Rarick]

That was about as demonstrative as Rarick could bring himself to be,

even back in the days before their fairy tale had begun to happen.

“Good morning, Jenny. Your street car days are over,” he had written

during the fifth year of their marriage. During the first year he had

sent her a modest little traveling-case for a birthday present, but

the card had read: “Pack my love and some of our dear dreams in this,

for our walking-trip through the Pyrenees.”

That had been before the acquisitive, tight-skinned look had spread

itself over the face of Jenny: before the fox had leaned out of the

nervous and intelligently homely face of the girl he had been proud of

himself for choosing from a world that seemed to him populated with

girls with no faces at all, only a vacuous geometry of pleasantly

related features.

No one but God and Rarick knew that the dowry that went with Jenny had

played no part in his choice. Sometimes, as the something flowed out

of their relationship that had been precious to him, it seemed there

must be some way to tear open the secret chambers of his heart and

reveal this truth to Jenny, on to whose lips, not so many years after

marriage, had crept occasional innuendo.

What she did not or would not remember was that it actually was well

after their engagement that Rarick, a young man from the outside of her

circle, had come to know about the twenty-five hundred dollars.

What she did and would remember, as if her mind were a magnifying-glass

under which a small mental image could become Gargantuan, was the hot

August day when they had taken the street car together for the Union

Trust Company, and withdrawn from her safety-deposit box there, the

twenty-five hundred dollars’ worth of government bonds which were to be

converted into capital investment in the Nick Nack Store.

That fact, in these years when Jenny was already buying an

eighty-five-hundred-dollar bauble far more casually than she had once

bought an eighty-dollar one, never lost its luminosity in the dark

places of her mind. It was a piece of phosphorescent memory. A cold,

flameless light that tinged every aisle of her mind where he was

concerned, and which she kept dancing before the eyes of her husband

like a signalman on a bridge at night swinging his lantern.

Behind her reminder to him that he was the thirteenth richest man in

the world there trailed the unspoken tagline, “thanks to the start I

gave you by intrusting you with my inheritance,” a string of words

which, spoken or unspoken, traveled through him in a groove that

innuendo had worn down, his live nerves the trolley of transmission.

Rebuttal would have meant the fatal act of admission to her implied

word. Rarick had learned various kinds of silences.

“I haven’t minded the years of your stubborn refusal to pretty nearly

everything I’ve asked for myself, Rarick. It is Jennifer now. I want

the child to see the light of her fifteenth birthday in the Ficke

house. That’s not asking much of a man many times a millionaire. The

pity is that it has to be coaxed out of you.”

“The pity of it” clung in a burr-like phrase to his brain.

The pity of it. The pity somehow of everything, including this

flavorless beginning of another day. Pretty Jennifer, who had

everything, and now, at barely fifteen, was so cruelly fretted, aided

and abetted by a doting mother, with wanting more than everything.

After all, if you had two motor-cars, there was only left for you

to want three, if the goal of your acquisitiveness was things. And

things. And things. It was an entirely different kind of wanting from

the desire to own a Buick sedan when you owned no car at all. The

difference between desiring a Buick sedan when you owned no car, or

desiring a third car when you already owned two, was all the difference

in the world. The pity of it. Jennifer at fifteen, who had a good mind,

was a good pupil, and was a phantom of delight to her father, already

too busy wanting more than everything.

That kind of thinking made him heavy and pedantic and old-as-the-hills,

as a father.

The little girl who wanted more than everything.

Damn her mother.

The phrase shot through his mind like a burst of flame, startling him

horribly.

Under cover of Jenny’s steady runnel of accusative and importuning

talk, he began to reason with himself, to calm himself, to rid his mind

of the taste of the phrase that had shot through his mind in sacrilege

to this woman who shared his bed.

As mothers went, Jenny would have stood impeccable before any jury. She

wanted passionately for her young. She was forever baring herself to

his scorn by asking in their name. She was a doting, gloating mother,

fierce for her offspring, yet, withal, sweet with them and to them.

Many a night through she had sat unnecessarily, but tirelessly, beside

the bed of Avery, whose first years had been precarious ones. The death

of two infants had gone hard with her. Jennifer was her doting, her

waking, and her sleeping thought.

Rarick, whose manner was not fortunate with his children because he was

seldom at ease with them, could not have formulated into words, except

in vague fashion to the effect that she spoiled them, the stubborn wall

of opposition which he erected between himself and Jenny’s plans and

dreams for her children.

“It is as if you were jealous of them,” she had barked at him once,

hysterically, when he was opposing an indoor roller-skating rink across

the top of the house.

No. No. No.

Without his knowing how to reach out a hand to stay them, except in

vague fumings and consistent conservatisms, the entire kingdom of

his household was drifting like a bit of land disassociating itself

from the mainland to become island, out into some high tide beyond his

reach. Jenny and Jennifer and his boy Avery were on that island. He

was back helplessly on the mainland; and Jenny, mark you, mind you,

no otherwise to it, was to blame! The bitterness of that tore at him

constantly, like a flame pulling itself off the candle.

Jennifer, for a time, while she had been a little pupil at Mary

Institute, had been something of an eager student, with a hint of her

mother’s old air of desire to know, about her. Rarick had said little,

but her school reports had been a source of deep private pleasure to

him; and once he had carried about in his pocket an essay of hers,

written on ruled paper, called “WHY WE LOVE RUSKIN.” He had filched

it off her desk and returned it there a few evenings later when he

observed the child scrambling among her possessions for what might have

been the essay.

Rarick had not, up to that time, known who Ruskin was, and it elated

him no little that the enlightenment should have come by way of his

daughter. “In mastery of prose language he has never been surpassed,”

the thirteen-year-old daughter of Rarick, undismayed by discursive

eagerness and floriated mannerism, had written in her roundly vertical

chirography. It was this phrase out of the mouth of his babe that must

have lain engraved upon Rarick’s memory when, years later, he acquired,

at what was said to be an astonishingly high price, a page of the

original manuscript of Ruskin’s _Præterita_.

Suddenly that brownish, rather studious Jennifer of those days back

in the solid square house on MacPherson Avenue had slipped from her

little-girlhood into a high-strung, mature-faced disciple of her

mother’s ambitions for her. The home in Westmoreland Place. Finishing

school in Tarrytown.

Now here was family history repeating itself. It had been the same

way when Jenny began to “feel her oats,” as Rarick was in the habit

of putting it, in the MacPherson Avenue house, and was casting an eye

toward Westmoreland Place. Jennifer’s graduation reception must be

held in the new home, and not in the twelve-room yellow-brick one on

MacPherson. The neighborhood was running down so. Stores. Flats. Even

the G. H. Francises were talking of selling.

The little brown jug of a Jennifer of the MacPherson Avenue house was

now the slip of a young miss, straight as a paper-cutter, with the

sophisticated eyes that for the life of him her father could never

catch and hold in a glance.

And now that brown child back there, whitened because her freckles

seemed to have come off, this Jennifer whom he was casting about, in

his futile way, to save, what was left of her, for himself, must have

her fifteenth birthday in a house on Fifth Avenue that almost faced the

Metropolitan Museum.

To think that he, John Rarick, who had once dreamed dreams no bigger

than that walking-trip through the Pyrenees, should be in a position

to give her such a house. Was Jenny, after all, the natural and doting

parent, and was he to Jennifer the grudging, silent father? Was he too

finished with youth to know his own children?

Could his dreams for Avery, the boy, slip between his fingers, too, as

this mother of his began to demand his rights for him? Would Avery grow

up alien to a father who seemed to have no shred of youth left that

would enable him the better to understand the youth in his children?

From what was it he was struggling to save them? His own innate sense

of rightness could be no deeper than his wisdom, and who was he to

be cocksure of his wisdom? After all, what was the meaning of this

success, which sometimes threatened to seem chimeric to him, if it was

not to enable him to do just such things as give Jennifer her fifteenth

birthday in one of the most beautiful and expensive houses in the world?

Success had done its share to teach Rarick himself new and complex

appetites. He was a philatelist of elaborate and expensive tastes.

There was in one of the pockets of his waistcoat, which was hanging

over the foot of the bed, a famous Gnostic gem, heliotrope, engraved

with the sacred name “Abrasax.” A museum in Boston had been bidder

against him for that gem. There were in that same pocket, result of

those same tastes acquired through his growing wealth, an ominous

and luminous opal, a tiny agate ring with a runic inscription of the

late-Saxon period, and a transparent aquamarine cut _en cabochon_

with the figure of a hump-bull. In his library, at this period, were

celebrated “firsts” upon the shelves; a Tintoretto, a Greuze, and a

triptych of the Cimabue period upon his walls.

What Jenny was demanding for herself and her children were the

equivalents of the runic gems, the celebrated firsts, and the misty

Greuzes.

No wonder, as she lay there beside him, silent for the moment, the

lines about her thin lips were tight with the distaste of their state

of constant asking, and the stretched look across her face was the

look that had been written there by the constant and almost automatic

opposition he had been erecting for years against the nature of her

desires for herself and her children.

