CHAPTER I

THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED

BY F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

1922

_Novels_

THE LAST TYCOON

(Unfinished)

_With a foreword by Edmund Wilson

and notes by the author_

TENDER IS THE NIGHT

THE GREAT GATSBY

THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED

THIS SIDE OF PARADISE

_Stories_

THE PAT HOBBY STORIES

_With an introduction by Arnold Gingrich_

TAPS AT REVEILLE

SIX TALES OF THE JAZZ AGE AND OTHER STORIES

_With an introduction by Frances Fitzgerald Lanahan_

FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS

_With an introduction by Arthur Mizener_

THE STORIES OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

_A selection of 28 stories, with

an introduction by Malcolm Cowley_

_Stories and Essays_

AFTERNOON OF AN AUTHOR

_With an introduction and notes

by Arthur Mizener_

THE FITZGERALD READER: A Selection

_Edited and with an introduction

by Arthur Mizener_

The victor belongs to the spoils.

--ANTHONY PATCH

TO

SHANE LESLIE, GEORGE JEAN NATHAN

AND MAXWELL PERKINS

IN APPRECIATION OF MUCH LITERARY HELP

AND ENCOURAGEMENT

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE

I. ANTHONY PATCH

II. PORTRAIT OF A SIREN

III. THE CONNOISSEUR OF KISSES

BOOK TWO

I. THE RADIANT HOUR

II. SYMPOSIUM

III. THE BROKEN LUTE

BOOK THREE

I. A MATTER OF CIVILIZATION

II. A MATTER OF AESTHETICS

III. NO MATTER!

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER I

ANTHONY PATCH

In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone

since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at

least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the

ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual "There!"--yet

at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the

conscious stage. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he

is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness

glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these

occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself

rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted

to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else

he knows.

This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very

attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state he

considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that

the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars

in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and

immortality. Until the time came for this effort he would be Anthony

Patch--not a portrait of a man but a distinct and dynamic personality,

opinionated, contemptuous, functioning from within outward--a man who

was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the

sophistry of courage and yet was brave.

A WORTHY MAN AND HIS GIFTED SON

Anthony drew as much consciousness of social security from being the

grandson of Adam J. Patch as he would have had from tracing his line

over the sea to the crusaders. This is inevitable; Virginians and

Bostonians to the contrary notwithstanding, an aristocracy founded

sheerly on money postulates wealth in the particular.

Now Adam J. Patch, more familiarly known as "Cross Patch," left his

father's farm in Tarrytown early in sixty-one to join a New York cavalry

regiment. He came home from the war a major, charged into Wall Street,

and amid much fuss, fume, applause, and ill will he gathered to himself

some seventy-five million dollars.

This occupied his energies until he was fifty-seven years old. It was

then that he determined, after a severe attack of sclerosis, to

consecrate the remainder of his life to the moral regeneration of the

world. He became a reformer among reformers. Emulating the magnificent

efforts of Anthony Comstock, after whom his grandson was named, he

levelled a varied assortment of uppercuts and body-blows at liquor,

literature, vice, art, patent medicines, and Sunday theatres. His mind,

under the influence of that insidious mildew which eventually forms on

all but the few, gave itself up furiously to every indignation of the

age. From an armchair in the office of his Tarrytown estate he directed

against the enormous hypothetical enemy, unrighteousness, a campaign

which went on through fifteen years, during which he displayed himself a

rabid monomaniac, an unqualified nuisance, and an intolerable bore. The

year in which this story opens found him wearying; his campaign had

grown desultory; 1861 was creeping up slowly on 1895; his thoughts ran a

great deal on the Civil War, somewhat on his dead wife and son, almost

infinitesimally on his grandson Anthony.

Early in his career Adam Patch had married an anemic lady of thirty,

Alicia Withers, who brought him one hundred thousand dollars and an

impeccable entré into the banking circles of New York. Immediately and

rather spunkily she had borne him a son and, as if completely

devitalized by the magnificence of this performance, she had thenceforth

effaced herself within the shadowy dimensions of the nursery. The boy,

Adam Ulysses Patch, became an inveterate joiner of clubs, connoisseur of

good form, and driver of tandems--at the astonishing age of twenty-six

he began his memoirs under the title "New York Society as I Have Seen

It." On the rumor of its conception this work was eagerly bid for among

publishers, but as it proved after his death to be immoderately verbose

and overpoweringly dull, it never obtained even a private printing.

This Fifth Avenue Chesterfield married at twenty-two. His wife was

Henrietta Lebrune, the Boston "Society Contralto," and the single child

of the union was, at the request of his grandfather, christened Anthony

Comstock Patch. When he went to Harvard, the Comstock dropped out of his

name to a nether hell of oblivion and was never heard of thereafter.

Young Anthony had one picture of his father and mother together--so

often had it faced his eyes in childhood that it had acquired the

impersonality of furniture, but every one who came into his bedroom

regarded it with interest. It showed a dandy of the nineties, spare and

handsome, standing beside a tall dark lady with a muff and the

suggestion of a bustle. Between them was a little boy with long brown

curls, dressed in a velvet Lord Fauntleroy suit. This was Anthony at

five, the year of his mother's death.

His memories of the Boston Society Contralto were nebulous and musical.

She was a lady who sang, sang, sang, in the music room of their house on

Washington Square--sometimes with guests scattered all about her, the

men with their arms folded, balanced breathlessly on the edges of sofas,

the women with their hands in their laps, occasionally making little

whispers to the men and always clapping very briskly and uttering cooing

cries after each song--and often she sang to Anthony alone, in Italian

or French or in a strange and terrible dialect which she imagined to be

the speech of the Southern negro.

His recollections of the gallant Ulysses, the first man in America to

roll the lapels of his coat, were much more vivid. After Henrietta

Lebrune Patch had "joined another choir," as her widower huskily

remarked from time to time, father and son lived up at grampa's in

Tarrytown, and Ulysses came daily to Anthony's nursery and expelled

pleasant, thick-smelling words for sometimes as much as an hour. He was

continually promising Anthony hunting trips and fishing trips and

excursions to Atlantic City, "oh, some time soon now"; but none of them

ever materialized. One trip they did take; when Anthony was eleven they

went abroad, to England and Switzerland, and there in the best hotel in

Lucerne his father died with much sweating and grunting and crying aloud

for air. In a panic of despair and terror Anthony was brought back to

America, wedded to a vague melancholy that was to stay beside him

through the rest of his life.

PAST AND PERSON OF THE HERO

At eleven he had a horror of death. Within six impressionable years his

parents had died and his grandmother had faded off almost imperceptibly,

until, for the first time since her marriage, her person held for one

day an unquestioned supremacy over her own drawing room. So to Anthony

life was a struggle against death, that waited at every corner. It was

as a concession to his hypochondriacal imagination that he formed the

habit of reading in bed--it soothed him. He read until he was tired and

often fell asleep with the lights still on.

His favorite diversion until he was fourteen was his stamp collection;

enormous, as nearly exhaustive as a boy's could be--his grandfather

considered fatuously that it was teaching him geography. So Anthony kept

up a correspondence with a half dozen "Stamp and Coin" companies and it

was rare that the mail failed to bring him new stamp-books or packages

of glittering approval sheets--there was a mysterious fascination in

transferring his acquisitions interminably from one book to another. His

stamps were his greatest happiness and he bestowed impatient frowns on

any one who interrupted him at play with them; they devoured his

allowance every month, and he lay awake at night musing untiringly on

their variety and many-colored splendor.

At sixteen he had lived almost entirely within himself, an inarticulate

boy, thoroughly un-American, and politely bewildered by his

contemporaries. The two preceding years had been spent in Europe with a

private tutor, who persuaded him that Harvard was the thing; it would

"open doors," it would be a tremendous tonic, it would give him

innumerable self-sacrificing and devoted friends. So he went to

Harvard--there was no other logical thing to be done with him.

Oblivious to the social system, he lived for a while alone and unsought

in a high room in Beck Hall--a slim dark boy of medium height with a shy

sensitive mouth. His allowance was more than liberal. He laid the

foundations for a library by purchasing from a wandering bibliophile

first editions of Swinburne, Meredith, and Hardy, and a yellowed

illegible autograph letter of Keats's, finding later that he had been

amazingly overcharged. He became an exquisite dandy, amassed a rather

pathetic collection of silk pajamas, brocaded dressing-gowns, and

neckties too flamboyant to wear; in this secret finery he would parade

before a mirror in his room or lie stretched in satin along his

window-seat looking down on the yard and realizing dimly this clamor,

breathless and immediate, in which it seemed he was never to have

a part.

Curiously enough he found in senior year that he had acquired a position

in his class. He learned that he was looked upon as a rather romantic

figure, a scholar, a recluse, a tower of erudition. This amused him but

secretly pleased him--he began going out, at first a little and then a

great deal. He made the Pudding. He drank--quietly and in the proper

tradition. It was said of him that had he not come to college so young

he might have "done extremely well." In 1909, when he graduated, he was

only twenty years old.

Then abroad again--to Rome this time, where he dallied with architecture

and painting in turn, took up the violin, and wrote some ghastly Italian

sonnets, supposedly the ruminations of a thirteenth-century monk on the

joys of the contemplative life. It became established among his Harvard

intimates that he was in Rome, and those of them who were abroad that

year looked him up and discovered with him, on many moonlight

excursions, much in the city that was older than the Renaissance or

indeed than the republic. Maury Noble, from Philadelphia, for instance,

remained two months, and together they realized the peculiar charm of

Latin women and had a delightful sense of being very young and free in a

civilization that was very old and free. Not a few acquaintances of his

grandfather's called on him, and had he so desired he might have been

_persona grata_ with the diplomatic set--indeed, he found that his

inclinations tended more and more toward conviviality, but that long

adolescent aloofness and consequent shyness still dictated to

his conduct.

He returned to America in 1912 because of one of his grandfather's

sudden illnesses, and after an excessively tiresome talk with the

perpetually convalescent old man he decided to put off until his

grandfather's death the idea of living permanently abroad. After a

prolonged search he took an apartment on Fifty-second Street and to all

appearances settled down.

In 1913 Anthony Patch's adjustment of himself to the universe was in

process of consummation. Physically, he had improved since his

undergraduate days--he was still too thin but his shoulders had widened

and his brunette face had lost the frightened look of his freshman year.

He was secretly orderly and in person spick and span--his friends

declared that they had never seen his hair rumpled. His nose was too

sharp; his mouth was one of those unfortunate mirrors of mood inclined

to droop perceptibly in moments of unhappiness, but his blue eyes were

charming, whether alert with intelligence or half closed in an

expression of melancholy humor.

One of those men devoid of the symmetry of feature essential to the

Aryan ideal, he was yet, here and there, considered handsome--moreover,

he was very clean, in appearance and in reality, with that especial

cleanness borrowed from beauty.

THE REPROACHLESS APARTMENT

Fifth and Sixth Avenues, it seemed to Anthony, were the uprights of a

gigantic ladder stretching from Washington Square to Central Park.

Coming up-town on top of a bus toward Fifty-second Street invariably

gave him the sensation of hoisting himself hand by hand on a series of

treacherous rungs, and when the bus jolted to a stop at his own rung he

found something akin to relief as he descended the reckless metal steps

to the sidewalk.

After that, he had but to walk down Fifty-second Street half a block,

pass a stodgy family of brownstone houses--and then in a jiffy he was

under the high ceilings of his great front room. This was entirely

satisfactory. Here, after all, life began. Here he slept, breakfasted,

read, and entertained.

The house itself was of murky material, built in the late nineties; in

response to the steadily growing need of small apartments each floor had

been thoroughly remodelled and rented individually. Of the four

apartments Anthony's, on the second floor, was the most desirable.

The front room had fine high ceilings and three large windows that

loomed down pleasantly upon Fifty-second Street. In its appointments it

escaped by a safe margin being of any particular period; it escaped

stiffness, stuffiness, bareness, and decadence. It smelt neither of

smoke nor of incense--it was tall and faintly blue. There was a deep

lounge of the softest brown leather with somnolence drifting about it

like a haze. There was a high screen of Chinese lacquer chiefly

concerned with geometrical fishermen and huntsmen in black and gold;

this made a corner alcove for a voluminous chair guarded by an

orange-colored standing lamp. Deep in the fireplace a quartered shield

was burned to a murky black.

Passing through the dining-room, which, as Anthony took only breakfast

at home, was merely a magnificent potentiality, and down a comparatively

long hall, one came to the heart and core of the apartment--Anthony's

bedroom and bath.

Both of them were immense. Under the ceilings of the former even the

great canopied bed seemed of only average size. On the floor an exotic

rug of crimson velvet was soft as fleece on his bare feet. His bathroom,

in contrast to the rather portentous character of his bedroom, was gay,

bright, extremely habitable and even faintly facetious. Framed around

the walls were photographs of four celebrated thespian beauties of the

day: Julia Sanderson as "The Sunshine Girl," Ina Claire as "The Quaker

Girl," Billie Burke as "The Mind-the-Paint Girl," and Hazel Dawn as "The

Pink Lady." Between Billie Burke and Hazel Dawn hung a print

representing a great stretch of snow presided over by a cold and

formidable sun--this, claimed Anthony, symbolized the cold shower.

The bathtub, equipped with an ingenious bookholder, was low and large.

Beside it a wall wardrobe bulged with sufficient linen for three men and

with a generation of neckties. There was no skimpy glorified towel of a

carpet--instead, a rich rug, like the one in his bedroom a miracle of

softness, that seemed almost to massage the wet foot emerging from

the tub....

All in all a room to conjure with--it was easy to see that Anthony

dressed there, arranged his immaculate hair there, in fact did

everything but sleep and eat there. It was his pride, this bathroom. He

felt that if he had a love he would have hung her picture just facing

the tub so that, lost in the soothing steamings of the hot water, he

might lie and look up at her and muse warmly and sensuously on

her beauty.

NOR DOES HE SPIN

The apartment was kept clean by an English servant with the singularly,

almost theatrically, appropriate name of Bounds, whose technic was

marred only by the fact that he wore a soft collar. Had he been entirely

Anthony's Bounds this defect would have been summarily remedied, but he

was also the Bounds of two other gentlemen in the neighborhood. From

eight until eleven in the morning he was entirely Anthony's. He arrived

with the mail and cooked breakfast. At nine-thirty he pulled the edge of

Anthony's blanket and spoke a few terse words--Anthony never remembered

clearly what they were and rather suspected they were deprecative; then

he served breakfast on a card-table in the front room, made the bed and,

after asking with some hostility if there was anything else, withdrew.

In the mornings, at least once a week, Anthony went to see his broker.

His income was slightly under seven thousand a year, the interest on

money inherited from his mother. His grandfather, who had never allowed

his own son to graduate from a very liberal allowance, judged that this

sum was sufficient for young Anthony's needs. Every Christmas he sent

him a five-hundred-dollar bond, which Anthony usually sold, if possible,

as he was always a little, not very, hard up.

The visits to his broker varied from semi-social chats to discussions of

the safety of eight per cent investments, and Anthony always enjoyed

them. The big trust company building seemed to link him definitely to

the great fortunes whose solidarity he respected and to assure him that

he was adequately chaperoned by the hierarchy of finance. From these

hurried men he derived the same sense of safety that he had in

contemplating his grandfather's money--even more, for the latter

appeared, vaguely, a demand loan made by the world to Adam Patch's own

moral righteousness, while this money down-town seemed rather to have

been grasped and held by sheer indomitable strengths and tremendous

feats of will; in addition, it seemed more definitely and

explicitly--money.

Closely as Anthony trod on the heels of his income, he considered it to

be enough. Some golden day, of course, he would have many millions;

meanwhile he possessed a _raison d'etre_ in the theoretical creation of

essays on the popes of the Renaissance. This flashes back to the

conversation with his grandfather immediately upon his return from Rome.

He had hoped to find his grandfather dead, but had learned by

telephoning from the pier that Adam Patch was comparatively well

again--the next day he had concealed his disappointment and gone out to

Tarrytown. Five miles from the station his taxicab entered an

elaborately groomed drive that threaded a veritable maze of walls and

wire fences guarding the estate--this, said the public, was because it

was definitely known that if the Socialists had their way, one of the

first men they'd assassinate would be old Cross Patch.

Anthony was late and the venerable philanthropist was awaiting him in a

glass-walled sun parlor, where he was glancing through the morning

papers for the second time. His secretary, Edward Shuttleworth--who

before his regeneration had been gambler, saloon-keeper, and general

reprobate--ushered Anthony into the room, exhibiting his redeemer and

benefactor as though he were displaying a treasure of immense value.

They shook hands gravely. "I'm awfully glad to hear you're better,"

Anthony said.

The senior Patch, with an air of having seen his grandson only last

week, pulled out his watch.

"Train late?" he asked mildly.

It had irritated him to wait for Anthony. He was under the delusion not

only that in his youth he had handled his practical affairs with the

utmost scrupulousness, even to keeping every engagement on the dot, but

also that this was the direct and primary cause of his success.

"It's been late a good deal this month," he remarked with a shade of

meek accusation in his voice--and then after a long sigh, "Sit down."

Anthony surveyed his grandfather with that tacit amazement which always

attended the sight. That this feeble, unintelligent old man was

possessed of such power that, yellow journals to the contrary, the men

in the republic whose souls he could not have bought directly or

indirectly would scarcely have populated White Plains, seemed as

impossible to believe as that he had once been a pink-and-white baby.

The span of his seventy-five years had acted as a magic bellows--the

first quarter-century had blown him full with life, and the last had

sucked it all back. It had sucked in the cheeks and the chest and the

girth of arm and leg. It had tyrannously demanded his teeth, one by one,

suspended his small eyes in dark-bluish sacks, tweeked out his hairs,

changed him from gray to white in some places, from pink to yellow in

others--callously transposing his colors like a child trying over a

paintbox. Then through his body and his soul it had attacked his brain.

It had sent him night-sweats and tears and unfounded dreads. It had

split his intense normality into credulity and suspicion. Out of the

coarse material of his enthusiasm it had cut dozens of meek but petulant

obsessions; his energy was shrunk to the bad temper of a spoiled child,

and for his will to power was substituted a fatuous puerile desire for a

land of harps and canticles on earth.

The amenities having been gingerly touched upon, Anthony felt that he

was expected to outline his intentions--and simultaneously a glimmer in

the old man's eye warned him against broaching, for the present, his

desire to live abroad. He wished that Shuttleworth would have tact

enough to leave the room--he detested Shuttleworth--but the secretary

had settled blandly in a rocker and was dividing between the two Patches

the glances of his faded eyes.

"Now that you're here you ought to _do_ something," said his grandfather

softly, "accomplish something."

Anthony waited for him to speak of "leaving something done when you pass

on." Then he made a suggestion:

"I thought--it seemed to me that perhaps I'm best qualified to write--"

Adam Patch winced, visualizing a family poet with a long hair and three

mistresses.

"--history," finished Anthony.

"History? History of what? The Civil War? The Revolution?"

"Why--no, sir. A history of the Middle Ages." Simultaneously an idea was

born for a history of the Renaissance popes, written from some novel

angle. Still, he was glad he had said "Middle Ages."

"Middle Ages? Why not your own country? Something you know about?"

"Well, you see I've lived so much abroad--"

"Why you should write about the Middle Ages, I don't know. Dark Ages, we

used to call 'em. Nobody knows what happened, and nobody cares, except

that they're over now." He continued for some minutes on the uselessness

of such information, touching, naturally, on the Spanish Inquisition and

the "corruption of the monasteries." Then:

"Do you think you'll be able to do any work in New York--or do you

really intend to work at all?" This last with soft, almost

imperceptible, cynicism.

"Why, yes, I do, sir."

"When'll you be done?"

"Well, there'll be an outline, you see--and a lot of preliminary

reading."

"I should think you'd have done enough of that already."

The conversation worked itself jerkily toward a rather abrupt

conclusion, when Anthony rose, looked at his watch, and remarked that he

had an engagement with his broker that afternoon. He had intended to

stay a few days with his grandfather, but he was tired and irritated

from a rough crossing, and quite unwilling to stand a subtle and

sanctimonious browbeating. He would come out again in a few days,

he said.

Nevertheless, it was due to this encounter that work had come into his

life as a permanent idea. During the year that had passed since then, he

had made several lists of authorities, he had even experimented with

chapter titles and the division of his work into periods, but not one

line of actual writing existed at present, or seemed likely ever to

exist. He did nothing--and contrary to the most accredited copy-book

logic, he managed to divert himself with more than average content.

AFTERNOON

It was October in 1913, midway in a week of pleasant days, with the

sunshine loitering in the cross-streets and the atmosphere so languid as

to seem weighted with ghostly falling leaves. It was pleasant to sit

lazily by the open window finishing a chapter of "Erewhon." It was

pleasant to yawn about five, toss the book on a table, and saunter

humming along the hall to his bath.

"To ... you ... beaut-if-ul lady,"

he was singing as he turned on the tap.

"I raise ... my ... eyes;

To ... you ... beaut-if-ul la-a-dy

My ... heart ... cries--"

He raised his voice to compete with the flood of water pouring into the

tub, and as he looked at the picture of Hazel Dawn upon the wall he put

an imaginary violin to his shoulder and softly caressed it with a

phantom bow. Through his closed lips he made a humming noise, which he

vaguely imagined resembled the sound of a violin. After a moment his

hands ceased their gyrations and wandered to his shirt, which he began

to unfasten. Stripped, and adopting an athletic posture like the

tiger-skin man in the advertisement, he regarded himself with some

satisfaction in the mirror, breaking off to dabble a tentative foot in

the tub. Readjusting a faucet and indulging in a few preliminary grunts,

he slid in.

Once accustomed to the temperature of the water he relaxed into a state

of drowsy content. When he finished his bath he would dress leisurely

and walk down Fifth Avenue to the Ritz, where he had an appointment for

dinner with his two most frequent companions, Dick Caramel and Maury

Noble. Afterward he and Maury were going to the theatre--Caramel would

probably trot home and work on his book, which ought to be finished

pretty soon.

Anthony was glad _he_ wasn't going to work on _his_ book. The notion of

sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe

thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed--the whole thing was

absurdly beyond his desires.

Emerging from his bath he polished himself with the meticulous attention

of a bootblack. Then he wandered into the bedroom, and whistling the

while a weird, uncertain melody, strolled here and there buttoning,

adjusting, and enjoying the warmth of the thick carpet on his feet.

He lit a cigarette, tossed the match out the open top of the window,

then paused in his tracks with the cigarette two inches from his

mouth--which fell faintly ajar. His eyes were focussed upon a spot of

brilliant color on the roof of a house farther down the alley.

It was a girl in a red negligé, silk surely, drying her hair by the

still hot sun of late afternoon. His whistle died upon the stiff air of

the room; he walked cautiously another step nearer the window with a

sudden impression that she was beautiful. Sitting on the stone parapet

beside her was a cushion the same color as her garment and she was

leaning both arms upon it as she looked down into the sunny areaway,

where Anthony could hear children playing.

He watched her for several minutes. Something was stirred in him,

something not accounted for by the warm smell of the afternoon or the

triumphant vividness of red. He felt persistently that the girl was

beautiful--then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a

rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in

terrestrial yards. The autumn air was between them, and the roofs and

the blurred voices. Yet for a not altogether explained second, posing

perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the

deepest kiss he had ever known.

He finished his dressing, found a black bow tie and adjusted it

carefully by the three-sided mirror in the bathroom. Then yielding to an

impulse he walked quickly into the bedroom and again looked out the

window. The woman was standing up now; she had tossed her hair back and

he had a full view of her. She was fat, full thirty-five, utterly

undistinguished. Making a clicking noise with his mouth he returned to

the bathroom and reparted his hair.

"To ... you ... beaut-if-ul lady,"

he sang lightly,

"I raise ... my ... eyes--"

Then with a last soothing brush that left an iridescent surface of sheer

gloss he left his bathroom and his apartment and walked down Fifth

Avenue to the Ritz-Carlton.

THREE MEN

At seven Anthony and his friend Maury Noble are sitting at a corner

table on the cool roof. Maury Noble is like nothing so much as a large

slender and imposing cat. His eyes are narrow and full of incessant,

protracted blinks. His hair is smooth and flat, as though it has been

licked by a possible--and, if so, Herculean--mother-cat. During

Anthony's time at Harvard he had been considered the most unique figure

in his class, the most brilliant, the most original--smart, quiet and

among the saved.

This is the man whom Anthony considers his best friend. This is the only

man of all his acquaintance whom he admires and, to a bigger extent than

he likes to admit to himself, envies.

They are glad to see each other now--their eyes are full of kindness as

each feels the full effect of novelty after a short separation. They are

drawing a relaxation from each other's presence, a new serenity; Maury

Noble behind that fine and absurdly catlike face is all but purring. And

Anthony, nervous as a will-o'-the-wisp, restless--he is at rest now.

They are engaged in one of those easy short-speech conversations that

only men under thirty or men under great stress indulge in.

ANTHONY: Seven o'clock. Where's the Caramel? _(Impatiently.)_ I wish

he'd finish that interminable novel. I've spent more time hungry----

MAURY: He's got a new name for it. "The Demon Lover "--not bad, eh?

ANTHONY: _(interested)_ "The Demon Lover"? Oh "woman wailing"--No--not a

bit bad! Not bad at all--d'you think?

MAURY: Rather good. What time did you say?

ANTHONY: Seven.

MAURY:_(His eyes narrowing--not unpleasantly, but to express a faint

disapproval)_ Drove me crazy the other day.

ANTHONY: How?

MAURY: That habit of taking notes.

ANTHONY: Me, too. Seems I'd said something night before that he

considered material but he'd forgotten it--so he had at me. He'd say

"Can't you try to concentrate?" And I'd say "You bore me to tears. How

do I remember?"

_(MAURY laughs noiselessly, by a sort of bland and appreciative widening

of his features.)_

MAURY: Dick doesn't necessarily see more than any one else. He merely

can put down a larger proportion of what he sees.

ANTHONY: That rather impressive talent----

MAURY: Oh, yes. Impressive!

ANTHONY: And energy--ambitious, well-directed energy. He's so

entertaining--he's so tremendously stimulating and exciting. Often

there's something breathless in being with him.

MAURY: Oh, yes. _(Silence, and then:)_

ANTHONY: _(With his thin, somewhat uncertain face at its most convinced)

_But not indomitable energy. Some day, bit by bit, it'll blow away, and

his rather impressive talent with it, and leave only a wisp of a man,

fretful and egotistic and garrulous.

MAURY: _(With laughter)_ Here we sit vowing to each other that little

Dick sees less deeply into things than we do. And I'll bet he feels a

measure of superiority on his side--creative mind over merely critical

mind and all that.

ANTHONY: Oh, yes. But he's wrong. He's inclined to fall for a million

silly enthusiasms. If it wasn't that he's absorbed in realism and

therefore has to adopt the garments of the cynic he'd be--he'd be

credulous as a college religious leader. He's an idealist. Oh, yes. He

thinks he's not, because he's rejected Christianity. Remember him in

college? just swallow every writer whole, one after another, ideas,

technic, and characters, Chesterton, Shaw, Wells, each one as easily

as the last.

MAURY:_(Still considering his own last observation)_ I remember.

ANTHONY: It's true. Natural born fetich-worshipper. Take art--

MAURY: Let's order. He'll be--

ANTHONY: Sure. Let's order. I told him--

MAURY: Here he comes. Look--he's going to bump that waiter. _(He lifts

his finger as a signal--lifts it as though it were a soft and friendly

claw.)_ Here y'are, Caramel.

A NEW VOICE: _(Fiercely)_ Hello, Maury. Hello, Anthony Comstock Patch.

How is old Adam's grandson? Débutantes still after you, eh?

_In person_ RICHARD CARAMEL _is short and fair--he is to be bald at

thirty-five. He has yellowish eyes--one of them startlingly clear, the

other opaque as a muddy pool--and a bulging brow like a funny-paper

baby. He bulges in other places--his paunch bulges, prophetically, his

words have an air of bulging from his mouth, even his dinner coat

pockets bulge, as though from contamination, with a dog-eared collection

of time-tables, programmes, and miscellaneous scraps--on these he takes

his notes with great screwings up of his unmatched yellow eyes and

motions of silence with his disengaged left hand._

_When he reaches the table he shakes hands with ANTHONY and MAURY. He is

one of those men who invariably shake hands, even with people whom they

have seen an hour before._

ANTHONY: Hello, Caramel. Glad you're here. We needed a comic relief.

MAURY: You're late. Been racing the postman down the block? We've been

clawing over your character.

DICK: (_Fixing_ ANTHONY _eagerly with the bright eye_) What'd you say?

Tell me and I'll write it down. Cut three thousand words out of Part One

this afternoon.

MAURY: Noble aesthete. And I poured alcohol into my stomach.

DICK: I don't doubt it. I bet you two have been sitting here for an hour

talking about liquor.

ANTHONY: We never pass out, my beardless boy.

MAURY: We never go home with ladies we meet when we're lit.

ANTHONY: All in our parties are characterized by a certain haughty

distinction.

DICK: The particularly silly sort who boast about being "tanks"! Trouble

is you're both in the eighteenth century. School of the Old English

Squire. Drink quietly until you roll under the table. Never have a good

time. Oh, no, that isn't done at all.

ANTHONY: This from Chapter Six, I'll bet.

DICK: Going to the theatre?

MAURY: Yes. We intend to spend the evening doing some deep thinking over

of life's problems. The thing is tersely called "The Woman." I presume

that she will "pay."

ANTHONY: My God! Is that what it is? Let's go to the Follies again.

MAURY: I'm tired of it. I've seen it three times. (_To DICK:_) The first

time, we went out after Act One and found a most amazing bar. When we

came back we entered the wrong theatre.

ANTHONY: Had a protracted dispute with a scared young couple we thought

were in our seats.

DICK: (_As though talking to himself_) I think--that when I've done

another novel and a play, and maybe a book of short stories, I'll do a

musical comedy.

MAURY: I know--with intellectual lyrics that no one will listen to. And

all the critics will groan and grunt about "Dear old Pinafore." And I

shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a

meaningless world.

DICK: (_Pompously_) Art isn't meaningless.

MAURY: It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.

ANTHONY: In other words, Dick, you're playing before a grand stand

peopled with ghosts.

MAURY: Give a good show anyhow.

ANTHONY:(To MAURY) On the contrary, I'd feel that it being a meaningless

world, why write? The very attempt to give it purpose is purposeless.

DICK: Well, even admitting all that, be a decent pragmatist and grant a

poor man the instinct to live. Would you want every one to accept that

sophistic rot?

ANTHONY: Yeah, I suppose so.

MAURY: No, sir! I believe that every one in America but a selected

thousand should be compelled to accept a very rigid system of

morals--Roman Catholicism, for instance. I don't complain of

conventional morality. I complain rather of the mediocre heretics who

seize upon the findings of sophistication and adopt the pose of a moral

freedom to which they are by no means entitled by their intelligences.

(_Here the soup arrives and what MAURY might have gone on to say is lost

for all time._)

NIGHT

Afterward they visited a ticket speculator and, at a price, obtained

seats for a new musical comedy called "High Jinks." In the foyer of the

theatre they waited a few moments to see the first-night crowd come in.

There were opera cloaks stitched of myriad, many-colored silks and furs;

there were jewels dripping from arms and throats and ear-tips of white

and rose; there were innumerable broad shimmers down the middles of

innumerable silk hats; there were shoes of gold and bronze and red and

shining black; there were the high-piled, tight-packed coiffures of many

women and the slick, watered hair of well-kept men--most of all there

was the ebbing, flowing, chattering, chuckling, foaming, slow-rolling

wave effect of this cheerful sea of people as to-night it poured its

glittering torrent into the artificial lake of laughter....

After the play they parted--Maury was going to a dance at Sherry's,

Anthony homeward and to bed.

