What welcome Linda met in New York came from Mr. Moses Feldt, who
embraced her warmly enough, but with an air slightly ill at ease. He
begged her to kiss her mama, who was sometimes hurt by Linda's coldness.
She made no reply, and found the same influence and evidence of the
power of suggestion in Judith. “We thought maybe you wouldn't care to
come back here,” the latter said pointedly, over her shoulder, while
she was directing the packing of a trunk. The Feldts were preparing for
their summer stay at the sea.
Her mother's room resembled one of the sales of obvious and expensive
attire conducted in the lower salons of pleasure hotels. There were
airy piles of chiffon and satin, inappropriate hats and the inevitable
confections of silk and lace. “It's not necessary to ask if you were
right at home with your father's family,” Mrs. Condon observed with an
assumed casual inattention. “I can see you sitting with those old women
as dry and false as any. No one saved me in the clacking, I'm sure.”
“We didn't speak of you,” Linda replied. She studied, unsparing,
the loose flesh of the elder's ravaged countenance. Her mother, she
recognized, hated her, both because she was like Bartram Lowrie and
still young, with everything unspent that the other valued and had lost.
In support of herself Mrs. Feldt asserted again that she had “lived,”
with stacks of friends and flowers, lavish parties and devoted
attendance.
“You may be smarter than I was,” she went on, “but what good it does
you who can say? And if you expect to get something for nothing you're
fooled before you start.” She shook out the airy breadths of a vivid
echo of past daring. “From the way you act a person might think you
were pretty, but you are too thin and pulled out. I've heard your looks
called peculiar, and that was, in a manner of speaking, polite. You're
not even stylish any more--the line is full again and not suitable for
bony shoulders and no bust.” She still cherished a complacency in her
amplitude.
Linda turned away unmoved. Of all the world, she thought, only Dodge
Pleydon had the power actually to hurt her. She knew that she would
see him soon again and that again he would ask her to marry him. She
considered, momentarily, the possibility of saying yes; and instantly
the dread born with him in the Lowrie garden swept over her. Linda told
herself that he was the only man for whom she could ever deeply care;
that--for every conceivable reason--such a marriage was perfect. But the
shrinking from its implications grew too painful for support.
Her mother's bitterness increased hourly; she no longer hid her feelings
from her husband and Judith; and dinner, accompanied by her elaborate
sarcasm, was a difficult period in which, plainly, Mr. Moses Feldt
suffered most and Linda was the least concerned. This condition, she
admitted silently, couldn't go on indefinitely; it was too vulgar if for
no other reason. And she determined to ask the Lowries for another and
more extended invitation.
Pleydon came, as she had expected, and they sat in the small
reception-room with the high ceiling and dark velvet hangings, the piano
at which, long ago it now seemed, Judith had played the airs of Gluck
for her. He said little, but remained for a long while spread over
the divan and watching her--in a formal chair--discontentedly. He rose
suddenly and stood above her, a domineering bulk obliterating nearly
everything else. In response to his demand she said, pale and composed,
that she was not “reasonable”; she omitted the “yet” included in his
question. Pleydon frowned. However, then, he insisted no further.
When he had gone Linda was as spent as though there had been a fresh
brutal scene; and the following day she was enveloped in an unrelieved
depression. Her mother mocked her silence as another evidence of
ridiculous pretentiousness. Mr. Moses Feldt regarded her with a furtive
concerned kindliness; while Judith followed her with countless small
irritating complaints. It was the last day at the apartment before their
departure for the summer. Linda was insuperably tired. She had gone to
her room almost directly after dinner, and when a maid came to her door
with a card, she exclaimed, before looking at it, that she was not in.
It was, however, Arnaud Hallet; and, with a surprise tempered by a faint
interest, she told the servant that she would see him.
There was, Linda observed at once, absolutely no difference in Arnaud's
clothing, no effort to make himself presentable for New York or her. In
a way, it amused her--it was so characteristic of his forgetfulness, and
it made him seem doubly familiar. He waved a hand toward the luxury of
the interior. “This,” he declared, “is downright impressive, and lifted,
I'm sure, out of a novel of Ouida's.
“You will remember,” he continued, “complaining about my sense of humor
one evening; and that, at the time, I warned you it might grow worse.
It has. I am afraid, where you are concerned, that it has absolutely
vanished. My dear, you'll recognize this as a proposal. I thought my
mind was made up, after forty, not to marry; and I specially tried not
to bring you into it. You were too young, I felt. I doubted if I
could make you happy, and did everything possible, exhausted all the
arguments, but it was no good.
“Linda, dear, I adore you.”
She was glad, without the slightest answering emotion, that Arnaud,
well--liked her. At the same time all her wisdom declared that she
couldn't marry him; and, with the unsparing frankness of youth and her
individual detachment, she told him exactly why.
“I need a great deal of money,” she proceeded, “because I am frightfully
extravagant. All I have is expensive; I hate cheap things--even what
satisfies most rich girls. Why, just my satin slippers cost hundreds of
dollars and I'll pay unlimited amounts for a little fulling of lace or
some rare flowers. You'd call it wicked, but I can't help it--it's me.
“I've always intended to marry a man with a hundred thousand dollars a
year. Of course, that's a lot--do you hate me for telling you?--but I
wouldn't think of any one with less than fifty--”
Arnaud Hallet interrupted quietly, “I have that.”
Linda gazed incredulously at his neglected shoes, the wrinkles of his
inconsiderable coat and unstudied scarf. She saw that, actually, he had
spoken apologetically of his possessions; and a stinging shame spread
through her at the possibility that she had seemed common to an
infinitely finer delicacy than hers.