His children, even the small boy Avery, approached him only through the

mother. The mother herself approached him as a diplomat goes to the

conference table, her points carefully tabulated in the portfolio of

her mind.

A man, if he loved them, could hold out only so long against his

children....

He swung himself to a sitting posture on the side of the bed, and

reached for a robe to slip on over his nightshirt. He was short,

somber, gnome-like, and a little ridiculous in his nightshirt; and he

never forgot it.

“I’ll buy you the Ficke house, Jenny.”

During the last six months of the six years the Raricks had occupied

the Ficke mansion, a man by the name of Dr. Felix Gerkes had lived on

the top floor of the house. He occupied two rooms and a green bathroom

with a frieze of mermaids over the tub. His meals for the most part

were brought to him and served on a card table beside a window that

overlooked Central Park, which separated him in a diagonal from the

Museum, where he had spent twenty-one years in the archæological

department. He was also an Indianologist of first-rank repute, a man

who had been frequently endowed with honorary degrees in the realms of

scholarship and science.

He was the author of numerous brochures and pamphlets, a text-book

on geology that was in general use throughout American colleges, had

written three books on amulets, precious stones, and meteorites, and

was regarded as a foremost living authority on religious uses of stones

among primitive peoples.

He was a lean, shabby fellow, with a walrus-like mustache and a

conspicuously prominent forehead with thin stringlets of hair brushed

sidewise across what threatened to become a bald horseshoe. His

clothing, so loosely it hung, seemed to have no points of contact with

his body.

The women of the household, even though weeks might pass without their

so much as encountering him, and then only in a hallway or on the rare

occasions when he dined with the family, thought him repulsive, and

considered it disgusting of Rarick to insist upon having him there.

A curious bond existed between these two men. They had first met when

Rarick had been directed to him for advice concerning a contemplated

purchase, for his collection, of a necklace of banded and variegated

agates, onyx, carnelians, and sards, attributed to the first century,

A.D.

In the course of a long and enlightening conversation with this wise,

strange man, who wore a hexagon-shaped Chinese skull-cap with a

crystal button on its peak, Gerkes had quoted from the _Pantagruel_ of

Rabelais, reciting almost word for word that part of the book which

describes the oracle of the Dive Bouteilly and its seven columns

of sapphire, jacinth, diamond, ruby, emerald, “_more brilliant and

glistening than those which were set in place of eyes in the marble

lion stretched before the tomb of King Hermias. The sixth column of

agate, the seventh of transparent syenite with a splendor like that

of Hymettian honey, and within appeared the moon in form and motion

such as she is in the heavens, full and new, waxing and waning._”

In the further course of that casual hour’s conversation, Gerkes

had discoursed upon the seven heavens of the Mohammedans, white

lapis-lazuli, the sack of Constantinople by the Sassanian Persian

king, Khusrau II, Navajo silversmiths, Figdor collection in Vienna,

use of black and white enamel on bezel, cramp-rings, Edward the

Confessor, native Indian mountaineers of California, Liberian silver,

Catherine von Bora and her marriage to Martin Luther, Cleveland Museum

of Art, Antiochus IV, aluminum kitchenware, alleged curative effects

of violet-blue, John Ruskin on crystals, balas-rubies, Flinders

Petrie, Field Museum of Natural History, and the snake story in _Gesta

Romanorum_.

Rarick, who had just returned from Atlanta, where he had contracted for

the annual run-of-the-mill output of two million cotton handkerchiefs

of the largest three concerns in the South, sat in the musty little

office of Gerkes, which was laid out at the moment with stone

arrow-heads of a Navajo collection, and let the wisdom of this slow man

flow against ear-drums that were still throbbing with the barter for

the delivery of the two million cotton squares that were to be sold in

eleven hundred and eight stores at five cents apiece.

There were lying undercurrent in Rarick’s mind at the time of this

talk, an impending conference of the Mountain region and Eastern

store-managers, with an eye to further standardization of window

display; a contemplated monopoly of the output of a paper-napkin

factory near Brattleboro, Vermont, and a trip to Springfield, with

one of his buyers, a German, for the purpose of demonstrating to

an American toy-manufacturer how to produce a celluloid doll, the

equivalent of the German product, which could retail for ten cents.

There was further at work under the surface of Rarick’s consciousness,

a major plan for the formation of a policy, not yet revealed to his

company, for the establishment of a Rarick store in every city of seven

thousand or over, in the entire country.

Years of nights of lying awake over that immense project were about to

fructify into action.

The thirteenth richest man in the world sat in that musty pocket of

an office with Gerkes until museum attendants began to turn off the

lights and rattle keys. Then Gerkes, who loved talk, and who, deep in

the midst of a discourse on amber deposits in the Stone Age, had found

a listener, clapped on his shapeless hat and walked home with Rarick

across the twilit park, depositing him at his door, without so much

as a glance up at the pale splendor of the façade of the Ficke house,

which John Rarick had purchased by sealed bid at sensational auction

seven years before. That meeting was the beginning of an impeccable

friendship between these two.

A week later, Rarick invited Gerkes to lunch at a downtown business

men’s club. Gerkes did not belong to the world of men to whom lunch is

a social or business ritual. He either took his off a lunch-stand in

the vicinity of the Museum or cut slivers with a pocket knife off the

small loaf of American cheese he kept in a desk drawer along with a box

of Swedish biscuit.

His imperviousness to surroundings was colossal. He had once lunched

with the King of England over a matter pertaining to the Jubilee

jewels, and was unable later to describe the occasion in anything

except the contents of the discussion.

He ate sparingly of Rarick’s carefully ordered luncheon, giving little

if any heed to it, and once more, apropos of the first-century string

of agates and sards, let his discourse flow from the crammed stock-room

of his mind.

Here was a man who, in casual discussion of a mediæval and practically

obsolete gem, could quote from the _Divina Commedia_ the lines in which

Dante uses these stones as a symbol of joy divine:

“L’altra letizia, che m’era gia nota

Preclara cosa, me si fece in vista

Qual fin balascio in che lo sol percota,”

and then, with a mental handspring and a Rabelaisian twist of the old

rascal in him, which was absurdly out of keeping with his odor of chalk

dust and blackboard, would lean his walrus mustache into Rarick’s ear

with a foul bit of anecdote about a youth with a ruby studded into his

flesh, who fancied the chryselephantine statue of Athena by Phidias.

After the boiling turmoil of a morning that held a conference on the

feasibility of installing soda-water fountains in the west of the

Mississippi areas, a complicated discussion with three architects

on the standard fronts of Rarick stores, a long-distance-telephone

conversation with the Chattanooga real-estate office on a

ninety-nine-year lease for a second store, and the consummation of

an order for one hundred thousand bathing-hats, to walk with Gerkes

through the sarcophagus of his mind was like emerging from noisy

sunlight into the green twilight of the Italian cypresses Rarick was

fond of transplanting, in long aisles, from Sicilian hillsides to his

own.

Here was a man who had a decayed-looking green circle on the front of

his neck, from a brass collar-button, which he was never to discard,

even after Rarick had sent him precious ones, but to whom, on the other

hand, a blemish on the crystal flesh of an art-object was something to

cause his own flesh to crawl upward.

Some five years after these meetings between the two, Gerkes fell ill

of a flaying neuritis, and, tracing him to the lair of his dwelling,

Rarick found him in a small room in the high-up rear of a Twenty-third

Street rooming-house, books stacked from floor to ceiling, and exactly

three personal objects in evidence. A wooden-backed hair-brush, a

pocket comb, and a tooth-brush, sharing the dresser-top with an

assortment of Aztec arrow-heads, proof-sheets of an article on scarabs

for the _Encyclopedia Britannica_, a copy of Plato’s _Phædon_, William

Langland’s _Piers Plowman_, and a _World Almanac_.

If Rarick had expected protest when he suggested the move from these

quarters to the suite at the top of his home, nothing of the sort

happened. With his imperviousness to environment or even to the sense

of personal obligation, Gerkes took up residence under his friend’s

roof. One had to live somewhere. Money was something you shared if

you had it, or you accepted if you had not. Within a week the walls

which Jenny had recently had done in yellow brocatelle, were plastered

with maps, and the furniture itself littered, as the lodging-house

room had been, with the story of the dawn of the human race as told

by flint-head, ax, and spear, littering up the decorator’s idea of a

perfect example of a suite done in the manner of the Second Empire.

Jenny’s kind of opposition to the invasion of Gerkes had been tinctured

with the wisdom of a certain restraint. Here was one of the times it

was not good to oppose Rarick. When his head seemed to jam down tightly

between his shoulders, and his lower lip shot out, and his eyes, which

so seldom met hers any more, slid up under their lids, leaving a horrid

effect of just white ball, Jenny had the intuition to know that here

was not the time to put up active opposition.

She had missed this scent a few times, once in particular over an

apparently trivial matter that had to do with Avery and a week-end stag

party of eleven school companions which she planned for him on board a

motor-yacht which she was maneuvering for his father to give him on his

fifteenth birthday.

