causes her to see the
sculpturesque nobility of her husband's character and the curtain
descends to slow sweet music while they stand heart to heart in the
calcium light of a grand reconciliation scene."

"Oh, Wallace, do forget for once that you are trying to be a playwright.
Forget the shop." Mrs. Wilstead was irritable. "I do wish she would join
us," looking about her nervously, "I want to go home. Is she utterly
careless?"

"Only absorbed," returned Martin calmly. "Didn't you hear her ask him
before they left the room, to come and look at the picture gallery where
he is to paint her portrait? She wanted him to judge of the lighting--a
night like this. I thought I saw the flutter of her white gown in the
garden yonder a bit ago."

"Oh do, for goodness sake, change the subject," said Alice Wilstead
hurriedly. "I am sure Cresswell must think it queer the way we are all
sitting out here with our heads together, in the teeth of that
approaching storm."

"Not at all," Martin reassured her. "Don't you see that Maud is doing
her duty heroically? Maud isn't the wife's confidante and dearest friend
for nothing."

"Isn't it perfectly wonderful about Maud?" commented Mrs. Hewston. "You
all know what a plain, angular creature she was, nothing really to
recommend her but her music and she always spoiled that by playing with
her shoulder blades."

"She's an extremely stunning woman," said Wallace Martin shortly.

"And all due to Dita Hepworth," announced Mrs. Wilstead. "Wonderful! I
never saw a woman with such a genius for dress and decoration. If her
beauty wasn't such an obvious quality, I should think it was due to her
almost uncanny knowledge of what is becoming and--Ah, thank Heaven, here
she is!"




CHAPTER V

PERDITA'S TALISMAN


Perdita Hepworth had entered the room, with Eugene Gresham just a step
or two behind her, and, after a glance in the direction of Maud Carmine
and her husband, had moved toward the little group on the balcony.
Gresham was used to any amount of attention and admiration, but the
adulatory interest which he may have merited and had, in fact, grown to
regard as his due, was always conspicuously lacking when he appeared
with Perdita.

"The picture gallery is the chosen spot," she announced as if bearing
some intelligence for which they had long been waiting, "and the
sittings are to be begun at once. I remember when I first knew Maud
Carmine, she said to me, 'Fancy what it must be like to have your
portrait painted by Eugene Gresham!'" Her low laughter rang with a sort
of triumphant amusement. "'Dear child,' I answered, 'I have had my
portrait painted by him so many times that there would be no novelty
whatever in the experience.' You know," to Mrs. Hewston, who looked
faintly puzzled, "'Gene and I have always known each other." She looked
over at Gresham who was seated on the arm of a chair talking to Maud
Carmine and Hepworth. "Has Maud been playing for Cresswell?" she asked
suddenly. "He is so fond of her music."

"Yes, she has been playing delightfully," answered Mrs. Wilstead, "and
she looks charming to-night. Maud who was always regarded as an ugly
duckling has suddenly become a swan."

"Ah, why not?" said Perdita carelessly. "Maud hadn't the faintest idea
how to make the most of herself. She gave the effect of hard lines and
angles, and hair and eyes and skin all cut from the same piece, a dingy
dust color. Like every other woman of that type she has a perfect
passion for mustard colors and hard grays. Ugh!" she shivered. "The only
thing to do with Maud was to make her realize that she must look odd and
mysterious, you know. That was all. Oh, she is beckoning to me. They
want something."

She crossed the room with that grace of bearing which nature had
bestowed upon her and with the added poise and assurance gained within
the last two years. She still gave the effect of extreme simplicity in
dress but it was retained as by a miracle, for although she wore no
jewels her white gown was of the most exquisite and costly lace. But her
head was undeniably carried a trifle higher than usual, and a very close
observer might have read boredom in her eyes, defiance in her chin,
rebellion in her shoulders. As she turned from the little group on the
balcony, she bit her lip irritably, before she again composed her
features to the conventional smile of hostess-like cordiality.

Alice Wilstead followed her with puzzled eyes.

"It is very difficult to understand a beauty," she said plaintively to
Martin.

"Put it more correctly," as he blew a cloud of smoke. "Say, it's
difficult to understand a woman."

"But I do not find it so," she smiled. "I'm one myself. I'm on to all
our various vagaries, but Dita Hepworth puzzles me. Look at this house.
There are effects here in decoration, so beautiful and unusual that
every one says Eugene Gresham directed them. I know he did not. Look at
Maud Carmine, and yet Dita herself usually wears the plainest of gowns."

"I must confess," said Martin, "that I do not follow you."

"Perhaps not," she mused, then with more animation. "Come, Wallace, tell
me exactly how she impresses you."

"That is easy," he replied. "She is one of the prettiest women I ever
saw in my life."

"Ah, of course," in annoyance, "but I didn't mean that. That is no
impression of character."

"Mm," he pondered. "It isn't much of one, no."

Alice leaned back in her chair. "I seem to discern depths in her that
the rest of you refuse to see. You stop at her beauty and are content
with never a peep beneath the surface."

Martin tossed his cigarette over the railing into the garden. "Frankly,
I think that you are searching for something that isn't there," he said
abruptly. "The gods never bestow all their gifts on one person. Since
you profess to know your own self so well you should realize that women
so very pretty as Mrs. Hepworth are rarely clever. Why should they be?
It is enough of an excuse for existence that they are beautiful."

"It is indeed," growled Hewston, who had been absorbed in sulky
meditation for some time. "I'd be contented if I thought she had enough
head on her shoulders to keep straight and not involve good old Hepworth
in God knows what."

Wallace laughed. "I'll lay you a wager, Mrs. Wilstead," he whispered,
tapping her fan with his finger-tips, "that the way things are going now
there will be a split in the Hepworth household within three months."

"Do not say it," she cried quickly. "I can not bear to think of such a
thing."

"I'll give you heavy odds, too," he went on cynically, leaning forward
to regard the group at the piano. "I'll make it a bracelet against a box
of cigars, provided I'm allowed to choose the brand of cigars."

"You might as well put in another provision then," she retorted,
"provided I am allowed to choose the bracelet. My taste in ornaments,
dear Wallace, is both unique and expensive. I like only odd jewelry."

"Odd jewelry! That is an old fad of yours, Alice," said Hepworth's voice
behind her.

She started slightly, she had not noticed his approach. "And your own,"
she smiled up at him. "Have you secured any new amulets lately,
Cresswell?"

"Yes, one. It is a beauty, a scarab. I must show it to you; also
another, a carved bloodstone set in very curiously wrought iron. I got
that from a Gipsy woman. It is an old Romany talisman."

"Do let us see them," pleaded Mrs. Hewston.

"Certainly, I shall be delighted to. Excuse me a few moments. I will get
the box myself. Naturally I would not trust it to the servants." He
smiled at his weakness.

"Naturally," said Hewston. "Come, let us all get into the drawing-room
to look at them. It is beginning to rain anyway."

It was only a few moments before Hepworth returned bearing a large,
black leather box. He placed it on a table just under the light and then
choosing a key from a ring, fitted it into the lock.

"I hold one key," he said to the group pressing about him as he lifted
the lid, "and Perdita the other. That is in case she may want to wear
any of these trinkets."

Alice Wilstead had been looking at Mrs. Hepworth at the moment her
husband entered the room and she alone had noticed that Dita started
violently when her eyes had fallen on the box and that all the rich
color had fled her cheek, leaving her, for a second or two, white as a
ghost.

The box held a series of trays, each padded and velvet lined and upon
these were fastened Cresswell Hepworth's noted collection of amulets.
Most of these talismans were very ancient, many of them revealed the
most beautiful workmanship. All of them were distinctive. Each one,
almost without exception, had a history, strange, romantic or sinister,
and these were all duly catalogued, but it was never necessary for
Hepworth to refer to this written history. He had not only the symbolic
significance of his favorite toys, but also the vicissitudes through
which they had passed, at his finger ends.

The top trays held scarabs, one of the most remarkable collections of
them extant, commemorating certain mighty and fallen dynasties; or this
reign or that of remote Egyptian rulers long crumbled to dust, and
Hepworth lifted them lovingly from their trays and turning them deftly
in his fingers explained their histories and expatiated on their beauty.

Beneath the scarabs lay the jade talismans exquisitely carved and handed
down from distant centuries. The hearts that had once beat beneath them
had long been dust, but the talismans, with no stain of time upon them
to dim their luster, would still serve as emblems of good luck to future
generations. Then there were quaint amber charms preserving the warmth
and flooding radiance of the sunlight that sparkles on sea foam in their
depths, and opals delicately clouded with mystery, their "hearts of fire
bedreamed in haze," carbuncles, jasper and hyacinth, all in their time
the almost priceless possessions of their owners because of the mystic
significance attaching to them. And then there were trays containing a
somewhat heterogeneous collection of old pieces of beaten silver and
iron with odd characters on them, representing periods of even greater
antiquity than scarab or jade.

These amulets were in many instances the memorials of bitter feuds and
hot duels, fought on the moment, at the gleam of a talisman which both
contestants claimed. More than one had been hastily rifled from the
dead, and more than one had been bestowed by a great lady on an untitled
lover of empty purse to aid him in winning fame and fortune.

"By the way, Alice," said Hepworth suddenly, "you have seen Dita's
amulet, have you not? It is almost, if not quite the gem of the
collection."

"No, I have never seen it," Mrs. Wilstead's whole piquant face was alive
with interest. "But I have heard of it. It was through it that you met,
was it not?"

Dita nodded. The color had come back to her face. "It was that old
talisman he was really interested in," she said. "I always tell him he
married me to get it."

Hepworth laughed. "It is well worth any one's interest. It has been in
her family for generations, and there are all sorts of legends and
traditions connected with it. It is said to give his heart's desire to
whomever possesses it, isn't it, Dita?"

"More than that," she replied, a little strangely, or at least so it
seemed to Alice Wilstead. "He to whom it is given--and it can not be
bought or bartered, it must always be bestowed--must sooner or later
reveal himself in his true character, either his baseness or his
nobility."

"Fascinating!" cried the women in chorus. "What is it like?"

"It is a square of crystal set in silver and gold. About the silver is
twined one of those old Celtic chains which can only be seen with a
microscope, where the links are so tiny that we have no instruments
delicate enough to fasten them together and which were believed to have
been made by the fairies. And now for a sight of it."

He was about to lift the next tray, when Dita laid a detaining hand on
his arm. "It isn't there, Cresswell," she said in a quick, low voice.

As if he had not heard her or had not taken in the full import of her
words, he laid the tray carefully upon the table, disclosing the one
beneath. Like the others, it too was full of curious amulets, but one
space was empty. Perdita's talisman was indeed missing.

"Why, Dita!" he exclaimed. "You did not mention to me--"

She shot a quick, unmistakable glance at Gresham. "Didn't I?" she
interrupted before he could go further. "It's being mended."

"Ah, those antique bits, they are always coming to pieces, at least I
know mine are," said Mrs. Wilstead with hasty fluency. "But, Cresswell,
there is still another tray, and I must see its contents before I go
home."

"Make it a month," said Martin in her ear. "I said three, didn't I?"




CHAPTER VI

SIROCCO


"Good night, Hewston, good night, Alice. Don't go yet, Gresham."
Hepworth laid a detaining hand on the artist's arm. "Sit down and smoke.
We haven't had a moment to discuss this portrait matter yet."

"I think," said Dita, moving toward the door, "that I shall leave you
two to discuss it and go to bed."

"Oh, my dear," her husband detained her with the same light touch with
which he had held Gresham. He pushed an easy chair forward so that she
should be seated between Eugene and himself. "We are going to get all
the details of the portrait settled to-night. A portrait of you and
painted by Gresham is sure to bloom and be admired for a century or two
at any rate."

Dita looked at him quickly as if suspecting him of some intention
beyond the discussion of the contemplated portrait, but meeting the
smiling blankness of his expression, turned away, not in the least
reassured, but more puzzled than ever, and sinking listlessly into the
chair sat staring moodily before her with veiled eyes and compressed
lips.

Eugene glanced at her uneasily, a frown between his brows. He knew her
like a book. She had always, always from childhood, been a creature of
moods. He was perfectly familiar with the various stages of the sirocco,
as he had long ago named her outbursts. She would become restless,
abstracted, absent, and then she would sit and brood as she was doing
now, until finally the sullen and threatening atmosphere would be
cleared by a burst of storm, a swift cyclone of anger.

Gresham gave the faintest of sighs and an almost imperceptible shrug of
the shoulders. This was a situation which he foresaw would require all
his tact and ingenuity.

"Is the picture gallery all right? Did you find it satisfactory?" asked
Hepworth.

"Excellent!" Eugene's brow cleared. He spoke with enthusiasm. "Yes, I
told Perdita that the lighting there will be perfect. I've about decided
to paint her in white. Yes," scrutinizing the indifferent object of the
discussion narrowly and yet remotely, as if he were visualizing his
finished portrait of her, "white velvet, I think, and rather a blare of
jewels. You see I want to bring out the dominating quality of her
beauty, harp on it, you know, so I want to present her eclipsing and
reducing to their proper places all the splendid accessories with which
we can surround her."

Her husband nodded approvingly. "What do you think, Dita?"

"Oh, by all means," she roused herself to answer, but making no effort
to conceal the irony of her tones. "Let Eugene give me all the
distinction and grace he is noted for bestowing on, you observe I do not
say perceiving in, his clients, or patients, or patrons, whatever he may
call them. Make the stones of my tiara and necklace even bigger and
whiter and more sparkling than they are, Eugene. Or better still, I'll
wear my diamond collar and my string of rubies and my rope of sapphires,
all shouting hurrah at once, three cheers for the red, white and blue!
Make me all glittery, Eugene, throw my sables over my shoulders."

"By Jove!" cried Gresham, interrupting her, a white flash of enthusiasm
across his face, "you may not dream it, Dita, but that's it exactly.
You've hit it."

"Yes," she went on satirically, "and present me in the middle of all
this splendor, overcome by the 'burden of an honor into which I was not
born.'"

"But you were born to it," interposed her husband quickly, "no one more
so."

"Perhaps," she sighed a little, her eyes and voice grew softer, "but at
a time when the outward manifestation had vanished."

