in the sunniest, most everyday places. Thank you, Doctor Tom. I don't
know why I wept. My spirit isn't weepy. It was just my eyes. My
spirit feels like singing 'Yankee Doodle' this minute."
"Let her go," he approved gayly, and directed the conversation through
the rest of the ride so skillfully to safe and sane and neutral matters
that long before they reached the Hill Sylvia had lost the last vestige
of self-consciousness, and was her old, merry, natural self, with a good
many of the "star sparkles" back in their places.
This process was so salutary that later when Tom and Lois were at the
Hall to dinner it hardly seemed possible to Sylvia that she had had any
queer feelings at all about the matter and teased and joked with the
doctor in precisely her old merry, audacious way, exactly as she had
been accustomed to doing since she was a naughty little schoolgirl at
St. Anne's. When they were walking home together in the starlight Lois
turned to her husband with a curious question.
"Tom, don't you ever wish you had waited for Sylvia? She is so lovely
and full of life. She is much more your kind than I am."
Tom Daly shook his head, and added with all honesty that there never had
been but one girl he had wanted to marry and he had been lucky enough to
get her. And Lois, suddenly lifting her face to his, gave him one of
her rare love looks; a look which he would have crossed the very fires
of Hell to gain.
As they entered the house she turned to him again.
"Tom, I am cold and indifferent and I don't always care about the things
you care so much for but I do care--about you. I wish you would try to
remember that, even when I hurt you. Do you mind kissing me?"
Tom Daly had not "minded." But it was not until they were upstairs in
their own room that the whole of Lois' slow speech evolved. She turned
from the mirror before which she had been letting down her long, ash
blond hair.
"Tom," she said.
"Yes, Lois."
"Do you know I have been having a feeling for a long time that you and
Sylvia were beginning to care for each other? It began that night she
was here and played to you all the evening while I wrote out checks. I
went out to cover the flowers and I saw you on her steps, with her hands
in yours looking so exactly like lovers something just froze in me. I
hate jealous women and I wouldn't say it or hardly think it, but that is
why I have been holding you so far off. If you could love Sylvia, I
didn't want to keep you. I wouldn't fight for anything--even love. But
to-night I saw it had all been just my imagination. I have hurt myself
and you just for nothing. I might have known Sylvia wasn't that kind.
Oh, Tom!"
But even as he drew Lois into his arms Tom Daly knew that it is
sometimes a woman's business to fight for love. Humbly he admitted that
it had been Sylvia and not himself nor Lois who had saved the day. As
honest a man as ever lived was Tom Daly, but neither then nor at any
other time did he tell his wife how narrowly her fears had escaped
realization. Nor did Sylvia Arden ever guess how slight an impetus
would have set herself and the fine man she knew as neighbor and brother
drifting into perilous seas, instead of being as they now were, anchored
safely in the haven of old friendship. That was Tom Daly's secret, and
he was used to keeping secrets, even his own.
*CHAPTER XIV*
*"AND HAVING EYES"*
After the night when Phil Lorrimer played with opportunity a minute,
then set it aside as not for his taking, things began to be different.
Human relations have a way of shifting into new combinations of form and
color like a kaleidoscope just when you think they have become as fixed
as the stars in their courses.
That night brought a reaction with Phil. He was actuated by a fierce
and relentless energy which only work could appease. Hence he came less
often to Miss Josephine Murray's pleasant apartment, but kept burrowing
deeper and deeper like a mole into the professional soil, working like a
demon by day, and studying, reading, experimenting doggedly by night,
trying his best to fill his mind so full that the thought of Sylvia
could not find a cranny in which to creep and grow. But the less vacuum
he left in his mind the bigger seemed the emptiness of his heart, or
rather its fullness, for was it not full to overflowing with love for
Sylvia? Like a mole, too, in his blindness, it did not occur to Phil
that his stubborn silence might be hurting Sylvia. Still less in his
humble unselfconsciousness did it occur to him that he might also be
hurting Barbara Day. He had supposed always she understood. His love
for Sylvia seemed as obvious and inevitable as rain and sun. It was
incredible that any one should be unaware of it. So he would perhaps
have reasoned, if it had seemed necessary to reason at all on the
subject, which it did not.