He found his way slowly over the jostled evening mass of Times Square,

which the chariot race and its thousand satellites made rarely beautiful

and bright and intimate with carnival. Faces swirled about him, a

kaleidoscope of girls, ugly, ugly as sin--too fat, too lean, yet

floating upon this autumn air as upon their own warm and passionate

breaths poured out into the night. Here, for all their vulgarity, he

thought, they were faintly and subtly mysterious. He inhaled carefully,

swallowing into his lungs perfume and the not unpleasant scent of many

cigarettes. He caught the glance of a dark young beauty sitting alone in

a closed taxicab. Her eyes in the half-light suggested night and

violets, and for a moment he stirred again to that half-forgotten

remoteness of the afternoon.

Two young Jewish men passed him, talking in loud voices and craning

their necks here and there in fatuous supercilious glances. They were

dressed in suits of the exaggerated tightness then semi-fashionable;

their turned over collars were notched at the Adam's apple; they wore

gray spats and carried gray gloves on their cane handles.

Passed a bewildered old lady borne along like a basket of eggs between

two men who exclaimed to her of the wonders of Times Square--explained

them so quickly that the old lady, trying to be impartially interested,

waved her head here and there like a piece of wind-worried old

orange-peel. Anthony heard a snatch of their conversation:

"There's the Astor, mama!"

"Look! See the chariot race sign----"

"There's where we were to-day. No, _there!_"

"Good gracious! ..."

"You should worry and grow thin like a dime." He recognized the current

witticism of the year as it issued stridently from one of the pairs at

his elbow.

"And I says to him, I says----"

The soft rush of taxis by him, and laughter, laughter hoarse as a

crow's, incessant and loud, with the rumble of the subways

underneath--and over all, the revolutions of light, the growings and

recedings of light--light dividing like pearls--forming and reforming in

glittering bars and circles and monstrous grotesque figures cut

amazingly on the sky.

He turned thankfully down the hush that blew like a dark wind out of a

cross-street, passed a bakery-restaurant in whose windows a dozen roast

chickens turned over and over on an automatic spit. From the door came a

smell that was hot, doughy, and pink. A drug-store next, exhaling

medicines, spilt soda water and a pleasant undertone from the cosmetic

counter; then a Chinese laundry, still open, steamy and stifling,

smelling folded and vaguely yellow. All these depressed him; reaching

Sixth Avenue he stopped at a corner cigar store and emerged feeling

better--the cigar store was cheerful, humanity in a navy blue mist,

buying a luxury ....

Once in his apartment he smoked a last cigarette, sitting in the dark by

his open front window. For the first time in over a year he found

himself thoroughly enjoying New York. There was a rare pungency in it

certainly, a quality almost Southern. A lonesome town, though. He who

had grown up alone had lately learned to avoid solitude. During the past

several months he had been careful, when he had no engagement for the

evening, to hurry to one of his clubs and find some one. Oh, there was a

loneliness here----

His cigarette, its smoke bordering the thin folds of curtain with rims

of faint white spray, glowed on until the clock in St. Anne's down the

street struck one with a querulous fashionable beauty. The elevated,

half a quiet block away, sounded a rumble of drums--and should he lean

from his window he would see the train, like an angry eagle, breasting

the dark curve at the corner. He was reminded of a fantastic romance he

had lately read in which cities had been bombed from aerial trains, and

for a moment he fancied that Washington Square had declared war on

Central Park and that this was a north-bound menace loaded with battle

and sudden death. But as it passed the illusion faded; it diminished to

the faintest of drums--then to a far-away droning eagle.

There were the bells and the continued low blur of auto horns from Fifth

Avenue, but his own street was silent and he was safe in here from all

the threat of life, for there was his door and the long hall and his

guardian bedroom--safe, safe! The arc-light shining into his window

seemed for this hour like the moon, only brighter and more beautiful

than the moon.

A FLASH-BACK IN PARADISE

_Beauty, who was born anew every hundred years, sat in a sort of outdoor

waiting room through which blew gusts of white wind and occasionally a

breathless hurried star. The stars winked at her intimately as they went

by and the winds made a soft incessant flurry in her hair. She was

incomprehensible, for, in her, soul and spirit were one--the beauty of

her body was the essence of her soul. She was that unity sought for by

philosophers through many centuries. In this outdoor waiting room of

winds and stars she had been sitting for a hundred years, at peace in

the contemplation of herself._

_It became known to her, at length, that she was to be born again.

Sighing, she began a long conversation with a voice that was in the

white wind, a conversation that took many hours and of which I can give

only a fragment here._

BEAUTY: (_Her lips scarcely stirring, her eyes turned, as always, inward

upon herself_) Whither shall I journey now?

THE VOICE: To a new country--a land you have never seen before.

BEAUTY: (_Petulantly_) I loathe breaking into these new civilizations.

How long a stay this time?

THE VOICE: Fifteen years.

BEAUTY: And what's the name of the place?

THE VOICE: It is the most opulent, most gorgeous land on earth--a land

whose wisest are but little wiser than its dullest; a land where the

rulers have minds like little children and the law-givers believe in

Santa Claus; where ugly women control strong men----

BEAUTY: (_In astonishment_) What?

THE VOICE: (_Very much depressed_) Yes, it is truly a melancholy

spectacle. Women with receding chins and shapeless noses go about in

broad daylight saying "Do this!" and "Do that!" and all the men, even

those of great wealth, obey implicitly their women to whom they refer

sonorously either as "Mrs. So-and-so" or as "the wife."

BEAUTY: But this can't be true! I can understand, of course, their

obedience to women of charm--but to fat women? to bony women? to women

with scrawny cheeks?

THE VOICE: Even so.

BEAUTY: What of me? What chance shall I have?

THE VOICE: It will be "harder going," if I may borrow a phrase.

BEAUTY: (_After a dissatisfied pause_) Why not the old lands, the land

of grapes and soft-tongued men or the land of ships and seas?

THE VOICE: It's expected that they'll be very busy shortly.

BEAUTY: Oh!

THE VOICE: Your life on earth will be, as always, the interval between

two significant glances in a mundane mirror.

BEAUTY: What will I be? Tell me?

THE VOICE: At first it was thought that you would go this time as an

actress in the motion pictures but, after all, it's not advisable. You

will be disguised during your fifteen years as what is called a

"susciety gurl."

BEAUTY: What's that?

(_There is a new sound in the wind which must for our purposes be

interpreted as_ THE VOICE _scratching its head._)

THE VOICE: (_At length_) It's a sort of bogus aristocrat.

BEAUTY: Bogus? What is bogus?

THE VOICE: That, too, you will discover in this land. You will find much

that is bogus. Also, you will do much that is bogus.

BEAUTY: (_Placidly_) It all sounds so vulgar.

THE VOICE: Not half as vulgar as it is. You will be known during your

fifteen years as a ragtime kid, a flapper, a jazz-baby, and a baby vamp.

You will dance new dances neither more nor less gracefully than you

danced the old ones.

BEAUTY: (_In a whisper_) Will I be paid?

THE VOICE: Yes, as usual--in love.

BEAUTY: (_With a faint laugh which disturbs only momentarily the

immobility of her lips_) And will I like being called a jazz-baby?

THE VOICE: (_Soberly_) You will love it....

(_The dialogue ends here, with_ BEAUTY _still sitting quietly, the stars

pausing in an ecstasy of appreciation, the wind, white and gusty,

blowing through her hair._

_All this took place seven years before_ ANTHONY _sat by the front

windows of his apartment and listened to the chimes of St. Anne's_.)

CHAPTER II

PORTRAIT OF A SIREN

Crispness folded down upon New York a month later, bringing November and

the three big football games and a great fluttering of furs along Fifth

Avenue. It brought, also, a sense of tension to the city, and suppressed

excitement. Every morning now there were invitations in Anthony's mail.

Three dozen virtuous females of the first layer were proclaiming their

fitness, if not their specific willingness, to bear children unto three

dozen millionaires. Five dozen virtuous females of the second layer were

proclaiming not only this fitness, but in addition a tremendous

undaunted ambition toward the first three dozen young men, who were of

course invited to each of the ninety-six parties--as were the young

lady's group of family friends, acquaintances, college boys, and eager

young outsiders. To continue, there was a third layer from the skirts of

the city, from Newark and the Jersey suburbs up to bitter Connecticut

and the ineligible sections of Long Island--and doubtless contiguous

layers down to the city's shoes: Jewesses were coming out into a society

of Jewish men and women, from Riverside to the Bronx, and looking

forward to a rising young broker or jeweller and a kosher wedding; Irish

girls were casting their eyes, with license at last to do so, upon a

society of young Tammany politicians, pious undertakers, and grown-up

choirboys.

And, naturally, the city caught the contagious air of entré--the working

girls, poor ugly souls, wrapping soap in the factories and showing

finery in the big stores, dreamed that perhaps in the spectacular

excitement of this winter they might obtain for themselves the coveted

male--as in a muddled carnival crowd an inefficient pickpocket may

consider his chances increased. And the chimneys commenced to smoke and

the subway's foulness was freshened. And the actresses came out in new

plays and the publishers came out with new books and the Castles came

out with new dances. And the railroads came out with new schedules

containing new mistakes instead of the old ones that the commuters had

grown used to....

The City was coming out!

Anthony, walking along Forty-second Street one afternoon under a

steel-gray sky, ran unexpectedly into Richard Caramel emerging from the

Manhattan Hotel barber shop. It was a cold day, the first definitely

cold day, and Caramel had on one of those knee-length, sheep-lined coats

long worn by the working men of the Middle West, that were just coming

into fashionable approval. His soft hat was of a discreet dark brown,

and from under it his clear eye flamed like a topaz. He stopped Anthony

enthusiastically, slapping him on the arms more from a desire to keep

himself warm than from playfulness, and, after his inevitable hand

shake, exploded into sound.

"Cold as the devil--Good Lord, I've been working like the deuce all day

till my room got so cold I thought I'd get pneumonia. Darn landlady

economizing on coal came up when I yelled over the stairs for her for

half an hour. Began explaining why and all. God! First she drove me

crazy, then I began to think she was sort of a character, and took notes

while she talked--so she couldn't see me, you know, just as though I

were writing casually--"

He had seized Anthony's arm and walking him briskly up Madison Avenue.

"Where to?"

"Nowhere in particular."

"Well, then what's the use?" demanded Anthony.

They stopped and stared at each other, and Anthony wondered if the cold

made his own face as repellent as Dick Caramel's, whose nose was

crimson, whose bulging brow was blue, whose yellow unmatched eyes were

red and watery at the rims. After a moment they began walking again.

"Done some good work on my novel." Dick was looking and talking

emphatically at the sidewalk. "But I have to get out once in a while."

He glanced at Anthony apologetically, as though craving encouragement.

"I have to talk. I guess very few people ever really _think_, I mean sit

down and ponder and have ideas in sequence. I do my thinking in writing

or conversation. You've got to have a start, sort of--something to

defend or contradict--don't you think?"

Anthony grunted and withdrew his arm gently.

"I don't mind carrying you, Dick, but with that coat--"

"I mean," continued Richard Caramel gravely, "that on paper your first

paragraph contains the idea you're going to damn or enlarge on. In

conversation you've got your vis-à-vis's last statement--but when you

simply _ponder_, why, your ideas just succeed each other like

magic-lantern pictures and each one forces out the last."

They passed Forty-fifth Street and slowed down slightly. Both of them

lit cigarettes and blew tremendous clouds of smoke and frosted breath

into the air.

"Let's walk up to the Plaza and have an egg-nog," suggested Anthony. "Do

you good. Air'll get the rotten nicotine out of your lungs. Come

on--I'll let you talk about your book all the way."

"I don't want to if it bores you. I mean you needn't do it as a favor."

The words tumbled out in haste, and though he tried to keep his face

casual it screwed up uncertainly. Anthony was compelled to protest:

"Bore me? I should say not!"

"Got a cousin--" began Dick, but Anthony interrupted by stretching out

his arms and breathing forth a low cry of exultation.

"Good weather!" he exclaimed, "isn't it? Makes me feel about ten. I mean

it makes me feel as I should have felt when I was ten. Murderous! Oh,

God! one minute it's my world, and the next I'm the world's fool. To-day

it's my world and everything's easy, easy. Even Nothing is easy!"

"Got a cousin up at the Plaza. Famous girl. We can go up and meet her.

She lives there in the winter--has lately anyway--with her mother

and father."

"Didn't know you had cousins in New York."

"Her name's Gloria. She's from home--Kansas City. Her mother's a

practising Bilphist, and her father's quite dull but a perfect

gentleman."

"What are they? Literary material?"

"They try to be. All the old man does is tell me he just met the most

wonderful character for a novel. Then he tells me about some idiotic

friend of his and then he says: '_There_'s a character for you! Why

don't you write him up? Everybody'd be interested in _him_.' Or else he

tells me about Japan or Paris, or some other very obvious place, and

says: 'Why don't you write a story about that place? That'd be a

wonderful setting for a story!'"

"How about the girl?" inquired Anthony casually, "Gloria--Gloria what?"

"Gilbert. Oh, you've heard of her--Gloria Gilbert. Goes to dances at

colleges--all that sort of thing."

"I've heard her name."

"Good-looking--in fact damned attractive."

They reached Fiftieth Street and turned over toward the Avenue.

"I don't care for young girls as a rule," said Anthony, frowning.

This was not strictly true. While it seemed to him that the average

debutante spent every hour of her day thinking and talking about what

the great world had mapped out for her to do during the next hour, any

girl who made a living directly on her prettiness interested him

enormously.

"Gloria's darn nice--not a brain in her head."

Anthony laughed in a one-syllabled snort.

"By that you mean that she hasn't a line of literary patter."

"No, I don't."

"Dick, you know what passes as brains in a girl for you. Earnest young

women who sit with you in a corner and talk earnestly about life. The

kind who when they were sixteen argued with grave faces as to whether

kissing was right or wrong--and whether it was immoral for freshmen to

drink beer."

Richard Caramel was offended. His scowl crinkled like crushed paper.

"No--" he began, but Anthony interrupted ruthlessly.

"Oh, yes; kind who just at present sit in corners and confer on the

latest Scandinavian Dante available in English translation."

Dick turned to him, a curious falling in his whole countenance. His

question was almost an appeal.

"What's the matter with you and Maury? You talk sometimes as though I

were a sort of inferior."

Anthony was confused, but he was also cold and a little uncomfortable,

so he took refuge in attack.

"I don't think your brains matter, Dick."

"Of course they matter!" exclaimed Dick angrily. "What do you mean? Why

don't they matter?"

"You might know too much for your pen."

"I couldn't possibly."

"I can imagine," insisted Anthony, "a man knowing too much for his

talent to express. Like me. Suppose, for instance, I have more wisdom

than you, and less talent. It would tend to make me inarticulate. You,

on the contrary, have enough water to fill the pail and a big enough

pail to hold the water."

"I don't follow you at all," complained Dick in a crestfallen tone.

Infinitely dismayed, he seemed to bulge in protest. He was staring

intently at Anthony and caroming off a succession of passers-by, who

reproached him with fierce, resentful glances.

"I simply mean that a talent like Wells's could carry the intelligence

of a Spencer. But an inferior talent can only be graceful when it's

carrying inferior ideas. And the more narrowly you can look at a thing

the more entertaining you can be about it."

Dick considered, unable to decide the exact degree of criticism intended

by Anthony's remarks. But Anthony, with that facility which seemed so

frequently to flow from him, continued, his dark eyes gleaming in his

thin face, his chin raised, his voice raised, his whole physical

being raised:

"Say I am proud and sane and wise--an Athenian among Greeks. Well, I

might fail where a lesser man would succeed. He could imitate, he could

adorn, he could be enthusiastic, he could be hopefully constructive. But

this hypothetical me would be too proud to imitate, too sane to be

enthusiastic, too sophisticated to be Utopian, too Grecian to adorn."

"Then you don't think the artist works from his intelligence?"

"No. He goes on improving, if he can, what he imitates in the way of

style, and choosing from his own interpretation of the things around him

what constitutes material. But after all every writer writes because

it's his mode of living. Don't tell me you like this 'Divine Function of

the Artist' business?"

"I'm not accustomed even to refer to myself as an artist."

"Dick," said Anthony, changing his tone, "I want to beg your pardon."

"Why?"

"For that outburst. I'm honestly sorry. I was talking for effect."

Somewhat mollified, Dick rejoined:

"I've often said you were a Philistine at heart."

It was a crackling dusk when they turned in under the white façade of

the Plaza and tasted slowly the foam and yellow thickness of an egg-nog.

Anthony looked at his companion. Richard Caramel's nose and brow were

slowly approaching a like pigmentation; the red was leaving the one, the

blue deserting the other. Glancing in a mirror, Anthony was glad to find

that his own skin had not discolored. On the contrary, a faint glow had

kindled in his cheeks--he fancied that he had never looked so well.

"Enough for me," said Dick, his tone that of an athlete in training. "I

want to go up and see the Gilberts. Won't you come?"

"Why--yes. If you don't dedicate me to the parents and dash off in the

corner with Dora."

"Not Dora--Gloria."

A clerk announced them over the phone, and ascending to the tenth floor

they followed a winding corridor and knocked at 1088. The door was

answered by a middle-aged lady--Mrs. Gilbert herself.

"How do you do?" She spoke in the conventional American lady-lady

language. "Well, I'm _aw_fully glad to see you--"

Hasty interjections by Dick, and then:

"Mr. Pats? Well, do come in, and leave your coat there." She pointed to

a chair and changed her inflection to a deprecatory laugh full of minute

gasps. "This is really lovely--lovely. Why, Richard, you haven't been

here for _so_ long--no!--no!" The latter monosyllables served half as

responses, half as periods, to some vague starts from Dick. "Well, do

sit down and tell me what you've been doing."

One crossed and recrossed; one stood and bowed ever so gently; one

smiled again and again with helpless stupidity; one wondered if she

would ever sit down at length one slid thankfully into a chair and

settled for a pleasant call.

"I suppose it's because you've been busy--as much as anything else,"

smiled Mrs. Gilbert somewhat ambiguously. The "as much as anything else"

she used to balance all her more rickety sentences. She had two other

ones: "at least that's the way I look at it" and "pure and

simple"--these three, alternated, gave each of her remarks an air of

being a general reflection on life, as though she had calculated all

causes and, at length, put her finger on the ultimate one.

Richard Caramel's face, Anthony saw, was now quite normal. The brow and

cheeks were of a flesh color, the nose politely inconspicuous. He had

fixed his aunt with the bright-yellow eye, giving her that acute and

exaggerated attention that young males are accustomed to render to all

females who are of no further value.

"Are you a writer too, Mr. Pats? ... Well, perhaps we can all bask in

Richard's fame."--Gentle laughter led by Mrs. Gilbert.

"Gloria's out," she said, with an air of laying down an axiom from which

she would proceed to derive results. "She's dancing somewhere. Gloria

goes, goes, goes. I tell her I don't see how she stands it. She dances

all afternoon and all night, until I think she's going to wear herself

to a shadow. Her father is very worried about her."

She smiled from one to the other. They both smiled.

She was composed, Anthony perceived, of a succession of semicircles and

parabolas, like those figures that gifted folk make on the typewriter:

head, arms, bust, hips, thighs, and ankles were in a bewildering tier of

roundnesses. Well ordered and clean she was, with hair of an

artificially rich gray; her large face sheltered weather-beaten blue

eyes and was adorned with just the faintest white mustache.

"I always say," she remarked to Anthony, "that Richard is an ancient

soul."

In the tense pause that followed, Anthony considered a pun--something

about Dick having been much walked upon.

"We all have souls of different ages," continued Mrs. Gilbert radiantly;

"at least that's what I say."

"Perhaps so," agreed Anthony with an air of quickening to a hopeful

idea. The voice bubbled on:

"Gloria has a very young soul--irresponsible, as much as anything else.

She has no sense of responsibility."

"She's sparkling, Aunt Catherine," said Richard pleasantly. "A sense of

responsibility would spoil her. She's too pretty."

"Well," confessed Mrs. Gilbert, "all I know is that she goes and goes

and goes--"

The number of goings to Gloria's discredit was lost in the rattle of the

door-knob as it turned to admit Mr. Gilbert.

He was a short man with a mustache resting like a small white cloud

beneath his undistinguished nose. He had reached the stage where his

value as a social creature was a black and imponderable negative. His

ideas were the popular delusions of twenty years before; his mind

steered a wabbly and anaemic course in the wake of the daily newspaper

editorials. After graduating from a small but terrifying Western

university, he had entered the celluloid business, and as this required

only the minute measure of intelligence he brought to it, he did well

for several years--in fact until about 1911, when he began exchanging

contracts for vague agreements with the moving picture industry. The

moving picture industry had decided about 1912 to gobble him up, and at

this time he was, so to speak, delicately balanced on its tongue.

Meanwhile he was supervising manager of the Associated Mid-western Film

Materials Company, spending six months of each year in New York and the

remainder in Kansas City and St. Louis. He felt credulously that there

was a good thing coming to him--and his wife thought so, and his

daughter thought so too.

He disapproved of Gloria: she stayed out late, she never ate her meals,

she was always in a mix-up--he had irritated her once and she had used

toward him words that he had not thought were part of her vocabulary.

His wife was easier. After fifteen years of incessant guerilla warfare

he had conquered her--it was a war of muddled optimism against organized

dulness, and something in the number of "yes's" with which he could

poison a conversation had won him the victory.

"Yes-yes-yes-yes," he would say, "yes-yes-yes-yes. Let me see. That was

the summer of--let me see--ninety-one or ninety-two--Yes-yes-yes-yes----"

Fifteen years of yes's had beaten Mrs. Gilbert. Fifteen further years of

that incessant unaffirmative affirmative, accompanied by the perpetual

flicking of ash-mushrooms from thirty-two thousand cigars, had broken

her. To this husband of hers she made the last concession of married

life, which is more complete, more irrevocable, than the first--she

listened to him. She told herself that the years had brought her

tolerance--actually they had slain what measure she had ever possessed

of moral courage.

She introduced him to Anthony.

"This is Mr. Pats," she said.

The young man and the old touched flesh; Mr. Gilbert's hand was soft,

worn away to the pulpy semblance of a squeezed grapefruit. Then husband

and wife exchanged greetings--he told her it had grown colder out; he

said he had walked down to a news-stand on Forty-fourth Street for a

Kansas City paper. He had intended to ride back in the bus but he had

found it too cold, yes, yes, yes, yes, too cold.

Mrs. Gilbert added flavor to his adventure by being impressed with his

courage in braving the harsh air.

"Well, you _are_ spunky!" she exclaimed admiringly. "You _are_ spunky. I

wouldn't have gone out for anything."

Mr. Gilbert with true masculine impassivity disregarded the awe he had

excited in his wife. He turned to the two young men and triumphantly

routed them on the subject of the weather. Richard Caramel was called on

to remember the month of November in Kansas. No sooner had the theme

been pushed toward him, however, than it was violently fished back to be

lingered over, pawed over, elongated, and generally devitalized by

its sponsor.

The immemorial thesis that the days somewhere were warm but the nights

very pleasant was successfully propounded and they decided the exact

distance on an obscure railroad between two points that Dick had

inadvertently mentioned. Anthony fixed Mr. Gilbert with a steady stare

and went into a trance through which, after a moment, Mrs. Gilbert's

smiling voice penetrated:

"It seems as though the cold were damper here--it seems to eat into my

bones."

As this remark, adequately yessed, had been on the tip of Mr. Gilbert's

tongue, he could not be blamed for rather abruptly changing the subject.

"Where's Gloria?"

"She ought to be here any minute."

"Have you met my daughter, Mr.----?"

"Haven't had the pleasure. I've heard Dick speak of her often."

"She and Richard are cousins."

"Yes?" Anthony smiled with some effort. He was not used to the society

of his seniors, and his mouth was stiff from superfluous cheerfulness.

It was such a pleasant thought about Gloria and Dick being cousins. He

managed within the next minute to throw an agonized glance at

his friend.

Richard Caramel was afraid they'd have to toddle off.

Mrs. Gilbert was tremendously sorry.

Mr. Gilbert thought it was too bad.

Mrs. Gilbert had a further idea--something about being glad they'd come,

anyhow, even if they'd only seen an old lady 'way too old to flirt with

them. Anthony and Dick evidently considered this a sly sally, for they

laughed one bar in three-four time.

Would they come again soon?

"Oh, yes."

Gloria would be _aw_fully sorry!

"Good-by----"

"Good-by----"

Smiles!

Smiles!

Bang!

Two disconsolate young men walking down the tenth-floor corridor of the

Plaza in the direction of the elevator.

A LADY'S LEGS

Behind Maury Noble's attractive indolence, his irrelevance and his easy

mockery, lay a surprising and relentless maturity of purpose. His

intention, as he stated it in college, had been to use three years in

travel, three years in utter leisure--and then to become immensely rich

as quickly as possible.

His three years of travel were over. He had accomplished the globe with

an intensity and curiosity that in any one else would have seemed

pedantic, without redeeming spontaneity, almost the self-editing of a

human Baedeker; but, in this case, it assumed an air of mysterious

purpose and significant design--as though Maury Noble were some

predestined anti-Christ, urged by a preordination to go everywhere there

was to go along the earth and to see all the billions of humans who bred

and wept and slew each other here and there upon it.

Back in America, he was sallying into the search for amusement with the

same consistent absorption. He who had never taken more than a few

cocktails or a pint of wine at a sitting, taught himself to drink as he

would have taught himself Greek--like Greek it would be the gateway to a

wealth of new sensations, new psychic states, new reactions in joy

or misery.

His habits were a matter for esoteric speculation. He had three rooms in

a bachelor apartment on Forty-forth street, but he was seldom to be

found there. The telephone girl had received the most positive

instructions that no one should even have his ear without first giving a

name to be passed upon. She had a list of half a dozen people to whom he

was never at home, and of the same number to whom he was always at home.

Foremost on the latter list were Anthony Patch and Richard Caramel.

Maury's mother lived with her married son in Philadelphia, and there

Maury went usually for the week-ends, so one Saturday night when

Anthony, prowling the chilly streets in a fit of utter boredom, dropped

in at the Molton Arms he was overjoyed to find that Mr. Noble was

at home.

His spirits soared faster than the flying elevator. This was so good, so

extremely good, to be about to talk to Maury--who would be equally happy

at seeing him. They would look at each other with a deep affection just

behind their eyes which both would conceal beneath some attenuated

raillery. Had it been summer they would have gone out together and

indolently sipped two long Tom Collinses, as they wilted their collars

and watched the faintly diverting round of some lazy August cabaret. But

it was cold outside, with wind around the edges of the tall buildings

and December just up the street, so better far an evening together under

the soft lamplight and a drink or two of Bushmill's, or a thimbleful of

Maury's Grand Marnier, with the books gleaming like ornaments against

the walls, and Maury radiating a divine inertia as he rested, large and

catlike, in his favorite chair.

There he was! The room closed about Anthony, warmed him. The glow of

that strong persuasive mind, that temperament almost Oriental in its

outward impassivity, warmed Anthony's restless soul and brought him a

peace that could be likened only to the peace a stupid woman gives. One

must understand all--else one must take all for granted. Maury filled

the room, tigerlike, godlike. The winds outside were stilled; the brass

candlesticks on the mantel glowed like tapers before an altar.

"What keeps you here to-day?" Anthony spread himself over a yielding

sofa and made an elbow-rest among the pillows.

"Just been here an hour. Tea dance--and I stayed so late I missed my

train to Philadelphia."

"Strange to stay so long," commented Anthony curiously.

"Rather. What'd you do?"

"Geraldine. Little usher at Keith's. I told you about her."

"Oh!"

"Paid me a call about three and stayed till five. Peculiar little

soul--she gets me. She's so utterly stupid."

Maury was silent.

"Strange as it may seem," continued Anthony, "so far as I'm concerned,

and even so far as I know, Geraldine is a paragon of virtue."

He had known her a month, a girl of nondescript and nomadic habits.

Someone had casually passed her on to Anthony, who considered her

amusing and rather liked the chaste and fairylike kisses she had given

him on the third night of their acquaintance, when they had driven in a

taxi through the Park. She had a vague family--a shadowy aunt and uncle

who shared with her an apartment in the labyrinthine hundreds. She was

company, familiar and faintly intimate and restful. Further than that he

did not care to experiment--not from any moral compunction, but from a

dread of allowing any entanglement to disturb what he felt was the

growing serenity of his life.

"She has two stunts," he informed Maury; "one of them is to get her hair

over her eyes some way and then blow it out, and the other is to say

'You cra-a-azy!' when some one makes a remark that's over her head. It

fascinates me. I sit there hour after hour, completely intrigued by the

maniacal symptoms she finds in my imagination."

Maury stirred in his chair and spoke.

"Remarkable that a person can comprehend so little and yet live in such

a complex civilization. A woman like that actually takes the whole

universe in the most matter-of-fact way. From the influence of Rousseau

to the bearing of the tariff rates on her dinner, the whole phenomenon

is utterly strange to her. She's just been carried along from an age of

spearheads and plunked down here with the equipment of an archer for

going into a pistol duel. You could sweep away the entire crust of

history and she'd never know the difference."

"I wish our Richard would write about her."

"Anthony, surely you don't think she's worth writing about."

"As much as anybody," he answered, yawning. "You know I was thinking

to-day that I have a great confidence in Dick. So long as he sticks to

people and not to ideas, and as long as his inspirations come from life

and not from art, and always granting a normal growth, I believe he'll

be a big man."

"I should think the appearance of the black note-book would prove that

he's going to life."

Anthony raised himself on his elbow and answered eagerly:

"He tries to go to life. So does every author except the very worst, but

after all most of them live on predigested food. The incident or

character may be from life, but the writer usually interprets it in

terms of the last book he read. For instance, suppose he meets a sea

captain and thinks he's an original character. The truth is that he sees

the resemblance between the sea captain and the last sea captain Dana

created, or who-ever creates sea captains, and therefore he knows how

to set this sea captain on paper. Dick, of course, can set down any

consciously picturesque, character-like character, but could he

accurately transcribe his own sister?"

Then they were off for half an hour on literature.

"A classic," suggested Anthony, "is a successful book that has survived

the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it's safe, like a

style in architecture or furniture. It's acquired a picturesque dignity

to take the place of its fashion...."

After a time the subject temporarily lost its tang. The interest of the

two young men was not particularly technical. They were in love with

generalities. Anthony had recently discovered Samuel Butler and the

brisk aphorisms in the note-book seemed to him the quintessence of

criticism. Maury, his whole mind so thoroughly mellowed by the very

hardness of his scheme of life, seemed inevitably the wiser of the two,

yet in the actual stuff of their intelligences they were not, it seemed,

fundamentally different.

They drifted from letters to the curiosities of each other's day.

"Whose tea was it?"

"People named Abercrombie."

"Why'd you stay late? Meet a luscious débutante?"

"Yes."

"Did you really?" Anthony's voice lifted in surprise.

"Not a débutante exactly. Said she came out two winters ago in Kansas

City."

"Sort of left-over?"

"No," answered Maury with some amusement, "I think that's the last thing

I'd say about her. She seemed--well, somehow the youngest person there."

"Not too young to make you miss a train."

"Young enough. Beautiful child."

Anthony chuckled in his one-syllable snort.

"Oh, Maury, you're in your second childhood. What do you mean by

beautiful?"

Maury gazed helplessly into space.

"Well, I can't describe her exactly--except to say that she was

beautiful. She was--tremendously alive. She was eating gum-drops."

"What!"

"It was a sort of attenuated vice. She's a nervous kind--said she always

ate gum-drops at teas because she had to stand around so long in

one place."

"What'd you talk about--Bergson? Bilphism? Whether the one-step is

immoral?"

Maury was unruffled; his fur seemed to run all ways.

"As a matter of fact we did talk on Bilphism. Seems her mother's a

Bilphist. Mostly, though, we talked about legs."

Anthony rocked in glee.

"My God! Whose legs?"

"Hers. She talked a lot about hers. As though they were a sort of choice

bric-à-brac. She aroused a great desire to see them."

