So she set about planning how it was pos_Possession（#73188）

to transport all her family and their belongings into a world which she

had disliked and even feared but which now must be faced. Fantastical

schemes were born, reared their heads and collapsed in a brain which

considered nothing impossible. She would herself support them all if

necessary, though she had not the faintest idea of how it was to be

done. Surely in a great city like New York, there were ways of becoming

rich, even fabulously so. She had read stories in the newspapers....

But her first action was a direct one. Dressed in black merino and armed

with an umbrella which she carried on important occasions as a general

bears his baton, she assailed her enemy Judge Weissman in the sanctuary

of his untidy office, and after a scene in which she accused him of

thievery, bribery and a dozen other crimes, she bullied him, playing

shrewdly upon a horsewhipping incident out of his own past, into using

his influence to gain for her husband some new work--not mere work but a

position worthy of him and of the dignity of her family.

She won the battle and in her triumph, which mounted higher and higher

during the walk home, she gave rein in her unbounded optimism to even

wilder and more fantastic schemes. There was relief in the knowledge

that at last she had taken things into her own hands. No longer was she

to be a power behind the throne urging forward an amiable and

indifferent husband. Things must change now. She herself would act. She

had achieved an opening wedge. In time she would secure an appointment

for her husband in New York. She could take the children there. She

could be where she could drop in on Ellen at the Babylon Arms

(preposterous name!). She would watch and aid them in their progress

toward success and glory. Ah, she could wrest anything from life. It

was, after all, nothing more than a question of energy and persistence.

These thoughts were whirling madly about her brain as she turned the

corner into Sycamore Street in time to see a group of children

congregated before the path that led into the shaggy domain of the

Tollivers. They appeared to be watching something and clung to the gate

peering in through the lilacs at the vine-covered house. Unconsciously

she increased her pace, and as she approached the gate they fell back,

with a look of awe and the sort of animal curiosity which comes into the

eyes of children gathered on the scene of a catastrophe. Through their

ranks and into the house, she made her way like a fine ship in full

sail.

Once inside she learned the news.

It was this--that upstairs in the room once occupied by Ellen there lay

on the bed the unconscious form of her father, the invincible Jacob

Barr. They told her that the patriarch, while superintending the loading

of hay in his mows, had made a miss-step and so crashed to the floor

twenty feet below. They had brought him to her house on a truss of hay.

The doctors, the same doctors whom Gramp Tolliver had baffled, said he

might die suddenly or that he might live for years, but he would never

walk again.

When she had put the place in order and driven out the confusion which

accompanies physicians, she seated herself in a chair opposite the

unconscious old man and presently began to weep.

“What good is it now? What difference does it make?” she repeated

bitterly over and over again.

* * * * *

Where before there had been but one, there were now two old men to be

managed, and Hattie Tolliver, understanding that it was now impossible

to follow Ellen, settled herself to waiting. For what? Perhaps for death

to claim her own father. It would have been, as she said, a blessing,

for the fracture concerned far more than a hip bone; the very spirit of

old Jacob Barr was crushed in that fall from the mows. Sinking back upon

the pillows of Ellen’s bed, he gave up the struggle. A life in which

there was no activity was for him no life at all. He became again like a

little child, like his own little children whom his daughter Hattie had

cared for through all the years of his widowhood. Sometimes he sang

songs and there were hours when he talked to himself and to Hattie of

things which had happened when she was a very little girl or before she

was born. He lived again in the Civil War and in the days preceding it

when the fleeing niggers hid in his great mows. Passers-by in Sycamore

Street sometimes heard snatches of singing in a voice now cracked, now

loud and strong and defiant.... _John Brown’s Body lies a-moldering in

the Grave, But his Soul goes marching on. Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!_

But Gramp Tolliver in his high room walled with books kept spry and

alert, triumphant now in the knowledge that he had survived old Jacob

Barr, that the stern virtue of the old Scotsman had not prolonged his

health and happiness by so much as an hour. He read his old books and

scribbled on bits of yellow paper, ageing not at all, remaining always

spare, cynical, vindictive.

In these days his daughter-in-law rarely addressed him, and less and

less frequently she came to see that his room was in order. There were

other cares to occupy her energy. There was a husband, working now, and

two growing boys and her own father to care for; in addition to all

these she had taken to sewing, secretly, for friends whose fortunes were

better. (She was a magnificent needle-woman.) And she had each day to

write a long letter to Ellen, though the letters in return came but

weekly and sometimes not so often.

They kept her informed of the bare facts of her daughter’s life. They

told her, in a new, amusing and somewhat cynical fashion of Ellen’s

adventures among the music teachers of the city ... of weeks spent

wandering through the bleak and drafty corridors of studio buildings,

tormented with the sounds made by aspiring young musicians. They

described the charlatans, the frauds, which she found on every side,

teachers who offered every sort of trick and method by which fame and

fortune could be reached by the one and only short cut. There were women

called Madame Tessitura and Madame Scarlatti, who had been born Smith or

Jones and knew less of music than May Seton, and men who wore velveteen

jackets and insisted upon being called “Maestro.” There were the usual

adventures (alarming to Hattie Tolliver who saw her daughter still as a

little girl) with lecherous old men. Indeed, in this connection Ellen

wrote with a certain hard mockery that was utterly strange and carried

overtones of an unmoral point of view, as if such things were to be

treated more as preposterous jokes than as “grave offenses.” And in this

Mrs. Tolliver fancied she discerned some traces of Lily’s influence. To

a woman like Lily, such things didn’t matter. She took them too lightly,

as a part of the day’s experience ... carefree, charming, indolent Lily,

so impossible to combat.

And at last, wrote Ellen, she had stumbled upon the proper person ... an

old man, a Frenchman, who bore the name of Sanson. He knew what music

could be, and so she had settled with him, working under his guidance.

In his youth he had known Liszt, and he had been a friend of Teresa

Carreño, until a quarrel with that temperamental beauty ended the

friendship. Ellen, he had hinted, might one day become as famous as

Carreño (she was like her in a way) but she must work, work, work and

not lose her head. It would be a long hard path with Paris at the end!

(It was always this thought which filled Mrs. Tolliver with a nameless

dread. Paris! Paris! And Lily!)

But what troubled her most was the absence of any comment upon Clarence

beyond a simple statement that he was well. By now she must have

realized that Ellen had no love for him. From her letters it was clear

that she had not found him actually offensive. He was a good enough

husband; he did everything for Ellen. It was, indeed, clear that he

worshiped her. But on her side there appeared to be only a great void,

a colossal emptiness where there should have been the emotion that was

the very foundation of her mother’s life.

Mrs. Tolliver worried too about the expenses of her daughter’s

household. In such matters, distance made no difference. It was her

habit to remark to her husband, “If only I could be near Ellen I could

teach her so much about managing. Clarence must make a great deal of

money to have such a flat and pay for her lessons too.”

And when she questioned Ellen in her letters, she received the reply

that Ellen had spoken to her husband and been told that there was no

need to worry. He had, he said, plenty of money ... eight thousand a

year.

* * * * *

It is possible of course that Ellen never loved him for an instant; it

is probable that the state of her affections never progressed beyond the

stage of the kindly pity which is akin to love. She was not a bad wife.

She cared for him admirably. She kept his house in order. She even

cooked for him delicacies which she had learned from her mother. He

insisted that she have a servant, declaring that he could easily afford

it. She gave him all that he asked, even of herself, and yet there was a

difference ... a difference with altered everything. It was that

difference which Hattie Tolliver, expert in such things, sensed in the

letters of her daughter. It filled her with a vague suspicion that Ellen

had sold herself to satisfy a thing no greater than mere ambition.

Of Clarence’s sentiments there could have been no doubt. He sang his

wife’s praises to the men at the Superba Electrical Company, to the men

whom he met on those trips into the west when Ellen was left behind

alone in the Babylon Arms. He bought her present after present until, at

length, the whole aspect of their little apartment was changed. Bit by

bit the furniture altered its character. First there was a small grand

piano, and then a sofa and presently a chair or two, and at last the

brass beds which he and Bunce had once occupied gave place to twin beds

of pale green ornamented with garlands of salmon pink roses. And

strangely enough as the apartment brightened, the little man himself

appeared slowly to fade. In contrast with his handsome and energetic

wife, he grew more and more pale. It was as if he were being devoured by

some inward malady. Yet there was nothing wrong. Doctors could discover

nothing save the usual weakness of his heart.

If he desired a more demonstrative affection than that given him by

Ellen, he said nothing of the desire. He never spoke of love. Indeed,

long afterward, when Ellen followed back her memories of their life

together she was unable to recall any mention of the word. If he desired

her passionately he sought her silently and with timidity, as if each

caress she gave him were far beyond that which he had any reason to

expect. He was a shy man and with Ellen it was impossible to speak of

such things; there was a coolness about her, a chastity of the sort

which surrounds some women regardless of everything. And always it was

she who dominated, always she who gave, coldly and without passion, as

if she felt that in all honor she owed him a debt.

With the passing of the months the breach between Ellen and Mr. Wyck

became complete. The other friends came sometimes to the Babylon Arms

where Clarence, with a sudden expansion of temperament, entertained them

in lordly fashion and beamed with pride in his wife. But Mr. Wyck no

longer came. There had been no open quarrel, not even a hasty word.

Quietly he had dropped from the habit of seeing Clarence at home. It was

a change so imperceptible that before Clarence understood it, it was

complete.

They met sometimes at lunch in one of the cheap restaurants frequented

by Mr. Wyck, for Clarence, so far as his own needs and pleasures were

concerned, had taken to a program of economy. And there, over greasy

food, they talked of the old days together, Clarence speaking with

sentiment and Mr. Wyck with a curious wistfulness. He too had grown pale

and cadaverous upon the diet in his Lexington Avenue boarding house. He

hated Ellen. He had hated her from the moment she had stepped through

the door of the apartment, so cool and arrogant, so sure of herself. But

he was too wise to betray his feeling save in subtle gibes at her and

references to the jolly old days that were passed. He was lost now in

the obscenities of a boarding house, a nobody treated scornfully even by

the old aunts in Yonkers who looked upon him still as an anemic little

boy with Fauntleroy curls playing among the iron dogs and deers of their

front lawn.

And no one, of course, knew that Mr. Wyck, wrapped in his shabby

overcoat, sometimes walked the streets after dark in the neighborhood of

Riverside Drive, the gale from the North River piercing his bones, his

pale eyes upturned toward the pleasant light that beamed from the top

floor of the Babylon Arms.

One night nearly two years after they were married, Clarence asked,

“What do you hear from your cousin?”

And Ellen, who had been playing all the evening, turned and asked, “What

cousin?”

“Miss Shane.”

“Oh, Lily!” And a shadow settled on her face as if the mention of Lily’s

name suddenly aroused memories which she had been striving to forget.

“Oh, Lily!” she repeated. “I haven’t heard from her in weeks. She never

writes. You know she is indolent.... When I last heard from her she was

all right. She wrote from Nice.”

Clarence kept silent for a moment. “Nice must be a beautiful place. A

man from the office was there last year, our foreign agent. Nice and

Monte Carlo. I guess they’re quite close together.”

“She has a house there. It’s called the Villa Blanche.”

Again Clarence remained thoughtful for a time. The newspaper had fallen

from his hands and lay now, crumpled and forgotten by his side.

Presently he blushed and murmured, “D’you think she might lend us the

house some time.... We might be able to go there.... Not now, but when

we have more money. I’d like to see Nice.”

And the shadow on Ellen’s face darkened. “We will ... some day. When I’m

famous and making money too.”

“But I don’t want to do it that way. I want to take you myself and pay

for everything.... We might have Lily come and visit us.”

Then to fill in the silence Ellen fell to playing again, softly now so

that it did not halt the conversation; yet the sound in some way

protected her. It was like the frail veil of lace which Lily wore. It

shut her in suddenly. Clarence talked no more. He lay back in his

stuffed chair, one hand strumming thoughtfully the wooden arm. A look of

loneliness, more and more frequent of late, came into his brown eyes.

It was Ellen who turned to him presently, in the midst of the soft music

and said, “I have good news for you. I am going to play to-morrow night

in public. I am going to be paid for it. Sanson arranged it. I’m going

to play at a party. It will mean money for us both.”

But Clarence wasn’t pleased. On the contrary he frowned and kept a

disapproving silence.

“It’s silly to feel that way about it,” continued Ellen. “Why should I

work as I do if not to make money in the end? Why shouldn’t a wife help

her husband? There’s nothing wrong in it.”

And then more music and more silence, while she destroyed slowly, bit by

bit, his hopes of grandeur, of conquering a world for the sake of the

woman he loved. He saw, perhaps, that despite anything he might do she

would in the end surpass him.

