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Cytherea

by Joseph Hergesheimer · English · Gutenberg #6847 · 528,891 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Cytherea

Author: Joseph Hergesheimer


        
Release date: November 1, 2004 [eBook #6847]
                Most recently updated: March 12, 2018

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CYTHEREA ***




Produced by Michelle Shephard, Charles Franks and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team









CYTHEREA.


By Joseph Hergesheimer


_For_ DOROTHY _Charming in the present and Secure with the past_




I

It was, probably, Lee Randon realized, the last time he would play golf
that year. He concluded this standing on a shorn hill about which the
country was spread in sere diminishing tones to the grey horizon. Below,
a stream held a cold glimmer in a meadow of brown, frost-killed grass;
and the wind, the bitter flaws where Lee stood, was thinly scattered
with soft crystals of snow. He was alone, no one would play with him
so late in the season, and there had been no boy present to carry his
clubs. Yes, this was the last time he'd try it until spring: Peyton
Morris, who had married Lee's niece and was at least fourteen years his
junior, had been justified in a refusal which, at its expression, had
made Lee cross.

At worse than forty-five, he had told Morris curtly, he was more active
than the young men hardly out of the universities. To this Peyton had
replied that undoubtedly Lee had more energy than he; personally he felt
as old as--as Egypt. Ridiculous, Lee decided, trying to make up his mind
whether he might continue playing or return, beaten by November, to the
clubhouse. In the end, with numb fingers, he picked up his ball, and
walked slowly back over the empty course. The wind, now, was behind him,
and increasingly comfortable he grew reflective:

The comparison of Peyton Morris's age with his, recalling the fact,
to be precise, of his forty-seven years, created a vague questioning
dissatisfaction. Suddenly he saw himself--a comfortable body in a
comfortable existence, a happy existence, he added sharply--objectively;
and the stout figure in knickerbockers, rough stockings, a yellow
buckskin jacket and checked cap pulled over a face which, he felt,
was brightly red, surprised and a little annoyed him. In the abrupt
appearance of this image it seemed that there had been no transitional
years between his slender youth and the present. He had an absurd
momentary impression that an act of malicious magic had in a second
transformed him into a shape decidedly too heavy for grace. His
breathing, where the ground turned upward, was even slightly labored.

It was, Lee thought with all the intensity of an original discovery,
devilish unpleasant to grow old; to die progressively on one's feet,
he elaborated the fact. That was what happened to a man--his liver
thickened, his teeth went, his veins became brittle pipes of lime. Worse
than all that, his potency, the spirit and heat of living, met without
any renewal its inescapable winter. This might, did, occur while his
being was rebellious with vain hope. Today, in spite of the slight
clogging of his breath, his body's loss of flexibility, his imagination
was as vigorous, as curious, as ever ... take that nonsense about the
doll, which, in a recalled classical allusion, he had privately named
Cytherea. Peyton Morris would never have entered into that!

Lee Randon, on one of his infrequent trips to New York, had seen it in
a confectioner's window on Fifth Avenue, and instantly it had captivated
his attention, brought him to a halt. The doll, beautifully dressed in
the belled skirt of the eighteen-forties, wore plum-colored silk with a
bodice and wide short sleeves of pale yellow and, crossed on the breast,
a strip of black Spanish lace that fell to the hem of the skirt.
It wasn't, of course, the clothes that attracted him--he only grew
conscious of them perhaps a month later--but the wilful charm, the
enigmatic fascination, of the still face. The eyes were long and half
closed under finely arched brows, there was a minute patch at the
right corner of a pale scarlet, smiling mouth; a pointed chin marked an
elusive oval beneath black hair drawn down upon a long slim neck, hair
to which was pinned an odd headdress of old gilt with, at the back,
pendent ornamental strands of gold-glass beads.

Insistently conventional, selectly ordinary, in appearance, the stick
with a pig-skin handle hanging from his left arm, he had studied the
doll with a deepening interest. Never in life, he told himself, had he
seen a woman with such a magnetic and disturbing charm. Fixed in intent
regard he became conscious that, strangely, rather than small the figure
seemed diminished by a distance which yet left every feature clear.
With this he grew satirical at himself; and, moving resolutely down
the Avenue, treated his absorption with ridicule. But the vision of the
face, the smile, the narrowed eyes, persisted in his mind; the truth
was that they troubled him; and within three blocks he had turned. The
second view intensified rather than lessened his feeling, and he walked
quickly into the shop odorous with burned sugar. The doll was removed
from the window--it had come from Paris, he learned--and, after a
single covert glance, he bought it, for, he needlessly informed the girl
wrapping it in an unwieldy light package, his daughter.

To his secret satisfaction, Helena, who was twelve, hadn't been strongly
prepossessed; and the doll--though Lee Randon no longer thought of it
as merely that--left downstairs, had been finally placed on the white
over-mantel of the fireplace by the dining-room door.

There, when he was alone, he very often stopped to gaze at the figure;
and, during such a moment of speculative abstraction, he had, from the
memories of early reading, called her Cytherea. That, Lee remembered
vaguely, was the Cytheranian name of the mysterious goddess of love,
Venus, of the principle, the passion, of life stirring in plants and
men. But in the shape above him it had been strangely modified from an
apparently original purpose, made infinitely difficult if not impossible
of understanding. His Cytherea bore the traces, the results, of old and
lost and polished civilizations; there was about her even a breath of
immemorial China. It mingled with a suggestion of Venice, the eighteenth
century Venice of the princes of Naxos--how curiously she brought back
tags of discarded reading!--and of the rococo Viennese court. This much
he grasped; but the secret of her fascination, of what, at heart, she
represented, what in her had happened to love, entirely escaped him.

Lee was interested in this, he reassured his normal intelligence,
because really it bore upon him, upon the whole of his married life with
Fanny. He wasn't, merely, the victim of a vagrant obsession, the tyranny
of a threatening fixed idea. No, the question advanced without answer
by Cytherea was not confined to her, it had very decidedly entered into
him, and touched, practically, everyone he knew, everyone, that was, who
had a trace of imagination. Existence had been enormously upset, in
a manner at once incalculable and clear, by the late war. Why, for
example, the present spirit of restlessness should particularly affect
the relation of men and women he couldn't begin to grasp. Not, he added
immediately, again, that it had clouded or shaken his happiness.

It had only given him the desire, the safe necessity, to comprehend the
powerful emotion that held Fanny and him secure against any accident
to their love. To their love! The repetition, against his contrary
intention, took on the accent of a challenge. However, he proceeded
mentally, it wasn't the unassailable fact that was challenged, but the
indefinable word love. Admiration, affection, passion, were clear in
their meanings--but love! His brow contracted in a frown spreading in a
shadowy doubt over his face when he saw that he had almost reached the
clubhouse; its long steep-pitched bulk lay directly across the path of
dusk, approaching from the east; and a ruddy flicker in the glass doors
on the veranda showed that a fire had been lighted. To his left, down
over the dead sod and beyond a road, he could see the broad low façade
of his house with its terraced lawn and aged stripped maples. There,
too, a window was bright on the first floor: probably Fanny was hearing
the children's lessons.

      *      *      *      *      *

That cheerful interior he completely visualized: Fanny, in the nicest
possible attire, sitting in the curly-maple rocking-chair, her slippered
feet--she had a premonition of rheumatism--elevated on the collapsible
stool she carried about with her; and Helena and Gregory hanging on
her knees. Gregory, of course, had tomorrow's task easily in hand, with
another star for a day's good conduct in school; but Helena, shining
in the gold and flush of her radiant inattention, would know nothing.
Helena, Lee Randon acknowledged, spelled atrociously. If it weren't for
the clubs and his spiked shoes he'd turn and go home directly, himself
supervise the children's efforts at education. But Fanny did it much
better than he; Helena and Gregory were closer to her; while they
volunteered endless personal and trivial admissions to her, he had to
ask them, detail by detail, what they were doing.

After he had changed his shoes and secured the latticed steel door of
his locker he went up to the main room of the clubhouse, where, on the
long divan before the open fire, he found Peyton Morris lounging with
Anette Sherwin by a low tea table. The hot water, they informed Lee
comfortably, was cold, inviting him by implication to ring for more; and
then they returned to the conversation he had interrupted. Anette said:

“I asked her from Friday till Monday, over the dance, you see; but she
wired she couldn't be sure. They are going to begin rehearsing at any
minute, and then shoot--it is shoot, isn't it?--the picture. What did
she tell you at the Plaza?”

“The same thing,” Peyton replied moodily. “I only saw her for a scrappy
dinner; she couldn't even wait for coffee, but rushed up to a conference
with her director.”

They were, Lee knew, talking about Mina Raff, a friend of Anette's
earlier summers by the sea who was beginning to be highly successful in
the more serious moving pictures. He had met her a number of years ago,
in Eastlake, but he retained no clear impression of her; and, admitting
that he hadn't gone to see her in a picture, wondered aloud at her
sudden fame. Peyton Morris glanced at him, frowning; he seemed at the
point of vigorous speech, then said nothing.

“Mina is lovely now, Lee,” Anette spoke in his place; “you will realize
that at once. She's like a--a wistful April moon, or corn silk.”

“I like black hair,” Randon asserted.

“That's amusing, when you think Fanny's is quite brown,” Anette replied.
“Whom have you been meeting with black hair? There's none I can remember
in Eastlake.”

“There isn't anybody in particular,” Lee reassured her; “it is just
an idea of mine.” He had a vision of intense black hair swept about an
enigmatic still smile, of an old gilt headdress. “Mina Raff must have
developed if she gets half the pay advertised.”

“She'll get twice that when this contract expires,” Peyton put in; “and
that will be increased again. No one on the screen can touch her.” He
made these declarations in a manner both shadowed and aggressive. Lee
observed that he held a cigarette in one hand and a match in the other
with no effort at conjunction.

“Mina simply tells you everything,” Anette continued. “If she comes you
must do your best. It's perfectly marvelous, with so much else, that she
even considers it. I couldn't budge her when she was practically free.”

“How is Claire?” Randon abruptly demanded.

“She's all right,” her husband returned; “a little offhand, but no more
than usual. I want her to go to the West Indies and take Ira but she
won't listen. Why anyone who doesn't have to stay through these rotten
winters I can't imagine.” A flaming log brought out his handsomely
proportioned face, the clear grey eyes, the light carefully brushed hair
and stubborn chin. Peyton was a striking if slightly sullen appearing
youth--yet he must be on the mark of thirty--and it was undeniable that
he was well thought of generally. At his university, Princeton, he had
belonged to a most select club; his family, his prospects, even
his present--junior partner in a young but successful firm of bond
brokers--were beyond reproach. Yet Lee Randon was aware that he had
never completely liked Peyton.

His exterior was too hard, too obviously certain, to allow any
penetration of the inevitable human and personal irregularities beneath.
It might be possible that he was all of a piece of the conventional
stereotyped proprieties; but Lee couldn't imagine Claire marrying or
holding to a man so empty, or, rather, so dully solid. Claire he admired
without reservation--a girl who had become a wife, a mother, with no
loss of her vivid character. Her attitude toward Ira, now four years
old--wholly different from Fanny's manner with her children--was lightly
humorous; publicly she treated her obligations as jokes; but actually,
Lee knew, she was indefatigable.

This was a type of high spirits, of highly bred courage, to which he was
entirely delivered. Fanny was a perfect mother, a remarkably fine wife,
but she bore an evident sense of her responsibilities. She wasn't so
good-looking as Claire, who at times was almost beautiful; but Fanny had
a very decided kind of attractiveness which Lee Randon wished she would
more bring out. She was a little too serious. He didn't actually
want her to drink and swear in public, that wouldn't become her; but
something of that sort, he felt, might help her. At times, when she had
had more than her customary cocktail and a half, he saw in her a promise
of what he desired.

God knew he wasn't criticizing Fanny, he hastened to reassure even
himself: how could he, in the face of all she had brought him--the
freedom of money and undeviating devotion and their two splendid
children? His house was as absolute in its restrained luxury of taste
as was the unfailing attention to his comfort. It was purely for her
own happiness that he wanted her to be, well--a little gayer. She was
already developing a tendency to sit serenely on the veranda of the club
through the dances, to encourage others rather than take an active part
herself.

Expanding in the glow of the fire and hot strong tea he forgot all about
his uncomfortable premonitions of age. Now it seemed to him that he had
never been younger in the sense of being merely alive; after the tonic
of the cold his nerves were strung like steel, his blood was in a full
tide. Lee was aware of a marked sense of pleasure at the closeness to
him of Anette; settling back, she willingly, voluntarily, leaned her
firm elastic body against him; her legs, as evident in woolen stockings
as his own, were thrust frankly out toward the flames.

“I'll meet her,” he heard Peyton say, and realized that they were still
talking about Mina Raff. She wouldn't attract him, Lee Randon, in the
least, he was sure of that ... no wistful April moon. What, then, did
engage him? He was unable to say, he didn't know. It was something
intangible, a charm without definite form; and his thoughts returned to
Cytherea--if he could grasp the secret of her fascination he would be
able to settle a great many disturbing feelings and needs. Yes, what
she mutely expressed was what, beneath his comprehension, he had come
to long for. He had never recognized it as the property of any woman nor
satisfied it in himself.

Here, certainly, his loyalty, his affection for Fanny, weren't damaged;
he was, he thought, beyond assault there. It was only that, together
with his fidelity to his wife, an increasing uneasiness possessed him,
an unabated separate interest in life, in women. He was searching for
something essential, he couldn't discover what; but, dismissing the
problem of how he'd act if he found it, the profound conviction remained
that when his hopeful quest was over then indeed he'd be old, finished,
drained. Lee Randon secretly cherished, jealously guarded, that
restless, vital reaching for the indefinable perfection of his hidden
desire. For a flash it was almost perceptible in Anette, her head
half-buried in the darkness of the divan behind the rise and fall of her
breasts in a close sweater of Jaeger wool.

      *      *      *      *      *

She stirred, smiled at him absently, and, with Peyton's assistance,
rose. The long room, unlighted except for the fire, was lost in
obscurity; the blackness against the window-panes was absolute. Outside,
however, Lee found a lingering glint of day; the snow had stopped, but
the wind had increased and was blowing over the open expanse of the
course in the high gaunt key of winter. His house, across the road,
showed regular cheerful rectangles of orange illumination: he always
returned to it with a feeling of relief and pleasant anticipation, but
he was very far from sharing Fanny's passionate attachment to their
home. Away--on past trips to the Michigan iron ore fields and now on
shorter journeys to eastern financial centers--he never thought of it,
he was absorbed by business.

But in that he wasn't alone, it was true of the majority of successful
men he knew over forty; they saw their wives, their homes, they
thought of their families, only in the intervals of their tyrannical
occupations. He, in reality, was rather better there than most, for
he occasionally stayed out at Eastlake to play golf; he was locally
interested, active, in the small town of Fanny's birth. Other men--

He made a calculation of how much time a practising lawyer saw his wife:
certainly he was out of the house before nine--Lee knew lawyers who were
in their offices at seven-thirty--and he was hardly back until after
five. Nine hours absent daily through the week; and it was probable that
he was in bed by eleven, up at seven--seven hours' sleep; of the eight
hours left in twenty-four half if not two-thirds of the Sundays and
some part of the others were devoted to a recreation; and this took no
account of the briefcases brought home, the thought and contributary
preoccupations.

More than that, his mind, his hopes and planning, were constantly
directed toward his legal concerns; the wife of such a man filled about
the position of his golf or billiards. Lee Randon had never analyzed
this before, and the result amazed him. With younger men, of course, it
was different; they had more time and interest for their homes, their
wives and children. Everything constantly shifted, changed, perished;
all, that was, but the unintelligible spurring need beyond any
accomplishment.

In him it was almost as though there were--or, perhaps, had been--two
distinct, opposed processes of thought, two different personalities, a
fact still admirably illustrated by his private interest in the doll,
in Cytherea. Much younger he had been fond of music, of opera and then
symphony concerts, and his university years had been devoted to a wide
indiscriminate reading: sitting until morning with college men of poetic
tendencies, he had discussed the intricacies of conduct in the light of
beauty rather than prudence. This followed him shyly into the world,
the offices of the Magnolia Iron Works; where, he had told himself
optimistically, he was but finding a temporary competence. What, when
he should be free to follow his inclination, he'd do, Lee never
particularized; it was in the clouds nebulous and bright, and
accompanied by music. His dream left him imperceptibly, its vagueness
killed partly by the superior reality of pig iron and ore and partly
because he never had anyone with whom to talk it over; he could find no
sympathy to keep it alive.

That it wasn't very robust was evident; and yet, throughout his youth,
it had been his main source of incentive. No one, in the Magnolia works,
knew the difference between the Glucks, Alma and Christopher, nor read
anything but the most current of magazines. At intervals Lee had found
a woman who responded to the inner side of him, and together they swept
into an aesthetic emotional debauch; but they came inevitably, in the
surrounding ugliness of thought and ascribed motives, to humiliating
and ugly ends; and he drifted with increasing rapidity to his present
financial and material sanity.

What remained of the other was hardly more than a rare accelerated
heart-beat at a chord of music like the memory of a lost happiness, or
at the sea shimmering with morning. He never spoke of it now, not
even to Fanny; although it was possible that he might be doing her
understanding an injustice. Fanny, generally, was a woman in whom the
best of sense triumphed; Fanny was practical. It was she who saw that
the furnace pipes were inspected, the chimney flues cleaned before
winter; and who had the tomato frames properly laid away in the
stable. Problems of drainage, of controversies with the neighbors, were
instinctively brought to her, and she met and disposed of them with an
unfailing vigorous good judgment.

A remarkable companion, he told himself; he had been a fortunate
man. She was at once conventional and an individual: Fanny never, for
example, wore the underclothes of colored crepe de chines, the elaborate
trifles, Lee saw in the shop windows, nightgowns of sheer exposure and
candy-like ribbons; hers were always of fine white cambric, scalloped,
perhaps, or with chaste embroidery, but nothing more. Neither did she
use perfumes of any sort, there was no array of ornamental bottles on
her dressing-table, no sachet among her handkerchiefs, her cambric was
not laid in scented flannel. Her dressing, a little severe, perhaps--she
liked tailored suits with crisp linen waists and blue serge with no more
than a touch of color--was otherwise faultless in choice and order; and,
it might be that she was wholly wise: Fanny was thin and, for a woman,
tall, with square erectly held shoulders. Her face was thin, too, almost
bony, and that magnified, emphasized, the open bright blueness of her
eyes; all her spirit, her integrity and beauty, were gathered in them;
her hair was pale and quite scanty.

Yes, Fanny's eyes were her principal attraction, they were forever
startling, contrasted with the rest, not only remarkable in shade
but, as well, in light; in her quick unreasoning tempers, the only
perceptible flaw of her character, they sparkled with brilliancy.
The tempers, Lee decided, descending the narrow stony road from
the club-house to his gate, were an unavoidable part of her special
qualities: her quick decisiveness, her sharp recognitions of right
and her obdurate condemnation of wrong--these distinctions were never
obscured in Fanny--necessitated a finality of judgment open to anger
at any contrary position. Aside from that she was as secure, as
predictable, as any heavenly orbit; her love for him, beginning before
marriage, had quietly and constantly increased; her usual mood was
moulded to his need; nothing had ever contested the supremacy of his
place with her.

Lee swung open the white wicket that broke the middle of his border
hedge and went up the path over the broad lawn; the house, an admirable
copy of locally colonial dwellings, was a yellow stucco, with a porch on
his left and the dining-room at the extreme right. Beyond the porch was
the square of the formal garden, indistinguishable at this season, and
the garage, the driveway, were hidden at the back. He mounted the broad
steps of field stone at the terrace, but, in place of going directly
in under the main portico, turned aside to the porch, past the dim bare
forms of the old maples. Just as he had anticipated, the glass door
showed him Fanny sitting in the maple slatted-back rocking-chair;
Gregory, in blue, was present, but Helena not to be seen.

His wife's hands were lying idly in her lap, and she was gazing into
nothingness with an expression he had never before noticed, there was
a faint troubled doubt on her brow, a questioning expression about her
eyes. As he stood momentarily quiet he saw her hands slowly clasp until
he felt that they were rigid, and her mouth became pinched; her face
seemed actually hard. Gregory spoke to her, with his fat fingers on her
sleeve, but she made no reply, paid no attention to him. Lee could hear
Gregory's demanding voice; and then, gathering herself, Fanny sighed
deeply and smiled at her boy. She was wearing her pearls, her rings
sparkled in glittering prisms; and, as he opened the door, Lee Randon
wondered if he had forgotten an engagement to go out for dinner?

      *      *      *      *      *

He asked at once if this were so, but found that they were staying at
home. She regarded him still, he realized, a little withdrawn in
the abstraction he had surprised. This, because it was so uncommon,
disturbed him, and he demanded what was worrying her.

“Nothing, really. What made you suppose I was bothered?” Her reply was
instinctive; and then, after a pause, she continued, more insecurely, “I
was only thinking about some things.... Lee,” she inquired, “you love me
very much, don't you?”