The idea of Avery on his own private yacht, lording it as host over

eleven youngsters to whom a yacht was that day’s toy, was roiling to

Rarick. There had been a similar scene, not two months before, over a

cigar-shaped roadster for Avery; but then there had been high, bitter,

even more terrible words and Rarick’s foot had come down with an

emphasis that Jenny somehow knew better than to further oppose, and

Avery had not even been allowed to come home from school at Newberry

over the occasion of his birthday.

There had been a matter that had to do with Jennifer, who had played

high stakes beside her mother at the baccarat tables of Nice and won

sums large enough for the papers to carry the story in headlines that

had been the occasion of peremptory cablegrams for their return to

America and had virtually shut off subsequent trips abroad.

There had been the affair, too, of the young Argentinian, son of a

castor-bean magnate, driving his Hispano-Suiza into the swimming-pool

at the Roslyn, Long Island, estate. Jenny had been as outraged as

Rarick, except that he went to the extreme of keeping the house closed

for two subsequent seasons.

There were certain well-defined limits to opposing Rarick, which were

none the less tricky limits, because there seemed to be no way, except

the intuitive one, to anticipate them. He would give in on many a grand

issue, such, for instance, as the Ficke house, Jennifer’s fabulous

string of matched pearls, or Jenny’s whim for five thousand acres of

French-Canadian tract north of Quebec, upon which they had built an

artificial lake, a forty-room chalet, “The Cataract,” and which had

been opened exactly twenty days in five years. On the other hand, a

trifle like Avery’s roadster, or this matter of Dr. Gerkes, would set

his head rigidly into the valley of his shoulders and square him for

fight.

The coming of Dr. Gerkes was one of those occasions. This time Jenny

knew it even before she raised the first faint dust of issue; but she

could not forego that first faint dust. The coming of Gerkes angered

her. It went against the grain. Not that, offhand, it would seem

to cause much of a ripple in a household where thirty-one servants

reported to the housekeeper every morning; but it did matter more than

was discernible at the first glance.

From the first, Jenny had found the Ficke house deceptive. A Gothic

library, two stories high, which ran across the entire Fifth Avenue

frontage, a drawing-room of enormous proportions, a Roman dining-room

into which you ascended by Pompeian-marble steps, and a glassed-in

conservatory for which a breakfast-room had been sacrificed as Rarick’s

passion for difficult and exotic transplantation began to grow, left

embarrassingly few bedroom suites.

An additional story would have marred the Hellenic grace of the

building, and the owner of the adjoining pile of magnificence felt

affronted, rather than tempted, by the Rarick offer to buy.

The yellow suite assigned to Dr. Gerkes subtracted one from the five

small suites of guest-chambers that Jenny had so elaborately planned

and redone. It is true that the comings and goings of Gerkes, who

preferred to use what was known as the service-entrance and the

small rear staircase that led quite privately up to his rooms, made

practically no dent in that household. He dined in his rooms, except on

those rare occasions when the family was home alone and Rarick wanted

him at table. He was seldom, if ever, seen in the wide, beautifully

vaulted corridors of the house; and yet to Jenny there was something

repulsive about his being there at all. The shabby black figure somehow

recalled the musty memory and figure of an old music-teacher back in

her St. Louis girlhood, whose face, close beside hers at the piano,

and his audible breathing had been repellent to her. A lady’s-maid

had gossiped to Jennifer, who gossiped to Jenny, that he used only

three towels a week, and no bed-linen, because he slept on the floor,

wrapped in one of the beautiful canary-yellow camel’s-hair blankets.

A secret survey of his rooms, one day during his absence, revealed to

Jenny’s horrified eyes the yellow-brocade hangings and bed-coverings

removed and crammed into a corner, the tops of her lovely curving

period-furniture covered with a layout of lean-looking hair-brush,

a whisk broom, and primitive stone implements, her paneled yellow

walls hung with pin-studded maps, and, on the mantelpiece, beside the

meticulously right ormolu clock, a box of Swedish biscuit, a cube of

American cheese, and a huge pocket knife, open.

That evening, before they went down to dinner, Jenny’s anger overflowed

her discretion.

“There’s a time and a place for everything, Rarick,” she said to him,

as he stood tugging at his collar in the enormous mirrored bathroom

which gave off their bedroom. “That man is no more comfortable here

than we are in having him.”

Standing in a foundation slip of coral-colored silk, over which she was

presently to slip a coral-colored evening dress of all front and no

back, her carrot-colored hair caught upward in the tight perpendicular

line which accentuated the narrowness of her head, she could see

Rarick’s neck, through the wall of mirror, drop into the slit of his

shoulders, and that peculiar look of the hunchback which she dreaded,

and of which she was wary, come cunningly into his face.

“What man?”

“Gerson, or whatever it was you said his name is.”

He turned, in his black trousers, stiff white shirt, black suspenders,

still tinkering with his tie, so that, as he faced her, she could see

his eyes ride up under his lids.

“I said his name is Felix Gerkes,” he pronounced, slowly and

meticulously, as you might mouth a lesson to a child. “Dr. Felix Gerkes

has condescended to come and make his home here.”

“Isn’t it usual, Rarick,” she said, her rising anger crowding closer on

her discretion, “for even so great a patron saint of indigent college

professors as yourself to consult the members of his family before

introducing a worthy outsider into the household?”

“There are few demands I make here. This is one of them.”

“You have a young-lady daughter to consider.”

“That is precisely what I did, when I introduced into this madhouse a

human being out of the world of ideas.”

“I see. You feel that Jennifer’s scientific education has been

neglected and that no young woman is equipped for life without a

Ph.D. knowledge of the glacial age,” she said, and glittered as she

stood there with her bronze-colored eyes and the points of light

off the tapping toe of her slipper. She could have plunged her long

jeweled fingers into the valleys of his shoulders and shaken him, as a

smothering sense of futility began to crowd her in.

“Not at all, Jenny. Our daughter’s education is all one could ask. She

knows a Hispano-Suiza from a Rolls-Royce. She knows a Cartier setting,

Theodore at the Ritz, her finishing-school ‘R’s,’ and how to stack her

artichoke leaves. I notice our son, too, already has quite a way with

his artichokes.”

The speech was not like him, but rather in mimicry of what she might

have said under similar circumstances.

“What a devil you are, Rarick!”

“A poor devil, Jenny,” he said, his face as pulled-looking as tarpaulin.

“You are a poor father.” She was going to add, “and a poor husband,”

but she let the words lodge in her eyes.

“I am that,” he said, replying to the spoken and unspoken indictment.

“What is it you want of us?” she cried. “Must you oppose your children

on every occasion, just as you have always opposed me? Is merely the

fact that we want something, sufficient itself to dispose you against

it? Why must you always be the stern parent to them, with me the

buffer between? What do you want?”

She did not know it, but she was voicing the cry within his heart.

What did he want? He wanted some of the intimacy from that boy of his

that was Jenny’s. He wanted some of that intimacy from Jennifer. He

wanted.... What did he want?...

“Do you want your children to skip their youth, so that they may follow

in the footsteps of some doddering college professor who spends his

life fiddling among arrow-heads?”

“I want Felix Gerkes in my house,” he said, climbing back from what was

sure to be a discussion of defeat by reason of what he considered her

colossal lack of logic, “because he knows things that we don’t know.

That we cannot buy for them. He has not mere learning. He has wisdom.”

“I see. Why Eskimo Indians like blubber.”

There was absolutely no way to capture a focal point of discussion

when you found yourself in argument with such a woman. She invariably

answered you in terms of something irrelevant, making you wild with

futility. Damn her! Damn her! In the years since that thought first

lightened into his brain, it had flashed there with recurring frequency.

“Yes, Jenny,” he said again, driven to the extremity of employing her

same skidding method, “and why your son, a second-year boy at Newberry,

maintains two roadsters, a motor-boat, a trotting horse, and fails in

his mid-year examinations.”

“No man ever understood a high-strung boy less than you understand

yours!”

The dart struck sure, and sent his head retreating down into his

shoulders. True. True. Too, too true.

“Nor a gay and beautiful daughter, one with brains, let me tell you

that, although you prefer to treat her as if she were a moron. She’s a

match for your professors. Jennifer’s got brains!”

“Exactly, damn it all! And for what? Waste. Waste.”

In a world of superficial interests, filled with the need to be

clever and sophisticated, you could be clever with the sharp edge

of your brain, if you had one, and sophisticated on a shoestring of

intelligence and no heart.

“Your merely clever person is only a first-rate second rather.”

“Try being one.”

“I can’t; it’s not in me.”

“Lots of things are not in you, Rarick. The ability to meet your world

is not in you.”

“I wish to God it were not so deeply in you.”

“Gerkes’s world, I suppose....”

“I don’t know his world. He knows the secret of things and of not being

smothered by them. Like you. Like me. Like your children.”

“Obviously, from the look of his hair-brush.”

You couldn’t argue with a woman like that. You couldn’t. You couldn’t.

The crazing sense of futility....

She was in her gown by now, a sort of henna-colored affair, as if

the threads had been picked from her hair--a gown that wrapped her

eccentrically thin body on a diagonal, rushing to a high ruff about her

neck in front, cut daringly, almost to her waist line, behind. Between

the bang of her hair and a stiff, enormously brilliant dog-collar of

diamonds, her eyes were red and level and full of the impudence of her

remark.

