After she had gone up-stairs, Mathilde went down again to telephone Pete
that she had made her decision. She went boldly snapping electric
switches, for her going was a sort of assertion of her right to
independent action. She would have hesitated even less if she had known
how welcome her news was, how he had suffered since their parting.
On going home from his interview with her, he found his mother dressing
to dine with Mr. Lanley, a party arranged before the unexpected arrival
of Mrs. Baxter. The only part of dressing that delayed Mrs. Wayne was her
hair, which was so long that the brushing of it took time. In this
process she was engaged when her son, in response to her answer, came
into her room.
“How is Mr. Farron?” she asked at once, and he, rather touched at the
genuineness of her interest, answered her in detail before her next
exclamation betrayed that it was entirely for the employer of Marty
Burke that she was solicitous. “Isn’t it too bad he was taken ill just
now?” she said.
The bitterness and doubt from which Wayne was suffering were not emotions
that disposed him to confidence. He did not want to tell his mother what
he was going through, for the obvious and perhaps unworthy reason that it
was just what she would have expected him to go through. At the same time
a real deceit was involved in concealing it, and so, tipping his chair
back against her wall, he said:
“The firm has asked me to go to China for them.”
His mother turned, her whole face lit up with interest.
“To China! How interesting!” she said. “China is a wonderful country. How
I should like to go to China!”
“Come along. I don’t start for two weeks.”
She shook her head.
“No, if you go, I’ll make a trip to that hypnotic clinic of Dr.
Platerbridge’s; and if I can learn the trick, I will open one here.”
The idea crossed Wayne’s mind that perhaps he had not the power of
inspiring affection.
“You don’t miss people a bit, do you, Mother?” he said.
“Yes, Pete, I do; only there is so much to be done. What does Mathilde
say to you going off like this? How long will you be gone?”
“More than a year.”
“Pete, how awful for her!”
“There is nothing to prevent her going with me.”
“You couldn’t take that child to China.”
“You may be glad to know that she is cordially of your opinion.”
The feeling behind his tone at last attracted his mother’s full
attention.
“But, my dear boy,” she said gently, “she has never been anywhere in her
life without a maid. She probably doesn’t know how to do her hair or mend
her clothes or anything practical.”
“Mother dear, you are not so awfully practical yourself,” he answered;
“but you would have gone.”
Mrs. Wayne looked impish.
“I always loved that sort of thing,” she said; and then, becoming more
maternal, she added, “and that doesn’t mean it would be sensible because
I’d do it.”
“Well,”--Wayne stood up preparatory to leaving the room,--“I mean to take
her if she’ll go.”
His mother, who had now finished winding her braid very neatly around her
head, sank into a chair.
“Oh, dear!” she said, “I almost wish I weren’t dining with Mr. Lanley.
He’ll think it’s all my fault.”
“I doubt if he knows about it.”
Mrs. Wayne’s eyes twinkled.
“May I tell him? I should like to see his face.”
“Tell him I am going, if you like. Don’t say I want to take her with me.”
Her face fell.
“That wouldn’t be much fun,” she answered, “because I suppose the truth
is they won’t be sorry to have you out of the way.”
“I suppose not,” he said, and shut the door behind him. He could not
truthfully say that his mother had been much of a comfort. He had
suddenly thought that he would go down to the first floor and get Lily
Parret to go to the theater with him. He and she had the warm friendship
for each other of two handsome, healthy young people of opposite sexes
who might have everything to give each other except time. She was
perhaps ten years older than he, extremely handsome, with dimples and
dark red hair and blue eyes. She had a large practice among the poor,
and might have made a conspicuous success of her profession if it had
not been for her intense and too widely diffused interest. She wanted to
strike a blow at every abuse that came to her attention, and as, in the
course of her work, a great many turned up, she was always striking
blows and never following them up. She went through life in a series of
springs, each one in a different direction; but the motion of her
attack was as splendid as that of a tiger. Often she was successful, and
always she enjoyed herself.
When she answered Pete’s ring, and he looked up at her magnificent
height, her dimples appeared in welcome. She really was glad to see him.
“Come out and dine with me, Lily, and go to the theater.”
“Come to a meeting at Cooper Union on capital punishment. I’m going to
speak, and I’m going to be very good.”
“No, Lily; I want to explain to you what a pitiable sex you belong to.
