In the next weeks, it seemed to Anne that the world had been recreated
while she and Roger loved by the lake. The old world of definite
working hours, through which strangers claimed her physical energy and
brain, as deeply strangers one day as the next; the old family life
of repression, grown unconscious from habit; minute but never ceasing
spiritual adjustment, strengthless rebellions against habits set in
steel bands before one awakened to their cramping horror, all had
dissolved in a community of interest in a larger and much simpler world.
In this world, men and women tried to increase happiness. They worked
with ideas; many ideas and many people striving to embody them in form.
Often in the mornings, after Anne had watched Roger vanish round the
corner of the street far below, she continued to stand on the porch of
the little cottage they had found on a rocky crag that rose from the
grass-grown cobbles to a view of the bay and Tamalpais. It was like
her inner life here, high above the confusions of her mother's muddled
thinking, her father's petulance, Belle's brutal experience. Above the
confusion of The Niche, the unironed laundry, the unreasoned bursts of
Hilda's extravagances, the intrusion of uninteresting gossip. The three
white-painted rooms with their sweep of bay and hills, close to the
stars at night, walled from the city below by the spicy fragrance of a
tangled garden, was another world.
Anne dreaded anything that might disturb its peace. No discordant
note must enter the full day, when alone in her new home, she made it
beautiful, or prepared for the guests Roger like to ask to dinner;
nor the pleasant evenings when she and Roger read or talked before
the fire, or went to the many meetings included in Roger's duty as
Wainwright's secretary.
But, at the end of two months, when Anne realized that this guarding
of her new peace had excluded her family, that neither Belle nor her
father had seen the place at all, and her mother only once, she was
ashamed and decided to ask all three to dinner the first night Belle
could take off and to make a little celebration of the occasion. On
the next Thursday evening, when Roger was at a conference with Hilary
Wainwright, Anne went especially to arrange the night.
"Well! I was just wishing you'd phone or something!" Hilda hurried
half-way down the stairs to meet Anne and walked back with her arm
about her daughter's waist. "It was kind of lonesome to-night and I
was just thinking of running down to Mrs. Welles for a minute, but
this is the night she goes to church and it didn't seem worth while. I
am glad." Hilda hugged her effusively; for, although Anne had made it
a rule to go home once a week, if only for a few moments late in the
afternoon, Hilda greeted each visit with such amazed admiration that
Anne had been able to include it among the many responsibilities of her
new life.
For Hilda was now very deeply impressed with Roger's importance as the
private secretary of a millionaire. Millionaire philanthropists had
not existed in Hilda's knowledge of the social structure and Roger's
close connection with one filled her with awe. The status of Hilary
Wainwright in the financial world had done much, also, to reconcile
James. And when, one day, shortly after Anne's marriage, he had chanced
to see Roger in earnest talk with the president of the Coast Electric,
James Mitchell had accepted Roger, in no generous apology to Anne for
his attitude the last night before her marriage, but in a thinly veiled
eagerness to know all about the schemes of the great man.
Anne despised herself for yielding to this curiosity, but it was so
much pleasanter when things moved smoothly, that she catered just a
little to him. She admitted him, without apparent consciousness of
his real purpose, to the projects of Hilary Wainwright for increasing
the total of human happiness. She threw off carelessly such phrases
as: "welding of classes," "the larger democracy," "the obligations of
wealth"; phrases which James Mitchell heard with satisfaction, as he
might have observed the social minutiæ of a class above him. As working
theories he did not visualize them at all, but it gave him a feeling of
Roger and Anne--hence vaguely himself--moving in high places.
To-night he was specially interested, for the papers were full of some
scheme of Wainwright's for getting sugar more cheaply to the market
from his plantations in Hawaii. In the office, James Mitchell had
spoken with authority upon the subject that very afternoon, and had
enjoyed the respectful attention of the other clerks.