“Doctor Gerkes remains, Jenny.”

She shrugged her shoulders and walked out.

Damn her! Damn her! Damn her!

A story about Jennifer Rarick went the rounds that winter, creating

hilarity at many a cocktail and dinner party.

It seemed that the Rarick house, shiningly conditioned, was now being

shouted out by sight-seeing-omnibus megaphones as the billion-dollar

Ficke-Rarick mansion purchased with Rarick dimes.

One morning, just as Jennifer, in riding-habit, was emerging from the

house to enter a large fawn-colored roadster which she was accustomed

to drive herself across the Park to the academy where she kept her

mounts, one of these omnibuses slowed while the megaphone roared of

Rarick dimes and billion-dollar mansions.

Throughout this canned oration, the daughter of John Rarick, one hand

against her slim hip, the other thumbing her nose at the omnibus, held

posture, precipitating the picture by a dash into her roadster at its

conclusion, and leaving a gasping and bucolic sight-seeing omnibus load

not quite sure that it had happened.

Whether it did happen or not, the gesture might be said to be somewhat

typical of Jennifer. I am. You are. Take me. Leave me.

Usually you took her. Even at her worst, when she was cocksure and

tiresomely sophisticated and pseudo and pretentious, there was about

her a hearty self-loathing, concerning which she was robustly frank.

“I despise myself,” she was constantly saying to people on club

verandas and in grand stands at polo matches, where patter

predominated. “I am a swine. I’m N. G. I’m stealing a ride through

life. I’m a panhandler.”

After a fashion she meant it. After the fashion of one who attempts to

appease a dissatisfaction by throwing to it slops of words.

People were always saying of her, “She has brains,” in the key of

saying, “Too bad, the girl has brains.”

“So’s my old man,” was Jennifer’s usual retort, in the slang with which

she hung her speech. She meant this. She admired her father from the

distance that lay between them. She wanted his respect and, strangely

enough, gave him precious little of hers.

The evening following his scene with Jenny regarding the coming of

Gerkes, Rarick sent for his daughter.

In a house filled with the confusions, the comings, the goings, the

ringing of telephones, and the hurrying of servants, that the two

women, mother and daughter, managed to create about themselves, the

occasions of family conference were seldom enough.

When the summons came for Jennifer to go to her father, in the library,

she was in the act of slapping about her rooms, with her own confused

English maid and her mother’s Breton maid hurrying at her heels, in the

effort to help her toward a dinner engagement for which she was already

thirty minutes late.

The fact of the matter was, she had remained shockingly overtime

at a bridge game at the Mayfair, vainly trying to retrieve a

several-hundred-dollar loss.

Jennifer was of that species of tormentor who, abusive of her servants,

was none the less beloved by them, because, quickly contrite, she wooed

them back by anointing their wounds with tips and gifts.

It was her maid Mariana’s boast that these tantrums kept her supplied

with furs, French gowns, and even jewels.

The last time Jennifer had been summoned in this fashion by her father

was about two years before. She had bought on a dare, at the auction

of a famous Long Island estate, a cigar-shaped roadster with an

Italian engine of very special make, for eleven thousand dollars. The

estate was being sold because the owner had been killed in this very

car. Jennifer had stood on a table in the garage and led the spirited

bidding.

Rarick, after a high and ugly scene with her in the library, had paid

the eleven thousand dollars, and the day following, in her enraged and

humiliated presence, had sold it to a dealer for twenty-five hundred.

“The meanest man in the world,” Jennifer had ground through clenched

teeth into her mirror after the episode, the tears of her humiliation

splashing down a face which, although molded after her father’s, had

a lightning beauty that darted into it and played around her eyes

and her lips. A straight brown slab of a girl, with a brilliant sort

of Jeanne d’Arc directness to her eyes, which were surrounded by a

mediæval-looking curtain of straight brown bob.

There had been, too, the highly unpleasant occasion when, like

a small girl, Jennifer at twenty had been obliged to endure the

unendurable indignity of standing beside her much younger brother for

a dressing-down from Rarick that had to do with Avery’s presence--to

say nothing of her own--at a swimming-pool party at Greenwich that had

found its way into insinuating print.

As a matter of fact, both Jennifer’s and Avery’s presence had been the

result of a flat tire in front of the estate of the friends who had

detained them. But somehow, facing her father, as she stood beside her

slim brother, there on the mysterious beauty of a sixteenth-century

Kuba hunting-rug, the truth of the story seemed too flimsy to bear

the telling, or something grim and hating in these children kept them

silent. Rarick was always to believe, not from what they said, but from

what they did not say, that their presence on this notorious occasion

had been deliberate.

In any event, a summons to her father in the library was grimly

associated with the scratching memory of scenes like those.

Then there had been the excruciating occasion when Jennifer and her

mother, returning from a season at Deauville and Le Touquet, had

successfully passed customs officials without declaring three important

and perfectly matched pearls, which they had sewn on to a beaded gown.

There had been an outrageous scene in the library when these facts

became known to Rarick; in fact, rage and terror had caused Jenny

to swoon--cutting her forehead as she went down--at her husband’s

reiterated threats to reveal the whole untidy business.

There was rankling, in some terror at the moment, in Jennifer’s

mind, a dread that an extremely private dramatic evening, entitled

“Casanova, Be Careful,” which had been staged with great lavishness

in the garden-amphitheater of a Connecticut estate, was through some

mysterious leak about to find its way into notorious publicity.

Hang it all! she had been lured into the thing chiefly because it had

given her an opportunity to try her hand at what she secretly suspected

in herself to be a talent for lyrical writing.

Hang it all! the way to avoid such jams as this was to ditch the

home condition. Marry forty-million-dollar Charley Kempner and spawn

him square-faced little Kempner heirs with Kempner casts in their

Kempner eyes. Or not marry Lew Bissinger and live in embroidered sin

with an already married man. Or pursue Berry Rhodes, who was simply

unassailable with social position, and who fascinated her. Or just

ditch it. Open a tea-room. Write a scandalous book. Hang it all! No

parent can hope to get away with _moyenâge_, maiden-in-a-tower stuff.

Yes, she had written the “Casanova, Be Careful” lyrics and danced in

the last of seven veils. Damned talented job, if she did say it. “Well,

Father,” she improvised to her mirror, “it’s come to this between you

and me; has been coming to this between you and me since you popped

me into a world I didn’t ask to be popped into. I’m no nincompoop.

You’d see to it that a daughter of yours wasn’t. But I’m tired being

treated like one. I’m finished. If you want to throw me a million or

two to save me from being somebody’s expensive hussy, I’m not too proud

to accept it. If you don’t, and since I’m not made of the stuff you

seem to think your daughter should be made of, I’m through, anyway.

I’ll go off and write a dirty play and show up the whole wretched

business of life as it is lived behind the tessellated walls of the

million-dollar Rarick mansion that is built out of dimes. If the walls

aren’t tessellated, they ought to be. I’ll give them a megaphonefull

that they’ll remember. I’ll tell the story of how somebody took a

couple of hair-pins and bent them into a couple of frowns and stuck

them into sour dough and made a little man who lived in tall marble

halls that kept him looking like a dwarf, and who would have thought

he was Napoleon, if he had quite had the nerve, but who only got as

far as owning everything in the world he could lay his hands on that

had belonged to Napoleon or was about Napoleon. I’ll tell the world

about this little man who got so rich on needles and pins that he hated

himself--and his family. I’ll tell the world, damn it! I’ll tell....”

cried Jennifer to herself, as she ran down the hall toward the library;

but not without pausing to snatch up a spangled scarf to throw across

the back of her dinner gown, which was cut to one inch above the waist

line, where a topaz buckle bit softly into the flesh.

What Rarick wanted with his daughter was to have her meet Gerkes.

He was standing waiting for her, on the hearthstone of a vaulted

fireplace that had been lifted out of the palace of a Milanese Sforza,

a small man who was forever to be dwarfed by the Gothic grandeur

through which he moved, and yet to whom the Druid twilight of such

splendor was to become a fetish.

Three enormous chandeliers, designed after the crowns of Merovingian

kings, poured cunningly diffused pools of light on to this scene of

mediæval resurrection. The very modern young Jennifer, who wore her

docked head like Jeanne d’Arc, and whose metallic frock clicked,

slouched in on slim, inelegant legs.

Her smartness, even back in the St. Louis days when she had first

begun to drift from him, had always been a source of her father’s deep

admiration. Not her indubitable smartness in the worldly sense, but the

brand of it that was indicated in the intelligent bright dark eyes, set

into a head that stood so erect and right between its slim shoulders.

She could have been anything, Jennifer could have been, except the

thing she was. And the thing she was, without his being able to define

the exact why, was anathema to her father.

It was not that she carried her cocktails vulgarly, or said gross

things with what passed for the new frankness. She was no more and no

less than any girl of her upbringing. Or her mother’s upbringing. If

anything, a little more. She drank rather less, smoked not at all, and,

in her own phraseology, had remained a virgin chiefly because she had

never let her curiosity get the better of her.