You have no character, no will--”
She shook her head, laughing.
“You are a personal lot, you young men,” she said. “You change your mind
about women every day, according to how one of them treats you.”
“They don’t amount to a row of pins, Lily.”
“Certainly some men select that kind, Pete.”
“O Lily,” he answered, “don’t talk to me like that! I want some one to
tell me I’m perfect, and, strangely enough, no one will.”
“I will,” she answered, with beaming good nature, “and I pretty near
think so, too. But I can’t dine with you, Pete. Wouldn’t you like to go
to my meeting?”
“I should perfectly hate to,” he answered, and went off crossly, to
dine at his college’s local club. Here he found an old friend, who most
fortunately said something derogatory of the firm of Benson & Honaton.
The opinion coincided with certain phases of Wayne’s own views, but he
contradicted it, held it up to ridicule, and ended by quoting incidents
in the history of his friend’s own firm which, as he said, were
probably among the crookedest things that had ever been put over in
Wall Street. Lily would not have distracted his mind more completely.
He felt almost cheerful when he went home about ten o’clock. His mother
was still out, and there was no letter from Mathilde. He had been
counting on finding one.
Before long his mother came in. She was looking very fine. She had on a
new gray dress that she had had made for her by a fallen woman from an
asylum, but which had turned out better than such ventures of Mrs.
Wayne’s usually did.
She had supposed she and Mr. Lanley were to dine alone, an idea which
had not struck her as revolutionary. Accustomed to strange meals in
strange company--a bowl of milk with a prison chaplain at a dairy
lunch-room, or even, on one occasion, a supper in an Owl Lunch Wagon with
a wavering drunkard,--she had thought that a quiet, perfect dinner with
Mr. Lanley sounded pleasant enough. But she was not sorry to find it had
been enlarged. She liked to meet new people. She was extremely
optimistic, and always hoped that they would prove either spiritually
rewarding, or practically useful to some of her projects. When she saw
Mrs. Baxter, with her jetty hair, jeweled collar, and eyes a trifle too
saurian for perfect beauty, she at once saw a subscription to the
working-girl’s club. The fourth person Mr. Wilsey, Lanley’s lawyer, she
knew well by reputation. She wondered if she could make him see that his
position on the eight-hour law was absolutely anti-social.
Mr. Lanley enjoyed a small triumph when she entered. He had been so
discreet in his description of her to Mrs. Baxter, he had been so careful
not to hint that she was an illuminating personality who had suddenly
come into his life, that he knew he had left his old friend with the
general impression that Mrs. Wayne was merely the mother of an
undesirable suitor of Mathilde’s who spent most of her life in the
company of drunkards. So when she came in, a little late as usual, in her
long, soft, gray dress, with a pink rose at her girdle, looking far more
feminine than Mrs. Baxter, about whom Adelaide’s offensive adjective
“upholstered” still clung, he felt the full effect of her appearance. He
even enjoyed the obviously suspicious glance which Mrs. Baxter
immediately afterward turned upon him.
At dinner things began well. They talked about people and events of which
Mrs. Wayne knew nothing, but her interest and good temper made her not an
outsider, but an audience. Anecdotes which even Mr. Lanley might have
felt were trivial gossip became, through her attention to them, incidents
of the highest human interest. Such an uncritical interest was perhaps
too stimulating.
He expected nothing dangerous when, during the game course, Mrs. Baxter
turned to him and asked how Mathilde had enjoyed what she referred to as
“her first winter.”
Mr. Lanley liked to talk about Mathilde. He described, with a little
natural exaggeration, how much she had enjoyed herself and how popular
she had been.
“I hope she hasn’t been bitten by any of those modern notions,” said
Mrs. Baxter.
Mr. Wilsey broke in.
“Oh, these modern, restless young women!” he said. “They don’t seem able
to find their natural contentment in their own homes. My daughter came to
me the other day with a wonderful scheme of working all day long with
charity organizations. I said to her, ‘My dear, charity begins at home.’
My wife, Mrs. Baxter, is an old-fashioned housekeeper. She gives out all
supplies used in my house; she knows where the servants are at every
minute of the day, and we have nine. She--”
“Oh, how is dear Mrs. Wilsey?” said Mrs. Baxter, perhaps not eager for
the full list of her activities.