“Why, of course,” he spoke almost impatiently.

“That is all I have, you see,” she admitted; “and that was what was in
my mind. The other women I know are so different; they seem to have so
many more interests than I, and to care less for them than I do for my
one. It is exactly as though I belonged before the war and they came
afterwards. It is true--I am old-fashioned. Well, I don't care if you
don't! But, just the same, it's a problem; I don't want to be out of the
times or narrow; and yet I can't, I don't know how, and I honestly don't
want to, change.

“It wouldn't be any better if I smoked more cigarettes or drank more
gin, that would be silly.” Lee was startled by the similarity of her
words to his unformed thought. “No one likes fun better than I do, but
the fun now is so different,” her voice had the sound of a wail, “it's
nothing but legs and getting kissed by anybody but your husband. I don't
want other men to kiss me, Lee, only you. And I want you to be glad
about that, to care for it more than anything else. You do, don't you?”

Again she hesitated, and again he assured her, in a species of
annoyance, of his feeling.

“It's because I adore you,” Fanny insisted; “it may be awfully foolish
and ark-like to say, but you're all I want, absolutely.” Her manner grew
indignant. “Some women at tea today laughed at me. They did nothing but
describe how they held their husbands' affections; actually that, as
though it were difficult, necessary; the details were sickening, and
reminded me of that old joke about leaving off your wedding ring. It
was all too horrid! And, underneath, they were bitter and vindictive,
yes--they were uneasy, afraid of something, of somebody, and treated
every good-looking woman as a dangerous enemy. I couldn't live like
that, I'd rather die: I told them they didn't trust the men they were
married to.”

“What did they say to that?” Lee asked, standing in the door.

“Agreed with me. Alice Lucian said I was damned well right she didn't
trust hers. She loved him, too, but she didn't propose to take any
liberties with the sanctity of her bed. They all thought Claire was a
fool to let Peyton see Mina Raff like that in New York--the way to avoid
trouble was to make sure it couldn't begin. Has Peyton said anything
to you about Mina Raff? She is perfectly stunning, of course, and an
actress.”

“Not to me,” Lee told her; then he recalled the prolonged attention to
Mina Raff on the divan at the Club. “What if he is crazy about her?” he
observed indifferently; “it can't come to anything. It won't hurt Claire
if Peyton sits out a few dances with a public idol.”

“I shouldn't think so either, but the others were so positive. I just
told them how happy we are together and how devoted you are--fifteen
marvelous years, Lee. It was plain that they envied us.” She rose and
came close to him, her widely-opened candid blue eyes level with his
gaze. “Not the slightest atom must ever come between us,” she said; “I
couldn't stand it, I've been spoiled. I won't have to, will I, Lee? Lee,
kiss me.”

He met the clinging thin passionate purity of her mouth. “No, certainly
not, never,” he muttered, extraordinarily stirred. He asserted to
himself that he would make no such fatal mistake. The other, the errant
fancy, was no more than a vagrant unimportant impulse. “Don't let these
women, who cat around, upset you; probably they are thinking not so much
about their husbands as they are of themselves. I've seen that Alice
Lucian parked out in a limousine during a dance, and she was going right
to it.”

“It is foolish of me,” Fanny agreed, “and not complimentary to our love.
I have kept you so long over nothing that you will be late for dinner.
I don't care!” Her manner bore a foreign trace of abandon in its radiant
happiness; and, with spread fingers on his back, she propelled him
toward the stairs. But, in their room, he failed to change his clothes:
he sat lost in a concentration of thought, of summoned determination.

The interior, with dotted white Swiss curtains at the large windows,
both an anomaly and an improvement on the architectural origin, was
furnished largely in dull rubbed mahogany, the beds had high slender
fluted posts, snowy ruffled canopies and counterpanes stitched in a
primitive design. He possessed an inlaid chest of drawers across from
the graceful low-boy used by Fanny as a dressing-table; there was a bed
stand with brass-tipped feet, a Duncan Fyfe, she declared; split hickory
chairs painted a dark claret color; small hooked rugs on the waxed
floor; and, against the mirror on his chest of drawers, a big photograph
of Fanny and the two children in the window-seat of the living room.

A dinner shirt lay in readiness on the bed, the red morocco boxes that
held his moonstone cuff links and studs were evident, but he ignored
those provisions for his ease. There was a strange, a different and
unaccountable, uneasiness, a marked discomfort, at his heart. The burden
of it was that he had a very great deal of which, it might well be, he
wasn't worthy. In Fanny, he told himself, as against everything else
discoverable, he had the utmost priceless security life could offer.
Outside the brightness and warmth and charm of their house the November
night was slashed by a black homeless wind.

Her sureness, undeniably, was founded on the inalterable strength of
her convictions; against that sustaining power, it occurred to him, the
correctness of her beliefs might be relatively unimportant. Could any
more be required of a faith than its ability, like a life preserver on
water, to hold an individual safe from sinking? Strangely enough, the
one or two greatly powerful men with whom he had come in contact were
like Fanny, prejudiced, closed against all opinions contrary to their
own, impatient of doubt and self-questioning.

Fanny, Lee Randon recognized, was indefatigable in her efforts to form
him in her own unassailable mould; she insisted in the most trivial, and
often tiresome, ways, that he should reach and maintain her standards.
He had been in return, more often than not, rebellious, humorously or
with a suspicion of annoyance; but now, suddenly, it seemed to him that
just that, the limitation of Fanny's determined attitude, was, perhaps,
the most desirable thing possible. If it were possible of acquisition!
Such a certainty wasn't his naturally--those two diverse strains in him
again; but one, he added, had been practically obliterated. The first
step in such a course of practical wisdom would be to put Cytherea out
of his life, dislodge her finally from his thoughts, and the over-mantel
downstairs. This, diplomatically with the doll, he could, of course,
do now, whenever he chose. With that, and whatever it represented,
accomplished, Lee had a premonition, his life would be secure, placid.

The disturbance caused by Fanny's searching tenderness subsided a
little; and, as it dwindled, the other restlessness, the sense, yes--of
wasted possibilities and years, once more grew evident. By God, if Fanny
insisted on being, at any cost, herself, it would be unreasonable in her
not to recognize the same need in him. But Lee was obliged to add the
old and familiar and increasingly heavy provision: any individuality of
being, of desire, must not be allowed to impair the validity of their
common existence, their marriage. Fanny had an advantage over him there,
for all her aspirations turned inward to their love, their home and
children; and his ... but if he knew their goal he could have beaten
life.

      *      *      *      *      *

Footfalls approaching over the hall--the maid to tell him dinner was
served--brought him sharply to his feet, and he hurried down to where
Fanny, who liked to do such things, had finished lighting the candles on
the table. In reply to the glance of interrogation at his inappropriate
clothes he explained that, trivially occupied, he had been unaware of
the flight of time. Throughout dinner Fanny and he said little; their
children had a supper at six o'clock, and at seven were sent to bed;
so there were commonly but two at the other table. He had an occasional
glimpse of his wife, behind a high centerpiece of late chrysanthemums,
the color of bright copper pennies and hardly larger; and he was struck,
as he was so often, by Fanny's youthful appearance; but that wasn't,
he decided, so much because of her actual person--although since her
marriage she had shown practically no change--as from a spirit of
rigorous purity; she was, in spite of everything, Lee realized,
completely virginal in mind.

The way she sat and walked, with her elbows close to her body and her
high square shoulders carried forward, gave her an air of eagerness, of
youthful hurry. Perhaps she grew more easily tired now than formerly;
her face then seemed thinner than ever, the temples sunken and
cheek-bones evident, and her eyes startling in their size and blueness
and prominence. She kept, too, the almost shrinking delicacy of a girl's
mind: Fanny never repeated stories not sufficiently saved from the gross
by their humor. Her private severity with women who did, he felt, was
too extreme. The truth was that she regarded the mechanism of nature
with distaste; Fanny was never lost, never abandoned, in passion--Lee
Randon had wondered if she regarded that as more than a duty, the
discharge of a moral, if not actually a religious, obligation. It was
certain that she was clothed in a sense of bodily shame, of instinctive
extreme modesty, which no situation or degree of feeling could destroy.

He understood, however, that he could not have Fanny as she was,
immeasurably fine, without accepting all the implications of her
character--other qualities, which he might desire, would as well bring
their defects. Lee didn't for a second want a wife like Anette. His
admiration for Fanny was, fundamentally, enormous. He was glad that
there was nothing hidden in his life which could seriously disturb her;
nothing, that was, irrevocable. Which had he been--wise or fortunate, or
only trivial? Perhaps, everything considered, merely fortunate; and
he wondered how she would have met an infidelity of his? He put his
question in the past tense because now, Lee congratulated himself, all
the danger was passed: forty-seven, with responsibilities that increased
every month in importance, and swiftly growing children; the hair above
his ears was patched with grey.

“I don't like that centerpiece,” Fanny observed, “I can't see you.
Still, it's as well, I suppose, since you didn't change. You look so
much better in dark clothes, Lee, thinner.”

“You shouldn't make me so comfortable.”

“You'd see to that, anyhow; men always do. Honestly, Alice Lucian was a
scream this afternoon, she said that she hated and distrusted all men;
yet I'm sure no one could be more considerate or dependable than Warner.
Now, if she had a husband like George Willard--”

“What would you do,” Lee asked, “if I spent my spare time with the very
young ones?”

“I'd have a doctor see you,” she replied coolly. “What in the world put
that in your head? Haven't you everything here a man could want? That's
exactly what they were talking about; it's so--so idiotic. Those
younger girls ought to be smacked and put to bed, with their one-piece
swimming-suits and shimmying. They give a very misleading impression.”

He lost the course of her speech in considering how little of themselves
women, old and young, showed each other. If Fanny meant, if she for a
moment thought, where the girls they were discussing came in, that there
was smoke without fire.... It was all devilish strange, the present day,
disturbing. The young men, since the war, had grown sober, and the
older men resembled George Willard. The exploding of so much powder, the
release of such naked passions, had over-thrown the balance of conduct
and pressure. How fortunate, he thought again, he was in having Fanny.

They moved into the enclosure by the fire-place, where Cytherea was
remote in shadow against the chimney, and through the hall to the living
room for coffee. His wife placed the portable stool under her feet, and
silence enveloped them. At intervals the clear treble of the children's
voices was audible from above, and once Fanny called up for them to be
quiet. The room was large, it filled that end of the lower floor, and
Lee's gaze idly rested on the smoke of his cigar, veiling the grand
piano in the far corner. There were no overhead lights, the plugs for
the lamps were set in the baseboard, and the radiance was pleasantly
diffused, warm and subdued: the dull immaculately white paint of the
bookshelves on his left, silver frames on a table, harmonious fabrics
and spots of color, consciously and sub-consciously spread a restful
pattern. In reply to his comment Fanny acknowledged that she had seen
the snow; she hated winter, she proceeded, and thought that if it turned
out as bad as last year they might get away to Cuba and see Daniel.

Daniel was Lee's brother, four years his junior, an administrador of a
sugar estancia in the Province of Camagüey; a man who, absorbed in his
crops and his adopted Spanish-tropical civilization, rarely returned to
the United States. This projected trip to Cuba they had discussed for
many Novembers; every year Fanny and he promised each other that,
early in February, they would actually go; and preparatory letters were
exchanged with Daniel Randon; but it always came to nothing. Either
it was impossible for Fanny to leave the children, the house, or the
servants, or Lee's affairs were in need of close supervision.

Suddenly it annoyed him to discuss again, uselessly, Camagüey; it
had become only a vain pretence, a sustained mirage, of escape from
disagreeable days. While it was hot in Cuba, Daniel maintained, the
trade wind coming with evening made the nights cool; it was far more
comfortable, summer and winter, at La Quinta than in Eastlake. Cuba,
he made it seem, Havana and the colonias of cane, the coast and the
interior, was a place with none of the drawbacks of a northern land or
society; there were, certainly, conventions--the Spanish were a very
punctilious people--but they operated in a conveniently definite, Daniel
might almost say a sensible masculine, manner. He had not gone into
any further detail, but had sunk into his celebrated immobility of
expression. Lee, therefore, had drawn his own, natural, conclusions; he
had come to regard Cuba in the same light as that of the early Castilian
adventurers--an El Dorado, but of freedom rather than gold.

A perverse restlessness settled upon him, and he put down his coffee cup
abruptly; the contentment in his surroundings vanished. Lee wanted to
be somewhere else, see something different, not so--so tranquil,
so complacently delivered to the uneventful. Fanny, he told himself
resentfully, would be satisfied to sit exactly where she was for a year.
She met his fleet scrutiny with a faint smile. Her face wouldn't be
greatly changed by old age, by death. She was like that, inside and out.
Whirling ungracious fancies passed through his brain. He shook his head,
and Fanny instantly demanded, “What is it, Lee, what is worrying you?”
 Nothing, he replied, but she continued to study him until, giving it up,
she turned to the approaching dance; there would be a dinner at the Club
before it, and forty people from out of town had accepted. They must all
have a perfect time, she declared. Gregory could be heard laughing, and,
with a sense of relief, of escape, he volunteered to go up and see what
kept the children roused. He would only make them worse, Fanny observed,
he was as fidgety as Helena; but her tone carried to him her compelling
affection.

      *      *      *      *      *

The darkened room where Helena and Gregory slept held a cold glimmering
whiteness; and the light he switched on showed a most sanitary bareness
and two severe iron beds. There was a moment's stillness as he entered,
the scrutiny of two rosy faces framed in blanket and sheet--there were
no pillows--and then there was a delighted vociferous recognition of his
presence.

“You must sit on my bed,” Helena insisted.

“No, mine!” Gregory cried; and, as he settled by his daughter, “For
every minute you're there, father, you must sit here. Guess what I have
with me.” Lee Randon had no idea, and Gregory produced a willow switch.
“That's for anybody who isn't good.”

There was a wriggle down under the blanket, and Lee leaned forward; “Are
those your feet?” he demanded; “do you go that far down, are you that
tall?”

“Gracious, that's nothing,” Helena cut in; “just see where I go.” He
discovered that her active toes were almost under the end bar of the
bed. The covers were moulded by her firm body. In a few years, he
thought with a constricted throat, Helena would be grown up, flung
into the complex troubles of maturity. However, he knew, life wouldn't
greatly upset her--she had a calmness more stolid than Fanny's together
with his own sharpened sensibilities: it was probable that she would
marry soon.

Gregory was different; while Helena, in small ways, was unamenable, he
was as good as the gold stars he continually got for admirable
conduct. He had a deliberate, careful mind and, already, a sense of
responsibilities. He spoke slowly, giving the impression that the
selection of words was a heavy business; where Helena's speech came in
careless rushes. Gregory, too, Lee Randon told himself, would not be at
a loss later. The two children actually demanded very little from him
now beyond the love they took for granted and its obvious return. But,
for his part, did he give them much, indeed, any more? Was there, Lee
wondered, a deficiency in his sense of parenthood?

He knew men all of whose labor was for their children; they slaved to
have comfortable sums against their children's futures; they schemed and
talked, often fatuously, for and about their sons and, in lesser degree,
daughters. They were, in short, wholly absorbed, no more than parents;
at the advent of a family they lost individuality, ambition, initiative;
nature trapped them, blotted them out; it used them for its great
purpose and then cast them aside, just as corporations used men for a
single task and dropped them when their productiveness was over.

But he wasn't like that, it might well be unfortunately. His
personality, his peculiar needs, had survived marriage; the vague
longings of youth had not been entirely killed. They were still potent
and still nameless; they had refused to be gathered into a definition as
exact as ambition. Lee had moved to Gregory's bed, and was holding one
of the small warm hands, inattentive to the eager clamor of voices.
Perhaps his ambition had vanished when he had left the first plan of his
future for the more tangible second: there wasn't much in the material
industry of iron founding, nor in his present wider activities, to
satisfy the imagination.

Taking the place of that, he had an uncommon amount of energy, vitality,
a force of some kind or other. Whatever he undertook he followed with a
full vigorous sweep; he was successful in convincing a large proportion
of the people with whom he dealt that their ends were the same as his;
and here, as well, chance, fate, had been with Lee--no one, practically,
had lost through a belief in him.

His situation today, he wholly and gladly admitted, had resulted from
the money Fanny brought him. Until his marriage he had been confined to
the Magnolia Iron Works; of which, it was conceivable, he would in time
be manager, maybe, much later, part owner. But, with fresh resources,
he tried fresh fields, investments, purchases, every one of which
prospered. He owned or operated or controlled an extraordinary diversity
of industries--a bottling works for nonalcoholic beverages, a small
structural steel plant, the Eastlake daily paper--a property that
returned forty per cent on his capital--a box works, purchased before
the war, with an output that had leaped, almost over night, from
thousands to millions, a well-known cigarette--

His energies, forever turning from routine paths and stereotyped
preoccupations, took him vividly into countless phases of existence.
He had accumulated nearly a million dollars and Fanny's affairs had
benefited greatly; his administration of her money had been rigid:
but--for whatever it was worth--his wife had, in liberating him from the
company of the super-hot cupolas, made it all possible.

A fist, now, was softly pounding him; and Gregory's voice threatened
tears. “What is it?” Lee Randon asked. “You will have to excuse me, I
was thinking.”

The narrative which followed, the confused history of a two and a half
dollar gold-piece finally taken from Gregory by his mother, was broken
into by Helena's irrepressible contempt at his youthfulness.

“He thinks the money is gone,” she explained, “because Mother put it in
the bank for him. I told him when he got it there would be a lot more,
but he just wouldn't listen to me. No matter what anybody said it was no
good.”

“Well,” Gregory inquired, “how much more?”

“I don't know, silly; but packs.”

“Seventy-seven dollars?”

“That depends on how long you leave it in the bank,” Lee instructed him.
“If you didn't ask for it for twenty years--”

“But I want it next Thursday,” Gregory hotly interrupted; “won't it be
any bigger then?”

“He does nothing but ask and ask questions,” Helena added. Lee patted
Gregory's cheek:

“Don't let Helena discourage you. If I don't put the light out your
mother will make me go to bed.”

There were breathless delighted giggles at the thought of that
absurdity. He leaned over his son. “Kiss me!” Helena cried. “Now kiss
me,” Gregory echoed. “Kiss me back again--”

The light went out with a sharp click, and the room was once more a
glimmering darkness, blanched and cold. The ruddy faces of the children,
their bright hair, even their voices, were subdued. Fanny, apparently,
hadn't moved; the light at her shoulder was reflected in the cut
steel buckles of her slippers; she had slight but graceful ankles. He
recognized this, drawing a sheaf of reports from his brief-case; but,
after a perfunctory glance, he dropped them beside him on the floor.

“Really, Lee, your condition is getting dreadful,” Fanny observed; “you
are too nervous for words. Go in and look at that doll you brought
from New York. She ought to teach you repose even if I can't.” A swift
concern shadowed her eyes. “Are you doing too much, do you think? It
isn't necessary, you know. We have plenty. I don't understand why you
will go so hard at all those fool concerns of yours. There might be a
mortgage on us, from the way you work.”

The latter part of her speech he forgot in the calling of his attention
to Cytherea. Fanny had said that the doll might tranquilize him. The
opposite was more probable--Cytherea, what could be more disturbing?
Fanny hadn't noticed her smile, the long half-closed eyes, the
expression of malicious tenderness, if such a thing were possible, the
pale seductiveness of her wrists and hands, the finger nails
stained with vermilion. He tried to imagine a woman like that, warm,
no--burning, with life. It seemed to Lee the doll became animated in a
whisper of cool silk, but he couldn't invent a place, a society, into
which she fitted. Not Eastlake, certainly, nor New York ... perhaps
Cuba. What a vanity of nonsense his thoughts had led him back into:
Cytherea, a thing of wax, was on the over-mantel beyond the hall; Cuba
beyond the sea.

The smoke of another cigar, precisely in the manner of the one before,
hung between him and the piano. His wife settled contentedly in the
curly maple rocker, her rings flashing in the swift drawing of threads
from a square of linen.

      *      *      *      *      *

Early in the morning Lee Randon drove himself, in a Ford sedan, to a
station on the main line of a railway which bore him into the city and
his office. It was nine miles from Eastlake to the station, where he
left the car for his return; and, under ordinary circumstances, he
accomplished the distance in twenty minutes. The road was good and lay
through open rolling country, grazing and farmed land; he knew its every
aspect thoroughly, each hill and turning and old stone house, in the
pale green of early spring with the flushed petals of the apple blossoms
falling on the dark ploughed ground; yellow with grain; a sweeping
stubble with the corn shocked in which rabbit hunters, brown like the
sheaves, called to their dogs.

Now it was sombre and, in the morning and evening, wrapped in blue mist;
the air had the thick damp coldness usually precipitated in snow; the
cattle, gathered about the fodder spread in the fields, were huddled
against the rising winds. The smoke of a chimney was flattened on a
low roof; and Lee, who had sometimes wished that he were a part of the
measured countryside life, had a sudden feeling of revolt from such
binding circumstances. He wasn't surprised, this morning, that it was
difficult to get men to work in the comparative loneliness of the farms,
or that farmers' sons went continually to the cities.