The glow had lingered, even become intensified in Gresham's face. "By
Jove!" he cried again, "you were trying to be sarcastic and all that,
Dita, but it was a great idea of yours just the same. I will paint your
portrait and it shall be hung side by side with my working girl. They
shall be companions of contrast. You see," explaining his idea to
Hepworth, "I am going to paint my working girl in the city streets just
at twilight on a winter evening, hastening home after the day's long
toil. The lights and colors of the shop windows dance and glitter about
her, blurred by the falling snow. Everything, lights, buildings,
passers-by, are all in that blurred, indistinct atmosphere, and she,
herself, is a part of the blur, looking through it, with her young, worn
face and wistful eyes, craving the beauty and the joy of life."

"No, no!" cried Dita suddenly. Rising, she moved rapidly up and down the
room, her head bent, her finger at her lip. "No!" she cried again, her
voice deeply vibrating. "I reckon you've just missed it, Eugene, it's
too--too conventional. I can imagine something truer than that. My
working girl, if I were painting her, should not be born to toil, not
always have regarded it as the great fact of existence, an inevitable
portion of her days and years from which she has never dreamed of
escape. No, I would picture her delicate, highly nurtured, with
traditions of race and breeding behind her; but poor, oh, very poor. And
she shouldn't look out on life with resigned, wistful eyes, but with
passionate, demanding ones, rebelling that her youth, her wonderful,
beautiful, dreaming youth was passing in a tomb of tradition, a green
and flowery tomb perhaps, maybe an old southern garden, but nevertheless
a place of dead lives, dead memories, dead customs. And she, this girl,
hates it, the dust and must of it. She hears always in her ears the
surges of that mighty ocean of life. And she can't resist it. She can't.
Then because her heart is set on it, she comes to a great city like
this, comes with all her high hopes and her untarnished confidence in
herself; and all this magnificent swirling tide of life, with its
mingled and mingling streams, seems to bear her onward to the highest
crest of the highest wave. Then she begins to hear, at first faintly and
then ever louder and more menacing, the voice of New York, with its
ceaseless reiteration of one theme, 'pay, pay, pay.' She turns
desperately to her little accomplishments, those little, untrained,
unskilful things that she can do, straws on that ocean; and expects them
to save her.

"Ah!" she drew her hand across her brow, her face contracting a moment.
"Then comes the grind between the millstones, the continual
disappointments, the terror by day and night, the rent, that rolls like
a snowball, the dreary evenings which she must spend alone in the dreary
little room, while all the time she hears the mocking invitation of the
great, glittering city to partake of her many feasts.

"And she," again Dita sighed deeply, "she begins to believe herself
doomed to dash her youth and beauty against the walls of a tomb. And she
has to learn so many things, among them the hideous accomplishment of
making both ends meet. What does she know of the use and value of money?
Oh, of course all kinds of cheap, left-handed pleasures are offered her,
because people consider her pretty, but it is an impossibility for her
to accept them. She has been born in the traditions of real lace and
real jewels. And the panic-fear! Ah!--" she broke off abruptly.

"Dear me, Dita. You should have been an orator." For the past five
minutes Eugene had been scarcely able to conceal his irritation,
frowning, biting his lips, twisting in his chair and casting furtive
glances at Hepworth. "I remember you used to be given to those bursts of
eloquence now and then."

"And what finally becomes of her?" asked Hepworth of his wife, ignoring
Eugene's interruption. His voice was low, expressing nothing more than a
polite interest.

"I don't know," said Dita wearily. "A number of things. She may
comfortably die, or marry, poor thing, any one who will have her."

"Very dramatic," said Gresham dryly. "You always did have histrionic
talent, Dita. I've often wondered that you did not attempt the stage."

Perdita opened and closed her eyes once or twice as if she had just
returned from a far country.

"I certainly wasn't much of a success at painting lamp-shades and menus,
was I, Eugene, in spite of your early training?"

He shrugged his shoulders without answering, made a slight, disclaiming
gesture with one hand and rose to his feet. "What!" listening intently
as a clock chimed somewhere. "I had no idea it was so late." His face
cleared. He was evidently relieved at his chance of escape. He shook
hands with Hepworth and then turned to Dita. "Remember that the first
sitting will be at twelve o'clock Wednesday morning, and please don't
keep me waiting. That is a fact that I have to impress on these charming
women," he turned laughingly to Hepworth, "that I am neither their
manicure nor hair-dresser. I am accustomed to keep them waiting if I
choose."

"I'll be ready," she said indifferently, but Eugene noticed with
apprehension, even alarm, that those deep vibrations which spoke of
barely controlled emotion were still existent in her tones. "I'll be
ready, velvet, diamonds, hurrah of jewels, if you wish, sables and all."

Again a gust of wind swept through the room and Hepworth went over to
close a window.

Eugene took quick advantage of the occasion. "For Heaven's sake," he
whispered, "pull yourself together."

His words were too late. Too late by half an hour. The sirocco had done
its work.




CHAPTER VII

THE GIFT OF FREEDOM


With the departure of a third person the situation immediately changed
complexion. It became more intimate and therefore more embarrassing.
With Eugene had departed the audience and the stimulus of playing to it.
The star and the stage manager were left alone. Untrammeled emotional
expression no longer seemed an heroic necessity. Under the calm,
unreadable, steady regard of her husband's eyes it held its elements of
banality and of sensationalism, of pseudo-emotion. Dita became sullen.
"I think I shall go to bed," she said abruptly and for the second time
and then turned to the door.

"Wait a moment." His voice was courteous, pleasant, but it would have
been a dull ear which could not have discerned the tone of command
beneath its even modulations.

It was new to Dita and arresting, and she paused, wavered a moment and
came back to the chair she had left and folding her arms upon its high
cushioned back, stood with still, sullen mouth and downcast eyes,
exhaling reluctance. She was feeling the reaction from her late mood of
exaltation, of dramatic visioning of poignant past experiences.

He waited a second or so, and then said, "Your working girl was a far
more dramatic conception than Gresham's. It might not lend itself so
much to pictorial representation. It might be more literary." He
appeared to give this question some consideration. "However," he
dismissed it with a wave of the hand, "that is neither here nor there.
What counts is this, were you the girl whose life you described so
feelingly and dramatically?"

There was silence between them for a moment. Dita's first impulse was to
maintain it indefinitely; ignore this question with barely suggested
contempt; with a faint gesture of dissent, signify that she considered
it a crudity, almost a vulgarity, and lightly, languidly, indifferently
dismiss the whole subject and leave the room. She knew how,
intuitively. Behind her were generations who understood how to flick an
unpleasant situation from the tips of their fingers, who would ignore
and dismiss with amused disdain an invitation to exculpate themselves or
explain, when to explain meant practically to retract. But false as she
felt, with waves of shame, she had been to her traditions and upbringing
in revealing her emotion, she was no coward. She lifted her head and met
his eyes. Gray eyes faced gray eyes--but with a difference. Hers were
the passionate, emotional Irish gray--with black beneath them, and the
long curling black lashes, but his were like mountain lakes, reflecting
a gray and steely sky. Hers revealed all the secrets she might wish to
hide; his concealed all his secrets admirably--discreet windows,
revealing nothing but what their owner desired they should reveal.

"Yes," she said with defiant brevity.

He appeared again to give this reply due consideration. He had risen now
and was walking up and down the floor. "What an impression it must have
made on you!" he said at last, very gently.

She plaited the lace of her sleeve. "You knew about me before we were
married," she said. "Why--?"

"Quite true, but sometimes something is said, it may be only a word, and
one's eyes become, as it were, unsealed. One sees a perfectly familiar
object or situation in an entirely new light. Your attitude now," he
turned to her rather sharply, "is that I am about to blame you, to take
you to task. Far from it. Why should I blame you for what has been
beyond your power? Your words to-night have made me realize that it has
been quite impossible for you to care for me, and that I have not been
able to make you happy. Ah," lifting his hand as she was about to speak,
"do not disclaim it. I know. You see, that very fact sends the whole
house of cards tumbling. The bitterness with which you have spoken
to-night would not have been in your mind, rankling, rankling all this
time, if you had been a happy woman. It was bound to burst into flame
sooner or later."

"Oh!" she broke out. "You have always won. You do not know what it is
like to lose; but I--I missed every mark I aimed at. I came up from the
South, so dead sure that I was a very gifted and accomplished person,
and that all I had to do was to hold out my apron and all the beautiful
and delightful things would tumble into it. But this great city surely
taught me a lesson, and she's no very gentle teacher, either. And I used
to sit up there in that tiresome little apartment among those
candle-shades and cotillion favors and think how--how pretty I was," she
flushed under his smile, "and rage, and get sick with disgust when I
thought how I would look after about twenty years of that kind of life.
I knew exactly how I'd look. I'd be one of those peaked, wistful-eyed
old maids, with rusty black clothes turning green and brown, and a
general air of apology for living. I could just see myself ironing out
the ribbons of my winter bonnet with which to trim my summer hat, and
then laundering my handkerchiefs and pasting them on the window-panes to
dry. And life, life was like a great, wonderful river, flowing by and
leaving me stranded on the shore. And then you came."

Hepworth laughed. "I don't wonder that you took the alternative. I'm
conceited enough to think it better than those ugly pictures your young
eyes were gazing at."

"Yes, they were ugly," she agreed. "Life just seemed like a dark,
dreary, cobwebby passageway, but I always felt as if I might come to a
door any minute and step through it into a beautiful garden. You seemed
the door." She spoke the last words a little shyly.

He glanced at her again, inscrutable, unfathomable things in that gaze.
"Ah, youth, youth and the waste of it!" There were tones in his voice
that brought the tears to her eyes, but he did not see them. He was
musing on the accident of her life, this flower of the dust, which he
had taken from the dingy environment she loathed. He had lavished all
the beauty and experience within his power upon her, and taken away
perhaps the one thing that had redeemed her life. He had seen only the
limitations and the makeshifts and how they had oppressed her dainty and
fastidious spirit; but it had never struck him before that in lifting
her away from them, above them, he had taken from her the one thing that
might have glorified her life, that the sordidness and the scrimpiness
were for her for ever haunted by the unexpected. That because she was
young and beautiful and free, the dreariness must have been irradiated
always by the rainbow tints of romance; and he had given her all the
beauty and glitter his money could buy in exchange for the joy of a
dream, and fancied that he had actually done something for her.

"Dita, forgive me," he murmured, a curiously bitter smile about his
mouth.

"Forgive you!" she looked at him a little cautiously. She didn't
understand the workings of his mind. He never gave her a hint either in
eyes or expression that would seem as a clue for her to follow.

"Yes. You should." Again he smiled at her. "You didn't get a fair
exchange. I see that very plainly now."

"You must not speak like that," she said quickly. "Believe me, it was a
great deal more than a fair exchange and I have always regarded it so.
Why do you think I have not been happy?"

"Because you have never really loved me."

"But I--I have always liked you," she cried quickly. "But," forlornly,
"you knew the truth at the time. Even if I had not, I should have had to
marry you anyway. I was so deep in debt I couldn't help it. I could not
manage any more than I can speak Sanscrit. So you see that there is
nothing to forgive. Believe me, I am always grateful, for before I
married you, I thought and thought, but I could see no other way."

He laughed again. He couldn't help it. He had a sense of humor and he
seemed to see, in a flashlight of vision, shocked Romance gather up her
skirts and shake the dust of Dita's threshold from her winged shoes.

"You are so really fearless and honest, Dita, that I venture to ask the
question." He put it with a rather diffident gentleness. "You have found
it quite impossible to care for me?"

"Oh, no," impulsively. "I have always liked you. I am really very fond
of you. But I am always tongue-tied before you. I never can think of
anything to say to you and I always say foolish things." She regarded
him with a wistful timidity.

He laughed ruefully. It was sorry mirth. "That is a proof of my
stupidity, my child, not yours."

He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. Up and down the room
he walked twice, three times, engrossed. Then having arrived at a
decision, he put it into words. "Dita," he stopped before her and looked
at her earnestly, "perhaps I am utterly rash and foolish, but will you
answer me one question? But first get all melodramatic ideas of the
state of my feelings out of your head." His smile was faintly cynical,
obscurely so. "And believe me, that what really concerns me is your
happiness. Are you in love with Eugene Gresham?"

She started, cast one quick glance at him, and then stared frowningly
before her, but he noticed that her hand trembled on the back of the
chair. "Why do you ask me that? I--I am married to you--I--" her voice
faltered, broke.

"Oh, no conventional utterances, please," he cried quickly. "That is not
worthy of you, not like you. There should be, there must be absolute
sincerity between us now. Tell me, Perdita, are you in love with Eugene
Gresham?"

"Ah, that I do not know." She looked beyond him and, still gazing, shook
her head. "I do not know. I never have known, never been sure. We were
boy and girl together, he a few years older. He is associated in my mind
with the life of green old gardens and the smell of jasmine flowers. He
lives in a wonderful world, a world of color that something in me always
yearns toward. It seems to me sometimes as if I would rise to it, and my
heart would blossom in purple and red. I seem doomed to talk foolishly
to you," she exclaimed rather piteously, "but most people's hidden
thoughts would sound foolish to others, would they not?"

"Go on, my dear." Then his controlled utterance gave way. "For heaven's
sake, why should you not feel that you can say anything to me? What kind
of an idea have I given you of myself? But tell me," quickly subduing
his emotion, "what is it you feel?"

"As if--as if my heart were a flower which had never really bloomed--a
cold, tightly folded bud, that yet held within the colorless outer
leaves wonderful red and purple petals. All there, awaiting a sesame,
and I sometimes dream that only Eugene can give me that sesame. But,"
the glow left her eyes, her head drooped, "I don't know, I don't know. I
thought I was sure once that I loved him. I do not know now."

"Where was Gresham during the time you were struggling here?" he asked
presently. And it struck her irrelevantly.

"In the East somewhere, I think. Doing his desert pictures. I used to
hear from him once in a great while."

He said nothing. Then he came nearer and took both her hands in his.

"Dita, my clear, I'm going to be egotistical and talk about myself for a
minute. Let me see if I can explain." Again that worn and flashing
smile, with a deeper touch of cynicism, flitted over his arrogant face.

    "'King Canute was weary-hearted,
        He had reigned for years a score,
      Pushing, struggling, battling, fighting,
        Killing much and robbing more.'