He accepted the invitation with such unusual grace that Anne was
ashamed for him; but when, a little later, as she said good-by to her
mother in the hall and Hilda whispered: "It will be a great occasion
for us, Annie. I never saw him so delighted," Anne forgave him. Her
mother had so few pleasures and this mood of her father's was almost
as great an event as the dinner itself. "I don't believe he remembers
a word he said that night," Hilda went on in the same confidential
whisper as she went with Anne down the stairs. "Anyhow he's never said
another thing about objecting and now--everything's going to be lovely.
I feel it in my bones. But three extra to dinner! I'm afraid it will
make a lot of extra work for you."
"Now, mamma, don't be silly. Besides, you haven't the least idea what a
fine cook I am."
"I don't doubt it a bit. Any one who can get up a dinner for a
millionaire! Goodness, I should be scared to death."
"Oh, Mr. Wainwright's simple. Roger says his god is simplicity." But
as Anne herself was not quite sure how Roger sometimes meant this, she
hurried over the puzzled stare in her mother's eyes. "Next Wednesday at
seven."
Hilda sparkled. She had never eaten later than six and the fashionable,
if inconvenient hour, clinched her belief in Roger's efficiency.
"I'll finish my new waist for the occasion and see that papa gets a
good shave."
She went as far as the street corner with Anne and gave her an extra
hug.
"Going to dinner with my married daughter. Why, I feel like a young
girl going to her first dance."
Anne kissed her. "You dear thing, you're going to eat a lot of meals of
your daughter's contriving only--don't expect too much this first time.
In spite of my boasting, I'm not always absolutely sure, especially
about salad dressing and gravy."
"I'll take a chance." Hilda nodded, her eyes so bright, that Anne drew
her quickly back and kissed her again.
"Don't forget, seven sharp."
"We'll be there in cap and bells, never fear."
She stood on the pavement until Anne had disappeared, then went smiling
back to the flat. Hilda Mitchell was indeed deeply grateful for her
daughter's happiness. In spite of her denial of the fear that Anne
might have been an old maid, she had never been quite sure of Anne's
powers of attraction. Anne was so "highfalutin'," what Belle called a
"spiritual aristocrat"; and, like most women who refer to the physical
relation with their husbands as "duty," Hilda considered spinsterhood a
disgrace.
* * * * *
To Anne's relief, by which she measured to a hairline her previous
anxiety, the dinner was a success. If Roger made an effort to meet
the Mitchells on their own ground, his tact exceeded Anne's keen
sensitiveness to discover. He kept the conversation at anecdotal level,
apparently because that mood was his own. James Mitchell laughed as
Anne had rarely heard him laugh, and reciprocated with uninteresting,
tedious reminiscences of the office. In her delight at "papa's mood,"
Hilda was sobered to quiet dignity. Belle was a little bored, as she
always was when she did not direct the conversation, but content, for
she had expected to shoulder the social responsibility at this initial
dinner, and she was not in the vein. She watched Roger and Anne and
wondered whether they were really as united as they seemed. Belle had
had more experience than even Hilda suspected.
Roger felt the evening glide pleasantly away and was glad that Anne had
done this. The Mitchells interested him not at all. He thought Hilda
a vapid fool, Belle pretentious and James a nonentity. They were a
perfect illustration of the bewildered and confused sheep. Anne's birth
among them was a miracle. But the miracle had happened and they would
always be more or less in the background of life.
A little after ten the Mitchells went. They kissed Anne and Anne
returned their kisses while Roger tried not to resent this very natural
act. They had kissed Anne and she had kissed them years before he
had known of her existence, but now, she was so exclusively his, her
delicate fairness so fully the outward expression of their love and
understanding, that this intimate physical contact with the Mitchells
echoed a discordant note in the perfect harmony.
So he forced himself, in rebuke of his jealousy, to the unnecessary
courtesy of seeing them down the long flight of stairs with a
flashlight, because the porchlight just missed a weak spot below the
second landing. But he came back three steps at a time to Anne.
"Well, little hostess, that was some dinner you got up." He went about
switching out all the lights except one, as he always did when people
had gone. With this dimming of the light, he closed out intruding
personalities, focussed life back to the points of himself and Anne.
"How did I behave?"