When she said a thing like that, Rarick ground his fingers into his

palms to keep from boxing the ears of the consciously modern young

Jennifer. She was so cocksure of what a sophisticated, unillusioned,

amusing thing it was to be Jennifer. She was tiresome and a swine, yes,

she was willing to admit, but only in the sense that her rattling-good

brain was going to waste in cocksure and debonair fashion. You couldn’t

live in her swinish set and take the world seriously enough to

concentrate. Hang it all! why try to write plays, even if you felt a

talent for it, when, to be true to the life she knew, they would have

to be dirty plays? Or why do charity or social work, when the world

hadn’t time for the dirty-nosed little darlings even after you’d gone

to all the trouble to save them for it. Part of the amusing thing it

was to be Jennifer was to be brutal and frank and unsentimental and

greedy and a little foul-mouthed.

To Rarick, this young woman of his flesh, his board, his keep, who

stood there on the hearth-rug before him, glittering in her gown of

fake armor, was as strange as if she had just stepped full grown from

the life-size silver-and-chalcedony Zeus that stood on a _credenza_

against the wall. Everything he felt about this illuminated edition of

himself was imbedded in disapproval. Had been, since the Mary Institute

days back in St. Louis, when she had stopped bounding the state of

Missouri for him in an unaffected little voice that was appealing, and

had first started going to football games in the white-kid gloves her

mother provided for her, with boys in their first long trousers, who

came calling for her in their family automobiles. He despised what she

had become, chiefly in terms of what she might have been.

“You sent for me, Father?” she said, the glance she guarded from

ever meeting his sliding to the spot where his graying hair hung in

the Napoleonic forelock down his brow, and simulating unconcern by

feeling very concernedly along the rear edges of her shining curtain of

coiffure.

“Dr. Felix Gerkes, of the National Museum and a scholar of considerable

consequence, is going to make his home with us. I suppose you know

that, Jennifer?”

Jennifer did. In fact, she was the one who had passed along to her

mother the first information concerning the thin-bristled hair-brush

and the square of American cheese, as they had sat, in pajamas, in

Jennifer’s bedroom over coffee one morning. Pretty snide, to stick a

fossil in the yellow suite, with the blessed old Gothic mausoleum as

cramped as a Harlem flat, when it came down to actual living-quarters.

But nevertheless a sense of relief ran through Jennifer. Thank Heaven,

he had not got wind of the whole silly business of “Casanova, Be

Careful.” They were damned clever lyrics, if she did say so, but fat

chance to get anything but a dressing-down for them from her father.

“I’m like the fellow, Father, when it comes to science, who kept

‘Stones of Venice’ on the geology shelf of his library.”

“Dr. Gerkes’s scientific achievement is by no means all there is to

him, Jennifer. I want you to cultivate him.”

His ability to antagonize his children was infallible.

She drew back from his command, with the kind of rearing of the neck

that he had beheld countless times in his boy Avery. A dull sense of

his impotence, where these youngsters were concerned, was a chronic

rage within him.

“I want you to have dinner with Dr. Gerkes and me tonight.”

“That’s impossible. I’m late as it is for early dinner with the Delaney

Stuarts. Shibby sails tomorrow.”

The name “Shibby Stuart” was no more anathema to him than a dozen

others which were constantly on the lips of his wife and daughter. In

fact, there were important reasons of diplomacy why there should be

an _entente cordiale_ with Delaney Stuart, president of an Eastern

Federal Reserve Bank with which the Rarick Chain, Inc., had enormous

transactions. But the picture of Shibby Stuart as he had once seen her

lying sick-drunk on a couch in his house, during one of Jennifer’s

dinner dances, rose crazily before him.

“You will remain at home for dinner tonight. It may help you to

remember you have a home.”

“Don’t be absurd, Father,” said Jennifer, and began pulling at the

net edge of her handkerchief. Her rage, which she felt hitting in hot

points against her eyeballs, was out of all proportion to the dilemma

of being obliged to cancel her dinner with Shibby Stuart. As a matter

of fact, even as she had been sliding into the armor gown that clicked,

the thought of evasion had flashed through her brain. What with her

back stiff and sore from riding a new mount that afternoon, and a more

recent invitation to go off to a speak-easy for dinner and dancing with

Berry Rhodes, here was an opportunity to pass up the Stuart farewell

dinner and incidentally repay Shibby for a last-minute non-appearance

of hers that she had recently staged at one of Jennifer’s bridge

luncheons.

“It isn’t often I make demands, Jennifer. I let weeks go by without so

much as seeing you at the dinner table. This is one of the times I want

you here.”

It seemed to her at the moment that nothing mattered quite so much as

dinner at the Stuarts’.

“You should have given me warning.”

“You should have had sufficient judgment to know there comes a time

when a halt must be called, if you won’t call it yourself. You haven’t

sat down to dinner in this house for three weeks or more.”

“Why should I? Everything I do gets on your nerves. If I’m so much as

called to the telephone, you humiliate me before a butler by refusing

to let me answer it.”

“I have known you to spend twenty minutes of a dinner hour at the

telephone.”

“If I say the moon is made of green cheese, then I’ve said something

off-color. Hell! why should I want to stay at home, Father?”

He reached out and hit a gong with a baton of lapis-lazuli, padded in

velvet.

“Miss Jennifer will join us at dinner,” he said to an immediate butler.

She waited until the door had closed again, and then, with her face

clenched and her hands clenched and her gown making jangling little

sounds as the quivers of her wrath shot through her, she lowered her

face until it almost touched her father’s.

“I just hate you sometimes,” she said, and began to cry the invariable

tears of anger and humiliation to which these scenes could reduce her.

“I wish I had the guts to go out and scrub floors for a prostitute,

rather than put up with being treated like one here.”

A fit of trembling that went through him like a tree-shake caught him

at the words which came off her lips, which were so close to his face

that it was as if he could feel their shape.

“You will have dinner at home tonight, Jennifer, even if your temper

does turn you into a barmaid.”

“It must be a splendid feeling to have to force the members of your

family to your side.”

“It is, Jennifer,” he said, and looked at her with what, for a moment,

threatening to disarm her, seemed like a film across his eyes. She sat

down, still pulling at the net edge of her handkerchief and every so

often scraping it angrily along her wet cheeks.

“Well, now you’ve got me, what is it you want with me? I suppose it

isn’t asking too much to be allowed leave-of-absence to get a message

off to the Stuarts. God knows what I am to say.”

He beat the gong again. “Telephone Mrs. Delaney Stuart that, owing to

an unavoidable change in her plans, Miss Jennifer will be unable to

come to dinner tonight.”

She held her face, during this, averted from the butler’s view of it, a

little squeal of rage rising to her throat.

“Now what? I suppose I am to spend a jolly evening at home talking

isinglass, or blue grottos, or dinosaurs’ eggs, or whatever it is one

talks to fossil-finders.” Her rage ended on a spurt of laughter and for

the life of him, he could not see her face break into amusement, her

eyes crinkling, and keep his own face straight.

“I want you to meet a great and simple person, Jennifer. A man who has

not grown simply great in his work, but great simply.”

“He sounds as if he ought to be done in stained glass.”

“He is witty enough to think that poor wit.”

“Thank you, Father. Any more lilies today?”

“Cultivate Dr. Gerkes, Jennifer. Cultivate Gerkes. You want to learn.”

He knew he was being roiling and didactic and tiresome again but to his

surprise, she flashed a tear-stained face at him that was lit with a

sudden sweetness, a clear-eyed curiosity to it that was reminiscent of

the small brown jug of a girl who had bounded Missouri.

“I do, Father! I know I’m all of a total loss. I’m on to myself, don’t

you forget it. I want to sit at the feet of somebody and learn. God

knows I don’t know anybody with a pair of feet like that. Trot out

this wise guy, Father. I’ll chuck everything and stay home at the

indoor sport of improving my so-called mind. Do you think he’d like

to collaborate with me on a book I’ve long had in mind, called ‘Sex

O’Clock’? Really, Father, I _am_ in favor of more and better brains.”

Jenny came in then, wearing a yellow satin gown that had been

dry-cleaned to the color of an old tooth, and so shrunken that it

spanned. She had long since discarded it from her more formal wardrobe,

but, with a survival of an old instinct for economy, went through the

mean and futile performance of reserving it for just such occasions as

this, when they dined alone and _en famille_.

“You look like the devil, darling,” said Jennifer, and kissed her.

“I feel like him and his bride,” said Jenny, stooping to draw at a

thread that was raveling at her hem. “I thought you were having dinner

at Shibby’s.”

“I’m dining at home with the Department of Arts and Sciences,” said

Jennifer, and dropped a large slow wink to her mother.

Across the island of the hunting-rug, Jenny regarded her husband with

eyes that had no gleam.

“I didn’t mind canceling the Dentons at the last moment and leaving a

vacancy in her opera box, but I don’t relish the idea of also being

on Shibby Stuart’s black list, any more than you should, Rarick,

considering your banking connections with them.”