“You see, we understood this when we married, Clarence. It’s nothing

new.... Is it?... Nothing new. Some day I shall be famous.” She said

this quite seriously, without the faintest trace of a smile. “Some day

I shall be great and famous. I mean to be.”

By now Clarence was leaning forward holding his head in his hands. His

glasses had slipped from his pointed nose and lay forgotten in his lap.

Presently he interrupted the music to say, mournfully, “And then I shall

be Mr. Tolliver ... husband of a famous woman.”

As though amazed by this sudden resentment, Ellen ceased playing for an

instant and regarded him with a curious penetrating look.

“It won’t be like that,” she said. And there entered her voice an

unaccustomed note of warmth. It was the pity again, an old sense of

sorrow.

“Besides,” she continued, “the day will come when I must go to Paris....

You see, I will have to polish off there ... I can live with Lily. It

won’t cost anything. You see, we can’t forget that. We have to think of

it. It’s nothing new.... I told you that in the beginning.”

* * * * *

For a long time there was no sound in the room save that of Ellen’s

music, soft, beautiful, appealing, as if she used it now as a balm for

the wounds caused by all she had been forced to say. Presently her

strong beautiful fingers wandered into the Fire Music and the tiny room

was filled with a glorious sound of flame and sparks, wild yet subdued,

thrilling yet mournful. And then for a time it seemed that, wrapped in

the color of the music, they were both released and swept beyond the

reach of all these petty troubles. When at last the music ceased,

Clarence roused himself slowly and, coming to her side, knelt there and

placed his arms about her waist, pressing his head against her. There

was in the gesture something pitiful and touching, as if he felt that by

holding her thus he might be able to keep her always. The little vein in

his throat throbbed with violence. There were times when his adoration

became a terrible thing.

It was the first time in all their life together that he had ever done

anything so romantic, so beautiful, and Ellen, looking down at him in a

kind of amazement, must have understood that there were forces at work

quite beyond her comprehension--something which, for the moment,

overwhelmed even his shame of love. The act, by its very suddenness,

appeared to strike a response in the girl herself, for she leaned toward

him and fell to stroking his hair.

“I didn’t know,” she said softly, “that you could be like this.... It

frightens me.... I didn’t know.”

His arms slowly held her more and more tightly, in a kind of fierce

desperation. “You won’t go,” he murmured, “you won’t leave me.... There

would be nothing left for me ... nothing in the world.”

“I’ll come back to you.... It won’t be for long. Perhaps, if there is

money enough you could go with me.”

But all the same, she was troubled by that simple act of affection.

Somehow, she had never thought of _his_ love in this fashion.

* * * * *

The rest of the evening was raised upon a different plane, new and

strange in their existence together. Some barrier, invisible as it was

potent, had given way suddenly, out of Clarence’s dread of the future it

seemed that there was born a new and unaccountable happiness. Ellen,

watching him slyly with a look of new tenderness, played for him the

simple music which he loved.

But at midnight when, at last, the music came to an end Clarence asked,

“Where are you going to play to-morrow?”

“At the house of a Mrs. Callendar ... I don’t know who she is.”

“If it’s Mrs. Richard Callendar ... she’s rich and fashionable. One of

the richest women in New York.... Rich and fashionable....” But the rest

was lost in a sudden return of a bitterness that seized him of late with

a growing frequency. He knew of Mrs. Callendar. Wyck, in his snobbery,

had spoken of her. One saw her name in the journals. It may have been

that he had thoughts of his own which no one had ever guessed ... not

even Ellen.

“It _is_ Mrs. Richard Callendar,” she said.

In the beginning Mrs. Callendar had regretted the sudden indisposition

of the great pianist she had engaged. It was, she said, _embétant_. But

presently as the hour of the reception drew near, the things which old

Sanson had said of his unknown prodigy began to have their effect and,

being like most women of affairs, a gambler as well, she saw in the

approach of the unknown substitute the possibility of an adventure. She

was, in any case, willing to take the word of old Sanson; he was, when

all was said and done, no humbug. He knew a performer when he saw one.

He did not go about his studio in a coat of velveteen calling upon his

pupils to address him as “Maestro.” In a satisfactory way, he got down

to brass tacks. What he had to offer must at least be interesting.

The drawing-room of the house on Murray Hill was enormous. It extended

the full length of one side of the house, finishing in a little alcove

where to-night space had been made for the performers, who sat shielded

by a lacquered screen reaching almost to the ceiling. Before it a little

place had been cleared and a small dais, covered with black velvet,

erected to serve as a stage. There was a great piano at one side and

then more cleared space reaching out to where the row of collapsible

chairs had been placed for the guests.

The room itself was painted gray and high up near the ceiling hung in a

row portraits of the Callendars, male and female, who had existed since

the immigrating member, an honest Dutch chemist, founded a fortune in

America by buying farms that lay north of Canal Street. The usual

furniture had been pressed back against the sides of the room or removed

entirely, but some of the pieces remained ... chairs and sofas of gilt

and salmon brocade, American adaptations of the monstrosities of Louis

Philippe--the furniture of some preceding Mrs. Callendar. And in gilt

cases of glass there ranged the famous Callendar collection of Chinese

bric-à-brac ... bowls and idols of jade, porphyry, and carved

sandalwood, row upon row of tear bottles (it was for these that the

collection was especially noted) in jade, ivory and porcelain. All these

ornaments represented the second period in the fortunes of the Callendar

family ... the days when the clipper ships of Griswold and Callendar

carried cargoes around the world from Singapore, Shanghai and Hong-Kong.

The fortune was now in its third stage. The clipper ships had vanished

and the money they once represented was now safe in the best stocks and

bonds it was possible to buy.

The room had never been brought up to date. Indeed it had remained

untouched since the Seventies, for Mrs. Callendar spent only a month or

two of the year in New York and, being thrifty, had not found it

necessary to alter anything. The caretaker, once a year when her

mistress returned, sent for a small army of charwomen, dusted, cleaned

and scrubbed the old house and engaged a corps of servants. The rest of

the time it remained empty but solid, immersed in the quiet dignity

which is acquired only by houses of great bankers, a symbol in the midst

of less enormous and somber dwellings, of all that is enduring and

respectable in a changing effervescent world.

At ten o’clock on this particular evening the lacquer screen concealed

behind its shimmering walls the figure of a Russian tenor, a Javanese

dancer (really a low caste Hindu woman who had her training in some

brothel of Alexandria) and the unknown American girl whom Sanson

recommended as a fine artist. They were entertainers, mountebanks,

brought together only to divert a crowd of guests, who presently would

arrive, jaded and somewhat torpid, from monstrous dinners of twenty

courses held in houses from Washington Square as far north as the east

Sixties. In the behavior of the three performers there was no great

cordiality. They sat apart, without interest in each other; indeed

there were in their manner unmistakable traces of jealousies as old as

their very profession.

Sometimes the tiny dancer, with skin like _café au lait_ satin, stirred

restlessly, setting all her bangles into jangling motion, to address the

Russian tenor in bad French. He was an enormous blond man with a chest

like a barrel and hands that rested like sausages upon his knees, a man

gauche in manner, a little like a bear let loose in a drawing-room ... a

mountain between the little Hindu woman and the American girl who sat a

little apart, slim and tall as Artemis, her black hair wound low over a

face that was pale with excitement. She knew no French and so, after the

first exchange of “Goot eefning!” with her two weird companions, she

lapsed into a silence which concentrated all its force upon a crevice in

the lacquered screen. Thus she was able to see the whole length of the

great drawing-room and witness the spectacle of the arriving guests.

At first there appeared only her employer, a squat, plump woman laced

until her figure resembled the hour glass shape of the ladies in

Renoir’s pictures of bourgeois picnics at St. Cloud. From sources hidden

in a veritable upholstery of satin and velvet, so cut as to emphasize

all her most voluptuous curves, little ladders and tongues of jet sprang

forth and glittered darkly at every motion of her tiny plump feet. The

face too was plump and, despite a drooping eyelid (which in her youth

might have been fascinating and now only made her appear to be in a

constant state of sly observation), it must have been lovely, perhaps

even subtle. The tight little mouth had an expression that was pleasant

and agreeable. It was as if she said, “Ah, well. Nothing in this world

surprises me. It will all come out right in the end.”

The sleek black hair she wore pulled back into an uncompromising knot,

though in front it was frizzed into a little bang which once might have

passed for a weapon of coquetry. Over all this was flung the glittering

sheen of jewels, prodigal, indecently Oriental in their extravagance.

Above the fuzzy bang reared a tiara of emeralds and diamonds and

beneath, sweeping over the mountainous curve of her bosom so that it

entangled itself in the plastrons of diamonds fastened beneath, hung a

necklace of emeralds. All these repeated their glitter in the rings on

the plump hands emerging from long tight sleeves of black satin, which

stretched perilously at each dominating gesture employed to direct the

small army of servants. But all the jewels were a little dirty. It was

probable that no money had been wasted in cleaning them in more than

twenty years.

This, then, was _the_ Mrs. Callendar, appearing to-night in _grande

tenue_ to receive a small and shrewdly picked list of guests at her only

entertainment of the season. To Ellen, peering with breathless curiosity

through the crack in the screen, this plump middle-aged woman must have

appeared a highly bedizened figure of fun; for Ellen, having come

freshly from the provinces, could have known nothing of all the glamour

and power that lay concealed in the hour glass of velvet, satin, and

soiled diamonds.

There was no secretary hired by this thrifty woman to send lists of her

guests to the daily papers and see that her picture or paragraphs

concerning her appeared once or twice a week. She did not even give

twenty course dinners interrupted by false endings of Roman punch, nor

circus entertainments like those of some women who filled the pages of

the noisier journals with columns of diversion for shop girls. Through

the barbaric spectacle of the late nineties and the early nineteen

hundreds she made her way quietly and firmly, knowing perhaps that she

was above these things, a power beyond power, living most of the year

abroad, seeing only those persons who amused her (for she had learned

long ago that in order to survive one must be selective). Indeed her

name was more likely to appear upon the pages devoted to stocks and

bonds than in the columns given over to what was known variously as the

_beau monde_ and the Four Hundred.

Queerest of all was the fact that behind this stout-willed dowager lay

an impossibly romantic past.

In the early Seventies when the steam freighters were making their final

inroads upon the business of the clipper ships, the house of Griswold

and Callendar, Shippers, Importers and Bankers with offices in

Liverpool, New York, Marseilles, Bombay and Shanghai, was already on a

decline. Already the capital was being shifted into bonds. In these days

there remains of this firm no importing business at all but only a great

banking house with offices in Wall and Threadneedle Streets and the

Boulevard Haussmann; but in the Seventies it was still a great shipping

company whose ships circled the globe and dealt alike with Chinese,

Indians, Frenchmen, Greeks, and the men of half a dozen other nations.

In consequence of these dealings there arose from time to time many

disputes, so that always there was some member of the firm on business

in a distant quarter of the world. It was to Richard Callendar, the

youngest and most vigorous member and the only Callendar in the firm,

that most of this traveling fell; and so, in the course of time, he

found himself in Constantinople on the business of settling claims with

a crafty fellow, one Dikran Leopopulos, whose bank had offices in

Calicut and Alexandria with the main house at the Golden Horn.

The contest between the two was drawn out, resolving itself at length

into a battle between Yankee shrewdness and Levantine deceit.

Leopopulos, a swarthy fellow with narrow green eyes, opened the

engagement by an onslaught of hospitality. He entertained his young

visitor in the most lavish and Oriental fashion. There were dinners to

which the _chic_ foreign world of Constantinople were invited ...

ambassadors, secretaries and their ladies, French, German, English and

American, in the banker’s palace in Pera; there were _pique-niques_

beside the River of Sweet Waters, and moonlight excursions in caïques

propelled by dark oarsmen, on the Bosphorus near the Greek banker’s

summer palace; and excursions in victorias to the ruins of Justinian’s

fortifications. He sought as a wily means of gaining his end to dazzle

the blond, romantic young American, to coddle him by eastern luxury into

a false bargain. And to make the entertainment complete, he brought

from her seclusion his young daughter, a girl of eighteen, slim, dark,

fresh from a French convent, dressed in the very latest modes from

Paris, to preside over his entertainments. The girl’s mother was dead,

having swooned and later passed away of the heat and confusion at the

great Exposition in Paris whither she had gone to visit, after many

years, her great-aunts. For the wife of Leopopulos had been French, the

daughter of an impoverished, moth-eaten Royalist, and in her child, the

slim young Thérèse, there was much that was French ... her wit, her

self-possession, her sense of knowing her way about the world. But there

was much too that was Levantine.