When they couldn't get there they crowded into their borough towns, into
Eastlake, at every opportunity, attracted by the gaiety, the lights, the
stir, the contact with humanity. Before prohibition they had drunk at
the hotel bars, and driven home, with discordant laughter and the urged
clatter of hoofs, to the silence of star-lit fields. The buggies had
gone; High Street, on Saturday night, was filled with automobiles;
there was practically no drunkenness; but there was no lessening in the
restless seeking stream of men, the curiosity of the women with folded
hands and tightly folded lips.

They all wanted a mitigation of a life which, fundamentally, did not
fill them; they had an absorbing labor, love and home and children,
the church, yet they were unsatisfied. They were discontented with
the primary facts of existence, the serious phases, and wanted, above
everything, tinsel and laughter. If a girl passing on the street smiled
boldly at such youths they were fired with triumph and happiness; they
nudged each other violently and made brazen declarations which, faced by
the girls, escaped in disconcerted laughter. Their language--and this,
too, was a revolt--was like the sweepings of the cow barns.

Life, it occurred to Lee Randon, in this connection, was amazingly
muddled; and he wondered what would happen if the restraint, since it
was no better than sham, should be swept away, and men acknowledged what
they so largely were? A fresh standard, a new set of values, would have
to be established. But before that could be accomplished an underlying
motive must be discovered. That he searched for in himself; suppose he
were absolutely free, not tomorrow, that evening, but now--

Would he go to the office, to the affairs of the Zenith cigarette, and,
once there, would he come home again--the four thirty-seven train and
the Ford in the shed by the station? Lee couldn't answer this finally. A
road led over the hills on the right, beyond a horizon of trees. He knew
it for only a short distance; where ultimately it led he had no idea.
But it was an enticing way, and he had an idiotic impulse to turn aside,
follow it, and never come back any more. Actually he almost cut in, and
he had to swing the car sharply to the left.

If he had been in trouble or debt, if his life had been a failure, he
would have understood his impulse; but as it was, with Fanny and Helena
and Gregory, all his flourishing affairs--why, it was insanity! However,
what absorbed him in his present state of mind, of inquiry, was its
honesty; nothing could be served by conventional protests and
nice sentiments. Lee had long wanted to escape from life, from the
accumulating limiting circumstances. Or was it death he tried to avoid?

What became clearest was that, of all the things which had happened to
him, he would not, at the beginning, have deliberately chosen any. One,
it seemed, bred by the other, had overtaken him, fastened upon him,
while he was asleep. Lee knew a man who, because of his light strength
and mastery of horses, had spent a prolonged youth riding in gentlemen's
steeplechases for the great Virginia stables; a career of racing silk
and odds and danger, of highly ornamental women and champagne, of
paddocks and formal halls and surreptitious little ante-rooms. That he
envied; and, recalling his safe ignominious usefulness during the war,
he envied the young half-drunk aviators sweeping in reckless arcs above
the fortified German cities.

Or was it, again, only youth that he lamented, conscious of its slipping
supinely from his grasp? Yet, if that were all, why was he rebellious
about the present, the future, rather than the past? Lee Randon wasn't
looking back in a self-indulgent melancholy. Nor was he an isolated,
peculiar being; yes, all the men he knew had, more or less, his own
feeling; he could think of none, even half intelligent, who was happy.
Each had Lee's aspect of having been forced into a consummation he would
not have selected, of something temporary, hurried, apologetic.

He thought more specially of men celebrated in great industries, who
had accumulated power beyond measure, millions almost beyond count--what
extravagantly mad outlets they turned to! The captains of steel, of
finance, were old, spent, before they were fifty, broken by machinery
and strain in mid-life, by a responsibility in which they were like pig
iron in an open hearth furnace. What man would choose to crumble, to
find his brain paralysed, at forty-five or six? Such labor was a form
of desperation, of drowning, forgetting, an affair at best an implied
failure.

That was the strength, the anodyne, of drink, of cocktails, that they
spread a glittering transformation about crass reality; people danced
at stated times, in hot crowded rooms, because life was pedestrian; they
were sick of walking in an ugly meaningless clamor and wanted to move to
music, to wear pearl studs and fragile slippers and floating chiffons.
“The whole damned business is a mess,” he said aloud. Then, reaching the
city, he threw himself with a familiar vigor into the activities he had
challenged.

Returning over the familiar road, in his small closed car, he was
quieter mentally, critical of his useless dissatisfaction; he was making
needless trouble for himself. Small things filled his thoughts, among
them the question of how much gin would be consumed by the cocktail
party Fanny and he were having before the dinner dance at the Country
Club. Peyton and Claire Morris, Anette and, if she came, Mina Raff, with
two men, and the Lucians. Perhaps twelve in all; two quarts. The Country
Club dances, principally made up of people who had known each other long
and intimately, decidedly needed an impetus; society was rather dreadful
without rum. Anette was an attractive girl; she had beautiful legs;
but they were hardly better than Fanny's; why in the name of God was he
captivated by Anette's casual ankles and indifferent to his wife's?

Women's legs--they were even no longer hidden--were only a reasonable
anatomical provision exactly shared by men. Why, he particularized, did
he prefer them in silk stockings rather than bare, and in black more
than bright colors? Anette's had never failed to excite his imagination,
but Alice Lucian's, graceful enough, were without interest for him. How
stupid was the spectacle of women in tights! Short bathing skirts left
him cold, but the unexpected, the casual, the vagaries of fashion
and the wind, were unfailingly potential. Humiliating, he thought, a
curiosity that should be left with the fresh experience of youth; but
it wasn't--comic opera with its choruses and the burlesque stage were
principally the extravagances of middle age.

      *      *      *      *      *

The orange juice and square bottles of clear gin, the array of glasses
and ice-filled pewter pitcher in which Lee mixed his drinks, were
standing conveniently on a table in the small reception room. Fanny,
in a lavender dress with a very full skirt decorated with erratically
placed pale yellow flowers, had everything in readiness. “Mina Raff
came,” she announced, as he descended the stairs. “Anette telephoned. To
be quite frank I didn't much care whether she did or didn't. She used to
be too stiff, too selfish, I thought; and I never liked Anette.”

“Nothing but prejudice, that,” he replied decidedly. “Anette has a
very good head. You have just heard stories from envious women.” He was
careful to say nothing about her legs. “I haven't found her the least
bit out of the way; and she thinks a lot of you.”

“Bosh,” Fanny said inattentively; “I know what she thinks of me. I am
surprised, Lee, that you do so well, because really you are nothing
but an impressionable old fool.” She touched him affectionately on the
cheek, “But I can take care of you and Anette too.”

He didn't in the slightest wish to be taken care of in the manner she
indicated; yet there was nothing he could answer; and, at the sound of
a motor on the drive, he turned toward the entrance at the back. It was
the Lucians; and as he greeted them the whole small company swept into
the house. Claire, with her narrow dark vivid face, wore diagonals of
black and grey, with a long trailing girdle of soft blues and pinks. She
came up at once to Lee and kissed him with a warm friendliness. “Have
you seen Mina Raff?” she asked; “she's wonderful.”

As Claire spoke Lee Randon saw the woman who was becoming such a noted
personality. She was slim, neither tall nor short--Peyton Morris was
removing a voluminous white cloak with dull red stripes and a high
collar of fox. He had been wrong in his remembrance of her, for her
loveliness was beyond challenge. Yes, a wistful April moon described her
very well: Mina Raff was ashen blonde, her face was a very pure oval,
and her large eyes, the delicate slightly drooping mouth, held an
expression of devastating sweetness.

She came forward promptly, and yet with a little touching air of
hesitation, and accused him, in a serious low voice, of having forgotten
her. That, he returned, was ridiculous, an impossibility. Pictures
of her were in all the magazines. Close by her he recognized that the
sweetness was far from sugary; there were indications of a determination
that reached stubbornness; already there were faint lines--skilfully
covered--at the corners of her eyes, and she was palpably, physically,
weary. It was that, he decided, which gave her the wistful charm. That
and something more. She was considered, he knew, and by the judges best
qualified, to have a very sure and perfect talent; and he had no doubt
that that possession stamped and qualified her.

He was obliged to attend to the cocktails; and, at his back, a gay
chatter of voices rose. He had fleeting impressions of very different
people: a strange man in naval uniform with the insignia of a commander;
Anette in a scanty sheath of satin from which an airy skirt spread
to the left like a fan; Alice Lucian sitting on the steps with George
Willard: Frank Carver remote and lost in his bitter thoughts; Elsie
Wayland with the gold halo of an income almost a dollar a minute.

Mina Raff, with Peyton Morris at her shoulder, smiled at him. “What
an adorable house,” she pronounced; “I wish I could have it near the
studio.” She waved Peyton away unceremoniously, “Come, everybody has
had enough drinks, and show it to me.” They passed through the hall,
and into the quiet of the space beyond, lighted by a single unobtrusive
lamp. “What a satisfactory fireplace!” she exclaimed in her faint key,
as though, Lee thought, her silent acting were depriving her of voice.
She sank onto the cushioned bench against the partition. “How did they
feel, do you suppose--the people, the men and women, who belonged to
such things?” As Lee watched her it seemed that she grew more remote,
shadowy, like a memory of long vanished beauty made before his eyes
from the shifting firelight and immaterial shadows. Mina Raff lost her
reality in an unreal charm that compressed his heart. The atmosphere
around her stirred with re-created dead emotions. Then:

“Ah!” she cried softly, unexpectedly, “what a wonderful doll.” She rose,
with a graceful gesture of her hands up to where Cytherea rested. “Where
did you get her? But that doesn't matter: do you suppose, would it be
possible for me, could I buy her?”

“I'm sorry,” Lee answered promptly; “we can't do without her. She
belongs to Helena,” he lied.

“But not to a child,” Mina Raff protested, with what, in her, was
animation and color; “it has a wicked, irresistible beauty.” She gazed
with a sudden flash of penetration at Lee Randon. “Are you sure it's
your daughter's?” she asked, once more repressed, negative. “Are you
quite certain it is not yours and you are in love with it?”

He laughed uncomfortably. “You seem to think I'm insane--”

“No,” she replied, “but you might, perhaps, be about that.” Her voice
was as impersonal as an oracle's. “You would be better off without her
in your house; she might easily ruin it. No common infidelity could be
half as dangerous. How blind women are--your wife would keep that about
and yet divorce you for kissing a servant. What did you call her?”

“Cytherea.”

“I don't know what that means.”

He told her, and she studied him in a brief masked appraisal. “Do you
know,” she went on, “that I get four hundred letters a week from men;
they are put everywhere, sometimes in my bed; and last week a man killed
himself because I wouldn't see him. You'd think that he had all a man
wanted from life; yet, in his library, with his secretary waiting for
him, he.... Why?” she demanded, questioning him with her subdued magic.

“Have you ever cared for any of them?” he asked indirectly.

“I'm not sure,” she replied, with an evident honesty; “I am trying to
make up my mind now. But I hope not, it will bring so much trouble. I
do all I can to avoid that; I really hate to hurt people. If it happens,
though, what can you do? Which is worse--to damage others or yourself?
Of course, underneath I am entirely selfish; I have to be; I always was.
Art is the most exhausting thing that is. But I don't know a great deal
about it; other people, who act rather badly, can explain so fully.”

From where Lee sat he could see Cytherea; the unsteady light fell on the
gilt headdress, the black hair and the pale disturbing smile. She seemed
to have paused in a slow graceful walk, waiting, with that wisdom at
once satirical and tender, for him. Together, slowly, deliberately, they
would move away from the known, the commonplace, the bound, into the
unknown--dark gardens and white marble and the murmur of an ultramarine
sea. He was rudely disturbed by the entrance of Anette and Peyton
Morris. “We're so sorry,” Anette said in an exaggerated air of apology;
“come on away, Peyton.” But the latter told Lee that Fanny was looking
for him. “We are ready to go over to the Club; it's ten minutes past
eight.”

Mina Raff gazed up at the doll. “I have an idea the devil made you,” she
declared.

“You are to go with us, Mina,” Peyton told her; “if you will get your
cloak--” The two women left, and Morris demanded:

“What was that damned rot about the doll?”

“Miss Raff wanted it.”

“Well, why not?”

Lee Randon turned away coldly. “Little girls can't have everything they
put their eyes on.” Morris muttered, and Lee asked, “What's that?” The
other failed to reply, but his remark had sounded remarkably like,
“She can.” Going, Lee looked back involuntarily: he hadn't, after all,
imagined Cytherea's quality, Mina Raff had recognized it, too; the dance
had lost its attraction for him.

      *      *      *      *      *

The automobiles started in a concentration of accelerated gasoline
explosions, their headlights sweeping across the house and plunging into
the farther night. Fanny gathered her wrap closely about her throat.
“I'm cold,” she asserted; “it was so nice at home, with the children,
and plans--I intend to take out that yellow rambler and try a climbing
American beauty rose there. What a lovely dress of Anette's; it must
be the one she's been talking about so much, that Miss Zillinger made;
really good for Eastlake. What was that man's name who was in the navy,
and did you notice his rank? The officers of the navy are a lot better
looking than army men. And Mina Raff, after all did you find her
interesting?”

“Quite. She struck me as very intelligent.” He had no wish to repeat the
conversation about Cytherea. It was queer, that; the more he considered
it the more significant it appeared to be. “Did it seem to you,” he
asked, “that Peyton was very attentive?”

“I didn't have time to notice. Do you think it's true about her getting
all that money? It looks almost wicked to me, with so many people
needing just a little. But anybody could see that she thinks only of
herself; I don't mean she isn't charitable, but in--in other ways.”

They were late, and the main floor was being emptied of a small crowd
moving into the dining-room. There the long table of the club dinner
reached from end wall to wall; and, with the scraping of chairs, a
confusion of voices, the places were filled. Lee found himself between
Bemis Fox, a younger girl familiar enough at the dances but whose
presence had only just been recognized, and Mrs. Craddock, in Eastlake
for the winter. Anette was across the board, and her lips formed the
query, “The first dance?”

Lee Randon nodded; he was measurably fond of her; he usually enjoyed a
party at which he found Anette. That she liked him was very evident; not
desperately, but enough to dispose of most restraint; she repeated to
Lee what stories, formal and informal, men told her, and she asked his
advice about situations always intimate and interesting.

The flood of voices, sustained on cocktails, rose and fell, there
were challenges down the length of the table and quickly exchanged
confidences. Bemis, publicly ingenuous, laid a light eager hand on his
arm, and Mrs. Craddock answered a question in a decided manner. The
dinner, Lee saw, was wholly characteristic of the club and its members:
they had all, practically, known each other for years, since childhood;
meeting casually on the street, in the discharge of a common living,
their greetings and conversation were based on mutual long familiarity
and recognized facts; but here, at such dances, they put on, together
with the appropriate dress, a totally other aspect.

An artificial and exotic air enveloped whatever they did and said--hardy
perennials, Lee thought, in terms Fanny's rather than his, they were
determined to transform themselves into the delicate and rare flowers
of a conservatory. Women to whom giggling was an anomaly giggled
persistently; others, the perfect forms of housewife and virtue, seemed
intent on creating the opposite engaging impression; they were all
seriously, desperately, addressed to a necessity of being as different
from their actual useful fates as possible.

The men, with the exception of the very young and the perpetually young,
were, Lee Randon knew, more annoyed than anything else; there was hardly
one of them who, with opportunity, would not have avoided the dinner as
a damned nuisance; scarcely a man would have put his stamp of approval
on that kind of entertainment. It was the women who engineered it, the
entire society of America, who had invented all the popular forms of
pleasure; it was their show, for the magnifying of their charms and the
spectacle of their gay satins and scented lace; and the men came,
paid, with a good humor, a patience, not without its resemblance to
imbecility. Women, Lee continued, constantly complained about living in
a world made by men for men; but the truth of that was very limited:
in the details, the details which, enormously multiplied, filled life,
women were omnipotent. No man could withstand the steady friction, the
inexhaustible wearing, of feminine prejudice; forever rolled in the
resistless stream of women's ambition, their men became round and smooth
and admirable, like pebbles. This, he saw, in Fanny's loving care, was
happening to him: she had spun him into the center of a silken web--

“You are not very polite,” Mrs. Craddock said.

“Are you a mind-reader,” he replied, “or haven't I heard you?”

“It doesn't matter,” she explained, “but you were so far away.”

He told her something of what had been in his thoughts, and she rewarded
him with a swift speculative interest. “I hadn't realized you were so
critical about your guinea hen,” she acknowledged. “Well, if what you
say is true, what can you do about it?”

“Nothing,” Lee returned non-committally; “I am comfortable.” This, he
instantly decided, sounded unfair to Fanny, and he substituted happy.
Mrs. Craddock obviously was not interested in the change. “I get as
tired of this as you do,” she asserted abruptly; “it's like being on a
merry-go-round someone else started and can't stop. You have no idea how
we get to hate the tunes.”

“But you mustn't forget the chance of catching a gold ring,” he reminded
her.

“It's brass,” Mrs. Craddock asserted.

The orchestra began in the other room and, though dinner was not over,
there were breaks in the table, couples dancing beyond. Anette rose, and
Lee Randon, taking her into his arms, swept out from the doorway.
“What was she talking about?” Anette demanded. “You,” he replied
experimentally. “I like her; experience has brought her some wisdom; and
she knows men, too.”

“God knows she ought to,” Anette's face was close to his, and he
caught the flash of malice in her eyes. Conscious of the flavor of an
acceptable flattery he didn't let this disturb him. “What a marvelous
dance,” she proceeded; “there must be twenty men over. But I like it
better when the porch isn't inclosed, and you can sit on the bunkers.”

How was it that she contrived to make nearly everything she said stir
his imagination? Anette had the art of investing the most trivial
comments with a suggestion of license. It was a stimulating quality, but
dangerous for her--she was past thirty with no sign of marriage on
the horizon. He wondered if she really had thrown her slipper over the
hedge? It wasn't important, Lee decided, if she had. How ludicrous it
was to judge all women, weigh their character, by the single standard
of chastity. But this much must be admitted, when that convention of
morality was broken it had no more significance than the fragments of
a coconut shell. The dance came to an end and they returned to their
vanilla mousse, coffee and cigarettes.

Some of the men were leaning over the table, drunk and noisy; a woman's
laugh was shrill, senseless. Senseless! That, for Lee Randon, described
the whole proceeding. He had looked forward to the dance with a happy
anticipation, and, now that it was here, even before he had come, he
was out of key with it. The efforts of the people about him to forget
themselves were stiff and unconvincing; their attitudes were no more
than masks held before their faces; there wasn't a genuine daring
emotion, the courage of an admitted thrill, to be found. And then, as if
to mock his understanding, he saw Peyton Morris with such a desperately
white face bent over Mina Raff that he had an impulse to reprove him for
his shameless exposure.

Instead, he cut in on their dancing and carried her to the other end of
the floor. “I don't know why you did that,” she complained; “you don't
like me. But you can dance, and with Peyton it's a little like rushing
down a football field. There! Shall we drop the encore and go outside?
My wrap is on a chair in the corner.”

      *      *      *      *      *

“I don't go to parties,” she explained; “I am only here on Anette's
account. That was Oscar Hammerstein's idea--he wouldn't let his
actresses even ride in a public car; he said that mystery was a part
of their value, and that people wouldn't pay to see them if they were
always on the streets. Beside, I am tired all the time; you can't
possibly know how hard I work; a hundred times harder than you, for
instance.”

“I've been told that about moving pictures.”

“The glare of the silver-foil reflectors is unbearable,” she looked up,
with a pointed and famous effect. “But you don't like me?”

“I do; aside from that, though, I'm not sure; probably because you are
so remote and cold.”

“Thank God!” she replied. “You haven't stopped to think where I'd be
if I weren't. And yet, no one, in their work, is supposed to be more
emotional. It's funny, and I don't pretend to understand. The trouble
with me is that I have no life of my own: ever since I was sixteen
I've done what directors told me, for the public; it is time I had some
private feelings.”

“It must be a nuisance,” he agreed.

Another dance began, but neither of them stirred; from where Lee sat the
long doors were panels of shifting colors and movement. The music
beat, fluctuated, in erratic bars. A deep unhappiness possessed him,
an appalling loneliness that sometimes descended on him in crowds. Even
Fanny, the thought of his children, could not banish it. Above the drum
he thought he could hear the sibilant dissatisfaction of the throng
striving for an eternity of youth. The glass about the porch, blotted
with night, was icy cold, but it was hot within; the steam pipes were
heated to their full capacity, and the women's painted and powdered
faces were streaked--their assumption of vitality and color was running
from them.

“Hideous,” Mina Raff said with a small grimace. She had the strange
ability of catching his unexpressed thoughts and putting them into
words. “Women,” she went on, “spend all their money and half their lives
trying to look well, and you'd suppose they would learn something, but
they don't.”