"Let us hope that it is not quite so bad as the last line infers; but
it gives the idea, the picture. Well, Dita, I saw you, a beautiful
flower, purple and red, if you will, although I do not think the
combination of colors appropriate. And you were blooming in a tin can in
a tenement window. It was insupportable, so I dreamed of transplanting
the flower into its fitting surroundings, a marble court. That was what
I crudely thought would mean your happiness. But I never secured the
flower to adorn the marble court. Believe that. Above all, I wanted and
I want its happiness. Dita, I'm weary-hearted, but I long--I long above
all things--to make you happy. Take the poor surroundings that I can
give you; but let your beauty have its meed, let your heart flower as it
will. Feel free to meet, with outstretched hands, the romance your youth
has dreamed of, for, Dita, I, who have only fettered you with jewels, am
going to give you something really worth while, thanking God very humbly
that it is in my power to do so, and the gift is freedom. You are free
from now on."

She started back, looking at him in frowning bewilderment and yet he saw
deep within her eyes a wild gleam of hope, of joy. "Free!" she repeated
uncertainly, "Free! How can I be free when I am married to you?"

[Illustration: "Free! How can I be free?"]

He laughed once more, and the dreariness of that laughter rang suddenly
hours afterward in her ears. "Those things can always be arranged," he
said. "But I am going to ask you a favor." Although he said "favor" her
quick ear caught the ring of authority in his tone. "Since you are not
sure that you love Gresham, I am going to ask that you wait a year
before securing your legal freedom. You shall have it, whether you
decide on him or not. Oh, believe that. Ah, one more request. Let me
urge you not to have your portrait painted just now. In view of possible
future events, it is much wiser, much safer to let that go for the
present. I think you will have to trust my judgment here. There is no
danger of your beauty waning." Again his worn and flashing smile. "And
now, it is very late and I think you had better get some sleep. Good
night." He smiled again, but she noticed how dreadfully tired he looked.
She winced a bit in soul.

"I am sorry that it has been such a fizzle," she turned to him with a
sort of shy, girlish friendliness and impulsiveness.

He smiled again and lightly touched her cheek with his finger. "Give no
more thought to that." He turned abruptly away.

"Ah, Dita," his voice arrested her from the threshold, "one more request
I am going to make and that is that you get your amulet to-morrow. If
not I shall have to see about it myself and I am really too busy to
bother with it at present." Again that iron ring of authority was in his
voice, but authority masked in velvet. "Will you very kindly attend to
this, my dear?"

She nodded mutely from the doorway, but did not lift her down-bent head,
nor raise her eyes to his.




CHAPTER VIII

FOOLS' LAUGHTER


When Dita wakened the next morning, it was very late, almost noon. She
came slowly to waking consciousness over wastes of apprehension,
oppressed by some heavy sense of disaster. What had happened? Ah, she
remembered it, it was last night. She squirmed uncomfortably and then
lay gazing with somber and introspective eyes about the beautiful room.
Slowly, the chaotic and uncomfortable thoughts which thronged
confusingly in her mind resolved themselves into two or three distinct
facts as scorching to her sensitiveness as if written in letters of
fire. First, she had let herself go unwarrantably. An electric storm
always exerted a sinister effect upon her, inducing a wildness, a
recklessness at first, eventually followed by melancholy and culminating
either in tears or temper. And she had yielded weakly to every phase of
this storm-induced mood.

Why did events have to take the bits in their teeth and gallop madly
along the road to ruin at the most placid and unexpected moments? Why
should an electric storm have blotted the sky and flashed its jagged
lightning over her nerves that especial evening? Why had she not
mastered the sirocco, driven it off in its first stealthy approaches?
But she melted to self-pity; Cresswell should not have taken her so
seriously. He might have realized that the storm, and that tiresome
dinner, and those tiresome people had goaded her unendurably. Grant them
every virtue, every grace, admit that there might have been an
attraction between herself and them in ordinary circumstances, but the
fact that they were old friends of her husband changed the whole
chemical situation. Attraction became repulsion, attempt to conceal the
fact as she would. But self-pity ultimately merged into self-accusation.
No matter what the causes, she had made a melodramatic scene. She had
told a lot of bare truths, which, like all bare truths, were only half
truths; about Eugene, for instance, practically admitting that she loved
him.

Well, did she? She sat up suddenly in bed and pushed the hair back from
her brow with both hands. She pondered intensely a moment. She didn't
know. She really didn't know. Was it love, this feeling she had for him,
had had for him ever since she had been a girl of fifteen? It was a
powerful attraction anyway--a sympathy, an understanding.

And Cresswell had offered her freedom, freedom! What did it mean? Her
heart began to beat quickly, excitedly. It meant the great adventure ...
if one had the courage ... one need "mourn no joy untasted, envy no
bliss gone by." She would throw off this ennui, this apathy which
afflicted her. She was free, free to seek and meet the unexpected. The
great adventure, a thousand adventures were before her. At last, she
would live. Suddenly she remembered her amulet. She must get it. She
gave this a moment's consideration, and then, before summoning her maid,
she went quickly to the telephone in her sitting-room, and rang up
Eugene Gresham's studio.

To her relief, he was there and answered the ring almost immediately.

"Are you there, 'Gene. I want to see you to-day, as soon as possible,
within an hour or so. Will it be convenient for you?"

"Oh, perfectly. But," there was anxiety in his voice, "nothing is wrong,
I hope."

"Oh, nothing much," she replied evasively, "only I want to talk to
you--but not here."

"Why not take luncheon with me," he replied, "at half-past one and
where?"

"Oh, not in any crowded restaurant," she answered a little impatiently.
"At some quiet place. A tea-room--the Wistaria?"

"Very well. Then within an hour and a half."

"And, oh, Eugene," her voice detaining him, "I want the talisman. Do not
fail to bring it. Do you understand?"

If Dita wore as a protecting disguise the simple and conventional dark
gown which has been prescribed by certain unalterable rules of fiction
as the proper costume for a lady hastening to a rendezvous, it failed of
its effect, but served instead to accentuate her beauty; nor detracted
in the least from her as an object of interest and comment.

And Eugene, with his fame, and his air, and his eyes, his lifted
shoulder and his limp, the pointed laurel leaves seeming to gleam
through his cloud of hair, handed her from her motor-car with the manner
of courts, his hat in hand, to the admiration of the passers-by. The
whisper ran: "Eugene Gresham and the beautiful Mrs. Hepworth." They
passed through a gaping aisle. They entered the tea-room to the craning
of necks. Poor souls! This was their measure of seclusion. Beauty and
genius! Fame and wealth! It is a combination New York loves. She serves
them up to her multitudes on a salver.

They were successful, however, in finding a remote table beneath swaying
purple clusters of artificial wistaria and a dimly mellow light. And
while Eugene ordered the luncheon, Dita glanced about her with a
sensation of relief; new surroundings always seem to hold out the
alluring if frequently vain promise of new thoughts and this was the
beginning of adventure, of that new life of infinite variety she meant
to live at last.

Eugene turned from the waiter, and leaning across the table narrowly
observed her.

"A trifle pale," he remarked. "Mad Dita!" reproachfully and yet
tenderly. "I hope all that atmospheric unpleasantness--mental, I mean,
did not come boiling and seething to the surface after I left last
night. I hoped the sirocco had spent itself before I left. But doubtless
Hepworth understands how you are affected by a storm."

"I'm afraid I did make rather a scene," she admitted, her lashes on her
cheek. "However, that is neither here nor there."

He drew a breath of relief.

"Then it is all over, the atmosphere cleared and we are to begin our
sittings to-morrow." He smiled in anticipation and laughingly drew her
picture upon the air.

"No," she shook her head, and spoke more reluctantly than before,
"Cresswell has requested me not to have my portrait painted just now. He
is kind enough," her smile was shadowy, "to think that there is no
particular danger of an immediate waning of my beauty and he desires me
to wait a few months."

"But that is impossible! Incredible!" he scowled with irritation and
threw himself back in the chair. "Oh, what a sirocco, what a sirocco it
must have been!" He shook his head back and forth and then dropped it in
his hands, studying the pattern of the table-cloth as though it were the
map of the situation. "To pass over my disappointment"--he lifted his
head and mechanically pushed about some of the dishes the waiter placed
before him on the table--"ignore it, let it go. I'm not going to press
that now; but there are other things to be considered. It is known that
I am to do your portrait. It was openly discussed last night. All this
must be taken into account. That is for appearances as far as you are
concerned. Then regarding me. I am not a paper-hanger or house painter
to be engaged and then dismissed at the whim of a millionaire. I can not
accept a commission from Hepworth and permit him to cancel it by a
negligent message, sent through a third person. Absurd!" He frowningly
bit a finger. "My plans and arrangements must be concluded for months
ahead. They can not be thrown askew like this. Oh, Dita, what did you
do, what did you say that brought this about? I worked like a Trojan
last night to avert anything of the kind."

She did not answer, but sipped her tea with downcast eyes and he saw
that the lashes on her cheeks were wet.

"Ah, Dita," his voice fell to a charming note of tenderness, a note to
stir any woman's heart, with the purple and white of the wistaria
clusters swaying above their heads and the mellow light reflected in his
eyes, his eager eyes which pierced life's stained and sordid curtain and
saw the wonder and miracle of beauty; and it was this power to discern
the eternal vision which illuminated his ugly, irregular, fascinating
face upon which work and dreams and experience had stamped their
impress. "You can not fancy what it means to me to paint your portrait
now. I've painted it before, crudely, in boyhood, and experienced then a
casual delight in the effort to portray a beautiful thing, and wrest a
few new secrets of art from the portrayal. That was all. But now," his
voice without being raised, yet lifted exultantly, "but now--my heart is
swept with insurgent seas at the thought of what it means. I am lover
and artist, fused in a fire of white enthusiasm. The lover sees, divines
what the artist can only guess at, and the artist offers to the lover a
perfected technique. I feel the stirring of this power to catch your
loveliness, Dita, and fix it on canvas imperishably. It would be the
great achievement. That is in the background of every artist's thoughts.
It is his pillar of cloud by day and his pillar of fire by night. The
great achievement!" He dreamed over it a moment. "I would paint the
South in you, Dita, 'warm and sweet and fickle is the South.' Ah! I
thought I loved you then. I thought I loved you the evening we parted,
but I know now that I have never really loved you before or I could not
have given you up."

They were almost alone, nearly every one had left the room. A long trail
of wistaria blew before her eyes. The light glowed through the silken,
yellow shades. The South! She smelled roses and jasmine. It seemed to
her for one bewildering moment as if her heart had indeed blossomed in
purple and red. She smiled lingeringly, sweetly into his eyes.

"The portrait's only postponed, Eugene, look at it in that way." The
words recalled her to herself with a start. This was paper wistaria and
electric light. She was no longer a girl in a flower-scented, green old
garden about to pose for a boyish and impatient artist. Here she was, in
spite of all her vows to the contrary, yielding to Eugene's spell
without a struggle. She was quite sure of his charm and magnetism, but
what she doubted now was her own heart.

"'Ah, the little more and how much it is. And the little less, and what
worlds away,'" she murmured beneath her breath, wondering unhappily if
she were born to doubt everything.

"But I can't and I won't submit to a postponement." He was now both
impatient and impassioned.

"It is not final," she explained. "Do take it as a postponement, nothing
more. He has his reasons--oh, they are not what you suspect. He is not
jealous. He is too big for that. It is something I can not go into now."
Her sentences were disjointed. She seemed almost incoherent to him. "Let
it be so for the present. I implore, no, I insist, that there be no
explanations. But I must go, it is getting late," she started as if to
rise; then sank back in her chair and held out her hand. "Oh, the
amulet, Eugene."

"I haven't got it," he threw out both empty hands and looked up at her
from under his brows with the expression of a naughty child. "Now
listen, Dita, before you get angry, although you're so wonderful when
you're angry that any one might be forgiven for tempting you into that
state; but after you called me up, the Nasmyths, those English people
you know, mother and daughter, were at the studio, and I was so intent
on getting them away in time to meet you, the mother is the most
interminable talker, that I finally bundled them out of the door and
came with them, with never a thought of the amulet."

"'Gene, how like you!" Her face was full of dismay. "Cresswell
especially asked me to get it to-day, and I don't think he believed for
one moment that clumsy fib I told about having it mended."

"I'll go at once and get it, and bring it to the house," he said
contritely. "You can make any explanation--"

"No, no more explanations," she said decisively. "They are perfect
spider-webs, the most involving things any poor fly can tangle himself
up in. They are, to mix metaphors, the quicksands of any situation.
They make of the simplest matter a problem of complexities."

"What does that go for?" Gresham tilted his head on one side and studied
her. "Does it mean that you and Hepworth quarreled about me, last
night?"

She looked back at him in inscrutable pondering, as if considering the
point, wondering, in fact, whether she and her husband really had
quarreled about him.

"No explanations, Eugene, that's fixed."

"As you will," in careless assent. "But, Dita," again that ardent note
of tenderness, warming his voice, and stirring her heart with all those
intimations of romance which she had never known. "We might as well
accept the inevitable, accept it with joy, face the light quite
fearlessly. We might as well see clearly at last, what for years we
should have known and believed and welcomed with all our hearts--that we
belong to each other."

Her quickly lowered eyelids veiled the sudden glow of her eyes.
"Perhaps," she whispered, "only I want time to think it out, to be sure
of myself. I--I've grown cautious."

He looked at her with the smile that could say so many things and to her
said but one. "Take time then, Dita, but permit me to pray that it will
not be long. And I--I shall await with what patience I may that dazzling
morning when you will open your beautiful, dreaming eyes, and know at
once and for ever that you are at last awake. When you will say, 'This
is my day of love, this is my hour and Eugene's! The world may go.' Take
your days or months, Dita. I give them to you, for I know that every
hour that passes will bring you nearer to me."

Famous artist, famous lover! Men saw his irregular, swarthy face, his
lifted shoulder, his limp, and wondered. But women saw the experiences
and aspirations and dreams that that face held, they saw the smiles
which said so many things exquisitely, they felt the subtle, intuitive
comprehension of every word, an understanding which held no
condemnation, but was as warming and stimulating as sunshine. His
love-making was as delightful and perfect as his art.

But again she threw off the sweet, poignantly sweet influence and strove
to think clearly.

"You had your chance, Eugene, before I was married. I would have
listened to you then, the night before you sailed for Europe, but you
didn't believe in me, you showed it plainly." Angry tears glittered in
her eyes at the remembrance.