When at last the revels came to an end, there were bickerings and

bargainings in which Yankee shrewdness, in the end, got the better of

Levantine deceit. The green-eyed Leopopulos to hide his sorrow gave a

farewell dinner aboard the young American’s ship (a Griswold and

Callendar clipper named _Ebenezer Holt_) and so, he believed, closed the

incident. It was not until the following day, when a veritable army of

fat Greek aunts and cousins, wailing and lamenting, burst at dawn into

his green bedroom, that he learned the full extent of his sorrow. His

daughter, the dark-eyed Thérèse, had sailed on the _Ebenezer Holt_ as

the bride of young Richard Callendar.

* * * * *

Thus Thérèse Callendar came to New York, a stranger out of the oldest of

worlds entering into the newest, confused a little by her surroundings

and by the primness of her husband’s family, so like and yet so unlike

the caution of her own Greek aunts and cousins. In those early days at

long dinners in rooms hung with plush and ornamented with Canalettos and

Cabanels, her sensations must have been very like those of an ancient

Alexandrian, civilized, cultivated, and a little decadent among the more

vigorous and provincial Romans of Cæsar’s day. In that age of innocence

she found it, no doubt, difficult going; for there was in New York no

warm welcome for a foreign woman, no matter how great her beauty, her

cultivation, or her charm; much less for a Greek from such a frontier

as Constantinople, the capital of the cruel and abandoned Turk. An alien

was a creature to be regarded as a curiosity, to be treated, unless he

possessed a great title, politely but with suspicion. She was, to be

sure, probably the first Greek who came to live on Manhattan’s rocky

island; but despite this and all the other barriers, she succeeded in

the end, because she was, after all, older than any of them, more

civilized, more fortified by those institutions which come only of an

old race. In her French blood she was old, but in her Greek blood how

much older! She was as old as the carved emerald which she wore always

upon her little hand, now so plump with middle age, in a ring which

legend had it survived the sack of Constantinople. In tradition she was

as old as Justinian and Theodora. The family of Leopopulos was proud--so

proud and so old that one no longer discussed its pride and age.

After two years she bore a son, and before the end of that year she

became a widow when her ardent young husband, swimming in the surf off

Newport, went in his reckless way too far out and never returned. The

son she called Richard, after the father, and together with her he

inherited the great Callendar fortune, to which was added with the

passing of years the gold, the olive orchards, the vineyards, and the

palaces of the green-eyed old Banker of Pera. But Thérèse Callendar

never married again; she devoted herself to the upbringing of her son

and to the husbanding of a great fortune which by shrewdness and will

she had long since doubled and tripled. She was, in her soul, a

Levantine; thrift and shrewdness were a part of her very flesh and

bones. She lived here and there, always on the move, now in

Constantinople, now in Paris, now in London, now in Cannes, now in New

York, even making at times trips to such outlandish places as Bombay and

Sumatra; a woman of sorts, of vast energy and sharp intelligence. And

slowly as she passed down the corridor of the years the slim chic figure

became an hour glass hung with jet and diamonds. Her eyes were no longer

good and she was able to see now only with the aid of lorgnettes through

which she stared with a petulant intensity into the faces of all her

companions.

But she was rich; she was respected; she was fashionable. Indeed in

those days of the Nineties and the early Nineteen Hundreds when European

titles had not yet acquired a doubtful character, she achieved an added

glamour through the unsought visits of bankrupt Royalist relatives,

distant in relationship but much in need of American heiresses. And at

least two of them took home as brides the respective daughters of an

American nickel plate king and a wizard of Wall Street. They were gaudy

days, less pleasant perhaps in the eyes of Thérèse Callendar than the

quiet provinciality she had known in the beginning as the bride of

Richard Callendar. This capital of the new world she knew, in the depths

of her racial instinct, to be an awkward affair, flamboyant, yet timid;

vulgar yet aspiring; arrogant but still a little fearful. It was the day

of twenty course dinners and banquets at which the cost of feeding each

guest was estimated in the daily press. The Greek woman knew that some

day this city would come of age.

So Ellen, trembling with excitement in her hiding place behind the

screen, must have caught a little of the smoldering magnificence that

lay hidden in the plump corseted figure, for presently she forgot

entirely the bearlike Russian tenor and the exotic dancer with her

outlandish bangles. She had eyes only for Mrs. Callendar and the guests

who had begun to arrive.

* * * * *

That wise hostess might have written an entire book on the subject of an

amusing entertainment. From the procession of guests it was clear that

she considered them a part of the evening’s diversion, a kind of

preliminary parade about the arena which provided variety and color. She

understood that people came when you provided rich food and amusing

types, the more preposterous the better.

A Tzigane orchestra, much in fashion, assembled itself presently and

played an accompaniment to the grand march of arriving guests. Among

the first were the Champion girls and their mother. These represented

the old families. The two girls, already past their first youth, wore

gowns made by Worth, cut low back and front, which fitted their thin

bodies in the Princess style. But these gowns, Thérèse saw instantly,

they had ruined; for in a moment of caution the deep V’s, front and

back, had been built up with modest inserts of lace and tulle, and short

sleeves of similar material had been inserted to shield the upper

portions of their white arms. They held themselves stiffly. Nothing of

them remained exposed save the fact that they were virgins.

Close upon their heels, so close that the mother in her haste appeared

to shuffle her daughters into a corner with the air of a hen covering

her chicks from a hawk, came that elderly rake, Wickham Chase, and Mrs.

Sigourney, the latter dressed tightly in black and diamonds rumored to

be paste--thin, piercing and hard, too highly painted, a divorcée. (None

but Thérèse Callendar would have dared to ask her.) And then Bishop

Smallwood, whom Sabine Cane called “The Apostle to the Genteel,” a

Bishop with a See in the far West, who managed to divide his time

between New York and Bar Harbor and Newport ... a fat, pompous man with

a habit of alluding too easily to “My wa’am friend Mrs. Callendar” and

“My wa’am friend Mrs. Champion” and “My wa’am friend Mrs. So-and-so” ad

infinitum through the lists of the wealthy and the fashionable. Trapped

between the Scylla of Mrs. Champion and her Virgins and Charybdis of the

questionable but very smart Mrs. Sigourney, the poor man found himself

at once in an untenable position. Seeing this, the small eyes of his

hostess glittered with a sinful light.

Next came the Honorable Emma Hawksby, a gaunt Englishwoman of some

thirty-eight summers with a face like a horse, projecting teeth, and

feet that appeared to better advantage in the hedgerows than in the ball

room. To-night they emerged barge-like from beneath a very fancy gown of

pink satin ornamented with sequins and yards of mauve tulle. It was in

her direction that the anxious Mrs. Champion steered her two virgins.

Was she not a cousin of the notorious Duke of Middlebottom?

And then the four Fordyce sisters, arriving unattended in a hollow

square formation, large, dark, powerful girls ranging in age from twenty

to thirty-one, filled with an inhuman energy and zeal for good works,

the very first of those who struggled for the enfranchisement of women.

Then one or two nondescript bachelors, of the handy sort seen everywhere

as conveniences, stuffed with food and wine taken at some monstrous

dinner in the Thirties; and on their heels Mrs. Mallinson, who belonged

in the category of Mrs. Champion and her virgins, but who had escaped

years ago into the freedom of the literary world wherein she wrote long

novels of society life. She was a hard woman and beginning to sag a

little here and there so that she threw up against the ravages of decay

bulwarks in the form of a black satin ribbon ornamented with diamonds

about her dewlapped throat. She lived outside Paris in a small château,

once the property of a royal mistress, and spoke with a French accent.

Because she was literary, she was considered, in Mrs. Champion’s mind,

also Bohemian.

In her hiding place behind the painted screen, the dark eyes of Ellen

Tolliver grew brighter and brighter. Behind her the Javanese dancer and

the Russian tenor had relapsed into a condition of moribund

indifference.

More and more guests filtered into the room, old, young, dowdy,

respectable, smart, one or two even a little déclassée. They regarded

each other for a time, slipping into little groups, gossiping for a

moment, melting away into new and hostile clusters, whispering,

laughing, sneering, until the whole room became filled with an animation

which even the great dinners of two hours earlier could not suffocate.

With the arrival of Lorna Vale the excitement reached its peak; even the

gipsies played more wildly. She was an actress! And in those days it was

impossible to imagine an actress and the Champion virgins in the same

room. The Bishop stared at her, somewhat furtively to be sure, and Mrs.

Champion, quivering, again executed her swooping gesture of protection

toward her two daughters. But Mrs. Sigourney, perhaps seeing in her an

ally, pierced the surrounding phalanx of eager young men and found a

place by her side. Each benefited by the contrast, for the one was

large, an opulent beauty with tawny hair, and the other, thin as a

hairpin, black and glittering.

Then, during a brief pause in the music, the wide doors opened again and

there entered Sabine Cane and Mrs. Callendar’s son Richard.

* * * * *

At their approach there was, even in that nervous, chattering throng, a

sudden hush, a brief heightening of interest as if the crowd, like a

field of wheat, had been swayed faintly for an instant by the swift eddy

of a zephyr. Then all was noisy again. It was a demonstration of

interest, polite, restrained, as it should have been at a gathering so

fashionable, but a demonstration that could not be entirely disguised.

It was in the women that the excitement found its core ... women who saw

in the dark young man a great match for their daughters, girls who

desired him for his fortune and his rakish good looks and found the

legend of his wild living a secret and sentimental attraction; widows

and spinsters who discerned in him matchmaking material of the first

order. Beyond doubt the glittering Mrs. Sigourney and the tawny Lorna

Vale held other ideas, not to be expressed in so polite an assemblage.

He had been, after all, notoriously attentive to both though they were

years older. But there was one element in the situation which raised the

interest to the pitch of hysteria; it was his attention to Sabine Cane,

a fact of growing importance which many a jet-hung bosom found hard to

support.

She was a year or two older than Richard Callendar (every woman present

could have told the very hour she made her entrance into society) and

she was not, like most of young Callendar’s women, an acclaimed beauty.

Yet there were other qualities which set her aside from the commonplace

round of marriageable girls. She was easily the most smartly dressed in

all the room; there was about her clothes a breathless sort of

perfection that bespoke the taste of an artist. In place of an

overwhelming beauty, she had developed a wit that could be infinitely

more disastrous. In this, she resembled Cleopatra, Madame de Staël and

the Montespan. These things made her perilous and caused many an

ambitious mother hours of sleeplessness.

A long nose, a generous mouth frankly painted, green eyes set a trifle

too near each other, a mass of brick red hair and a marvelous figure ...

these things comprised the physical aspect of Sabine Cane, a combination

that was changeable and a trifle bizarre and therefore, as Thérèse

Callendar had observed more than once, enormously _intrigante_. But

there was more than this, for in the green eyes there lay a light of

humor and malice and beneath the brick red hair a brain which had a

passion for the affairs of other people. What disconcerted her enemies

most was her air of entering a room; she did not walk in, she made an

entrance. It was as if such women as Mrs. Sigourney and Lorna Vale did

not exist. Lily Langtry or Cléo de Merode were less effective. To-night

she wore a brilliant yellow dress with a wide full train. It was as if

she understood shrewdly her ugliness and made capital of it.

Sabine knew things about these people who filled the drawing

room--little bits of gossip, scraps of information picked up here and

there in the course of her twenty-six years. She knew, for example, that

Mrs. Champion (mother of the virgins and most rarefied of aristocrats)

had a grandmother known as Ruddy Mary who in her first assault upon the

social ranks had invited people to a monstrous ball by invitations

written in red ink, and so gained a sobriquet that was now forgotten.

She knew that Wickham Chase had a maternal grandfather who had been a

Jewish pawnbroker and laid up the money which he now spent. She knew

that the Honorable Emma Hawksby (niece of the notorious Duke of

Middlebottom) was without a cent in the world and found an easy winter

in New York by living off those who liked to speak of the dear Duke’s

cousin. “Honorable” was not a great title, but it went far enough in

those days to keep the Honorable Emma in bed and board for the winter.

She even knew that a brother of the Apostle to the Genteel had to be

kept, at some expense to the Apostle, in an out of the way country town

in order that he might not make a drunken spectacle of himself before

the Apostle’s many “wa’am friends.”

Sabine kept a great many family skeletons in her clever memory and it

was impossible to know the moment when she might bring them forth and

rattle them in the most grisly fashion.

It was clear that her companion, shrewder than the well-fed young men

about him, penetrating with those instincts which came to him from the

plump bundle of satin and diamonds who stood receiving the guests,

understood perfectly the atmospheric disturbance. He was young, clever,

handsome in a fashion that was a little sinister, and very rich, so rich

that the whispers of gossip that clustered about him--even the talk of

Mrs. Sigourney and Lorna Vale--made no difference. Mrs. Champion found

him not entirely beneath consideration as a possible match for Margaret

or Janey, the redoubtable virgins.