“What do women dress for?” he demanded; “is it to make themselves
seductive to men or to have other women admire and envy them?”

“Both,” she answered, “but mostly it's a sort of competition with men
for the prize. I'll tell you something about us if you like--we are
not made of sugar and spice and other pleasant bits, but only of two:
prostitute and mother. Not, of course, separately, or in equal parts;
some of us have more of one, others more of the other. That girl across
the table from you is all prostitute, the married woman you were talking
to is both, quite evenly divided; your wife is a mother, even with her
remarkable eyes.” She stopped his obvious inquiry:

“I am an artist, and no one has yet discovered what that is. Do you
remember the straw you used to get with a glass of soda water? You see,
often I think I'm like that, a thing for bright colors to pour through.
It's very discouraging. There is Peyton, and he'll want to dance.” She
rose, slipping out of her cloak.

Lee Randon saw Fanny not far away, and he dropped into a chair beside
her. “Well,” he asked, “how is it going?”

“It seems all right,” she told him, with one of her engaging smiles. “I
was surprised that you talked so long to Mina Raff; I had the idea you
didn't like her.” Women, he reflected, were uncanny. “Three women are
just plastered up in the dressing-room,” she continued; “Sophie Tane
ruined her dress completely, and Crystal Willard has been sobbing for
an hour. Lee, there are horrid bruises on her arm--do you think he is
brutal?”

He told her not to bother about the Willards, and then rose to get a
chair for Claire Morris. “Peyton is simply fascinated,” Claire asserted
lightly. “This Mina ought to have something handsome for giving him such
a splendid time. She is a lovely wench, Lee.”

“You have it over her like a tent, Claire,” he insisted; “you're lovely
and human both.”

“Thank you, darling; I'm human, fast enough, now that the drink is
dying. I believe for the first time in my life I am ready to leave
a dance before the last flourish of the music. Fanny, we are getting
older; it's hideous but so. We're getting on, but our young men are
gayer every day.”

Fanny Randon's smile, her expression, were secure.

This made Lee restive, and, patting her hand, he left to dance with
Alice Lucian. “When this is over,” she informed him, “we'll get Anette
and George, and go out to my car. There is a Thermos bottle of cocktails
hidden under the seat.” The girl who had sat at Lee's right was dancing
with a tall fair-haired boy in a corner. Entirely oblivious of the rest
of the room, they were advancing two matched steps and then retreating,
their eyes tightly shut and cheeks together. A man fell in the middle
of the floor, catching his partner's skirt and tearing it from the
waistband. Everywhere the mad effort at escape!

Lee Randon lost his impression of the triviality of the occasion: they
all seemed desperately searching for that something he had lost and
which was overwhelmingly important to him; and all the while the music
stuttered and mocked and confused a tragic need. Or it was like a
momentary release from deadly confinement, a respite that, by its rare
intoxication, drove the participants into forms of incredulous cramped
abandon. Positively, he thought, they were grasping at light, at color,
at the commonplace sounds of a few instruments, as though they were
incalculable treasures. Alice, when she danced, held her head back with
eyes half closed; and suddenly, with her mouth a little parted, she,
too, had a look of Cytherea, a flash of the withheld beauty which filled
him with restlessness.

It startled him, and, sub-consciously, his arm tightened about her. She
responded immediately, with an accelerated breath, and the resemblance
was gone. Greatly to his relief, a man cut in on them, and once more he
found himself dancing with Anette. She asked him, in a murmurous warmth,
if he liked her, at all. And, with a new and surprising, a distasteful,
sense of lying, he replied that he did, tremendously. No, a feeling in
him, automatic and strange, responded--not Anette! He wanted to leave
her, to leave everyone here, and go. For what? At the same time he
realized that he would stay, and go out, drink, in the Lucians' car. He
had a haunting impression, familiar to him in the past weeks, that he
was betraying an essential quality of his being.

Yet along with this his other consciousness, his interest in Anette,
lingered; it existed in him tangibly, a thing of the flesh, not to be
denied. She was all prostitute, Mina Raff had said, using the word in
a general sense rather than particularly, without an obvious condemning
morality. Indeed, it might easily be converted into a term of praise,
for what, necessarily, it described was the incentive that forever drove
men out to difficult accomplishment, to anything rather than ease. Good
or bad, bad or good--which, such magic or maternity, was which?

“What are you thinking about?”

“It would take years to tell you.”

“I wish ... you might; but I didn't mean to say that, to let you know--”

“You didn't let me know anything,” he broke into her period impatiently.
“If we get on together isn't that enough? It's really not necessary
to hide ourselves behind a lot of pretentious words. And what we feel
tonight hasn't a thing to do with tomorrow; probably then we'll be
entirely different; how can it matter?”

“It does, though, because you might hate me tomorrow for being myself
tonight. What you think of me has to be big enough to guard against
that. You hurt me, Lee, very much, talking in that way.”

      *      *      *      *      *

Alice Lucian, with George Willard, passed them and nodded significantly
toward the entrance. “You will need a cloak,” Lee told Anette;
“it's blowing colder and colder.” She vanished up the stairs, to
the dressing-rooms, while Lee stood waiting with Willard. He didn't
especially like the latter, a man with an exuberant loud friendliness, a
good nature, that served as a cover for a facilely predatory sensuality.

He was continually taking hold of feminine arms, bending close over
dinner dresses; and he used--with a show of humorous frankness--his long
knowledge of the girls of Eastlake as a reason for kissing them on every
possible occasion.

Anette and Alice appeared, with their wraps turned to exhibit the silk
linings, bright like their dresses; and, at a favorable moment, they
slipped out into the malice of the wind beating on them from the
darkness. Anette was pressed tightly against Lee, Alice and George
Willard were vaguely ahead; and, after a short breathless distance,
they were in the protection of the shed. The Lucians' automobile had
an elaborate enclosed body: shutting the doors they were completely
comfortable, unobserved and warm. “No,” Alice directed, “don't put on
the light; I can find it. There! We'll have to use the cap for a glass.”
 The aluminum top of the bottle was filled and refilled; the frigid
gin and orange juice brought Lee Randon a glow of careless well-being,
irresponsibility.

The others had gone to the front seat, where they were squeezed into a
remarkably small space. Anette sat leaning forward, her chin propped in
her left hand and the right lightly resting on Lee's knee. A loose board
in the shed kept up an exasperating clatter. A match flared and Willard
lighted a cigarette. It was curious about Alice--only in the last year,
and for no reason Lee could discover, had she done things such as
this. Perhaps, with no children, and the money Warner had accumulated
comparatively lately, she hadn't enough to do. Of course, Warner, a
splendid individual, could not be called entertaining; he was totally
absorbed in his business, often away at the wood-pulp mill, in the
Laurentian Mountains, in which he had a large interest.

Warner Lucian had nearly all the principal virtues--integrity,
generosity, courage, and he was as single in mind as Willard was
dubious; but, in spite of so much, it was clear that he had begun
to weary Alice. She was publicly indifferent to him, careless of his
wishes; she had even complained to Lee about her husband's good conduct,
explaining that if he would only have what she termed an affair he would
be more human.

“I am still very cross at you.” Anette spoke out of a gloom in which her
face was barely distinguishable. “You took all the niceness out of our
friendship and made it seem horrid; just as though you had pulled off my
clothes; I--I haven't the same feeling about you.”

His effort at honesty, at discovering the mystery of profound disturbing
needs, had been vain. Gathering Anette in his arms Lee kissed her.
She rested there for a moment; then, with her hands against his chest,
pushed him away. “I can't, now,” she told him; “somehow it's all
spoiled. It seemed as though you were studying me disapprovingly. I'm
not just bad, you know.”

“I don't think you are bad at all,” he replied irritably; “you brought
that into it. Why, in the name of heaven, should I?”

“Fanny doesn't like me,” she said at a tangent.

“Who put that in your head?”

“Fanny. She's hardly civil.”

“If you mean she's jealous, she isn't.”

“You hardly need to add that. Of course, I realize Fanny Randon couldn't
be jealous of me. Good Lord, no! Why should she be? No one would give me
a thought.”

Anette, wholly irrational, was furious. Damn women, anyway! It was
impossible to get along with them, since they hadn't a grain of reason.
He was superior to her temper, indifferent to it, because he was
indifferent to her. Suddenly the charm she had had for him was gone, the
seductiveness dissolved, leaving only Anette, a fairly good-looking
girl he had known for a great while. His warm response to her was dead;
whatever she had aroused and satisfied, or left in suspense, no longer
contented him. The memory of his interest in her, the thought he had
expended, was now a cause of surprise, incomprehensible. Lee wanted to
return to the club house and Fanny.

There was an obscure indication of Alice's hands raised in the
rearrangement of her hair. George Willard half turned, facing the rear
of the car. “I can't see much,” he said, “but it is evident that you
two have been fighting. Why don't you live in peace and happiness? The
trouble's all with Lee, too, you don't have to tell me that, Anette; he
is too cursed cantankerous; and it would serve him right if you'd come
up here with us.”

Anette opened the door and an icy draft swept about their knees. “Not
yet,” Willard begged; “we won't be missed.”

“You may stay as long as you want,” Anette replied, “but I am going
back.” Positively her voice bore a trace of tears. What, what was it all
about? It was Alice who decided that they should return together: “The
bottle's empty, my hair net is fixed for the third time, and we had
better. You get out, George, please. No, I told you.”

Lee Randon welcomed the solid rushing of the wind; it swept in full
blast across the open of the golf course and made walking precarious.
Anette was lost, forgotten. If the chill air could only take the fever,
the desire, out of his mind and blood! He wished that he might be
absorbed into the night, the storm, become one with its anonymous force,
one with the trees he heard laboring on their trunks. Instead of the
safety of being a part of nature he felt that, without directions, he
had been arbitrarily set down on earth, left to wander blindly with no
knowledge of his destination or its means of accomplishment.

Fragments of a dance measure were audible, and he returned to the
pounding music, the heat, the perceptibly chlorinated perfumes and
determined activity. He went at once in search of his wife; she had
apparently not moved from the chair in which he had left her. Meeting
her slightly frowning, questioning expression he told her simply,
without premeditation or reserve, that he had been out in an automobile.
Fanny was obviously not prepared for his candor, and she studied him
with the question held on her lifted face. Then banishing that she
proceeded to scold him:

“You know how I hate you to do such things, and it seems precisely as
though my wish were nothing. It isn't because I am afraid of how you'll
act, Lee; but I will not let you make a fool of yourself. And that,
exactly, is what happens. I don't want women like Anette to have
anything on you, or to think you'll come whenever they call you. I can't
make out what it is in your character that's so--so weak. There simply
isn't any other name for it. I don't doubt you, Lee,” she repeated, in
a different, fuller voice, “I know you love me; and I am just as certain
you have never lied to me. I'm sure you haven't, in spite of what the
girls say about men.”

He was cut by an unbearably sharp, a knife-like, regret that he had
ever, with Fanny, departed from the utmost truth. Lee Randon had a
sudden vision, born of that feeling returning from the shed, of the
illimitable tranquility, the release from all triviality, of an honesty
beyond equivocation or assault. Fanny, in her way, possessed it; but
that, he saw, was made vulnerable, open to disaster, through her love
for him. It was necessary, for complete safety, to be entirely insulated
from the humanity of emotions. That condition he instinctively put from
his thoughts as being as undesirable as it was beyond realization. Lee,
with all his vitality, drew away from a conception, a figure, with the
cold immobility of death. After all, he reassured himself, he had never
essentially lied to Fanny; he had merely suppressed some unnecessary
details in order to make their existence smoother. The welcome collapse
of his small affair with Anette proved the wisdom of avoiding the
exaggeration and difficulty of explanations.

“Lee,” Fanny said, changing the direction of their thoughts, “I don't
want to bother you, but I am uneasy about Claire and Peyton. He hasn't
left Mina Raff a minute this evening. And he has such an unhappy
expression, not at all as though he were enjoying himself.”

“I noticed that,” Lee agreed; “but it will do him no good with
Mina--she's a cold potato, career's the only thing in her head.” Then
he remembered what Mina Raff had told him about her individuality, her
personal desire; and he repeated it to his wife.

“I don't think Claire is entirely wise,” she went on; “but you can't
tell her a thing. She listens as sweetly as possible and then says that
she won't interfere with Peyton. Well, someone else will. Claire has too
much reserve, she is too well-bred and quietly superior. You wait and
see if I am not right; life is very vulgar, and it will take advantage
of her.”

“I wonder if you are? Well, as you say, we shall see. If Mina Raff fixes
her mind on him there will be a lot to watch.”

“You must speak to him.”

“Now there,” Lee expostulated, “you make me sick. How--will you tell
me--can I speak to Peyton until he first says something? And when that
happens, as easily as not it may be a cable from Peru. You want to
interfere too much, Fanny, and insist that everybody follow your idea of
right.”

She retired into a silence of wisdom that merely looked down on him. Her
face was troubled, her lips tightly compressed. “What time is it?” she
asked sharply; “the ribbon of my watch is worn out. Oh, we can go home
with decency. It makes me rather sick here.”

He went below, for his hat and coat, and found the room beyond the
lockers, built as an informal café before the era of prohibition,
occupied by a number of men transferring the balance of fulness from a
row of bottles to themselves.

He accepted a drink, more for the purpose of considering Peyton Morris,
moodily abstracted by the table, than for itself. It seemed to Lee that
the young man had actually aged since the cocktail party at his house,
earlier in the evening. Peyton's mouth was hard and sullen; his brow was
corrugated. “We're going home,” Lee told him; “and it seemed to me that
an hour ago Claire was tired.”

“She didn't tell me,” Peyton responded punctiliously; “and certainly
if she's low we'll go too.” He rose promptly, and, with his outer garb,
accompanied Lee Randon. His step was uncertain, and Lee put a hand under
his elbow. “Liquored?” he asked casually.

“Not in my brain,” Peyton Morris returned: “it seems like I could never
get drunk again; but my dam' feet are all over the place. Thanks
for hanging on to me: I have an idea you are going to drop me pretty
quickly.”

“I don't want to question you,” Randon said, “or in any way force
a confidence, but, Peyton, in addition to the relationship, I am
exceptionally fond of Claire; and, since helping you is practically the
same thing as helping her--”

“I wish to Christ I had been sunk in the North Sea,” Morris broke in
bitterly.

They were up the stairs and standing on the emptied floor of an
intermission. Fanny, prepared to leave, was gazing about for him.
“You've been an age,” she cried to Lee; “and, Peyton, Claire is at last
looking for you; although she'd kill me for saying it. You had better go
outside a minute, first, and clear your head.”

He came very near to her, slightly swaying. “Fanny, you are a darling,
but you are hard; you are hard as the Commandments.”

“That is not very kind, Peyton,” she protested; “but I have some common
sense.”

“Haven't you any uncommon sense?” he begged. “That's what I want. A
little just now might save everything.”

“You must try to find out,” she informed him; “I think I have been
successful with Lee; anyhow he ought to say so.”

“I do,” Lee Randon asserted quickly. “Fanny is wonderful. If I'm of no
use go to her.”

“You don't know,” Peyton muttered; “you can have no idea.”

“What in the world was he talking about?” she asked Lee in the
automobile.

“Peyton is in love with Mina Raff,” he admitted shortly, in a pressure
of conflicting emotions.

“Lee!” she exclaimed; “are you sure? Did he say so? That is simply
frightful.”

“I imagine it's worse than you realize.”

“Do you mean--”

“Nothing actual yet,” he interrupted her impatiently; “perhaps
nothing you would bother about. But you'd be wrong. It's all in his
thoughts--some damned spoiled ideal, and as dangerous as possible.”

“Poor Claire,” she said.

“Of course, that's the thing to say,” he agreed. “The man is always a
criminal in such situations.”

“You are not trying to defend him?” she asked quietly.

“Maybe I am; I don't know. After all, we are jumping at conclusions;
Peyton was drunk. But, for heaven's sake, if either of them comes to you
don't just be moral. Try to understand what may have happened. If you
lecture them they will leave you like a shot.”

Fanny was driving, and she moved one hand from the wheel to his cheek.
“It isn't us, anyhow, Lee; and that is really all I care for. We are
closer than others, different. I don't know what I'd do if you should
die first--I couldn't move, I couldn't go on.”

“You would have the children,” he reminded her.

“They are nothing compared with you.” It was the only time she had made
such an admission, and it moved him profoundly. It at once surcharged
him with gratitude and an obscure disturbance.

“You mustn't pin so much to me,” he protested; “you ought to think of a
hundred other things.”

“I would if I could; I often try, but it is impossible. It is terrible
to care for a man the way I do for you; and that's why I am so glad you
are what you are: silly at times, ridiculously impressionable, but not
at all like George Willard, or Peyton Morris.”

He had an overwhelming impulse to explain himself in the most searching
unsparing detail to Fanny, the strange conviction that in doing it he
would anticipate, perhaps escape, grave trouble. Lee Randon realized,
however, that he would have to begin with the doll, Cytherea; and the
difficulty, the preposterousness, of trying to make that clear to his
wife, discouraged and kept him silent. No woman, and least of any the
one to whom he was married, could be trusted to understand his feeling,
his dissatisfaction in satisfaction, the restlessness at the heart of
his peace.

Fanny went up at once, but he lingered, with a cigar, in the living
room. A clock struck one. A photograph of Claire with her bridesmaids,
Peyton and his ushers, on a lawn, in the wide flowered hats of summer
and identical boutonnières, stood on a table against the wall; and
beyond was an early girlish picture of Fanny, in clothes already
absurdly out of mode. She had a pure hovering smile; the aspect of
innocence time had been powerless to change was accentuated; and her
hands managed to convey an impression of appeal. He had been, in the
phrase now current, crazy about her; he was still, he told himself
strictly. Well, he was ... yet he had kissed Anette; not for the first
time, either; but, he recognized, for the last. He was free of that!
A space, a phase, of his life was definitely behind him. A pervading
regret mingled with the relief of his escape from what he had finally
seen as a petty sensuality. The little might, in the sequence, be safer,
better, than the great. But he vigorously cast off that ignominious
idea. A sense of curious pause, stillness, enveloped Lee and surprised
him, startled him really, into sitting forward and attentive. The wind
had dropped, vanished into the night and sky: the silence without was as
utter as though Lee Randon were at the center of a vacuum.




II


On Saturday morning Lee telephoned to his office, found nothing that
required his immediate attention there and, the brief-case again in
evidence, stayed at Eastlake. Fanny, too, with her hair severely plain
and an air of practical accomplishment, was occupied with her day book.
She kept this faithfully; but Lee couldn't decide whether the obvious
labor or her pleasure in the accomplishment were uppermost. She
addressed the day book with a frowning concentration, supplementary
additions and subtractions on stray fragments of paper, which at times
brought him with an offer of assistance to her shoulder. But this she
resolutely declined--she must, she insisted, maintain her obligation
along with his. However, Fanny, like all other women, he thought, was
entirely ignorant of the principle of which money was no more than a
symbol: she saw it not as an obligation, or implied power, but as an
actuality, pouring from a central inexhaustible place of bright ringing
gold and crisp currency.

However, Fanny had always been accustomed to the ease of its possession,
familiar with it; and that had stamped her with its superiority of
finish. How necessary, he continued, money was to women; or, rather, to
the women who engaged his imagination; and women were usually the first
consideration, the jewelled rewards, of wealth. As he visualized, dwelt
on, them, their magnetic grace of feeling and body was uppermost: sturdy
utilitarian women in the kitchen, red-faced maids dusting his stairs,
heavily breasted nurses, mothers, wives at their petty accounts--he
ended abruptly a mental period escaping from the bounds of propriety.
What he meant, all that he meant, was that beauty should be the main
consideration. Lee applied himself to far different values; and, before
he had finished, lunch was ready.

“I have been thinking half the morning about Claire and Peyton,” Fanny
told him; “I do feel that we exaggerated the situation last night; it
all seemed more immediate, bigger, than it will turn out. Heavens, as
you said, they can't do anything, nothing can happen.”

He was still inclined to believe that. “There is a tremendous lot of
talk and no result; yes--no one really does a thing. They want to, and
that's all it comes to.”

Fanny cast a glance of repressed attention at him across a lower
center-piece. “If you could be whatever you wanted, what and where, what
would you choose?” she asked.

“Here, with you and the children,” his voice replied without hesitation.
The youth of her expression was happily stained by a flush. He meant it,
Lee told himself sharply. But about Peyton--

“Of course, he was drunk last night, and he said nothing conclusive; he
was only wretchedly unhappy--wished he had been killed in the war and
all the romantic rest.”

“It is too much for me,” Fanny decided generally; “but I am glad that
I was young when I was; being alive was quite simple then. I am
comparatively young, Lee, 'way under forty--well, two years--but you
can't realize how things have changed in such a short while. The women
we knew didn't even smoke then. Wasn't it only five or six years ago
they were first allowed to in nice cafés? And, not simply that, men
didn't, either, when they were with us. We used to go to Cape May; they
called the dances hops; and do you, oh, do you, remember the bathing
suits?”

