Linda heard Vigné's laugh, the expression of a sheer lightness of heart,
following a low eager murmur of voices in her daughter's room, and she
was startled by its resemblance to the gay pitch of Mrs. Moses Feldt's
old merriment. Three of Vigné's friends were with her, all approximately
eighteen, talking, Linda knew, men and--it was autumn--anticipating the
excitements of their bow to formal society that winter. They had, she
silently added, little enough to learn about the latter. Through the
year past they had been to a dancing-class identical, except for an
earlier hour and age, with mature affairs; but before that they had been
practically introduced to the pleasures of their inheritance.
The men were really boys at the university, past the first year,
receptacles of unlimited worldly knowledge and experience. They belonged
to exclusive university societies and eating clubs, and Linda found
their stiff similarity of correct bigoted pattern highly entertaining.
She had no illusions about what might be called their morals; they were
midway in the period of youthful unrestraint; but she recognized as well
that their attitude toward, for example, Vigné was irreproachable. Such
boys affected to disdain the girls of their associated families ... or
imagined themselves incurably in love.
The girls, for their part, while insisting that forty was the ideal age
for a lover--the terms changed with the seasons, last year “suitor” had
been the common phrase--were occasionally swept in young company into a
high irrational passion. Mostly, through skillful adult pressure or firm
negation, such affairs came to nothing; but even these were sometimes
overcome. And, when Linda had been disturbed by the echo of old days in
her daughter's tones, she was considering exactly such a state.
One of the nicest youths imaginable, Bailey Sandby, had lost all trace
of superior aloofness in a devotion to Vigné. He was short, squarely
built, with clear pink cheeks, steady light blue eyes and crisp very
fair hair. This was his last season of academic instruction, after
which a number of years, at an absurdly low payment, awaited him in
his father's bond brokerage concern. However, he was, Linda gathered,
imperious in his urgent need for Vigné's favor.
Ridiculous, she thought, at the same time illogically rehearsing the
resemblances of Vigné to her grandmother. She had no doubt that the
parties Vigné shared on the terraces and wide lawns, in the informal
dancing at country houses, were sufficiently sophisticated; there was
on occasion champagne, and--for the masculine element anyhow--cocktails.
The aroma of wine, lightly clinging to her young daughter's breath,
filled her with an old instinctive sickness.
She had spoken to Arnaud who, in turn, severely addressed Vigné;
but during this Linda had been oppressed by the familiar feeling of
impotence. The girl, of course, had properly heard them; but she gave
her mother the effect of slipping easily beyond their grasp. When she
had gone to bed Arnaud repeated a story brought to him by the juvenile
Lowrie, under the influence of a temporary indignation at his sister's
unwarranted imposition of superiority. Arnaud went on:
“Actually they had this kissing contest, it was at Chestnut Hill, with
a watch held; and Vigné, or so Lowrie insisted, won the prize for length
of time--something like a minute. Now, when I was young--”
Submerged in apprehensive memory Linda lost most of his account of
the Eden-like youth of his earlier day. When, at last, his assertions
pierced her abstraction, it was only to bring her to the realization of
how pathetically little he knew of either Vigné or her. She weighed
the question of utter frankness here--the quality enhanced by universal
obscurity--but she was obliged to check her desire for perfect
understanding. A purely feminine need to hide, even from Arnaud, any
detracting facts about women shut her into a diplomatic silence. In
reality he could offer them no help; their problems--in a world
created more objectively by the hand of man than God--were singular to
themselves. Women were quite like spoiled captives to foreign princes,
masking, in their apparent complacency, a necessarily secret but
insidiously tyrannical control. It wouldn't do, in view of this, to
expose too much.
The following morning it was Arnaud, rather than herself, who had a
letter from Pleydon. “He wants us to come over to New York and his
studio,” the former explained. “He has some commission or other from a
city in the Middle West, and a study to show us. I'd like it very
much; we haven't seen this place, and his surroundings are not to be
overlooked.”
Pleydon's rooms were directly off Central Park West, in an apartment
house obviously designed for prosperous creative arts, with a hall
frescoed in the tones of Puvis de Chavannes and an elevator cage
beautifully patterned in iron grilling. Dodge Pleydon met them in his
narrow entry and conducted them into a pleasant reception-room. “It's a
duplex,” he explained of his quarters; “the dining-room you see and the
kitchen's beyond, while the baths and all that are over our heads; the
studio fills both floors.”
There were low book cases with their continuous top used as a shelf for
a hundred various objects, deep long chairs of caressing ease and chairs
of coffee-colored wicker with amazingly high backs woven with designs of
polished shells into the semblance of spread peacocks' tails. The yellow
silk curtains at the windows, the rug with the intricate coloring of a
cashmere shawl, the Russian tea service, were in a perfection of order;
and Linda almost resentfully acknowledged the skilful efficiency of his
maid. It was surprising that, without a wife, a man could manage such a
degree of comfort!
Over tea far better than hers, in china of an infinitely finer
fragility, she studied Pleydon thoughtfully. He looked still again
perceptibly older, his face continued to grow sparer of flesh,
emphasizing the aggressively bony structure of his head. When he shut
his mouth after a decided statement she could see the projection of the
jaw and the knotted sinews at the base of his cheeks. No, Dodge didn't
seem well. She asked if there had been any return of the fever and he
nodded in an impatient affirmative, returning at once to the temporarily
suspended conversation with Arnaud. There was a vast difference, too, in
the way in which he talked.
His attitude was as assertive as ever, but it had less expression in
words; unaccountable periods of silence, almost ill-natured, overtook
him, spaces of abstraction when it was plain that he had forgotten the
presence of whoever might be by. Even direct questions sometimes failed
to pierce immediately his consciousness. Dodge, Linda told herself,
lived entirely too much alone. Then she said this aloud, thoughtlessly,
and she was startled by the sudden intolerable flash of his gaze.
An awkward pause followed, broken by the uprearing of Pleydon's
considerable length.
“I must take you into the studio before it is too dark,” he proceeded.
“Every creative spirit knows when its great moment has come. Well, mine
is here.” The men stood aside as Linda, her head positively ringing with
the thrill that was like a strain of Gluck, the happy sadness, entered
the bare high spaciousness of Dodge Pleydon's workroom.