"What is she--a dancer?"

"No, I found she was a cousin of Dick's."

Anthony sat upright so suddenly that the pillow he released stood on end

like a live thing and dove to the floor.

"Name's Gloria Gilbert?" he cried.

"Yes. Isn't she remarkable?"

"I'm sure I don't know--but for sheer dulness her father--"

"Well," interrupted Maury with implacable conviction, "her family may be

as sad as professional mourners but I'm inclined to think that she's a

quite authentic and original character. The outer signs of the

cut-and-dried Yale prom girl and all that--but different, very

emphatically different."

"Go on, go on!" urged Anthony. "Soon as Dick told me she didn't have a

brain in her head I knew she must be pretty good."

"Did he say that?"

"Swore to it," said Anthony with another snorting laugh.

"Well, what he means by brains in a woman is--"

"I know," interrupted Anthony eagerly, "he means a smattering of

literary misinformation."

"That's it. The kind who believes that the annual moral let-down of the

country is a very good thing or the kind who believes it's a very

ominous thing. Either pince-nez or postures. Well, this girl talked

about legs. She talked about skin too--her own skin. Always her own. She

told me the sort of tan she'd like to get in the summer and how closely

she usually approximated it."

"You sat enraptured by her low alto?"

"By her low alto! No, by tan! I began thinking about tan. I began to

think what color I turned when I made my last exposure about two years

ago. I did use to get a pretty good tan. I used to get a sort of bronze,

if I remember rightly."

Anthony retired into the cushions, shaken with laughter.

"She's got you going--oh, Maury! Maury the Connecticut life-saver. The

human nutmeg. Extra! Heiress elopes with coast-guard because of his

luscious pigmentation! Afterward found to be Tasmanian strain in

his family!"

Maury sighed; rising he walked to the window and raised the shade.

"Snowing hard."

Anthony, still laughing quietly to himself, made no answer.

"Another winter." Maury's voice from the window was almost a whisper.

"We're growing old, Anthony. I'm twenty-seven, by God! Three years to

thirty, and then I'm what an undergraduate calls a middle-aged man."

Anthony was silent for a moment.

"You _are_ old, Maury," he agreed at length. "The first signs of a very

dissolute and wabbly senescence--you have spent the afternoon talking

about tan and a lady's legs."

Maury pulled down the shade with a sudden harsh snap.

"Idiot!" he cried, "that from you! Here I sit, young Anthony, as I'll

sit for a generation or more and watch such gay souls as you and Dick

and Gloria Gilbert go past me, dancing and singing and loving and hating

one another and being moved, being eternally moved. And I am moved only

by my lack of emotion. I shall sit and the snow will come--oh, for a

Caramel to take notes--and another winter and I shall be thirty and you

and Dick and Gloria will go on being eternally moved and dancing by me

and singing. But after you've all gone I'll be saying things for new

Dicks to write down, and listening to the disillusions and cynicisms and

emotions of new Anthonys--yes, and talking to new Glorias about the tans

of summers yet to come."

The firelight flurried up on the hearth. Maury left the window, stirred

the blaze with a poker, and dropped a log upon the andirons. Then he sat

back in his chair and the remnants of his voice faded in the new fire

that spit red and yellow along the bark.

"After all, Anthony, it's you who are very romantic and young. It's you

who are infinitely more susceptible and afraid of your calm being

broken. It's me who tries again and again to be moved--let myself go a

thousand times and I'm always me. Nothing--quite--stirs me.

"Yet," he murmured after another long pause, "there was something about

that little girl with her absurd tan that was eternally old--like me."

TURBULENCE

Anthony turned over sleepily in his bed, greeting a patch of cold sun on

his counterpane, crisscrossed with the shadows of the leaded window. The

room was full of morning. The carved chest in the corner, the ancient

and inscrutable wardrobe, stood about the room like dark symbols of the

obliviousness of matter; only the rug was beckoning and perishable to

his perishable feet, and Bounds, horribly inappropriate in his soft

collar, was of stuff as fading as the gauze of frozen breath he uttered.

He was close to the bed, his hand still lowered where he had been

jerking at the upper blanket, his dark-brown eyes fixed imperturbably

upon his master.

"Bows!" muttered the drowsy god. "Thachew, Bows?"

"It's I, sir."

Anthony moved his head, forced his eyes wide, and blinked triumphantly.

"Bounds."

"Yes, sir?"

"Can you get off--yeow-ow-oh-oh-oh God!--" Anthony yawned insufferably

and the contents of his brain seemed to fall together in a dense hash.

He made a fresh start.

"Can you come around about four and serve some tea and sandwiches or

something?"

"Yes, sir."

Anthony considered with chilling lack of inspiration. "Some sandwiches,"

he repeated helplessly, "oh, some cheese sandwiches and jelly ones and

chicken and olive, I guess. Never mind breakfast."

The strain of invention was too much. He shut his eyes wearily, let his

head roll to rest inertly, and quickly relaxed what he had regained of

muscular control. Out of a crevice of his mind crept the vague but

inevitable spectre of the night before--but it proved in this case to be

nothing but a seemingly interminable conversation with Richard Caramel,

who had called on him at midnight; they had drunk four bottles of beer

and munched dry crusts of bread while Anthony listened to a reading of

the first part of "The Demon Lover."

--Came a voice now after many hours. Anthony disregarded it, as sleep

closed over him, folded down upon him, crept up into the byways of

his mind.

Suddenly he was awake, saying: "What?"

"For how many, sir?" It was still Bounds, standing patient and

motionless at the foot of the bed--Bounds who divided his manner among

three gentlemen.

"How many what?"

"I think, sir, I'd better know how many are coming. I'll have to plan

for the sandwiches, sir."

"Two," muttered Anthony huskily; "lady and a gentleman."

Bounds said, "Thank you, sir," and moved away, bearing with him his

humiliating reproachful soft collar, reproachful to each of the three

gentlemen, who only demanded of him a third.

After a long time Anthony arose and drew an opalescent dressing grown of

brown and blue over his slim pleasant figure. With a last yawn he went

into the bathroom, and turning on the dresser light (the bathroom had no

outside exposure) he contemplated himself in the mirror with some

interest. A wretched apparition, he thought; he usually thought so in

the morning--sleep made his face unnaturally pale. He lit a cigarette

and glanced through several letters and the morning Tribune.

An hour later, shaven and dressed, he was sitting at his desk looking at

a small piece of paper he had taken out of his wallet. It was scrawled

with semi-legible memoranda: "See Mr. Howland at five. Get hair-cut. See

about Rivers' bill. Go book-store."

--And under the last: "Cash in bank, $690 (crossed out), $612 (crossed

out), $607."

Finally, down at the bottom and in a hurried scrawl: "Dick and Gloria

Gilbert for tea."

This last item brought him obvious satisfaction. His day, usually a

jelly-like creature, a shapeless, spineless thing, had attained Mesozoic

structure. It was marching along surely, even jauntily, toward a climax,

as a play should, as a day should. He dreaded the moment when the

backbone of the day should be broken, when he should have met the girl

at last, talked to her, and then bowed her laughter out the door,

returning only to the melancholy dregs in the teacups and the gathering

staleness of the uneaten sandwiches.

There was a growing lack of color in Anthony's days. He felt it

constantly and sometimes traced it to a talk he had had with Maury Noble

a month before. That anything so ingenuous, so priggish, as a sense of

waste should oppress him was absurd, but there was no denying the fact

that some unwelcome survival of a fetish had drawn him three weeks

before down to the public library, where, by the token of Richard

Caramel's card, he had drawn out half a dozen books on the Italian

Renaissance. That these books were still piled on his desk in the

original order of carriage, that they were daily increasing his

liabilities by twelve cents, was no mitigation of their testimony. They

were cloth and morocco witnesses to the fact of his defection. Anthony

had had several hours of acute and startling panic.

In justification of his manner of living there was first, of course, The

Meaninglessness of Life. As aides and ministers, pages and squires,

butlers and lackeys to this great Khan there were a thousand books

glowing on his shelves, there was his apartment and all the money that

was to be his when the old man up the river should choke on his last

morality. From a world fraught with the menace of débutantes and the

stupidity of many Geraldines he was thankfully delivered--rather should

he emulate the feline immobility of Maury and wear proudly the

culminative wisdom of the numbered generations.

Over and against these things was something which his brain persistently

analyzed and dealt with as a tiresome complex but which, though

logically disposed of and bravely trampled under foot, had sent him out

through the soft slush of late November to a library which had none of

the books he most wanted. It is fair to analyze Anthony as far as he

could analyze himself; further than that it is, of course, presumption.

He found in himself a growing horror and loneliness. The idea of eating

alone frightened him; in preference he dined often with men he detested.

Travel, which had once charmed him, seemed at length, unendurable, a

business of color without substance, a phantom chase after his own

dream's shadow.

--If I am essentially weak, he thought, I need work to do, work to do.

It worried him to think that he was, after all, a facile mediocrity,

with neither the poise of Maury nor the enthusiasm of Dick. It seemed a

tragedy to want nothing--and yet he wanted something, something. He knew

in flashes what it was--some path of hope to lead him toward what he

thought was an imminent and ominous old age.

After cocktails and luncheon at the University Club Anthony felt better.

He had run into two men from his class at Harvard, and in contrast to

the gray heaviness of their conversation his life assumed color. Both of

them were married: one spent his coffee time in sketching an

extra-nuptial adventure to the bland and appreciative smiles of the

other. Both of them, he thought, were Mr. Gilberts in embryo; the number

of their "yes's" would have to be quadrupled, their natures crabbed by

twenty years--then they would be no more than obsolete and broken

machines, pseudo-wise and valueless, nursed to an utter senility by the

women they had broken.

Ah, he was more than that, as he paced the long carpet in the lounge

after dinner, pausing at the window to look into the harried street. He

was Anthony Patch, brilliant, magnetic, the heir of many years and many

men. This was his world now--and that last strong irony he craved lay in

the offing.

With a stray boyishness he saw himself a power upon the earth; with his

grandfather's money he might build his own pedestal and be a Talleyrand,

a Lord Verulam. The clarity of his mind, its sophistication, its

versatile intelligence, all at their maturity and dominated by some

purpose yet to be born would find him work to do. On this minor his

dream faded--work to do: he tried to imagine himself in Congress rooting

around in the litter of that incredible pigsty with the narrow and

porcine brows he saw pictured sometimes in the rotogravure sections of

the Sunday newspapers, those glorified proletarians babbling blandly to

the nation the ideas of high school seniors! Little men with copy-book

ambitions who by mediocrity had thought to emerge from mediocrity into

the lustreless and unromantic heaven of a government by the people--and

the best, the dozen shrewd men at the top, egotistic and cynical, were

content to lead this choir of white ties and wire collar-buttons in a

discordant and amazing hymn, compounded of a vague confusion between

wealth as a reward of virtue and wealth as a proof of vice, and

continued cheers for God, the Constitution, and the Rocky Mountains!

Lord Verulam! Talleyrand!

Back in his apartment the grayness returned. His cocktails had died,

making him sleepy, somewhat befogged and inclined to be surly. Lord

Verulam--he? The very thought was bitter. Anthony Patch with no record

of achievement, without courage, without strength to be satisfied with

truth when it was given him. Oh, he was a pretentious fool, making

careers out of cocktails and meanwhile regretting, weakly and secretly,

the collapse of an insufficient and wretched idealism. He had garnished

his soul in the subtlest taste and now he longed for the old rubbish. He

was empty, it seemed, empty as an old bottle--

The buzzer rang at the door. Anthony sprang up and lifted the tube to

his ear. It was Richard Caramel's voice, stilted and facetious:

"Announcing Miss Gloria Gilbert."

"How do you do?" he said, smiling and holding the door ajar.

Dick bowed.

"Gloria, this is Anthony."

"Well!" she cried, holding out a little gloved hand. Under her fur coat

her dress was Alice-blue, with white lace crinkled stiffly about

her throat.

"Let me take your things."

Anthony stretched out his arms and the brown mass of fur tumbled into

them.

"Thanks."

"What do you think of her, Anthony?" Richard Caramel demanded

barbarously. "Isn't she beautiful?"

"Well!" cried the girl defiantly--withal unmoved.

She was dazzling--alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a

glance. Her hair, full of a heavenly glamour, was gay against the winter

color of the room.

Anthony moved about, magician-like, turning the mushroom lamp into an

orange glory. The stirred fire burnished the copper andirons on

the hearth--

"I'm a solid block of ice," murmured Gloria casually, glancing around

with eyes whose irises were of the most delicate and transparent bluish

white. "What a slick fire! We found a place where you could stand on an

iron-bar grating, sort of, and it blew warm air up at you--but Dick

wouldn't wait there with me. I told him to go on alone and let me

be happy."

Conventional enough this. She seemed talking for her own pleasure,

without effort. Anthony, sitting at one end of the sofa, examined her

profile against the foreground of the lamp: the exquisite regularity of

nose and upper lip, the chin, faintly decided, balanced beautifully on a

rather short neck. On a photograph she must have been completely

classical, almost cold--but the glow of her hair and cheeks, at once

flushed and fragile, made her the most living person he had ever seen.

"... Think you've got the best name I've heard," she was saying, still

apparently to herself; her glance rested on him a moment and then

flitted past him--to the Italian bracket-lamps clinging like luminous

yellow turtles at intervals along the walls, to the books row upon row,

then to her cousin on the other side. "Anthony Patch. Only you ought to

look sort of like a horse, with a long narrow face--and you ought to be

in tatters."

"That's all the Patch part, though. How should Anthony look?"

"You look like Anthony," she assured him seriously--he thought she had

scarcely seen him--"rather majestic," she continued, "and solemn."

Anthony indulged in a disconcerted smile.

"Only I like alliterative names," she went on, "all except mine. Mine's

too flamboyant. I used to know two girls named Jinks, though, and just

think if they'd been named anything except what they were named--Judy

Jinks and Jerry Jinks. Cute, what? Don't you think?" Her childish mouth

was parted, awaiting a rejoinder.

"Everybody in the next generation," suggested Dick, "will be named Peter

or Barbara--because at present all the piquant literary characters are

named Peter or Barbara."

Anthony continued the prophecy:

"Of course Gladys and Eleanor, having graced the last generation of

heroines and being at present in their social prime, will be passed on

to the next generation of shop-girls--"

"Displacing Ella and Stella," interrupted Dick.

"And Pearl and Jewel," Gloria added cordially, "and Earl and Elmer and

Minnie."

"And then I'll come along," remarked Dick, "and picking up the obsolete

name, Jewel, I'll attach it to some quaint and attractive character and

it'll start its career all over again."

Her voice took up the thread of subject and wove along with faintly

upturning, half-humorous intonations for sentence ends--as though

defying interruption--and intervals of shadowy laughter. Dick had told

her that Anthony's man was named Bounds--she thought that was wonderful!

Dick had made some sad pun about Bounds doing patchwork, but if there

was one thing worse than a pun, she said, it was a person who, as the

inevitable come-back to a pun, gave the perpetrator a mock-reproachful

look.

"Where are you from?" inquired Anthony. He knew, but beauty had rendered

him thoughtless.

"Kansas City, Missouri."

"They put her out the same time they barred cigarettes."

"Did they bar cigarettes? I see the hand of my holy grandfather."

"He's a reformer or something, isn't he?"

"I blush for him."

"So do I," she confessed. "I detest reformers, especially the sort who

try to reform me."

"Are there many of those?"

"Dozens. It's 'Oh, Gloria, if you smoke so many cigarettes you'll lose

your pretty complexion!' and 'Oh, Gloria, why don't you marry and

settle down?'"

Anthony agreed emphatically while he wondered who had had the temerity

to speak thus to such a personage.

"And then," she continued, "there are all the subtle reformers who tell

you the wild stories they've heard about you and how they've been

sticking up for you."

He saw, at length, that her eyes were gray, very level and cool, and

when they rested on him he understood what Maury had meant by saying she

was very young and very old. She talked always about herself as a very

charming child might talk, and her comments on her tastes and distastes

were unaffected and spontaneous.

"I must confess," said Anthony gravely, "that even _I_'ve heard one

thing about you."

Alert at once, she sat up straight. Those eyes, with the grayness and

eternity of a cliff of soft granite, caught his.

"Tell me. I'll believe it. I always believe anything any one tells me

about myself--don't you?"

"Invariably!" agreed the two men in unison.

"Well, tell me."

"I'm not sure that I ought to," teased Anthony, smiling unwillingly. She

was so obviously interested, in a state of almost laughable

self-absorption.

"He means your nickname," said her cousin.

"What name?" inquired Anthony, politely puzzled.

Instantly she was shy--then she laughed, rolled back against the

cushions, and turned her eyes up as she spoke:

"Coast-to-Coast Gloria." Her voice was full of laughter, laughter

undefined as the varying shadows playing between fire and lamp upon her

hair. "O Lord!"

Still Anthony was puzzled.

"What do you mean?"

"_Me_, I mean. That's what some silly boys coined for _me_."

"Don't you see, Anthony," explained Dick, "traveller of a nation-wide

notoriety and all that. Isn't that what you've heard? She's been called

that for years--since she was seventeen."

Anthony's eyes became sad and humorous.

"Who's this female Methuselah you've brought in here, Caramel?"

She disregarded this, possibly rather resented it, for she switched back

to the main topic.

"What _have_ you heard of me?"

"Something about your physique."

"Oh," she said, coolly disappointed, "that all?"

"Your tan."

"My tan?" She was puzzled. Her hand rose to her throat, rested there an

instant as though the fingers were feeling variants of color.

"Do you remember Maury Noble? Man you met about a month ago. You made a

great impression."

She thought a moment.

"I remember--but he didn't call me up."

"He was afraid to, I don't doubt."

It was black dark without now and Anthony wondered that his apartment

had ever seemed gray--so warm and friendly were the books and pictures

on the walls and the good Bounds offering tea from a respectful shadow

and the three nice people giving out waves of interest and laughter back

and forth across the happy fire.

DISSATISFACTION

On Thursday afternoon Gloria and Anthony had tea together in the grill

room at the Plaza. Her fur-trimmed suit was gray--"because with gray you

_have_ to wear a lot of paint," she explained--and a small toque sat

rakishly on her head, allowing yellow ripples of hair to wave out in

jaunty glory. In the higher light it seemed to Anthony that her

personality was infinitely softer--she seemed so young, scarcely

eighteen; her form under the tight sheath, known then as a hobble-skirt,

was amazingly supple and slender, and her hands, neither "artistic" nor

stubby, were small as a child's hands should be.

As they entered, the orchestra were sounding the preliminary whimpers to

a maxixe, a tune full of castanets and facile faintly languorous violin

harmonies, appropriate to the crowded winter grill teeming with an

excited college crowd, high-spirited at the approach of the holidays.

Carefully, Gloria considered several locations, and rather to Anthony's

annoyance paraded him circuitously to a table for two at the far side of

the room. Reaching it she again considered. Would she sit on the right

or on the left? Her beautiful eyes and lips were very grave as she made

her choice, and Anthony thought again how naïve was her every gesture;

she took all the things of life for hers to choose from and apportion,

as though she were continually picking out presents for herself from an

inexhaustible counter.

Abstractedly she watched the dancers for a few moments, commenting

murmurously as a couple eddied near.

"There's a pretty girl in blue"--and as Anthony looked obediently--"

there! No. behind you--there!"

"Yes," he agreed helplessly.

"You didn't see her."

"I'd rather look at you."

"I know, but she was pretty. Except that she had big ankles."

"Was she?--I mean, did she?" he said indifferently.

A girl's salutation came from a couple dancing close to them.

"Hello, Gloria! O Gloria!"

"Hello there."

"Who's that?" he demanded.

"I don't know. Somebody." She caught sight of another face. "Hello,

Muriel!" Then to Anthony: "There's Muriel Kane. Now I think she's

attractive, 'cept not very."

Anthony chuckled appreciatively.

"Attractive, 'cept not very," he repeated.

She smiled--was interested immediately.

"Why is that funny?" Her tone was pathetically intent.

"It just was."

"Do you want to dance?"

"Do you?"

"Sort of. But let's sit," she decided.

"And talk about you? You love to talk about you, don't you?"

"Yes." Caught in a vanity, she laughed.

"I imagine your autobiography would be a classic."

"Dick says I haven't got one."

"Dick!" he exclaimed. "What does he know about you?"

"Nothing. But he says the biography of every woman begins with the first

kiss that counts, and ends when her last child is laid in her arms."

"He's talking from his book."

"He says unloved women have no biographies--they have histories."

Anthony laughed again.

"Surely you don't claim to be unloved!"

"Well, I suppose not."

"Then why haven't you a biography? Haven't you ever had a kiss that

counted?" As the words left his lips he drew in his breath sharply as

though to suck them back. This _baby_!

"I don't know what you mean 'counts,'" she objected.

"I wish you'd tell me how old you are."

"Twenty-two," she said, meeting his eyes gravely. "How old did you

think?"

"About eighteen."

"I'm going to start being that. I don't like being twenty-two. I hate it

more than anything in the world."

"Being twenty-two?"

"No. Getting old and everything. Getting married."

"Don't you ever want to marry?"

"I don't want to have responsibility and a lot of children to take care

of."

Evidently she did not doubt that on her lips all things were good. He

waited rather breathlessly for her next remark, expecting it to follow

up her last. She was smiling, without amusement but pleasantly, and

after an interval half a dozen words fell into the space between them:

"I wish I had some gum-drops."

"You shall!" He beckoned to a waiter and sent him to the cigar counter.

"D'you mind? I love gum-drops. Everybody kids me about it because I'm

always whacking away at one--whenever my daddy's not around."

"Not at all.--Who are all these children?" he asked suddenly. "Do you

know them all?"

"Why--no, but they're from--oh, from everywhere, I suppose. Don't you

ever come here?"

"Very seldom. I don't care particularly for 'nice girls.'"

Immediately he had her attention. She turned a definite shoulder to the

dancers, relaxed in her chair, and demanded:

"What _do_ you do with yourself?"

Thanks to a cocktail Anthony welcomed the question. In a mood to talk,

he wanted, moreover, to impress this girl whose interest seemed so

tantalizingly elusive--she stopped to browse in unexpected pastures,

hurried quickly over the inobviously obvious. He wanted to pose. He

wanted to appear suddenly to her in novel and heroic colors. He wanted

to stir her from that casualness she showed toward everything

except herself.

"I do nothing," he began, realizing simultaneously that his words were

to lack the debonair grace he craved for them. "I do nothing, for

there's nothing I can do that's worth doing."

"Well?" He had neither surprised her nor even held her, yet she had

certainly understood him, if indeed he had said aught worth

understanding.

"Don't you approve of lazy men?"

She nodded.

"I suppose so, if they're gracefully lazy. Is that possible for an

American?"

"Why not?" he demanded, discomfited.

But her mind had left the subject and wandered up ten floors.

"My daddy's mad at me," she observed dispassionately.

"Why? But I want to know just why it's impossible for an American to be

gracefully idle"--his words gathered conviction--"it astonishes me.

It--it--I don't understand why people think that every young man ought

to go down-town and work ten hours a day for the best twenty years of

his life at dull, unimaginative work, certainly not altruistic work."

He broke off. She watched him inscrutably. He waited for her to agree or

disagree, but she did neither.

"Don't you ever form judgments on things?" he asked with some

exasperation.

She shook her head and her eyes wandered back to the dancers as she

answered:

"I don't know. I don't know anything about--what you should do, or what

anybody should do."

She confused him and hindered the flow of his ideas. Self-expression had

never seemed at once so desirable and so impossible.

"Well," he admitted apologetically, "neither do I, of course, but--"

"I just think of people," she continued, "whether they seem right where

they are and fit into the picture. I don't mind if they don't do

anything. I don't see why they should; in fact it always astonishes me

when anybody does anything."

"You don't want to do anything?"

"I want to sleep."

For a second he was startled, almost as though she had meant this

literally.

"Sleep?"

"Sort of. I want to just be lazy and I want some of the people around me

to be doing things, because that makes me feel comfortable and safe--and

I want some of them to be doing nothing at all, because they can be

graceful and companionable for me. But I never want to change people or

get excited over them."

"You're a quaint little determinist," laughed Anthony. "It's your world,

isn't it?"

"Well--" she said with a quick upward glance, "isn't it? As long as

I'm--young."

She had paused slightly before the last word and Anthony suspected that

she had started to say "beautiful." It was undeniably what she

had intended.

Her eyes brightened and he waited for her to enlarge on the theme. He

had drawn her out, at any rate--he bent forward slightly to catch

the words.

But "Let's dance!" was all she said.

ADMIRATION

That winter afternoon at the Plaza was the first of a succession of

"dates" Anthony made with her in the blurred and stimulating days before

Christmas. Invariably she was busy. What particular strata of the city's

social life claimed her he was a long time finding out. It seemed to

matter very little. She attended the semi-public charity dances at the

big hotels; he saw her several times at dinner parties in Sherry's, and

once as he waited for her to dress, Mrs. Gilbert, apropos of her

daughter's habit of "going," rattled off an amazing holiday programme

that included half a dozen dances to which Anthony had received cards.

He made engagements with her several times for lunch and tea--the former

were hurried and, to him at least, rather unsatisfactory occasions, for

she was sleepy-eyed and casual, incapable of concentrating upon anything

or of giving consecutive attention to his remarks. When after two of

these sallow meals he accused her of tendering him the skin and bones of

the day she laughed and gave him a tea-time three days off. This was

infinitely more satisfactory.

One Sunday afternoon just before Christmas he called up and found her in

the lull directly after some important but mysterious quarrel: she

informed him in a tone of mingled wrath and amusement that she had sent

a man out of her apartment--here Anthony speculated violently--and that

the man had been giving a little dinner for her that very night and that

of course she wasn't going. So Anthony took her to supper.

"Let's go to something!" she proposed as they went down in the elevator.

"I want to see a show, don't you?"

Inquiry at the hotel ticket desk disclosed only two Sunday night

"concerts."

"They're always the same," she complained unhappily, "same old Yiddish

comedians. Oh, let's go somewhere!"

To conceal a guilty suspicion that he should have arranged a performance

of some kind for her approval Anthony affected a knowing cheerfulness.

"We'll go to a good cabaret."

"I've seen every one in town."

"Well, we'll find a new one."

She was in wretched humor; that was evident. Her gray eyes were granite

now indeed. When she wasn't speaking she stared straight in front of her

as if at some distasteful abstraction in the lobby.

"Well, come on, then."

He followed her, a graceful girl even in her enveloping fur, out to a

taxicab, and, with an air of having a definite place in mind, instructed

the driver to go over to Broadway and then turn south. He made several

casual attempts at conversation but as she adopted an impenetrable armor

of silence and answered him in sentences as morose as the cold darkness

of the taxicab he gave up, and assuming a like mood fell into a

dim gloom.

A dozen blocks down Broadway Anthony's eyes were caught by a large and

unfamiliar electric sign spelling "Marathon" in glorious yellow script,

adorned with electrical leaves and flowers that alternately vanished and

beamed upon the wet and glistening street. He leaned and rapped on the

taxi-window and in a moment was receiving information from a colored

doorman: Yes, this was a cabaret. Fine cabaret. Bes' showina city!

"Shall we try it?"

With a sigh Gloria tossed her cigarette out the open door and prepared

to follow it; then they had passed under the screaming sign, under the

wide portal, and up by a stuffy elevator into this unsung palace

of pleasure.

The gay habitats of the very rich and the very poor, the very dashing

and the very criminal, not to mention the lately exploited very

Bohemian, are made known to the awed high school girls of Augusta,

Georgia, and Redwing, Minnesota, not only through the bepictured and

entrancing spreads of the Sunday theatrical supplements but through the

shocked and alarmful eyes of Mr. Rupert Hughes and other chroniclers of

the mad pace of America. But the excursions of Harlem onto Broadway, the

deviltries of the dull and the revelries of the respectable are a matter

of esoteric knowledge only to the participants themselves.

A tip circulates--and in the place knowingly mentioned, gather the lower

moral-classes on Saturday and Sunday nights--the little troubled men who

are pictured in the comics as "the Consumer" or "the Public." They have

made sure that the place has three qualifications: it is cheap; it

imitates with a sort of shoddy and mechanical wistfulness the glittering

antics of the great cafes in the theatre district; and--this, above all,

important--it is a place where they can "take a nice girl," which means,

of course, that every one has become equally harmless, timid, and

uninteresting through lack of money and imagination.

There on Sunday nights gather the credulous, sentimental, underpaid,

overworked people with hyphenated occupations: book-keepers,

ticket-sellers, office-managers, salesmen, and, most of all,

clerks--clerks of the express, of the mail, of the grocery, of the

brokerage, of the bank. With them are their giggling, over-gestured,

pathetically pretentious women, who grow fat with them, bear them too

many babies, and float helpless and uncontent in a colorless sea of

drudgery and broken hopes.

They name these brummagem cabarets after Pullman cars. The "Marathon"!

Not for them the salacious similes borrowed from the cafés of Paris!

This is where their docile patrons bring their "nice women," whose

starved fancies are only too willing to believe that the scene is

comparatively gay and joyous, and even faintly immoral. This is life!

Who cares for the morrow?

Abandoned people!

Anthony and Gloria, seated, looked about them. At the next table a party

of four were in process of being joined by a party of three, two men and

a girl, who were evidently late--and the manner of the girl was a study

in national sociology. She was meeting some new men--and she was

pretending desperately. By gesture she was pretending and by words and

by the scarcely perceptible motionings of her eyelids that she belonged

to a class a little superior to the class with which she now had to do,

that a while ago she had been, and presently would again be, in a

higher, rarer air. She was almost painfully refined--she wore a last

year's hat covered with violets no more yearningly pretentious and

palpably artificial than herself.

Fascinated, Anthony and Gloria watched the girl sit down and radiate the

impression that she was only condescendingly present. For _me_, her eyes

said, this is practically a slumming expedition, to be cloaked with

belittling laughter and semi-apologetics.

--And the other women passionately poured out the impression that though

they were in the crowd they were not of it. This was not the sort of

place to which they were accustomed; they had dropped in because it was

near by and convenient--every party in the restaurant poured out that

impression ... who knew? They were forever changing class, all of

them--the women often marrying above their opportunities, the men

striking suddenly a magnificent opulence: a sufficiently preposterous

advertising scheme, a celestialized ice cream cone. Meanwhile, they met

here to eat, closing their eyes to the economy displayed in infrequent

changings of table-cloths, in the casualness of the cabaret performers,

most of all in the colloquial carelessness and familiarity of the

waiters. One was sure that these waiters were not impressed by their

patrons. One expected that presently they would sit at the tables ...

"Do you object to this?" inquired Anthony.

Gloria's face warmed and for the first time that evening she smiled.

"I love it," she said frankly. It was impossible to doubt her. Her gray

eyes roved here and there, drowsing, idle or alert, on each group,

passing to the next with unconcealed enjoyment, and to Anthony were made

plain the different values of her profile, the wonderfully alive

expressions of her mouth, and the authentic distinction of face and form

and manner that made her like a single flower amidst a collection of

cheap bric-à-brac. At her happiness, a gorgeous sentiment welled into

his eyes, choked him up, set his nerves a-tingle, and filled his throat

with husky and vibrant emotion. There was a hush upon the room. The

careless violins and saxophones, the shrill rasping complaint of a child

near by, the voice of the violet-hatted girl at the next table, all

moved slowly out, receded, and fell away like shadowy reflections on the

shining floor--and they two, it seemed to him, were alone and infinitely

remote, quiet. Surely the freshness of her cheeks was a gossamer

projection from a land of delicate and undiscovered shades; her hand

gleaming on the stained table-cloth was a shell from some far and wildly

virginal sea....

Then the illusion snapped like a nest of threads; the room grouped

itself around him, voices, faces, movement; the garish shimmer of the

lights overhead became real, became portentous; breath began, the slow

respiration that she and he took in time with this docile hundred, the

rise and fall of bosoms, the eternal meaningless play and interplay and

tossing and reiterating of word and phrase--all these wrenched his

senses open to the suffocating pressure of life--and then her voice came

at him, cool as the suspended dream he had left behind.