And while Phil burrowed and blundered Barbara grew up. Her cheeks shed
their soft childlike curves. Her eyes lost their dewy morning-glory
look. They seemed not to wonder any more, but to know. The city had
set its seal upon her, fed her youth to its strange gods. But the city
was not all to blame. What had happened to Barb might have happened
anywhere. The little drama in which she was playing out her part might
have been staged in any other place quite as well. Nor was it at all an
original drama. Its plot is curiously old though it has infinite
variations.
It came to Barb that winter that, after all, happiness wasn't the
essential thing she had believed. One could, it seemed, go on eating and
sleeping and walking and talking and typing and even laughing, just the
same, even if one did feel a little like an empty goblet, turned bowl
down, with all its sparkling contents spilled out. It was queer, but it
was so.
Yet way down in the bottom of Barb's heart there still nestled a little
winged creature called Hope, just as there had been in the bottom of
Pandora's box. Maybe things were not as strange as they seemed. Maybe
it was just that people were very busy about Christmas time. Possibly
after New Year's it would be different again.
But before New Year's Barb discovered that things would never be
different, and the way she found out was very simple.
On the second evening of her visit to Jeanette, Sylvia had run away from
the stately "Duplex on the Drive" to take supper with Barb, and Miss
Murray, for purposes of her own, had asked Doctor Lorrimer to join them
also. He had been a little late in arriving and as the others had
already gone into the dining-room Barb opened the door for him. He
greeted her with the old friendly terrible grip which crushed Barb's
ring into her finger and set the blood singing through her. He started
to make a remark about the weather but his opinion of that commodity was
never completed for suddenly from the room beyond Sylvia's laughter
rippled out.
Did you ever happen to be engaged in decorous conversation with a man
and suddenly see a change sweep over his face, and an arrested,
listening, illuminated look take possession of it, just because
somewhere in the distance he had heard a step, a voice, a laugh,
belonging to somebody who was not yourself? That was what Barbara Day
saw, and the little winged creature used her wings then and there and
never came back. Barb heard the clock tick out as before, "Suppose a
chap wants to marry a girl," but she knew now, once and for all, that
the clock had never been talking about Barbie Day. It had always meant
Sylvia Arden from the beginning.
But Barb's fathers had been fighting men and she herself was game to her
little brown fingertips.
"Hurry!" she said gayly, just a shade _too_ gayly, perhaps, only Phil
did not notice. "Sylvia's here and soup's served." And as she pushed
aside the curtains into the dining-room she announced with a gallant
flourish, "Doctor Lorrimer, ladies."
But while Phil and Sylvia shook hands she did not look at them, busying
herself instead with rearranging the scarlet carnations which stood in
the center of the table, complaining to her aunt as she did so that the
flowers looked "stiff" and "old-maidish" and needed a "touch."
It was Barb who was the blithest of them all that night at the little
supper party, bestowing to it the "touch" just as she had to the
carnations. Sylvia and Phil were both slightly self-conscious and not
very conversational. Miss Josephine Murray was somewhat silent too,
watching the young people with eyes that saw all there was to see and
understanding things at which she had been able only to guess hitherto.
That night after Sylvia and Phil had gone, Barb slipped quickly away to
bed, a little afraid of what her aunt's keen gaze might have discovered,
and longing, in any case, to be alone with the dark and the Thing she
had been dodging all the evening, the Thing which sooner or later had to
be faced and grappled with.
Later Miss Murray found her wide awake and stooped to kiss her with
unwonted tenderness.
"Good night, Barbie. Anything I can do to--put you to sleep?"
Barb shook her head with a tired little smile. Then suddenly she sat up.
"If you don't mind, I think I'd like you to put your arms around me and
hold me tight for a minute. Mother used to hold me that way when I
felt--achey."
Miss Josephine's arms went around the girl, holding her very "tight"
indeed for a few moments of silence.
"Do you feel very achey, Barbie?" she asked presently.