"Ah, how could I?" His smile was at once cynical and tender. "I knew
your temperament, that craving, artistic temperament. It is much like my
own. We spring from the same stock, remember. You had all the inherited
love of luxury and beauty as I told you then and you were starved,
starved, Dita, and in a state of revolt. Your imagination was aflame
with what Hepworth offered. And I--" he threw out his hands with a
disclaiming gesture, "Where was I? My feet on shifting sands, I hadn't
touched bedrock then. Ah, well, what's the use? The past is past. It's
the future we face. My heaven, Perdita, what a future!"

His eyes held her, drew her. Involuntarily, she swayed toward him. Then,
impatiently, as if resenting her own attitude, she rose to her feet.

Dita drove home, with the faint smile still lingering about her lips,
still dreaming in her eyes. She drove through the park, green still in
spite of frost. A mist palely irradiated by the sunshine it obscured
enveloped the landscape in a sort of opaline enchantment and
unsubstantiality.

It was with a sigh of regret that she entered her own house. She felt as
if she had wilfully shut the door on the wooing and pensive autumn
without and gone into the bleak and wintry atmosphere of regret and
puzzle and doubt.

But as she moved listlessly across the hall a servant handed her a note
from her husband.

She tore it open and read it. Then she read it again. It seemed to her
that the rustle of the paper was like the crackle of thorns, and the
fool's laughter associated with it. She had meant to manage this
situation in her own way, to keep her hand well on the lever, and behold
it was all arranged for her.

Very briefly the letter informed her that Hepworth's western interests
would require his personal supervision for several months. That he hoped
she would endeavor to make herself as comfortable and happy as possible
and arrange her time in any way that best suited her. That was all. But
as she walked to her own apartments it seemed to her that the air echoed
and rang with the arid and mirthless laughter of fools.




CHAPTER IX

A TELEPHONE CALL


Maud Carmine was slowly pulling off her gloves before the fire in the
old-fashioned drawing-room of the old-fashioned down-town house where
she and her mother lived alone. It was not five o'clock, but the
evenings were so short now that she hesitated whether or not to turn on
the lights, but the firelight was brilliant and so much more attractive
than electricity, no matter how softly shaded that might be.

Yes, the firelight was so bright that in its radiance she could see her
figure reflected in the long mirror between the windows with its ornate
and early Victorian frame. She walked forward and standing before it
gazed at herself with a little smile. She was not a pretty woman, but
she was certainly a striking and attractive one and quite beautifully
gowned. That was the most noticeable thing about her, the _dernier cri_
worn with style and distinction. Her heart went out in gratitude to
Perdita.

While she stood there still surveying herself Wallace Martin was
announced.

"And no tea here for you," said Maud. "I've been out all afternoon.
Mother is gadding somewhere at this unconscionable hour, so I suppose
they thought I didn't want any. I'll send for some and it will be here
in a jiffy."

"I do want some, and some solid substantial bread and butter," confessed
Martin. "I'm hungry. I'm dining out to-night, but the dinner is set for
some unholy late hour, and I've been at a rehearsal all afternoon."

"A rehearsal of your own play?"

He nodded. "My very own," he said. "One of the million or two I've
written has actually been accepted."

"Oh, Wallace!" She held out her hands, her interest and pleasure showing
plainly in her voice. "I am more than delighted. It seems too good to be
true."

"Don't be too enthusiastic yet," he strove to speak dryly. "It may be
accepted by the managers, it is still a question whether it will be
accepted by the public. It's run one gantlet, but whether it will run
two remains to be seen."

"Oh, Wallace," she cried again. "How can you be so pessimistic and calm
and calculating and all that? Why, I should be off my head with joy."

"I am," he said tersely. "Maud, don't tell any one, but I feel like a
Wright aeroplane."

"I won't breathe it," she promised gaily, "but please don't add to the
fame I'm sure you're going to get from that play, by flying over the
housetops to rehearsals. Oh, here is tea, muffins, bread and butter,
cake. Anything else you'll have?"

He sank back contentedly. "Nothing but to insist that you tell that 1820
butler of yours that you're not at home to any one else. It's too
deliciously cosy to be spoiled by women simpering and rustling and men
lounging and clattering in. Just the firelight--it's a little early for
fire, but this evening is quite chilly--and the tea-kettle singing in
that nice homey way, and even a big Persian cat on the hearthrug. It's
'ome and 'eaven. And what a contrast to last night! Better a dinner of
herbs like this, where love is, than the stalled ox of yestere'en."

A faint blush seemed to tinge Maud's cheek, but it may have been, after
all, but the flickering firelight.

"Last night wasn't awfully pleasant, was it?" she said with a little
sigh.

"Pleasant! It was deadly. Poor Maud!" helping himself to more bread and
butter. "How hard you worked!"

"How silly you are!" she cried indignantly. "Perfectly absurd the way
you all acted. Horrid-minded creatures, bored and trying to make a
situation out of nothing. Eugene Gresham and Dita have known each other
for years. There is even some kind of a southern relationship between
them, quite near, I believe."

"La, la!" said Wallace, again helping himself generously this time to
cake, "your loyalty is beautiful, but don't let it drive you to take a
stand you may have to abandon."

"Wallace!" she turned from him indignantly and the firelight showed that
her eyes were full of tears.

"I mean it just the same." He placed his tea-cup on the table and bent
toward her. "Look here, Maud, your friend, Mrs. Hepworth, is a very
pretty woman, but she isn't a very bright one."

"That is just where you are mistaken," she returned. "She is extremely
clever but you don't seem to understand how much training and
environment have to do with those things. Take a woman as pretty as
Dita, a woman who has been beautiful and admired from her babyhood--she
has always been the center of attraction, she has never had to observe
people closely, to study their moods and characteristics, never has had
to try to please." There was a depth of mournful experience in Maud's
tone. "Therefore she seems to carry things with a high hand, seems to
lack subtlety and finesse and deference to the opinions of others.
Therefore, you, seeing this, immediately put it down to lack of brains.
It is a stupidity unworthy of you, at least it is a snap-shot judgment,
a lack of that careful, sympathetic study and analysis of character
which I should fancy would be necessary to you as a playwright."

He sat for a moment or two, with hands loosely clasped between his
knees, gazing into the bed of glowing coals. This attitude and silence
on his part continued for some minutes. "There!" he turned around so
suddenly that she jumped, "I've given due and careful consideration to
all you have to say and I will repeat my original statement. Mrs.
Hepworth is a very pretty woman, but she isn't a very bright one, not
bright enough to be ordinarily discreet."

Her shoulders twitched petulantly. "Wallace! The blot on your character
is that you are a bit of a gossip, yes you are, and you mingle with a
lot of idle people who have nothing better to do than to spend time that
might be put to valuable uses in making mountains out of mole hills.
Truly, it's an idiotic mental employment that is not worthy of you."

"Maud, you rouse me to argument; you do, really. I am not talking about
Mrs. Hepworth's very manifestly displayed interest in Gresham last
night. That might be attributed to half a dozen different causes. She
might have had a row with her husband or dressmaker, or have been so
bored by the happy family group gathered about her that she was ready
for anything. Any one could see that she was rather out-of-sorts,
excited and reckless and all that. I am not even thinking of last night,
and I will immediately withdraw any aspersions I may seem to have cast
on Mrs. Hepworth's brain power, if you will tell me why she gave Eugene
Gresham that old trinket, amulet, talisman or whatever it is?"

Maud began to laugh, quite naturally at first, and then she stopped
suddenly. She remembered the scene of the night before, the empty space
in the tray. She remembered Cresswell Hepworth's surprise, and Dita's
sullenness.

"But you heard Dita last night say that it was broken and that it was
being mended," she protested, but some way her protestations sounded
flat and unconvincing in her own ears.

"Yes, and you remember that she glanced quickly at Eugene Gresham before
she answered. You also remember that Hepworth, in the innocence of his
heart, explained that the old legend or tradition which had been
connected with the charm for centuries had been that it could neither be
bought nor sold, but that it could only be given away, given away with
the heart's love of the possessor, and in that case it would prove a
blessing to both him who gave and him who took."

Martin stooped and lifted the Persian cat upon his knees. "Well, my dear
Maud, the end of that story is that Gresham has the amulet."

"If that is true," she flashed back, "he took it to be mended for her."

"The circumstances do not seem to point that way," he said mildly.
"Really, Maud, it's the deuce of a mix-up, and I'm simply trying to
prepare you for the worst. You know those English people, the Nasmyths,
in draggled tweeds and velveteens; the mother wears an India shawl, and
the daughter a hat which looks as if it were made of carpet. Well, they
were at the Hewstons' to luncheon to-day and they had just come from
Eugene Gresham's studio where they had been pottering about the best
part of the morning, although Alice Wilstead said their boots and their
faces looked as if they had been chasing over plowed fields. Well, they
were yelping about Gresham like all other women, and raving about the
beautiful things he had, and Mrs. Nasmyth told how she got to poking
about on a table and found your friend's amulet; and she, of course,
made an awful scream about it, and Gresham, who, she naively remarked,
didn't seem any too pleased at her discovery, explained that it was a
good-luck charm, of very ancient workmanship, which had been given to
him by a dear friend, and then he gently and firmly locked it up before
her eyes in a little cabinet."

"Horrid creature!" murmured Maud.

"Who?" said Wallace eagerly. "You can't possibly mean Gresham, do you,
Maud? What!" his tones expressed a wondering delight as she mutely but
emphatically nodded her head. "To hear a woman speak thus of that hero
of romance! Never has such a grateful sound saluted my ears. Never!
Maud, I am really afraid I am going to hug you."

"You are going to do nothing of the kind." She could not help laughing,
although she was seriously worried.

"Well, we'll waive it for the present," he conceded, again sinking
languidly back in his chair, "but that isn't the worst. I told you that
it was the deuce of a mix-up, and so it is. To continue now on page
eight hundred and ninety-nine, the Nasmyths babbled all this out at
luncheon, and old Hewston got perfectly apoplectic. He swelled up and
became purple and emitted the most dreadful snorts and whiffles, and
grunts and groans, until finally just as his wife and Alice Wilstead
thought he was going to fall down in a fit, he got up and puffed away
from the table, and Alice and Mrs. Hewston rushed after him, leaving the
poor Nasmyths to take care of themselves. And not one thing could those
two women do with him. You know what an obstinate, pig-headed,
meddlesome old thing he is--and his head was set on jumping into his car
and off to tell Hepworth as quickly as possible and, my dear Maud, that
is what he did. Alice Wilstead said that she and Mrs. Hewston hung on to
his coat-tails up to the very moment he entered the car, begging,
praying, beseeching, imploring. She said he dragged them all the way
across the sidewalk and literally kicked himself free from them." Martin
threw back his head in a great burst of laughter in which Maud very
feebly joined.

"I wish I'd been there," she said regretfully. "He'd only have got in
that motor over my dead body; but, Wallace, when did you hear all this?"

"I met Alice Wilstead limping up the avenue, on her way home, and she
told me about it."

"I wish--" began Maud, but she was interrupted by a summons to the
telephone. When she returned to the room a few moments later, her face
was graver than ever.

"I'll have to leave you, Wallace," she said. "You can stay here with the
cat and the fire and the tea-kettle if you want to. Perhaps mother will
come in, but Dita wishes me to come to her at once."




CHAPTER X

OUT OF THE GILDED CAGE


Prompt as Maud was in responding to Dita's plea for her immediate
presence, Dita was equally prompt in hurling herself upon her friend's
sympathetic bosom.

Maud had been shown at once to the sitting-room of Mrs. Hepworth's
personal suite of apartments, and there Dita sat in the dim and
depressing gloaming of the unlighted chamber, a figure of dejection.

She had not even removed her hat, but sat brooding in the twilight until
Maud's entrance roused her and she flung herself across the room and
into the latter's arms with the impetuous rush of a cyclone.

Dita was temperamentally far more given to anger than to tears, but the
strain of the last two days had culminated now in a burst of wild
weeping, and Maud found it necessary to soothe and calm her before she
could venture to inquire into the immediate cause of her friend's very
poignant and unfeigned distress; so she applied herself to the task of
consolation with only vague conjectures as to the cause for grief.

She was able, however, from Dita's almost incoherent statements, to
patch together a fairly accurate idea of what had occurred.

"Just read this letter," Dita thrust the sheets into Maud's hand. "Oh,
you can not, not in this light. Wait a moment," she touched a button and
the room was flooded with a rose-colored radiance. Maud stepped nearer
one of the lamps and gave her most earnest attention to the words
Cresswell Hepworth had written. His utterance through the medium of the
pen, was brief, self-controlled, restrained and to the point. And as
Maud read his well-considered words, something like a feeling of despair
swept over her.

"He has gone, actually gone," cried Dita, as Maud handed the letter back
to her without comment. "Gone," she repeated the words as if the fact in
itself were quite unbelievable. She crushed the letter in her hand and
threw it on the floor. "He will be gone months, looking after his mines
and railroads and I'm to stay here. He never even said good-by to me,
and this," she touched the crumpled ball of paper contemptuously with
her foot, "gives me very plainly to understand that it is a virtual
separation. Oh," she jerked the pins out of her hat and sent that plumey
velvet head-covering spinning across the room, then turned to her calm
and sympathetic friend with a real fear and a real appeal in her eyes.
"What am I going to do? For a few months it will be all right, and then
people will begin to talk like everything. And you know how it will
appear. Every one will say that Cresswell discovered that I was having
an affair with some one, Eugene, of course, and that he, Cresswell, and
I had a row and that he refused to live with me longer, but that he
nevertheless was so chivalrous that he turned over this house and the
country places to me. Oh, dear, why did I have to have a sirocco?"

"Heaven knows," said Maud. "Let it be a lesson to you. Never have
another one. There, there, dear, I didn't mean any reproaches or I
told-you-sos. So stop howling or you'll mar your beauty permanently.
Oh, now, don't lift your head and glare at me indignantly and say you
hope you will, that it's never been anything but a curse to you. I've
been too plain all my life to listen with patience to anything of the
kind. Now, let me think." She sat with finger on lip deeply considering,
while Dita still punctured the silence with loud occasional sobs.

"You will have to travel," she said decisively. "Yup will have to travel
until people begin to talk and then you will have to keep on traveling
until they stop talking. But oh, Dita, can't you try and patch it up?"