“Look at Boadicea and her daughters,” Sabine whispered maliciously in

his ear as they came abreast of this virtuous group.

Young Callendar was tall, with dark skin, closely cropped black hair and

a wiry kind of strength that was an heritage of his green-eyed

grandfather, the Banker of Pera. When Sabine said “Boadicea,” he laughed

and showed a row of fine teeth set white against an olive skin. It was

this same dark skin which gave his eyes a look of strangeness. The eyes

should have been brown or black; instead they were a clear gray and had

a way of looking at a person as if they bored quite through him. People

said he was fascinating or wild or vicious, according to their standards

of such things. The women morbidly watched his greeting of Mrs.

Sigourney and Lorna Vale, but they discovered nothing. All the talk may

only have been gossip. He was, after all, only twenty-four ... a boy.

But, of course, he had French and Greek blood and had lived on the

continent. “That,” said Mrs. Mallinson, the escaped novelist, with an

old world air, “makes a difference.”

Behind the screen, the Hindu dancer had begun to droop a little with

boredom, like a dark flower turning on its stem. Close by her side the

bear-like Russian tenor had fallen asleep, his enormous blond head bent

forward against his rumpled shirt front; his enormous hands, bursting

the seams of his civilized white kid gloves, hung limp between Herculean

thighs clad in black broadcloth that would have benefited by a visit to

the cleaners.

Only Ellen remained alert and nervous, peering through her crevice, all

interest now in the handsome young man and the bizarre red-haired woman

at his side. These, her instinct told her, were characters, individuals,

powerful in the same fashion that the plump little woman covered with

dirty diamonds was powerful. And deep down in her heart a tiny voice

kept saying, “This is the great world. Some day I shall be on the other

side of the screen, seated no longer with mountebanks.”

* * * * *

Behind the screen she experienced a swift tumult of emotions, confused

and ecstatic like the sensations she had known on sight of her first

play in a real theater. The scene was glamorous, extravagant. Perhaps

for an instant she caught a sense of what was really passing before her

eyes; it may have been that she understood the spectacle even more

clearly than any of the participants save only Thérèse Callendar ...

that these people were not gathered in the tomb-like room because they

were drawn by any bond of affection, but rather because they had been

summoned, each of them, to play his little rôle in a comedy of manners

which the world called fashionable life. There was the Bishop who played

a part quite his own (two bishops would have been too many and so, by

giving the evening a clerical aspect, have dulled the edge of its

_chic_). Mrs. Sigourney, wicked and painted, played the rôle of Sin, a

fascinating and indispensable part, just as Mrs. Champion and her

virgins as Virtue, Purity and Chastity, were her foil; and Mrs.

Mallinson and Lorna Vale were the Muses of Literature and the Drama.

Others stood for Family, and Wealth and what-not, while Mrs. Callendar,

hidden behind the drooping lids of her near-sighted green eyes,

understood all this and pulled the strings. She made for the piece an

admirable showman.

Ellen, watching them, grew excited, and out of this excitement there

emerged slowly a new ambition, which had nothing to do with a career in

music. It was, rather, a passionate desire to conquer this world as

well, so that she might fling her triumph back into the world of the

Town; it would serve as an admirable weapon to flaunt in the faces of

those who had mocked her poverty. For she had not yet escaped the Town;

she had not even learned how difficult it would be ever to escape.

* * * * *

The Russian tenor was a dismal failure. Save for the fact that he was

Russian and therefore wildly exotic, he would have been impossible, for

he sang in a bleating voice a popular ballad or two by Tosti and a

dreary bit of folk music, still half-caught in the mists of slumber. In

the back of the room, seated against the wall so that the figures of the

other guests rose in silhouette between them and the lights of the low

stage, Richard Callendar and the ugly Sabine sat like naughty children,

jeering. They were bored by such spectacles; they were interested only

in the individuals which comprised it. They saw that the others were a

little restless.

And then there was a brief hush broken presently by the music of the

Tzigane orchestra augmented by drums and clarinets, rising slowly at

first and then breaking into a crescendo of Arab music, filled with

insinuating and sensual rhythms, accentuated by the beating of a

tom-tom, and from behind the lacquered screen there arose a faint

tinkling sound like the music of a million tiny bells heard from a

great distance. Then as the music rose to a climax the sound grew

suddenly more and more clear and from behind the screen sprang the

Javanese dancer, gyrating, now bending low, now rising with a motion of

a tawny lily swept by a breeze. It was a beautiful body, soft yet

muscular, wild yet restrained. She wore the costume of a Burmese dancer,

all gold with a towering hat like a pagoda made all of gold. Her breasts

were covered with gold and her thighs, and on her hands she wore

gauntlets of gold that ran out into long tapering pinnacles; but the

rest of her was naked. The skin of _café au lait_ satin glistened,

voluptuous and extravagant. There were tiny gold bells on her wrists and

ankles.

For an instant a faint gasp, barely audible, swept the little group

seated on collapsible chairs. From her hiding place in the shadows

Sabine Cane nudged her companion and whispered again, “Look at

Boadicea!”

Before her eyes, between her and the dancer, Mrs. Champion had raised

her fan; her daughters had done likewise. Between her and “his wa’am

friend” Mrs. Mallinson, the Bishop stirred uneasily. Some leaned

forward; others feigned indifference. One or two of the men assumed

expressions of boredom. For none of them, save in brothels in Paris, had

ever seen a woman dancing without tights, utterly naked.

Withdrawn a little from the others Thérèse Callendar sat staring at the

dancer through her lorgnettes. She was immovable but interested, as if

the barbaric music and the sight of the Hindu woman’s naked body roused

in her a train of dim racial memories. And slowly in another part of the

room Sabine Cane became aware that Thérèse Callendar’s son no longer had

any interest in her. He no longer heard the malicious sallies she

uttered in a whisper. He had risen now and was standing so that he might

have a clearer view of the little dais bathed in light where the golden

dancer swayed and whirled to the wild music of the Tziganes. Slowly his

body stiffened and into the weird gray eyes there came a look of fierce

concentration. The dark muscular hands, clasping the chair, so near to

Sabine that she could have touched them, grew taut and white. It was not

mere sensuality that was roused by the sight; Sabine, with her hard

intelligence, must have known that it was something more profound,

something that savored of a passionate and barbaric excitement, as if

the man was stirred in the depths of his spirit. She must have

understood then for the first time that he was of a race so different,

so alien that there was a part of him forever beyond comprehension.

Sabine said nothing. Fascinated, she watched him quietly until, as the

music died suddenly, the dancer stood motionless as a statue of bronze

and gold. There was a ripple of embarrassed applause and she

disappeared, then another hush and the nervous murmur of many voices. On

her little throne Thérèse, like a plump Buddha, nodded her approval and

beat her plump hands together. “C’est une vraie artiste,” she murmured,

leaning toward Mrs. Sigourney, in whose eyes there glittered the light

of jealousy at being outdone in spectacularity by a hired entertainer.

In her corner Sabine said, “Beautiful!” To which young Callendar made no

reply. He fingered his mustache and presently, smiling slowly, he

murmured, “Mama shouldn’t have done it. She has shocked some of them.

This isn’t Paris. Not yet!”

They were different from the others--Thérèse and her son.

* * * * *

While he was still speaking the gypsies deserted the stage, leaving it

bare now save for the great piano. Again a brief hush and there emerged

from behind the painted screen with a curious effect of abruptness and

lack of grace a tall girl, very tall and very straight, with smooth

black hair done in the style of Cléo de Merode and cheeks that were

flushed. She wore a plain gown of black very tight and girdled with

rhinestones that, shimmering, threw off shattered fragments of light as

she walked. Her strong white arms were bared to the shoulder. There was

pride in her walk, and assurance, yet these things hid a terror so

overpowering that only those who sat quite near saw that her lip was

bleeding where she had bitten it.

On her little throne Thérèse Callendar in cold blood waited. She

wondered, doubtless, whether Sanson had failed her, and slowly she began

to perceive that he had not. Somehow as she emerged from behind the

screen, the American girl captured the imagination of her audience; it

was as if she dominated them by some unreal power. They stirred and

looked more closely. It was not altogether a matter of beauty, for the

dancer who had preceded her was by all the rules far more beautiful. It

was something beyond mere physical beauty. It emanated from her whole

body, running outward, engulfing all the little audience. They became

aware of her.

“Hm!” murmured Mrs. Callendar. “Here is something new. Something

magnificent. A born actress ... crude still, but with magnetism!” And

she raised her lorgnettes and peered very hard with her short sighted

little eyes.

To Richard Callendar, Sabine murmured, “Interesting! Who is she?”

“She’s very handsome.... A discovery of Mama’s.”

And then, seating herself the girl began after a shower of liquid notes,

to play, softly and suggestively, a Chopin valse, one that was filled

with melody and simple rhythm. After the hot passion of the dancer she

filled the great room with the effect of a soft wind infinitely cool and

lovely, serene in its delicacy. She appeared presently to forget her

fright and gave a performance that was beautiful not alone in sound but

in manner as well. It may have been that old Sanson taught her that a

great performance meant more than merely making beautiful sounds. All

her face and body played their part in the poise, the grace of every

movement, the sweep and the gesture. But it is more probable that she

was born knowing these things, for they are a matter more of instinct

than of training and lie thus beyond the realm of mere instruction.

There could be no doubt of the impression she made, yet in all the

audience there was none, unless it was old Thérèse Callendar, who

suspected that she had never before played in the presence of anything

but a small town audience. There was in her performance the fire of wild

Highland ancestors, the placidity of English lanes, the courage of men

who had crossed mountains into a wilderness, perhaps even the Slavic

passion of a dim ancestress brought from Russia to live among the dour

Scots of Edinburgh, the hard, bright intelligence of Gramp, and the

primitive energy of Hattie Tolliver. There was all the stifled emotion

pent so long in a heart dedicated to secrecy, and the triumph of wild

dreams; and there was too a vast amount of passion for that little

company who believed in her, whom she dared not betray by failure ...

for Lily whose very gown she wore, and the withered Miss Ogilvie; for

Gramp, and young Fergus who worshiped her with his eyes, for her gentle

father and the fierce old woman in Shane’s Castle; but most of all for

that indomitable and emotional woman whom she must repay one day by

forcing all the world to envy her.

* * * * *

When she had finished she was forced to return because overtones of all

this wild emotion had filtered vaguely into the very heart of the

restless, distracted audience on stiff collapsible chairs. They

applauded; it was as if she had suddenly claimed them.

Then she played savagely the Revolutionary Prelude and disappeared

behind the lacquered screen. There was a hush and then more talk and

then a sudden excitement which began at the screen and ran in little

ripples through all the stiff gathering. From the alcove there emerged

the bass rumbling of the Russian, stirred suddenly into somnolent

activity, and again a wild tinkling of little bells and a torrent of

French in the shrill voice of the Javanese dancer. The screen parted and

the dancer, half naked, covered only by the heavy gold ornaments and a

wrapper of scarlet silk, emerged chattering French and gesticulating.

She addressed Mrs. Callendar who stirred herself into a sudden dull

glitter of movement. The son left the ugly Sabine and joined his mother,

calm but with a fierce, bright look in his eyes. The American girl ...

the unknown pianist had fainted!

When at length Ellen became conscious of her surroundings, it was with

the faint odor of stables in her nostrils and in her ears the jingling

of harness and the steady, brisk clop! clop! made by the hoofs of

spirited horses upon wet asphalt. The cabriolet, flitting through the

streaks of light made by street lamps on the wet pavement, was passing

through an open space where the light shone on the bare branches of

trees and banks of wet and dirty snow. Otherwise everything was silent.

When she stirred presently and moved into an upright posture, she saw by

her side a mass of sable, the sudden glint of a brilliant yellow dress,

captured and fixed by a stray beam of light and then the face and bright

lips of the bizarre woman with red hair, who stirred and murmured,

“It’s all right. I’m Miss Cane. On the other side is Mr. Callendar ...

Mrs. Callendar’s son.”

The dark man removed his top hat and bowed. “We’re taking you home,” he

said, “to the Babylon Arms.... That’s right, isn’t it?”

There was a faint trace of accent in his voice ... vaguely familiar,

confused somehow with a memory of mimosa and the figure of Lily standing

beneath the glowing Venice in the drawing room of Shane’s Castle. The

same sort of accent....

“That’s right, isn’t it?” continued the voice of the dark young man.

“The Babylon Arms?”

Then for the first time, Ellen spoke, slowly and with a certain shyness.

“Yes. I live there.... But how did you know?”

The man laughed. “Two reasons,” he said. “First. Sanson told my mother.

Second. My mother owns the Babylon Arms.”

Again a wandering ray of light flitted across the window of the

cabriolet illuminating for an instant the brilliant lips of Miss Cane.