"I belong here," she murmured, "I'm like these people."

For an instant this seemed a sardonic and unnecessary paradox hurled at

him across the impassable distances she created about herself. Her

entrancement had increased--her eyes rested upon a Semitic violinist who

swayed his shoulders to the rhythm of the year's mellowest fox-trot:

"Something--goes

Ring-a-ting-a-ling-a-ling

Right in-your ear--"

Again she spoke, from the centre of this pervasive illusion of her own.

It amazed him. It was like blasphemy from the mouth of a child.

"I'm like they are--like Japanese lanterns and crape paper, and the

music of that orchestra."

"You're a young idiot!" he insisted wildly. She shook her blond head.

"No, I'm not. I _am_ like them.... You ought to see.... You don't know

me." She hesitated and her eyes came back to him, rested abruptly on

his, as though surprised at the last to see him there. "I've got a

streak of what you'd call cheapness. I don't know where I get it but

it's--oh, things like this and bright colors and gaudy vulgarity. I seem

to belong here. These people could appreciate me and take me for

granted, and these men would fall in love with me and admire me, whereas

the clever men I meet would just analyze me and tell me I'm this because

of this or that because of that."

--Anthony for the moment wanted fiercely to paint her, to set her down

_now_, as she was, as, as with each relentless second she could never

be again.

"What were you thinking?" she asked.

"Just that I'm not a realist," he said, and then: "No, only the

romanticist preserves the things worth preserving."

Out of the deep sophistication of Anthony an understanding formed,

nothing atavistic or obscure, indeed scarcely physical at all, an

understanding remembered from the romancings of many generations of

minds that as she talked and caught his eyes and turned her lovely head,

she moved him as he had never been moved before. The sheath that held

her soul had assumed significance--that was all. She was a sun, radiant,

growing, gathering light and storing it--then after an eternity pouring

it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence, to that part of him

that cherished all beauty and all illusion.

CHAPTER III

THE CONNOISSEUR OF KISSES

From his undergraduate days as editor of The Harvard Crimson Richard

Caramel had desired to write. But as a senior he had picked up the

glorified illusion that certain men were set aside for "service" and,

going into the world, were to accomplish a vague yearnful something

which would react either in eternal reward or, at the least, in the

personal satisfaction of having striven for the greatest good of the

greatest number.

This spirit has long rocked the colleges in America. It begins, as a

rule, during the immaturities and facile impressions of freshman

year--sometimes back in preparatory school. Prosperous apostles known

for their emotional acting go the rounds of the universities and, by

frightening the amiable sheep and dulling the quickening of interest and

intellectual curiosity which is the purpose of all education, distil a

mysterious conviction of sin, harking back to childhood crimes and to

the ever-present menace of "women." To these lectures go the wicked

youths to cheer and joke and the timid to swallow the tasty pills, which

would be harmless if administered to farmers' wives and pious

drug-clerks but are rather dangerous medicine for these "future

leaders of men."

This octopus was strong enough to wind a sinuous tentacle about Richard

Caramel. The year after his graduation it called him into the slums of

New York to muck about with bewildered Italians as secretary to an

"Alien Young Men's Rescue Association." He labored at it over a year

before the monotony began to weary him. The aliens kept coming

inexhaustibly--Italians, Poles, Scandinavians, Czechs, Armenians--with

the same wrongs, the same exceptionally ugly faces and very much the

same smells, though he fancied that these grew more profuse and diverse

as the months passed. His eventual conclusions about the expediency of

service were vague, but concerning his own relation to it they were

abrupt and decisive. Any amiable young man, his head ringing with the

latest crusade, could accomplish as much as he could with the débris of

Europe--and it was time for him to write.

He had been living in a down-town Y.M.C.A., but when he quit the task of

making sow-ear purses out of sows' ears, he moved up-town and went to

work immediately as a reporter for The Sun. He kept at this for a year,

doing desultory writing on the side, with little success, and then one

day an infelicitous incident peremptorily closed his newspaper career.

On a February afternoon he was assigned to report a parade of Squadron

A. Snow threatening, he went to sleep instead before a hot fire, and

when he woke up did a smooth column about the muffled beats of the

horses' hoofs in the snow... This he handed in. Next morning a marked

copy of the paper was sent down to the City Editor with a scrawled note:

"Fire the man who wrote this." It seemed that Squadron A had also seen

the snow threatening--had postponed the parade until another day.

A week later he had begun "The Demon Lover."...

In January, the Monday of the months, Richard Caramel's nose was blue

constantly, a sardonic blue, vaguely suggestive of the flames licking

around a sinner. His book was nearly ready, and as it grew in

completeness it seemed to grow also in its demands, sapping him,

overpowering him, until he walked haggard and conquered in its shadow.

Not only to Anthony and Maury did he pour out his hopes and boasts and

indecisions, but to any one who could be prevailed upon to listen. He

called on polite but bewildered publishers, he discussed it with his

casual vis-à-vis at the Harvard Club; it was even claimed by Anthony

that he had been discovered, one Sunday night, debating the

transposition of Chapter Two with a literary ticket-collector in the

chill and dismal recesses of a Harlem subway station. And latest among

his confidantes was Mrs. Gilbert, who sat with him by the hour and

alternated between Bilphism and literature in an intense cross-fire.

"Shakespeare was a Bilphist," she assured him through a fixed smile.

"Oh, yes! He was a Bilphist. It's been proved."

At this Dick would look a bit blank.

"If you've read 'Hamlet' you can't help but see."

"Well, he--he lived in a more credulous age--a more religious age."

But she demanded the whole loaf:

"Oh, yes, but you see Bilphism isn't a religion. It's the science of all

religions." She smiled defiantly at him. This was the _bon mot_ of her

belief. There was something in the arrangement of words which grasped

her mind so definitely that the statement became superior to any

obligation to define itself. It is not unlikely that she would have

accepted any idea encased in this radiant formula--which was perhaps not

a formula; it was the _reductio ad absurdum_ of all formulas.

Then eventually, but gorgeously, would come Dick's turn.

"You've heard of the new poetry movement. You haven't? Well, it's a lot

of young poets that are breaking away from the old forms and doing a lot

of good. Well, what I was going to say was that my book is going to

start a new prose movement, a sort of renaissance."

"I'm sure it will," beamed Mrs. Gilbert. "I'm _sure_ it will. I went to

Jenny Martin last Tuesday, the palmist, you know, that every one's _mad_

about. I told her my nephew was engaged upon a work and she said she

knew I'd be glad to hear that his success would be _extraordinary_. But

she'd never seen you or known anything about you--not even your _name_."

Having made the proper noises to express his amazement at this

astounding phenomenon, Dick waved her theme by him as though he were an

arbitrary traffic policeman, and, so to speak, beckoned forward his

own traffic.

"I'm absorbed, Aunt Catherine," he assured her, "I really am. All my

friends are joshing me--oh, I see the humor in it and I don't care. I

think a person ought to be able to take joshing. But I've got a sort of

conviction," he concluded gloomily.

"You're an ancient soul, I always say."

"Maybe I am." Dick had reached the stage where he no longer fought, but

submitted. He _must_ be an ancient soul, he fancied grotesquely; so old

as to be absolutely rotten. However, the reiteration of the phrase still

somewhat embarrassed him and sent uncomfortable shivers up his back. He

changed the subject.

"Where is my distinguished cousin Gloria?"

"She's on the go somewhere, with some one."

Dick paused, considered, and then, screwing up his face into what was

evidently begun as a smile but ended as a terrifying frown, delivered

a comment.

"I think my friend Anthony Patch is in love with her."

Mrs. Gilbert started, beamed half a second too late, and breathed her

"Really?" in the tone of a detective play-whisper.

"I _think_ so," corrected Dick gravely. "She's the first girl I've ever

seen him with, so much."

"Well, of course," said Mrs. Gilbert with meticulous carelessness,

"Gloria never makes me her confidante. She's very secretive. Between you

and me"--she bent forward cautiously, obviously determined that only

Heaven and her nephew should share her confession--"between you and me,

I'd like to see her settle down."

Dick arose and paced the floor earnestly, a small, active, already

rotund young man, his hands thrust unnaturally into his bulging pockets.

"I'm not claiming I'm right, mind you," he assured the

infinitely-of-the-hotel steel-engraving which smirked respectably back

at him. "I'm saying nothing that I'd want Gloria to know. But I think

Mad Anthony is interested--tremendously so. He talks about her

constantly. In any one else that'd be a bad sign."

"Gloria is a very young soul--" began Mrs. Gilbert eagerly, but her

nephew interrupted with a hurried sentence:

"Gloria'd be a very young nut not to marry him." He stopped and faced

her, his expression a battle map of lines and dimples, squeezed and

strained to its ultimate show of intensity--this as if to make up by his

sincerity for any indiscretion in his words. "Gloria's a wild one, Aunt

Catherine. She's uncontrollable. How she's done it I don't know, but

lately she's picked up a lot of the funniest friends. She doesn't seem

to care. And the men she used to go with around New York were--" He

paused for breath.

"Yes-yes-yes," interjected Mrs. Gilbert, with an anaemic attempt to hide

the immense interest with which she listened.

"Well," continued Richard Caramel gravely, "there it is. I mean that the

men she went with and the people she went with used to be first rate.

Now they aren't."

Mrs. Gilbert blinked very fast--her bosom trembled, inflated, remained

so for an instant, and with the exhalation her words flowed out in

a torrent.

She knew, she cried in a whisper; oh, yes, mothers see these things. But

what could she do? He knew Gloria. He'd seen enough of Gloria to know

how hopeless it was to try to deal with her. Gloria had been so

spoiled--in a rather complete and unusual way. She had been suckled

until she was three, for instance, when she could probably have chewed

sticks. Perhaps--one never knew--it was this that had given that health

and _hardiness_ to her whole personality. And then ever since she was

twelve years old she'd had boys about her so thick--oh, so thick one

couldn't _move_. At sixteen she began going to dances at preparatory

schools, and then came the colleges; and everywhere she went, boys,

boys, boys. At first, oh, until she was eighteen there had been so many

that it never seemed one any more than the others, but then she began to

single them out.

She knew there had been a string of affairs spread over about three

years, perhaps a dozen of them altogether. Sometimes the men were

undergraduates, sometimes just out of college--they lasted on an average

of several months each, with short attractions in between. Once or twice

they had endured longer and her mother had hoped she would be engaged,

but always a new one came--a new one--

The men? Oh, she made them miserable, literally! There was only one who

had kept any sort of dignity, and he had been a mere child, young Carter

Kirby, of Kansas City, who was so conceited anyway that he just sailed

out on his vanity one afternoon and left for Europe next day with his

father. The others had been--wretched. They never seemed to know when

she was tired of them, and Gloria had seldom been deliberately unkind.

They would keep phoning, writing letters to her, trying to see her,

making long trips after her around the country. Some of them had

confided in Mrs. Gilbert, told her with tears in their eyes that they

would never get over Gloria ... at least two of them had since married,

though.... But Gloria, it seemed, struck to kill--to this day Mr.

Carstairs called up once a week, and sent her flowers which she no

longer bothered to refuse.

Several times, twice, at least, Mrs. Gilbert knew it had gone as far as

a private engagement--with Tudor Baird and that Holcome boy at Pasadena.

She was sure it had, because--this must go no further--she had come in

unexpectedly and found Gloria acting, well, very much engaged indeed.

She had not spoken to her daughter, of course. She had had a certain

sense of delicacy and, besides, each time she had expected an

announcement in a few weeks. But the announcement never came; instead, a

new man came.

Scenes! Young men walking up and down the library like caged tigers!

Young men glaring at each other in the hall as one came and the other

left! Young men calling up on the telephone and being hung up upon in

desperation! Young men threatening South America! ... Young men writing

the most pathetic letters! (She said nothing to this effect, but Dick

fancied that Mrs. Gilbert's eyes had seen some of these letters.)

... And Gloria, between tears and laughter, sorry, glad, out of love and

in love, miserable, nervous, cool, amidst a great returning of presents,

substitution of pictures in immemorial frames, and taking of hot baths

and beginning again--with the next.

That state of things continued, assumed an air of permanency. Nothing

harmed Gloria or changed her or moved her. And then out of a clear sky

one day she informed her mother that undergraduates wearied her. She was

absolutely going to no more college dances.

This had begun the change--not so much in her actual habits, for she

danced, and had as many "dates" as ever--but they were dates in a

different spirit. Previously it had been a sort of pride, a matter of

her own vainglory. She had been, probably, the most celebrated and

sought-after young beauty in the country. Gloria Gilbert of Kansas City!

She had fed on it ruthlessly--enjoying the crowds around her, the manner

in which the most desirable men singled her out; enjoying the fierce

jealousy of other girls; enjoying the fabulous, not to say scandalous,

and, her mother was glad to say, entirely unfounded rumors about

her--for instance, that she had gone in the Yale swimming-pool one night

in a chiffon evening dress.

And from loving it with a vanity that was almost masculine--it had been

in the nature of a triumphant and dazzling career--she became suddenly

anaesthetic to it. She retired. She who had dominated countless parties,

who had blown fragrantly through many ballrooms to the tender tribute of

many eyes, seemed to care no longer. He who fell in love with her now

was dismissed utterly, almost angrily. She went listlessly with the most

indifferent men. She continually broke engagements, not as in the past

from a cool assurance that she was irreproachable, that the man she

insulted would return like a domestic animal--but indifferently, without

contempt or pride. She rarely stormed at men any more--she yawned at

them. She seemed--and it was so strange--she seemed to her mother to be

growing cold.

Richard Caramel listened. At first he had remained standing, but as his

aunt's discourse waxed in content--it stands here pruned by half, of all

side references to the youth of Gloria's soul and to Mrs. Gilbert's own

mental distresses--he drew a chair up and attended rigorously as she

floated, between tears and plaintive helplessness, down the long story

of Gloria's life. When she came to the tale of this last year, a tale of

the ends of cigarettes left all over New York in little trays marked

"Midnight Frolic" and "Justine Johnson's Little Club," he began nodding

his head slowly, then faster and faster, until, as she finished on a

staccato note, it was bobbing briskly up and down, absurdly like a

doll's wired head, expressing--almost anything.

In a sense Gloria's past was an old story to him. He had followed it

with the eyes of a journalist, for he was going to write a book about

her some day. But his interests, just at present, were family interests.

He wanted to know, in particular, who was this Joseph Bloeckman that he

had seen her with several times; and those two girls she was with

constantly, "this" Rachael Jerryl and "this" Miss Kane--surely Miss Kane

wasn't exactly the sort one would associate with Gloria!

But the moment had passed. Mrs. Gilbert having climbed the hill of

exposition was about to glide swiftly down the ski-jump of collapse. Her

eyes were like a blue sky seen through two round, red window-casements.

The flesh about her mouth was trembling.

And at the moment the door opened, admitting into the room Gloria and

the two young ladies lately mentioned.

TWO YOUNG WOMEN

"Well!"

"How do you do, Mrs. Gilbert!"

Miss Kane and Miss Jerryl are presented to Mr. Richard Caramel. "This is

Dick" (laughter).

"I've heard so much about you," says Miss Kane between a giggle and a

shout.

"How do you do," says Miss Jerryl shyly.

Richard Caramel tries to move about as if his figure were better. He is

torn between his innate cordiality and the fact that he considers these

girls rather common--not at all the Farmover type.

Gloria has disappeared into the bedroom.

"Do sit down," beams Mrs. Gilbert, who is by now quite herself. "Take

off your things." Dick is afraid she will make some remark about the age

of his soul, but he forgets his qualms in completing a conscientious,

novelist's examination of the two young women.

Muriel Kane had originated in a rising family of East Orange. She was

short rather than small, and hovered audaciously between plumpness and

width. Her hair was black and elaborately arranged. This, in conjunction

with her handsome, rather bovine eyes, and her over-red lips, combined

to make her resemble Theda Bara, the prominent motion picture actress.

People told her constantly that she was a "vampire," and she believed

them. She suspected hopefully that they were afraid of her, and she did

her utmost under all circumstances to give the impression of danger. An

imaginative man could see the red flag that she constantly carried,

waving it wildly, beseechingly--and, alas, to little spectacular avail.

She was also tremendously timely: she knew the latest songs, all the

latest songs--when one of them was played on the phonograph she would

rise to her feet and rock her shoulders back and forth and snap her

fingers, and if there was no music she would accompany herself

by humming.

Her conversation was also timely: "I don't care," she would say, "I

should worry and lose my figure"--and again: "I can't make my feet

behave when I hear that tune. Oh, baby!"

Her finger-nails were too long and ornate, polished to a pink and

unnatural fever. Her clothes were too tight, too stylish, too vivid, her

eyes too roguish, her smile too coy. She was almost pitifully

overemphasized from head to foot.

The other girl was obviously a more subtle personality. She was an

exquisitely dressed Jewess with dark hair and a lovely milky pallor. She

seemed shy and vague, and these two qualities accentuated a rather

delicate charm that floated about her. Her family were "Episcopalians,"

owned three smart women's shops along Fifth Avenue, and lived in a

magnificent apartment on Riverside Drive. It seemed to Dick, after a few

moments, that she was attempting to imitate Gloria--he wondered that

people invariably chose inimitable people to imitate.

"We had the most _hectic_ time!" Muriel was exclaiming enthusiastically.

"There was a crazy woman behind us on the bus. She was absitively,

posolutely _nutty_! She kept talking to herself about something she'd

like to do to somebody or something. I was _pet_rified, but Gloria

simply _wouldn't_ get off."

Mrs. Gilbert opened her mouth, properly awed.

"Really?"

"Oh, she was crazy. But we should worry, she didn't hurt us. Ugly!

Gracious! The man across from us said her face ought to be on a

night-nurse in a home for the blind, and we all _howled_, naturally, so

the man tried to pick us up."

Presently Gloria emerged from her bedroom and in unison every eye turned

on her. The two girls receded into a shadowy background,

unperceived, unmissed.

"We've been talking about you," said Dick quickly, "--your mother and

I."

"Well," said Gloria.

A pause--Muriel turned to Dick.

"You're a great writer, aren't you?"

"I'm a writer," he confessed sheepishly.

"I always say," said Muriel earnestly, "that if I ever had time to write

down all my experiences it'd make a wonderful book."

Rachael giggled sympathetically; Richard Caramel's bow was almost

stately. Muriel continued:

"But I don't see how you can sit down and do it. And poetry! Lordy, I

can't make two lines rhyme. Well, I should worry!"

Richard Caramel with difficulty restrained a shout of laughter. Gloria

was chewing an amazing gum-drop and staring moodily out the window. Mrs.

Gilbert cleared her throat and beamed.

"But you see," she said in a sort of universal exposition, "you're not

an ancient soul--like Richard."

The Ancient Soul breathed a gasp of relief--it was out at last.

Then as if she had been considering it for five minutes, Gloria made a

sudden announcement:

"I'm going to give a party."

"Oh, can I come?" cried Muriel with facetious daring.

"A dinner. Seven people: Muriel and Rachael and I, and you, Dick, and

Anthony, and that man named Noble--I liked him--and Bloeckman."

Muriel and Rachael went into soft and purring ecstasies of enthusiasm.

Mrs. Gilbert blinked and beamed. With an air of casualness Dick broke in

with a question:

"Who is this fellow Bloeckman, Gloria?"

Scenting a faint hostility, Gloria turned to him.

"Joseph Bloeckman? He's the moving picture man. Vice-president of 'Films

Par Excellence.' He and father do a lot of business."

"Oh!"

"Well, will you all come?"

They would all come. A date was arranged within the week. Dick rose,

adjusted hat, coat, and muffler, and gave out a general smile.

"By-by," said Muriel, waving her hand gaily, "call me up some time."

Richard Caramel blushed for her.

DEPLORABLE END OF THE CHEVALIER O'KEEFE

It was Monday and Anthony took Geraldine Burke to luncheon at the Beaux

Arts--afterward they went up to his apartment and he wheeled out the

little rolling-table that held his supply of liquor, selecting vermouth,

gin, and absinthe for a proper stimulant.

Geraldine Burke, usher at Keith's, had been an amusement of several

months. She demanded so little that he liked her, for since a lamentable

affair with a débutante the preceding summer, when he had discovered

that after half a dozen kisses a proposal was expected, he had been wary

of girls of his own class. It was only too easy to turn a critical eye

on their imperfections: some physical harshness or a general lack of

personal delicacy--but a girl who was usher at Keith's was approached

with a different attitude. One could tolerate qualities in an intimate

valet that would be unforgivable in a mere acquaintance on one's

social level.

Geraldine, curled up at the foot of the lounge, considered him with

narrow slanting eyes.

"You drink all the time, don't you?" she said suddenly.

"Why, I suppose so," replied Anthony in some surprise. "Don't you?"

"Nope. I go on parties sometimes--you know, about once a week, but I

only take two or three drinks. You and your friends keep on drinking all

the time. I should think you'd ruin your health."

Anthony was somewhat touched.

"Why, aren't you sweet to worry about me!"

"Well, I do."

"I don't drink so very much," he declared. "Last month I didn't touch a

drop for three weeks. And I only get really tight about once a week."

"But you have something to drink every day and you're only twenty-five.

Haven't you any ambition? Think what you'll be at forty?"

"I sincerely trust that I won't live that long."

She clicked her tongue with her teeth.

"You cra-azy!" she said as he mixed another cocktail--and then: "Are you

any relation to Adam Patch?"

"Yes, he's my grandfather."

"Really?" She was obviously thrilled.

"Absolutely."

"That's funny. My daddy used to work for him."

"He's a queer old man."

"Is he nice?" she demanded.

"Well, in private life he's seldom unnecessarily disagreeable."

"Tell us about him."

"Why," Anthony considered "--he's all shrunken up and he's got the

remains of some gray hair that always looks as though the wind were in

it. He's very moral."

"He's done a lot of good," said Geraldine with intense gravity.

"Rot!" scoffed Anthony. "He's a pious ass--a chickenbrain."

Her mind left the subject and flitted on.

"Why don't you live with him?"

"Why don't I board in a Methodist parsonage?"

"You cra-azy!"

Again she made a little clicking sound to express disapproval. Anthony

thought how moral was this little waif at heart--how completely moral

she would still be after the inevitable wave came that would wash her

off the sands of respectability.

"Do you hate him?"

"I wonder. I never liked him. You never like people who do things for

you."

"Does he hate you?"

"My dear Geraldine," protested Anthony, frowning humorously, "do have

another cocktail. I annoy him. If I smoke a cigarette he comes into the

room sniffing. He's a prig, a bore, and something of a hypocrite. I

probably wouldn't be telling you this if I hadn't had a few drinks, but

I don't suppose it matters."

Geraldine was persistently interested. She held her glass, untasted,

between finger and thumb and regarded him with eyes in which there was a

touch of awe.

"How do you mean a hypocrite?"

"Well," said Anthony impatiently, "maybe he's not. But he doesn't like

the things that I like, and so, as far as I'm concerned, he's

uninteresting."

"Hm." Her curiosity seemed, at length, satisfied. She sank back into the

sofa and sipped her cocktail.

"You're a funny one," she commented thoughtfully. "Does everybody want

to marry you because your grandfather is rich?"

"They don't--but I shouldn't blame them if they did. Still, you see, I

never intend to marry."

She scorned this.

"You'll fall in love someday. Oh, you will--I know." She nodded wisely.

"It'd be idiotic to be overconfident. That's what ruined the Chevalier

O'Keefe."

"Who was he?"

"A creature of my splendid mind. He's my one creation, the Chevalier."

"Cra-a-azy!" she murmured pleasantly, using the clumsy rope ladder with

which she bridged all gaps and climbed after her mental superiors.

Subconsciously she felt that it eliminated distances and brought the

person whose imagination had eluded her back within range.

"Oh, no!" objected Anthony, "oh, no, Geraldine. You mustn't play the

alienist upon the Chevalier. If you feel yourself unable to understand

him I won't bring him in. Besides, I should feel a certain uneasiness

because of his regrettable reputation."

"I guess I can understand anything that's got any sense to it," answered

Geraldine a bit testily.

"In that case there are various episodes in the life of the Chevalier

which might prove diverting."

"Well?"

"It was his untimely end that caused me to think of him and made him

apropos in the conversation. I hate to introduce him end foremost, but

it seems inevitable that the Chevalier must back into your life."

"Well, what about him? Did he die?"

"He did! In this manner. He was an Irishman, Geraldine, a semi-fictional

Irishman--the wild sort with a genteel brogue and 'reddish hair.' He was

exiled from Erin in the late days of chivalry and, of course, crossed

over to France. Now the Chevalier O'Keefe, Geraldine, had, like me, one

weakness. He was enormously susceptible to all sorts and conditions of

women. Besides being a sentimentalist he was a romantic, a vain fellow,

a man of wild passions, a little blind in one eye and almost stone-blind

in the other. Now a male roaming the world in this condition is as

helpless as a lion without teeth, and in consequence the Chevalier was

made utterly miserable for twenty years by a series of women who hated

him, used him, bored him, aggravated him, sickened him, spent his money,

made a fool of him--in brief, as the world has it, loved him.

"This was bad, Geraldine, and as the Chevalier, save for this one

weakness, this exceeding susceptibility, was a man of penetration, he

decided that he would rescue himself once and for all from these drains

upon him. With this purpose he went to a very famous monastery in

Champagne called--well, anachronistically known as St. Voltaire's. It

was the rule at St. Voltaire's that no monk could descend to the ground

story of the monastery so long as he lived, but should exist engaged in

prayer and contemplation in one of the four towers, which were called

after the four commandments of the monastery rule: Poverty, Chastity,

Obedience, and Silence.

"When the day came that was to witness the Chevalier's farewell to the

world he was utterly happy. He gave all his Greek books to his landlady,

and his sword he sent in a golden sheath to the King of France, and all

his mementos of Ireland he gave to the young Huguenot who sold fish in

the street where he lived.

"Then he rode out to St. Voltaire's, slew his horse at the door, and

presented the carcass to the monastery cook.

"At five o'clock that night he felt, for the first time, free--forever

free from sex. No woman could enter the monastery; no monk could descend

below the second story. So as he climbed the winding stair that led to

his cell at the very top of the Tower of Chastity he paused for a moment

by an open window which looked down fifty feet on to a road below. It

was all so beautiful, he thought, this world that he was leaving, the

golden shower of sun beating down upon the long fields, the spray of

trees in the distance, the vineyards, quiet and green, freshening wide

miles before him. He leaned his elbows on the window casement and gazed

at the winding road.

"Now, as it happened, Thérèse, a peasant girl of sixteen from a

neighboring village, was at that moment passing along this same road

that ran in front of the monastery. Five minutes before, the little

piece of ribbon which held up the stocking on her pretty left leg had

worn through and broken. Being a girl of rare modesty she had thought to

wait until she arrived home before repairing it, but it had bothered her

to such an extent that she felt she could endure it no longer. So, as

she passed the Tower of Chastity, she stopped and with a pretty gesture

lifted her skirt--as little as possible, be it said to her credit--to

adjust her garter.

"Up in the tower the newest arrival in the ancient monastery of St.

Voltaire, as though pulled forward by a gigantic and irresistible hand,

leaned from the window. Further he leaned and further until suddenly one

of the stones loosened under his weight, broke from its cement with a

soft powdery sound--and, first headlong, then head over heels, finally

in a vast and impressive revolution tumbled the Chevalier O'Keefe, bound

for the hard earth and eternal damnation.

"Thérèse was so much upset by the occurrence that she ran all the way

home and for ten years spent an hour a day in secret prayer for the soul

of the monk whose neck and vows were simultaneously broken on that

unfortunate Sunday afternoon.

"And the Chevalier O'Keefe, being suspected of suicide, was not buried

in consecrated ground, but tumbled into a field near by, where he

doubtless improved the quality of the soil for many years afterward.

Such was the untimely end of a very brave and gallant gentleman. What do

you think, Geraldine?"

But Geraldine, lost long before, could only smile roguishly, wave her

first finger at him, and repeat her bridge-all, her explain-all:

"Crazy!" she said, "you cra-a-azy!"

His thin face was kindly, she thought, and his eyes quite gentle. She

liked him because he was arrogant without being conceited, and because,

unlike the men she met about the theatre, he had a horror of being

conspicuous. What an odd, pointless story! But she had enjoyed the part

about the stocking!

After the fifth cocktail he kissed her, and between laughter and

bantering caresses and a half-stifled flare of passion they passed an

hour. At four-thirty she claimed an engagement, and going into the

bathroom she rearranged her hair. Refusing to let him order her a taxi

she stood for a moment in the doorway.

"You _will_ get married," she was insisting, "you wait and see."

Anthony was playing with an ancient tennis ball, and he bounced it

carefully on the floor several times before he answered with a soupçon

of acidity:

"You're a little idiot, Geraldine."

She smiled provokingly.

"Oh, I am, am I? Want to bet?"

"That'd be silly too."

"Oh, it would, would it? Well, I'll just bet you'll marry somebody

inside of a year."

Anthony bounced the tennis ball very hard. This was one of his handsome

days, she thought; a sort of intensity had displaced the melancholy in

his dark eyes.

"Geraldine," he said, at length, "in the first place I have no one I

want to marry; in the second place I haven't enough money to support two

people; in the third place I am entirely opposed to marriage for people

of my type; in the fourth place I have a strong distaste for even the

abstract consideration of it."

But Geraldine only narrowed her eyes knowingly, made her clicking sound,

and said she must be going. It was late.

"Call me up soon," she reminded him as he kissed her goodbye, "you

haven't for three weeks, you know."

"I will," he promised fervently.

He shut the door and coming back into the room stood for a moment lost

in thought with the tennis ball still clasped in his hand. There was one

of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the

streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It

was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no

outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully--assuaged

only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all

efforts and attainments were equally valueless.

He thought with emotion--aloud, ejaculative, for he was hurt and

confused.

"No _idea_ of getting married, by _God_!"

Of a sudden he hurled the tennis ball violently across the room, where

it barely missed the lamp, and, rebounding here and there for a moment,

lay still upon the floor.

SIGNLIGHT AND MOONLIGHT

For her dinner Gloria had taken a table in the Cascades at the Biltmore,

and when the men met in the hall outside a little after eight, "that

person Bloeckman" was the target of six masculine eyes. He was a

stoutening, ruddy Jew of about thirty-five, with an expressive face

under smooth sandy hair--and, no doubt, in most business gatherings his

personality would have been considered ingratiating. He sauntered up to

the three younger men, who stood in a group smoking as they waited for

their hostess, and introduced himself with a little too evident

assurance--nevertheless it is to be doubted whether he received the

intended impression of faint and ironic chill: there was no hint of

understanding in his manner.

"You related to Adam J. Patch?" he inquired of Anthony, emitting two

slender strings of smoke from nostrils overwide.

Anthony admitted it with the ghost of a smile.

"He's a fine man," pronounced Bloeckman profoundly. "He's a fine example

of an American."

"Yes," agreed Anthony, "he certainly is."

--I detest these underdone men, he thought coldly. Boiled looking! Ought

to be shoved back in the oven; just one more minute would do it.

Bloeckman squinted at his watch.

"Time these girls were showing up ..."

--Anthony waited breathlessly; it came--

"... but then," with a widening smile, "you know how women are."

The three young men nodded; Bloeckman looked casually about him, his

eyes resting critically on the ceiling and then passing lower. His

expression combined that of a Middle Western farmer appraising his wheat

crop and that of an actor wondering whether he is observed--the public

manner of all good Americans. As he finished his survey he turned back

quickly to the reticent trio, determined to strike to their very

heart and core.

"You college men? ... Harvard, eh. I see the Princeton boys beat you

fellows in hockey."