Her words gave fresh impetus to Perdita's gradually decreasing sobs.
"You do not know him," she wept, "and to tell the truth, neither do I;
but I have enough of an understanding of him to know that he always
considers a step very thoroughly before he takes it, looks well into the
chasm before he leaps, and it's no use trying to get him to change his
mind when he has decided what course he means to pursue. Anyway, I do
not wish it. I want to be free, but not this way. Oh, was ever a woman
placed in such a position as I? I believe Cresswell would forgive
anything but the sin of not knowing one's own mind and I had to confess
to him last night that I wasn't sure of mine or of my heart either. He
has a contempt for me, of course, and," rising restlessly and moving
about, "I can't and won't accept his contempt, and I can't and won't
continue to live on his money and potter about his old houses. I feel as
if I would rather die."

"But, dearest," cried Maud bewildered. "What else is there for you to
do? What else can you do?"

"Nothing apparently," she said. Her dark gown fell about her in the long
lines of perfect grace. As she stood there, beautiful as the tragic
muse, her great eyes transfixed Maud with her scorn, but the scorn was
not for her friend, but for herself. "What can I do? I am about the most
useless creature on all this green earth. I sit and cry at a situation
which tortures my pride, instead of coming to a decision. I made a
beggardly pittance trying to earn my own living, and I won't go back to
that kind of life, a disgusting, sordid, scrimpy life, which stifled
every generous impulse or spontaneous action. I will not go back, I will
not give up all the things I love and have become accustomed to. I was
born to this. I love it, and will have it, but not on these terms.

"I haven't been utterly futile here, as I was in those other
circumstances. I have made Cresswell Hepworth's upholstery, stiff
houses, 'decorated and furnished by the most expensive and artistic
firms,' look really livable and lovely. Truly, haven't I? Great artists
have raved over them. Oh, I'm not afraid of velvets and tapestries and
embroideries. I have no burgeois reverence for them. Color was always
like clay to me. I always long to take it and mold it into new
combinations. Why, I couldn't keep my hands off a rainbow if I got a
chance at it, even the angels couldn't shoo me away." She was in one of
her swift, mercurial changes of mood, her mouth dimpling, her eyes
sparkling. "I'm not afraid of all the splendor of color or of all the
gorgeously rich materials that God or man ever devised. I ache to take
them and combine them and melt them together and contrast them. I'll
dare any combination to get an effect I want, an effect that haunts me,
and is like music in my consciousness. Isn't it strange that I can do
anything I like with great heavy draperies? I wave my hand at them and
they fall into just the lines I want. I can get all kinds of effects in
a room, but give me a little palette with little gobs of paint on it,
and little, little brushes and I can't do even a decent lamp mat. That
is one reason Eugene and I have always understood each other so well.
He, too, knows the call of color. Oh, stop looking that way, as if I
were going straight to shipwreck just because I mention Eugene. The
important thing to consider now is what I am going to do."

"I've told you once," said Maud, with settled conviction; "travel."

"On Cresswell's money?" bitterly. "Well, I suppose you think it's either
that or huddling into some black hole and attempting to earn my living
again--a phrase that's the synonym for me of a cheap and nasty
experience, but there must be some way out. No, I am utterly wasted,
futile, ineffective. I do not believe, I solemnly do not believe, that I
have one single, solitary gift in this world except being pretty."

"Look at me!" said Maud with a rather whimsical, cynical little smile.
"I think that I'm the living proof of one of your especial gifts. Why,
Dita, my dear, I'm a creation of yours. I'm considered one of the most
stunning women in town and about the best dressed and," Maud's really
soft and attractive smile transfixed her face, "I've won, I am really
beginning to dare to believe it, the interest and I hope the affection
of the only man I ever cared for and who never gave me a glance when I
was just 'that plain Maud Carmine, who is musical, you know.' Oh, I mean
Wallace, of course," blushing. "I haven't got over the wonder of it yet,
I assure you. I'm still mentally pinching myself and saying, 'If this be
I.' Think of it, Dita! I know the treasures of the socially humble, if
any one does. I always had position, but that amounts to very little in
these days, unless one has other things to back it up. It has been
gradually losing importance, pushed to the wall by money, the ability to
entertain, personal charm and good clothes, an air, a flare, a wit;
until now the poor, solemn, superannuated thing, so long unduly revered,
is really trotted back into the corner. Yes, I had position, but not
recognition. The back seats for me, so I rubbed along on my music and
conversation as best I could, poor fool! And then you came, and waved
your magic wand over me, took me in hand, and the world began to
appraise me at your valuation."

"That was nothing," said Dita carelessly. "I just have the knack of
seeing people as they ought to be. I could do what I did for you with
anybody, if they would only let me. You were nice and plastic and put
yourself entirely in my hands."

"Plastic!" echoed Maud. "You mean hopeless! But turn about is fair play.
Take the advice I offer you, and travel. If you say the word we'll start
for Japan to-morrow. And you needn't touch a penny of your husband's
money either, my child. I have enough for both of us."

"Maud, you're a darling." Dita smiled in warm appreciation. "But--"

"But, Dita," Maud's voice held both fear and appeal, "if you do stay
here, you will not, you must not see Eugene Gresham."

Dita smiled at her again, inscrutably. "An idea has come to me," she
said, quite irrelevantly, "a dazzling idea. I really believe that it is
the solution of the whole matter."

She considered this dazzling idea, her eyes growing brighter every
moment.

"Oh, Maud, Maud!" she cried, clasping her hands, "what an inspiration!
I'm going on my own again. Yes, I am. Don't look so horrified. I know
I've grouched and fussed a lot over my past efforts in that direction,
but you see I tried to do things in a small way, cotillion favors and
such, and it didn't suit me. It wasn't my _metier_, not my way. I loathe
detail. I can do things on a big scale or not at all. You know that. And
my present idea means the big scale. When I first came to New York I
regarded it as the great adventure, but then I didn't know how to go
about anything. I was as ignorant as a baby of everything--everything.
The tremendous professional skill required, my own ineptitude, the utter
inadequacy of my poor, amateur accomplishments, my entire ignorance of
business methods, all frightened, dazed, stupefied me, but now, now, I
just believe I'll have another try."

"Oh, what _have_ you got in your head now?" cried Maud in frightened
resignation.

"You see it's like this," Dita ignored the question and continued to
follow her own train of thought. "New York demands one of two things of
the stranger who comes knocking at her gates, either training or a new
idea. She can take care of any trained person, but if she has to conduct
the educational process, she does it with a club. Now I'm going back to
her with my new idea. Oh, I was crushed a bit ago, but now I am really
enjoying myself as I have not done since the first dazzle of marrying
Cresswell and seeing his money turn itself so easily into the beautiful
things I had longed for all my life. But I've been getting tireder and
tireder of being the twittering canary in the gilded cage. Cresswell
opened the door last night and now I'm going to fly put, but in a
totally different direction from the one he expects me to take." She
laughed delightedly. "Oh, do you think New York will listen to my new
idea?"

"She'll listen to Mrs. Cresswell Hepworth," said Maud dryly. "It won't
make much difference about the idea, whether it's new or old." She
thought of a conversation Hepworth's friends had held at the wedding
breakfast and sighed reminiscently. "I'm afraid you're making Cress
rather a background."

"Why not?" said Dita cheerfully and defiantly. "Serves him right, going
away in the fashion he did and putting me in such a position. 'Moses an'
Aaron,' as my old mammy used to say, you needn't try to dissuade me.
You'll be as crazy about the idea as I am when I unfold it to you. The
twittering canary is going to hop out of the gilded cage, and build her
own nest. It's the great adventure. It is to live. Won't Cresswell open
those sleepy eyes of his when he sees this move of mine on the
chessboard? I'm done with failure, this venture of ours is a success
before it's begun."




CHAPTER XI

A DOLL OR A BOX OF CANDY


Perdita, being one of those ardent, mercurial creatures who run with
winged feet to meet every event in life, whether it be joyous or
disastrous, had encountered her bad quarter of an hour the morning after
the dinner party.

Hepworth's, however, was postponed for a later and more lingering
occasion. We euphemistically limit these seasons of judgment to quarters
of an hour in speaking of them, but they are quite independent of time,
and may continue through days.

Perdita had a temperamental advantage. Hers were those swift changes of
mood so disconcerting to the devils of ennui and depression; but her
husband's period of reaction lasted, with but little mitigation, all the
way across the continent.

A most lusty and persistent demon of doubt and self-accusation boarded
his car within a few hours after the train left the station, invaded his
luxurious solitude and, indifferent to a chilling reception, there
remained. To Hepworth, the demon's most searing insinuation was that,
instead of a masterly retreat in good order, this departure of his for
the other side of the continent was a virtual renunciation of all that
he cared most to win and to hold. Fool and coward, the demon whispered,
to quit the game just at the moment when his presence was an imperative
necessity. But, although the demon was eloquent--it is an attribute of
demons--and his suggestions were like red-hot pincers, it never entered
Hepworth's head to turn back. On the contrary, it was characteristic
that having decided on a certain course, he was not to be swayed by the
demon's most subtle and ingenious arguments. He was merely rendered
supremely uncomfortable by them.

He had offered Perdita her freedom and he meant it without any
reservations. She should decide on her own course, follow her own
leadings according to the limits of her own folly or discretion, but
free she should be, and free even from any shadowy influence that his
mere presence might exert. Quixotic, scrupulously so: but then that was
Hepworth's way.

The demon laughed at this obstinately maintained, unalterable decision.
What chance, it sardonically suggested, had any mere average man against
a rival like Eugene Gresham? Women love glamour. Perdita especially
adored it blindly. Most women, certainly Perdita, would rather follow
the alluring, brilliant gleam of the will-o'-the-wisp, any time, than
the smoky but dependable light of the useful household lantern.

These gloomy reflections served to goad and stab like so many tormenting
banderillos, but Hepworth's resolution to absent himself for a time, and
thus insure Perdita a free hand, remained unalterable, in fact it
hardened, became like iron.

The journey over, his spirits improved; the demon was far less
persistent and only occasionally showed himself. There were a number of
business matters of varying importance requiring his attention, and
these very fully occupied his mind. He had made his headquarters for a
time at Santa Barbara.

Then, suddenly, his busy, if rather monotonous and routine existence
became diversified by a series of peculiar events which, in his most
wildly imaginative moments, he would never have conjectured.

One afternoon, as he sat before an open window in the villa he had
taken, looking out over a wonderful garden, all fragrance and color, at
the blue channel, the mountains, the distant islands gleaming fairy-like
through their golden haze, the name of Mr. James Fleming was brought to
him and served very effectually to rouse him from his spiritless
daydreaming, on whose confines hovered the demon.

Hepworth sat up, care vanished from his brow, the depressed droop of his
mouth changed to a smile. "Fleming! Jim Fleming!" he exclaimed. "Show
him in at once," to the waiting servant.

Mr. Fleming wasted no time in appearing and Hepworth pushed back his
chair and rose, meeting him with a hearty hand-clasp and one of his most
brilliant smiles.

This was the effect the arrival of Fleming invariably produced. One
might have thought from the way men greeted him that he was some great
public benefactor. Quite the opposite. Hepworth, and no doubt many
others, had, through him, lost thousands of dollars, but this did not in
the least affect their pleasure in his society nor tarnish their
confidence in his good intentions.

Fleming was about Hepworth's age, rather tall and rather stout. He had a
broad, clean-shaven face, and the mouth of an orator, large, mobile,
stretching across his face in a straight line and turning up sharply at
the corners. His eyes, which were blue-gray, had a most ingratiating and
irresistible expression of camaraderie.

During the course of his life many unkind names had been applied to
Fleming, but by women, mark you, never by men. There were quantities of
good wives and mothers who regarded him very much as the devil is
supposed to regard holy water. Had they not reason? At the very mention
of his name they had seen a certain wild, primitive gleam light the eyes
of even their most staid and house-broken men, and at the sound of his
voice the most tractable and responsible husbands would seem to hear
again the pipes of Pan, and forgetful of duty, daily bread and family
obligations would follow eagerly whither those wild notes led.

Beyond question Fleming possessed that magnetic quality which opens all
doors. He was at home in any society and where he was laughter flowed as
wine. He had neither profession nor settled business, but always
referred to himself as a "prospector--a prospector of the old school."

The first gay greetings over, Mr. Fleming established himself in a
comfortable chair, and said without preamble, but with his usual
devil-may-care nonchalance, "I've come to ask a favor of you, Cress, a
mighty big favor."

Hepworth mechanically stretched his hand out toward his check book.

"Oh, it's not money I want this time," said Fleming easily. "It's no
favor to me to lend me money. That's always spent on others. Anyway,
I've got more than I can handle for once. You see, it's this way. I've
got to go over to Idaho. I've just got wind of a big thing there, a big
thing. Two boys I know want me to go over and look at it and I'm off
to-day. Biggest thing that's been struck in years, they tell me. Both
of them stone broke. Didn't have enough money to pay railway fare. Stole
rides, practically no food for a week. If there's anything in it, I may
be good enough to allow you to finance it."

"Let me see," said Hepworth reflectively, "according to the invariable
law of ratio, I'm about due to win on some of these ventures of yours
I've so obligingly financed."

Mr. Fleming solemnly and sadly shook his head. "Set a beggar on
horseback and sooner or later he'll show his rags. The born millionaire!
You show all the degenerate earmarks." He pointed the finger of scorn at
Hepworth. "Even if I hadn't come along you would still have been a
millionaire, climbed to it on some one else's shoulders. Entirely
forgotten the old days, haven't you? Why who," explosively, "laid the
foundation of your soul-deadening fortune? Me. Myself. Well, that's what
a man has to expect in this world. But seriously, Cress, I do want you
to do something for me."

"Don't frighten me in this way then," said Hepworth. "If it isn't money,
I'm getting apprehensive. You're in some scrape and I've got to take
off my coat and work like a nigger to get you out."