"Oh, no," lied Barb. "I just wanted to be petted a little weeny mite,
that was all. I'm all right. Thank you, Aunt Jo. Don't bother. Do go
to bed. I know you are tired."
That was the nearest the two ever came to speaking of the Thing but
neither fell asleep until dawn, and when Barb awoke from her brief,
heavy slumber she was entirely grown up.
Out in the crisp chill of the December night, after leaving Miss Murray
and Barb, Phil and Sylvia had found their tongues. All the hurt and
estrangement of the past months seemed magically to have shed itself,
leaving only the old happy intimacy with perhaps a touch of something
new and even more exhilarating about it.
As they walked along the river front they talked of many things, of
Phil's work, of Jack's unprecedented diligence, of Gus Nichols' success
on the road, of Felicia's designs, and Lois Daly's novel, of "Hester
house" and Phil's mother, of Barb's services to the Cause, and Suzanne's
mysterious journeyings; of everything indeed, it seemed, except the
subject which was nearest the surface, their own selves.
When they reached the Lathams' apartment they were still as far from
having said the really important things that trembled on their lips as
they had been at the beginning. Sylvia knew perfectly well what she
wanted to say but being a woman could not say it. Phil also knew
perfectly well what he wanted to say but being a man set his lips and
did not say it. It was only as Sylvia paused in the doorway and held out
her hand to Phil that the thing came near to getting said in spite of
them both.
"Sylvia!" Phil's voice had a quick little catch in it very unlike his
usual rather deliberate speech. "If I don't see much of you while you
are here you will understand, won't you? It won't be because I don't
want to but because I--don't dare." And his frank blue eyes implored
her to understand and forgive.
"Are you sure--there is anything--to be afraid of?" Sylvia's words had
jerked a little, too, and as she drew her hand away to press the bell
her eyes expressed more even than her tongue had said.
"Sylvia!" Phil took a swift step nearer but before he could say any
more a solemn liveried person had appeared in the doorway and stood at
blinking attention while Sylvia shot one dazzling glance at the young
doctor and vanished into the dim spaces of the hall, whence it seemed to
Phil, though he could not be sure, she kissed her hand to him behind the
liveried person's back, before she was lost in the elevator. Phil
stared after her a moment in dazed silence then went out into the night.
The next day, when he came in from the clinic, he found a little note
from Sylvia inviting him to take tea with her the following afternoon.
"Of course it is all nonsense about your not seeing much of me while I
am here," the note had added. "Phil, can't you understand there isn't
anything to be afraid of?" The last was underscored. And then the
writer subscribed herself conventionally his as ever.
Phil read the note hungrily several times and puzzled more than a little
over its contents, which he perceived were open to more than one
interpretation, especially the underscored portion. And then he had sat
down and written an answer which he dispatched by special messenger.
The answer expressed thanks and polite regret that the writer had a
previous engagement.
Sylvia had run away into her own room to read the note and grew first a
little rosy, then a little white as she read. Then she tore the missive
into bits, and going to the window, deliberately let the fragments
flutter away in the December blast outside.
"I might as well have proposed and done with it," she thought hotly.
"Phil Lorrimer needn't worry. I won't endanger his precious peace of
mind again while I'm here. Previous engagement, indeed! He's afraid of
my money and he makes me tired."
As a matter of fact she did Phil injustice in one particular at least.
The previous engagement had been perfectly authentic. The Washington
Square Players were giving that afternoon a first performance of a play
which had been translated from the Russian by a friend of Phil's and he
had promised to be present and had long ago invited Barb to go with him.
And Barb being fully determined that Phil should never guess how things
were had kept her engagement and succeeded in behaving so comradely and
sisterly, which was precisely the way she had been behaving all along
only more so, that her escort was allowed to continue in his state of
innocence and ignorance as to things better left unknown, which was
quite according to code.
But it was one of those odd coincidences that sometimes occur that
Sylvia and Jeanette should have been whirling swiftly toward the park on
their way home from the matinee just at the moment when Phil and Barb
were transferring to the Subway at the Circle. Very much absorbed the
latter appeared to be in each other's society, so much so that neither
saw the limousine pass them, but Sylvia had not been so blind, and
Jeanette also had taken in the scene.