“I am not so certain about any great change,” he objected. “I seem to
recall--”

“Horrid people will always be horrid!” she exclaimed. “I knew one or two
very fast girls; but they were different about it from now, it was only
whispered around and condemned, and it's shouted out today. I wish I had
known you sooner; I would have done a lot better than your mother. I'd
like to have had you, Lee, as a little boy; but I suppose you're enough
that yet.”

His opposition to Fanny's maternal manner, directed at him, was stronger
than customary; she seemed to accept in herself every responsibility for
him; as though, whenever his actions were unfortunate, it had been
due to her imperfect control. With practically no experience of life,
guarded from its threatening aspects, her attitude was that, not without
patience, she brought him with relative safety through a maze in which
otherwise he'd be lost. This was evident now in what he felt to be the
complacency of her voice and expression; and a perverse impulse grew in
him to combat and shatter her blind satisfaction. Lee subdued this, in
the merest decency; but the effort left him thoroughly irritated. He
found, finally, an outlet for his annoyance in the restlessness of
Helena; and he ordered her from the table.

This show of paternal discipline Fanny met with lowered eyes and a
silence that endured until Gregory had walked sedately from the room;
then she reminded Lee that he must never, absolutely never, correct his
children when he was in an ill temper.

“That's nonsense,” he returned shortly; “you ought to see that because
it's impossible. Even theoretically I don't agree with you--a child can
understand a punishment in which there is some warmth. You are dealing
with a little animal and not a reasonable being.” To this Fanny replied
that her children were not animals.

“Really, Fanny, you don't know what you are talking about,” he asserted;
“we are all, men and women and children and giraffes, animals. You might
look that up in the dictionary.”

“I haven't any need to,” she observed, with a calmness that further
tried him. “If the dictionary says that it isn't a very good one. And
if you are trying to tell me that Helena and Gregory are no better than
giraffes you're sillier than usual.”

“That isn't in the least what I said,” Lee retorted, with widely
separated words. “I wasn't speaking of the comparative but of the
absolute. It is a fact that we are animals, more responsible and with
greater powers than the others, but animals, animals.”

“Then what is an animal?” Fanny demanded.

“A mammal.”

A marked expression of distaste invaded her. “It has a nasty sound,” she
admitted with her instinctive recoiling from life. “I don't see how we
got on this subject anyhow, it's too much like sex. It seems you are
able to discuss nothing else.”

“It is only nasty in your mind,” he declared.

“That's exactly like you, you all over, to blame things on me. It's
convenient, I must say, but not fair nor true: it was you who got in a
wicked temper and sent Helena, who was feeling miserable, away.”

“You always say the children are sick when they misbehave.”

“I wish I could be as sure of you as I was of that,” she answered
quickly; “for instance, when you go out in automobiles at the dances
with women.”

“Now, we are beginning,” he told her with emphasis; “we never had an
argument that didn't degenerate into this; and I'm sick of it.”

“I thought I was the one who was sick of it,” Fanny complained; “I
wonder that I don't just let you go.”

“I wish you would,” he said, rising; “I give you my word, I'd rather
be damned comfortably than have this endless trouble.” In a position of
unassailable quiet behind his papers he told himself that the scene with
Fanny had been particularly vain because, underneath, he agreed with
her opinion about the casual expression of small emotions; he no longer
wanted it any more than she did. Yes, at last they were one there. And
yet he felt further from her even than before--whatever his marriage
hadn't satisfied, that he had stilled in minor ways, was now without
check. The truth was that it had increased, become more serious,
insistent.

The tangible facts, the letters and memoranda, before him, retreated and
came back to his consciousness. Tobacco worms had been boring through
his cigars, and destroyed a third of the box. Helena passed, affecting
a grievance out of any proportion to its cause in him. Outside, the
country was flooded with a deceptive golden radiance; and he remembered,
suddenly, that Alice Lucian had told him to bring Fanny to the Club and
a tea that afternoon, which she was giving for Mina Raff. He repeated
this to his wife, in a conciliatory regret at his forgetfulness; and she
replied that if he cared to go she would come over later for him in the
car. Lee, standing at a window, thought he wouldn't; but, adding
that Peyton would be there, he decided that, in view of the possible
developments, his presence might be wise.

      *      *      *      *      *

The early gloom gathered familiarly in the long main room of the
clubhouse; the fire cast out fanwise and undependable flickering
light upon the relaxed figures; it shone on tea cups, sparkled in rich
translucent preserves, and glimmered through a glass sugar bowl. It was
all, practically, Lee Randon reflected, as it had been before and would
be again. How few things, out of a worldful, the ordinary individual
saw, saw--that was--to comprehend, to experience: a limited number of
interiors, certain roads and streets, fields and views. He made his way
through life blinded to the customary and unaware of the strange; summer
was hot and winter, usually, cold; the spring became green under
rain; winds blew and the leaves fell in fall--of how much more was he
conscious?

It was the same with regard to people; he, Lee Randon, knew a
great many, or rather, he could repeat their names, recognize their
superficial features at sight. But to say that he actually knew
them--that was nonsense! Why, he was almost totally ignorant of himself.
How much could he explain of Fanny's late state of mind? She had done
all that was possible to make it clear to him; with little result. Fanny
was an extraordinarily honest person; or, damn it, she seemed to be. He
had a reputation for truthfulness; but how much of what was in his mind
would he admit to his wife? The discrepancy between what he appeared
and what he felt himself to be, what he thought and what published, was
enormous, astounding.

There, as well, was Peyton Morris; Lee would have sworn that he
understood him thoroughly--a character as simple, as obvious as Fanny's.
But here was Morris seated with Mina Raff on the stairs to the upper
floor, beyond the radius of the fire; and, though they were not ten feet
away, he could not hear a word of what they were saying. At intervals
there was an indistinct murmur, nothing more. Claire, at Lee Randon's
side, was sitting with her chin high and a gaze concentrated on the
twisting flames: talking generally had fallen into a pause.

The door from without opened, Fanny entered, and there was a momentary
revival of animation. “Is Lee here?” she demanded; “but I know he is.
The fire is just as attractive at home, yet, even with nothing to do,
he'll hardly wait to give it a poke. Where's Peyton?”

“On the stairs,” someone answered casually.

There was a movement, and Mina Raff approached. “It's so hot here,” she
asserted.

“It is warmer out,” Fanny informed her; “I wonder what the weather is in
New York?”

“I can't say, I'm sure; but I shall discover tomorrow morning. I have to
be back as early as possible. Then--work, work, work.”

“Mina has been made a star,” Peyton Morris announced. But he stopped
awkwardly, apparently conscious of the warmth, the largeness, in his
voice. Fanny whispered to Lee that it was quite too outrageous. In
return, he asked, “What?” and, indignant, she drew away from him.

The conversation died again. Lee Randon could see Mina Raff's profile,
held darkly against the glow; her lips and chin were firm. “Where,”
 Anette asked her, “shall you stay when you get back--at Savina Grove's?”
 No, Mina replied, her hours would be too long and uncertain to allow
that; probably she would be at the Plaza. Lee had heard the Groves' name
mentioned before in connection with Mina Raff; and he made an effort
to recall the reason. The Groves--it was the William Loyd Groves--were
rather important people, financially and socially; and one of them, yes,
that was it, was related to Mina, but which he didn't know.

More came back to him: Mina Raff's parents had died when she was a young
girl, and the Groves had rescued her from the undistinguished evils of
improvidence; she had lived with them until, against their intensest
objections, she had gone into moving pictures. Probably the Groves'
opposition had lasted until Mina's success; or, in other words, their
support had been withheld from her through the period when it had been
most needed.

Yes, the girl had a determined mouth. If he, Lee Randon, had followed
his first inclinations--were they in the way of literature?--how
different his life would have been. Mina Raff had been stronger, more
selfish, than her environment: selfishness and success were synonymous.
Yet, as a human quality, it was more hated, more reviled, than any
other. Its opposite was held as the perfect, the heavenly, ethics of
conduct. To be sacrificed, that was the accepted essence of Christ;
fineness came through relinquishment. He didn't believe it, he told
himself fiercely; something deep, integral, in him revolted absolutely.

Mina Raff had been wholly justified; the very people who had thrown
all their weight against her admitted it fully. It was only when such a
self-belief was without compensating result, value, that it was wrong.
But who could say what any outcome would be? Some people took the chance
and others didn't; he had not. Then the question came up of whether he
had not failed as it was? No one would agree with him that it might be
failure; he hadn't called it that. Suddenly, vehemently, he wished
that he could grow old at once, in a second; anything to quiet the
restlessness at his heart.

Lee had a conviction that he ought to decide the case of the individual
against the world, the feeling that it was of the greatest importance
to him; but for centuries men had considered, without answer, just that.
The thing to do was to live, not to think; for it was possible that
those who thought, weighed causes and results, hardly lived at all in
the sense he meant. All the people he knew were cautious before they
were anything else; they existed primarily for their stomachs. The
widely advertised beauty of self sacrifice was golden only when it
adorned like a halo the heads of others. That was natural, inevitable
to the struggle for survival; it didn't answer Lee's question, which, he
felt, was of the spirit rather than the body.

“It's getting late,” Fanny said briskly. There was a general movement,
sighs and the settling of skirts. The lights were switched on, and the
fire, that had been a source of magic, became nothing more than ugly
grey charring logs with a few thin tongues of flame. Lee, with his
wife, stopped to say good-bye to Mina Raff; Fanny's manner was bright,
conventional; as palpably insincere to the other woman, Lee was certain,
as it was to him. He said:

“I hope your new picture will go well.”

“Thank you,” she responded, her slight hand lingeringly holding his;
“perhaps you will like me better on the screen than in reality.”

“Could you tell me which was which?”

She hesitated. “Three months ago, yes, but not now; I'm not sure of
myself.”

“That was positively indecent,” Fanny observed afterward; “she is as
bold as brass. I hope I am not as big a fool as Claire.”

“Claire and you are very different,” he told her; “I have an idea that
she is doing whatever is possible. But then we don't know what we
are talking about: it's fairly evident that Peyton and Mina Raff are
interested in each other, they may be in love; and, if they are, what
does that mean? It isn't your feeling for the children or mine for you;
they are both love; yet what is it?”

“It is God in us,” Fanny said gravely; “and keeps us all, Helena and
Gregory and you and me, safely together.”

She seldom spoke to him of religion, but it dwelt closely, vitally,
within her, and not as an inherited abstraction or correct social
observation, but definitely personal in its intercommunication. Lee
Randon had none at all; and in her rare references to it he could only
preserve an awkward silence. That had always been a bar between his
family and himself, particularly with the children: he was obliged
to maintain an endless hypocrisy about the miracles, the dogmas and
affairs, of Sunday school and the church. As a child he had been so
filled with a literal Presbyterian imagery that, when a degree of reason
discarded figures of speech seen as concrete actualities, nothing had
been left. With the lapse of a purely pictorial heaven and hell, the
loss of eternal white choirs and caldrons of the unrepentant, only earth
remained.

      *      *      *      *      *

He could recall in gloomy detail his early impression of Paradise: it
was a sombre plain floating cloud-like in air, with, doubling through
it, an unspeakable sluggish river of blood; God, bearded and frowning in
the severity of chronic judgment, dominated from an architectural throne
a throng of the saved in straight garments and sandalled feet; and, in
the foreground, a lamb with a halo and an uplifted cross was intent on
the baptism of individuals issuing unaccountably white from the thickly
crimson flood.

Yet his children, in a modified Episcopalian form, were being taught the
same thing: the Mosaic God; Christ Jesus who took unto Himself the sin
of the world; the rugged disciple, St. Peter and the loving disciple,
St. John. The sky, they learned, was the habitation of light-winged
angels. The ark was still reported on its memorable voyage, with its
providential pairs of animals gathered from every zone, but there was
a growing reticence about Jonah. The persistence of such credulity, Lee
thought, was depressing; just as the churches, leaning on the broken
support of a charity they were held to dispense, were a commentary on
the poverty of the minds and spirits of men.

Yes, the necessity of charging Helena and Gregory with such assurances,
their rigid bending into mental forms, large and small, in which he
had no confidence, put Lee outside the solidity of his family. In the
instruction, the influences, widely held paramount in the welding of
polite Christian characters, Fanny was indefatigable--the piece of
silver firmly clasped in the hand for collection, the courtesy
when addressed by elders, the convention that nature, birds, were
sentimentally beneficent. When Gregory brought out these convictions,
lessons, in his indescribably fresh eager tones, Lee listened with a
helpless disapproval.

Everything, it seemed to Lee Randon, increased the position of
self-delusion at the expense of what he felt to be reality. His doubts,
for example, were real; with no will, no effort on his part, they
invaded his mind ceaselessly. Cytherea's disturbing charm was real, as
definite as Fanny's quiet actuality. However, he wasn't interested in
an abstract arraignment of life, but intent only on the truth about
himself. Lee wanted to discharge fully his duty to existence--in the
more inglorious phrase, he didn't want to make a fool of himself--and
yet it was growing more difficult all the while to distinguish folly
from sense.

This affair, if it did exist, of Peyton's with Mina Raff wasn't so
easily determined as Fanny insisted. Perhaps, like his own, Peyton
Morris' life had been restricted by artificial barriers thrown about the
rebellious integrity of his fundamental being. Few children could
stand out against the combined forces of the older world; but it was
conceivable that, later, like a chrysalis, they might burst the hard,
superimposed skin and emerge triumphant.

That damned problem of self-sacrifice!

How much claim had men upon each other? What did children gain who
sacrificed their lives for their parents? It was supposed to bring them
nobility; but, at the same time, didn't it develop in the parents the
utmost callous selfishness; didn't the latter, as their needs were
exclusively consulted, grow more exacting, unreasonable? Was not love
itself the most unreasonable and exacting thing imaginable?

Once surrendered to it, the tyranny of a beloved subject was absolute:
Lee told himself that the emotion he was considering--the most sacred
of earthly ties--ignominiously resembled the properties of fly paper. He
turned abruptly from that graceless thought: it was a great deal warmer,
and a mist, curiously tangible in the night, was rising through the bare
branches of the maple trees.

“I am going to talk to Claire,” Fanny said firmly.

“It would do both of you no good,” he informed her; “besides, you'll
have to take so much for granted.”

“Claire will tell me.”

“I wonder?” They were in their room, preparing for bed; Fanny, with
her hair spread in a thin brown tide over the chaste shoulders of her
nightgown, was incredibly like a girl. The mechanical sweep of her hand
with a brush kept a brief sleeve falling back from the thinness of her
arm. How delicately methodical she was--an indispensable quality in
the repeated trying contacts, the lost privacy, of marriage. So much
depended upon the very elusiveness which the security of possession,
habit, destroyed.

“This love,” he continued his speculations aloud, “isn't at all
understood--we are ignorant about it in spite of endless experience and
reports and poetry. Take us,” he had one of his dangerous impulses of
complete honesty, “before we were married, while we were engaged, we
had an impracticable romantic attraction for each other. I know that
I thought of you all the time, day and night; and, just because you
existed, the whole world was full of prismatic colors; it was as though
an orchestra were playing continually and I were floating on the finest
music. You were like a figure in heaven that drew me up to you.

“Well, that lasted quite a while into our marriage; at first I had
an even greater emotion. Then, as Helena and Gregory were born, it
changed.” Midway in the brushing of her hair Fanny was motionless
and intent. “I don't say it decreased, Fanny, that it lost any of its
importance; but it did change; and in you as well as me. It wasn't
as prismatic, as musical, and there's no use contradicting me. I can
explain it best for myself by saying that my feeling for you became
largely tenderness.”

“Oh!” Fanny exclaimed, in a little lifting gasp; “oh, and that
tenderness,” her cheeks were bright with sudden color, “why, it is no
more than pity.”

“That isn't just,” he replied; “unless you want to speak of pity at its
very best. No, that won't do: my affection for you is made of all our
experiences, our lives and emotions, together. We are tied by a thousand
strings--common disappointments and joy and sickness and hope and pain
and heaven knows what else. We're held by habit, too, and convenience
and the opinion of society. Certainly it is no smaller than the first,”
 he argued, but more to himself than to Fanny; “that was nothing but a
state of mind, of spirit; you can't live on music.”

“Don't you think you have said enough for one night?” she asked, in
a calm voice belied by the angry sparkle of her eyes, the faint
irrepressible trembling of her lips. “Do you think I want to hear that
it is only convention and our neighbors that keep you with me? You have
no right to insist that your horridness is true of me, either. I--I
could hear music, if you would let me.” She sank on the little cushioned
bench before her dressing table, where her youthfulness took on a
piercing aspect of misery. Fanny's declaration, not far from tears,
that she was just as she had always been was admirably upheld by her
appealing presence.

The tenderness he had admitted, reduced by a perceptive impatience and
the sense of having been wholly, wilfully, misunderstood, carried him
over to her. He took Fanny, with her face strained away from him, into
his arms. “Don't be an idiot,” he begged softly; “you ought to be used
to my talking by now. Let me go on, it can't come to anything--” She
stiffened in his embrace:

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing, nothing,” he answered shortly, releasing her; “where is all
that certainty you assured me of? If you go on like this I shall never
be able to tell you my thoughts, discuss problems with you; and it seems
to me that's very necessary.”

“It has been lately,” she spoke in a metallic voice; “nothing satisfies
you any more; and I suppose I should have been prepared to have you say
things to me, too. But I'm not; you might even find that I am not the
idiot you suspect.”

“I was giving you a chance to prove that,” he pointed out.

“Now you have discovered the fatal truth you can save yourself more
trouble in the future.” She emphatically switched off a light beside
her, leaving him standing in a sole unsparing illumination. Yet in her
extreme resentment she was, he recognized, rubbing Vaseline into her
finger nails, her final nightly rite. Then there was silence where
once he had kissed her with a reluctance to lose her in even the short
oblivion of sleep.

      *      *      *      *      *

Throughout Monday, at his office, Lee Randon thought at uncomfortable
intervals of the late incipient scenes with Fanny. They had
quarrels--who hadn't?--but they had usually ended in Fanny shedding some
tears that warmly recemented their deep affections. This latter time,
however, she had not wept--at the point of dissolving into the
old surrender she had turned away from him, both in reality and
metaphorically, and fallen asleep in an unexpected cold reserve. He was
sorry, for it brought into their relationship a definite new quality of
difference. He was aware of the thorough inconsistency of his attitude
toward their marriage; again two opposed forces were present in
him--one, Fanny, as, bound to her, he knew and cherished; and the
other--the devil take the other!

He was organizing a new company, and, figuring impatiently, he pressed
the button for Mrs. Wald, his secretary. She appeared at once and
quietly, her notebook and pencil ready, took a place at his side. “Run
this out, please, Mrs. Wald,” and an involved financial transaction
followed. What he wanted to ascertain was, with a preferred stock
bearing eight per cent at a stated capitalization, and the gift of a
bonus of common, share for share, how much pie would remain to be cut up
between a Mr. Hadly, Sanford, and himself? The woman worked rapidly,
in long columns of minute neat figures. “About thirty-four thousand
dollars, each, Mr. Randon,” she announced almost directly. “Is that
close enough; or do you want it to the fraction?”

“Good enough; send Miss Mathews in.”

Almost anyone on his staff, Lee reflected, knew more about the processes
of his business than he did; he supplied the energy, the responsibility
of the decisions, more than the brains of his organization; and
it perfected the details. The stenographer, Miss Mathews, was very
elaborately blonde, very personable; and, dictating to her, Lee Randon
remembered the advice given him by a large wielder of labor and finance.
“Lee,” he had said, touching him with the emphasis of a finger, “never
play around with an employee or a client.”

He, John Lenning Partins, had been a man of eccentric humors, and--like
all individuals who supported heavy mental burdens, inordinately taxed
their brains--he had his hours, unknown to the investing public, of
erratic, but the word was erotic, conduct. On more than one occasion
he had peremptorily telegraphed for Lee to join him at some unexpected
place, for a party. Once, following a ball at the Grand Opera House, in
Paris, they had motored in a taxi-cab, with charming company, to Calais.
During that short stay in France John Partins had spent, flung variously
away, four hundred thousand dollars.

The industrious, the clerks, efficient women like Mrs. Wald, the
middle-aged lawyers in his office, were rewarded...by a pension. It
was all very strange, upside down: what rot that was about the infinite
capacity for taking pains! He supposed it wouldn't do to make this
public, the tritest maxims were safer for the majority; but it was too
bad; it spread the eternal hypocrisies of living. He asked Miss Mathews:

“You're not thinking of getting married, are you? Because if you do I'll
have your young man deported; I simply won't let go of you.”

“I don't see any signs of it, Mr. Randon,” she replied, half serious and
half smiling; “my mother thinks it's awful, but I'm not in any hurry.
There are men I know, who might like me; they show me a very good time;
but somehow I am not anxious. I guess in a way it's the other married
girls I see: either they housework at home, and I couldn't be bothered
with that; or they are in an office and, somehow, that seems wrong,
too. I want so much,” she admitted; “and with what clothes cost now it's
terrible.”