The lips were smiling, as if conscious that they were shielded by the

darkness, but it was a mocking smile and the memory of it haunted Ellen

long afterward. It was as if the painted lips were really speaking and

said, “The Babylon Arms is a preposterous pretentious place.” And for

the first time, perhaps, Ellen doubted the magnificence of that vast

pile.

Her next speech was dictated by the careful precepts of Hattie Tolliver.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have fainted.... It ruined

everything.”

There was a stifled laugh from Sabine Cane. “Nonsense! It gave us a

chance to get into the air.”

Then silence once more and the echoing clop! clop! clop! clop! regular

as the beams of light which flashed past the open door of Thérèse

Callendar’s cabriolet.

* * * * *

Long after midnight the carriage came to a halt before the gigantic

Syrian lions of cast iron that ornamented the entrance to the Babylon

Arms. It was young Callendar who descended first, lending his arm with a

grave and alien grace to Ellen who, having recovered entirely, emerged

with a sure and vigorous step. The third occupant, instead of remaining

behind as she might well have been expected to do, followed them, driven

by an overpowering desire to miss nothing. So with Ellen between them,

Callendar in a top hat, and Sabine Cane, muffled in sables and holding

her full yellow train high above the wet pavements, descended upon the

astonished negro who ran the elevator.

Here Ellen bade them good night. “I’m all right now.... It was good of

you to have come.”

But they insisted upon accompanying her. There were protests, into which

there entered a sudden note of desperation as if the girl were striving

to conceal something which lay hidden at the top of the flamboyant

apartment.

“But you might faint again,” protested Sabine firmly. “I shan’t be

satisfied until I see you safe in your flat.”

“Besides,” observed young Callendar, smiling, “some day the Babylon Arms

will be mine. I should like to see what it looks like, abovestairs.”

So they pressed her until at last she yielded and in their company was

borne aloft in the swaying elevator. As it jolted to a halt, she bade

them good night once more, saying, “The elevator only runs this far and

I live two flights above. I’ll go the rest of the way alone.”

But they went with her through the red painted corridors under the light

of the flickering gas up the flights of stairs to a door which she

opened with her own key. There at last the farewells were made, for she

did not invite them to enter.

“My mother will call in the morning,” said Callendar, “to see that you

are not really ill.... Oh yes! You couldn’t prevent her! You don’t know

her as well as I do!”

“Good night.”

And as the door closed they caught a sudden glimpse of a man, standing

timidly in the dim light of an inner room, listening with an air of

curiosity to their talk. He was a small man and rather thin, and stood

dressed in a shirt and trousers. His hair was rumpled; obviously he had

been “sitting up.” Behind him there was a table covered with papers and

accounts. All this the shrewd eye of Sabine captured in one swift

instant.

As they descended under the guidance of the negro, Callendar said, “The

man ... who was he?”

“Some one ... perhaps her lover. Musicians have lovers....”

Her companion turned sharply. “No ...” he said, “not a lover. A woman

with such spirit wouldn’t have that sort of lover.”

Sabine laughed softly and with a hint of wickedness in her voice. “You

don’t know women ... how queer they can be. Besides....” And she

indicated with a nod of her red head the listening negro. “One must be

careful.” But she regarded Callendar with a new interest and during the

long ride back through the park she remained silent save to comment now

and then upon the bits of gossip which he discussed. Knowing him so

well, perhaps she understood that a new source of disturbance had

crossed his path. There was between them a remarkable sense of

intimacy, as if each expected the other to understand him perfectly.

By the time they reached the solid house on Murray Hill the party was

already on the wane and the guests had begun, in a motley stream, to

leave. Mrs. Champion and her daughters disappeared among the first after

Mrs. Callendar had the audacity to bring forward the artists and beg

them to join the guests. The Russian tenor stood awkwardly alone and in

a corner and the tiny dancer, in a turban and gown of crimson and gold

brocade, sat surrounded by young men. She had learned the business of

entertaining during those early days in Alexandria.

The prediction of young Callendar came true, for in the morning, while

Ellen sat in a purple wrapper practising her scales, the bell rang

suddenly and into the room came Mrs. Callendar, dressed coquettishly in

a very tight black suit, a hat much too large for her short, plump

figure, and a voluminous stole of sable. The climb up the two flights of

stairs above the elevator had been very nearly too much for her and she

greeted Ellen with much panting and blowing.

“Good morning, my dear,” she said. “I hope you’re none the worse for

last night’s experience.”

Ellen smiled respectfully and bade her guest seat herself in the padded

arm chair that was the property of Clarence. “I’m all right again. I

can’t imagine what could have made me faint. I’m sorry. It must have

spoiled the party.”

At this Mrs. Callendar, settling herself in the chair, chuckled, “Not at

all. Not at all. They’ll talk of it for days. You could not have done

better. It was dramatic ... dramatic.”

“I’m all right. You needn’t have come. It is good of you.”

“Perhaps you lace too tightly,” suggested Mrs. Callendar, returning to

the subject of Ellen’s collapse.

“I don’t lace at all,” said Ellen. “I can’t play if I’m all boxed in.”

Mrs. Callendar threw back her stole and nodded her head sagely. “You’re

much wiser, my dear. Much wiser. When I was a girl I was famous for my

waist. Sixteen inches it was ... only sixteen inches.” And she brought

together her plump fingers in a gesture which implied that once she

might have encircled her waist with her two hands. “But I fainted.... I

used to faint daily. I don’t lace tightly any more, but it makes no

difference. It’s just stayed that way. You see, my corsets are quite

loose.” And she thrust a finger into the space between her ample bosom

and her corset to prove her statement. “I know my figure is bad in these

days. Too many curves and too little height. But I’m past forty and it

doesn’t matter so much.”

Secretly Ellen must have compared the figure of her guest with that of

her own vigorous mother. Mrs. Tolliver was ten years the older, yet her

appearance was that of a woman much younger than Mrs. Callendar. It was

in this difference that the Levantine blood of the latter betrayed her.

She was a friendly woman, certainly, and one who was quite sure of

herself, fortified clearly by the conviction that the king can do no

wrong.

“You shouldn’t have climbed the stairs just to see if I was all right.”

“But you see,” said Mrs. Callendar, “I’m interested in you. Sanson tells

me you have a great future. He doesn’t tell me such things if he doesn’t

believe them.... But don’t let that turn your head. Nothing comes

without work ... least of all, anything to do with the arts.”

For a moment Ellen did not reply. At last she said, thoughtfully, “I

know that.”

“You are bitter,” observed Mrs. Callendar, “and perhaps unhappy,” she

added with a shrewd glance of her near sighted eyes. “Well, that’s a

good thing. It shows character, and no artist ever existed without

character. Character is the thing that counts.” Here, having regained

her breath, she rose and placing the lorgnettes against her slanting

eyes, she wandered to the window. “It’s a fine view you have from here,”

and after a moment’s consideration, “Not so fine as it appears at first.

Too many locomotives and signboards. You see,” she added, turning toward

the girl, “I came here this morning for other reasons too. I own the

Babylon Arms.”

“So your son told me.”

“But I’ve never seen it before. I’m only in New York for a month or two

at a time. I own a great deal of property here and there. I don’t have

to look at it. I have a good agent ... a young Jew, trustworthy ... a

fellow who knows values up and down. I pay him well and he knows that if

he played me a trick, I’d throw him out at once. Oh, I can trust him.

Besides, I’m a Levantine myself and in every Levantine there is a Jew

hidden away. We understand each other ... Minsky and I. It’s a fine

building but the elevator ought to run all the way up. Then I could

charge you more rent. I suppose there’s no room for it. The architect

made these upper floors too fancy. No eye for comfort and common sense.”

And having uttered this torrent of opinions, she returned to the plush

chair and said, “But tell me about yourself. I have a terrible curiosity

about people. You’re American, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” replied Ellen. There was about this preposterous visitor a

quality that was irresistible. It was impossible to know whether you

liked or disliked her, because she gave you no time to consider. Even if

you decided against her, it availed nothing; she swept over you with the

persuasion of a mountain torrent ... a powerful woman and one whose

friendliness was disarming. For a moment or two, the absurd thought that

she might have been drinking lingered in Ellen’s mind.

“Well,” observed Mrs. Callendar, “some day this raw country is going to

produce a superb art. Maybe you’re one of the first artists. Who can

say?” Fumbling in the reticule of black jet she brought out at last a

tiny cigarette case, made of onyx with the name Thérèse in small

diamonds, a bizarre box which in the possession of a woman less powerful

and less foreign would have been vulgar. “I suppose you smoke?”

“No,” said Ellen, “I never have.”

“Well, you will.” And she thrust the case back into the reticule. “You

don’t mind if I do?”

“Certainly not.” Ellen brought out the small table consecrated to the

smoking apparatus of her husband. It was a violation of Clarence’s

principles. On this subject he had spoken to Ellen many times, saying

always, “Women who smoke are all of one kind.”

“Wouldn’t you have a cup of tea or a bit of cake?” asked Ellen. “I owe

you something for the climb up the stairs.”

“Thank you, no. Not at this hour of the day, and besides there is my

figure to consider. It is real suffering to possess at the same time a

tendency toward fat and an appetite for rich food.”

She paused for a moment to breathe in the smoke of the tiny scented

cigarette. All this time her eyes, aided by the lorgnettes, had been

roving the room, as if somewhere within its walls she might find other

clues to Ellen’s history. To Ellen this action must have been

disconcerting, especially since the drooping lid which half concealed

one eye of the visitor made it impossible ever to know in what direction

or in what object she was interested.

“But tell me about yourself,” she continued. “You like Sanson?”

“He is a good teacher.”

“No monkey business about him ... no fanfaronade and nonsense. I’ve

known him a great many years. I see him in Paris more often than here.

He’s not so busy over there.”

Ellen sat on the edge of her chair, like a school girl in the presence

of an elderly aunt. In the age and self-possession of her guest there

was some quality which caused her to feel an awful sense of youth and

inexperience. “I’m going to Paris to study in a year or two,” she said

modestly. It was almost as if Mrs. Callendar had the power of making her

enact a rôle.

“Of course. So you must. Nobody here would pay to hear an American

musician. And you must take a foreign name. That’s important. Some day

it won’t be. But it is now. We’re still afraid to trust ourselves.

People spend money for names as well as music. You must have a good

foreign name, the fancier the better so long as it doesn’t sound like a

music hall. Have you any friends over there?”

“I have a cousin.” Her manner was better now, a little more contained

and far less shy, for the amazing friendliness of Mrs. Callendar had

begun to accomplish the inevitable effect. This dowager was perhaps the

first woman in all the city who had been friendly toward her, the first

woman who had not been a little on her guard, a little uncertain ... the

way Bunce’s wife was uncertain and hostile. And there was something in

the manner of Mrs. Callendar which must have reminded Ellen of her

mother ... a certain recklessness, a quality that was quite beyond

barriers of any sort.

“Is the cousin male or female?” asked Mrs. Callendar, “because in Paris

it makes a difference.”

“Female,” replied Ellen.

“Indeed! Perhaps I know her?”

“Her name is Shane,” said Ellen. “Lily Shane.”

For a time Mrs. Callendar regarded the blue smoke of her cigarette in

silence, thoughtfully. “Shane,” she murmured. “Shane? I don’t think I

know any one named Shane? I know most of the Americans in Paris. Has she

lived there long?”

“Many years.”

“Shane? Shane?” Mrs. Callendar continued to murmur with an air of

searching the recesses of her excessively active brain; and then, all at

once, she grew alert. “Shane! Shane! Of course. Reddish hair. Tall.

Beautiful. Madame Shane. I’ve never met her, but I’ve seen her

somewhere. She’s been pointed out to me ... maybe at the races, maybe at

the Opéra. Madame Shane ... to be sure. A beauty! A widow, isn’t she?”

There was in Ellen’s reply no haste: indeed she waited for a long time

as if turning the simple inquiry over and over in her mind. Lily a

widow! Lily who had never been married! She did not, as her mother might

have done, spring impulsively to a blundering answer. Perhaps out of her

memory there emerged old thoughts, old gossip, bits of instinct and

emotion which presently fashioned itself into a comprehensible

pattern--such things as her own pride of race, the tribal sense that was

so strong in her family, the memory of gossip about a child, indeed all

those fragments of mystery which surrounded the existence of her cousin.

When she replied it was calmly in a manner that protected Lily. “Yes,”

she said, “a widow. That’s the one,” as if nothing had occurred that was

in the least surprising.

“A beautiful woman,” continued Mrs. Callendar crushing out the ember of

her cigarette upon the tray dedicated to the ashes of Clarence. “And

now,” she added, “coming to the point, I wanted to know whether you

would come sometimes and play for me in the evenings.... Not a

performance, you understand, but simply to play once in a while for me

and perhaps my son and Miss Cane and one or two friends.... Miss

Cane--you may remember her--came home with you last night ... a clever

woman. I’d pay you well ... understand that. I’d like to have you once

or twice a week. I don’t go out frequently. I love music but I dislike

musicians. You’ll understand that when you come to see more of them.”

