How could you! I have seen your advertisement of The Camp in _The
Four Seasons_. It is earning much talk and criticism. I don't know
what you could have been thinking of. I have always regarded you
as one of the sanest and best-bred women I know. But it seems that
you are not above sacrificing your own dignity to financial
gain----
"Well, in the name of all that's ridiculous," exclaimed Mary; "of all
that's impertinent!--will somebody kindly tell me what my personality
has to do with our prospectus of The Camp?"
Those who could have told her held their tongues and quaked inwardly.
The others joined in Mary's surprise and indignation. Even Arthur, who
hated the whole innkeeping scheme, was roused out of his ordinary
placidity.
"I shall write to the horrid old woman," said Mary, "and tell her to
mind her own business. I shall also tell her that we are receiving so
many applications for accommodations that we don't know how to choose.
That isn't quite true, of course; but we have received some. Since I am
not above sacrificing my dignity"--she went on angrily--"to financial
gain, I may as well throw a few lies into the bargain."
The next day, addressed to "The Camp," came the long-expected number of
_The Four Seasons_. Arthur opened it and began to turn the leaves.
Presently, from the centre of a page, he saw his six beautiful sisters
looking him in the face.
"Mary!" he called, in such a voice that she came running. She looked and
turned white. Eve came, and Maud and Phyllis.
"Who is responsible for this--" cried Arthur, "for this sickening--this
degraded piece of mischief?"
"You corrected the final proofs yourself," said Maud.
"And sealed them up. If I find that some mischief-maker in the office of
_The Four Seasons_ has been playing tricks----"
"The mischief-makers are to be found nearer home," said Mary. "Don't you
remember that Lee and Gay took the proofs to the post-office. They said
they were bored and could think of nothing to do. _This_ is what they
were thinking of doing!"
"Where are they?" he said in a grim voice.
"Now, Arthur," said Maud, "think before you say anything to them that
you may regret. As for the picture of us in our bathing-suits--well, I,
for one, don't see anything dreadful about it. In fact, I think we look
rather lovely."
Arthur groaned.
"I want to talk to Lee and Gay," he said. "My sisters--an advertisement
in a magazine--for drummers and newsboys to make jokes about----"
He grew white and whiter, until his innocent sisters were thoroughly
frightened. Then he started out of the playroom in search of Lee and
Gay.
In or about The Camp they were not to be found. Nobody had seen them
since breakfast. With this information, he returned to the playroom.
"They've run away," he said, "and I'm going after them."
"I wouldn't," said Mary. "The harm's been done. You can't very well
spank them. I wish you could. You can only scold--and what earthly good
will that do them, or you?"
"I don't know that anything I may say," said Arthur, "_will_ do them any
good. I live in hopes."
"Have you any idea where they've gone?"
"I'll cast about in a big circle and find their tracks."
When Arthur, mittened and snow-shoed, had departed in search of Lee and
Gay, the remaining sisters gathered about the full-page advertisement in
_The Four Seasons_, and passed rapidly from anger to mild hysterics.
Mary was the last to laugh.
And she said: "Girls, I will tell you an awful secret. I never would
have consented to this, but as long as Lee and Gay have gone and done
it, I'm--_glad_."
"The only thing _I_ mind," said Eve, "is Arthur. He'll take it hard."
"We can't help that," said Maud. "Business is business. And this
wretched, shocking piece of mischief spells success. I feel it in my
bones. There's no use being silly about ourselves. We've got our way to
make in the world--and, as a sextet----"
She lingered over the picture.
"As a sextet, there's no use denying that we are rather lovely to look
at."
Phyllis put in a word blindly.
"Maud," she said, "among the applications you have received, how many
are from women?"
Maud laughed aloud.
"None," she said.
"There wouldn't be," said Eve.
"Well," said Mary, "compared to the rest of you, I'm quite an old woman,
and I say--so much the better."
V
Even on going into the open air from a warmed room, it would not have
struck you as a cold day. But thermometers marked a number of degrees
worse than zero. The sky was bright and blue. Not a breath of wind
stirred. In the woods the underbrush was hidden by the smooth
accumulations of snow, so that the going was open.
The Adirondack winter climate is such that a man runs less risk of
getting too cold than of getting too warm. Arthur, moving swiftly in a
great circle so that at some point he should come upon the tracks of his
culprit sisters, shed first his mittens and then his coat. The former he
thrust into his trousers pocket, and he hung the latter to a broken limb
where he could easily find it on his return.