"Wasn't that your little friend with Phil Lorrimer?" the latter had
asked. "Somebody was telling me he goes everywhere with her. I
shouldn't wonder if they were engaged, should you? They certainly
looked devoted enough." So Jeanette had rattled on and never noticed
that Sylvia had not answered.
That night Sylvia had gone to a big ball and worn a wonderful,
sophisticated Paquin gown of sea green satin and pearls. She looked
very young and lovely. The men flocked around her and she managed them
all like a seasoned coquette and had three proposals during the course
of the evening. Of course it was perfectly well known that she was an
heiress as well as a beauty, so the proposers was not so romantically
rash as might have been thought.
And from that time on Sylvia "went the pace" as madly as Jeanette
herself, without pause or rest. After that one supper party Barb was
never able to capture her friend again, her engagements piled up so fast
and high. It looked as if Suzanne's prophecy about the "labyrinth" were
being fulfilled. As for Phil, never once was he able to see her again.
She was always out when he called or telephoned and always had previous
engagements when he tried to get her for the theater or a concert. She
was as invisible, so far as he was concerned, as if some fairy's wand
had drawn a magic circle about her, a fact which made him burrow deeper
than ever in his work and made him look a little older and grimmer than
his twenty-five years warranted.
*CHAPTER XV*
*THE CITY AND SYLVIA*
Sylvia had supposed herself sufficiently grown up and wise and modern
when she came to the city but she had not been there a week before she
knew that she had been a veritable innocent, an infant in swaddling
clothes, so to speak. Here was life, of a sort, with a vengeance.
In Jeanette's circle, Sylvia saw Mammon worship executed on so
prodigious a scale and with such sacrificial ardor it fairly took her
breath away. Everything was of the superlative degree. Sheer wealth,
sheer elaboration, sheer success, sheer bigness, sheer speed, were all
that counted it seemed. And in the melee the old-fashioned virtues,
spiritual values, ideals, were somehow either dimmed beyond recognition
or totally extinguished. Love showed itself chiefly in the guise of
passion, often frankly illicit, and in lust frequently but thinly
veiled. The motley throng of young-old men and old-young men who paid
court to herself were obviously actuated by one of two motives or a
combination of the two, the impulse of passion, or the impulse of
avarice. Both points of view Sylvia loathed and thought degrading to
herself as well as the men who held them. Nearly all of the group of
more or less importunate suitors who thronged about her she frankly
despised. The men she might have liked and respected did not come near
her, much less enter the lists. No doubt they classed her with the
other women with whom she appeared, women butterfly clad, butterfly
souled, obviously unfit for the serious purposes of life. Sylvia did not
wonder that the real men kept away. They showed their realness by so
doing she thought.
Once, at a dinner, fate and her hostess allotted a different kind of
companion, a grim looking person with very broad shoulders and very
clear blue eyes, who let her severely alone during three courses and
then when she was getting desperately bored by the over-assiduous
attentions of the receding-chinned, narrow-browed scion of wealth who
sat at her other elbow had suddenly turned to explode a question in her
direction.
"What the devil do you see in all this?"
Sylvia had retorted that she didn't know what she saw but was trying to
find out.
"When the pumpkin coach arrives I shall skip back home and think it
over," she had added whimsically with a Sylvia smile.
Her neighbor had grunted a little at that and eyed her sharply from
under his heavy brows.
"I thought as much," he said. "You don't belong."
"Don't I?" Sylvia had inquired dubiously. "Isn't my gown all right?"
She was wearing a New York creation this time, of white tulle and gold
tissue, a frock which Jeanette had pronounced a "dream," so her anxiety
was not very deep-seated. "Or is it my hair? Ears are out just now,
aren't they. They told me they were."
"Oh, you are protectively colored all right. It isn't that.
Superficially you might be any one of this sea of ninnies that surround
us. But, my dear young lady, your eyes betray you. You have a brain."
"Dear me!" sighed Sylvia, looking around her apprehensively. "Is it so
bad as that? I hope nobody else suspects."