“You leave my banking connections to me.”

“Gladly.”

“Never mind, Mother. Father and I have evolved a new philosophy of

life. Less philosophy and more life.”

“The philosophy, I suppose, that the rich are all mean and frivolous

and vicious, and the poor holy and righteous.”

He regarded her with the masked look to his face that could cause her

to say over and over to herself: “Little man. Little man, you. Little

fake Napoleon, you.”

“Holy righteousness, my dear Jenny, cannot reside exclusively among the

poor while you are you.”

“Attaboy, Father!” said Jennifer, and jammed a pillow into the cave

between the small of her back and the couch. “I can forgive a dirty dig

if it’s well dug. Can’t you, Mother?”

Her mother glanced at her wrist watch, a singular and precious one, set

into the plane surface of a square diamond.

“It’s a wise house guest who is on time for his meals.”

“At that rate, Jenny, our average run of them must be morons.”

“Life among the Raricks,” sang out Jennifer and hurling out the pillow,

jumped to her feet and to some inner syncopated rhythm, began teetering

on her slim toes down the great length of room that led to an organ at

its far end.

Carved down the pipes of the towering instrument was the legend of the

St. Gregorian Mass, the meeting of Abraham and Melchisedec, and the

Last Supper. A chime, somewhere in the complicated heart of the organ,

which was rigged with all sorts of mechanical attachments, gave out

the half-hours. To Jennifer’s hilarity, it played the grand operas,

stained-window versions of the action springing into light above the

keyboards. “Father’s folly,” she called it.

“Jennifer, if you turn that on, I’ll scream!”

“Keep your well-known equilibrium, Jenny. I just wanted to see the fat

Brünnehilde, in purple cheeks and corsets, heave in stained glass.”

How small they made him, these women of his. That organ, built in at

tremendous expense and effort by tearing out one entire end of the

house, was as dear as someone beloved could have been. The storied

operas, stalking in stained glass to the pressure of a button, peopled

his solitude, plunged, in the glory of melody, through his evenings,

saturating his thirsting spirit. Chromoesque tinned music, perhaps, but

full of solaces....

“Jennifer!”

“I’m not! I’m not turning it on. Surely, if Father can stand his

‘Faust’ served up to him like Campbell’s soup, you should be able to

endure a magenta and majestic trickle of ‘Tannhäuser.’”

“Do you think Gerkes understood the dinner-hour, Rarick?”

“Why, Jenny, what _is_ the matter? The man is not even due for five

minutes. I’ve known you to hold dinner three-quarters of an hour

without a whimper when the guests happen to be yours, as they almost

invariably are.”

“She’s a cave-in from dieting, Father.”

That was doubtless true. It offended him to the point of disgust to

see this angular woman responding to a herd instinct that apparently

deprived her of logic, trying to reduce herself still closer to her

skeleton by nibbling at meal-time on a special faddistic diet of chop

and pine-apple slices.

“I’m a cave-in, all right,” said Jenny, and stretched her thin body

outright on a divan and pressed her fingers into her eyes and bared her

teeth in an on-edge fashion.

“Nerves. Underfed,” said Rarick, eyeing her from the opposite side of

the hearth.

“Nerves, all right. Reason, all wrong.”

There descended a silence characteristic of their times together.

Taking up an object here and there, as she wandered aimlessly about the

museum-like room, Jennifer began to whistle in short, breathy snatches.

“For Heaven’s sake, Jennifer, stop it!”

“Sorry, Mother.”

Silence.

“Say, Dad, what do you call this?”

“That’s a Tau-crossed pastoral staff. French, about the eleventh

century....”

“No, I mean the gold panel above it!”

“Oh, that’s a reredos of St. Peregrine. It’s part of an old

altar-table. I bought it at the Donetti auction at the same time I got

the ivory panel of the Virgin Mary with the pearl crown there, over the

doorway.”

“I think it’s a waste of those lovely seed pearls, Rarick. You might

have them done into something wearable for Jennifer or me.”

He did not answer.

“I was going to say, Father, I saw what might be a sister panel to

that reredos today, at Duveen’s. I was there with Mary Dakin. She

got caught in a tumbling market and was trying to unload two Romneys

that came with her share of her grandmother’s estate. By the way,

wouldn’t be interested, would you, Father, in buying a pair of Romneys?

Mangy-looking, but frightfully _bona-fide_. Girl with a lamb. And Boy

with a Goat. Or maybe his was a lamb, too. Well, anyway, Mary’s asking

fifteen thousand for the pair, and Duveen’s sent a man to appraise.”

“Not interested.”

“What did they stick you for the pearl-incrusted reredos, Dad?”

“Hellman bid for me ... something like twenty-five thousand, if I

remember....”

“Good God!” said Jenny from her reclining position, blowing smoke and

holding her cigarette at bare arm’s length upward from her.

“Good God, what?” barked Rarick, ready to be on edge.

“Good God, she’s hungry!” said Jennifer, and resumed her aimless tour.

Silence.

“A Baby Gar speed-boat for your son would have cost half that much.

Why is it so much easier to understand your own desire to own a

sixteen-thousand-dollar piece of ivory slab than it is for you to

understand a boy’s desire for the things that mean youth and sport to

him?”

“Because it is not his desire. I am convinced that all these notions to

add more and more dangerous and expensive toys to the jumble of things

with which you are cluttering his school life and educating both your

children to demand, come from you.”

“In which Jennifer is drawn dirtily into the picture.”

“Keep quiet, Jennifer.”

“Sorry, Mother.”

“Your boy demands precious little.”

“I realize that, Jenny. In fact, it is just my point.”

“Fortunately, Rarick, I am of sufficiently tough fiber to nag in his

behalf for some of the things he is too sensitive to nag for himself.”

“What are some of those things, Jenny?”

“The things to which, as a rich man’s son, he is entitled.”

“Meaning....”

“O Lord! Rarick, I haven’t it left in me to go over it all again.”

“I’ll go over it for you. Meaning things. Things to keep him moving

instead of thinking. Devices for speed. For motion. Things to distract

him from books, _things_ to distract him from thinking.”

“Good Lord, Dad, where do you get off? Things? You’ve spent half your

life shoveling snide things into the shopping-bags of snide people who

need snide things like safety-pins and stewpans. You’ve glorified the

American dime by making it stand for _things_. You’re the Thing King!”

How astute she was! Clever, slim Jennifer, with her sophisticated

Egyptian-looking eyes, merciless in her ability to lay him open to

himself.

“A major reason why I want to spare my own from the tyranny of things,”

he yapped back at them, trying to express, with the chronic sense of

futility, some of the malaria of his spirit which managed to keep his

family at this kind of antagonized arm’s length.

“You don’t seem particularly inclined to spare yourself the tyranny of

those fifteenth-century tapestries or that enameled Pietà up there that

cost a king’s ransom, or unpronounceable and unwearable gems with which

your pockets are crammed.”

“There is at least something of the story of mankind to be found in

historical objects.”

“There’s beauty in that motor-boat Avery isn’t going to get,” sang

Jennifer, cupping the tall heel of her slipper in her hand and

teetering. “Slim, speedy beauty, let me tell you that. And as for that

story-of-mankind stuff, if you ask me, it is pretty much the low-down

same, whether you read it off the hieroglyphics of an amulet from

Hindustan or study our gigolo civilization through a magnifying-glass

shaped like a monocle. And, Father, speaking of gigolos, I’m in

love! He’s a window-dresser for a haberdasher by day, and dances at

Florentine’s by night. Abbey Chadwick engaged him for her dinner

dance, and I’m going to have him for mine next week. He tangos like a

patent-leather-haired god, and his name is Nemo.”

“Darling, that’s the name of a rubber corset or a comic strip or

something.”

“No, Mother. He wears one and is the other; but, oh, my beating heart!”

“Bicarbonate of soda, darling!”

Why must he stand there with disgust printed on to his features,

instead of meeting her vulgarity as Jenny did, by snapping her fingers.

Was Jenny, after all, clever and even subtle with her children, giving

them their heads, to prevent them from running away? Her children

adored her. They were easy and indolent and insolent in her presence.

Sometimes he even felt himself hankering for some of that insolence.

Avery had once said to his mother in Rarick’s presence, “Shut up, old

darling,” and he had rebuked him for it. At that there had flashed

between Avery and his mother a look of amused understanding at his lack

of understanding. Letters from Avery to his mother were constantly

lying about the gold-stoppered bottles and knickknacks of her

dressing-tables. He never read them, even surreptitiously, but he knew

they were chatty letters that preyed upon the easy indulgences of his

mother; and, meticulous as he was not to read, constantly his glance

was being snagged by such salutatory exuberance as “Dearest Brick of a

Mother” or “Dearest Mother-on-the-Spot.”

That was precisely what Jennifer was saying to her now.

“Mother-on-the-Spot, you’re beautiful, but dumb.”

Dr. Gerkes entered then, after the inconsequential manner he had

of appearing on a scene without the slightest preamble. His dinner

clothes, which he called his “overalls,” because he wore them when he

lectured, hung from the rounded part of his back like a suit that had

been suspended from a nail. His shuffling footsteps skidded the small

rugs from under them like so much silent gravel.