“Moralists and social investigators would call you a bad girl,” he told
her; “but I agree with you; get your pretty hats and suits, and smart
shoes, as long as you are able. You're not a bit better in a kitchen
than you are here, taking dictation from me; and I am not sure you would
be more valuable at home with a child or two. You are a very unusual
stenographer, rapid and accurate, and you have a good mind in addition
to your figure. Why should you lose all that at once, give it up, for
the accidents of cholera infantum and a man, as likely as not, with a
consumptive lung?”

“But what about love, Mr. Randon? That's what throws me off. Some say
it's the only thing in life.”

“I'm damned if I know,” he admitted, leaning back from his wide
flat-topped desk. “I hear the same thing, and I am rather inclined to
believe it. But I have an idea that it is very different from what most
people insist; I don't think it is very useful around the house; it has
more to do with the pretty hat than with a dishpan. If you fall in
love go after the thing itself, then; don't hesitate about tomorrow
or yesterday; and, above all else, don't ask yourself if it will last;
that's immaterial.”

“You make it sound wild enough,” she commented, rising.

“The wilder the better,” he insisted; “if it is not delirious it's
nothing.”

The road and countryside over which he returned in the motor sedan,
partly frozen, were streaked by rills of muddy surface water; the sky,
which appeared definitely to rest on the surrounding hills, was grey
with a faint suffusion of yellow at the western horizon. It was all as
dreary, as sodden, as possible. Eastlake, appearing beyond a shoulder of
bare woods, showed a monotonous scattering of wet black roofs, raw
brick chimneys, at the end of a long paved highway glistening with steel
tracks.

Lee Randon was weary, depressed: nothing in his life, in any existence,
offered the least recompense for the misfortune of having been born. He
left his car at the entrance of his dwelling; Christopher, the gardener,
came sloshing over the sod to take it into the garage; and, within, he
found the dinner-table set for three. “It's Claire,” his wife informed
him; “she called up not half an hour ago to ask if she could come.
Peyton was away over night, she said, and she wanted to see us.” He went
on up to his room, inattentive even to Claire's possible troubles.

He dressed slowly, automatically, and descended to the fire-lit space
that held Cytherea in her mocking, her becoming, aloofness. In the
brightly illuminated room beyond the hall Helena and Gregory were
playing parchesi--Gregory firmly grasped the cup from which he intently
rolled the dice; Helena shook the fair hair from her eyes and, it
immediately developed, moved a pink marker farther than proper.

“You only got seven!” Gregory exclaimed; “and you took it nine right on
that safety.”

“What if I did?” she returned undisturbed. “I guess a girl can make a
mistake without having somebody yell at her. Your manners aren't very
good.”

“Yes, they are, too,” he asserted, aggrieved; “I have to tell you if
you move to a safety where you don't belong.” He shook the dice from the
cup. “Now, see there--that just brings me to your man, and I can send
him home.”

“I don't care,” Helena informed him; “it's a young sort of game, anyhow.
Now I'm wearing waists and buttoned skirts I'd just as leaves write a
letter to Margaret West with no boys in it at all.”

She left the parchesi board, and crossed the room to the piano, where
she stood turning over sheets of music with a successful appearance of
critical interest. Gregory, silently struggling with the injustice of
this, gazed up with a shadowed brow at Lee. “I was going to beat her,”
 he said, “I was almost home, and she went away. She just got up like
nothing was happening.” Helena put in, “Neither there was.” Lee Randon
took her place. “You can beat me instead,” he proposed. His interest
in the game, he felt, was as false as Helena's pretended musical
preoccupation; but he rolled the dice and shifted the counters, under
Gregory's undeviating scrutiny, with the conviction that parchesi was
not conspicuously different from the other more resounding movements of
the world and its affairs. Gregory easily vanquished him, and Lee rose
with a curt, unwarranted nod of dismissal.

      *      *      *      *      *

Freezing cocktails in the pewter pitcher, in the repetition of minor
duties which, Lee Randon thought, now constituted four-fifths of his
life, he told himself that Claire Morris had never looked better: she
was wearing a dress of a soft negative blue material, high about her
throat, with glimpses of bright embroidery that brought out her darkly
vivid personality. Claire had a slim low-breasted figure, gracefully
broad shoulders; and her face, it might be because of its definite,
almost sharp, outline, held the stamp of decided opinions. Claire's
appearance, he recognized, her bearing, gave an impression of arrogance
which, however, was only superficially true--she could be very
disagreeable in situations, with people, that she found inferior,
brutally casual and unsympathetic; but more privately, intimately, she
was remarkably simple-hearted, free from reserve. She was related to Lee
through her father, a good blood, he told himself; but her mother had
brought her a concentration of what particular vigorous aristocracy--an
unlimited habit of luxury without the responsibility of acknowledged
place--the land afforded.

The drinks had been consumed, the soup disposed of, when Claire said
abruptly, “Peyton is going to leave me.”

Although, in a way, Lee had been prepared for such an announcement, the
actuality upset him extremely. Fanny gasped, and then nodded warningly
toward the waitress, leaving the dining-room; at any conceivable
disaster, he reflected, Fanny would consider the proprieties.

“When did he tell you?” Fanny demanded.

“He didn't,” Claire replied; “I told him. It was a great relief to both
of us.”

“Say what you like outside,” Lee put in vigorously; “but at least with
us be honest.”

“I am, quite,” she assured him; “naturally I don't want Peyton to go--I
happen to love him. And there's Ira. But it was an impossible position;
it couldn't go on, Peyton was absolutely wretched, we both were; and
so I ended it. I laid out all his best silk pajamas so that he'd look
smart--”

“How can you?” Fanny cried; “oh, how can you? It is too wicked, all too
horrible, for words. I don't think you are advanced or superior, Claire,
you failed him and yourself both. It's perfectly amazing to me, after
the men you have met, that you don't know them. You must keep them going
in the right direction; you can't let them stop, or look around, once;
I only learned that lately, but it is so. They haven't an idea of what
they want, and they try everything. Then if you let a man go he is the
first to blame you; it's like winking at murder.”

“How could I keep him when he didn't want to stay?” Claire asked
wearily; “I am not too moral, but I couldn't quite manage that. Then
what you say might do for some men, but not Peyton. You see, he has
always been very pure; all his friends at Princeton were like that; they
were proud of it and very severe on the other. And afterwards, when he
went into the city, it was the same; Peyton would get drunk any number
of times with any number of men, but, as he said, he was off women. The
stage door, it seems, is very old-fashioned now.

“When we were engaged, and he told me that he was really pure, I was
simply mad with happiness. I thought it was such a marvelous thing for
a girl to find. I still think that; and yet, I don't know. If he were
different, had had more experience, perhaps this wouldn't have hit him
so hard. He would have kissed his Mina on the porch, outside the dance,
and come home.”

“As for that Raff woman--” Fanny stopped, at a loss for a term to
express her disgust.

“Why not?” Claire asked. “She wanted Peyton and went after him: he isn't
for her art, I believe, but for herself. I haven't talked to her; I
can't make up my mind about that. Probably it would do no good. Peyton
is splendidly healthy; it won't be necessary to tell her anything about
draughts and stomach bands.”

“Claire, you're utterly, tragically wrong,” Fanny wailed. “I wish I
could shake sense into you. Up to a point this is your fault; you are
behaving in a criminally foolish way.”

“What do you think Claire should do?” Lee asked his wife.

She turned to him, a flood of speech on her lips; but, suddenly, she
suppressed it; the expression, the lines, of concern were banished
from her face. “There is so much,” she replied equably; “they haven't
discussed it enough; why, it ought to take a year, two, before they
reached such a decision. Peyton can't know his mind, nor Claire hers.
And Ira, that darling innocent little child.”

“Damn Ira!” Claire Morris exclaimed.

“You mustn't,” Fanny asserted; “you're not yourself. Mina Raff should
be burned alive, something terrible done to her.” Fanny's voice had the
hard cold edge of fanatical conviction. “If she had come into my house
making trouble.... But that couldn't have happened; I'd have known at
once.”

“You are more feminine than I am,” Claire told her. “I see this in a
very detached manner, as if it didn't concern me. I suppose I can't
realize that it has happened to us. It has! But if you are right, Fanny,
and it's necessary to treat a man like a green hunter, then this was
bound to occur. I couldn't do anything so--so humiliating; he could bolt
sooner or later. I did the best I knew how: I was amusing as possible
and always looked well enough. I never bothered Peyton about himself and
encouraged him to keep as much of his freedom as possible.

“I don't believe in the other,” she said to Fanny Randon in a sharp
accession of rebellion; “it is degrading, and I won't live that way, I
won't put up with it. If he wants to go, to be with Mina Raff, how in
God's name can I stop it? I won't have him in my bed with another woman
in his heart; I made that clear to you. And I can't have him hot and
cold--now all Mina and then the sanctity of his home. I've never had a
house of that kind; it was christened, like a ship, with champagne.

“I have never cared for domestic things. I'd rather wear a dinner-gown
than an apron; I'd a damn sight rather spin a roulette wheel than rock a
cradle. And, perhaps, Peyton wanted a housewife; though heaven knows he
hasn't turned to one. It's her blonde, no bland, charm and destructive
air of innocence. I've admitted and understood too much; but I couldn't
help it--my mother and grandmother, all that lot, were the same way,
and went after things themselves. The men hated sham and sentimentality;
they asked, and gave, nothing.”

Fanny, it was evident, was growing impatient at what was not without its
challenge of her character and expressed convictions. “I do agree with
you, Claire, that we are not alike,” she admitted. Her voice bore a
perceptible note of complacency, of superior strength and position.
“Just last week I was telling Lee that I belonged before the war--things
were so different then, and, apparently, it's only in my house they
haven't changed. We are frightfully behind the times, and you'd be
surprised at how glad we are. It was your mother's father, wasn't it,
who fell in love with the Spanish woman while he was in the Embassy
at Seville? My family weren't people of public connections, although
a great-aunt married Senator Carlinton; but they had the highest
principles.”

“They were lucky,” Claire Morris replied indifferently; “I am beginning
to think it isn't what you have so much as what happens to it. Anyhow,
Peyton is going away with Mina Raff, and I am sorry for him; he's so
young and so certain; but this has shaken him. Peyton's a snob, really,
like the rest of his friends, and Mina's crowd won't have that for a
moment: he can't go through her world judging men by their slang and
by whom they knew at college. I envy him, it will be a tremendously
interesting experience.” If her eyes were particularly brilliant it was
because they were surrounded by an extreme darkness. Her voice, commonly
no more than a little rough in its deliberate forthrightness, was high
and metallic. She gave Lee the heroic impression that no most mighty
tempest would ever see her robbed of her erect defiance. It was at once
her weakness and strength that she could be broken but not bent.

      *      *      *      *      *

After dinner Claire, who was staying with the Randons until tomorrow,
played picquet with Lee; and his wife, her shapely feet elevated above
the possible airs of the floor, continued to draw threads from the
handkerchiefs she was making for Christmas. Claire played very well and,
at five cents a point, he had to watch the game. On a specially big
hand she piqued and repiqued. “That,” she declared, “will pay you for
caputting me.” The jargon of their preoccupation, “A point of six; yes,
to the ace; paid; and a quatorze, kings,” was the only sound until Fanny
rose, decidedly. “I am going to bed.” She hesitated at the door. “I hope
you'll be comfortable, Claire: I had some club soda and rye put in your
room, since you like it so well. Don't be too late, please, Lee; it
makes you tired starting so early in the morning.”

“You'll have to forgive me,” Claire said, when Fanny had gone; “but I
don't--I never did--like women.”

“Do you think any more of men, now?”

“Heavens, yes. I wish I could find someone to blame for what has
happened, Peyton specially, but I can't, not to save my life. It seems
so hopelessly inevitable. I don't want you to suppose I'm not unhappy,
Lee; or that I care only a little for Peyton. I love him very much; I
needed him, and my love, more than I can explain. As Fanny as good as
told me, I am a wild bird; anything, almost, with what is behind me, may
happen. It was just the irony of chance that this affair caught Peyton,
the immaculate, instead of me. I was awfully glad that I had an anchor
that seemed so strong; in my own faulty way I adored everything I had; I
wanted to be tranquil, and it had a look of security.”

“It isn't over, Claire,” Lee asserted. “I haven't seen that young fool
yet.”

“Please don't bother him; and it's too much to drag out the moralities
on my account.”

“Moralities!” he echoed indignantly, “who said a word about them? I'm
not interested in morals. Lord, Claire, how little you know me. And
as for bothering him, he'll have to put up with that. He has invited a
certain amount of it.”

They forgot the game and faced each other across the disordered cards.
“If I won't argue with him,” she insisted, “you can't. But we needn't
discuss it--he won't listen to you, Peyton's all gone. I never saw such
a complete wreck.”

“He can't avoid it,” Lee went on; “I'll have to do it if it is only for
myself; I am most infernally curious about the whole works. I want to
find out what it's about.”

“If you mean love, he can't tell you; he hasn't had enough experience to
express it. You might do better with me.”

“No, I want it from the man; a woman's feeling, even yours, would do
me no good. You see, this has always been explored, accounted for,
condemned, written about, from the feminine side. Where the man is
considered it is always in the most damnable light. If, in the novels, a
man leaves his home he is a rascal of the darkest sort, and his end is a
remorse no one would care to invite. That may be, but I am not prepared
to say. No, dear Claire, I am not considering it in preparation for
anything; I want to know; that's all.”

“The books are stuff, of course,” she agreed. “The grandfather of mine
who was killed in Madrid--it wasn't Seville--must have had a gorgeous
time: a love affair with one of the most beautiful women alive. It
lasted five months before it was found out and ended; and his wife and
he had been sick of living together. After it was over she was pleased
at being connected with such a celebrated scandal; it made her better
looking by reflected loveliness. She was rather second class, I believe,
and particularly fancied the duchess part.”

“It wouldn't be like that in the current novels, or even in the better:
either your grandparent or the duchess would be a villainous person, and
the other a victim. I'm inclined to think that most of the ideas about
life and conduct are lifted from cheap fiction. They have the look of
it. But that realization wouldn't help us, with the world entirely on
the other side.”

“No, it isn't,” Claire objected; “and it's getting less so all around
us. Perhaps men haven't changed much, yet; but you don't hear the women
talk as I do. I don't like them, as I said; they are too damned skulking
for me; but they are gathering a lot more sense in a short while.”

“I don't agree with you there,” he replied; “you are getting your own
infinitesimal world confused with the real overwhelming majority; you
haven't an idea how it feels and, in particular, of what it thinks
of you, smoking and gambling and damning your fate. It may be largely
envy--personally I am convinced it is--but they have you ticketed
straight for hell just the same.”

“It doesn't interest me.” Claire increasingly showed the strain, the
unhappiness, through which she was parsing. Nor did it him, he ended
lamely, except in the abstract. This at once had the elements of a lie
and the unelaborate truth; he couldn't see how his curiosity applied
to him, and yet he was intent on its solving. The fixed mobile smile of
Cytherea flashed into his thoughts. His perpetual restlessness struck
through him.

His attitude toward the Morrises was largely dictated by his fondness
for Claire. He had determined what, exactly, he would say to Peyton.
Yet, as a fact, he returned to his former assertion to Fanny; the boy
would make it difficult, if not impossible, to discuss such intimate
relationships. And as Claire had pointed out, the very openness
of Peyton's life would make him exceptionally far to reach; he was
particularly youthful in his hardness, his confidence in his acts and
friends and beliefs; yet all that couldn't help but be upset now.

“Fanny will think I have designs on you,” Claire remarked; “go up when
you like. I am not a bit sleepy.”

Lee had no intention of going to bed then, and told her so. It seemed to
him that, perhaps, with Claire, he might discover something that would
set his questioning at rest. Vain delusion. He asked what her plans
were:

“I'll stay in Eastlake for the winter, and, in March, go to Italy, to
give Peyton his divorce--Florence; I lived a while at Arcetri; it's very
lovely.”

He had a momentary experimental vision of a small yellow villa among
the olives of the Florentine hills, of crumbling pink walls with
emerald green lizards along the stones, of myrtles and remarkable
lilies-of-the-valley. Twenty years ago it would have drawn him
irresistibly; but not now; he wanted--where his wants were articulate--a
far different thing. It had nothing to do with Italy, or any other
country; his intentness had been withdrawn from the surfaces of life,
however charming; they had plunged into the profounder mysteries of
being. Lee had gained nothing if not a certain freedom from exterior
circumstance; his implied revolt against trivialities, if it did no
other good, had at least liberated him from the furniture of existence.
However, it had begun to appear that this was not an unmixed blessing;
he had the uncomfortable sensation of having put out, on a limitless
sea, in a very little boat too late to arrive at any far hidden
desirable coast.

Claire shivered, and, discovering that she was cold, he insisted on
her going upstairs. “To my pure sheets,” she said, with a touch of her
familiar daring. Left alone, Lee was depressed by the hour; the room,
his house, seemed strange, meaningless, to him. There was a menace in
the unnatural stillness; Fanny's unfinished handkerchief, her stool,
were without the warmth of familiar association. It might have been a
place into which he had wandered by accident, where he didn't belong,
wouldn't stay. It was inconceivable that, above him, his wife and
children were sleeping; the ceiling, the supine heavy bodies, seemed to
sag until they rested on his shoulders; he was, like Atlas, holding
the whole house up. It was with acute difficulty that he shook off the
illusion, the weight. From outside came the thin howling of a dog, and
it, too, seemed to hold a remote and desperate interrogation.

      *      *      *      *      *

He slept badly, in short broken stretches, with the Morrises constantly
in his mind; and what, in the slightest dislocation of reality, was
dream and what waking he couldn't determine; at times his vision
seemed to hold both--a door, the irrevocable door, swung open, the end
impended, but he was unable to see the faces of the man and woman;
when he looked anxiously a blind spot intervened. The morning found him
unrefreshed, impatient; and he was glad that his early breakfast was
solitary; Lee didn't want then to see either Claire or Fanny, he was in
no mood to discuss Peyton's seizure. That, it seemed to Lee Randon, was
exactly what had happened to the younger man--Peyton had gone within the
region of a contagious fever that had run through all his blood.

Yet, at dinner, to his surprise, Fanny said very little about what had
entirely occupied their thoughts; she was quiet, reserved; her attitude
was marked by a careful dignity. Her gaze, even more than commonly,
rested on her husband. “I had a wretched night, too,” she told him; “my
head is like a kite. I've thought and thought until my brain aches, it
is so full. But there are some things I decided; and if you don't agree
with them I'm sorry; because, Lee, I am right, I am indeed.”

“Of course you are,” he replied; “but, possibly, only for yourself. I
mean, for instance, that you can't be sure you're right for Claire.”

“No, no, that's just the same as saying there isn't any right or wrong
at all, and you know better. Yes, what I am certain about is duty; you
must do that before everything else. Peyton's duty is to Claire and
their child. It is as clear as this soup. Nothing else matters so much,
or at all. Why, Lee, the world is made up of people doing their duty;
what, I'd like to know, would become of it if they didn't? You don't
seem to realize it, but there are loads of obligations I get dreadfully
tired of, like the Social Service when it is my month to follow the
accounts, and visits to Annie Hazard who has a cancer of the stomach and
is dying, and thinking every day what to get you and the children and
the servants to eat. Suppose, some morning, I didn't stir, but just
rested in bed--what would happen? What did happen last winter when I
had pleurisy? Why, the whole house went to pieces, and, when you
weren't worrying about me, while I was getting well, you were the
most uncomfortable man imaginable. I don't want you to think I am
complaining, or that I don't love every minute and stick and stone of my
home and life; I do. But you seem to forget about me ... that's because
the house goes along so smoothly. It would be a good lesson if you had
to live with some other woman for a while.”

“I'm sure every word is so,” he returned; “no one could have a better
wife; you've spoiled me outrageously; I feel like that pig Christopher
has in a pen out by the stable.”

“You might think of something nicer to say,” she protested. “You're not
easy to live with, either,” Fanny continued; “you hardly ever agree with
what other people think; and you curse fearfully. I wish you wouldn't
swear like that, Lee. I object to it very much in Claire; I can't help
believing that she thinks it is smart or funny. And you encourage her.
If Claire had been different--no, don't interrupt me--this would never
have happened. You may say what you like about her good breeding: she's
been too flippant. I felt that last night. Claire doesn't accept her
obligations seriously enough. She's kept herself lovely looking, but
that isn't the whole thing.”

“What is the whole thing?” he demanded.

“I've told you, but you won't listen--duty.”

“You put that above all the rest?”

Fanny hesitated. “I said my head hurt because I've thought so much. Love
and duty, yes; I see them as the same. Duty without love would be hard,
and there isn't any love without duty.” Fanny evidently grew aware of
her threatening incoherence. “It isn't necessary to tell you in so many
words,” she said defensively; “you are only being contrary.”