“Well, at present she is in a sanatorium,” replied her husband, “from
overwork, just plain overwork.”
Mr. Lanley, catching Mrs. Wayne’s twinkling eye, could only pray that
she would not point out that a sojourn in a sanatorium was not
complete contentment in the home; but before she had a chance, Mrs.
Baxter had gone on.
“That’s so like the modern girl--anything but her obvious duty. She’ll
help any one but her mother and work anywhere but in the home. We’ve had
a very painful case at home lately. One of our most charming young girls
has suddenly developed an absolutely morbid curiosity about the things
that take place in the women’s courts. Why, as her poor father said to
me, ‘Mrs. Baxter, old as I am, I hear things in those courts so shocking
I have hard work forgetting them; and yet Imogen wants me to let her go
into those courts day after day--’”
“Oh, that’s abnormal, almost perverted,” said Mr. Wilsey, judicially.
“The women’s courts are places where no--” he hesitated a bare instant,
and Mrs. Wayne asked:
“No woman should go?”
“No girl should go.”
“Yet many of the girls who come there are under sixteen.”
Mr. Wilsey hid a slight annoyance under a manner peculiarly bland.
“Ah, dear lady,” he said, “you must forgive my saying that that remark is
a trifle irrelevant.”
“Is it?” she asked, meaning him to answer her; but he only looked
benevolently at her, and turned to listen to Mrs. Baxter, who was saying:
“Yes, everywhere we look nowadays we see women rushing into things they
don’t understand, and of course we all know what women are--”
“What are they?” asked Mrs. Wayne, and Lanley’s heart sank.
“Oh, emotional and inaccurate and untrustworthy and spiteful.”
“Mrs. Baxter, I’m sure you’re not like that.”
“My dear Madam!” exclaimed Wilsey.
“But isn’t that logical?” Mrs. Wayne pursued. “If all women are so, and
she’s a woman?”
“Ah, logic, dear lady,” said Wilsey, holding up a finger--“logic, you
know, has never been the specialty of your sex.”
“Of course it’s logic,” said Lanley, crossly. “If you say all Americans
are liars, Wilsey, and you’re an American, the logical inference is that
you think yourself a liar. But Mrs. Baxter doesn’t mean that she thinks
all women are inferior--”
“I must say I prefer men,” she answered almost coquettishly.
“If all women were like you, Mrs. Baxter, I’d believe in giving them the
vote,” said Wilsey.
“Please don’t,” she answered. “I don’t want it.”
“Ah, the clever ones don’t.”
“I never pretended to be clever.”
“Perhaps not; but I’d trust your intuition where I would pay no attention
to a clever person.”
Lanley laughed.
“I think you’d better express that a little differently, Wilsey,” he
said; but his legal adviser did not notice him.
“My daughter came to me the other day,” he went on to Mrs. Baxter, “and
said, ‘Father, don’t you think women ought to have the vote some day?’
and I said, ‘Yes, my dear, just as soon as men have the babies.’”
“There’s no answer to that,” said Mrs. Baxter.
“I fancy not,” said Wilsey. “I think I put the essence of it in that
sentence.”
“If ever women get into power in this country, I shall live abroad.”
“O Mrs. Baxter,” said Mrs. Wayne, “really you don’t understand women--”
“I don’t? Why, Mrs. Wayne, I am a woman.”
“All human beings are spiteful and inaccurate and all those things you
said; but that isn’t _all_ they are. The women I see, the wives of my
poor drunkards are so wonderful, so patient. They are mothers and
wage-earners and sick nurses, too; they’re not the sort of women you
describe. Perhaps,” she added, with one of her fatal impulses toward
concession, “perhaps your friends are untrustworthy and spiteful, as
you say--”
Mrs. Baxter drew herself up. “My friends, Mrs. Wayne,” she said--“my
friends, I think, will compare favorably even with the wives of your
drunkards.”
Mr. Lanley rose to his feet.
“Shall we go up-stairs?” he said. Mr. Wilsey offered Mrs. Baxter his
arm. “An admirable answer that of yours,” he murmured as he led her from
the room, “admirable snub to her perfectly unwarranted attack on you and
your friends.”
“Of course you realize that she doesn’t know any of the people I know,”
said Mrs. Baxter. “Why should she begin to abuse them?”