There was a graciousness to Gerkes. A man of almost unlimited

intellectual contacts, he could be loquacious enough on subjects

where he felt informed, and an indulgent listener to those who, in

his opinion, wanted to talk more than he. Stupidity he regarded as a

cardinal vice. It made him snappy. His principal income was derived

from lecturing, but he could be thoroughly rude to the interrogators

who crowded and chirped around him at women’s clubs; and even at the

meetings of such learned organizations as scientific and historical

societies he was capable of rebuking a colleague for the inattention to

his lecture that his question had implied.

On the other hand, there was an amusing mixture of the Socratic and

Rabelaisian about Gerkes. He loved the private and impolite jokes that

had to be told behind the barrier of a hand, and the curbstone and the

platform were alike his rostrums. He had never married, due principally

to chronic lack of income and what he regarded as the popular fallacy

that two could live as cheaply as one. His eye for a pretty woman was

a quick, discerning one. It lit on Jennifer, who was standing in one

of the pools of light, glittering in her armor, her dress a blaze of

winking metallic disks, and her eyes as if they had come off the gown.

Rarick’s pride in his friend was pretentious and clumsy.

“Gerkes, I wish you’d tell my daughter that story about the Taoist

priest who once found himself, when a meteor fell, in Lahore, India.

There’s a mighty fine moral there.” Or, “Gerkes, I’d like for my wife

to hear your opinion of our own Arizona summers and how they compare

with say a country like Switzerland. I cannot get my family to realize

that they don’t have to cross the Atlantic for beauty of scene or

variety of climate.”

“Three chamber-of-commerce cheers,” said Jennifer, and held her

cocktail-glass up against the light.

“See America first,” said Jenny, and gulped hers down.

It was the kind of patter for which Gerkes had little retort.

Persiflage, the smiting word at any price, chic sophistication for the

average truism, tea-table and round-table caliber of profundities,

disarmed and bewildered him. He was at his worst. The descent to the

dining-room through aisles of tapestries was made goose-step. Gerkes,

who was never ill at ease, only silent where it seemed the better part

of wisdom, plowed solemnly through the high-napped rugs.

Not even port wine or champagne-cup, made by Jenny at table in a

frosted-silver pitcher over a _mélange_ of fresh, whole, cling-stone

peaches and black cherries, could succeed in drawing him out of

the slough of amiable silence into which the occasion had thus far

submerged him.

“I hope you are finding your quarters comfortable, Doctor Gerkes,” said

Jenny from the head of her table, where they sat sparsely grouped,

because it could have accommodated four times their number. The secret

of the icy grace with which Jenny presided at her table, Jennifer was

fond of declaring, was that her mother never permitted her head to

touch the back of her tall chair, or her hand to lie along its arms.

“Very comfortable, thank you,” said Gerkes, who was interested in his

portion of slim frizzled smelts. “It’s a pleasant room.”

“Room?” repeated Jenny, and swung her high, curved glance to her

husband.

“You’ve a couple of them, Gerkes, or is it three? Don’t guess you’ve

had time to check up.”

“Well now, Rarick, I haven’t,” said Gerkes without embarrassment.

“There’s another room leads off, I take it.”

“No, old dear, you don’t take it,” said Jennifer, popping an almond

into her mouth and grinning; “you apparently leave it.”

“I’m pretty much of an Eskimo,” he said. “They live in bare rooms and

keep stacked such furniture as they need, outside their houses, until a

piece is called in for use. Simplifies.”

“Dr. Gerkes has lived up there a lot among them, Jenny. He also spent

two years in Lapland, studying.”

“You don’t say so,” said Jenny, regarding him over a smelt poised on

the end of her fork. “Wasn’t it somebody or other said of the French

that no race which eats little _escargots_, suffocated in their shells,

can ever achieve civilization? Well, that’s the way I feel about

Eskimos and blubber. Fancy being the kind of person that can drink it!”

“One must fancy it; because they don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Drink blubber.”

“But I always thought....”

“No, my dear lady, you never thought, or you wouldn’t be of the opinion

that Eskimos drink blubber.”

“Why don’t they?”

“Why can’t you drink this wine-tumbler full of olive-oil?”

“Why--er--obviously--I can’t.”

“Well, for that same obvious anatomical reason, the Eskimo, who,

strange as it may seem, is constructed just as you are, could not drink

quantities of oil, either, and keep it down. Sorry to have to seem to

be concrete.”

“You _are_ smart, aren’t you?” said Jennifer, and propped her elbows on

the table and her chin in her palm, and regarded his lusterless figure

across the table. “Now tell me how they put ships in bottles, and who

wrote ‘Titus Andronicus.’”

“The best way to make a ship in a bottle is to begin working from the

inside of the bottle, outward. Glycon is the reputed inventor of a kind

of logaœdic verse. Bivalves have snouts. Biology, around the time of

the Council of Trent, insisted that the vein of the fourth finger of a

_fiancée’s_ hand led to the heart. Does that square me scholastically

with your daughter, Rarick?” said Gerkes, irritated or stimulated to a

point of loquacity that took his breath away.

“I think it must be wonderful,” said Jennifer, widening her eyes at

him, “to be wise enough to play dumb. I’m always trying to be not too

dumb to play wise. It can’t be got away with.”

“Nothing of the sort,” championed her mother. “You’ve a good brain.

Jennifer is a graduate of Miss Pratt’s, Doctor Gerkes.”

“Yes, and I would have gone to college, Doctor, but I would have been

sure to fall in love with all my professors under forty, and it would

have been so complicated.”

Gerkes told a none-too-chaste tale then from the _Cent Nouvelles_,

about a lady and a certain three lovers.

“He’s a nasty old _roué_,” said Jenny to herself, although she had

rocked with laughter through far more pointless tales when her table

blazed with friends of her own choosing.

“By the way, Rarick, there’s an idea behind the story I just told that

ought to interest you. Louis Sixteenth, to whom the authorship is

attributed, goes on to relate that this lady, while bathing, lost her

diamond ring. While diamonds were undoubtedly not common at this time,

it proves, however, that the stone which Henley picked up for you at

Bruges, could easily date back to at least 1460.”

“By Jove! So it could! It also proves that they faceted their stones

back in those days, too, now doesn’t it? That’s a mighty interesting

point. That’s what I mean, Jennifer, by the historical value of

inanimate things.”

It was Rarick’s way of attempting to justify to his daughter the

telling of the _risqué_ story. “Even at his worst, the talk of Gerkes

mattered, which was more than he could say of the endless sluices of it

that roared through the Rarick functions,” was what he was desperately

and in his clumsy, antagonizing way, trying to convey to Jennifer.

And strangely enough, Jennifer’s reaction to one whom she might just as

readily have regarded as a vile old bore, was as rare to herself as it

was to Rarick.

After coffee, when the candles softened down closer to their reflection

in the long fine pool of table, and Jenny, maneuvering to extricate her

daughter from the vise of a dull evening, suggested that she accompany

her to the last act of “Louise,” for which a pair of tickets were going

begging, there was hesitation from Jennifer. She knew that after the

opera they were sure to join up with the Chadwicks and the Edgertons

for dancing at Florentine’s. Except for the seductive fact that Berry

Rhodes might also be in the party, and Berry could tango like the

Argentine Republic, Jennifer for the moment, wanted to remain around

the pool of quiet talk and quiet candlelight and the slow syrupy flow

of liqueurs and the intellectual luster of this dim old fogey, Gerkes.

Except there was that seductive possibility that Berry might drop in at

Florentine’s....

“I’m glad you’re going to stick around,” she told Gerkes, when she gave

him her hand in good-night.

“Doctor Gerkes has promised to make this his home indefinitely.”

“Let me come up, will you, and get on to some books to read and some

things to think about?”

“Come up and I’ll show you a manuscript of the ninth century, which

I am translating for a library in Cologne. It will make the hottest

sex-novel in your library look like a juvenile book.”

“I think you’re immense. You keep your feet nice and pedicured, because

I am going to sit at them. Do you think you can convert a sow’s ear

into a silk purse?”

“I might find I have a silk purse to start with, and what if I should

unwittingly reduce it to a sow’s ear?”

“Father, where _did_ you find him!”

“Dr. Gerkes will tell you for himself tomorrow evening, if you will

join us.”

“Have a footstool ready for me every evening, Doctor Gerkes. I’m going

to try a new way of showing myself a good time. My present one is a

flop. Until tomorrow....”

Poor Jennifer. She meant it. But, as a matter of fact, she saw him

exactly two subsequent times, that high-exciting and excited winter of

her twenty-third year. Once when muffled from her knees to the tip of

her nose in an ermine-and-sable wrap, she had rushed downstairs between

two young men who were making noises with their teeth like ukuleles,

just in time to nod to Gerkes as he came out of her father’s library

with a stack of books in his hand.

The second time, she had seen him quite crazily, through a keyhole. She

was never to be quite clear about that, however. It was six o’clock

in the morning, and she had been “on a party” with Berry Rhodes. The

door before which she had crouched had lurched about so; and so had the

figure of Dr. Gerkes, seen crazily through the keyhole.