Unfortunate man. He had drawn another blank. They had been three years

out and heeded only the big football games. Whether, after the failure

of this sally, Mr. Bloeckman would have perceived himself to be in a

cynical atmosphere is problematical, for--

Gloria arrived. Muriel arrived. Rachael arrived. After a hurried "Hello,

people!" uttered by Gloria and echoed by the other two, the three swept

by into the dressing room.

A moment later Muriel appeared in a state of elaborate undress and

_crept_ toward them. She was in her element: her ebony hair was slicked

straight back on her head; her eyes were artificially darkened; she

reeked of insistent perfume. She was got up to the best of her ability

as a siren, more popularly a "vamp"--a picker up and thrower away of

men, an unscrupulous and fundamentally unmoved toyer with affections.

Something in the exhaustiveness of her attempt fascinated Maury at first

sight--a woman with wide hips affecting a panther-like litheness! As

they waited the extra three minutes for Gloria, and, by polite

assumption, for Rachael, he was unable to take his eyes from her. She

would turn her head away, lowering her eyelashes and biting her nether

lip in an amazing exhibition of coyness. She would rest her hands on her

hips and sway from side to side in tune to the music, saying:

"Did you ever hear such perfect ragtime? I just can't make my shoulders

behave when I hear that."

Mr. Bloeckman clapped his hands gallantly.

"You ought to be on the stage."

"I'd like to be!" cried Muriel; "will you back me?"

"I sure will."

With becoming modesty Muriel ceased her motions and turned to Maury,

asking what he had "seen" this year. He interpreted this as referring to

the dramatic world, and they had a gay and exhilarating exchange of

titles, after this manner:

MURIEL: Have you seen "Peg o' My Heart"?

MAURY: No, I haven't.

MURIEL: (_Eagerly_) It's wonderful! You want to see it.

MAURY: Have you seen "Omar, the Tentmaker"?

MURIEL: No, but I hear it's wonderful. I'm very anxious to see it. Have

you seen "Fair and Warmer"?

MAURY: (_Hopefully_) Yes.

MURIEL: I don't think it's very good. It's trashy.

MAURY: (_Faintly_) Yes, that's true.

MURIEL: But I went to "Within the Law" last night and I thought it was

fine. Have you seen "The Little Cafe"?...

This continued until they ran out of plays. Dick, meanwhile, turned to

Mr. Bloeckman, determined to extract what gold he could from this

unpromising load.

"I hear all the new novels are sold to the moving pictures as soon as

they come out."

"That's true. Of course the main thing in a moving picture is a strong

story."

"Yes, I suppose so."

"So many novels are all full of talk and psychology. Of course those

aren't as valuable to us. It's impossible to make much of that

interesting on the screen."

"You want plots first," said Richard brilliantly.

"Of course. Plots first--" He paused, shifted his gaze. His pause

spread, included the others with all the authority of a warning finger.

Gloria followed by Rachael was coming out of the dressing room.

Among other things it developed during dinner that Joseph Bloeckman

never danced, but spent the music time watching the others with the

bored tolerance of an elder among children. He was a dignified man and a

proud one. Born in Munich he had begun his American career as a peanut

vender with a travelling circus. At eighteen he was a side show

ballyhoo; later, the manager of the side show, and, soon after, the

proprietor of a second-class vaudeville house. Just when the moving

picture had passed out of the stage of a curiosity and become a

promising industry he was an ambitious young man of twenty-six with some

money to invest, nagging financial ambitions and a good working

knowledge of the popular show business. That had been nine years before.

The moving picture industry had borne him up with it where it threw off

dozens of men with more financial ability, more imagination, and more

practical ideas...and now he sat here and contemplated the immortal

Gloria for whom young Stuart Holcome had gone from New York to

Pasadena--watched her, and knew that presently she would cease dancing

and come back to sit on his left hand.

He hoped she would hurry. The oysters had been standing some minutes.

Meanwhile Anthony, who had been placed on Gloria's left hand, was

dancing with her, always in a certain fourth of the floor. This, had

there been stags, would have been a delicate tribute to the girl,

meaning "Damn you, don't cut in!" It was very consciously intimate.

"Well," he began, looking down at her, "you look mighty sweet to-night."

She met his eyes over the horizontal half foot that separated them.

"Thank you--Anthony."

"In fact you're uncomfortably beautiful," he added. There was no smile

this time.

"And you're very charming."

"Isn't this nice?" he laughed. "We actually approve of each other."

"Don't you, usually?" She had caught quickly at his remark, as she

always did at any unexplained allusion to herself, however faint.

He lowered his voice, and when he spoke there was in it no more than a

wisp of badinage.

"Does a priest approve the Pope?"

"I don't know--but that's probably the vaguest compliment I ever

received."

"Perhaps I can muster a few bromides."

"Well, I wouldn't have you strain yourself. Look at Muriel! Right here

next to us."

He glanced over his shoulder. Muriel was resting her brilliant cheek

against the lapel of Maury Noble's dinner coat and her powdered left arm

was apparently twisted around his head. One was impelled to wonder why

she failed to seize the nape of his neck with her hand. Her eyes, turned

ceiling-ward, rolled largely back and forth; her hips swayed, and as she

danced she kept up a constant low singing. This at first seemed to be a

translation of the song into some foreign tongue but became eventually

apparent as an attempt to fill out the metre of the song with the only

words she knew--the words of the title--

"He's a rag-picker,

A rag-picker;

A rag-time picking man,

Rag-picking, picking, pick, pick,

Rag-pick, pick, pick."

--and so on, into phrases still more strange and barbaric. When she

caught the amused glances of Anthony and Gloria she acknowledged them

only with a faint smile and a half-closing of her eyes, to indicate that

the music entering into her soul had put her into an ecstatic and

exceedingly seductive trance.

The music ended and they returned to their table, whose solitary but

dignified occupant arose and tendered each of them a smile so

ingratiating that it was as if he were shaking their hands and

congratulating them on a brilliant performance.

"Blockhead never will dance! I think he has a wooden leg," remarked

Gloria to the table at large. The three young men started and the

gentleman referred to winced perceptibly.

This was the one rough spot in the course of Bloeckman's acquaintance

with Gloria. She relentlessly punned on his name. First it had been

"Block-house." lately, the more invidious "Blockhead." He had requested

with a strong undertone of irony that she use his first name, and this

she had done obediently several times--then slipping, helpless,

repentant but dissolved in laughter, back into "Blockhead."

It was a very sad and thoughtless thing.

"I'm afraid Mr. Bloeckman thinks we're a frivolous crowd," sighed

Muriel, waving a balanced oyster in his direction.

"He has that air," murmured Rachael. Anthony tried to remember whether

she had said anything before. He thought not. It was her initial remark.

Mr. Bloeckman suddenly cleared his throat and said in a loud, distinct

voice:

"On the contrary. When a man speaks he's merely tradition. He has at

best a few thousand years back of him. But woman, why, she is the

miraculous mouthpiece of posterity."

In the stunned pause that followed this astounding remark, Anthony

choked suddenly on an oyster and hurried his napkin to his face. Rachael

and Muriel raised a mild if somewhat surprised laugh, in which Dick and

Maury joined, both of them red in the face and restraining

uproariousness with the most apparent difficulty.

"--My God!" thought Anthony. "It's a subtitle from one of his movies.

The man's memorized it!"

Gloria alone made no sound. She fixed Mr. Bloeckman with a glance of

silent reproach.

"Well, for the love of Heaven! Where on earth did you dig that up?"

Bloeckman looked at her uncertainly, not sure of her intention. But in a

moment he recovered his poise and assumed the bland and consciously

tolerant smile of an intellectual among spoiled and callow youth.

The soup came up from the kitchen--but simultaneously the orchestra

leader came up from the bar, where he had absorbed the tone color

inherent in a seidel of beer. So the soup was left to cool during the

delivery of a ballad entitled "Everything's at Home Except Your Wife."

Then the champagne--and the party assumed more amusing proportions. The

men, except Richard Caramel, drank freely; Gloria and Muriel sipped a

glass apiece; Rachael Jerryl took none. They sat out the waltzes but

danced to everything else--all except Gloria, who seemed to tire after a

while and preferred to sit smoking at the table, her eyes now lazy, now

eager, according to whether she listened to Bloeckman or watched a

pretty woman among the dancers. Several times Anthony wondered what

Bloeckman was telling her. He was chewing a cigar back and forth in his

mouth, and had expanded after dinner to the extent of violent gestures.

Ten o'clock found Gloria and Anthony beginning a dance. Just as they

were out of ear-shot of the table she said in a low voice:

"Dance over by the door. I want to go down to the drug-store."

Obediently Anthony guided her through the crowd in the designated

direction; in the hall she left him for a moment, to reappear with a

cloak over her arm.

"I want some gum-drops," she said, humorously apologetic; "you can't

guess what for this time. It's just that I want to bite my finger-nails,

and I will if I don't get some gum-drops." She sighed, and resumed as

they stepped into the empty elevator: "I've been biting 'em all day. A

bit nervous, you see. Excuse the pun. It was unintentional--the words

just arranged themselves. Gloria Gilbert, the female wag."

Reaching the ground floor they naïvely avoided the hotel candy counter,

descended the wide front staircase, and walking through several

corridors found a drug-store in the Grand Central Station. After an

intense examination of the perfume counter she made her purchase. Then

on some mutual unmentioned impulse they strolled, arm in arm, not in the

direction from which they had come, but out into Forty-third Street.

The night was alive with thaw; it was so nearly warm that a breeze

drifting low along the sidewalk brought to Anthony a vision of an

unhoped-for hyacinthine spring. Above in the blue oblong of sky, around

them in the caress of the drifting air, the illusion of a new season

carried relief from the stiff and breathed-over atmosphere they had

left, and for a hushed moment the traffic sounds and the murmur of water

flowing in the gutters seemed an illusive and rarefied prolongation of

that music to which they had lately danced. When Anthony spoke it was

with surety that his words came from something breathless and desirous

that the night had conceived in their two hearts.

"Let's take a taxi and ride around a bit!" he suggested, without looking

at her.

Oh, Gloria, Gloria!

A cab yawned at the curb. As it moved off like a boat on a labyrinthine

ocean and lost itself among the inchoate night masses of the great

buildings, among the now stilled, now strident, cries and clangings,

Anthony put his arm around the girl, drew her over to him and kissed her

damp, childish mouth.

She was silent. She turned her face up to him, pale under the wisps and

patches of light that trailed in like moonshine through a foliage. Her

eyes were gleaming ripples in the white lake of her face; the shadows of

her hair bordered the brow with a persuasive unintimate dusk. No love

was there, surely; nor the imprint of any love. Her beauty was cool as

this damp breeze, as the moist softness of her own lips.

"You're such a swan in this light," he whispered after a moment. There

were silences as murmurous as sound. There were pauses that seemed about

to shatter and were only to be snatched back to oblivion by the

tightening of his arms about her and the sense that she was resting

there as a caught, gossamer feather, drifted in out of the dark. Anthony

laughed, noiselessly and exultantly, turning his face up and away from

her, half in an overpowering rush of triumph, half lest her sight of him

should spoil the splendid immobility of her expression. Such a kiss--it

was a flower held against the face, never to be described, scarcely to

be remembered; as though her beauty were giving off emanations of itself

which settled transiently and already dissolving upon his heart.

... The buildings fell away in melted shadows; this was the Park now,

and after a long while the great white ghost of the Metropolitan Museum

moved majestically past, echoing sonorously to the rush of the cab.

"Why, Gloria! Why, Gloria!"

Her eyes appeared to regard him out of many thousand years: all emotion

she might have felt, all words she might have uttered, would have seemed

inadequate beside the adequacy of her silence, ineloquent against the

eloquence of her beauty--and of her body, close to him, slender

and cool.

"Tell him to turn around," she murmured, "and drive pretty fast going

back...."

Up in the supper room the air was hot. The table, littered with napkins

and ash-trays, was old and stale. It was between dances as they entered,

and Muriel Kane looked up with roguishness extraordinary.

"Well, where have _you_ been?"

"To call up mother," answered Gloria coolly. "I promised her I would.

Did we miss a dance?"

Then followed an incident that though slight in itself Anthony had cause

to reflect on many years afterward. Joseph Bloeckman, leaning well back

in his chair, fixed him with a peculiar glance, in which several

emotions were curiously and inextricably mingled. He did not greet

Gloria except by rising, and he immediately resumed a conversation with

Richard Caramel about the influence of literature on the

moving pictures.

MAGIC

The stark and unexpected miracle of a night fades out with the lingering

death of the last stars and the premature birth of the first newsboys.

The flame retreats to some remote and platonic fire; the white heat has

gone from the iron and the glow from the coal.

Along the shelves of Anthony's library, filling a wall amply, crept a

chill and insolent pencil of sunlight touching with frigid disapproval

Thérèse of France and Ann the Superwoman, Jenny of the Orient Ballet and

Zuleika the Conjurer--and Hoosier Cora--then down a shelf and into the

years, resting pityingly on the over-invoked shades of Helen, Thaïs,

Salome, and Cleopatra.

Anthony, shaved and bathed, sat in his most deeply cushioned chair and

watched it until at the steady rising of the sun it lay glinting for a

moment on the silk ends of the rug--and went out.

It was ten o'clock. The Sunday Times, scattered about his feet,

proclaimed by rotogravure and editorial, by social revelation and

sporting sheet, that the world had been tremendously engrossed during

the past week in the business of moving toward some splendid if somewhat

indeterminate goal. For his part Anthony had been once to his

grandfather's, twice to his broker's, and three times to his

tailor's--and in the last hour of the week's last day he had kissed a

very beautiful and charming girl.

When he reached home his imagination had been teeming with high pitched,

unfamiliar dreams. There was suddenly no question on his mind, no

eternal problem for a solution and resolution. He had experienced an

emotion that was neither mental nor physical, nor merely a mixture of

the two, and the love of life absorbed him for the present to the

exclusion of all else. He was content to let the experiment remain

isolated and unique. Almost impersonally he was convinced that no woman

he had ever met compared in any way with Gloria. She was deeply herself;

she was immeasurably sincere--of these things he was certain. Beside her

the two dozen schoolgirls and debutantes, young married women and waifs

and strays whom he had known were so many females, in the word's most

contemptuous sense, breeders and bearers, exuding still that faintly

odorous atmosphere of the cave and the nursery.

So far as he could see, she had neither submitted to any will of his nor

caressed his vanity--except as her pleasure in his company was a caress.

Indeed he had no reason for thinking she had given him aught that she

did not give to others. This was as it should be. The idea of an

entanglement growing out of the evening was as remote as it would have

been repugnant. And she had disclaimed and buried the incident with a

decisive untruth. Here were two young people with fancy enough to

distinguish a game from its reality--who by the very casualness with

which they met and passed on would proclaim themselves unharmed.

Having decided this he went to the phone and called up the Plaza Hotel.

Gloria was out. Her mother knew neither where she had gone nor when she

would return.

It was somehow at this point that the first wrongness in the case

asserted itself. There was an element of callousness, almost of

indecency, in Gloria's absence from home. He suspected that by going out

she had intrigued him into a disadvantage. Returning she would find his

name, and smile. Most discreetly! He should have waited a few hours in

order to drive home the utter inconsequence with which he regarded the

incident. What an asinine blunder! She would think he considered himself

particularly favored. She would think he was reacting with the most

inept intimacy to a quite trivial episode.

He remembered that during the previous month his janitor, to whom he had

delivered a rather muddled lecture on the "brother-hoove man," had come

up next day and, on the basis of what had happened the night before,

seated himself in the window seat for a cordial and chatty half-hour.

Anthony wondered in horror if Gloria would regard him as he had regarded

that man. Him--Anthony Patch! Horror!

It never occurred to him that he was a passive thing, acted upon by an

influence above and beyond Gloria, that he was merely the sensitive

plate on which the photograph was made. Some gargantuan photographer had

focussed the camera on Gloria and _snap_!--the poor plate could but

develop, confined like all things to its nature.

But Anthony, lying upon his couch and staring at the orange lamp, passed

his thin fingers incessantly through his dark hair and made new symbols

for the hours. She was in a shop now, it seemed, moving lithely among

the velvets and the furs, her own dress making, as she walked, a

debonair rustle in that world of silken rustles and cool soprano

laughter and scents of many slain but living flowers. The Minnies and

Pearls and jewels and jennies would gather round her like courtiers,

bearing wispy frailties of Georgette crepe, delicate chiffon to echo her

cheeks in faint pastel, milky lace to rest in pale disarray against her

neck--damask was used but to cover priests and divans in these days, and

cloth of Samarand was remembered only by the romantic poets.

She would go elsewhere after a while, tilting her head a hundred ways

under a hundred bonnets, seeking in vain for mock cherries to match her

lips or plumes that were graceful as her own supple body.

Noon would come--she would hurry along Fifth Avenue, a Nordic Ganymede,

her fur coat swinging fashionably with her steps, her cheeks redder by a

stroke of the wind's brush, her breath a delightful mist upon the

bracing air--and the doors of the Ritz would revolve, the crowd would

divide, fifty masculine eyes would start, stare, as she gave back

forgotten dreams to the husbands of many obese and comic women.

One o'clock. With her fork she would tantalize the heart of an adoring

artichoke, while her escort served himself up in the thick, dripping

sentences of an enraptured man.

Four o'clock: her little feet moving to melody, her face distinct in the

crowd, her partner happy as a petted puppy and mad as the immemorial

hatter.... Then--then night would come drifting down and perhaps another

damp. The signs would spill their light into the street. Who knew? No

wiser than he, they haply sought to recapture that picture done in cream

and shadow they had seen on the hushed Avenue the night before. And they

might, ah, they might! A thousand taxis would yawn at a thousand

corners, and only to him was that kiss forever lost and done. In a

thousand guises Thaïs would hail a cab and turn up her face for loving.

And her pallor would be virginal and lovely, and her kiss chaste as

the moon....

He sprang excitedly to his feet. How inappropriate that she should be

out! He had realized at last what he wanted--to kiss her again, to find

rest in her great immobility. She was the end of all restlessness, all

malcontent.

Anthony dressed and went out, as he should have done long before, and

down to Richard Caramel's room to hear the last revision of the last

chapter of "The Demon Lover." He did not call Gloria again until six. He

did not find her in until eight and--oh, climax of anticlimaxes!--she

could give him no engagement until Tuesday afternoon. A broken piece of

gutta-percha clattered to the floor as he banged up the phone.

BLACK MAGIC

Tuesday was freezing cold. He called at a bleak two o'clock and as they

shook hands he wondered confusedly whether he had ever kissed her; it

was almost unbelievable--he seriously doubted if she remembered it.

"I called you four times on Sunday," he told her.

"Did you?"

There was surprise in her voice and interest in her expression. Silently

he cursed himself for having told her. He might have known her pride did

not deal in such petty triumphs. Even then he had not guessed at the

truth--that never having had to worry about men she had seldom used the

wary subterfuges, the playings out and haulings in, that were the stock

in trade of her sisterhood. When she liked a man, that was trick enough.

Did she think she loved him--there was an ultimate and fatal thrust. Her

charm endlessly preserved itself.

"I was anxious to see you," he said simply. "I want to talk to you--I

mean really talk, somewhere where we can be alone. May I?"

"What do you mean?"

He swallowed a sudden lump of panic. He felt that she knew what he

wanted.

"I mean, not at a tea table," he said.

"Well, all right, but not to-day. I want to get some exercise. Let's

walk!"

It was bitter and raw. All the evil hate in the mad heart of February

was wrought into the forlorn and icy wind that cut its way cruelly

across Central Park and down along Fifth Avenue. It was almost

impossible to talk, and discomfort made him distracted, so much so that

he turned at Sixty-first Street to find that she was no longer beside

him. He looked around. She was forty feet in the rear standing

motionless, her face half hidden in her fur coat collar, moved either by

anger or laughter--he could not determine which. He started back.

"Don't let me interrupt your walk!" she called.

"I'm mighty sorry," he answered in confusion. "Did I go too fast?"

"I'm cold," she announced. "I want to go home. And you walk too fast."

"I'm very sorry."

Side by side they started for the Plaza. He wished he could see her

face.

"Men don't usually get so absorbed in themselves when they're with me."

"I'm sorry."

"That's very interesting."

"It _is_ rather too cold to walk," he said, briskly, to hide his

annoyance.

She made no answer and he wondered if she would dismiss him at the hotel

entrance. She walked in without speaking, however, and to the elevator,

throwing him a single remark as she entered it:

"You'd better come up."

He hesitated for the fraction of a moment.

"Perhaps I'd better call some other time."

"Just as you say." Her words were murmured as an aside. The main concern

of life was the adjusting of some stray wisps of hair in the elevator

mirror. Her cheeks were brilliant, her eyes sparkled--she had never

seemed so lovely, so exquisitely to be desired.

Despising himself, he found that he was walking down the tenth-floor

corridor a subservient foot behind her; was in the sitting room while

she disappeared to shed her furs. Something had gone wrong--in his own

eyes he had lost a shred of dignity; in an unpremeditated yet

significant encounter he had been completely defeated.

However, by the time she reappeared in the sitting-room he had explained

himself to himself with sophistic satisfaction. After all he had done

the strongest thing, he thought. He had wanted to come up, he had come.

Yet what happened later on that afternoon must be traced to the

indignity he had experienced in the elevator; the girl was worrying him

intolerably, so much so that when she came out he involuntarily drifted

into criticism.

"Who's this Bloeckman, Gloria?"

"A business friend of father's."

"Odd sort of fellow!"

"He doesn't like you either," she said with a sudden smile.

Anthony laughed.

"I'm flattered at his notice. He evidently considers me a--" He broke

off with "Is he in love with you?"

"I don't know."

"The deuce you don't," he insisted. "Of course he is. I remember the

look he gave me when we got back to the table. He'd probably have had me

quietly assaulted by a delegation of movie supes if you hadn't invented

that phone call."

"He didn't mind. I told him afterward what really happened."

"You told him!"

"He asked me."

"I don't like that very well," he remonstrated.

She laughed again.

"Oh, you don't?"

"What business is it of his?"

"None. That's why I told him."

Anthony in a turmoil bit savagely at his mouth.

"Why should I lie?" she demanded directly. "I'm not ashamed of anything

I do. It happened to interest him to know that I kissed you, and I

happened to be in a good humor, so I satisfied his curiosity by a simple

and precise 'yes.' Being rather a sensible man, after his fashion, he

dropped the subject."

"Except to say that he hated me."

"Oh, it worries you? Well, if you must probe this stupendous matter to

its depths he didn't say he hated you. I simply know he does."

"It doesn't wor----"

"Oh, let's drop it!" she cried spiritedly. "It's a most uninteresting

matter to me."

With a tremendous effort Anthony made his acquiescence a twist of

subject, and they drifted into an ancient question-and-answer game

concerned with each other's pasts, gradually warming as they discovered

the age-old, immemorial resemblances in tastes and ideas. They said

things that were more revealing than they intended--but each pretended

to accept the other at face, or rather word, value.

The growth of intimacy is like that. First one gives off his best

picture, the bright and finished product mended with bluff and falsehood

and humor. Then more details are required and one paints a second

portrait, and a third--before long the best lines cancel out--and the

secret is exposed at last; the planes of the pictures have intermingled

and given us away, and though we paint and paint we can no longer sell a

picture. We must be satisfied with hoping that such fatuous accounts of

ourselves as we make to our wives and children and business associates

are accepted as true.

"It seems to me," Anthony was saying earnestly, "that the position of a

man with neither necessity nor ambition is unfortunate. Heaven knows

it'd be pathetic of me to be sorry for myself--yet, sometimes I

envy Dick."

Her silence was encouragement. It was as near as she ever came to an

intentional lure.

"--And there used to be dignified occupations for a gentleman who had

leisure, things a little more constructive than filling up the landscape

with smoke or juggling some one else's money. There's science, of

course: sometimes I wish I'd taken a good foundation, say at Boston

Tech. But now, by golly, I'd have to sit down for two years and struggle

through the fundamentals of physics and chemistry."

She yawned.

"I've told you I don't know what anybody ought to do," she said

ungraciously, and at her indifference his rancor was born again.

"Aren't you interested in anything except yourself?"

"Not much."

He glared; his growing enjoyment in the conversation was ripped to

shreds. She had been irritable and vindictive all day, and it seemed to

him that for this moment he hated her hard selfishness. He stared

morosely at the fire.

Then a strange thing happened. She turned to him and smiled, and as he

saw her smile every rag of anger and hurt vanity dropped from him--as

though his very moods were but the outer ripples of her own, as though

emotion rose no longer in his breast unless she saw fit to pull an

omnipotent controlling thread.

He moved closer and taking her hand pulled her ever so gently toward him

until she half lay against his shoulder. She smiled up at him as he

kissed her.

"Gloria," he whispered very softly. Again she had made a magic, subtle

and pervading as a spilt perfume, irresistible and sweet.

Afterward, neither the next day nor after many years, could he remember

the important things of that afternoon. Had she been moved? In his arms

had she spoken a little--or at all? What measure of enjoyment had she

taken in his kisses? And had she at any time lost herself ever

so little?

Oh, for him there was no doubt. He had risen and paced the floor in

sheer ecstasy. That such a girl should be; should poise curled in a

corner of the couch like a swallow newly landed from a clean swift

flight, watching him with inscrutable eyes. He would stop his pacing

and, half shy each time at first, drop his arm around her and find

her kiss.

She was fascinating, he told her. He had never met any one like her

before. He besought her jauntily but earnestly to send him away; he

didn't want to fall in love. He wasn't coming to see her any

more--already she had haunted too many of his ways.

What delicious romance! His true reaction was neither fear nor

sorrow--only this deep delight in being with her that colored the

banality of his words and made the mawkish seem sad and the posturing

seem wise. He _would_ come back--eternally. He should have known!

"This is all. It's been very rare to have known you, very strange and

wonderful. But this wouldn't do--and wouldn't last." As he spoke there

was in his heart that tremulousness that we take for sincerity in

ourselves.

Afterward he remembered one reply of hers to something he had asked her.

He remembered it in this form--perhaps he had unconsciously arranged and

polished it:

"A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically

without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress."

As always when he was with her she seemed to grow gradually older until

at the end ruminations too deep for words would be wintering in

her eyes.

An hour passed, and the fire leaped up in little ecstasies as though its

fading life was sweet. It was five now, and the clock over the mantel

became articulate in sound. Then as if a brutish sensibility in him was

reminded by those thin, tinny beats that the petals were falling from

the flowered afternoon, Anthony pulled her quickly to her feet and held

her helpless, without breath, in a kiss that was neither a game nor

a tribute.

Her arms fell to her side. In an instant she was free.

"Don't!" she said quietly. "I don't want that."

She sat down on the far side of the lounge and gazed straight before

her. A frown had gathered between her eyes. Anthony sank down beside her

and closed his hand over hers. It was lifeless and unresponsive.

"Why, Gloria!" He made a motion as if to put his arm about her but she

drew away.

"I don't want that," she repeated.

"I'm very sorry," he said, a little impatiently. "I--I didn't know you

made such fine distinctions."

She did not answer.

"Won't you kiss me, Gloria?"

"I don't want to." It seemed to him she had not moved for hours.

"A sudden change, isn't it?" Annoyance was growing in his voice.

"Is it?" She appeared uninterested. It was almost as though she were

looking at some one else.

"Perhaps I'd better go."

No reply. He rose and regarded her angrily, uncertainly. Again he sat

down.

"Gloria, Gloria, won't you kiss me?"

"No." Her lips, parting for the word, had just faintly stirred.

Again he got to his feet, this time with less decision, less confidence.

"Then I'll go."

Silence.

"All right--I'll go."

He was aware of a certain irremediable lack of originality in his

remarks. Indeed he felt that the whole atmosphere had grown oppressive.

He wished she would speak, rail at him, cry out upon him, anything but

this pervasive and chilling silence. He cursed himself for a weak fool;

his clearest desire was to move her, to hurt her, to see her wince.

Helplessly, involuntarily, he erred again.

"If you're tired of kissing me I'd better go."

He saw her lips curl slightly and his last dignity left him. She spoke,

at length:

"I believe you've made that remark several times before."

He looked about him immediately, saw his hat and coat on a

chair--blundered into them, during an intolerable moment. Looking again

at the couch he perceived that she had not turned, not even moved. With

a shaken, immediately regretted "good-by" he went quickly but without

dignity from the room.

For over a moment Gloria made no sound. Her lips were still curled; her

glance was straight, proud, remote. Then her eyes blurred a little, and

she murmured three words half aloud to the death-bound fire:

"Good-by, you ass!" she said.

PANIC

The man had had the hardest blow of his life. He knew at last what he

wanted, but in finding it out it seemed that he had put it forever

beyond his grasp. He reached home in misery, dropped into an armchair

without even removing his overcoat, and sat there for over an hour, his

mind racing the paths of fruitless and wretched self-absorption. She had

sent him away! That was the reiterated burden of his despair. Instead of

seizing the girl and holding her by sheer strength until she became

passive to his desire, instead of beating down her will by the force of

his own, he had walked, defeated and powerless, from her door, with the

corners of his mouth drooping and what force there might have been in

his grief and rage hidden behind the manner of a whipped schoolboy. At

one minute she had liked him tremendously--ah, she had nearly loved him.

In the next he had become a thing of indifference to her, an insolent

and efficiently humiliated man.

He had no great self-reproach--some, of course, but there were other

things dominant in him now, far more urgent. He was not so much in love

with Gloria as mad for her. Unless he could have her near him again,

kiss her, hold her close and acquiescent, he wanted nothing more from

life. By her three minutes of utter unwavering indifference the girl had

lifted herself from a high but somehow casual position in his mind, to

be instead his complete preoccupation. However much his wild thoughts

varied between a passionate desire for her kisses and an equally

passionate craving to hurt and mar her, the residue of his mind craved

in finer fashion to possess the triumphant soul that had shone through

those three minutes. She was beautiful--but especially she was without

mercy. He must own that strength that could send him away.

At present no such analysis was possible to Anthony. His clarity of

mind, all those endless resources which he thought his irony had brought

him were swept aside. Not only for that night but for the days and weeks

that followed his books were to be but furniture and his friends only

people who lived and walked in a nebulous outer world from which he was

trying to escape--that world was cold and full of bleak wind, and for a

little while he had seen into a warm house where fires shone.

About midnight he began to realize that he was hungry. He went down into

Fifty-second Street, where it was so cold that he could scarcely see;

the moisture froze on his lashes and in the corners of his lips.

Everywhere dreariness had come down from the north, settling upon the

thin and cheerless street, where black bundled figures blacker still

against the night, moved stumbling along the sidewalk through the

shrieking wind, sliding their feet cautiously ahead as though they were

on skis. Anthony turned over toward Sixth Avenue, so absorbed in his

thoughts as not to notice that several passers-by had stared at him. His

overcoat was wide open, and the wind was biting in, hard and full of

merciless death.

... After a while a waitress spoke to him, a fat waitress with

black-rimmed eye-glasses from which dangled a long black cord.

"Order, please!"

Her voice, he considered, was unnecessarily loud. He looked up

resentfully.

"You wanna order or doncha?"

"Of course," he protested.

"Well, I ast you three times. This ain't no rest-room."

He glanced at the big clock and discovered with a start that it was

after two. He was down around Thirtieth Street somewhere, and after a

moment he found and translated the

[Illustration: S'DLIHC]

[Transcribers note: The illustration shows the word "CHILD's" in mirror

image.]

in a white semicircle of letters upon the glass front. The place was

inhabited sparsely by three or four bleak and half-frozen night-hawks.

"Give me some bacon and eggs and coffee, please."

The waitress bent upon him a last disgusted glance and, looking

ludicrously intellectual in her corded glasses, hurried away.

God! Gloria's kisses had been such flowers. He remembered as though it

had been years ago the low freshness of her voice, the beautiful lines

of her body shining through her clothes, her face lily-colored under the

lamps of the street--under the lamps.

Misery struck at him again, piling a sort of terror upon the ache and

yearning. He had lost her. It was true--no denying it, no softening it.