"Honest to God, no," said Mr. Fleming fervently. "It's just this. You
see my little girl is here to spend her vacation with me--jumped across
three states and got here day before yesterday, and under the
circumstances it's kind of rough on her for me to go skating off this
way leaving her all alone in a barracks of a hotel and in this place
where she don't know a soul. Sure's I'm sitting here, Cress, I did my
best not to listen to the boys," Fleming spoke earnestly. He always had
the virtue of believing profoundly in himself. "It didn't seem fair to
her, you know. But, oh Lord! What's the use? You know how it is when a
new property swims into my ken. I get the fever so's I can't eat and I
can't sleep, and it's 'my heart in the Highlands' so's I'm like to die
unless I'm up and away to that little old new mine that's just been
found, seeing what's to her, anyway. And you may believe it or not," in
solemn asseveration, "but all the time I'm holding back and trying not
to go. I've got the cramp in my feet so that I can't hobble, but the
moment I yield, and take to the path again, it's gone. That's a fact.
Now," the musical note of persuasion was strong in Mr. Fleming's voice,
"now all I'm asking of you, Cress, is to look in on my little girl now
and then and see that she has everything she wants. She's got a sort of
vinegar-faced Sue with her that she calls her maid, so she's not
entirely alone; but I want to be easy in my mind about her, to know that
she's got some one to fall back on if anything unpleasant comes up.

"She's pretty cute, you know. About on to everything that's going. Can
take the best kind of care of herself. Has had to, poor kid. Her mother
died, and you know, Cress, she might just as well have had a grasshopper
for a father as me. Although I've tried, she'd tell you herself, I've
tried, that is, as far as the limitations of my artistic temperament
would permit. But when I feel the _wanderlust_ and the _weltschmerz_ and
all that in my blood and hear the siren voices of new properties
calling, why, the fireside fetters have got to fall, the white, clinging
arms have got to unloosen their grip. That's all there is to it. You
know in books how the father of a motherless daughter is always father
and mother and brothers and sisters and grandmother, uncles and aunts to
her? Well, I haven't been all those to Fuschia. I wouldn't have known
how and she wouldn't have stood for it. She's got no particular use for
fireside fetters, herself. Oh," optimistically, "I guess she'll be all
right here. I'm leaving her all the money she can spend. But I just want
you to keep an eye on her. Kind of see that the wheels are running all
right and that she's amused and don't mope. You'll like her, you know.
It's a funny thing, but everybody's just crazy and always has been about
that kid."

Hepworth was not proof against the appeal in his old friend's eyes,
neither was he capable of shattering Fleming's simple faith that he,
Hepworth, a jaded and middle-aged person, would find Fleming's daughter
a delightful and interesting charge.

Fleming's mind still ran on his child. "She's about the only thing in
petticoats that has any real confidence in me," he said, with pride.
"It's only been once or twice in my career that I've seen a look of real
friendship in a woman's eyes. The first sight of me brings that wary,
on-guard gleam way back in their blue or brown windows of the soul. You
can't fool a woman. They've got those intuitions, you know, and they
know instinctively that I'm a born missionary to the henpecked, that
it's my mission in life to bring a little cheer into the lives of those
poor shut-ins, the married men; scatter a little sunshine on their path.

"By the way," as if struck by a sudden thought, "you've married since I
last saw you. Some slip of a girl, I'll be bound. That's what the
middle-aged millionaire's sure to do. Well, hold on to your money,
Cress. Don't trust to your own fascinations. And you keep an eye on my
little Fuschia, won't you?"

Manfully concealing his apprehensions, Hepworth promised to do all that
lay in his power to be a father to Fleming's daughter and had the
consolation of seeing his old friend depart most jauntily and evidently
with a weight off his mind.

But when the door had finally closed on him Hepworth let his
perfunctorily smiling face relax. But it did not remain merely grave and
preoccupied, for as he continued to gaze fixedly, but unseeingly, at a
large paper weight before him, his eyes narrowed and his brow contracted
in a frown.

He had neither the heart, time nor inclination to spend his leisure
moments amusing such an utterly spoiled, untrained, undisciplined child
as he was sure Fleming's daughter must be. Allowed to choose her own
path from babyhood, wilful, headstrong--oh, well, what was the use of
anticipating? He'd promised to look after her, and disagreeable duty as
it was sure to be, he had to see it through, and that was all there was
about it.

He decided to look her up the next afternoon. Take her a doll or a box
of candy. Perhaps, though, she was too old for a doll. How old was she,
anyway? He had forgotten to ask Jim. Probably about twelve or fifteen
years. Yes, certainly, the box of candy was safer. That was always
acceptable and agreeable to any of the seven ages of women.

He sighed again, and then, as if seeking distraction, he picked up the
New York newspaper he was about to open when Fleming's card had been
brought to him. He surveyed it languidly, his eye roving with
indifference up and down the columns. Suddenly his attention was vividly
arrested.

His whole gaze, even further, his whole heart hung on a paragraph
stating that Eugene Gresham had just sailed on the _Mauritania_. It was
known among Mr. Gresham's friends that he had recently received a
commission to paint the portrait of a princess of the royal house of
Austria and that upon completing this he would go to England to finish a
portrait, already begun, on a previous occasion, of the beautiful Lady
Heppelwynd. Mr. Gresham, when seen on board ship a moment before
sailing, would neither confirm nor deny these rumors.

The frown disappeared from Hepworth's face. What commendable discretion!
Whether the credit were due Dita or Gresham mattered little. It was the
admirable restraint, this delicate and unexpected regard for
appearances, which Hepworth applauded. To do him justice, that was his
first thought, the sober second one was profound relief that the
fascinating will-o'-the-wisp was as far away from the impulsive and
curious Dita as was the smoky lantern. He put the paper down and rose to
his feet. Fleming's little girl should have a box of candy that was a
box of candy.




CHAPTER XII

FUSCHIA FLEMING


Procrastination was a thief that had never succeeded in wresting much
time from Hepworth. He was one of those rare and exemplary natures who
never put off until to-morrow what they can do to-day. Never did he
stand shivering on the edge of his cold bath, but plunged in immediately
without pause for consideration. Obnoxious virtues these--prejudicial to
any popularity among his fellow-beings, therefore it speaks volumes for
him that he was able to overlive them.

This all goes to show that although the duty of keeping an eye on
Fleming's daughter became more repugnant to him the longer it remained
in contemplation, he yet lost no time in looking her up, as he expressed
it to himself. Neither did he waver in his promise to himself fitly to
celebrate Eugene Gresham's departure for other shores, but kept his vow
by selecting the most gaudily decorated and wastefully beribboned box of
sweets he could secure, and armed with it, as a hostage to impertinent
childhood, took himself to the big hotel where Miss Fuschia Fleming was
stopping.

He sent up his name to her and was very shortly informed that Miss
Fleming was in the garden and would be delighted to have him join her
there.

Hepworth curled his lip. What grown-up airs! Naturally, she had lost no
time in turning up her hair and having her gowns lengthened since her
father's departure, and he, Hepworth, would have to play up to this
phase of missishness.

He was dazzled for the moment by the bright sunshine, the brilliant
flowers, and mechanically followed the page, threading his way through
various groups of people. Before a table among the roses sat a young
woman reading. The page stopped; Hepworth stopped; the young woman cast
aside her book and rose.

[Illustration: Before a table sat a young woman reading.]

"How do you do, Mr. Hepworth?" She stretched out her hand with a boyish
gesture, smiling into his eyes, and the sunshine grew dim. "Won't you
sit down? I've just ordered some tea. If you don't drink it, won't you
tell the man to bring you something else when he comes? Father said--"

"But father is surely not Fleming, Jim Fleming," he said, firmly
determined to get this absurd mistake straightened out at once.

"But father just is," she asserted as firmly. "And since you asked for
Miss Fleming, I am she, Fuschia Fleming. That is my ridiculous name."

But Hepworth had so far lost his mental equilibrium that he could not
immediately recover himself.

"Fuschia Fleming is a little girl," he insisted, although this time not
half so positively, "and great Heavens," with one of his quick smiles,
"I've brought you a box of candy and just barely escaped buying you a
doll."

"I wish you had," she said. "I love dolls, especially the kind that you
would bring me." There was undeniably something heady about Fuschia
Fleming's glance. "And as for sweets, they're grateful and comforting to
any age. You'd better give me that box at once, and I'll give you a
practical demonstration of my appreciation."

Fuschia had the curliest mouth. There is no other way to describe it. It
was all in ripples, not small, but looking smaller than it really was
because it turned up quite sharply at the corners, like her father's.
And the lashes that lay on her pale, smooth cheeks were the curliest and
longest Hepworth had ever seen. Her eyes were blue, blue as the sea, and
very cool and gay and inclusive. Without being sharp or speculative or
inquisitive, they yet took in all the details of whatever they rested
upon.

But Hepworth was a keen observer, and he noticed at once that although
her pale face was for the most part alive with laughter, there was yet a
certain worn look about it, as if she had been recently over-taxed and
fatigued. There were faint but undeniable lines about the mouth and eyes
that time had never etched there; and that blythe assured bearing, her
detached, yet ready manner, were not suggestive of the ease of confident
youth. They bespoke training.

Hepworth's eyes, their droop rather more pronounced than usual, were
fastened on an adjacent palm, as if he demanded from it the answer to
this riddle. Getting no response there, he turned his speculating eye
on a tree of magnificent crimson roses as if hoping for some
enlightenment from that quarter.

"Why do you not tell me all about it?" urged Fuschia gently. "What's the
use of trying to puzzle me out unaided? Father has evidently told you a
lot of conflicting things. I really can throw more light on the subject
than any one else."

Her voice was beautiful, soft and full and creamy, with all exquisite
modulations and inflections, and its music cleared Hepworth's befogged
brain. He released the palm and the rose tree from the third degree to
which he had been subjecting them, and leaned back in his chair as if he
relaxed his mind as well as his body, smiling back at her, as confident
now, and as assured as herself.

"I don't have to," he said. "I know. It's just come to me. You see your
father didn't happen to mention that you are studying for the stage."

"Studying for the stage!" she cried, as if to refute him, considered,
and then nodded emphatically. "Of course I am, and expect to be until I
die; but hardly in the sense you mean. My field of study at the present
time includes a good deal of practical experience. I've been on the
stage now for three years, ever since I left school."

"On the stage!" he exclaimed. "But my dear child, under what name?"

"My own," she answered. "Oh, do not look so puzzled. It is the most
unlikely thing in the world that you should ever have heard of me. I'm
far from a star, just one of the humble members of first this and then
that western stock company. You see, my idea was to get my training and
experience before I burst upon New York. But New York is beginning to
seem too iridescent a dream ever to be realized."

There was a fall in her voice, a touch of wistfulness, which Hepworth
found rather touching because its pathos was both uncalculated and
unconscious.

"Why?" he asked in surprise. This note of resignation in her tones, of
acceptance of a disappointing, inevitable circumstance, struck him as
singularly out of character and aroused his curiosity.

"It's been the same thing several times in succession now," said
Fuschia, a touch of superstitious gravity in her expression. "Just as
father is preparing to stake me, and I'm getting a company together to
take New York by storm as Rosalind, why, father loses his last dime on a
dead-sure thing. There's a law about it. The biggest winning proposition
in years, always comes along just as I am ready to cross the Alps and
storm Italy. Uncanny, isn't it?"

"What nonsense!" Hepworth clipped off the end of a cigar as if it were
Fleming's head. "Do not let yourself be affected by such an absurdity.
The only law, and I admit it's a strong and binding one, is Jim's
selfishness and irresponsibility. Now my dear child," Hepworth was
beginning to fancy himself enormously in the role of paternal adviser,
"you make him give you as much as possible."

"I do," she interrupted softly.

"And you lay it all aside, very securely, never touching a penny of
it--"

"What about my clothes?" another interruption.

"Never touching a penny of it," went on Hepworth firmly, ignoring these
asides on her part, "until you have saved enough to finance yourself.
Isn't that reasonable?"

"Ye-s," admitted Fuschia. "It is a very reasonable and sensible
suggestion, Mr. Hepworth, that is," thoughtfully, "if you leave out
father and me. But just get it into your head that at the moment I'd
save a nice little heap, father would be hit with an overwhelming
impulse to back the wrong horse, and, here's something awfully queer
psychologically, Mr. Hepworth, I'd know as sure as I'm Fuschia Fleming
that it was the wrong horse, and yet, I'd get inoculated with the mental
virus before I'd know it, and beg him to let me in on it. And you know
that father is incapable of staking half or even two thirds of his
little all against any proposition he believes in. The only thing that
can satisfy him and make his blood tingle is to stake the whole. No
limit but the blue canopy of heaven. Limits do fret father."

Mr. Hepworth slightly lifted his shoulders. Then he dropped another lump
of sugar into a cup of hot tea she had given him.

"I wish to seem neither irrelevant nor impertinent," he said at last,
"but can you act?"

Miss Fuschia Fleming threw up her white chin and laughter bubbled
unquenchable from her throat, not vain-glorious mirth, as if the fact of
her superlative achievement mocked his crude question, but the
unrestrained laughter of genuine amusement.

"The idea of asking an actress such a question," she said at last,
touching each eye lightly and deftly with a delicate handkerchief. "You
may thank your lucky stars that I don't nearly drown you with
picturesque and highly colored tales of my triumphs and then hurl the
full scrap-book at you. My, but you are a rash man! To ask a
professional if she can act!" Again her full-throated laughter rang out
delightfully and so heartily that it shook the petals from the cluster
of pale golden roses she wore on her breast.

"But look here, seriously now," her laughter died quickly away, her face
assumed a gravity he had not dreamed her mobile features could express,
her gaze fastened upon him with a sort of hungry, passionate eagerness.

"That was a horrible question of yours," she shivered, as if the breeze
blowing over the gardens from the Elysian sea chilled her. "One should
know intuitively, instinctively whether an actress can act or not. Good
Lord!" she brought her hand down on the table. "If you don't feel it,
know it, beyond all argument, why it isn't there, that's all.

"Unless I set you dreaming, unless I suggest in this or that varying
pose or expression, the whole world of women, I'm not a born actress.
Training, study can make a good mechanical nightingale of me, a clever
imitation of the real thing. That's all. But unless I have the chameleon
quality of reflecting my part, the unerring understanding of any type of
woman I may be called upon to represent, how can I be an actress? What
does it profit me to give the public a carefully studied, intellectual
representation of Portia or Nora, or Juliet or Candida, wide apart as
the poles as they may be? I must not only apprehend them, I must be them
in every fibre of my being, in every cell of my brain, in every beat of
my heart, or I'm nothing. Unless I can convince you that Camille and I
are one in emotion and view of life, and then obliterate that
impression when I speak to you as Rosalind, why I'm not an actress, not
the kind I care to be, anyway."

"By Jove, my dear," cried Hepworth, "you need have no doubts on that
score." He had not felt the thrill of such genuine enthusiasm for many a
long day.