“You have explained yourself beautifully,” he hastened to assure her; “I
am the person who is at sea.”

“Why, Lee!” she exclaimed, surprised; “I don't know anyone who is so
decided. That's what makes me raging, you're so dogmatic. There, that
is a splendid word. Don't eat that apple, it isn't baked; I can see from
here.” She rang. “Varney,” Fanny addressed the maid, “take Mr. Randon's
apple out and see if there isn't another better done, please. I warned
you about that; he can't eat them uncooked.”

“Let me keep it,” he protested; “it might have an excellent effect on my
disposition.”

“Don't interfere, Lee,” she responded coldly: “yes, Varney. It's really
idiotic of you,” she turned to him; “you are not a boy any more, you're
not even a young man, and you can't take liberties with your digestion.
You are quite like Helena with her prayers--if she feels very well she's
apt to forget them, but if she's sick she says them as hard as possible.
I wish she were like Gregory.”

“Gregory and you are cut out of the same gold cloth,” Lee Randon
pronounced.

“That was lovely of you, Lee.” Fanny radiated happiness. “No one could
say anything prettier to his old wife.” Dinner was over, and, rising,
she walked around the table and laid a confident arm on his shoulders.
The knife-like tenderness which, principally, he had for her overwhelmed
him; and he held Fanny against him in a silent and straining embrace.
For that reason he was annoyed at himself when, sitting through an
uneventful evening, his simile of the pig, enormously fat, sleepily
contented, in its pen, returned to him. It wasn't that he found an
actual analogy between the pig and life, individuals, on a higher plane,
so much as that he was vaguely disturbed by the impression that there
was an ultimate similitude between him, Lee Randon, and a fattened
somnolence of existence.

After all, were his individual opinions and doubts expressed in a manner
forceful enough to diversify him from a porcine apathy? The pig, secure
against the inequalities of fate and weather, wallowed through life with
a dull fullness of food as regular as the solar course. Christopher was
his wife. Now that, Lee told himself, with a vision of the gardener's
moustache, sadly drooping and stained with tobacco, his pale doubtful
gaze, was inexcusable. He abruptly directed his thoughts to Peyton
and Claire Morris; how exact Claire had been in the expression of her
personality! What, he grasped, was different in her from other women was
precisely that; together with an astonishing lack of sentimental bias,
it operated with the cutting realism of a surgeon's blade. She had, as
well, courage.

That was the result of her heritage; and he wondered if all strong
traits were the action of superior blood strayed into expected and
unexpected places? It was probable, but not susceptible of proof. The
pig's blood was that of the best registered Berkshire. God damn the pig!

He asked Fanny if she had heard any further particulars of the proposed
rearrangement of the Morrises' lives; when they were to separate;
but she knew no more than he. “I hope he doesn't come here,” she said
vigorously: “I should refuse to speak to him or have him at my table.
Outrageous! I can't make out why you take it so coolly. Mina Raff's a
rotten immoral woman; it doesn't matter how it's arranged. Why,” she
gasped, “she can be no more than Peyton's mistress, no better than the
women on the street.”

“That is so,” he agreed. But his following question of the accepted
badness of mistresses and streetwalkers he wisely kept to himself.
Were they darker than the shadow cast by the inelastic institution of
matrimony? At one time prostitutes were greatly honored; but that had
passed, he was convinced, forever; and this, on the whole, he
concluded, was fortunate; for, perhaps, if prostitution were thoroughly
discredited, marriage might, in some Elysian future, be swept of most of
its rubbish. Houses of prostitution, mistresses, like charity, absorbed
and dissipated a great deal of the dissatisfaction inseparable from the
present misconceptions of love and society. The first move, obviously,
in stopping war was the suppression of such ameliorating forces as
the Red Cross; and, conversely, with complete unions, infidelity would
languish and disappear.

      *      *      *      *      *

He thought of this further in the darkened theatre to which, driven by
his growing curiosity, he had gone to see Mina Raff in the leading part
of a moving picture. It was a new version, in a new medium, of an old
and perennial melodrama; but, too late for the opening scenes, the story
for the moment was incomprehensible to him. However, it had to do with
the misadventures of a simple country girl in what, obviously, was
the conventional idea of a most sophisticated and urbane society.
Lee waited, and not vainly, to see the feminine grub transformed, by
brilliant clothes, into a butterfly easily surpassing all the select
glittering creatures of the city; and he told himself that, personally,
he vastly preferred Mina Raff in her plainest dress.

It was strange--seeing her there; while, in fact, she was in New York
with far different things occupying her thoughts. Here she was no more
than an illusion, a pattern, without substance, of projected light
and shade; she had neither voice nor warmth nor color; only the most
primitive minds could be carried away, lost, in the convention of her
flat mobile effigy! Yet, after a little, he found that he as well was
absorbed in the atmosphere of emotional verity she created. It was
clear to him now that not the Mina Raff in New York, but this, was the
important reality. In herself she was little compared to what she so
miraculously did. Then--the final step in a surrender, however much
he hated the word, to art--he forgot Mina Raff completely. He lost her
partly in his own mental processes and partly in the unhappy girl she
was portraying:

It was an uncomplicated story of betrayal, of a marriage that was no
marriage, and the birth, in circumstances of wretched loneliness, of
an illegitimate baby. The father annoyed Lee excessively; he was the
anciently familiar inaccurate shape of conventionalized lust without
an identifying human trait. Not for a second did Lee believe in his
grease-pencilled incontinence and perfidy; but the child he seduced,
incidents of the seduction charged with the beauty of pity, thronged
Lee's mind with sensations and ideas. However, it was the world
surrounding the central motive, the action, that most engaged him;
hardly a trait of generosity dignified it; and, exaggeratedly as a
universal meanness and self-righteous cruelty was shown, it scarcely
departed, he felt, from the truth.

Why was it that virtue, continence, corroded the heart? Why did people
who, through predilection, went to churches, regard those who didn't
with such an insistent animosity? Why did the church itself seek to
obliterate--as though they were a breathing menace--all who stood
outside its doors? There was something terribly wrong in the reaction of
life to religion, or in the religion that was applied to life. It
began, in the symbolical person of Christ, with, at least, a measure
of generosity; but that had been long lost. Now the bitterness of the
religious rather resembled envy.

In the picture flickering on the screen the girl who had suffered the
agonies of birth sat, with her baby on her young lap, in the forlorn
room of a village boarding house. The baby was sick, a doctor had left
shortly before, and one minute clenched hand rested on the mother's bare
breast. Lee found himself gazing fixedly at the girl's face: trouble
slowly clouded it, the trouble was invaded by fear, a terrible question.
He realized that the hand was growing cold--the baby was dead.

Waves of suffering passed darkly over the mother, incredulity swiftly
followed by a frozen knowledge; she tried with her lips, her mouth, to
breath life into the flesh already meaningless, lost to her. Then the
tragedy of existence drew her face into a mask universal and timeless,
a staring tearless shocked regard as white and inhuman as plaster of
Paris. Emotion choked at Lee's throat; and, in a sense of shame at
having been so shaken, he admitted that Mina Raff had an extraordinary
ability: he evaded the impressive reality by a return to the trivial
fact. In the gloom there was only a scattering of applause, a failure
of approbation caused either by an excess of emotion in the audience,
or--this he thought more probable--a general uneasiness before a great
moment of life. The crowded theatre was wholly relieved, itself again,
in a succeeding passage of trivial clowning.

Hatred pursued the youthful informally maternal figure: that,
eventually, she was saved by the love of an individual was small before
the opposed mass--women surrounded her with vitriolic whispers, women
turned her maliciously from house to house, a woman had betrayed her.
Finally the tide of Christianity rose, burst, in a biblical father
who drove her into a night of snow that was a triumph of the actual
substituted for the cut paper of stage convention. That she would be
rescued, no doubt was permitted; and Lee took no part in the storm of
applause which greeted this act of satisfactory heroics.

The other spirit had appalled him: in his state of mental doubt--it
might equally have been a condition of obscure hope--he had been rudely
shoved toward pessimism; the converse of the announced purpose of the
picture. The audience, for one thing, was so depressingly wrong in the
placing of its merriment: it laughed delightedly at a gaunt feminine
vindictiveness hurrying through the snow on an errand of destruction.
The fact that the girl's maternity was transcendent in a generous and
confident heart, made lovely by spiritual passion, escaped everyone. The
phrase, spiritual passion, had occurred to him without forethought
and he wondered if it were permissible, if it meant anything? It did
decidedly to him; he told himself further that it was the fusion of
the body and all the aspirations called spirit in one supreme act of
feeling.

It had been his and Fanny's ... at first. Then the spirit, though it
had lingered in other relationships, had deserted the consummation of
passion. That hadn't grown perfunctory, but it became a thing more and
more strictly of the flesh; with this it was less thrilling. There, he
believed, they were not singular; or, anyhow, he wasn't; he saw what he
was convinced was the same failure in the men past youth about him. But
in Fanny there was, he recognized, that fierce if narrow singleness of
impulse, of purity. His thoughts of other women were not innocent of
provocative conjecture--Anette's sinuous body, now as dead to him as
Alohabad, recurred to his mind--but in this Fanny was utterly loyal.
Yes, she had, a thing impossible for any man he had known, a mental
singleness of desire.

Was it that which had in her an affinity with the oppressors of the
picture, which made her, mechanically, the vigorously enlisted enemy
of the actual Mina Raff? It startled him a little to realize that
Fanny--for all her marked superiority--was definitely arrayed with the
righteous mob. She was sorry for those who failed in the discharge of
duty to God and man, and she worked untiringly to reinstate them--in
her good opinion. That was it, and it was no more! All such attempted
salvation resolved itself into the mere effort to drag men up to the
complacent plane of the incidental savior.

This recognition took a great deal of the vigor from his intended
conversation with Peyton Morris: anything in the way of patronage,
he reflected, would be as useless as it would be false. But he had no
impulse to forego his purpose; he was engaged to help Claire who was
too proud to help herself; yes, by heaven, and too right for the least
humiliation. If Claire suffered, it must be because the world was too
inferior for hope of any kind.

Lee was not unaware of the incongruity of his position, for he was
equally ignoring the needs of two others, Peyton and Mina Raff. It was
evident to him now, since he had seen her in a picture, that she was
well worth the greatest consideration. She lay outside the stream of
ordinary responsibilities. What held him steady was the belief that she
and Peyton were not so important to each other as they thought; Claire
needed him more badly than Mina. There was a possibility--no, it was
probable--that Claire deserted would develop into an individual as empty
and as vacantly sounding as a drum. She had said as much. Her heritage,
together with its splendors of courage and charm, signally carried that
menace.

      *      *      *      *      *

So much, joined to what already was thronging his thoughts, brought
Lee's mind to resemble the sheet of an enormous ledger covered with a
jumble of figures apparently beyond any reduction to an answer. He was
considering Claire and Mina Raff, Mina and Claire, at a hunt breakfast
at Willing Spencer's in Nantbrook Valley, north of Eastlake, when,
with a plate of food in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, he
collided with Peyton Morris, his face pinched and his eyes dull from
a lack of rest. The Spencer house was sparely furnished, a square
unimpressive dwelling principally adapted to the early summers of its
energetic children; and Peyton and Lee Randon allowed themselves to be
crowded into the bare angle formed by a high inner door.

“Claire told you,” the younger said.

“Yes,” Lee replied briefly. It wouldn't, after all, be difficult to talk
to Peyton; he was obviously miserable from the necessity of suppressing
what absorbed his entire consciousness.

“Well, I suppose you think there's nothing to be said for me,” his voice
was defiant; “and that I ought to be shot.”

“Very much to the contrary,” Lee asserted; “there is so much to say
that it's difficult to know where to begin. With another situation
practically the same, I might have agreed with you thoroughly; but, with
Claire and what I have gathered of you, in this special one I can't.”

“It isn't absolutely necessary,” the other pointed out; “Mina and I will
have a lot to ignore.”

“The first thing you'll have to manage,” Lee observed sharply, “is to
grow up. You are not in a place to be helped by leather-headed satire
and visions of solitary grandeur. My interest comes only from Claire and
some personal curiosity; Mina Raff doesn't require anyone's assistance.
Of you all, her position is clearest. I don't know if you can be brought
to see it, but this is only incidental, a momentary indulgence, with
her.”

“What you don't seem to get,” Peyton told him, with a brutally cold
face, “is that I may smash you; now, where you are.”

“That was possible,” Lee agreed; “and you are right--I had overlooked
it. I think that's passed, though; I'm going to keep on as if it were.
Why, you young fool, you seem to have no conception, none in the world,
of what you propose to do. In a week, in your frame of mind, you'd have
a hundred fights; there would be time for nothing else but knocking out
the men who insulted you. You'll collapse over Sunday if you are not
absolutely and totally impervious to everything and everybody. The only
way you can throw the world over is to ignore it; while you appear to
have the idea that it should put a rose in your buttonhole.”

“You don't have to tell me it's going to be stiff,” Peyton Morris
asserted gloomily. “I can take care of that. Claire and Ira are the hard
part. Lee, if anyone a year ago had said that I was like this, that
I was even capable of it, I'd have ruined him. God, what a thing to
happen! I want you to understand that we, Mina and I, didn't have a
particle to do with it--it just flatly occurred. I had seen her only
three times when it was too late; and if you think I didn't try to break
it, and myself, too--”

Lee nodded. “Certainly. Why not, since it's bound to knock you on the
head? You've been very unfortunate: I can't imagine a man to whom this
would come worse.”

“If I can make Mina happy I don't care about myself.”

“Of course, that is understood,” Lee Randon returned impatiently; “it
is nothing but sentimental rot, all the same. If you are not contented,
easy in mind, how can she be happy? You have got to believe entirely in
what you are doing, it must be right to you on every possible side; and
you can't make that grade, Peyton; you are too conventional underneath.”

“Sink your spurs in me,” he said doggedly; “it's funny when you really
think about it. Why, only a little while ago, if I had heard of a man
doing this, I would have beaten him up just on general principles:
running away from his wife and child, with another woman, an actress,
that's what it is! I tell myself that, but the words haven't a trace of
meaning or importance. Somehow, they don't seem to apply to me, to us;
they can say what they like, but Mina isn't wicked. She--she loves me,
Lee; and, suddenly, that swept everything else out of sight.

“But go back to me--you realize that I was rather in favor of what I
was, what I had. Brandenhouse is a good school and my crowd ran it. We
were pretty abrupt with boys who whored about; and, at Princeton, well,
we thought we were it. We were, still, there; and I got a heavy idea of
what I liked and was like. We were very damned honorable and the icing
on the cake generally. That was good after I left college, too; but
what's the use of going into it; I was in the same old Brandenhouse
surrounding. The war split us wide open. Or I thought it did; but, Lee,
by God, I don't believe it changed a thing. I got my touch of concussion
early, Ira was born, and, and--”

“Disaster,” Lee Randon pronounced shortly.

“Call it that if you choose; there isn't much use in calling it at all:
it simply is.”

“With someone else, yes; but with you, no, not finally; you haven't
the character and disposition to get away with it. You don't, secretly,
approve of yourself, Peyton; and that will be fatal. The truth is that,
while you want this now, in a year, or two years, or five, you'll demand
the other. You think it is going to be different from everything else
in heaven and earth, you're convinced it's going to stay all in the sky;
but it will be on the solid familiar ground. Understand again--it isn't
your plan I'm attacking; but your ability; that and your real ignorance
of Mina Raff.

“If you imagine for an instant that this love will be bigger than her
work, if you suppose that, against her acting, it will last, you are
an idiot for your pains. If I don't know the side of her you do, I have
become fairly familiar with one you haven't dreamed of. She is a greater
actress than people yet recognize, principally because of the general
doubt about moving pictures; but that recognition will come, and, when
it does, you will be swept out of sight.

“No, you haven't the slightest suspicion of what it is about; that side
of her, and it's very nearly the whole woman, is a blank. She admitted
to me that she couldn't understand it herself. But what she is doing is
dragging into her genius what it needs. She loves you now, and tomorrow
she'll love a Belgian violinist, a great engineer, a Spanish prince at
San Sebastian. How will you take sitting in the salon and hearing them
padding around over your head? It's no good your getting mad at me; I am
not blaming Mina Raff; you are. I admire her tremendously.

“In the beginning I said she could watch out for herself, and I
intimated that I was reasonably indifferent to what happened to you: it
is Claire I am concerned about. Unfortunately for her, and without much
reason, she loves you too. When Mina is done with you and you stray
back, from, perhaps, South America, Claire won't be here. I don't
mean that she will have gone away, or be dead in the familiar sense.
I haven't any doubt but that she would live with you again--she is not
small-minded and she's far more unconventional than you--what there was
of her.”

“If you or anyone else thinks that I don't admire Claire--” he stopped
desperately. “We won't get far talking,” Peyton added; “even if all you
have said is a fact. You can't hit on much that I've missed. You might
just as well curse me and let me go.”

“Nothing of the sort,” Lee Randon returned equably; “that's exactly what
I have no intention of doing. In the interest of Claire I must try to
open your eyes.” The younger man said indignantly:

“You talk as though I were a day-old kitten. It's cursed impertinent: I
don't seem to remember asking for so much advice.”

      *      *      *      *      *

Throughout their conversation they were both holding the plates of
sausage and scrambled eggs, from which rose a pungent odor, inevitable
to the occasion. And, in a silence which fell upon them, Lee realized
the absurdity of their position behind the door. “We can't keep this
up,” he declared, and moved into the eddying throng, the intermingling
ceaseless conversations. Almost at once Peyton Morris disappeared, and
Lee found Fanny at his shoulder. Neither of them fox-hunted, although
they hacked a great deal over the country roads and fields, and they
had ridden to the Spencers' that morning. Fanny wore dark brown and a
flattened hunting derby which, with her hair in a short braid tied by a
stiff black ribbon, was particularly becoming. She was, he told himself,
with her face positively animated, sparkling, from talk, unusually
attractive. Fanny was like that--at times she was singularly engaging.

“What did he say?” she demanded, nodding in the direction in which
Peyton had disappeared. “I have avoided him all morning.”

“An uncommon lot for Peyton,” Lee acknowledged. “I almost think he has
been jarred out of his self-complacency. But, on the whole, that is
not possible. It's temporary with him. At one time I thought--in the
language of youth--he was going to crown me.”

“The little beast!” she exclaimed viciously. “If he had I'd have made
him sorry. I saw Claire a few minutes ago, and she asked me to tell
you, if she missed you, that she had something for you to see. Wasn't
it strange that she said nothing to me about it? I should think, in her
scrape, she'd rather turn to a woman than to a man. But Claire isn't
very feminine: I've always felt her hardness.”

“Then that's why she didn't speak to you,” Lee assented superficially.
“I'll go over tonight, after dinner. They must be pretty nearly ready to
drop the fox, and it's beginning to drizzle.”

There was, soon after that, an exodus from the back of the house to the
fields beyond. It was a very fair hunting country, rolling and clear of
brush, with grouped woods on the surrounding hills and streams in the
swales below. The clouds were broken and aqueous, and the grass held
a silver veil of fine raindrops. Only an inconsiderable part of those
present were following the hounds; the others, in a restricted variety
of sporting garb--the men in knickerbockers and gaiters or riding
breeches, the women breeched and severely coated or swathed in wide
reddish tweed capes--stood, with a scattering of umbrellas and upturned
collars, in a semi-circle on the soggy turf.

There was a baying of hounds from the direction of the stables, and
the Master swung up on a bright chestnut horse with a braided tail.
A huntsman appeared with a shuttered box, holding the fox, and an old
brown and white hound bitch, wise with many years of hunting, to follow
and establish and announce the scent. “If you are ready, Brace,” the
Master said to his huntsman, “you may drop.” A stable boy held the
hound, and, raising the shutter, Brace shook the fox out on the ground.

The animal--in view of the commotion about to pursue it--was
surprisingly small, slim flanked; proportionately the tail seemed
extravagant. “I hope the brush won't get wet,” a man behind Lee spoke;
“when it does they can't run.” As it was, the fox, obviously, was
reluctant to start; it crouched in the rough grass and glanced fleetly
around with incredibly sharp black eyes. The men shouted and flung up
their arms; but the animal was indifferent to their laudable efforts.
The hunt, Lee Randon thought, had assumed an aspect of the ridiculous;
the men and women on expensive excited horses, the pack yelping from
beyond a road, the expectant on-lookers, were mocked by the immobility
of the puzzled subject of the chase. Finally the fox obligingly moved a
few steps; it hesitated again, and then trotted forward, slipping under
a fence. Lee could follow it clearly across the next field and into the
next; its progress was unhurried, deliberate, insolent.

“Give him six minutes,” the Master decided.