For Ellen it was, of course, the opening of a new world in which she

might become independent, a world such as she had imagined the city to

be. It was as if, overnight, the whole course of her life had been

changed. There were chances now, subtle, hidden gambits for which she

had an instinct.

“Yes,” she replied quietly. “I think I could arrange it to come.”

“And very likely,” said Mrs. Callendar, “I could get other engagements

for you.” She had risen now and was wrapping the sable stole about her

short fat neck. “I’ll let you know when I’ll want you to come. I’ll

write you a note that will be a sort of contract between us. I believe

in contracts. Never trust the human race.... And now good-by, Miss

Tolliver. I’m glad you’re all right again. You may have fainted out of

fright. There were people there last night ... stupid people ... who

would have frightened Rubinstein himself.”

So Ellen thanked her, bade her good-by and walked with her to the top of

the stairs. Half way down, Mrs. Callendar turned. “I suppose,” she said

with a rising inflection, “that you live here alone.”

“No,” said Ellen; but that was all she said, and Mrs. Callendar, smiling

to herself, disappeared amused, no doubt, by the memory of the story

which Sabine Cane had told her when she had returned across the park

from the Babylon Arms.

* * * * *

Once the door was closed, Ellen flung herself into a chair and sat

staring out of the window into the gray clouds that swept across the sky

high above the North River. It must have occurred to her then that Mrs.

Callendar had departed with an amazing amount of information ...

knowledge which concerned herself and her family, her future, her plans,

even the details of the very flat in which she lived. Her guest had,

after a fashion, absorbed her and her life much as a sponge absorbs

water. By now Mrs. Callendar could doubtless have drawn a detailed and

accurate picture of the flat and written a history of its occupant.

Indeed she had very nearly tripped Ellen into one unfortunate

truthfulness. That was a fascinating thought ... Lily and her strange

foreign life. Lily a widow? What were her morals? How did she live in

Paris? Surely no one in the Town could have had the faintest idea. But

_Madame_ Shane! Still Mrs. Callendar might have been mistaken. It would

have been, under the circumstances, a natural error. It was as though

Lily was destined in some unreal fashion to play a part in Ellen’s own

life. Always she was there, or at least some hint of her. Even Clarence

talked of her in a way he did not use when speaking of other women. Yet

no one knew anything of Lily.

Smiling dimly she rose, and before returning to her music she took the

brass ash tray containing the remains of Mrs. Callendar’s scented

cigarette and cleaned it thoroughly, taking care to bury the offending

morsels well out of sight where Clarence could never find them.

Certainly she performed this act through no fear of him. Rather it was

with an air of secrecy as if already she and her visitor had entered

into a conspiracy. It may have been only a touch of that curious

understanding which flashes sometimes between persons of great

character.

The life of Mr. Wyck was no longer of interest to any one; yet there

were times, usually after a stronger dose than usual of his wife’s power

and independence, when Clarence sought the company of Wyck with the air

of a man in need of refreshment and rest. For she had brought into the

lives of both men a sense of strain which, during the days of their

amiable companionship on the top floor of the Babylon Arms, had been

utterly lacking. To Clarence, this new condition of affairs remained a

mystery; but Wyck, with an intuition that was feminine, must sometimes

have come close to the real reason.

He knew, beyond all doubt, that Ellen, for all her indifference, was his

enemy--an enemy who never once considered her foe, an enemy who in her

towering self-sufficiency had not troubled to include him in her

reckoning. There were times, during the lunches the two men had together

in a tiny restaurant in Liberty Street, when he came very close to

speaking the truth, so close that Clarence, moved by a shadowy and

pathetic loyalty, turned the talk of his companion into other channels.

People said that a wife made a difference with one’s friends, that

marriage ended old friendships and began new ones. There were, to be

sure, old ones that had come very near to the end of the path, but in

their place there were no new ones. It was wonderful how Ellen appeared

to exist without friends.

“She is busy, I suppose,” he confided in admiration to Wyck over the

greasy table, “and she is more independent than most women but still I

don’t see how she stands it. She might have had Bunce’s wife for a

friend.”

Wyck said, “Oh, no! _She’s_ not good enough for her.” And then as if he

had spoken too bitterly, he added, “I can understand that. Bunce’s wife

is a vulgar woman.” He had never forgiven the contractor’s daughter the

theft of Bunce. He hated her so strongly that in order to disparage her,

it was necessary by comparison to reflect praise upon another enemy.

There were at times long silences when neither man spoke at all, for

even their talk of shop came to an end after it had been turned over and

over a hundred times. What thoughts occurred in those tragic silences

neither one could have revealed to the other because they were in the

realm of those things which friends, or even those who cling to the rags

of friendship, cannot afford to tell each other.

Clarence with his nose-glasses and neat white collar drank his thin

coffee and thought, “Wyck is a dull fellow. How could I ever have liked

him? Funny how men grow apart.”

And across the table Wyck, finishing his apple sauce, thought, “Ah, if

only there was some way to save him. That woman is destroying him

slowly, bit by bit. He should never have married her. If only I could

get him back where he would be happy again.”

* * * * *

There were in these thoughts the vestiges of truth. At one time they

were more filled with truth than at another, for no thing is true

persistently and unutterably. Yet in their truth Clarence was the

happier of the two because he had discovered in his marriage a freedom

of a new and different sort; through Ellen he was strong enough to yield

nothing to the shabby little man who sat opposite him. In some way he

had caught a sense of her independence, a knowledge that she was not as

other women, or even as most men. She belonged to the ruthless and the

elect. As for Wyck, he had only his sense of loss, for which there was

no reward, and a pang which he was resolved one day to heal by some

revenge, as yet vague and unplanned. And in his heart he believed that

friendship between men was a bond far finer, far more pure than any

relation between a man and woman.

“See!” he thought, over his apple sauce, “what it is doing to Clarence.

It is destroying him. His love for her is consuming him.”

And when they had finished eating and had paid the yellow-haired cashier

who sat enthroned behind the till, it was their habit to saunter into

the streets and lose themselves in the noon crowds of lower Broadway.

Sometimes they wandered as far as the Battery to sit on a bench and

watch the fine ships going proudly across a bay of brilliant blue out to

the open sea. But there was not much pleasure in their promenade. It

ended always in the same fashion with Clarence looking at his watch to

observe, “It’s time we started back.”

And so they would return, back the same way over the same streets and

over the same doorstep. There were times when the sight of the blue sea

and the great ships sliding silently through the green water filled the

heart of Mr. Wyck with a wild turbulence which was beyond his

understanding. Those were times when he hated both his friend and the

woman who held him prisoner.

But no one was really interested in Mr. Wyck. In the evening when he

returned to the gas-lit bed room in Lexington Avenue there was nothing

for him to do. He read sometimes, but not frequently, and on warm nights

he sat on the doorstep watching the passers-by and exchanging a word now

and then with the grim woman who was his landlady. There were long hours

in which there was nothing to do but to think, and not even the gray

cat, watching the shadow of her tail against the decaying brownstone of

the doorstep, could have guessed the dark trend of those secret

thoughts.

His life, his happiness had been ruined by a stranger who scorned even

to think of him.

* * * * *

Other changes came in the life of Clarence.

Once he had been a great one for organizations. He had been vice

president of the Mutual Benefit Association of the Superba Electrical

Company and a member of no less than three lodges. In the days before

his marriage the duties concerned with all these organizations had

required much of his time, but when Ellen arrived he came to stay more

and more at home, and little by little these gaieties too lost their

place in his life. It seemed that he was content to remain in the flat

reading the newspaper, working over his accounts and now and then merely

listening to his wife’s music with a strange expression of bewilderment

as if it were impossible for him ever to understand her; and that little

vein in his throat, which Lily had observed with such interest, throbbed

and throbbed with a desire which sometimes must have terrified him.

Sitting there in the long evenings, silhouetted as she played, against

the brilliant blue of a sky that stretched out interminably beyond the

windows of the Babylon Arms, she had an air of lofty magnificence, an

aloofness that was unconquerable. There were times when she seemed a

very symbol of all that was unattainable; and always she was related to

the wild dreams that became gradually less and less turbulent.

When she told him of these new engagements to play for Mrs. Callendar,

he frowned and said, “But what of me? What am I to do?”

“It means more money for us ... and we need money. You see, Mrs.

Callendar pays me well. My music will cost me nothing. Perhaps I shall

be able to put something aside. Besides there is the experience which

must not be overlooked.”

These things were true, and of late the mention of the money she might

earn seemed not so unpleasant to Clarence as it had once been. He was,

it appeared, more troubled by the fear of her escaping him, for he

said, “I don’t think it’s wise to go too much with these people. They’re

not our sort.... I’ve heard stories of how they live. They’re society

people.”

At which Ellen mocked him, laughing, to say, “But I have nothing to do

with them. I work for them. I entertain them ... that’s all.”

“And Wyck says that young Callendar has a reputation for being a bad

one.”

Ellen laughed again, scornfully. “How does he know anything about young

Callendar? Wyck and his boarding house. It’s because he hates me. I know

what he’s like ... a mean, nasty little man who hates me.”

“He has friends.... His family was rich once in New York.”

What Clarence said was true. Wyck did know because, although he had long

since ceased to have any existence for such people as the Callendars,

there were channels by way of housemaids and distant relatives through

which news of their world penetrated at last, somewhat distorted and

magnified, to the spinster aunts in Yonkers, and so at length to Mr.

Wyck himself. For the old ladies had known young Callendar’s father as a

boy and they still lived in the world of those early days when,

ensconced on lower Fifth Avenue behind plush curtains ornamented with

ball fringe, they had received the Sunday procession of fashionables.

The vulgar, new city of this early twentieth century, for all its noise

and show, did not exist for them any more than they, for all their thin

blooded pride, existed for the Callendars. It was after all an affair

merely of dollars and cents. The Callendars had increased their fortune;

the Wycks had lost theirs.

“I shall go to the Callendars’ and play for them because it is

necessary,” said Ellen. “I am not a fool. I can take care of myself.”

To this abrupt statement, Clarence found no answer. He yielded quietly

and, presently, on the nights when Ellen played in the great house on

Murray Hill, he found himself going back once more to his three lodges

and the Mutual Benefit Association of the Superba Electrical Company.

There were members of the latter organization who thought it queer that

their vice president attended the annual ball, held that year in a

Brooklyn Hotel, as he had always done, alone, without his wife. It

happened that she played that night in the solid house on Murray Hill.

* * * * *

And what then of Ellen herself? She was not, surely, unconscious of all

that was happening so slowly, so imperceptibly about her. It is true

that she was one of those who are born to success, one for whom the past

does not exist and the present has reality only in so far as it provides

a step into the future. Indeed, during those years in the city, even the

Town itself became a very distant and shadowy memory. She was concerned,

desperately, with what lay before her, confused perhaps by a sense of

imminent disaster so vague that it could have for her no real meaning or

significance.

But of course she never spoke of these things to her husband, perhaps

because she was conscious that he might not understand them. At times

the old pity for him, the same pity which had seized her so

unaccountably upon the night of their flight, overwhelmed her, and at

such moments it was her habit to be tender with him in a fashion that

sent him into extravagant flights of happiness. But these moments

became, after a while, conscious things on the part of Ellen so that

presently she used them cheaply to quiet his unhappiness as one might

use a gaudy stick of candy to quiet an unhappy child. Such little things

made him happy.

* * * * *

Sometimes in the night she would lie in one of the green beds ornamented

with garlands of salmon pink roses, listening to the sounds of the city

that lay far beneath them ... the distant rumble which rose and mingled

somehow with the glow of light that filled all the dome of the sky, a

rumble pierced sharply by the sudden shrill cry of a city child playing

late in the streets, or the faint clop! clop! of hoofs upon asphalt

blurred now and again by the ghostly boom of a great ship’s whistle

rising from the fog-veiled river ... marvelous, splendorous sounds of a

great world close at hand. There lay in these sounds a wonderful sense

of the crowd--in which she herself was not a part. Lying there, her

fingers would clutch the bedclothes tightly and presently she would

become conscious that in her listening she was not alone, that beside

her, separated by the little chasm which divided the two green beds,

Clarence too lay awake ... listening. She must have known in those hours

an unreal consciousness of something that was waiting ... a Thing

destined not to become clear until long afterward ... a Thing which

waited silently and with a terrible patience. It was an experience that

was not rare; it happened many nights, so that presently she came to be

happy in the weeks when Clarence, traveling through the night hundreds

of miles from her, was not there at all.