"There would be some sense in running away in summer," he thought. "It
would take an Indian or a dog to track them then, but in winter--I gave
them credit for more sense."
He came upon the outgoing marks of their snow-shoes presently, just
beyond Phyllis's garden, to the north of the camp. In imagination he saw
the two lithe young beauties striding sturdily and tirelessly over the
snow, and then and there the extreme pinnacles of his anger toppled and
fell. There is no occupation to which a maiden may lend herself so
virginal as woodmanship. And he fell to thinking less of his young
sisters' indiscretion than of the extreme and unsophisticated innocence
which had led them into it. What could girls know of men, anyway? What
did his sisters know of him? That he had been extravagant and rather
fast. Had they an inkling of what being rather fast meant? His smooth
forehead contracted with painful thoughts. Even Mary's indignation upon
the discovery of the photograph in _The Four Seasons_ had not matched
his own. She had been angry because she was a gentlewoman, and
gentlewomen shun publicity. She had not even guessed at the degradation
to which broadcast pictures of beautiful women are subjected. His anger
turned from his sisters presently and glowered upon the whole world of
men; his hands closed to strike, and opened to clutch and choke. That
Lee and Gay had done such a thing was earnest only of innocence coupled
with mischief. They must know that what they had done was wrong, since
they had fled from any immediate consequences, but how wrong it was they
could never dream, even in nightmares. Nor was it possible for him to
explain. How, then, could any anger which he might visit upon them
benefit? And who was he, when it came to that, to assume the
unassailable morality of a parent?
It came to this: That Arthur followed the marks of Lee's and Gay's
snow-shoes mechanically, and raged, not against them, not against the
world of men, but against himself. He had said once in jest that many an
artistic impulse had been crushed by the camera and the pianola. But how
pitifully true this had been in his own case! If he had been born into
less indulgence, he might have painted, he might have played. The only
son in a large family of daughters, his father and mother had worshipped
the ground upon which his infant feet had trod. He had never known what
it was to want anything. He had never been allowed to turn a hand to his
own honest advantage. He was the kind of boy who, under less golden
circumstances, would have saved his pocket-money and built with his own
hands a boat or whatever he needed. There is a song: "I want what I want
when I want it." Arthur might have sung: "I get what I'm going to want
and then I don't want it."
His contemporaries had greatly envied him, when, as a mere matter of
justice, they should have pitied him. All his better impulses had been
gnarled by indulgence. He had done things that showed natural ability;
but of what use was that? He was too old now to learn to draw. He played
rather delightfully upon the piano, or any other instrument, for that
matter. To what end? He could not read a note.
There was nothing that Arthur could not have done, if he had been let
alone. There were many things that he would have done.
At college he had seen in one smouldering flash of intuition how badly
he had started in the race of life. When others were admiring his many
brilliancies, he was mourning for the lost years when, under almost any
guidance save that of his beloved father, he might have laid such sturdy
foundations to future achievements--pedestals on which to erect statues.
Self-knowledge had made him hard for a season and cynical. As a tired
sea-gull miscalculates distance and dips his wings into the sea, so
Arthur, when he thought that he was merely flying low the better to see
and to observe, had alighted without much struggling in a pool of
dissipation and vice.
The memory was more of a weariness to him than a sharp regret. Of what
use is remorse--after the fact? Let it come before and all will be well.
At last, more by accident than design, he drew out of the muddy ways
into which he had fallen and limped off--not so much toward better
things as away from worse.
Then it was that Romance had come for him, and carried him on strong
wings upward toward the empyrean.
Even now, she was only twenty. She had married a man more than twice her
age. He had been her guardian, and she had felt that it was her duty.
Her marriage proved desperately unhappy. She and Arthur met, and, as
upon a signal, loved.
For a few weeks of one golden summer, they had known the ethereal bliss
of seeing each other every day. They met as little children, and so
parted. They accepted the law and convention which stood between them,
not as a barrier to be crossed or circumvented but with childlike faith
as a something absolutely impassable--like the space which separates the
earth and the moon.
They remained utterly innocent in thought and deed, merely loved and
longed and renounced so very hard that their poor young hearts almost
broke.