When the time had gone the leash of the single hound was slipped. She
ran around in a circle, whining eagerly, her nose to the sod, and then
with a high yelp, set smartly off in a direction absolutely opposite to
that taken by the fox. She was brought back and her nose held to the hot
scent; again, with a fresh assurance, the bitch gave tongue, followed
the trail to where it went under the fence, and turned, instead of
bearing to the right, to the left. There were various exclamations. A
kennel man declared, “She knows what she's about, and the fox will swing
into Sibley's Cover.” Someone else more sceptically asserted that the
hound was a fool. Her sustained cry floated back from under the hill;
and, in another minute, the pack, the hunt, was off. The horses rose
gracefully in a sleek brown tide over the first fence; and then there
was a division--the hounds scattered and bunched and scattered, some of
the riders went to the left after the palpable course of the fox, others
pounded direct for Sibley's Cover, and the remainder reined up over the
hounds.

Although long association and familiarity had made such scenes a piece
with Lee Randon's subconsciousness, today the hunt seemed nothing more
than nonsense. He laughed, and made a remark of disparaging humor; but
he found no support. Willing Spencer, kept out of the field by a broken
collar bone, gazed at him with lifted eyebrows. Fanny and Lee turned
to their horses, held for them by a groom at a mounting block, and went
home. The rain had increased, but, not cold, Lee found it pleasant on
his face. They jogged quietly over the roads bordered with gaunt sombre
hedges, through the open countryside, into Eastlake.

Nothing, he realized, had been accomplished with Peyton Morris; the
other was too numbed, shocked, by the incredible accident that had
overtaken him to listen to reason. Lee felt that he could hardly have
said more. He wondered what Claire had to show him. Still, he wasn't
through with her husband; he had no intention of resting until every
hope was exhausted. What particularly impressed him--he must speak of it
to Peyton--was that no matter where Morris might get he would find life
monotonously the same. It was very much like mountain climbing--every
peak looked different, more iridescent and desirable, from the one
occupied; but, gazing back, that just left appeared as engaging, as
rare, as any in the distance. Every experience in the life surrounding
him was the same as all the others; no real change was offered, because
the same dull response permeated all living; no escape such as Peyton
planned was possible.

Escape, Lee Randon continued, happened within; it was not, he repeated,
a place on earth, or any possession, but a freedom, a state, of mind.
Peyton Morris, while it was quite possible for him to be destroyed, was
incapable of mental liberty, readjustments; he might drive himself on
the rocks, on the first reef where he disregarded the clamor of warning
bells and carefully charted directions, but he was no Columbus for the
discovery of a magical island, a Cuba, of spices and delectable
palms. Peyton had looked with a stolid indifference at the dangerously
fascinating, the incomprehensible, smile of Cytherea. Yes, if the young
donkey could be forced past this tempting patch of grazing, if he could
only be driven a short distance farther down the highway of custom,
Claire would be safe.

But she must be made to think that such a conclusion had been purely
the result of Peyton's reserved strength, and not of a mere negative
surrender following doubt. And, above all, there must be no appearance
of Mina Raff having, after a short trial, herself discarded him. On such
trivialities Claire's ultimate happiness might hang. Truth was once
more wholly restrained, hidden, dissimulated; the skillful shifting of
painted masks, false-faces, continued uninterrupted its progress. A new
lethargy enveloped Lee: his interest, his confidence, in what he was
trying to prevent waned. What did it matter who went and who stayed? In
the end it was the same, unprofitable and stale. All, probably, that his
thought had accomplished was to rob his ride of its glow, make flat the
taste of the whiskey and charged water he prepared. However, shortly
a pervading warmth--but it was of the spirits--brought back his lately
unfamiliar sense of well-being.

      *      *      *      *      *

The Morrises lived in a large remodelled brick house, pleasantly
pseudo-classic, beyond the opposite boundary of Eastlake; and, leaving
his car in the turn of the drive past the main door, Lee walked into the
wide hall which swept from front to back, and found a small dinner party
at the stage of coffee and cigarettes. It was composed, he saw at
once, of Peyton's friends; as he entered three young men rose
punctiliously--Christian Wager, with hair growing close like a mat on a
narrow skull and a long irregular nose; Gilbert Bromhead, a round figure
and a face with the contours and expression, the fresh color, of
a pleasant and apple-like boy; and Peyton. They had been at their
university together; and, Lee Randon saw, they were making, with a
characteristic masculine innocence, an effort to secure their wives in
the same bond of affectionate understanding that held them.

Claire, who had smiled acknowledgingly with her eyes when Lee
approached, returned to a withdrawn concentration upon the section of
table-cloth immediately before her; she answered the remarks directed
to her with a temporary measure of animation vanishing at once with the
effort. Christian Wager, who was in London with a branch of an American
banking firm, had married an English girl strikingly named Evadore.
She was large, with black hair cut in a scanty bang; but beyond these
unastonishing facts there was nothing in her appearance to mark or
remember. However, a relative of hers, he had been told, distant but
authentic, had been a lady-in-waiting to the Queen. Gilbert Bromhead's
wife was southern, a small appealing compound of the essence of the
superlatively feminine.

Lee Randon, in a chair drawn up for him at the table, studied the women,
arbitrarily thrown together, with a secret entertainment. Evadore Wager
was frankly--to a degree almost Chinese--curious about the others. At
short regular intervals, in a tone of unvaried timbre and inexhaustible
surprise, she half exclaimed, “Fancy.” Claire was metallic, turned
in, with an indifference to her position that was actually rude, upon
herself. But Mrs. Gilbert Bromhead made up for any silence around her
in a seductive, low-pitched continuous talking. A part of this was
superficially addressed to Claire and the solidly amazed Evadore;
but all its underlying intention, its musical cadences and breathless
suspensions for approval, were flung at the men. The impression she
skillfully conveyed to Lee Randon, by an art which never for an
instant lost its aspect of the artless, was that he, at least, older in
experience than the rest there, alone entirely understood and engaged
her.

The men--even Peyton, temporarily--resting confident on a successful
bringing of their wives into the masculine simplicity of their common
memories and affection, said little. With eyes puckered wisely against
the cigarette smoke they made casual remarks about their present
occupations and terse references to companions and deeds of the
past. Only Peyton had been of any athletic importance; he had played
university foot-ball; and, in view of this, there was still a tinge of
respect in Bromhead's manner. A long run of Peyton's, crowned with a
glorious and winning score, was recalled. But suddenly it failed to stir
him. “How young we were then,” he observed gloomily.

Christian Wager protested. “That isn't the right tone. We were young
then, true, but Princeton was teaching us what it meant to be men.
In that game, Morris, you got something invaluable to you now, hard
endurance and fairness--”

“In my day,” Lee interposed, “the team was told to sink a heel in any
back that looked a little too good for us.”

“There were instructors like that,” Gilbert Bromhead assented; “and some
graduate coaches are pretty cunning; but they are being discredited.”

Wager largely, obliviously, passed over this interruption. “We learned
decency,” he proceeded, “in business and ideals and living; and to give
and take evenly. In the war and in civil life we were and are behind the
big issues. This new license and socialistic rant, the mental and moral
bounders, must be held down, and we are the men to do it. Yes, and I
believe in the church, the right church, we're all for that: I tell you
the country depends on the men the best colleges turn out.”

“My God, Christian, you must have made a lot of money lately,” Bromhead
observed. “You talk exactly like the president of a locomotive works.
You have been dining with the best, too; I can tell that with certainty.
Answer us this, honestly--do you mention the Royal Family in your
prayers?”

Evadore laughed. “Do you know, that's really awfully good. He does put
it on a bit, doesn't he?”

“If you let Christian go on,” Peyton added, “he'll talk about the sacred
ties of Anglo-Saxon blood and tradition, with the English and American
exchange ruling the world. Gilbert, how did your artillery company get
along with the Londoners?”

“All right, if we were near a brick yard.”

Claire rose abruptly, and they drifted out to a reception room opening,
with a wide arch, beyond the hall. Gilbert Bromhead's wife hesitated;
then, confidentially, she told Lee that she adored to sit on stairs.
“Very well,” he assented; “these of the Morrises' are splendid.” He was
a step below her, and her knees and his shoulder settled together.

“I like older men so much,” she admitted what she had already
so adroitly conveyed; “patches of grey above the ears are so
distinguished.”

“Older than what?”

Apparently forgetful that her gesture included Gilbert Bromhead she
indicated the rooms that now held the others. “Young men are so head
over heels,” she particularized; “they are always disarranging things.”
 She laughed, a delectable sound. “I oughtn't to have said that, and I
wouldn't--to them. I might almost tell you the story about the man
in the department store and the drawers.” Their contact was more
pronounced. “Isn't that English girl extraordinary? I didn't believe for
a minute that was her own color till I was close to it. Her hair isn't
dyed; but why does she wear that skimpy bang?” Again she laughed, a
pure golden melody. “But you admired it, I know you did; men are so
unaccountable. Could you trust her, do you think? It wasn't very nice to
make fun of her husband.” Adroitly, without the flutter of a ruffle, she
moved to a higher step, and Claire--before Lee had any premonition of
her appearance--stood below them with chocolates.

“She is rather attractive,” his companion admitted, when Claire had
gone. “She doesn't like me, or Mrs. Wager, though; and I must say she
made it plain in her own house. I've been studying her, and there is
something wrong. Is she happy with Peyton Morris? I thought he was
right nice until you came.” She turned for a better view, through the
balustrade, of the doors beyond, and then drew her skirt close so that
he could move up beside her. “It's just like a smoke-house in there,”
 she reported. “I don't truthfully think cigarettes are nice for a woman;
and I wouldn't dream of taking whiskey; in the South we never. You'd
call that out of date.” She bent forward, arranging the ribbon of a
slipper, and her mouth met his in a long kiss.

“What made you suppose you could do that?” she demanded; “how did
you know I wouldn't be cross with you? But ... somehow I didn't mind.
Although you mustn't again, so publicly. I wonder why, with you, it
seemed so perfectly nice, and not at all as if I had only met you?”

There was a response to that as recognized, as exact, as the bishop's
move in chess; indeed, it was expected of him; she was hesitating,
waiting for it; but he was unable to reassure her with the conventional
sentiment. A month ago he would have commanded and developed an enticing
situation; but now, for Lee Randon, it was without possibilities, hardly
more than perfunctory. A shade of vexation invaded her bearing, and
she moved a significant infinitesimal fraction away from him. Then she
discovered a wind blowing down the stairs. “I have to take such good
care of myself,” she told Lee, preparing to descend. “It is because I am
so delicate--I can get upset at nothing. Here you are all so strong; you
have an advantage over me. Gilbert, dear,” she called from the hall, her
voice musical with tender reproach, “I can't see how you love me, you
stay away so far.”

      *      *      *      *      *

“What did the little ass say to you?” Claire asked. Lee was standing
with her by the piano, and the others were around the fireplace in the
farther spaciousness. “Nothing much,” he replied. “You mean that she
never stopped. I'll admit she's skillful; but she needn't think I'm a
fool. But you will never guess what I want to tell you. My dear Lee,
that Mrs. Grove wrote me a letter. I have it here in my dress, for you
to read. It's a scream.” He took the sheet of note paper: it was grey
with an address on East Sixty-sixth Street embossed in pale vermilion,
and had an indefinable scent. The writing was decisive:

“MY DEAR MRS. MORRIS,

“It is so difficult for me to express my disturbance at what Mina Raff
has just told me, that I am asking to see you here, at my house in New
York. Engagements make it difficult for me to leave at present. I hope
you will not find this impertinent from an older woman, threatened very
much as you in her affections by an impossible calamity--”

The signature, Savina Grove, had the crispness of a name often attached
to opinions and papers of authority.

“That's rather cool,” he agreed.

“Cool! The woman's demented. No, I suppose she thinks I am an honest
wronged woman or something objectionable of the sort. I was going to
throw it away when I kept it to amuse you.”

“It does, Claire; and I'm glad to see it; impertinent as she admits it
may be, you must consider. As Mrs. Grove writes, you are both caught.”

“If you think I'll go see her you are madder still.”

“I realize you won't; but worse things could happen. It's the only
possible approach to Mina Raff; I had a chance to try Peyton, but it did
no good. It seems to me this Mina ought to have some understanding.”

Claire Morris said: “You can do it.”

He reflected. “Well, perhaps; I'm your uncle; there are no brothers,
and what other family you have is away. It might be useful. Anyhow, she
would hear a thing or two about you from me.”

“Seriously, Lee, you'd only get angry: I can see Mrs. Grove as though
she were in the room--the utmost New York self-satisfaction. And I won't
have you discussing my affairs.”

“Absurd. A thousand people will be talking about them soon if this isn't
managed. I have an idea I had better go to New York and try what can be
done there. I got along well enough with the girl herself; and perhaps,
though it's not likely, Mrs. Grove has some influence.”

“Of course, I can't stop you,” Claire said; her hand strayed over his,
on the piano. “I'm simply enraged at myself, Lee. Why, I should let him
go with cheers--except where I was sorry for him--but I can't. He is
such a sweet child; and, you see, he was all mine.”

“I can't leave before Thursday.” He considered. “I'll have a wire sent
to the Groves, say something regretful and polite about you--measles.”

“Don't bother,” she returned.

Peyton came stiffly up to them. “I happened to mention, Claire, that we
had some champagne left, and it created the intensest excitement. I told
them it would do no good, that you were keeping hold of it; but they
insisted on a look at the bottles.”

“Get them, Peyton,” she replied unhesitatingly. “I was keeping it, but
perhaps for now. This is a very appropriate time for you and me, and the
last of the cases left over from our wedding.”

An expression of pain tightened his mouth; he turned away without
further speech. “We'll have it in the dining-room,” Claire announced;
“big glasses filled with ice.” They gathered about the bare table, and
Peyton Morris ranged the dark green bottles, capped in white foil, on
the sideboard. He worked with a napkin at a cork: there was a restrained
sibilant escaping pressure, and the liquid rose in frothing bubbles
through the ice.

It was, Lee thought, a golden drink, flooded, up to a variable point,
with an inimitable gaiety. In comparison whiskey was brutalizing; sherry
was involved with a number of material accompanying pleasures; port was
purely masculine and clarets upset him; beer was a beverage and not a
delight; ale a soporific; and Rhine wines he ignored. Champagne held
in solution the rhythm of old Vienna waltzes, of ball rooms with
formal greenery, floating with passions as light as the tarleton skirts
floating about dancing feet. But it wasn't, he insisted, a wine for
indiscriminate youth--youth that couldn't distinguish between the sweet
and the dry. It was for men like himself, with memories, unrealized
dreams. Ugly women, and women who were old, and certainly prudes, should
never be given a sip.

Peyton Morris again filled all the glasses; there was a clatter of
talk, the accent of the South, about Lee; but he grew oblivious of
it. Champagne always gave Fanny a headache; neither was it a drink for
contented mothers, housewives. Contrarily, it was the ideal, the only,
wine for seductions. It belonged most especially to masked balls, divine
features vanishing under a provocative edge of black satin. He thought
of little hidden tables and fantastic dresses, fragile emotion; lips and
knees and garters. It all melted away before the intentness of Claire's
expression. Peyton was doggedly holding to the rim of the table; Gilbert
Bromhead was very close to Evadore; the black sheath of her hair had
slipped and her eyes were blank; the blanched delicate hand of the South
nearest Christian Wager had disappeared, Christian's hand on that side
could not be seen. Peyton once more filled the glasses:

“It must all go,” Claire insisted; “I won't have a drop left.”

Wager's sentimentality overflowed in approved and well-established
channels: Princeton was their mother, their sacred alma--alma mater.
Here, under Peyton's roof, they had gathered to renew ... friendships
unbroken with their wives, their true wives; oceans couldn't separate
them, nor time, nor--nor silver locks among the gold. They must come to
London next December: anniversary of mutual happiness and success. Take
the children, the sons of old Princeton, to Christmas pantomine.

“Once,” Evadore told them, “I went to a night club. Do you know what
that is, over here? I don't believe I can explain it; but there are
quantities of champagne and men and principally girls; but they're not
girls at all, if you see what I mean, not by several accidents. It would
have been splendid, but I got sick, and it turned into a ghastly mess,
mostly in the cab. That was rather thick, wasn't it?”

Claire rose, and Lee Randon heard her say, under her breath, “Oh hell”;
but there was another full bottle, and she had to sit again. He had
promised Fanny not to stay long, and, if he were coming home, she never
went to sleep until he was in the house. Lee wasn't drunk, but then,
he recognized, neither was he sober. Why should he be the latter? he
demanded seriously of himself. His glass was empty, the champagne was
all gone. Mrs. Gilbert Bromhead was perceptibly leaning on Christian
Wager, her skill blurred; Evadore's face was damply pallid, her mouth
slack; she left the table, the room, hurried and unsteady, evidently
about to repeat the thickness of the act that had marred her enjoyment
of the night club; Claire was openly contemptuous of them all.

Outside, it had grown much colder, the ruts in the road were frozen,
treacherous, but Lee Randon drove his car with a feeling of inattentive
mastery. He saw some stars, an arc light, black patches of ice; and, as
he increased his speed, he sang to an emphatic lifted hand of a being
in the South Seas who wore leaves, plenty of leaves ... But none of the
silly songs now could compare with--with the bully that, on the levees,
he was going to cut down. However, in his house, he grew quiet. “Lee,”
 his wife called sleepily from their room, “you are so late, dear. I
waited the longest while for some of the addresses for our Christmas
cards. You must remember to give them to me tomorrow.”

Her voice, heavy with sleep and contentment and love, fell upon his
hearing like the sound of a pure accusing bell. He wasn't fit to have a
wife like Fanny, children as good as Helena and Gregory: he, Lee Randon,
was a damned ingrate! That bloody doll--he had threatened to put it
in the fire before--could now go where it belonged. But the hearth was
empty, cold. Cytherea, with her disdainful gaze, evaded his wavering
reach.




III


Fanny, where the Groves were concerned, was utterly opposed to the
plan which, Lee gathered, Claire had half supported. “It's really too
foolish,” his wife told him; “what can Mrs. Grove and you have to say
to each other? And you won't get anywhere with Mina Raff. Indeed, Lee, I
think it isn't quite dignified of you.”

“That won't bother me,” he replied indulgently. “I was wondering--you
haven't been away for so long--if you'd come with me. This other affair
wouldn't take half a day: you could buy clothes and there are the
theatres.”

“I'd love to.” She hesitated. “When did you mean to go?” But, when
he said the following noon, she discovered that that didn't allow her
enough time for preparations. “You don't realize how much there is to do
here, getting the servants and the children satisfactorily arranged. You
might telephone me after you're there; and, if you didn't come back at
once, perhaps I could manage it.”

Lee telegraphed Mrs. William Loyd Grove of his intention; and, with a
table put up at his seat in the Pullman car for New York, he occupied
himself opportunely with the reports of his varied profitable concerns.
He had had a reply, sufficiently cordial, to his telegram, arranging for
him to go directly to the Groves' house; but that he had declined; and
when he gave the driver of a taxi-cab the address on East Sixty-sixth
Street it was past four and the appropriate hour for afternoon tea.

The house, non-committal on the outside--except for the perceived
elaboration of the window draperies within--was, Lee saw at once, a
rich undisturbed accumulation of the decorative traditions of the
eighteen-eighties. The hall was dark, with a ceiling and elaborate
panels of black walnut and a high dull silver paper. The reception room
into which he was shown, by a maid, was jungle-like in its hangings and
deep-tufted upholstery of maroon and royal blue velvets, its lace and
twisted cords with heavy tassels, and hassocks crowded on the sombrely
brilliant rugs sacred in mosques. There was a mantle in colored marbles,
cabinets of fretted ebony, tables of onyx and floriated ormolu, ivories
and ornaments of Benares brass and olivewood.

In the close incongruity of this preserved Victorianism Mrs. William
Loyd Grove, when she appeared soon after, startled Lee Randon by her
complete expression of a severely modern air. She was dressed for the
street in a very light brown suit, rigidly simple, with a small black
three-cornered hat, a sable skin about her neck, and highly polished
English brogues with gaiters. Mrs. Grove was thin--no, he corrected that
impression, she was slight--her face, broad at the temples, narrowed
gracefully to her chin; her eyes were a darker blue than the velvet;
and her skin at once was evenly pale and had a suggestion of transparent
warmth. The slender firm hand she extended, her bearing and the glimpse
of a round throat, had lost none of the slender flexibility of youth.

“The first thing I must do,” she told him in an unsympathetic, almost
harsh, voice, “is to say that I agree with you entirely about this
house. It's beyond speech. But William won't have it touched. Probably
you are not familiar with the stubborn traditions of old New Yorkers.
Of course, when Mrs. Simeon Grove was alive, it was hopeless; but I
did think, when she died, that something could be done. You can see how
wrong I was--William can't be budged.”

She was, he silently continued his conclusions, past forty, but by not
more than a year, or a year and a half. All that her signature suggested
was true: she was more forcible, decisive, than he had expected. Money
and place, with an individual authentic strength of personality, gave
her voice its accent of finality, her words their abruptness, her manner
an unending ease.

“Mina said she might be here,” Mrs. Grove went on, from an uncomfortable
Jacobean chair, “if something or othe

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