Sometimes her hand would steal out and in the darkness be touched and

clasped by another hand that trembled and clung to hers in a sort of

terror.

Ellen’s awareness of Richard Callendar came over her slowly, a sensation

neither desired nor anticipated, but one which stole upon her in some

obscure fashion through the corridors of her own music. It would have

been impossible to fix the moment at which this awareness took form;

certainly it was not during that first damp drive through the park,

when, wedged between his slim body and that of the yellow-clad Sabine,

she had her first view of him. On that occasion she had remarked him

merely as a young man perhaps of thirty (in this she was wrong by five

years) who possessed a beauty of a kind new to her, a beauty of which

there were traces to be found among certain of the workers in the Mills

that hugged the dying hedges of Shane’s Castle. It was, in short, a kind

of mystical, unearthly beauty born of an old, old race that was sensual

and filled with an intense capacity for suffering ... a kind of beauty

never to be found among her own Scotch and English friends and

relatives. It had its determining quality in the extraordinary blackness

of his hair, the dark olive of his skin and the unreality of gray eyes

so queerly placed in so much darkness.

Sabine Cane, so completely civilized, so disillusioned, understood this

beauty with the mind of one capable of an amazing detachment and power

of analysis, for she had an extraordinary power of pulling herself up

short in the midst of her emotions and saying, “This is indeed

interesting. Here am I giving way to a good wholesome passion. Well!

Well!...” and then, “It’s all very good so long as I don’t allow myself

to be hurt by it.” For Sabine had the sort of intelligence which is the

equipment of every potential sensualist.

This awareness on the part of Ellen forced its way through a torrent of

impressions and emotions into a consciousness never too well organized.

At the “parties” of Mrs. Callendar, there were, as the amusing woman

predicted, never more than three or four people. There was always

herself and usually her son. Sometimes Sabine Cane, whose relationship

to the older woman was that of one who shares a complete understanding,

was present, and now and then an elderly beau or two, of the sort which

appears at concerts and the opera where they sit in the rear of boxes

obscured somewhat by bedizened dowagers.

These entertainments, referred to variously by Thérèse Callendar as

musicales, parties and soirées, were held in the vast drawing room where

Ellen appeared on that first evening. While she played, the others,

flanked by brocade curtains of immense dimensions, rows of Callendar

family portraits and cases filled with bronze Buddhas and jade tear

bottles, sat about respectful, listening, prepared to speak only in

hushed voices, for it was true that all of them were wholly devoted to

music ... all perhaps, save Sabine who, it might be said, was present as

much because she found Thérèse Callendar amusing and had a profound

curiosity regarding the shy, handsome girl who came to entertain them.

Ellen had a capacity for “feeling her audience.” She had not played many

times before she knew exactly the degree and quality of appreciation in

each of those who listened. She came to know that Sabine neither

understood music nor cared very greatly for it, and that Mrs. Callendar

preferred the compositions which were a little wild and barbaric. In the

dark young Richard Callendar there was a quality altogether different

from any of the others. It was a kind of appreciation which she had

experienced only twice before. Lily listened in that fashion and her own

brother Fergus. It was as if they abandoned themselves completely to the

sound, as if they became in all their senses quite immersed. For a long

time after the music ceased it was difficult for them to return wholly

to the world of reality. She herself knew the intoxication; it was an

emotion quite beyond the realm of drunkenness; it might be perhaps

comparable to the effect of certain drugs. Richard Callendar listened in

that fashion, and understanding this she came at length to play for him

alone, moved only by an instinct of profound gratitude.

Even Sabine Cane, with all her sharp intelligence, failed to understand

what was happening before her green eyes. She knew, vaguely, that there

were times when the girl outdid herself, when the sounds she made

possessed a beauty unusual in degree and quality, but her penetration

seldom progressed beyond this point, because, by virtue of that strange

and mystical bond, the other two were raised into a world quite beyond

her. If there was a difference it lay in this ... that to Sabine one

would have said that nothing could ever happen, because she guarded

herself so carefully.

* * * * *

In the beginning, Ellen had come in only to play in the evenings at nine

o’clock when the others had finished dinner and were sitting in the

walnut-paneled library over cigarettes, coffee and liqueurs. She came,

as a mountebank, to entertain. It was her habit to arrive quietly, to

greet Mrs. Callendar and then sit modestly a little apart from the

others until the moment came for her to play. They were kind to her, and

sometimes quite cordial--even Sabine who, out of an awkwardness born of

a nature really shy, talked with her in the most confused and disjointed

fashion, sometimes, under the stress of temptation, striving even to pry

into the details of her life. Perhaps Sabine, in the recesses of her

clear intelligence, speculated regarding the origins, the background,

the very surroundings of Ellen. Her own life had been one ordered and

held in check by a rigid tradition ... a nurse, a day school kept by an

affected and clever old harridan in impoverished circumstances, a year

abroad and at last a coming-out ball. The independence she possessed lay

altogether in her own thoughts, a thing hid away deeply. It moved like a

mountain torrent confined placidly within the walls of a canal. It

manifested itself only in a sharpness of tongue, a restless and

malicious desire for gossip. She encouraged her imagination to rebuild

the lives of her friends according to some pattern more exciting than

that of the straight-laced world by which she was submerged. It was

this, perhaps, which drew her to old Thérèse Callendar and her son. In

them she found a freedom, a sophistication that elsewhere was lacking.

Richard Callendar was not unwilling to discuss such things as

mistresses. Thérèse did not treat her as if she were a spotless virgin

to be protected against the realities of the world. They provided

release to an intelligence bound in upon all sides by the corseted

bejetted traditions of the day. They treated her with respect, as an

individual. They possessed candor.

And so in the beginning her curiosity had seemed to Ellen, not

understanding all this, an impudent thing, to be snubbed quietly in the

proud way she had. She understood, well enough, that Sabine possessed

the advantage ... at least in the world of Mrs. Callendar’s

drawing-room. Sabine was at home there. She had lived always in such

drawing-rooms. And yet there came a night when Sabine turned with her

strange abruptness and said apropos of nothing, “I envy you.”

At which Ellen smiled and asked, “Why?”

“Because,” continued the abrupt Sabine, “you will always have the

advantage over us (she was quite frank in admitting that they belonged

to different worlds). It is always so with those who make their way by

their wits.”

Once Ellen might have pondered such a speech, wondering whether she

should consider herself insulted by it. But in the experience of many

talks with Sabine, she came to understand that there lay at the bottom

of the observation no more than a complete honesty. Indeed, the remark

was so honest that in the very moment it was made, Ellen saw not only

its honesty but its truth. She _was_ making her way by her wits. Sabine

had nothing to make ... nothing to expect save a marriage which would

occur in due time according to the plan that controlled all Sabine’s

life. And the artist in Ellen leapt at once to assume the rôle. She

would make her way by her wits, from now on, consciously. That placed

her. It provided her with a certain definiteness of personality.

“People like that are always more sure of themselves,” Sabine continued.

“I’ve noticed it. Take Mrs. Sigourney. She’s done it. She’s outraged

some people but she’s got what she wanted.... She was nobody and now

she’s chic. It’s her wits, always her wits.... She never does the wrong

thing ... never puts herself in a place where she can be hurt.”

At the end of the speech, Sabine’s voice dropped suddenly. There was

even a little echo of something ... perhaps a faint sigh, as if it came

somewhere from deep within her. She _had_ been hurt then, perhaps a long

time ago. Perhaps her flawless clothes, her sharp and witty tongue, her

air of entering a room, were all no more than an armor she had raised

about herself. She was not, like Ellen, isolated, independent, free ...

belonging to nothing, to no one, save only herself. Her friendship with

Richard Callendar may only have been a bit of bravado, to flaunt in the

face of the others who desired him.

Ellen saw it, clearly now. In the Town she would have been like Sabine.

There, in a community all her own, they could have hurt her. Here in

this world there was no one who could do her any injury. Alone,

isolated, she was stronger than she had been in the very midst of all

those who had known her since the beginning.

“I wish,” continued Sabine, “that you would tell me about yourself some

time.... Tell me and Richard. He’s interested in such things.”

“But I must play now,” said Ellen.

* * * * *

On the same night when the hour came for Ellen to be sent home in Mrs.

Callendar’s cabriolet, the plump woman said, “The next time.... Let’s

see, it’s Thursday, isn’t it?... You must come for dinner.... I’ll send

Wilkes at twenty to eight.”

That there was any such thing as kindliness involved in all these

complicated, new relationships had never occurred to Ellen, perhaps

because she had never for a moment expected it. It was only with the

invitation to dinner, in itself a tacit recognition of her individuality

as something more than a mere music box, that the real state of affairs

first became clear to her. It was as if she had progressed a step in the

world, as if she had achieved a little already of the vast things she

had set out to accomplish. She tried, in her direct, unsubtle way of

speaking, to convey something of the idea to Clarence. She wanted him,

as always, desperately to understand her actions. She wanted him,

perhaps dishonestly, to believe that she could not help acting as she

did, that it was not from choice but from a desire to brighten both

their lives that she left him now and then to venture forth into regions

which it was impossible for him to penetrate. And in her own fashion, as

she had done so often with her mother, she told him the truth

selectively, so that although she did not lie she managed to achieve an

effect that was not the truth.

The great thing which she neglected to admit was this ... that she had

come now to the point where it was no longer possible to take him with

her. Even his fantastic dreams could not make him more than he was, and

that was not enough. He had come to the end of his tether. She had

barely begun. Imagine him in Mrs. Callendar’s drawing-room! Fancy the

abrupt Sabine Cane talking to him as she talked to Ellen! He, she knew,

would suffer more than any one.

She said to him, “I’m sorry, but on Thursday I shall be out for

dinner.... I’ve got to dine with Mrs. Callendar.... It’s business,

dear.... I must do these things.”

And at the speech, Clarence assumed that hurt and crestfallen look which

touched her sense of pity. It was the one thing which could alter her

determination; indeed there were times when she must have suspected that

he used it consciously, as his only weapon. It moved her even now, so

that she went so far as to kiss him and say, “It’s just one night.”

“But it’s a beginning.” He saw it perhaps, clearly enough, more clearly

than she ever imagined. “I wish you wouldn’t.”

And then she explained to him again the things which it was necessary

for her to do in order to win what she must have. She talked long and

eloquently, for she was earnest and she pitied him. It was clear that

her dishonesty arose not so much out of any evil calculation as out of a

desire to have everything, to go her way and still leave Clarence

unharmed and happy. It was a thing impossible, of course, yet it never

seemed so to her. There was in her so much of her indomitable mother

that she was never able to believe in the impossible.

So she talked eloquently and at length she even arranged it for him that

he should dine on Thursday night with Mr. and Mrs. Bunce. Thus, by a

single act, she accomplished another thing. She dined with the Bunces

without having to dine with them. She knew too that they would be

happier with Clarence there alone. It would be like the old days,

without strain, an evening when the three of them,--Clarence and Harry

Bunce and his rosy wife,--could dine, as one might say, in peace. There

would be no strain, no sense of an intruder in their midst. For she was

a stranger, always; they were never quite at ease with her.

Thus Clarence found the evening arranged, and he was content in his way,

for he liked the Bunces.

Afterward Ellen’s clearest memory of the evening was the voice of Sabine

drifting from the drawing-room as she entered the hall, saying, “The

trouble with Boston people is that they are all descended from middle

class immigrants and they’ve been proud of it ever since.”

This speech became fixed somehow in her brain as a symbol of Sabine’s

queer worldliness, of a strangely cynical honesty that would color her

whole point of view up to the very end. If Sabine thought it idiotic to

take pride in being middle class, if she thought it absurd not to strive

after distinction, she would say it, whether or not people thought her a

snob. The world to her was thus and so; it moved according to an ancient

pattern. All the orations in the world upon the subject of democracy

could not alter the rule of things. Besides, it was a good enough rule.

Why pretend it wasn’t? Sabine, of course, could afford to take such a

position. In a worldly sense, she had nothing to strive for. She had

been born to those things.

Ellen, removing the squirrel coat Clarence had given her, turned these

considerations over in her mind as she entered the room. She was

watching them all to-night as she had watched them once before through

the crack in the lacquered screen, cautiously, with an air of an enemy

laying siege to their fortress.

There was, beneath the gaze of the Callendar ancestors, only Mrs.

Callendar in a dress of jet and sequins, Sabine in a brilliant green

gown and Richard Callendar, handsome and dark in his black and white

clothes. Richard rose and came forward to meet her.

“Mama,” he said, smiling, “has just been talking of you. She believes

that one day you will be a great personality.”

“We are dining alone, the four of us,” said Mrs. Callendar abruptly. It

was clear that she meant to keep Ellen forever in ignorance of what she

had said.