"No danger. They aren't looking for brains. Bodies content 'em. I hope
you don't think this Punch and Judy show is the real New York? You are
a stranger, I take it?"
"A pilgrim and a stranger. Where is the real New York?"
"Downtown, a good deal of it. Some of it is in the universities,
especially in the night classes. Some of it is in the laboratories where
they are fighting disease and achieving chemical miracles. Some of it is
in the little back bedrooms where the chap from the up-state village has
come down to peddle his dreams in the market place. The real New
York--the real America--is made up of just two things--the dream and the
deed. Those that make dreams their masters fail and go to pieces and
that is a tragedy. Those that build without the vision will see the
work of their hands filter to dust. And that's a worse tragedy. But
those who can dream and transmute the dream to human gain, in tangible
form--they are the real thing. These people here haven't the decency to
dream nor the energy to do. They are the scum on the surface. They are
punk--most of 'em. Rotten."
Sylvia had looked around her a little startled. The scene had looked
brilliant and appealing to her a moment ago. Somehow now she saw it
through this brutal stranger's eyes a "Punch and Judy show.". She
shivered slightly. Suddenly she felt a bit like a little girl at a
party, grown homesick, all at once, ready to be taken home quick. For
she could not help believing her neighbor was right. Underneath the
glamour and the beauty and the poise and the breeding around her there
was a good deal that was more or less "rotten." She had seen it in
men's eyes and heard it in their voices, yes, in the women's, too. She
was filled with a great disgust and with some shame as well. For in her
zest for experience had she not let her own shield get a little dented
and tarnished? She turned back to her companion, her new knowledge in
her eyes.
"Why did you tell me?" she reproached.
"Why, indeed? You knew it without my telling you. See here, girl, I'm
going to Alaska myself to-morrow. I can't stand much of this sort of
thing. I'd like to think you were going to pull out, too, before the
taint gets you. I said your eyes betrayed you. They did. But it isn't
only that you have brains. The brains are there but there is something
else too. You have faith. You've lived in a decent sort of world where
people are straight and kind and honest and simple. Better go back to
it while there is still time."
Sylvia drew a long breath.
"Thank you," she said. "I believe I will."
Later Jeanette asked her what she had found to say to Archibald Grant.
"He's the Arctic Explorer Grant, you know. Quite the biggest toad in the
puddle there, to-night."
"Was he?" Sylvia had looked thoughtful. "I didn't know who he was but
we had rather an interesting talk. Jeanette, I've got to go home."
"Go home! Why, Sylvia, you haven't been here two weeks yet!"
"I know. But I'm incurably a home person. I've had a wonderful time but
I want to see Arden Hall and Felicia and--"
"Jack?" teased Jack's sister languidly.
Sylvia flushed a little. At the moment it did seem as if she would be
very glad, indeed, to see Jack. Jack was so clean and young and joyous
and wholesome. He seemed to her to belong to a different world from
that which his sister inhabited. But, after all, at Jeanette's
insistence, Sylvia agreed to stay another week.
Jeanette herself was almost feverish in her gayety these days. It
seemed, indeed, as if she could not stop if she tried, as if "all the
devils of Hell were loose and after her" as Jack had said. She was a
puzzle to Sylvia. That she was not happy was apparent, but she was
always gay, talkative, full of quick laughter and brilliant plans for
new pleasures, something fresh every hour. There were always many men
in her wake. Usually they were men of brains, men "who did things," as
the phrase goes, musicians, writers, artists and the like. Jeanette did
not affect fools, as she had said curtly to Sylvia once. She had brains
herself and used them. She was rather famous and rather feared for her
somewhat satirical wit. Her husband was a quiet, scholarly aristocrat,
who spent most of his time reading memoirs of somebody or other, or
bringing out elegant "privately printed" monographs. In Jeanette's
scheme of things he seemed scarcely to count at all, beyond the
essential facts of having provided her with an extravagant income and an
assured place in New York society. To do her justice, however, Jeanette
was by no means dependent upon her husband for these things. She made
her own circle wherever she went. She did not need either the Latham
money or name to assure her leadership. She was a born queen. These
factors were merely contributing circumstances.