He forgot the delicate and uncertain state of his marital affairs,
forgot the censorious world, his ennui and doubt and regret.

"I have a conviction," he said, "that Jim is going to win a lot on this
new proposition of his. If he doesn't, it's all the same anyway. Why
should you waste your youth and your genius in twentieth rate stock
companies?"

In spite of these cheering words, her head continued to droop. Her face
had grown paler, and sad were the eyes she lifted to his.

"But you asked me if I could act. You weren't sure. You didn't see me as
Camille or Rosalind. You just saw Fuschia Fleming all the time."

"Of course I did." His smile was most comfortingly reassuring. "But I
saw Fuschia Fleming as Juliet and Portia and all the others. I merely
asked you if you could act to see what you would say. No, no, my dear,
your future is written so plainly that he who runs may read. No more
one-night stands in dreary little towns, Miss Fuschia Fleming, but long
engagements, crowded houses, enormous box-office receipts, wildly
enthusiastic audiences. Can't you hear and see them? New York, London,
Paris for you!"

"Oh-h!" Fuschia was herself again. She exhaled rapture in an ecstatic
sigh. She rose. It is impossible to sit in moments of such high
exultation. She positively seemed to soar, to tread on clouds. It was
growing late and chill. Almost every one had left the garden, only a few
absorbed groups remained. Fuschia was an actress. Self-expression was a
necessity to her. She rested her hand, a snowflake, gratefully on his
arm, she floated against him, a thistledown, and before he knew it had
lightly, enthusiastically, unconcernedly kissed him on the cheek.

"You dear," she cried, "I'll repay you by showing you what I can do. To
tread the forest of Arden in New York! Oh-h! But you are not going. No,
no, no!"

That was what Hepworth, rather overcome by the unconventional and
unexpected expression of her thanks, was preparing to do. He thought it
best, but his decision was not adamantine, far from it. He always prided
himself upon the open mind, and an ability to see all sides of a
question, so when Fuschia suggested that he return later and dine with
her, it struck him as a possible, even admirable solution of his daily
puzzle how to put in the evening and he accepted without more debate,
with an alacrity, in fact, bordering on gratitude.

He was therefore on time to the minute and Miss Fleming was equally
punctual.

As they sat through a dinner, not elaborate, but as prolonged as if it
were composed of all the courses on the menu, Hepworth was struck by the
positive quality of Fuschia's beauty. It was not always so, evidently.
She was as changeful as the chameleon she had spoken of. In the garden
that afternoon, in her white serge frock, she had at first impressed him
as a pale, rather attractive looking young woman whose charm was
greater than her prettiness; but viewed in the rose-colored lights, and
across the pink blossoms on their small table, she was a very wonderful
creature. She was, in truth, wild with joy and her expression of it was
delightful. Her eyes were blue as the sea when the sun is one vast
sparkle over it, her mouth, made for laughter, grew curlier every
moment. Her white evening gown was a dream.

In addition to her admirable outward appearance, Miss Fuschia Fleming
was a comedienne of unsurpassed gifts. She was also witty, well-read and
sweet-natured, and when she chose to exert herself she could make sixty
minutes seem sixty seconds by any one's watch, even that of the grimmest
old curmudgeon, and Hepworth certainly was not the grimmest old
curmudgeon. He was only a very lonely and sad-hearted man whose days had
been hanging heavily on his hands.

"Good old Jim," he soliloquized as he took his way homeward that
evening. "He believed sufficiently in my friendship to come right to me
when he was in a hole. Made no bones about it. Asked me to keep an eye
on his daughter, sure enough of my affection for him to know I'd do it.
I shouldn't wonder if this Idaho proposition is a good thing if it's
properly financed. Jim's judgment is pretty sound. Well, we'll see,
we'll see."




CHAPTER XIII

SHOCKING THE HEWSTONS


As the winter wore on the weather in New York offered daily a more
violent and odious comparison to the blue seas and balmy airs of
California. The cold, sullen skies, dull, damp days and piercing winds
set more than one dreaming of sunshine and summer, and among the many
was Alice Wilstead.

She was pondering thus, looking about her with surprise, one especially
snowy, dreary winter afternoon as she took her way to Mrs. Hewston's. It
was one of those thoroughly depressing days when nothing could really
raise one's spirits but the inspiring glow of firelight. Mrs. Wilstead
certainly looked as if she needed that and all positively cheering if
not inebriating things as she entered Mrs. Hewston's drawing-room. Her
piquant dark face was meant for smiles and gaiety, all of her features
apparently designed to that end, for the corners of her mouth, the tip
of her nose, the slant of her eyes, all inclined upward. It is a tragedy
when a person of such countenance is in an introspective or melancholy
mood. Sober meditations have an aging and blighting effect on the
features of those born to look out upon the world with an arch and
piquant interest.

Isabel Hewston roused herself a little reluctantly. She was sitting
alone most comfortably in a delightfully easy chair, she had on a
becoming and loose Paris tea-gown. She had resolutely put behind her the
haunting specter of increasing flesh, had taken an afternoon off from
the persistent and continued battle she had been forced to wage with it,
and now lay, a box of sweets on the table beside her, a new novel in her
hand, enjoying to the full her temporary respite. It is to her credit
that she put aside her book at the most nerve-tingling paragraph without
a sigh.

"Dear Alice," she exclaimed, lifting herself on one elbow, "you have a
bad-news look all over you, the very rustle of your skirt proclaims it.
What can be the matter?"

"Give me some tea," said Mrs. Wilstead gloomily, "and let me sit down
and rest." She slowly removed her furs. "My dear Isabel, do you mean to
say you do not know?"

"Know what?" asked Mrs. Hewston in bewilderment, ringing and
mechanically ordering tea. "How could I possibly know anything after
just getting off the steamer this morning? What has happened? You
haven't been speculating, Alice, and losing all your money?"

Mrs. Wilstead hastily disclaimed any such unforgivable crime and
inconsolable grief as losing money. "Then really you have not heard,"
she exclaimed. "Isabel, I am more worried than I can say. Lemon, please.
It is stupid of you, Isabel, never to get into your head the fact that I
couldn't be guilty of taking cream. To think of such a thing occurring!
I had hoped that with Eugene Gresham out of the way, having the decency
to go to England and France, and the papers full of his spectacular
stunts, that all talk would cease and that when Cresswell Hepworth came
back from that western trip that everything would be all right."

"What are you talking about?" asked Isabel Hewston with the calmness of
despair. "If it isn't too much trouble, would you mind making a few
explanations? Just one might suffice."

"It is that absurd, undisciplined Perdita Hepworth. She has had her head
completely turned by the success of Maud Carmine and now she and Maud
have gone into business together."

"Into business?" Mrs. Hewston made a tremendous clatter among the
tea-cups. "Business! What can you mean? Cresswell has not failed?"

"Good heavens, no! But that is the reason he has been so long in the
West. At least that is what every one says. Dita and Maud informed him
of this scheme, and he, of course, expressed his opinion of the whole
matter, refused to countenance it; but he couldn't do anything with such
a headstrong creature as Dita, and so he simply cleared out; went West
and has stayed there, while those two girls have gone stubbornly on and
carried out their plans."

"Business!" Isabel still rolled her eyes in dazed speculation. "But what
kind of business? What could they possibly do? Lamp-shades, menu-cards?
I'm sure I've always heard that Perdita didn't make such a brilliant
success when she tried that sort of thing before!"

"Menu-cards! Lamp-shades!" Alice laughed scornfully. "That's mere paper
dolls to this venture. This is a business of their own invention,
although Dita does take orders for house decoration also; but the main
purpose is dressing the wealthy, telling the plain little daughters of
the rich what to wear."

"For pity's sake!" gasped Isabel. "What sort of place is it, beauty
parlors or dressmaking?"

"Oh, dear me, neither! Nothing so commonplace. They have taken a house
just on the Avenue (they say it is a dream within), and you have to
write for an appointment, and then if they will consider you at all they
write back and set a time, and you go exactly as if you were calling,
you know, and you are received by either Maud or Dita or both. Then you
come again whenever they tell you, and all the time Dita is studying you
just as a portrait painter would. Finally, when she feels that she has
you thoroughly in mind, and is quite decided about the way you shall be
clothed, she has designs made for you of hats and gowns, little water
colors, you know, and sends you to her dressmaker. She also has your
maid come and dress your hair before her, according to her directions.
And it costs you!" Alice Wilstead pursed her mouth and lifted her brows,
"It costs you! Oh, like the dickens!"

"Who is that?" said Mrs. Hewston turning.

"Only me," Wallace Martin replied modestly and ungrammatically,
entering, as usual, unannounced, a privileged friend of the family, and
greeting the two women with his usual barking cheerfulness.

"I just walked up home with that pretty little Lolita Withers, and, as
you were only a block or two farther, I came on here."

The two women gazed at each other with a long, wondering stare. "Lolita
Withers!" they exclaimed simultaneously. "Pretty!" Nothing could have
been more eloquent than their tones.

"My dear Wallace," said Mrs. Hewston, finding her voice, "is this some
new joke? Are you quite sane?"

"He means it for a joke," said Mrs. Wilstead, who had been peering at
him curiously. "He is going in for eccentricity, or else the success of
his play has gone to his head."

"Not a bit of it," replied Martin with unmoved smiles. "Lolita Withers
is at present an obviously pretty girl. Any one would so consider her."

"Obviously pretty." Mrs. Wilstead had found her tongue by this time, and
acrid and scoffing it proved. "That skinny, ineffective little Lolita
Withers! Dull-eyed, anaemic, with stooping shoulders and wispy light
hair."

"She looks like a dream of spring," said Wallace, helping himself
lavishly to tea and cakes. "A sort of an evanescent beauty. Truly, yes,"
he affirmed, "she's been to Maud Carmine and Perdita Hepworth." He gave
a great burst of laughter.

"If they can make any one believe that Lolita Withers is pretty," said
Mrs. Hewston dazedly, "they are indeed benefactors of the race."

"Perdita Hepworth is a genius, a wizard. I always said so." Alice
announced this with a sort of triumphant conviction. "She could make
Aaron's rod blossom like the rose."

"But where did they get the money?" Mrs. Hewston's mind turned always to
practical things. "If Dita really quarreled with Cress, would he--?"

"Maud's money." Martin spoke with the assurance of one possessing
authoritative knowledge. "Cresswell Hepworth! Oh, no, he went off in a
terrible huff because the girls laid their plans before him and told him
what they were going to do. At least," he amended, "that is the idea I
got from the little that Maud has occasionally told me. Yes, it's Maud's
money; but they'll lose nothing, plucky girls! Double and treble it,
more likely. They've already had an overwhelming success."

"I'm going to them," cried Isabel Hewston excitedly. "If they are so
wonderful they ought to be able to make me look slender without my
having to go to all the bother of being really slender."

"You'll have to stand in line then; that old Mrs. Peter Huff is jumping
for joy and calling down blessings on their heads because they've
literally transformed her three ugly daughters. Maud said they were
splendid material, and Dita did wonders with them. The old lady hopes to
get them married off now."

"Alice! When can we go to them?" Mrs. Hewston's voice was trembling with
excitement.

"I can't go now." There was a distinct fall of disappointment in Alice
Wilstead's voice. "The truth is, I'm going to California with the
Warrens the first of next week. Why, what is that?"

There was a sound of some one wheezing, puffing, muttering without the
door, and then the curtain was violently jerked aside and Mr. Hewston
entered. His hair stood up white and ruffled about his head, his face
was of a much livelier crimson than usual, and he was puffing out his
lips as if blowing fire and smoke from his mouth. In one hand he was
tightly clasping a newspaper.

"Willoughby! My dear!" his wife rose in consternation. "What is it, what
has happened?"

For answer Mr. Hewston spread open the paper and struck it with his
hand. "Read that," he cried tragically, "read that! My poor friend,
driven from his home by the vagaries of a mad, irresponsible girl, his
life ruined by the foolish, frivolous creature he married! Turned from
his home, he was driven to this."

Wallace had seized the paper, and the two women hung over his shoulder
to scan the sheet before them.

What met their eyes were huge, black head-lines above and below the
pictures of Cresswell Hepworth and a very pretty woman.

The head-lines announced that the two had been in an accident in Mr.
Hepworth's motor-car at Santa Barbara. Both were thrown out, but neither
sustained any serious injuries. The article went on to say that Mr.
Hepworth had, during his stay in the West, evinced great interest in the
career of this beautiful and gifted young woman, an actress of
reputation in her part of the world, but unknown in the East. It was
understood, however, that she was to play a New York engagement during
the coming spring, making her first bow to a metropolitan audience as
Rosalind in a superb stage presentation of _As You Like It_. There was
no question of the beauty of the mounting of this famous comedy, nor the
strength of the company with which the young star would be surrounded,
as the capital behind her was practically unlimited.




CHAPTER XIV

PUBLICITY


When the beautiful, young wife of a multi-millionaire takes advantage of
her husband's absence on a prolonged and unavoidable business trip to
embark upon a rather bizarre and eccentric venture of her own, it is to
be expected the situation will be hugely discussed, especially in its
three-fold phases--the lady first, the exact relations existing between
husband and wife next, and third, the business itself.

Perhaps in this case the business should be put first, above the lady,
and above any sentimental interest in marital misunderstandings, for
Perdita's skill in "bedecking and bedraping" was well known among her
sisters, whose ideals in bedecking were those of Paris, and who had no
Greek longings to be "noble and nude and antique." And had they not for
the past two years enviously regarded Maud Carmine--who had been as a
walking _mannequin_ among them, the living, breathing advertisement of
Perdita's abilities.

Therefore from the very first business bade fair to engulf the new firm
and sweep the two partners off their feet, and if the list of those who
daily assembled in "Hepworth and Carmine's" reception-rooms were to be
published, it would look like a social registry or a page from _Who's
Who_; that is, a page with all of the masculine names carefully culled.

There were elderly ladies and young girls, and ladies in all the waning
stages between the two. The elderly and waning ones all hoped before
Mrs. Hepworth got through with them to look like the young girls, and
the young girls, with all the enthusiasm of youth, hoped to look like
Perdita Hepworth.