* * * * *

The dining room was done in the grand manner of the Second Empire, a

room copied at the behest of young Callendar’s grandfather from a house

built by the Duc de Morny for one of his mistresses. It was grandiose,

with columns of white and gilt, centering upon a massive table and a

group of chairs with backs which ended a foot or two sooner than they

should have ended. On the four panels of the walls there hung pictures

of Venice in the dry, hard manner of Canaletto ... Venice at Dawn,

Venice at Sunset, Venice at Carnival Time and Venice in Mourning for the

Pope. On the huge table stood a silver épergne filled to overflowing

with the most opulent of fruits ... mangoes, persimmons, red bananas,

Homberg grapes and pomegranates. It was as if Thérèse Callendar had

built this monument of fruit to recapture something of her own Oriental

background--the rest of the room was so bad, so filled with the shadows

of Cockney demi-mondaines and snuffbox adventures out of the Second

Empire. At the four corners of the vast épergne stood four huge

candelabra of silver.

Despite the air of depression given out by the monstrous room, it

possessed a somber magnificence. To Ellen, the only magnificence

approaching it lay in the drawing-room of that gloomy house known as

Shane’s Castle, set in the midst of the smoking furnaces. Aunt Julia’s

house was like it, filled with pictures and furniture and carpets which,

like these, had been brought out of Europe.

There were wines for dinner, not one or two, but an array of port,

madeira, sauterne, sherry and, at the place where Mrs. Callendar seated

herself in a chair raised more than the others so that she might

dominate the massive table, a pint of champagne for herself in a tiny

silver bucket filled with ice. It was a schoolgirl’s dream of

magnificence ... something out of the pages of a super-romantic

novelette. In the beginning, the spectacle, proceeding through course

after course, dazzled Ellen and made her shy. It was superb food, for in

the veins of Thérèse there blended the blood of Frenchman and Greek. It

was food that had a taste ... not the boiled stuff of Anglo-Saxons.

* * * * *

After dinner, when they had all gone into the dark library, the moment

came at last when Ellen’s tongue was loosed. It may have been the wine

she drank or it may have been the cigarette which, in her new freedom,

she smoked over the coffee (for in a single evening she had broken two

of Clarence’s rules); but it is more likely that it was the picture

hanging over the mantelpiece, which changed everything.

She looked at it carefully and then said, “Is that by Turner? My aunt

has one by him.”

And a moment later, under the subtle urgence of Sabine, she was telling

them everything. She described, for example, the Town, its Mills, its

desolation, the misery of the workers. She painted for them a picture of

her own family, of the Red Scot who lay now, helpless and childish, in

her own big bed. She told them of her other grandfather, cold and aloof,

who had run away in his youth and lived in the Paris of the Second

Empire, and now existed in a room walled in by books. She recreated

before their eyes the gloomy color of Shane’s Castle, only to be

interrupted in the midst by Thérèse Callendar, who turned to Sabine and

observed, “She is a cousin, you know, of the Madame Shane we saw once at

Madame de Cyon’s in Paris.... You remember Madame de Cyon, the Russian

woman, whose husband was French minister to Bulgaria.... She lived in

the Avenue du Bois. A Bonapartist. Madame Shane was the beauty with red

hair.... Miss Tolliver’s Aunt Julia is her mother.”

And then she permitted Ellen to continue, and the girl meanwhile, even

as she talked, understood that Mrs. Callendar had not forgotten Lily.

She had even fixed the place and time of their meeting. It was clear

that she had been thinking of Lily, as every one did.

She told the story simply enough, but with an earnestness that was

moving. To her the canvas which she painted was not remarkable, but to

the listeners it appeared to hold, perhaps because it was so new to

them, the fascination of a world which was utterly strange and a little

exotic. They listened, moved by the simplicity of her utterance, and

Richard Callendar asked her questions about the mills and furnaces,

about the foreign population. The recital was a success and out of it

she learned something new,--that there was nothing of such power as

simplicity, nothing of such interest as individuality. She understood

all that from the way in which they listened. It was the first time in

all her life when she had thrown caution to the winds. She was, for an

hour, her complete self.

But there was one part of the story which she did not tell. It was that

part which concerned her elopement and all that had followed it. She

said simply, “And so I came to New York to study, and luckily fell into

the hands of Sanson....”

Richard Callendar stood up suddenly and poked the fire. His mother said,

“You could not have done better,” and Sabine observed, “Here in New York

we forget that the rest of the country exists.... I’ve never been out of

New York except to go to Europe or to some summer place.”

To-night, instead of being a performer, one who played in public, she

was the guest, the center of the evening.

* * * * *

She played for them the Moonlight Sonata and while she played, she

became conscious again of the curious, breathless way in which Richard

Callendar listened. It seemed, for a time, that he existed only in a

single spirit which somehow enveloped her and the music of Beethoven.

All the evening he had been silent and watchful, as silent and as

watchful as herself, save in the moment when she was carried away by her

own story. When she had finished playing she was conscious of another

fact, perhaps even more interesting. It was that Sabine had noticed a

difference and was regarding the handsome Callendar with a look so

intent that Ellen, turning sharply, caught her unaware.

This new world was a world of shadows, of hints, of insinuations, a

world of curious restraints and disguises. Out of these, in the very

instant she turned from the piano, she understood that the relation

between Sabine and young Callendar was more than a casual friendship.

Sabine was in love with him, passionately, perhaps without even knowing

it, for it must have required a terrible force to lead a woman so

circumspect into such a betrayal.

* * * * *

That night, for a second time, Ellen left the house in company with

Sabine and Richard Callendar. It came about that, as they were preparing

to leave, young Callendar proposed to accompany them and without further

discussion entered the carriage. In the past it had been the custom to

send Ellen home in the cabriolet while Callendar followed in the

brougham with Sabine. Sometimes these two walked to Sabine’s house. She

lived in Park Avenue, a half dozen blocks away, in a tall narrow house,

exceedingly stiff and formal in appearance ... a house which one could

not but say suited her admirably.

On the way, they talked music for a time and when the cabriolet

approached Sabine’s corner, she said simply, “I am tired. You can drop

me at home.”

So she bade them good night without further ado and disappeared into the

narrow house. It was a strange thing for her to have done. Ellen and

Callendar must have expected her to accompany them all the way to the

Babylon Arms and to return alone with him; that would have been the

order of things. But she was more subtle than they imagined. If she

understood, as Ellen was certain she had, that there was some new thing

come into the relations that existed among them all, she was clever. She

did not attempt to change or even interrupt this new current; wise in

the depths of her shrewd mind she saw that to be an obstacle was not

the same as to be a goal. So she left Richard Callendar with the

stranger who had become her rival. It may have caused her sleeplessness

and torment; she may have felt a keen jealousy, but it was impossible to

know. It may also have been that, knowing the continental ideas of

Callendar, she was not concerned over her ultimate victory. By the rule

of the very tradition which had shut her in, Callendar could not _marry_

this stranger.

As Callendar reëntered the cabriolet, Ellen settled back into her corner

to wait. She watched, as always, but this time she was conscious that

there was another who was watching. It seemed for the first time that

there had risen up in her path a person, perhaps even an enemy, who

played the same waiting game. Callendar sat in his corner, his dark face

visible now and then as a streak of light from the lamps entered the

door, and in that uncertain and shifting illumination, Ellen studied him

closely for the first time.

It was a strangely pleasing face; the very dark pallor, so evenly

distributed, so perfectly shaded caught her attention as a kind of

beauty new to her. There was no ruddiness here, no boisterous energy.

Rather it was a silent, subtle kind of beauty. The power behind it was

not so much a crude energy as a strength that was placid yet possessed

of the quality of steel. It was a strength that revealed itself in the

firm, clean line of the jaw and in the square, almost hard modeling of

the intelligent head. If there was a hint of passion it lay in the red

lips that were so full and sensual beneath the fine black mustache. He

wore the collar of his coat turned up a little, with his hat pulled well

over his eyes so that the whole gave an impression of rakishness and

adventure. Yet her instinct told her that here was something to be

feared, something subtle and rather neat, of a sort strange to her.

They must have ridden several blocks in silence when he said to her, in

a voice that was warm and carried faint traces of an accent, “I say, you

are a remarkable person. I’d never dreamed how much it took to bring you

where you are.”

When she answered, Ellen felt a new and absurd inclination to become a

helpless, almost arch, young girl. “It’s nothing,” she said. “I’d never

thought about it.”

“It was an entertaining story you gave us.... You see people like me and

Sabine seldom get any idea of what the real world is like.” He paused

for a moment and then continued as if to make clear what he meant--“I

mean a world in which people have to fight for things. We just have

them. We forget about the others. And we’re in the minority of about ...

shall we say ... one to a thousand. I’ve always had what I wanted.... I

suppose I’ll always have it.”

This was strange talk, in a queer philosophic vein, to which Ellen

answered again, “I don’t know ... I’ve never thought about the

difference. I know what I want and some day ... I suppose I’ll have it.”

“You _are_ an extraordinary musician ... you know,” he continued. “I

wonder if you know how extraordinary.”

Ellen did know; she was sure of it. But she saw fit not to answer

because she was a little puzzled. In a world bounded by Clarence and

Herman Biggs, she had not met a man of this sort. He was younger than

Clarence and not much older than Herman but that made no difference. It

was something that had nothing to do with age. Rather it was a matter of

experience. She knew she was an excellent musician; she must have

believed it or she could not have gone her own way with such unswerving

directness, but she chose to answer modestly. In the dim light of the

cab, it was impossible to know whether or not she actually smirked.

“Perhaps I am. How is one to know?... About one’s self, I mean.”

“My mother and I know about such things,” he replied, and then for a

time the cabriolet fell into silence. They turned from the avenue into

the park, and presently out of his corner he spoke again.

“You’re sure you told us everything to-night? You didn’t leave out of

the story anything that might interest us?”

There was in this an impertinence which Ellen sensed and considered for

a time. He was looking out of the window at the bare trees of the park

with a splendid air of indifference, which Ellen felt was not

indifference at all. Far back in her consciousness an odd feeling of

triumph came into existence, a queer, inexplicable feeling that she was

the dominant one, that somehow she had caught him now off his guard, as

if she found he was not so clever as he thought. She became aware of a

genuine sense of conflict, vague and undefined, ... a sort of conflict

between her own intelligence and one that was quite as powerful. She

watched the clear-cut ivory profile for a time and then said, “No. I

left out nothing that could possibly interest anybody but me.”

(That much for his curiosity about the little man he saw for an instant

through the open door at the Babylon Arms!)

Callendar turned to her. “I sound impertinent, but I only ask because it

seems to me that you are even more interesting than the story you tell.”

Again this was bold and even personal, as though he sought to assume

possession of that part of her which should belong to no one ... the

part which was _herself_, at which he had no right to pry. The

temptation to become feminine seized her once more.

“I suppose,” she said, “that that is a compliment. I thank you for it.

Of course, I don’t know how true it is.”

“It _is_ true,” he replied abruptly. “You are admirable ... and

courageous. Spirit is a fine thing ... the greatest in the world.”

* * * * *

There was one thing for which she was thankful. He did not treat her as

if she were a silly girl, as a man might, for example, have treated May

Seton. In years he was not much older than herself yet in reality she

understood that he was centuries older. Of that, she was certain. What

she did not understand was that his approach to life, down to the

veriest detail, was one which, by the nature of things, was not only

alien but incomprehensible. He had patience, a quality which in her was

so utterly lacking as to be inconceivable; he could wait. It was this

which puzzled her ... this and the sense of conflict, so complicated,

that was always a little way off, just out of reach and not to be

understood.

From a great distance, she watched him and even herself, confused,

puzzled, but profoundly interested. That much she had gained from the

blood that flowed in old Gramp Tolliver’s veins. She was always

watching, waiting, learning.

* * * * *

The rest of their conversation was less interesting. It possessed, to be

sure, a strange quality of leisure; there were long silences not in the

least awkward and uncomfortable. On the contrary, despite that sense of

conflict and watching, there was a certain calmness about them, as of

the silences which fall between old friends immersed in a perfect

understanding. It was perhaps the same friendliness which she neglected

always to take into consideration, in which she would never quite

believe.

At the Babylon Arms they passed between the Syrian Lions of cast iron

and at the elevator he left her. There was no prying this time, no

evidence of curiosity. As he bade her good night, he suggested that one

day they might lunch together. Then the swaying elevator bore her upward

to Clarence and out of sight of Callendar.

The sense of conflict disturbed her, even after Clarence came in from

the Bunces’, murmuring apologies for having forgotten her and stayed so

late. He apologized too for having, in the enthusiasm of a pinochle

game, invited the Bunces to dinner four weeks later when he had returned

from his western trip.

So she set about planning how it was possible to escape from the Town,