But a new idea had seared his sky--what of Bloeckman! What would happen

now? There was a wealthy man, middle-aged enough to be tolerant with a

beautiful wife, to baby her whims and indulge her unreason, to wear her

as she perhaps wished to be worn--a bright flower in his button-hole,

safe and secure from the things she feared. He felt that she had been

playing with the idea of marrying Bloeckman, and it was well possible

that this disappointment in Anthony might throw her on sudden impulse

into Bloeckman's arms.

The idea drove him childishly frantic. He wanted to kill Bloeckman and

make him suffer for his hideous presumption. He was saying this over and

over to himself with his teeth tight shut, and a perfect orgy of hate

and fright in his eyes.

But, behind this obscene jealousy, Anthony was in love at last,

profoundly and truly in love, as the word goes between man and woman.

His coffee appeared at his elbow and gave off for a certain time a

gradually diminishing wisp of steam. The night manager, seated at his

desk, glanced at the motionless figure alone at the last table, and then

with a sigh moved down upon him just as the hour hand crossed the figure

three on the big clock.

WISDOM

After another day the turmoil subsided and Anthony began to exercise a

measure of reason. He was in love--he cried it passionately to himself.

The things that a week before would have seemed insuperable obstacles,

his limited income, his desire to be irresponsible and independent, had

in this forty hours become the merest chaff before the wind of his

infatuation. If he did not marry her his life would be a feeble parody

on his own adolescence. To be able to face people and to endure the

constant reminder of Gloria that all existence had become, it was

necessary for him to have hope. So he built hope desperately and

tenaciously out of the stuff of his dream, a hope flimsy enough, to be

sure, a hope that was cracked and dissipated a dozen times a day, a hope

mothered by mockery, but, nevertheless, a hope that would be brawn and

sinew to his self-respect.

Out of this developed a spark of wisdom, a true perception of his own

from out the effortless past.

"Memory is short," he thought.

So very short. At the crucial point the Trust President is on the stand,

a potential criminal needing but one push to be a jailbird, scorned by

the upright for leagues around. Let him be acquitted--and in a year all

is forgotten. "Yes, he did have some trouble once, just a technicality,

I believe." Oh, memory is very short!

Anthony had seen Gloria altogether about a dozen times, say two dozen

hours. Supposing he left her alone for a month, made no attempt to see

her or speak to her, and avoided every place where she might possibly

be. Wasn't it possible, the more possible because she had never loved

him, that at the end of that time the rush of events would efface his

personality from her conscious mind, and with his personality his

offense and humiliation? She would forget, for there would be other men.

He winced. The implication struck out at him--other men. Two

months--God! Better three weeks, two weeks----

He thought this the second evening after the catastrophe when he was

undressing, and at this point he threw himself down on the bed and lay

there, trembling very slightly and looking at the top of the canopy.

Two weeks--that was worse than no time at all. In two weeks he would

approach her much as he would have to now, without personality or

confidence--remaining still the man who had gone too far and then for a

period that in time was but a moment but in fact an eternity, whined.

No, two weeks was too short a time. Whatever poignancy there had been

for her in that afternoon must have time to dull. He must give her a

period when the incident should fade, and then a new period when she

should gradually begin to think of him, no matter how dimly, with a true

perspective that would remember his pleasantness as well as his

humiliation.

He fixed, finally, on six weeks as approximately the interval best

suited to his purpose, and on a desk calendar he marked the days off,

finding that it would fall on the ninth of April. Very well, on that day

he would phone and ask her if he might call. Until then--silence.

After his decision a gradual improvement was manifest. He had taken at

least a step in the direction to which hope pointed, and he realized

that the less he brooded upon her the better he would be able to give

the desired impression when they met.

In another hour he fell into a deep sleep.

THE INTERVAL

Nevertheless, though, as the days passed, the glory of her hair dimmed

perceptibly for him and in a year of separation might have departed

completely, the six weeks held many abominable days. He dreaded the

sight of Dick and Maury, imagining wildly that they knew all--but when

the three met it was Richard Caramel and not Anthony who was the centre

of attention; "The Demon Lover" had been accepted for immediate

publication. Anthony felt that from now on he moved apart. He no longer

craved the warmth and security of Maury's society which had cheered him

no further back than November. Only Gloria could give that now and no

one else ever again. So Dick's success rejoiced him only casually and

worried him not a little. It meant that the world was going

ahead--writing and reading and publishing--and living. And he wanted the

world to wait motionless and breathless for six weeks--while

Gloria forgot.

TWO ENCOUNTERS

His greatest satisfaction was in Geraldine's company. He took her once

to dinner and the theatre and entertained her several times in his

apartment. When he was with her she absorbed him, not as Gloria had, but

quieting those erotic sensibilities in him that worried over Gloria. It

didn't matter how he kissed Geraldine. A kiss was a kiss--to be enjoyed

to the utmost for its short moment. To Geraldine things belonged in

definite pigeonholes: a kiss was one thing, anything further was quite

another; a kiss was all right; the other things were "bad."

When half the interval was up two incidents occurred on successive days

that upset his increasing calm and caused a temporary relapse.

The first was--he saw Gloria. It was a short meeting. Both bowed. Both

spoke, yet neither heard the other. But when it was over Anthony read

down a column of The Sun three times in succession without understanding

a single sentence.

One would have thought Sixth Avenue a safe street! Having forsworn his

barber at the Plaza he went around the corner one morning to be shaved,

and while waiting his turn he took off coat and vest, and with his soft

collar open at the neck stood near the front of the shop. The day was an

oasis in the cold desert of March and the sidewalk was cheerful with a

population of strolling sun-worshippers. A stout woman upholstered in

velvet, her flabby cheeks too much massaged, swirled by with her poodle

straining at its leash--the effect being given of a tug bringing in an

ocean liner. Just behind them a man in a striped blue suit, walking

slue-footed in white-spatted feet, grinned at the sight and catching

Anthony's eye, winked through the glass. Anthony laughed, thrown

immediately into that humor in which men and women were graceless and

absurd phantasms, grotesquely curved and rounded in a rectangular world

of their own building. They inspired the same sensations in him as did

those strange and monstrous fish who inhabit the esoteric world of green

in the aquarium.

Two more strollers caught his eye casually, a man and a girl--then in a

horrified instant the girl resolved herself into Gloria. He stood here

powerless; they came nearer and Gloria, glancing in, saw him. Her eyes

widened and she smiled politely. Her lips moved. She was less than five

feet away.

"How do you do?" he muttered inanely.

Gloria, happy, beautiful, and young--with a man he had never seen

before!

It was then that the barber's chair was vacated and he read down the

newspaper column three times in succession.

The second incident took place the next day. Going into the Manhattan

bar about seven he was confronted with Bloeckman. As it happened, the

room was nearly deserted, and before the mutual recognition he had

stationed himself within a foot of the older man and ordered his drink,

so it was inevitable that they should converse.

"Hello, Mr. Patch," said Bloeckman amiably enough.

Anthony took the proffered hand and exchanged a few aphorisms on the

fluctuations of the mercury.

"Do you come in here much?" inquired Bloeckman.

"No, very seldom." He omitted to add that the Plaza bar had, until

lately, been his favorite.

"Nice bar. One of the best bars in town."

Anthony nodded. Bloeckman emptied his glass and picked up his cane. He

was in evening dress.

"Well, I'll be hurrying on. I'm going to dinner with Miss Gilbert."

Death looked suddenly out at him from two blue eyes. Had he announced

himself as his vis-à-vis's prospective murderer he could not have struck

a more vital blow at Anthony. The younger man must have reddened

visibly, for his every nerve was in instant clamor. With tremendous

effort he mustered a rigid--oh, so rigid--smile, and said a conventional

good-by. But that night he lay awake until after four, half wild with

grief and fear and abominable imaginings.

WEAKNESS

And one day in the fifth week he called her up. He had been sitting in

his apartment trying to read "L'Education Sentimental," and something in

the book had sent his thoughts racing in the direction that, set free,

they always took, like horses racing for a home stable. With suddenly

quickened breath he walked to the telephone. When he gave the number it

seemed to him that his voice faltered and broke like a schoolboy's. The

Central must have heard the pounding of his heart. The sound of the

receiver being taken up at the other end was a crack of doom, and Mrs.

Gilbert's voice, soft as maple syrup running into a glass container, had

for him a quality of horror in its single "Hello-o-ah?"

"Miss Gloria's not feeling well. She's lying down, asleep. Who shall I

say called?"

"Nobody!" he shouted.

In a wild panic he slammed down the receiver; collapsed into his

armchair in the cold sweat of breathless relief.

SERENADE

The first thing he said to her was: "Why, you've bobbed your hair!" and

she answered: "Yes, isn't it gorgeous?"

It was not fashionable then. It was to be fashionable in five or six

years. At that time it was considered extremely daring.

"It's all sunshine outdoors," he said gravely. "Don't you want to take a

walk?"

She put on a light coat and a quaintly piquant Napoleon hat of Alice

Blue, and they walked along the Avenue and into the Zoo, where they

properly admired the grandeur of the elephant and the collar-height of

the giraffe, but did not visit the monkey house because Gloria said that

monkeys smelt so bad.

Then they returned toward the Plaza, talking about nothing, but glad for

the spring singing in the air and for the warm balm that lay upon the

suddenly golden city. To their right was the Park, while at the left a

great bulk of granite and marble muttered dully a millionaire's chaotic

message to whosoever would listen: something about "I worked and I saved

and I was sharper than all Adam and here I sit, by golly, by golly!"

All the newest and most beautiful designs in automobiles were out on

Fifth Avenue, and ahead of them the Plaza loomed up rather unusually

white and attractive. The supple, indolent Gloria walked a short

shadow's length ahead of him, pouring out lazy casual comments that

floated a moment on the dazzling air before they reached his ear.

"Oh!" she cried, "I want to go south to Hot Springs! I want to get out

in the air and just roll around on the new grass and forget there's ever

been any winter."

"Don't you, though!"

"I want to hear a million robins making a frightful racket. I sort of

like birds."

"All women _are_ birds," he ventured.

"What kind am I?"--quick and eager.

"A swallow, I think, and sometimes a bird of paradise. Most girls are

sparrows, of course--see that row of nurse-maids over there? They're

sparrows--or are they magpies? And of course you've met canary

girls--and robin girls."

"And swan girls and parrot girls. All grown women are hawks, I think, or

owls."

"What am I--a buzzard?"

She laughed and shook her head.

"Oh, no, you're not a bird at all, do you think? You're a Russian

wolfhound."

Anthony remembered that they were white and always looked unnaturally

hungry. But then they were usually photographed with dukes and

princesses, so he was properly flattered.

"Dick's a fox terrier, a trick fox terrier," she continued.

"And Maury's a cat." Simultaneously it occurred to him how like

Bloeckman was to a robust and offensive hog. But he preserved a

discreet silence.

Later, as they parted, Anthony asked when he might see her again.

"Don't you ever make long engagements?" he pleaded, "even if it's a week

ahead, I think it'd be fun to spend a whole day together, morning and

afternoon both."

"It would be, wouldn't it?" She thought for a moment. "Let's do it next

Sunday."

"All right. I'll map out a programme that'll take up every minute."

He did. He even figured to a nicety what would happen in the two hours

when she would come to his apartment for tea: how the good Bounds would

have the windows wide to let in the fresh breeze--but a fire going also

lest there be chill in the air--and how there would be clusters of

flowers about in big cool bowls that he would buy for the occasion. They

would sit on the lounge.

And when the day came they did sit upon the lounge. After a while

Anthony kissed her because it came about quite naturally; he found

sweetness sleeping still upon her lips, and felt that he had never been

away. The fire was bright and the breeze sighing in through the curtains

brought a mellow damp, promising May and world of summer. His soul

thrilled to remote harmonies; he heard the strum of far guitars and

waters lapping on a warm Mediterranean shore--for he was young now as he

would never be again, and more triumphant than death.

Six o'clock stole down too soon and rang the querulous melody of St.

Anne's chimes on the corner. Through the gathering dusk they strolled to

the Avenue, where the crowds, like prisoners released, were walking with

elastic step at last after the long winter, and the tops of the busses

were thronged with congenial kings and the shops full of fine soft

things for the summer, the rare summer, the gay promising summer that

seemed for love what the winter was for money. Life was singing for his

supper on the corner! Life was handing round cocktails in the street! Old

women there were in that crowd who felt that they could have run and won

a hundred-yard dash!

In bed that night with the lights out and the cool room swimming with

moonlight, Anthony lay awake and played with every minute of the day

like a child playing in turn with each one of a pile of long-wanted

Christmas toys. He had told her gently, almost in the middle of a kiss,

that he loved her, and she had smiled and held him closer and murmured,

"I'm glad," looking into his eyes. There had been a new quality in her

attitude, a new growth of sheer physical attraction toward him and a

strange emotional tenseness, that was enough to make him clinch his

hands and draw in his breath at the recollection. He had felt nearer to

her than ever before. In a rare delight he cried aloud to the room that

he loved her.

He phoned next morning--no hesitation now, no uncertainty--instead a

delirious excitement that doubled and trebled when he heard her voice:

"Good morning--Gloria."

"Good morning."

"That's all I called you up to say-dear."

"I'm glad you did."

"I wish I could see you."

"You will, to-morrow night."

"That's a long time, isn't it?"

"Yes--" Her voice was reluctant. His hand tightened on the receiver.

"Couldn't I come to-night?" He dared anything in the glory and

revelation of that almost whispered "yes."

"I have a date."

"Oh--"

"But I might--I might be able to break it."

"Oh!"--a sheer cry, a rhapsody. "Gloria?"

"What?"

"I love you."

Another pause and then:

"I--I'm glad."

Happiness, remarked Maury Noble one day, is only the first hour after

the alleviation of some especially intense misery. But oh, Anthony's

face as he walked down the tenth-floor corridor of the Plaza that night!

His dark eyes were gleaming--around his mouth were lines it was a

kindness to see. He was handsome then if never before, bound for one of

those immortal moments which come so radiantly that their remembered

light is enough to see by for years.

He knocked and, at a word, entered. Gloria, dressed in simple pink,

starched and fresh as a flower, was across the room, standing very

still, and looking at him wide-eyed.

As he closed the door behind him she gave a little cry and moved swiftly

over the intervening space, her arms rising in a premature caress as she

came near. Together they crushed out the stiff folds of her dress in one

triumphant and enduring embrace.

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER I

THE RADIANT HOUR

After a fortnight Anthony and Gloria began to indulge in "practical

discussions," as they called those sessions when under the guise of

severe realism they walked in an eternal moonlight.

"Not as much as I do you," the critic of belles-lettres would insist.

"If you really loved me you'd want every one to know it."

"I do," she protested; "I want to stand on the street corner like a

sandwich man, informing all the passers-by."

"Then tell me all the reasons why you're going to marry me in June."

"Well, because you're so clean. You're sort of blowy clean, like I am.

There's two sorts, you know. One's like Dick: he's clean like polished

pans. You and I are clean like streams and winds. I can tell whenever I

see a person whether he is clean, and if so, which kind of clean he is."

"We're twins."

Ecstatic thought!

"Mother says"--she hesitated uncertainly--"mother says that two souls

are sometimes created together and--and in love before they're born."

Bilphism gained its easiest convert.... After a while he lifted up his

head and laughed soundlessly toward the ceiling. When his eyes came back

to her he saw that she was angry.

"Why did you laugh?" she cried, "you've done that twice before. There's

nothing funny about our relation to each other. I don't mind playing the

fool, and I don't mind having you do it, but I can't stand it when we're

together."

"I'm sorry."

"Oh, don't say you're sorry! If you can't think of anything better than

that, just keep quiet!"

"I love you."

"I don't care."

There was a pause. Anthony was depressed.... At length Gloria murmured:

"I'm sorry I was mean."

"You weren't. I was the one."

Peace was restored--the ensuing moments were so much more sweet and

sharp and poignant. They were stars on this stage, each playing to an

audience of two: the passion of their pretense created the actuality.

Here, finally, was the quintessence of self-expression--yet it was

probable that for the most part their love expressed Gloria rather than

Anthony. He felt often like a scarcely tolerated guest at a party she

was giving.

Telling Mrs. Gilbert had been an embarrassed matter. She sat stuffed

into a small chair and listened with an intense and very blinky sort of

concentration. She must have known it--for three weeks Gloria had seen

no one else--and she must have noticed that this time there was an

authentic difference in her daughter's attitude. She had been given

special deliveries to post; she had heeded, as all mothers seem to heed,

the hither end of telephone conversations, disguised but still

rather warm--

--Yet she had delicately professed surprise and declared herself

immensely pleased; she doubtless was; so were the geranium plants

blossoming in the window-boxes, and so were the cabbies when the lovers

sought the romantic privacy of hansom cabs--quaint device--and the staid

bill of fares on which they scribbled "you know I do," pushing it over

for the other to see.

But between kisses Anthony and this golden girl quarrelled incessantly.

"Now, Gloria," he would cry, "please let me explain!"

"Don't explain. Kiss me."

"I don't think that's right. If I hurt your feelings we ought to discuss

it. I don't like this kiss-and-forget."

"But I don't want to argue. I think it's wonderful that we _can_ kiss

and forget, and when we can't it'll be time to argue."

At one time some gossamer difference attained such bulk that Anthony

arose and punched himself into his overcoat--for a moment it appeared

that the scene of the preceding February was to be repeated, but knowing

how deeply she was moved he retained his dignity with his pride, and in

a moment Gloria was sobbing in his arms, her lovely face miserable as a

frightened little girl's.

Meanwhile they kept unfolding to each other, unwillingly, by curious

reactions and evasions, by distastes and prejudices and unintended hints

of the past. The girl was proudly incapable of jealousy and, because he

was extremely jealous, this virtue piqued him. He told her recondite

incidents of his own life on purpose to arouse some spark of it, but to

no avail. She possessed him now--nor did she desire the dead years.

"Oh, Anthony," she would say, "always when I'm mean to you I'm sorry

afterward. I'd give my right hand to save you one little moment's pain."

And in that instant her eyes were brimming and she was not aware that

she was voicing an illusion. Yet Anthony knew that there were days when

they hurt each other purposely--taking almost a delight in the thrust.

Incessantly she puzzled him: one hour so intimate and charming, striving

desperately toward an unguessed, transcendent union; the next, silent

and cold, apparently unmoved by any consideration of their love or

anything he could say. Often he would eventually trace these portentous

reticences to some physical discomfort--of these she never complained

until they were over--or to some carelessness or presumption in him, or

to an unsatisfactory dish at dinner, but even then the means by which

she created the infinite distances she spread about herself were a

mystery, buried somewhere back in those twenty-two years of

unwavering pride.

"Why do you like Muriel?" he demanded one day.

"I don't very much."

"Then why do you go with her?"

"Just for some one to go with. They're no exertion, those girls. They

sort of believe everything I tell them--but I rather like Rachael. I

think she's cute--and so clean and slick, don't you? I used to have

other friends--in Kansas City and at school--casual, all of them, girls

who just flitted into my range and out of it for no more reason than

that boys took us places together. They didn't interest me after

environment stopped throwing us together. Now they're mostly married.

What does it matter--they were all just people."

"You like men better, don't you?"

"Oh, much better. I've got a man's mind."

"You've got a mind like mine. Not strongly gendered either way."

Later she told him about the beginnings of her friendship with

Bloeckman. One day in Delmonico's, Gloria and Rachael had come upon

Bloeckman and Mr. Gilbert having luncheon and curiosity had impelled her

to make it a party of four. She had liked him--rather. He was a relief

from younger men, satisfied as he was with so little. He humored her and

he laughed, whether he understood her or not. She met him several times,

despite the open disapproval of her parents, and within a month he had

asked her to marry him, tendering her everything from a villa in Italy

to a brilliant career on the screen. She had laughed in his face--and he

had laughed too.

But he had not given up. To the time of Anthony's arrival in the arena

he had been making steady progress. She treated him rather well--except

that she had called him always by an invidious nickname--perceiving,

meanwhile, that he was figuratively following along beside her as she

walked the fence, ready to catch her if she should fall.

The night before the engagement was announced she told Bloeckman. It was

a heavy blow. She did not enlighten Anthony as to the details, but she

implied that he had not hesitated to argue with her. Anthony gathered

that the interview had terminated on a stormy note, with Gloria very

cool and unmoved lying in her corner of the sofa and Joseph Bloeckman of

"Films Par Excellence" pacing the carpet with eyes narrowed and head

bowed. Gloria had been sorry for him but she had judged it best not to

show it. In a final burst of kindness she had tried to make him hate

her, there at the last. But Anthony, understanding that Gloria's

indifference was her strongest appeal, judged how futile this must have

been. He wondered, often but quite casually, about Bloeckman--finally he

forgot him entirely.

HEYDAY

One afternoon they found front seats on the sunny roof of a bus and rode

for hours from the fading Square up along the sullied river, and then,

as the stray beams fled the westward streets, sailed down the turgid

Avenue, darkening with ominous bees from the department stores. The

traffic was clotted and gripped in a patternless jam; the busses were

packed four deep like platforms above the crowd as they waited for the

moan of the traffic whistle.

"Isn't it good!" cried Gloria. "Look!"

A miller's wagon, stark white with flour, driven by a powdery clown,

passed in front of them behind a white horse and his black team-mate.

"What a pity!" she complained; "they'd look so beautiful in the dusk, if

only both horses were white. I'm mighty happy just this minute, in

this city."

Anthony shook his head in disagreement.

"I think the city's a mountebank. Always struggling to approach the

tremendous and impressive urbanity ascribed to it. Trying to be

romantically metropolitan."

"I don't. I think it is impressive."

"Momentarily. But it's really a transparent, artificial sort of

spectacle. It's got its press-agented stars and its flimsy, unenduring

stage settings and, I'll admit, the greatest army of supers ever

assembled--" He paused, laughed shortly, and added: "Technically

excellent, perhaps, but not convincing."

"I'll bet policemen think people are fools," said Gloria thoughtfully,

as she watched a large but cowardly lady being helped across the street.

"He always sees them frightened and inefficient and old--they are," she

added. And then: "We'd better get off. I told mother I'd have an early

supper and go to bed. She says I look tired, damn it."

"I wish we were married," he muttered soberly; "there'll be no good

night then and we can do just as we want."

"Won't it be good! I think we ought to travel a lot. I want to go to the

Mediterranean and Italy. And I'd like to go on the stage some time--say

for about a year."

"You bet. I'll write a play for you."

"Won't that be good! And I'll act in it. And then some time when we have

more money"--old Adam's death was always thus tactfully alluded

to--"we'll build a magnificent estate, won't we?"

"Oh, yes, with private swimming pools."

"Dozens of them. And private rivers. Oh, I wish it were now."

Odd coincidence--he had just been wishing that very thing. They plunged

like divers into the dark eddying crowd and emerging in the cool fifties

sauntered indolently homeward, infinitely romantic to each other ...

both were walking alone in a dispassionate garden with a ghost found

in a dream.

Halcyon days like boats drifting along slow-moving rivers; spring

evenings full of a plaintive melancholy that made the past beautiful and

bitter, bidding them look back and see that the loves of other summers

long gone were dead with the forgotten waltzes of their years. Always

the most poignant moments were when some artificial barrier kept them

apart: in the theatre their hands would steal together, join, give and

return gentle pressures through the long dark; in crowded rooms they

would form words with their lips for each other's eyes--not knowing that

they were but following in the footsteps of dusty generations but

comprehending dimly that if truth is the end of life happiness is a mode

of it, to be cherished in its brief and tremulous moment. And then, one

fairy night, May became June. Sixteen days now--fifteen--fourteen----

THREE DIGRESSIONS

Just before the engagement was announced Anthony had gone up to

Tarrytown to see his grandfather, who, a little more wizened and grizzly

as time played its ultimate chuckling tricks, greeted the news with

profound cynicism.

"Oh, you're going to get married, are you?" He said this with such a

dubious mildness and shook his head up and down so many times that

Anthony was not a little depressed. While he was unaware of his

grandfather's intentions he presumed that a large part of the money

would come to him. A good deal would go in charities, of course; a good

deal to carry on the business of reform.

"Are you going to work?"

"Why--" temporized Anthony, somewhat disconcerted. "I _am_ working. You

know--"

"Ah, I mean work," said Adam Patch dispassionately.

"I'm not quite sure yet what I'll do. I'm not exactly a beggar, grampa,"

he asserted with some spirit.

The old man considered this with eyes half closed. Then almost

apologetically he asked:

"How much do you save a year?"

"Nothing so far--"

"And so after just managing to get along on your money you've decided

that by some miracle two of you can get along on it."

"Gloria has some money of her own. Enough to buy clothes."

"How much?"

Without considering this question impertinent, Anthony answered it.

"About a hundred a month."

"That's altogether about seventy-five hundred a year." Then he added

softly: "It ought to be plenty. If you have any sense it ought to be

plenty. But the question is whether you have any or not."

"I suppose it is." It was shameful to be compelled to endure this pious

browbeating from the old man, and his next words were stiffened with

vanity. "I can manage very well. You seem convinced that I'm utterly

worthless. At any rate I came up here simply to tell you that I'm

getting married in June. Good-by, sir." With this he turned away and

headed for the door, unaware that in that instant his grandfather, for

the first time, rather liked him.

"Wait!" called Adam Patch, "I want to talk to you."

Anthony faced about.

"Well, sir?"

"Sit down. Stay all night."

Somewhat mollified, Anthony resumed his seat.

"I'm sorry, sir, but I'm going to see Gloria to-night."

"What's her name?"

"Gloria Gilbert."

"New York girl? Someone you know?"

"She's from the Middle West."

"What business her father in?"

"In a celluloid corporation or trust or something. They're from Kansas

City."

"You going to be married out there?"

"Why, no, sir. We thought we'd be married in New York--rather quietly."

"Like to have the wedding out here?"

Anthony hesitated. The suggestion made no appeal to him, but it was

certainly the part of wisdom to give the old man, if possible, a

proprietary interest in his married life. In addition Anthony was a

little touched.

"That's very kind of you, grampa, but wouldn't it be a lot of trouble?"

"Everything's a lot of trouble. Your father was married here--but in the

old house."

"Why--I thought he was married in Boston."

Adam Patch considered.

"That's true. He _was_ married in Boston."

Anthony felt a moment's embarrassment at having made the correction, and

he covered it up with words.

"Well, I'll speak to Gloria about it. Personally I'd like to, but of

course it's up to the Gilberts, you see."

His grandfather drew a long sigh, half closed his eyes, and sank back in

his chair.

"In a hurry?" he asked in a different tone.

"Not especially."

"I wonder," began Adam Patch, looking out with a mild, kindly glance at

the lilac bushes that rustled against the windows, "I wonder if you ever

think about the after-life."

"Why--sometimes."

"I think a great deal about the after-life." His eyes were dim but his

voice was confident and clear. "I was sitting here to-day thinking about

what's lying in wait for us, and somehow I began to remember an

afternoon nearly sixty-five years ago, when I was playing with my little

sister Annie, down where that summer-house is now." He pointed out into

the long flower-garden, his eyes trembling of tears, his voice shaking.

"I began thinking--and it seemed to me that _you_ ought to think a

little more about the after-life. You ought to be--steadier"--he paused

and seemed to grope about for the right word--"more industrious--why--"

Then his expression altered, his entire personality seemed to snap

together like a trap, and when he continued the softness had gone from

his voice.

"--Why, when I was just two years older than you," he rasped with a

cunning chuckle, "I sent three members of the firm of Wrenn and Hunt to

the poorhouse."

Anthony started with embarrassment.

"Well, good-by," added his grandfather suddenly, "you'll miss your

train."

Anthony left the house unusually elated, and strangely sorry for the old

man; not because his wealth could buy him "neither youth nor digestion"

but because he had asked Anthony to be married there, and because he had

forgotten something about his son's wedding that he should have

remembered.

Richard Caramel, who was one of the ushers, caused Anthony and Gloria

much distress in the last few weeks by continually stealing the rays of

their spot-light. "The Demon Lover" had been published in April, and it

interrupted the love affair as it may be said to have interrupted

everything its author came in contact with. It was a highly original,

rather overwritten piece of sustained description concerned with a Don

Juan of the New York slums. As Maury and Anthony had said before, as the

more hospitable critics were saying then, there was no writer in America

with such power to describe the atavistic and unsubtle reactions of that

section of society.

The book hesitated and then suddenly "went." Editions, small at first,

then larger, crowded each other week by week. A spokesman of the

Salvation Army denounced it as a cynical misrepresentation of all the

uplift taking place in the underworld. Clever press-agenting spread the

unfounded rumor that "Gypsy" Smith was beginning a libel suit because

one of the principal characters was a burlesque of himself. It was

barred from the public library of Burlington, Iowa, and a Mid-Western

columnist announced by innuendo that Richard Caramel was in a sanitarium

with delirium tremens.

The author, indeed, spent his days in a state of pleasant madness. The

book was in his conversation three-fourths of the time--he wanted to

know if one had heard "the latest"; he would go into a store and in a

loud voice order books to be charged to him, in order to catch a chance

morsel of recognition from clerk or customer. He knew to a town in what

sections of the country it was selling best; he knew exactly what he

cleared on each edition, and when he met any one who had not read it,

or, as it happened only too often, had not heard of it, he succumbed to

moody depression.

So it was natural for Anthony and Gloria to decide, in their jealousy,

that he was so swollen with conceit as to be a bore. To Dick's great

annoyance Gloria publicly boasted that she had never read "The Demon

Lover," and didn't intend to until every one stopped talking about it.

As a matter of fact, she had no time to read now, for the presents were

pouring in--first a scattering, then an avalanche, varying from the

bric-à-brac of forgotten family friends to the photographs of forgotten

poor relations.

Maury gave them an elaborate "drinking set," which included silver

goblets, cocktail shaker, and bottle-openers. The extortion from Dick

was more conventional--a tea set from Tiffany's. From Joseph Bloeckman

came a simple and exquisite travelling clock, with his card. There was

even a cigarette-holder from Bounds; this touched Anthony and made him

want to weep--indeed, any emotion short of hysteria seemed natural in

the half-dozen people who were swept up by this tremendous sacrifice to

convention. The room set aside in the Plaza bulged with offerings sent

by Harvard friends and by associates of his grandfather, with

remembrances of Gloria's Farmover days, and with rather pathetic

trophies from her former beaux, which last arrived with esoteric,

melancholy messages, written on cards tucked carefully inside, beginning

"I little thought when--" or "I'm sure I wish you all the happiness--"

or even "When you get this I shall be on my way to--"

The most munificent gift was simultaneously the most disappointing. It

was a concession of Adam Patch's--a check for five thousand dollars.

To most of the presents Anthony was cold. It seemed to him that they

would necessitate keeping a chart of the marital status of all their

acquaintances during the next half-century. But Gloria exulted in each

one, tearing at the tissue-paper and excelsior with the rapaciousness of

a dog digging for a bone, breathlessly seizing a ribbon or an edge of

metal and finally bringing to light the whole article and holding it up

critically, no emotion except rapt interest in her unsmiling face.

"Look, Anthony!"

"Darn nice, isn't it!"

No answer until an hour later when she would give him a careful account

of her precise reaction to the gift, whether it would have been improved

by being smaller or larger, whether she was surprised at getting it,

and, if so, just how much surprised.

Mrs. Gilbert arranged and rearranged a hypothetical house, distributing

the gifts among the different rooms, tabulating articles as "second-best

clock" or "silver to use _every_ day," and embarrassing Anthony and

Gloria by semi-facetious references to a room she called the nursery.

She was pleased by old Adam's gift and thereafter had it that he was a

very ancient soul, "as much as anything else." As Adam Patch never quite

decided whether she referred to the advancing senility of his mind or to

some private and psychic schema of her own, it cannot be said to have

pleased him. Indeed he always spoke of her to Anthony as "that old

woman, the mother," as though she were a character in a comedy he had

seen staged many times before. Concerning Gloria he was unable to make

up his mind. She attracted him but, as she herself told Anthony, he had

decided that she was frivolous and was afraid to approve of her.