There arrived then, one morning, at this palace of hope, Mrs. Willoughby
Hewston, who, as she stepped from her motor, glanced nervously right and
left and ascended the steps of the house Perdita and Maud had taken
just off the Avenue with an agility of which her best friends would not
have considered her capable. This nervousness, this hurry was due to the
fact that only the day before she had mentioned her intention to her
husband, with the result that she was thunderously ordered not to go
near the place, under penalty of his worse than censure. He gave her to
understand that this would be something too terrible for her imagination
even to apprehend. Consequently, Mrs. Hewston wasted no time in getting
to Hepworth and Carmine's as early as possible the next morning. She
would have been less than woman had she not done so.

The reception-room was spacious, sunny and restful, depending for its
effect upon beautiful woods and long, unbroken lines; for color, there
was the hint of ivory and tea-green, ineffably serene, and there Mrs.
Hewston awaited Dita, her agitation subsiding somewhat under the calm
influence of the place.

But when Dita appeared it returned in full force. "Oh, my dear," she
exclaimed, "what a charming spot this is! How original! How daring of
you and Maud! Oh, my dear, if Willoughby knew I was here!" She raised
her hands with a gesture full of meaning. "You know that he is in such a
state anyway over those newspaper articles."

"What newspaper articles?" asked Perdita. "Do you mean those that have
appeared about all this?" she waved her hand comprehensively about her.

"Haven't you seen them?" Mrs. Hewston looked frightened. "Oh, my dear
child, how very stupid of me. Why, why did I mention them? I supposed,
of course, that you knew. But if you do not, please do not ask me
anything more, for I never, never will be the bearer of bad news."

Dita stared at her in puzzled amazement for a moment and then she took
her firmly by the shoulders. "Look here, Mrs. Hewston, you are
frightening me dreadfully. I haven't an idea what you are talking about.
Now you must tell me, indeed you must. Do you not see the state of mind
in which you leave me unless you do?"

"Oh, my dear," Mrs. Hewston shook her handkerchief out of her bag,
evidently preparing for its possible use. "I didn't mean to frighten
you, and you shouldn't allow yourself to be so easily upset. Now,
understand, no one was hurt, but those dreadful papers yesterday were
full of a motor accident which occurred in California."

"Cresswell's car?" interrupted Dita quickly. "Was he--" She was about to
say "injured," but Mrs. Hewston took the word from her mouth, or rather,
substituted another for it.

"Alone? No, dear," shaking her head a little as at the regrettable, but
to be expected frailties of men. "He was not alone. He was driving the
car, it seems, with a beautiful young actress by his side. She must be a
very--er--persuasive person, too, because the papers said that she is to
appear here this spring in some superb production or other, and they
strongly insinuated that Cress' money is behind the whole thing. But you
see, that, as I said, there's nothing in it all, nothing really to worry
over."

"I see," said Dita, but slowly and without enthusiasm.

"And now, my dear," Mrs. Hewston had suddenly grown quite brisk, "let's
forget all this and talk of something that is more interesting to you,
because it's in your line. Perdita," in her most wheedling and cooing
tones, "I want you to make me lovely."

"You are lovely, Mrs. Hewston."

"Oh, in a middle-aged, broad, pink kind of way, but I want you to make
me look slender and lissome and girlish without all this awful dieting
and exercise and these dreadfully tight corsets that make one feel as if
one were nothing more nor less than blanc-mange in a tin mold. And you
know you do come out of them with your flesh all fluted, just like the
blanc-mange when it's set."

"You shall be quite lissome, I promise you that," said Dita consolingly,
if rather absently. "Come to me again early next week and I shall have
some designs for you to consider, beautiful, long folds and all that.
But I can't perform miracles, you know, and you'll have to diet a little
and exercise; yes, and wear the boned corset; you don't want to look
like a--"

"Do not say it!" cried Mrs. Hewston nervously. "I am sure you are going
to say either 'whale' or 'tub,' and I can't stand it. That's what those
awful corsettieres always say when I protest the least bit against
their tortures.

"And Perdita, one thing more--my chin. I always say the chin is the
greatest give-away a woman's got. She can get around anything else, but,
no matter what she does, that chin sticks out like a cliff and reveals
every year she's lived. Of course, you may try to draw off attention
with a diamond dog collar or jeweled black velvets, but at the best
they're only poor, miserable makeshifts; and one must wear evening dress
no matter whether one has rolls of flesh or a gridiron of bones. If you
don't, people either think you come from the woods or have something
worse than bones or superfluous flesh to conceal. Just look at
Willoughby!" Mrs. Hewston's emotions overcame her here and she dabbed
her eyes carefully with her handkerchief. "He is fat as a pig. He
shuffles and hobbles about with the gout. He eats anything he pleases,
and never thinks of cultivating a pleasant expression. Yet if I should
die, he could marry again without difficulty. Oh, it's a hard world for
us women! But really, I must go, dear. Just look out and see if you see
Willoughby by chance, either up or down the street."

As soon as she was assured of safety and had departed, Perdita, who,
fortunately for herself and her customers, had no other appointments for
the morning, sent for the papers of the day before and carefully
considered the incident of Mr. Hepworth, Miss Fuschia Fleming and the
motor-car as set forth in the various journals.

"And so," said Perdita to herself with glooming eyes, when she had
finished an exhausting perusal, "he is going to back this deserving
young adventuress, who has, no doubt, played upon his sympathies, in a
great spectacular presentation this spring, and in New York. Well, there
will be something else spectacular. I will make this venture of ours a
stupendous success now or I will know the reason why. Where on earth is
Maud? She is never about when I really need her."

She frowned a moment over Maud's delinquency and then happened to
remember that Miss Carmine had expressed an intention of being present
at a rehearsal of one of Wallace Martin's plays. Dita then decided on
the moment to drive to the theater and consult with her partner at once
on the new and spectacular policy of their house which she was mentally
outlining.

But first, before starting, she thoughtfully selected some of a number
of photographs of herself and also of Maud. "I suppose I shall have a
dreadful time persuading her," she reflected as she drove through the
streets. "She has bred in the bone those old-fashioned ideals of New
York when it lived in Bleecker and Houston Streets."

But curiously enough, while events of one character had led Perdita
strongly to consider the adoption of a certain line of action,
circumstances of a widely differing nature had impelled Maud practically
to the same conclusion. Which only goes to show how clever a weaver is
Fate and how wonderfully she contrasts and combines all her various
threads.

For two or three hours Maud had been sitting in a dimly-lighted, empty
playhouse, watching the rather dreary and disillusionizing progress of
Martin's latest play.

It was an odd thing, she mournfully reflected, that Wallace never got
himself, his own, bubbling, merry, joyous self, full of quirks and
quips, into his plays. They would seem to have been written by a
secondary personality, for they were all, without exception, intensely
serious and depressing, dealing with problems of the most complex and
dun-colored character.

Maud was extremely practical. She never dreamed of buoying up her
spirits with any ambrosial reflections that this latest offering was "a
distinct contribution to the more serious drama." Neither did she
attempt to convince herself that there were enough high-browed folk in
the town to keep the play on for, peradventure, three nights. No, she
simply, and with her usual common sense, reserved judgment until the
third act, and then after a moment of wonder that Wallace had found a
firm of managers willing to undertake the production, with all the
expense entailed, when they had just one chance in a million to win (in
her opinion, at least), she turned to more practical issues.

"Dita and I," she remarked mentally, "have got to make a stupendous
success if I want to marry Wallace, which I do, and he is going to
continue to write plays, which he is. But I'll have a frightful time
persuading Dita to run her business along the lines of twentieth century
advertising. She has all sorts of ante-bellum ideas about stately
procedure and measured methods, derived, of course, from those
generations of lazy southern aristocrats."

While she mused, amid the terrific racket of moving things about the
stage in preparation for the fourth act, she felt a light touch upon her
shoulder, and looked up to see Perdita, pale but determined, standing
beside her.

"I'll just slip into this seat beside you," said Mrs. Hepworth, suiting
the action to the word. "I want to talk to you a few minutes. Now,
Maudie, I know that you will not like it, but we've been doing
awfully well lately, and I think it would be a good idea to put what
we've made in advertisement. Of course, there's a lot we can get without
paying for it. The Sunday newspapers will print pages about us,
especially--especially if we let them have some of our most stunning
pictures and allow those interviews where the artists sit and make
sketches of you."

Maud looked at her business partner as one who, bidden to rub a magic
ring on his finger and wish, sees his wish come true. Here was Perdita
approaching her tactfully, and timidly entreating her to do the very
thing that was in her mind to accomplish. She could not grasp it, but
sat staring at her companion in an amazement so profound that it bereft
her of speech.

Perdita misinterpreted the silence. "I've got to make a red-and-yellow
success," she exclaimed with emotion. "I've--I've just got to be in the
newspapers. Don't take it in this cold, reproving way."

"My dear Perdita," Maud spoke with crisp distinctness. "I'm not! It's
your attitude of mind, not your sentiments, that surprises me. The
latter are my own. You," she continued virtuously, "are probably
actuated by your vanity; I, by my heart. Look at that!" she waved one
hand toward the stage, "or rather don't look at it. Now let us come to
an understanding. You know that I have always loved Wallace. You know
that he has lately loved me. You also know what it costs me a year to
be one of the best-dressed women in New York and maintain my newly
acquired reputation for good looks; consequently the business has to
make handsome returns. We live in the twentieth century under artificial
conditions, and it's no use pretending it's Arcadia and the simple life.
It's not. We're hothouse blossoms, Perdita, products of this great
forcing bed, New York, and we might just as well adapt ourselves to
conservatory conditions. Wallace wouldn't look at me if I were a hardy
annual. He didn't when I was what God and nature made me. But Wallace
suits me, child though he is, in many ways, and I can do a great deal
with him. I may even," but Maud's tone had lost its high confidence and
was a trifle dubious now, "I may even make a playwright of him."

"Why, here he is now with--with Eugene Gresham," interrupted Perdita.
This was but the second time Perdita had seen Eugene since his return a
few days before.

Out from the wings stepped the two men and then clambered over the
footlights and the orchestra space, and hastened down the aisle to join
Mrs. Hepworth and Miss Carmine, who had now a number of large
photographs spread over their knees, intently studying them.

"Good morning," Wallace shook hands exuberantly with both women. "Went
splendidly, didn't it? We're going to have the first act over again."

"Very impressive, very," said Gresham, who looked in the best of health
and spirits.

Maud cast one withering look at him, but it glanced lightly off, turned
aside by his smile. He saw it, however, and as quickly as possible got
into a seat on the other side of Perdita.

"Have you seen the papers?" he asked happily. "Blessings on Miss Fuschia
Fleming. I shall do my humble best to keep the ball rolling. As soon as
she appears in New York, I'm going to put in a request to do her
portrait. Something bizarre, weird and splotchily thrilling, you know.
Quite violent. That will keep a crowd around it from dawn to dark as
soon as it's exhibited. It doesn't make the least difference whether she
has any ability or not. She may be, and probably is, the most awkward,
scrawny and nasal of western actresses; what of it? With Hepworth for
her angel and Gresham for her painter, her vogue is secure. And Perdita,
Rosita, your freedom is that much nearer."

"Eugene," Perdita's eyes flashed, "I think it extremely bad taste, even
vulgar, of you to talk in that vein."

And Eugene hastened to retrieve his blunder, and soon Perdita, who was
never long impervious to his spell, was smiling once more.

Miss Carmine, however, was of sterner stuff. She did not wince, although
she saw that there was no remedy for Wallace's malady but the knife, and
he, unwittingly, wasted no time in precipitating his destiny.

"What are you doing with all those photographs of yourself and Mrs.
Hepworth?" he asked.

"We are going to give them to some reporters, who are getting up stories
for the Sunday papers."

"Maud!" Martin spoke in the deep, pained tones of his leading man.
"Maud, I have said nothing. In fact I admired and approved when you and
Mrs. Hepworth went into this business venture. But such methods for you,
for her! Do you not feel that you owe something to yourselves, and that
she at least owes something to Hepworth? Oh, of what are you thinking?"

"Money," said Maud succinctly. "Something you evidently are not thinking
of." She glanced toward the stage.

"I hope not," he answered stiffly. "Art--"

"Art, art! Don't prate about art." Maud did not intend to spare the
knife. "Art must be an individual expression and your play is simply
hash seasoned with reminiscences. Oh, dear, dear Wallace, you can write
a good play. I know you can, when you will write as Wallace Martin, and
not after Sudermann, Ibsen, Hauptmann, Shaw. Look at this act. Wallace,
tell me, is there no other way of picturing the gay, irresponsible life
than by a costume ball in an artist's studio? Must the _vie de Boheme_
always be thus presented? Then why does the lover in a problem play
usually have to be a Russian prince in Moujik costume? And the heroine's
midnight visit to his apartments! Couldn't you, wouldn't they allow you,
to write just one play without it? And need the lady, after her past has
been discovered and fully discussed, always go out into the tempest in
search of her better self, and slam the door behind her?"

"Maud! Maud! You--you are pulling down the pillars of the temple,"
gasped Martin. "It's blasphemous! Every one says the play is good. You
can not judge from a rehearsal. Let us change the subject," with
dignity. "Since you have not hesitated to criticize me, I feel that I am
justified in again urging you not to go into these gaudy advertising
methods. Willoughby Hewston seems to feel that Cresswell was terribly
chagrined at his wife's going into business. And truly, you should urge
her to show some consideration for him."

"A fig for Willoughby Hewston." Maud fumbled in her bag and drew forth
an envelope. "Here is a letter I got from Cresswell yesterday. He
congratulates me on the enterprise we have shown, and says that he is
delighted that Dita's interests have found so congenial and healthful a
channel in which to flow."




CHAPTER XV

A WIDOW'S SMILE


One morning, a California morning, all sea-breezes and flower-scents and
golden sunshine, Mr. Hepworth read, as he ate his breakfast, a letter
from Willoughby Hewston. The letter, in itself, was a long one, and it
also contained a bulky enclosure. This enclosure was the full page of a
sensational New York newspaper. This exhibited enormous, black
head-lines, screaming innuendo of the most blasting character. In the
center of the page were pictures of Hepworth and a dark, heavy-browed
young woman, with large eyes and strongly-marked Hebraic features. The
page was further embellished by pen sketches surrounding these
photographic reproductions, sketches of a startling and romantic nature,
a wrecked automobile, a picturesque young woman in very high heels and a
very long coat, fainting into the arms of a tall, rather elderly man,
presumably Hepworth.

Hepworth had scowled and reddened at the first sight of this dreadful
page, and his expression did not improve as he continu

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