Jenny, standing before a full-length, three-sided mirror, did an

uncharacteristic thing. She removed from the front of her peignoir of

coffee-colored lace, a small cascade of ruffles, which left her chest

bare, daubed powder on to the V, and then stood off to survey. Her

bathroom, an enormous one guiltless of tile, cleverly disguised in

rugs, taffetas, a sunken bathtub with growing plants on its coping, and

porcelain water-birds on little stands against a background of glazed

Chinese wall-paper, reflected her figure over and over again. There

was no angle from which she could not contemplate herself. Profile.

Semi-profile. Full front. Back. She bent into them all, surveying. She

was the angular type of woman that wears high neck-ruffs well. She

owned dog-collars of jewels; principally pearls with vertical bars of

sapphires, emeralds, diamonds, or jade. She need not have feared for

her neck and shoulders. It was just that, somehow, the close collar,

the narrow cuff, the high ruff of fur at the hands and wrists and neck,

gave Jenny what air of distinction she could claim. Tall, narrow, her

high coiffure boldly revealing her ears and planes of cheek, there was

something studiedly, if remotely, Bernhardtian about Jenny. At least

she grasped at the wisp of resemblance and pandered to it for all it

was worth.

Yet, standing before the mirror, holding the cascade of coffee-colored

lace alternately against her chest and then removing it, she finally

decided to leave it off, feeling strangely not herself as she did so.

As a matter of fact, she was not herself. So strangely not herself that

once she crossed her arms over her flat chest and hugged her shoulders

in an exultant little fashion.

The no-longer-to-be-evaded truth of it was that Jenny, whose impeccable

wifehood, extending over a period of twenty-three years, had been

an easy virtue, was excited away and beyond her usual and curiously

volatile air of composure, by the fact that a young Argentine, named

Ramond Lopez, was coming in for a five-o’clock cocktail with her in the

conservatory.

It had been arranged in the hurried breaking up of a party at the

Ambassadeur the previous afternoon. Abbey Chadwick had asked twenty

to tea and dancing, including young Lopez, who was said to be a paid

dancer at Florentine’s, a gigolo of exalted type who mingled socially

by virtue of his connections, but who, nevertheless, was paid by the

management. He had sat next to Jennifer at the Ambassadeur and had

coaxed her to attempt a tango which she had never before ventured on

a public floor. He and a Spanish girl professionally known as Cleo,

had danced two Brazilian ballroom numbers at one of Jennifer’s dinner

dances a few weeks previous, and been paid handsomely for it.

The son of a partially defunct coffee king, whose fortune had been

spent in defending his daughter Bianca from the charge of having shot

and instantly killed her young _roué_ of a millionaire husband as he

was leaving his racing-stable, Ramond’s anomalous position kept him

hovering precariously between two worlds. He had been a mere lad in

school, in Switzerland, at the time of the notorious case of Bianca

Lopez Dakin, but the swift tides of family fortune, the death of his

father, a little later the death of Bianca, and the paltriness of his

inheritance, had swept him from Rio Janeiro. He was any young man with

a dancing-figure and a personable air.

It was said of him, as it was said of his kind, that women contributed

chiefly toward his support. Possibly. It is certain, however, that

Jenny, whose social world was a happy hunting-ground for the hired or

more subtly rewarded gigolo, had never bartered in the strange coin of

that realm except in the out-and-out terms of signing checks to paid

entertainers for services rendered and received. The case of Ramond

had been different from the case of Nemo, the case of Tom and Dick and

Harry, only to the extent that he had occasionally been present in

social capacity at functions where she and Jennifer dined or danced.

It had all come about so suddenly that it seemed to Jenny her confused

senses must be playing her a prank. As tidy about her emotions as she

was about the objects on her dressing-table, and more and more given

of late years to going about to all occasions and functions without

Rarick, the man beside her at dinner or in an opera box or with whom

she danced, catalogued readily according to these tidy emotions.

Whatever Rarick might hold against her, Jenny was given to reminding

herself, infidelity by word or action, as wife, or mother to his

children, could never be one of his indictments.

The former, on those not infrequent occasions when she brought this

subject to the fore, Rarick let rest uncontroversial; but the latter,

which was scarcely true to Rarick, was more than he could hear without

rebuttal. The very fact that Jenny’s children adored her, caused him to

contend bitterly that she misused her power by smothering them beneath

bracelets and shields.

Be that as it may, here was Jenny now, standing before her mirror,

hugging her shoulders and shaken to the very foundation of that

temperamental frigidity which had always stood her in such good stead.

Ramond Lopez, cross between a gigolo, and somebody or other’s tame

robin, and who taught the tango for fifteen dollars a lesson at Palm

Beach during the season, had suddenly walked devastatingly into her

consciousness. She could trace its inchoate beginnings back to the

night of Jennifer’s dinner dance, when he and the Spanish girl, the

fellow Nemo and a beautifully sinuous little Russian, had alternated in

exhibition dances. Later Ramond had asked her to sit out a tango with

him in Rarick’s conservatory, of all places! A brackish retreat, this

erstwhile breakfast-room, of hot-smelling soils and difficult pottings

in Osmunda leaves and sphagnum moss, and which was devoted almost

exclusively to orchid plants imported from Brazil and Japan. In the

various processes of their hybridization, they were seldom, as Jenny

and Jennifer were constantly complaining, sufficiently presentable to

save them florist’s expenditures.

Jenny was not the one to invite the highly special attentions of slim

young men with Latin eyes. She danced with them, dined, and cocktailed,

even flirted in that rather excited brittle manner of hers; but,

outside of that, her slate was clean. The security of that state

of her mind was unconsciously apparent in the thrust of her clean

scimitar-thin features.

A young wag of a society writer for a caustic weekly had described

Jenny’s face as two profiles pasted together. It was enormously apt.

Lopez, at Jennifer’s dance, had sat among the unflowering hybrids of

Rarick’s odontiodes, cypripediums, and other curious orchids of purely

botanical interest, and with his immediate eyes covering her face like

a mask of sweet ether, had solemnly refuted this delicious indictment,

paying her, instead, breathy compliments that somehow failed to arouse

her usual sure-fire ability to laugh a bad boy cruelly into his place.

At Ramond’s lispings, something starved in Jenny had lifted its

desolate head. Excepting for the months of courtship, when an eager,

rather timidly idealistic young clerk had wooed the intelligent-looking

Jenny Avery on the “chigger”-infested banks of the Meramac, there had

been precious few words, except in platitude, addressed warmly and

closely into Jenny’s eyes.

Almost immediately after her marriage, the alienating affair of the

twenty-five hundred had mattered terribly in their relationship.

Bitter with having given, bitter with having allowed himself to accept,

once Rarick had seen her reaction set in, the honey dried out of the

brief flower of marriage.

No, it had been many a day since close, fervent things had been said

to Jenny. Ramond had made her suddenly and hurtingly aware of it.

Something in her had thawed and was aching. Ramond, half her age, had

interpreted her with a melancholy kind of wisdom.

“Why do you try to deceive me, as you do the others, with your icy

manner?” he said to her, with the slight accent that lifted his lips in

a flare off his square white teeth.

“My dear boy,” she said, starting to be brittle and annihilating in

the cocksure way she had, “you are now in the act of telling me how

misunderstood I am.”

To her surprise, he was neither annihilated nor subdued. He caught both

her slim cool wings of hands, half-buried under wrist-ruffs, in the

grip of his own.

“You must not talk like that to me. You do not mean what you say.

You are the most interesting woman that I know. One cannot bear to

be in the company of the insipid young girls, once he has known you.

Do not pretend, Mrs. Rarick, that you need to be told that you are

fascinating. Sometimes I think you are as Dante would have been if he

had been beautiful and a woman. Sometimes I think you are most like

Bernhardt. Then I think you are like the best of both of them.”

“Why, you foolish boy!” she said, the words, from lack of conviction,

slow and stiff on her lips. American men simply did not look at one

like that. They had not the eyes....

“I want to see more of you, Mrs. Rarick. I want to know you. Am I

impertinent----”

He was.

“--or just one more admirer. After all, I cannot be what you call in

America, such a ‘total loss,’ Mrs. Rarick, or I would not have the

good sense to recognize so quickly a brilliant and worth-while woman

when I see one. It is easy to dance with your beautiful girls over

here--but they are not so nimble with their brains as with their feet

and tongues. Am I impertinent?”

He was. Yet how amusing of him! Here was no mere patent-leather-haired

gigolo, with a gift for wearing evening clothes and making middle-aged

women horrible. Impudent of him to have insinuated his fingers up under

the fur cuff of her long, tight sleeve--in flames--she did not withdraw

them----

* * * * *

There was a letter between Jenny’s bodice and her flesh, as she

maneuvered before the mirror. It was a line from Ramond, confirming

what had been the hurried arrangement for this afternoon’s cocktail.

Lest you forget what is unforgettably important to me. This afternoon

at five, where the orchids dare not bloom for fear of comparison.