Five days!--A dancing platform was being erected on the lawn at

Tarrytown. Four days!--A special train was chartered to convey the

guests to and from New York. Three days!----

THE DIARY

She was dressed in blue silk pajamas and standing by her bed with her

hand on the light to put the room in darkness, when she changed her mind

and opening a table drawer brought out a little black book--a

"Line-a-day" diary. This she had kept for seven years. Many of the

pencil entries were almost illegible and there were notes and references

to nights and afternoons long since forgotten, for it was not an

intimate diary, even though it began with the immemorial "I am going to

keep a diary for my children." Yet as she thumbed over the pages the

eyes of many men seemed to look out at her from their half-obliterated

names. With one she had gone to New Haven for the first time--in 1908,

when she was sixteen and padded shoulders were fashionable at Yale--she

had been flattered because "Touch down" Michaud had "rushed" her all

evening. She sighed, remembering the grown-up satin dress she had been

so proud of and the orchestra playing "Yama-yama, My Yama Man" and

"Jungle-Town." So long ago!--the names: Eltynge Reardon, Jim Parsons,

"Curly" McGregor, Kenneth Cowan, "Fish-eye" Fry (whom she had liked for

being so ugly), Carter Kirby--he had sent her a present; so had Tudor

Baird;--Marty Reffer, the first man she had been in love with for more

than a day, and Stuart Holcome, who had run away with her in his

automobile and tried to make her marry him by force. And Larry Fenwick,

whom she had always admired because he had told her one night that if

she wouldn't kiss him she could get out of his car and walk home. What

a list!

... And, after all, an obsolete list. She was in love now, set for the

eternal romance that was to be the synthesis of all romance, yet sad for

these men and these moonlights and for the "thrills" she had had--and

the kisses. The past--her past, oh, what a joy! She had been

exuberantly happy.

Turning over the pages her eyes rested idly on the scattered entries of

the past four months. She read the last few carefully.

"_April 1st_.--I know Bill Carstairs hates me because I was so

disagreeable, but I hate to be sentimentalized over sometimes. We drove

out to the Rockyear Country Club and the most wonderful moon kept

shining through the trees. My silver dress is getting tarnished. Funny

how one forgets the other nights at Rockyear--with Kenneth Cowan when I

loved him so!

"_April 3rd_.--After two hours of Schroeder who, they inform me, has

millions, I've decided that this matter of sticking to things wears one

out, particularly when the things concerned are men. There's nothing so

often overdone and from to-day I swear to be amused. We talked about

'love'--how banal! With how many men have I talked about love?

"_April 11th_.--Patch actually called up to-day! and when he forswore me

about a month ago he fairly raged out the door. I'm gradually losing

faith in any man being susceptible to fatal injuries.

"_April 20th_.--Spent the day with Anthony. Maybe I'll marry him some

time. I kind of like his ideas--he stimulates all the originality in me.

Blockhead came around about ten in his new car and took me out Riverside

Drive. I liked him to-night: he's so considerate. He knew I didn't want

to talk so he was quiet all during the ride.

"_April 21st_.--Woke up thinking of Anthony and sure enough he called

and sounded sweet on the phone--so I broke a date for him. To-day I feel

I'd break anything for him, including the ten commandments and my neck.

He's coming at eight and I shall wear pink and look very fresh and

starched----"

She paused here, remembering that after he had gone that night she had

undressed with the shivering April air streaming in the windows. Yet it

seemed she had not felt the cold, warmed by the profound banalities

burning in her heart.

The next entry occurred a few days later:

"_April 24th_.--I want to marry Anthony, because husbands are so often

'husbands' and I must marry a lover.

"There are four general types of husbands.

"(1) The husband who always wants to stay in in the evening, has no vices

and works for a salary. Totally undesirable!

"(2) The atavistic master whose mistress one is, to wait on his pleasure.

This sort always considers every pretty woman 'shallow,' a sort of

peacock with arrested development.

"(3) Next comes the worshipper, the idolater of his wife and all that is

his, to the utter oblivion of everything else. This sort demands an

emotional actress for a wife. God! it must be an exertion to be thought

righteous.

"(4) And Anthony--a temporarily passionate lover with wisdom enough to

realize when it has flown and that it must fly. And I want to get

married to Anthony.

"What grubworms women are to crawl on their bellies through colorless

marriages! Marriage was created not to be a background but to need one.

Mine is going to be outstanding. It can't, shan't be the setting--it's

going to be the performance, the live, lovely, glamourous performance,

and the world shall be the scenery. I refuse to dedicate my life to

posterity. Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to one's

unwanted children. What a fate--to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my

self-love, to think in terms of milk, oatmeal, nurse, diapers.... Dear

dream children, how much more beautiful you are, dazzling little

creatures who flutter (all dream children must flutter) on golden,

golden wings----

"Such children, however, poor dear babies, have little in common with the

wedded state.

"_June 7th_.--Moral question: Was it wrong to make Bloeckman love me?

Because I did really make him. He was almost sweetly sad to-night. How

opportune it was that my throat is swollen plunk together and tears were

easy to muster. But he's just the past--buried already in my

plentiful lavender.

"_June 8th_.--And to-day I've promised not to chew my mouth. Well, I

won't, I suppose--but if he'd only asked me not to eat!

"Blowing bubbles--that's what we're doing, Anthony and me. And we blew

such beautiful ones to-day, and they'll explode and then we'll blow more

and more, I guess--bubbles just as big and just as beautiful, until all

the soap and water is used up."

On this note the diary ended. Her eyes wandered up the page, over the

June 8th's of 1912, 1910, 1907. The earliest entry was scrawled in the

plump, bulbous hand of a sixteen-year-old girl--it was the name, Bob

Lamar, and a word she could not decipher. Then she knew what it

was--and, knowing, she found her eyes misty with tears. There in a

graying blur was the record of her first kiss, faded as its intimate

afternoon, on a rainy veranda seven years before. She seemed to remember

something one of them had said that day and yet she could not remember.

Her tears came faster, until she could scarcely see the page. She was

crying, she told herself, because she could remember only the rain and

the wet flowers in the yard and the smell of the damp grass.

... After a moment she found a pencil and holding it unsteadily drew

three parallel lines beneath the last entry. Then she printed FINIS in

large capitals, put the book back in the drawer, and crept into bed.

BREATH OF THE CAVE

Back in his apartment after the bridal dinner, Anthony snapped out his

lights and, feeling impersonal and fragile as a piece of china waiting

on a serving table, got into bed. It was a warm night--a sheet was

enough for comfort--and through his wide-open windows came sound,

evanescent and summery, alive with remote anticipation. He was thinking

that the young years behind him, hollow and colorful, had been lived in

facile and vacillating cynicism upon the recorded emotions of men long

dust. And there was something beyond that; he knew now. There was the

union of his soul with Gloria's, whose radiant fire and freshness was

the living material of which the dead beauty of books was made.

From the night into his high-walled room there came, persistently, that

evanescent and dissolving sound--something the city was tossing up and

calling back again, like a child playing with a ball. In Harlem, the

Bronx, Gramercy Park, and along the water-fronts, in little parlors or

on pebble-strewn, moon-flooded roofs, a thousand lovers were making this

sound, crying little fragments of it into the air. All the city was

playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it

up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be

beautiful as a story, promising happiness--and by that promise giving

it. It gave love hope in its own survival. It could do no more.

It was then that a new note separated itself jarringly from the soft

crying of the night. It was a noise from an areaway within a hundred

feet from his rear window, the noise of a woman's laughter. It began

low, incessant and whining--some servant-maid with her fellow, he

thought--and then it grew in volume and became hysterical, until it

reminded him of a girl he had seen overcome with nervous laughter at a

vaudeville performance. Then it sank, receded, only to rise again and

include words--a coarse joke, some bit of obscure horseplay he could not

distinguish. It would break off for a moment and he would just catch the

low rumble of a man's voice, then begin again--interminably; at first

annoying, then strangely terrible. He shivered, and getting up out of

bed went to the window. It had reached a high point, tensed and stifled,

almost the quality of a scream--then it ceased and left behind it a

silence empty and menacing as the greater silence overhead. Anthony

stood by the window a moment longer before he returned to his bed. He

found himself upset and shaken. Try as he might to strangle his

reaction, some animal quality in that unrestrained laughter had grasped

at his imagination, and for the first time in four months aroused his

old aversion and horror toward all the business of life. The room had

grown smothery. He wanted to be out in some cool and bitter breeze,

miles above the cities, and to live serene and detached back in the

corners of his mind. Life was that sound out there, that ghastly

reiterated female sound.

"Oh, my _God_!" he cried, drawing in his breath sharply.

Burying his face in the pillows he tried in vain to concentrate upon the

details of the next day.

MORNING

In the gray light he found that it was only five o'clock. He regretted

nervously that he had awakened so early--he would appear fagged at the

wedding. He envied Gloria who could hide her fatigue with careful

pigmentation.

In his bathroom he contemplated himself in the mirror and saw that he

was unusually white--half a dozen small imperfections stood out against

the morning pallor of his complexion, and overnight he had grown the

faint stubble of a beard--the general effect, he fancied, was

unprepossessing, haggard, half unwell.

On his dressing table were spread a number of articles which he told

over carefully with suddenly fumbling fingers--their tickets to

California, the book of traveller's checks, his watch, set to the half

minute, the key to his apartment, which he must not forget to give to

Maury, and, most important of all, the ring. It was of platinum set

around with small emeralds; Gloria had insisted on this; she had always

wanted an emerald wedding ring, she said.

It was the third present he had given her; first had come the engagement

ring, and then a little gold cigarette-case. He would be giving her many

things now--clothes and jewels and friends and excitement. It seemed

absurd that from now on he would pay for all her meals. It was going to

cost: he wondered if he had not underestimated for this trip, and if he

had not better cash a larger check. The question worried him.

Then the breathless impendency of the event swept his mind clear of

details. This was the day--unsought, unsuspected six months before, but

now breaking in yellow light through his east window, dancing along the

carpet as though the sun were smiling at some ancient and reiterated gag

of his own.

Anthony laughed in a nervous one-syllable snort.

"By God!" he muttered to himself, "I'm as good as married!"

THE USHERS

_Six young men in_ CROSS PATCH'S _library growing more and more cheery

under the influence of Mumm's Extra Dry, set surreptitiously in cold

pails by the bookcases._

THE FIRST YOUNG MAN: By golly! Believe me, in my next book I'm going to

do a wedding scene that'll knock 'em cold!

THE SECOND YOUNG MAN: Met a débutante th'other day said she thought your

book was powerful. As a rule young girls cry for this primitive business.

THE THIRD YOUNG MAN: Where's Anthony?

THE FOURTH YOUNG MAN: Walking up and down outside talking to himself.

SECOND YOUNG MAN: Lord! Did you see the minister? Most peculiar looking

teeth.

FIFTH YOUNG MAN: Think they're natural. Funny thing people having gold

teeth.

SIXTH YOUNG MAN: They say they love 'em. My dentist told me once a woman

came to him and insisted on having two of her teeth covered with gold.

No reason at all. All right the way they were.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: Hear you got out a book, Dicky. 'Gratulations!

DICK: (_Stiffly_) Thanks.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: (_Innocently_) What is it? College stories?

DICK: (_More stiffly_) No. Not college stories.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: Pity! Hasn't been a good book about Harvard for years.

DICK: (_Touchily_) Why don't you supply the lack?

THIRD YOUNG MAN: I think I saw a squad of guests turn the drive in a

Packard just now.

SIXTH YOUNG MAN: Might open a couple more bottles on the strength of

that.

THIRD YOUNG MAN: It was the shock of my life when I heard the old man

was going to have a wet wedding. Rabid prohibitionist, you know.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: (_Snapping his fingers excitedly_) By gad! I knew I'd

forgotten something. Kept thinking it was my vest.

DICK: What was it?

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: By gad! By gad!

SIXTH YOUNG MAN: Here! Here! Why the tragedy?

SECOND YOUNG MAN: What'd you forget? The way home?

DICK: (_Maliciously_) He forgot the plot for his book of Harvard

stories.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: No, sir, I forgot the present, by George! I forgot to

buy old Anthony a present. I kept putting it off and putting it off, and

by gad I've forgotten it! What'll they think?

SIXTH YOUNG MAN: (_Facetiously_) That's probably what's been holding up

the wedding.

(THE FOURTH YOUNG MAN _looks nervously at his watch. Laughter._)

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: By gad! What an ass I am!

SECOND YOUNG MAN: What d'you make of the bridesmaid who thinks she's

Nora Bayes? Kept telling me she wished this was a ragtime wedding.

Name's Haines or Hampton.

DICK: (_Hurriedly spurring his imagination_) Kane, you mean, Muriel

Kane. She's a sort of debt of honor, I believe. Once saved Gloria from

drowning, or something of the sort.

SECOND YOUNG MAN: I didn't think she could stop that perpetual swaying

long enough to swim. Fill up my glass, will you? Old man and I had a

long talk about the weather just now.

MAURY: Who? Old Adam?

SECOND YOUNG MAN: No, the bride's father. He must be with a weather

bureau.

DICK: He's my uncle, Otis.

OTIS: Well, it's an honorable profession. (_Laughter._)

SIXTH YOUNG MAN: Bride your cousin, isn't she?

DICK: Yes, Cable, she is.

CABLE: She certainly is a beauty. Not like you, Dicky. Bet she brings

old Anthony to terms.

MAURY: Why are all grooms given the title of "old"? I think marriage is

an error of youth.

DICK: Maury, the professional cynic.

MAURY: Why, you intellectual faker!

FIFTH YOUNG MAN: Battle of the highbrows here, Otis. Pick up what crumbs

you can.

DICK: Faker yourself! What do _you_ know?

MAURY: What do _you_ know?

LICK: Ask me anything. Any branch of knowledge.

MAURY: All right. What's the fundamental principle of biology?

DICK: You don't know yourself.

MAURY: Don't hedge!

DICK: Well, natural selection?

MAURY: Wrong.

DICK: I give it up.

MAURY: Ontogony recapitulates phyllogony.

FIFTH YOUNG MAN: Take your base!

MAURY: Ask you another. What's the influence of mice on the clover crop?

(_Laughter._)

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: What's the influence of rats on the Decalogue?

MAURY: Shut up, you saphead. There _is_ a connection.

DICK: What is it then?

MAURY: (_Pausing a moment in growing disconcertion_) Why, let's see. I

seem to have forgotten exactly. Something about the bees eating

the clover.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: And the clover eating the mice! Haw! Haw!

MAURY: (_Frowning_) Let me just think a minute.

DICK: (_Sitting up suddenly_) Listen!

(_A volley of chatter explodes in the adjoining room. The six young men

arise, feeling at their neckties._)

DICK: (_Weightily_) We'd better join the firing squad. They're going to

take the picture, I guess. No, that's afterward.

OTIS: Cable, you take the ragtime bridesmaid.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: I wish to God I'd sent that present.

MAURY: If you'll give me another minute I'll think of that about the

mice.

OTIS: I was usher last month for old Charlie McIntyre and----

(_They move slowly toward the door as the chatter becomes a babel and

the practising preliminary to the overture issues in long pious groans

from ADAM PATCH'S organ_.)

ANTHONY

There were five hundred eyes boring through the back of his cutaway and

the sun glinting on the clergyman's inappropriately bourgeois teeth.

With difficulty he restrained a laugh. Gloria was saying something in a

clear proud voice and he tried to think that the affair was irrevocable,

that every second was significant, that his life was being slashed into

two periods and that the face of the world was changing before him. He

tried to recapture that ecstatic sensation of ten weeks before. All

these emotions eluded him, he did not even feel the physical nervousness

of that very morning--it was all one gigantic aftermath. And those gold

teeth! He wondered if the clergyman were married; he wondered perversely

if a clergyman could perform his own marriage service....

But as he took Gloria into his arms he was conscious of a strong

reaction. The blood was moving in his veins now. A languorous and

pleasant content settled like a weight upon him, bringing responsibility

and possession. He was married.

GLORIA

So many, such mingled emotions, that no one of them was separable from

the others! She could have wept for her mother, who was crying quietly

back there ten feet and for the loveliness of the June sunlight flooding

in at the windows. She was beyond all conscious perceptions. Only a

sense, colored with delirious wild excitement, that the ultimately

important was happening--and a trust, fierce and passionate, burning in

her like a prayer, that in a moment she would be forever and

securely safe.

Late one night they arrived in Santa Barbara, where the night clerk at

the Hotel Lafcadio refused to admit them, on the grounds that they were

not married.

The clerk thought that Gloria was beautiful. He did not think that

anything so beautiful as Gloria could be moral.

"CON AMORE"

That first half-year--the trip West, the long months' loiter along the

California coast, and the gray house near Greenwich where they lived

until late autumn made the country dreary--those days, those places, saw

the enraptured hours. The breathless idyl of their engagement gave way,

first, to the intense romance of the more passionate relationship. The

breathless idyl left them, fled on to other lovers; they looked around

one day and it was gone, how they scarcely knew. Had either of them lost

the other in the days of the idyl, the love lost would have been ever to

the loser that dim desire without fulfilment which stands back of all

life. But magic must hurry on, and the lovers remain....

The idyl passed, bearing with it its extortion of youth. Came a day when

Gloria found that other men no longer bored her; came a day when Anthony

discovered that he could sit again late into the evening, talking with

Dick of those tremendous abstractions that had once occupied his world.

But, knowing they had had the best of love, they clung to what remained.

Love lingered--by way of long conversations at night into those stark

hours when the mind thins and sharpens and the borrowings from dreams

become the stuff of all life, by way of deep and intimate kindnesses

they developed toward each other, by way of their laughing at the same

absurdities and thinking the same things noble and the same things sad.

It was, first of all, a time of discovery. The things they found in each

other were so diverse, so intermixed and, moreover, so sugared with love

as to seem at the time not so much discoveries as isolated phenomena--to

be allowed for, and to be forgotten. Anthony found that he was living

with a girl of tremendous nervous tension and of the most high-handed

selfishness. Gloria knew within a month that her husband was an utter

coward toward any one of a million phantasms created by his imagination.

Her perception was intermittent, for this cowardice sprang out, became

almost obscenely evident, then faded and vanished as though it had been

only a creation of her own mind. Her reactions to it were not those

attributed to her sex--it roused her neither to disgust nor to a

premature feeling of motherhood. Herself almost completely without

physical fear, she was unable to understand, and so she made the most of

what she felt to be his fear's redeeming feature, which was that though

he was a coward under a shock and a coward under a strain--when his

imagination was given play--he had yet a sort of dashing recklessness

that moved her on its brief occasions almost to admiration, and a pride

that usually steadied him when he thought he was observed.

The trait first showed itself in a dozen incidents of little more than

nervousness--his warning to a taxi-driver against fast driving, in

Chicago; his refusal to take her to a certain tough café she had always

wished to visit; these of course admitted the conventional

interpretation--that it was of her he had been thinking; nevertheless,

their culminative weight disturbed her. But something that occurred in a

San Francisco hotel, when they had been married a week, gave the matter

certainty.

It was after midnight and pitch dark in their room. Gloria was dozing

off and Anthony's even breathing beside her made her suppose that he was

asleep, when suddenly she saw him raise himself on his elbow and stare

at the window.

"What is it, dearest?" she murmured.

"Nothing"--he had relaxed to his pillow and turned toward her--"nothing,

my darling wife."

"Don't say 'wife.' I'm your mistress. Wife's such an ugly word. Your

'permanent mistress' is so much more tangible and desirable.... Come

into my arms," she added in a rush of tenderness; "I can sleep so well,

so well with you in my arms."

Coming into Gloria's arms had a quite definite meaning. It required that

he should slide one arm under her shoulder, lock both arms about her,

and arrange himself as nearly as possible as a sort of three-sided crib

for her luxurious ease. Anthony, who tossed, whose arms went tinglingly

to sleep after half an hour of that position, would wait until she was

asleep and roll her gently over to her side of the bed--then, left to

his own devices, he would curl himself into his usual knots.

Gloria, having attained sentimental comfort, retired into her doze. Five

minutes ticked away on Bloeckman's travelling clock; silence lay all

about the room, over the unfamiliar, impersonal furniture and the

half-oppressive ceiling that melted imperceptibly into invisible walls

on both sides. Then there was suddenly a rattling flutter at the window,

staccato and loud upon the hushed, pent air.

With a leap Anthony was out of the bed and standing tense beside it.

"Who's there?" he cried in an awful voice.

Gloria lay very still, wide awake now and engrossed not so much in the

rattling as in the rigid breathless figure whose voice had reached from

the bedside into that ominous dark.

The sound stopped; the room was quiet as before--then Anthony pouring

words in at the telephone.

"Some one just tried to get into the room! ...

"There's some one at the window!" His voice was emphatic now, faintly

terrified.

"All right! Hurry!" He hung up the receiver; stood motionless.

... There was a rush and commotion at the door, a knocking--Anthony went

to open it upon an excited night clerk with three bell-boys grouped

staring behind him. Between thumb and finger the night clerk held a wet

pen with the threat of a weapon; one of the bell-boys had seized a

telephone directory and was looking at it sheepishly. Simultaneously the

group was joined by the hastily summoned house-detective, and as one man

they surged into the room.

Lights sprang on with a click. Gathering a piece of sheet about her

Gloria dove away from sight, shutting her eyes to keep out the horror of

this unpremeditated visitation. There was no vestige of an idea in her

stricken sensibilities save that her Anthony was at grievous fault.

... The night clerk was speaking from the window, his tone half of the

servant, half of the teacher reproving a schoolboy.

"Nobody out there," he declared conclusively; "my golly, nobody _could_

be out there. This here's a sheer fall to the street of fifty feet. It

was the wind you heard, tugging at the blind."

"Oh."

Then she was sorry for him. She wanted only to comfort him and draw him

back tenderly into her arms, to tell them to go away because the thing

their presence connotated was odious. Yet she could not raise her head

for shame. She heard a broken sentence, apologies, conventions of the

employee and one unrestrained snicker from a bell-boy.

"I've been nervous as the devil all evening," Anthony was saying;

"somehow that noise just shook me--I was only about half awake."

"Sure, I understand," said the night clerk with comfortable tact; "been

that way myself."

The door closed; the lights snapped out; Anthony crossed the floor

quietly and crept into bed. Gloria, feigning to be heavy with sleep,

gave a quiet little sigh and slipped into his arms.

"What was it, dear?"

"Nothing," he answered, his voice still shaken; "I thought there was

somebody at the window, so I looked out, but I couldn't see any one and

the noise kept up, so I phoned down-stairs. Sorry if I disturbed you,

but I'm awfully darn nervous to-night."

Catching the lie, she gave an interior start--he had not gone to the

window, nor near the window. He had stood by the bed and then sent in

his call of fear.

"Oh," she said--and then: "I'm so sleepy."

For an hour they lay awake side by side, Gloria with her eyes shut so

tight that blue moons formed and revolved against backgrounds of deepest

mauve, Anthony staring blindly into the darkness overhead.

After many weeks it came gradually out into the light, to be laughed and

joked at. They made a tradition to fit over it--whenever that

overpowering terror of the night attacked Anthony, she would put her

arms about him and croon, soft as a song:

"I'll protect my Anthony. Oh, nobody's ever going to harm my Anthony!"

He would laugh as though it were a jest they played for their mutual

amusement, but to Gloria it was never quite a jest. It was, at first, a

keen disappointment; later, it was one of the times when she controlled

her temper.

The management of Gloria's temper, whether it was aroused by a lack of

hot water for her bath or by a skirmish with her husband, became almost

the primary duty of Anthony's day. It must be done just so--by this much

silence, by that much pressure, by this much yielding, by that much

force. It was in her angers with their attendant cruelties that her

inordinate egotism chiefly displayed itself. Because she was brave,

because she was "spoiled," because of her outrageous and commendable

independence of judgment, and finally because of her arrogant

consciousness that she had never seen a girl as beautiful as herself,

Gloria had developed into a consistent, practising Nietzschean. This, of

course, with overtones of profound sentiment.

There was, for example, her stomach. She was used to certain dishes, and

she had a strong conviction that she could not possibly eat anything

else. There must be a lemonade and a tomato sandwich late in the

morning, then a light lunch with a stuffed tomato. Not only did she

require food from a selection of a dozen dishes, but in addition this

food must be prepared in just a certain way. One of the most annoying

half hours of the first fortnight occurred in Los Angeles, when an

unhappy waiter brought her a tomato stuffed with chicken salad instead

of celery.

"We always serve it that way, madame," he quavered to the gray eyes that

regarded him wrathfully.

Gloria made no answer, but when the waiter had turned discreetly away

she banged both fists upon the table until the china and silver rattled.

"Poor Gloria!" laughed Anthony unwittingly, "you can't get what you want

ever, can you?"

"I can't eat _stuff_!" she flared up.

"I'll call back the waiter."

"I don't want you to! He doesn't know anything, the darn _fool_!"

"Well, it isn't the hotel's fault. Either send it back, forget it, or be

a sport and eat it."

"Shut up!" she said succinctly.

"Why take it out on me?"

"Oh, I'm _not_," she wailed, "but I simply _can't_ eat it."

Anthony subsided helplessly.

"We'll go somewhere else," he suggested.

"I don't _want_ to go anywhere else. I'm tired of being trotted around

to a dozen cafés and not getting _one thing_ fit to eat."

"When did we go around to a dozen cafés?"

"You'd _have_ to in _this_ town," insisted Gloria with ready sophistry.

Anthony, bewildered, tried another tack.

"Why don't you try to eat it? It can't be as bad as you think."

"Just--because--I--don't--like--chicken!"

She picked up her fork and began poking contemptuously at the tomato,

and Anthony expected her to begin flinging the stuffings in all

directions. He was sure that she was approximately as angry as she had

ever been--for an instant he had detected a spark of hate directed as

much toward him as toward any one else--and Gloria angry was, for the

present, unapproachable.

Then, surprisingly, he saw that she had tentatively raised the fork to

her lips and tasted the chicken salad. Her frown had not abated and he

stared at her anxiously, making no comment and daring scarcely to

breathe. She tasted another forkful--in another moment she was eating.

With difficulty Anthony restrained a chuckle; when at length he spoke

his words had no possible connection with chicken salad.

This incident, with variations, ran like a lugubrious fugue through the

first year of marriage; always it left Anthony baffled, irritated, and

depressed. But another rough brushing of temperaments, a question of

laundry-bags, he found even more annoying as it ended inevitably in a

decisive defeat for him.

One afternoon in Coronado, where they made the longest stay of their

trip, more than three weeks, Gloria was arraying herself brilliantly for

tea. Anthony, who had been down-stairs listening to the latest rumor

bulletins of war in Europe, entered the room, kissed the back of her

powdered neck, and went to his dresser. After a great pulling out and

pushing in of drawers, evidently unsatisfactory, he turned around to the

Unfinished Masterpiece.

"Got any handkerchiefs, Gloria?" he asked. Gloria shook her golden head.

"Not a one. I'm using one of yours."

"The last one, I deduce." He laughed dryly.

"Is it?" She applied an emphatic though very delicate contour to her

lips.

"Isn't the laundry back?"

"I don't know."

Anthony hesitated--then, with sudden discernment, opened the closet

door. His suspicions were verified. On the hook provided hung the blue

bag furnished by the hotel. This was full of his clothes--he had put

them there himself. The floor beneath it was littered with an

astonishing mass of finery--lingerie, stockings, dresses, nightgowns,

and pajamas--most of it scarcely worn but all of it coming indubitably

under the general heading of Gloria's laundry.

He stood holding the closet door open.

"Why, Gloria!"

"What?"

The lip line was being erased and corrected according to some mysterious

perspective; not a finger trembled as she manipulated the lip-stick, not

a glance wavered in his direction. It was a triumph of concentration.

"Haven't you ever sent out the laundry?"

"Is it there?"

"It most certainly is."

"Well, I guess I haven't, then."

"Gloria," began Anthony, sitting down on the bed and trying to catch her

mirrored eyes, "you're a nice fellow, you are! I've sent it out every

time it's been sent since we left New York, and over a week ago you

promised you'd do it for a change. All you'd have to do would be to cram

your own junk into that bag and ring for the chambermaid."

"Oh, why fuss about the laundry?" exclaimed Gloria petulantly, "I'll

take care of it."

"I haven't fussed about it. I'd just as soon divide the bother with you,

but when we run out of handkerchiefs it's darn near time

something's done."

Anthony considered that he was being extraordinarily logical. But

Gloria, unimpressed, put away her cosmetics and casually offered him

her back.

"Hook me up," she suggested; "Anthony, dearest, I forgot all about it. I

meant to, honestly, and I will to-day. Don't be cross with your

sweetheart."

What could Anthony do then but draw her down upon his knee and kiss a

shade of color from her lips.

"But I don't mind," she murmured with a smile, radiant and magnanimous.

"You can kiss all the paint off my lips any time you want."

They went down to tea. They bought some handkerchiefs in a notion store

near by. All was forgotten.

But two days later Anthony looked in the closet and saw the bag still

hung limp upon its hook and that the gay and vivid pile on the floor had

increased surprisingly in height.

"Gloria!" he cried.

"Oh--" Her voice was full of real distress. Despairingly Anthony went to

the phone and called the chambermaid.

"It seems to me," he said impatiently, "that you expect me to be some

sort of French valet to you."

Gloria laughed, so infectiously that Anthony was unwise enough to smile.

Unfortunate man! In some intangible manner his smile made her mistress

of the situation--with an air of injured righteousness she went

emphatically to the closet and began pushing her laundry violently into

the bag. Anthony watched her--ashamed of himself.

"There!" she said, implying that her fingers had been worked to the bone

by a brutal taskmaster.

He considered, nevertheless, that he had given her an object-lesson and

that the matter was closed, but on the contrary it was merely beginning.

Laundry pile followed laundry pile--at long intervals; dearth of

handkerchief followed dearth of handkerchief--at short ones; not to

mention dearth of sock, of shirt, of everything. And Anthony found at

length that either he must send it out himself or go through the

increasingly unpleasant ordeal of a verbal battle with Gloria.

GLORIA AND GENERAL LEE

On their way East they stopped two days in Washington, strolling about

with some hostility in its atmosphere of harsh repellent light, of

distance without freedom, of pomp without splendor--it seemed a

pasty-pale and self-conscious city. The second day they made an

ill-advised trip to General Lee's old home at Arlington.

The bus which bore them was crowded with hot, unprosperous people, and

Anthony, intimate to Gloria, felt a storm brewing. It broke at the Zoo,

where the party stopped for ten minutes. The Zoo, it seemed, smelt of

monkeys. Anthony laughed; Gloria called down the curse of Heaven upon

monkeys, including in her malevolence all the passengers of the bus and

their perspiring offspring who had hied themselves monkey-ward.

Eventually the bus moved on to Arlington. There it met other busses and

immediately a swarm of women and children were leaving a trail of

peanut-shells through the halls of General Lee and crowding at length

into the room where he was married. On the wall of this room a pleasing

sign announced in large red letters "Ladies' Toilet." At this final blow

Gloria broke down.

"I think it's perfectly terrible!" she said furiously, "the idea of

letting these people come here! And of encouraging them by making these

houses show-places."

"Well," objected Anthony, "if they weren't kept up they'd go to pieces."

"What if they did!" she exclaimed as they sought the wide pillared

porch. "Do you think they've left a breath of 1860 here? This has become

a thing of 1914."

"Don't you want to preserve old things?"

"But you _can't_, Anthony. Beautiful things grow to a certain height and

then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay. And

just as any period decays in our minds, the things of that period should

decay too, and in that way they're preserved for a while in the few

hearts like mine that react to them. That graveyard at Tarrytown, for

instance. The asses who give money to preserve things have spoiled that

too. Sleepy Hollow's gone; Washington Irving's dead and his books are

rotting in our estimation year by year--then let the graveyard rot too,

as it should, as all things should. Trying to preserve a century by

keeping its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive by

stimulants."