Mr. Wilsey laughed, and shook his finger.
“Just because she doesn’t know them. That, I’m afraid, is the rub. That’s
what I usually find lies behind the socialism of socialists--the sense of
being excluded. This poor lady has evidently very little _usage du
monde_. It is her pitiful little protest, dear Madam, against your charm,
your background, your grand manner.”
They sank upon an ample sofa near the fire, and though the other end of
the large room was chilly, Lanley and Mrs. Wayne moved thither with a
common impulse.
Mrs. Wayne turned almost tearfully to Lanley.
“I’m so sorry I’ve spoiled your party,” she said.
“You’ve done much worse than that,” he returned gravely.
“O Mr. Lanley,” she wailed, “what have I done?”
“You’ve spoiled a friendship.”
“Between you and me?”
He shook his head.
“Between them and me. I never heard people talk such nonsense, and yet
I’ve been hearing people talk like that all my life, and have never taken
it in. Mrs. Wayne, I want you to tell me something frankly--”
“Oh, I’m so terrible when I’m frank,” she said.
“Do I talk like that?”
She looked at him and looked away again.
“Good God! you think I do!”
“No, you don’t talk like that often, but I think you feel that way a
good deal.”
“I don’t want to,” he answered. “I’m sixty-four, but I don’t ever want to
talk like Wilsey. Won’t you stop me whenever I do?”
Mrs. Wayne sighed.
“It will make you angry.”
“And if it does?”
“I hate to make people angry. I was distressed that evening on the pier.”
He looked up, startled.
“I suppose I talked like Wilsey that night?”
“You said you might be old-fashioned but--”
“Don’t, please, tell me what I said, Mrs. Wayne.” He went on more
seriously: “I’ve got to an age when I can’t expect great happiness from
life--just a continuance of fairly satisfactory outside conditions; but
since I’ve known you, I’ve felt a lightening, a brightening, an
intensifying of my own inner life that I believe comes as near happiness
as anything I’ve ever felt, and I don’t want to lose it on account of a
reactionary old couple like that on the sofa over there.”
He dreaded being left alone with the reactionary old couple when
presently Mrs. Wayne, very well pleased with her evening, took her
departure. He assisted her into her taxi, and as he came upstairs with a
buoyant step, he wished it were not ridiculous at his age to feel so
light-hearted.
He saw that his absence had given his guests an instant of freer
criticism, for they were tucking away smiles as he entered.
“A very unusual type, is she not, our friend, Mrs. Wayne?” said Wilsey.
“A little bit of a reformer, I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Baxter.
“Don’t be too hard on her,” answered Lanley.
“Oh, very charming, very charming,” put in Wilsey, feeling, perhaps, that
Mrs. Baxter had been severe; “but the poor lady’s mind is evidently
seething with a good many undigested ideas.”
“You should have pointed out the flaws in her reasoning, Wilsey,”
said his host.
“Argue with a woman, Lanley!” Mr. Wilsey held up his hand in protest.
“No, no, I never argue with a woman. They take it so personally.”
“I think we had an example of that this evening,” said Mrs. Baxter.
“Yes, indeed,” the lawyer went on. “See how the dear lady missed the
point, and became so illogical and excited under our little discussion.”
“Funny,” said Lanley. “I got just the opposite impression.”
“Opposite?”
“I thought it was you who missed the point, Wilsey.”
He saw how deeply he had betrayed himself as the others exchanged a
startled glance. It was Mrs. Baxter who thought of the correct reply.
“_Were_ there any points?” she asked.
Wilsey shook his finger.
“Ah, don’t be cruel!” he said, and held out his hand to say good night;
but Lanley was smoking, with his head tilted up and his eyes on the
ceiling. What he was thinking was, “It isn’t good for an old man to get
as angry as I am.”
“Good night, Lanley; a delightful evening.”
Mr. Lanley’s chin came down.
“Oh, good night, Wilsey; glad you found it so.”
When he was gone, Mrs. Baxter observed that he was a most agreeable
companion.
“So witty, so amiable, and, for a leader at the bar, he has an
extraordinarily light touch.”
Mr. Lanley had resumed his position on the hearth-rug and his
contemplation of the ceiling.
“Wilsey’s not a leader at the bar,” he said, with open crossness.
He showed no disposition to sit and chat over the events of the evening.