"So you think that just as a time goes to pieces its houses ought to go

too?"

"Of course! Would you value your Keats letter if the signature was

traced over to make it last longer? It's just because I love the past

that I want this house to look back on its glamourous moment of youth

and beauty, and I want its stairs to creak as if to the footsteps of

women with hoop skirts and men in boots and spurs. But they've made it

into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty. It hasn't any right to

look so prosperous. It might care enough for Lee to drop a brick now and

then. How many of these--these _animals_"--she waved her hand

around--"get anything from this, for all the histories and guide-books

and restorations in existence? How many of them who think that, at best,

appreciation is talking in undertones and walking on tiptoes would even

come here if it was any trouble? I want it to smell of magnolias instead

of peanuts and I want my shoes to crunch on the same gravel that Lee's

boots crunched on. There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no

poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books,

houses--bound for dust--mortal--"

A small boy appeared beside them and, swinging a handful of

banana-peels, flung them valiantly in the direction of the Potomac.

SENTIMENT

Simultaneously with the fall of Liège, Anthony and Gloria arrived in New

York. In retrospect the six weeks seemed miraculously happy. They had

found to a great extent, as most young couples find in some measure,

that they possessed in common many fixed ideas and curiosities and odd

quirks of mind; they were essentially companionable.

But it had been a struggle to keep many of their conversations on the

level of discussions. Arguments were fatal to Gloria's disposition. She

had all her life been associated either with her mental inferiors or

with men who, under the almost hostile intimidation of her beauty, had

not dared to contradict her; naturally, then, it irritated her when

Anthony emerged from the state in which her pronouncements were an

infallible and ultimate decision.

He failed to realize, at first, that this was the result partly of her

"female" education and partly of her beauty, and he was inclined to

include her with her entire sex as curiously and definitely limited. It

maddened him to find she had no sense of justice. But he discovered

that, when a subject did interest her, her brain tired less quickly than

his. What he chiefly missed in her mind was the pedantic teleology--the

sense of order and accuracy, the sense of life as a mysteriously

correlated piece of patchwork, but he understood after a while that such

a quality in her would have been incongruous.

Of the things they possessed in common, greatest of all was their almost

uncanny pull at each other's hearts. The day they left the hotel in

Coronado she sat down on one of the beds while they were packing, and

began to weep bitterly.

"Dearest--" His arms were around her; he pulled her head down upon his

shoulder. "What is it, my own Gloria? Tell me."

"We're going away," she sobbed. "Oh, Anthony, it's sort of the first

place we've lived together. Our two little beds here--side by

side--they'll be always waiting for us, and we're never coming back to

'em any more."

She was tearing at his heart as she always could. Sentiment came over

him, rushed into his eyes.

"Gloria, why, we're going on to another room. And two other little beds.

We're going to be together all our lives."

Words flooded from her in a low husky voice.

"But it won't be--like our two beds--ever again. Everywhere we go and

move on and change, something's lost--something's left behind. You can't

ever quite repeat anything, and I've been so yours, here--"

He held her passionately near, discerning far beyond any criticism of

her sentiment, a wise grasping of the minute, if only an indulgence of

her desire to cry--Gloria the idler, caresser of her own dreams,

extracting poignancy from the memorable things of life and youth.

Later in the afternoon when he returned from the station with the

tickets he found her asleep on one of the beds, her arm curled about a

black object which he could not at first identify. Coming closer he

found it was one of his shoes, not a particularly new one, nor clean

one, but her face, tear-stained, was pressed against it, and he

understood her ancient and most honorable message. There was almost

ecstasy in waking her and seeing her smile at him, shy but well aware of

her own nicety of imagination.

With no appraisal of the worth or dross of these two things, it seemed

to Anthony that they lay somewhere near the heart of love.

THE GRAY HOUSE

It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to

slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are

significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty

an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an

organ--and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of

humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only

youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory. A brilliant ball, gay with

light romantic laughter, wears through its own silks and satins to show

the bare framework of a man-made thing--oh, that eternal hand!--a play,

most tragic and most divine, becomes merely a succession of speeches,

sweated over by the eternal plagiarist in the clammy hours and acted by

men subject to cramps, cowardice, and manly sentiment.

And this time with Gloria and Anthony, this first year of marriage, and

the gray house caught them in that stage when the organ-grinder was

slowly undergoing his inevitable metamorphosis. She was twenty-three; he

was twenty-six.

The gray house was, at first, of sheerly pastoral intent. They lived

impatiently in Anthony's apartment for the first fortnight after the

return from California, in a stifled atmosphere of open trunks, too many

callers, and the eternal laundry-bags. They discussed with their friends

the stupendous problem of their future. Dick and Maury would sit with

them agreeing solemnly, almost thoughtfully, as Anthony ran through his

list of what they "ought" to do, and where they "ought" to live.

"I'd like to take Gloria abroad," he complained, "except for this damn

war--and next to that I'd sort of like to have a place in the country,

somewhere near New York, of course, where I could write--or whatever I

decide to do."

Gloria laughed.

"Isn't he cute?" she required of Maury. "'Whatever he decides to do!'

But what am _I_ going to do if he works? Maury, will you take me around

if Anthony works?"

"Anyway, I'm not going to work yet," said Anthony quickly.

It was vaguely understood between them that on some misty day he would

enter a sort of glorified diplomatic service and be envied by princes

and prime ministers for his beautiful wife.

"Well," said Gloria helplessly, "I'm sure I don't know. We talk and talk

and never get anywhere, and we ask all our friends and they just answer

the way we want 'em to. I wish somebody'd take care of us."

"Why don't you go out to--out to Greenwich or something?" suggested

Richard Caramel.

"I'd like that," said Gloria, brightening. "Do you think we could get a

house there?"

Dick shrugged his shoulders and Maury laughed.

"You two amuse me," he said. "Of all the unpractical people! As soon as

a place is mentioned you expect us to pull great piles of photographs

out of our pockets showing the different styles of architecture

available in bungalows."

"That's just what I don't want," wailed Gloria, "a hot stuffy bungalow,

with a lot of babies next door and their father cutting the grass in his

shirt sleeves--"

"For Heaven's sake, Gloria," interrupted Maury, "nobody wants to lock

you up in a bungalow. Who in God's name brought bungalows into the

conversation? But you'll never get a place anywhere unless you go out

and hunt for it."

"Go where? You say 'go out and hunt for it,' but where?"

With dignity Maury waved his hand paw-like about the room.

"Out anywhere. Out in the country. There're lots of places."

"Thanks."

"Look here!" Richard Caramel brought his yellow eye rakishly into play.

"The trouble with you two is that you're all disorganized. Do you know

anything about New York State? Shut up, Anthony, I'm talking to Gloria."

"Well," she admitted finally, "I've been to two or three house parties

in Portchester and around in Connecticut--but, of course, that isn't in

New York State, is it? And neither is Morristown," she finished with

drowsy irrelevance.

There was a shout of laughter.

"Oh, Lord!" cried Dick, "neither is Morristown!' No, and neither is

Santa Barbara, Gloria. Now listen. To begin with, unless you have a

fortune there's no use considering any place like Newport or

Southhampton or Tuxedo. They're out of the question."

They all agreed to this solemnly.

"And personally I hate New Jersey. Then, of course, there's upper New

York, above Tuxedo."

"Too cold," said Gloria briefly. "I was there once in an automobile."

"Well, it seems to me there're a lot of towns like Rye between New York

and Greenwich where you could buy a little gray house of some--"

Gloria leaped at the phrase triumphantly. For the first time since their

return East she knew what she wanted.

"Oh, _yes_!" she cried. "Oh, _yes_! that's it: a little gray house with

sort of white around and a whole lot of swamp maples just as brown and

gold as an October picture in a gallery. Where can we find one?"

"Unfortunately, I've mislaid my list of little gray houses with swamp

maples around them--but I'll try to find it. Meanwhile you take a piece

of paper and write down the names of seven possible towns. And every day

this week you take a trip to one of those towns."

"Oh, gosh!" protested Gloria, collapsing mentally, "why won't you do it

for us? I hate trains."

"Well, hire a car, and--"

Gloria yawned.

"I'm tired of discussing it. Seems to me all we do is talk about where

to live."

"My exquisite wife wearies of thought," remarked Anthony ironically.

"She must have a tomato sandwich to stimulate her jaded nerves. Let's go

out to tea."

As the unfortunate upshot of this conversation, they took Dick's advice

literally, and two days later went out to Rye, where they wandered

around with an irritated real estate agent, like bewildered babes in the

wood. They were shown houses at a hundred a month which closely adjoined

other houses at a hundred a month; they were shown isolated houses to

which they invariably took violent dislikes, though they submitted

weakly to the agent's desire that they "look at that stove--some stove!"

and to a great shaking of doorposts and tapping of walls, intended

evidently to show that the house would not immediately collapse, no

matter how convincingly it gave that impression. They gazed through

windows into interiors furnished either "commercially" with slab-like

chairs and unyielding settees, or "home-like" with the melancholy

bric-à-brac of other summers--crossed tennis rackets, fit-form couches,

and depressing Gibson girls. With a feeling of guilt they looked at a

few really nice houses, aloof, dignified, and cool--at three hundred a

month. They went away from Rye thanking the real estate agent very

much indeed.

On the crowded train back to New York the seat behind was occupied by a

super-respirating Latin whose last few meals had obviously been composed

entirely of garlic. They reached the apartment gratefully, almost

hysterically, and Gloria rushed for a hot bath in the reproachless

bathroom. So far as the question of a future abode was concerned both of

them were incapacitated for a week.

The matter eventually worked itself out with unhoped-for romance.

Anthony ran into the living room one afternoon fairly radiating

"the idea."

"I've got it," he was exclaiming as though he had just caught a mouse.

"We'll get a car."

"Gee whiz! Haven't we got troubles enough taking care of ourselves?"

"Give me a second to explain, can't you? just let's leave our stuff with

Dick and just pile a couple of suitcases in our car, the one we're going

to buy--we'll have to have one in the country anyway--and just start out

in the direction of New Haven. You see, as we get out of commuting

distance from New York, the rents'll get cheaper, and as soon as we find

a house we want we'll just settle down."

By his frequent and soothing interpolation of the word "just" he aroused

her lethargic enthusiasm. Strutting violently about the room, he

simulated a dynamic and irresistible efficiency. "We'll buy a car

to-morrow."

Life, limping after imagination's ten-league boots, saw them out of town

a week later in a cheap but sparkling new roadster, saw them through the

chaotic unintelligible Bronx, then over a wide murky district which

alternated cheerless blue-green wastes with suburbs of tremendous and

sordid activity. They left New York at eleven and it was well past a hot

and beatific noon when they moved rakishly through Pelham.

"These aren't towns," said Gloria scornfully, "these are just city

blocks plumped down coldly into waste acres. I imagine all the men here

have their mustaches stained from drinking their coffee too quickly in

the morning."

"And play pinochle on the commuting trains."

"What's pinochle?"

"Don't be so literal. How should I know? But it sounds as though they

ought to play it."

"I like it. It sounds as if it were something where you sort of cracked

your knuckles or something.... Let me drive."

Anthony looked at her suspiciously.

"You swear you're a good driver?"

"Since I was fourteen."

He stopped the car cautiously at the side of the road and they changed

seats. Then with a horrible grinding noise the car was put in gear,

Gloria adding an accompaniment of laughter which seemed to Anthony

disquieting and in the worst possible taste.

"Here we go!" she yelled. "Whoo-oop!"

Their heads snapped back like marionettes on a single wire as the car

leaped ahead and curved retchingly about a standing milk-wagon, whose

driver stood up on his seat and bellowed after them. In the immemorial

tradition of the road Anthony retorted with a few brief epigrams as to

the grossness of the milk-delivering profession. He cut his remarks

short, however, and turned to Gloria with the growing conviction that he

had made a grave mistake in relinquishing control and that Gloria was a

driver of many eccentricities and of infinite carelessness.

"Remember now!" he warned her nervously, "the man said we oughtn't to go

over twenty miles an hour for the first five thousand miles."

She nodded briefly, but evidently intending to accomplish the

prohibitive distance as quickly as possible, slightly increased her

speed. A moment later he made another attempt.

"See that sign? Do you want to get us pinched?"

"Oh, for Heaven's sake," cried Gloria in exasperation, "you _always_

exaggerate things so!"

"Well, I don't want to get arrested."

"Who's arresting you? You're so persistent--just like you were about my

cough medicine last night."

"It was for your own good."

"Ha! I might as well be living with mama."

"What a thing to say to me!"

A standing policeman swerved into view, was hastily passed.

"See him?" demanded Anthony.

"Oh, you drive me crazy! He didn't arrest us, did he?"

"When he does it'll be too late," countered Anthony brilliantly.

Her reply was scornful, almost injured.

"Why, this old thing won't _go_ over thirty-five."

"It isn't old."

"It is in spirit."

That afternoon the car joined the laundry-bags and Gloria's appetite as

one of the trinity of contention. He warned her of railroad tracks; he

pointed out approaching automobiles; finally he insisted on taking the

wheel and a furious, insulted Gloria sat silently beside him between the

towns of Larchmont and Rye.

But it was due to this furious silence of hers that the gray house

materialized from its abstraction, for just beyond Rye he surrendered

gloomily to it and re-relinquished the wheel. Mutely he beseeched her

and Gloria, instantly cheered, vowed to be more careful. But because a

discourteous street-car persisted callously in remaining upon its track

Gloria ducked down a side-street--and thereafter that afternoon was

never able to find her way back to the Post Road. The street they

finally mistook for it lost its Post-Road aspect when it had gone five

miles from Cos Cob. Its macadam became gravel, then dirt--moreover, it

narrowed and developed a border of maple trees, through which filtered

the weltering sun, making its endless experiments with shadow designs

upon the long grass.

"We're lost now," complained Anthony.

"Read that sign!"

"Marietta--Five Miles. What's Marietta?"

"Never heard of it, but let's go on. We can't turn here and there's

probably a detour back to the Post Road."

The way became scarred with deepening ruts and insidious shoulders of

stone. Three farmhouses faced them momentarily, slid by. A town sprang

up in a cluster of dull roofs around a white tall steeple.

Then Gloria, hesitating between two approaches, and making her choice

too late, drove over a fire-hydrant and ripped the transmission

violently from the car.

It was dark when the real-estate agent of Marietta showed them the gray

house. They came upon it just west of the village, where it rested

against a sky that was a warm blue cloak buttoned with tiny stars. The

gray house had been there when women who kept cats were probably

witches, when Paul Revere made false teeth in Boston preparatory to

arousing the great commercial people, when our ancestors were gloriously

deserting Washington in droves. Since those days the house had been

bolstered up in a feeble corner, considerably repartitioned and newly

plastered inside, amplified by a kitchen and added to by a

side-porch--but, save for where some jovial oaf had roofed the new

kitchen with red tin, Colonial it defiantly remained.

"How did you happen to come to Marietta?" demanded the real-estate agent

in a tone that was first cousin to suspicion. He was showing them

through four spacious and airy bedrooms.

"We broke down," explained Gloria. "I drove over a fire-hydrant and we

had ourselves towed to the garage and then we saw your sign."

The man nodded, unable to follow such a sally of spontaneity. There was

something subtly immoral in doing anything without several months'

consideration.

They signed a lease that night and, in the agent's car, returned

jubilantly to the somnolent and dilapidated Marietta Inn, which was too

broken for even the chance immoralities and consequent gaieties of a

country road-house. Half the night they lay awake planning the things

they were to do there. Anthony was going to work at an astounding pace

on his history and thus ingratiate himself with his cynical

grandfather.... When the car was repaired they would explore the country

and join the nearest "really nice" club, where Gloria would play golf

"or something" while Anthony wrote. This, of course, was Anthony's

idea--Gloria was sure she wanted but to read and dream and be fed tomato

sandwiches and lemonades by some angelic servant still in a shadowy

hinterland. Between paragraphs Anthony would come and kiss her as she

lay indolently in the hammock.... The hammock! a host of new dreams in

tune to its imagined rhythm, while the wind stirred it and waves of sun

undulated over the shadows of blown wheat, or the dusty road freckled

and darkened with quiet summer rain....

And guests--here they had a long argument, both of them trying to be

extraordinarily mature and far-sighted. Anthony claimed that they would

need people at least every other week-end "as a sort of change." This

provoked an involved and extremely sentimental conversation as to

whether Anthony did not consider Gloria change enough. Though he assured

her that he did, she insisted upon doubting him.... Eventually the

conversation assumed its eternal monotone: "What then? Oh, what'll we

do then?"

"Well, we'll have a dog," suggested Anthony.

"I don't want one. I want a kitty." She went thoroughly and with great

enthusiasm into the history, habits, and tastes of a cat she had once

possessed. Anthony considered that it must have been a horrible

character with neither personal magnetism nor a loyal heart.

Later they slept, to wake an hour before dawn with the gray house

dancing in phantom glory before their dazzled eyes.

THE SOUL OF GLORIA

For that autumn the gray house welcomed them with a rush of sentiment

that falsified its cynical old age. True, there were the laundry-bags,

there was Gloria's appetite, there was Anthony's tendency to brood and

his imaginative "nervousness," but there were intervals also of an

unhoped-for serenity. Close together on the porch they would wait for

the moon to stream across the silver acres of farmland, jump a thick

wood and tumble waves of radiance at their feet. In such a moonlight

Gloria's face was of a pervading, reminiscent white, and with a modicum

of effort they would slip off the blinders of custom and each would find

in the other almost the quintessential romance of the vanished June.

One night while her head lay upon his heart and their cigarettes glowed

in swerving buttons of light through the dome of darkness over the bed,

she spoke for the first time and fragmentarily of the men who had hung

for brief moments on her beauty.

"Do you ever think of them?" he asked her.

"Only occasionally--when something happens that recalls a particular

man."

"What do you remember--their kisses?"

"All sorts of things.... Men are different with women."

"Different in what way?"

"Oh, entirely--and quite inexpressibly. Men who had the most firmly

rooted reputation for being this way or that would sometimes be

surprisingly inconsistent with me. Brutal men were tender, negligible

men were astonishingly loyal and lovable, and, often, honorable men took

attitudes that were anything but honorable."

"For instance?"

"Well, there was a boy named Percy Wolcott from Cornell who was quite a

hero in college, a great athlete, and saved a lot of people from a fire

or something like that. But I soon found he was stupid in a rather

dangerous way."

"What way?"

"It seems he had some naïve conception of a woman 'fit to be his wife,'

a particular conception that I used to run into a lot and that always

drove me wild. He demanded a girl who'd never been kissed and who liked

to sew and sit home and pay tribute to his self-esteem. And I'll bet a

hat if he's gotten an idiot to sit and be stupid with him he's tearing

out on the side with some much speedier lady."

"I'd be sorry for his wife."

"I wouldn't. Think what an ass she'd be not to realize it before she

married him. He's the sort whose idea of honoring and respecting a woman

would be never to give her any excitement. With the best intentions, he

was deep in the dark ages."

"What was his attitude toward you?"

"I'm coming to that. As I told you--or did I tell you?--he was mighty

good-looking: big brown honest eyes and one of those smiles that

guarantee the heart behind it is twenty-karat gold. Being young and

credulous, I thought he had some discretion, so I kissed him fervently

one night when we were riding around after a dance at the Homestead at

Hot Springs. It had been a wonderful week, I remember--with the most

luscious trees spread like green lather, sort of, all over the valley

and a mist rising out of them on October mornings like bonfires lit to

turn them brown--"

"How about your friend with the ideals?" interrupted Anthony.

"It seems that when he kissed me he began to think that perhaps he could

get away with a little more, that I needn't be 'respected' like this

Beatrice Fairfax glad-girl of his imagination."

"What'd he do?"

"Not much. I pushed him off a sixteen-foot embankment before he was well

started."

"Hurt him?" inquired Anthony with a laugh.

"Broke his arm and sprained his ankle. He told the story all over Hot

Springs, and when his arm healed a man named Barley who liked me fought

him and broke it over again. Oh, it was all an awful mess. He threatened

to sue Barley, and Barley--he was from Georgia--was seen buying a gun in

town. But before that mama had dragged me North again, much against my

will, so I never did find out all that happened--though I saw Barley

once in the Vanderbilt lobby."

Anthony laughed long and loud.

"What a career! I suppose I ought to be furious because you've kissed so

many men. I'm not, though."

At this she sat up in bed.

"It's funny, but I'm so sure that those kisses left no mark on me--no

taint of promiscuity, I mean--even though a man once told me in all

seriousness that he hated to think I'd been a public drinking glass."

"He had his nerve."

"I just laughed and told him to think of me rather as a loving-cup that

goes from hand to hand but should be valued none the less."

"Somehow it doesn't bother me--on the other hand it would, of course, if

you'd done any more than kiss them. But I believe _you're_ absolutely

incapable of jealousy except as hurt vanity. Why don't you care what

I've done? Wouldn't you prefer it if I'd been absolutely innocent?"

"It's all in the impression it might have made on you. _My_ kisses were

because the man was good-looking, or because there was a slick moon, or

even because I've felt vaguely sentimental and a little stirred. But

that's all--it's had utterly no effect on me. But you'd remember and let

memories haunt you and worry you."

"Haven't you ever kissed any one like you've kissed me?"

"No," she answered simply. "As I've told you, men have tried--oh, lots

of things. Any pretty girl has that experience.... You see," she

resumed, "it doesn't matter to me how many women you've stayed with in

the past, so long as it was merely a physical satisfaction, but I don't

believe I could endure the idea of your ever having lived with another

woman for a protracted period or even having wanted to marry some

possible girl. It's different somehow. There'd be all the little

intimacies remembered--and they'd dull that freshness that after all is

the most precious part of love."

Rapturously he pulled her down beside him on the pillow.

"Oh, my darling," he whispered, "as if I remembered anything but your

dear kisses."

Then Gloria, in a very mild voice:

"Anthony, did I hear anybody say they were thirsty?"

Anthony laughed abruptly and with a sheepish and amused grin got out of

bed.

"With just a _little_ piece of ice in the water," she added. "Do you

suppose I could have that?"

Gloria used the adjective "little" whenever she asked a favor--it made

the favor sound less arduous. But Anthony laughed again--whether she

wanted a cake of ice or a marble of it, he must go down-stairs to the

kitchen.... Her voice followed him through the hall: "And just a

_little_ cracker with just a _little_ marmalade on it...."

"Oh, gosh!" sighed Anthony in rapturous slang, "she's wonderful, that

girl! She _has_ it!"

"When we have a baby," she began one day--this, it had already been

decided, was to be after three years--"I want it to look like you."

"Except its legs," he insinuated slyly.

"Oh, yes, except his legs. He's got to have my legs. But the rest of him

can be you."

"My nose?"

Gloria hesitated.

"Well, perhaps my nose. But certainly your eyes--and my mouth, and I

guess my shape of the face. I wonder; I think he'd be sort of cute if he

had my hair."

"My dear Gloria, you've appropriated the whole baby."

"Well, I didn't mean to," she apologized cheerfully.

"Let him have my neck at least," he urged, regarding himself gravely in

the glass. "You've often said you liked my neck because the Adam's apple

doesn't show, and, besides, your neck's too short."

"Why, it is _not_!" she cried indignantly, turning to the mirror, "it's

just right. I don't believe I've ever seen a better neck."

"It's too short," he repeated teasingly.

"Short?" Her tone expressed exasperated wonder.

"Short? You're crazy!" She elongated and contracted it to convince

herself of its reptilian sinuousness. "Do you call _that_ a short neck?"

"One of the shortest I've ever seen."

For the first time in weeks tears started from Gloria's eyes and the

look she gave him had a quality of real pain.

"Oh, Anthony--"

"My Lord, Gloria!" He approached her in bewilderment and took her elbows

in his hands. "Don't cry, _please_! Didn't you know I was only kidding?

Gloria, look at me! Why, dearest, you've got the longest neck I've ever

seen. Honestly."

Her tears dissolved in a twisted smile.

"Well--you shouldn't have said that, then. Let's talk about the b-baby."

Anthony paced the floor and spoke as though rehearsing for a debate.

"To put it briefly, there are two babies we could have, two distinct and

logical babies, utterly differentiated. There's the baby that's the

combination of the best of both of us. Your body, my eyes, my mind, your

intelligence--and then there is the baby which is our worst--my body,

your disposition, and my irresolution."

"I like that second baby," she said.

"What I'd really like," continued Anthony, "would be to have two sets of

triplets one year apart and then experiment with the six boys--"

"Poor me," she interjected.

"--I'd educate them each in a different country and by a different

system and when they were twenty-three I'd call them together and see

what they were like."

"Let's have 'em all with my neck," suggested Gloria.

THE END OF A CHAPTER

The car was at length repaired and with a deliberate vengeance took up

where it left off the business of causing infinite dissension. Who

should drive? How fast should Gloria go? These two questions and the

eternal recriminations involved ran through the days. They motored to

the Post-Road towns, Rye, Portchester, and Greenwich, and called on a

dozen friends, mostly Gloria's, who all seemed to be in different stages

of having babies and in this respect as well as in others bored her to a

point of nervous distraction. For an hour after each visit she would

bite her fingers furiously and be inclined to take out her rancor

on Anthony.

"I loathe women," she cried in a mild temper. "What on earth can you say

to them--except talk 'lady-lady'? I've enthused over a dozen babies that

I've wanted only to choke. And every one of those girls is either

incipiently jealous and suspicious of her husband if he's charming or

beginning to be bored with him if he isn't."

"Don't you ever intend to see any women?"

"I don't know. They never seem clean to me--never--never. Except just a

few. Constance Shaw--you know, the Mrs. Merriam who came over to see us

last Tuesday--is almost the only one. She's so tall and fresh-looking

and stately."

"I don't like them so tall."

Though they went to several dinner dances at various country clubs, they

decided that the autumn was too nearly over for them to "go out" on any

scale, even had they been so inclined. He hated golf; Gloria liked it

only mildly, and though she enjoyed a violent rush that some

undergraduates gave her one night and was glad that Anthony should be

proud of her beauty, she also perceived that their hostess for the

evening, a Mrs. Granby, was somewhat disquieted by the fact that

Anthony's classmate, Alec Granby, joined with enthusiasm in the rush.

The Granbys never phoned again, and though Gloria laughed, it piqued her

not a little.

"You see," she explained to Anthony, "if I wasn't married it wouldn't

worry her--but she's been to the movies in her day and she thinks I may

be a vampire. But the point is that placating such people requires an

effort that I'm simply unwilling to make.... And those cute little

freshmen making eyes at me and paying me idiotic compliments! I've grown

up, Anthony."

Marietta itself offered little social life. Half a dozen farm-estates

formed a hectagon around it, but these belonged to ancient men who

displayed themselves only as inert, gray-thatched lumps in the back of

limousines on their way to the station, whither they were sometimes

accompanied by equally ancient and doubly massive wives. The townspeople

were a particularly uninteresting type--unmarried females were

predominant for the most part--with school-festival horizons and souls

bleak as the forbidding white architecture of the three churches. The

only native with whom they came into close contact was the broad-hipped,

broad-shouldered Swedish girl who came every day to do their work. She

was silent and efficient, and Gloria, after finding her weeping

violently into her bowed arms upon the kitchen table, developed an

uncanny fear of her and stopped complaining about the food. Because of

her untold and esoteric grief the girl stayed on.

Gloria's penchant for premonitions and her bursts of vague

supernaturalism were a surprise to Anthony. Either some complex,

properly and scientifically inhibited in the early years with her

Bilphistic mother, or some inherited hypersensitiveness, made her

susceptible to any suggestion of the psychic, and, far from gullible

about the motives of people, she was inclined to credit any

extraordinary happening attributed to the whimsical perambulations of

the buried. The desperate squeakings about the old house on windy nights

that to Anthony were burglars with revolvers ready in hand represented

to Gloria the auras, evil and restive, of dead generations, expiating

the inexpiable upon the ancient and romantic hearth. One night, because

of two swift bangs down-stairs, which Anthony fearfully but unavailingly

investigated, they lay awake nearly until dawn asking each other

examination-paper questions about the history of the world.

In October Muriel came out for a two weeks' visit. Gloria had

called her on long-distance, and Miss Kane ended the conversation

characteristically by saying "All-ll-ll righty. I'll be there with

bells!" She arrived with a dozen popular songs under her arm.

"You ought to have a phonograph out here in the country," she said,

"just a little Vic--they don't cost much. Then whenever you're lonesome

you can have Caruso or Al Jolson right at your door."

She worried Anthony to distraction by telling him that "he was the first

clever man she had ever known and she got so tired of shallow people."

He wondered that people fell in love with such women. Yet he supposed

that under a certain impassioned glance even she might take on a

softness and promise.

But Gloria, violently showing off her love for Anthony, was diverted

into a state of purring content.

Finally Richard Caramel arrived for a garrulous and to Gloria painfully

literary week-end, during which he discussed himself with Anthony long

after she lay in childlike sleep up-stairs.

"It's been mighty funny, this success and all," said Dick. "Just before

the novel appeared I'd been trying, without success, to sell some short

stories. Then, after my book came out, I polished up three and had them

accepted by one of the magazines that had rejected them before. I've

done a lot of them since; publishers don't pay me for my book till

this winter."

"Don't let the victor belong to the spoils."

"You mean write trash?" He considered. "If you mean deliberately

injecting a slushy fade-out into each one, I'm not. But I don't suppose

I'm being so careful. I'm certainly writing faster and I don't seem to

be thinking as much as I used to. Perhaps it's because I don't get any

conversation, now that you're married and Maury's gone to Philadelphia.

Haven't the old urge and ambition. Early success and all that."

"Doesn't it worry you?"

"Frantically. I get a thing I call sentence-fever that must be like

buck-fever--it's a sort of intense literary self-consciousness that

comes when I try to force myself. But the really awful days aren't when

I think I can't write. They're when I wonder whether any writing is

worth while at all--I mean whether I'm not a sort of glorified buffoon."

"I like to hear you talk that way," said Anthony with a touch of his old

patronizing insolence. "I was afraid you'd gotten a bit idiotic over

your work. Read the damnedest interview you gave out----"

Dick interrupted with an agonized expression.

"Good Lord! Don't mention it. Young lady wrote it--most admiring young

lady. Kept telling me my work was 'strong,' and I sort of lost my head

and made a lot of strange pronouncements. Some of it was good, though,

don't you think?"

"Oh, yes; that part about the wise writer writing for the youth of his

generation, the critic of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever

afterward."

"Oh, I believe a lot of it," admitted Richard Caramel with a faint beam.

"It simply was a mistake to give it out."

In November they moved into Anthony's apartment, from which they sallied

triumphantly to the Yale-Harvard and Harvard-Princeton football games,

to the St. Nicholas ice-skating rink, to a thorough round of the

theatres and to a miscellany of entertainments--from small, staid dances

to the great affairs that Gloria loved, held in those few houses where

lackeys with powdered wigs scurried around in magnificent Anglomania

under the direction of gigantic majordomos. Their intention was to go

abroad the first of the year or, at any rate, when the war was over.

Anthony had actually completed a Chestertonian essay on the twelfth

century by way of introduction to his proposed book and Gloria had done

some extensive research work on the question of Russian sable coats--in

fact the winter was approaching quite comfortably, when the Bilphistic

demiurge decided suddenly in mid-December that Mrs. Gilbert's soul had

aged sufficiently in its present incarnation. In consequence Anthony

took a miserable and hysterical Gloria out to Kansas City, where, in the

fashion of mankind, they paid the terrible and mind-shaking deference

to the dead.

Mr. Gilbert became, for the first and last time in his life, a truly

pathetic figure. That woman he had broken to wait upon his body and play

congregation to his mind had ironically deserted him--just when he could

not much longer have supported her. Never again would he be able so

satisfactorily to bore and bully a human soul.