_The Egolatress_
Infinitely more lovely in the winter darkness than in the revealing
light of day, Summit Avenue stretched beneath the moon. The clashing
architectures of the huge houses were mercifully blurred into harmony
by the night, and the long piles of snow drew the picture into a loose,
graceful unity. Beneath the glowing strands of the boulevard lights
flowed a double current of automobiles, in smooth streams that wound
out to the suburbs and downtown to the bays of commerce and amusement.
Before the doors of the Territorial Club the streams turned in a
sweeping curve, and occasionally cars left the current to turn in,
pause a moment before the pseudo-Gothic entrance, and then join the
parked flank in the driveway.
A long blue roadster, once sleek and new, now battered, and dusty still
from months of confinement, slid to a stop, like a stick caught on the
bank of a stream. The young driver busied himself with the intricate
process of locking his car. It was dear to him. His companion climbed
out, shivering.
“Great Scott! You have cold nights up there,” he said. “At home there’s
no snow on the ground at all.”
The owner of the car laughed. “You’ll get used to it, in two weeks.
Throw that rug over the radiator, will you?” He finished locking
the car, got out, and, as an extra precaution, lifted the hood and
disconnected the spark-plugs.
“Can’t be too careful of the old boiler,” he said apologetically. “If
it was stolen I wouldn’t get another one out of dad for a century.”
In the lobby he nodded to the young negro who came to take their coats,
with the familiarity of a member, and turned to his companion, who was
glancing curiously at the chattering groups of men and girls in evening
dress who were in the lobby.
“From the crowd, Tommy, I gather we’ve looked in on some one’s party.
Wait, and I’ll see who’s giving it.”
In a tall, loosely hung way, Tommy was rather handsome; distinguished,
certainly. He had deep grey eyes, and a way of taking all things with
a slow, questioning smile, that either charmed or exasperated. He was
very dark; a Southerner; twenty-two perhaps.
The other, short, and sandy-haired, and blue-eyed, carrying himself
with that preoccupied air of conscious importance which is so often
the aspect of short people, was in excellent contrast. By their
oppositeness they set one another off; rather to Tommy’s advantage.
“Grant’s party, for Millicent,” his host said, returning. “Mrs. Grant’s
an old social-enemy and friend of mother’s; we’re invited to stay.”
He led the way down a short hall to the right, past parted velvet
curtains, toward the source of the music. Before the formidable Mrs.
Grant, a matron of the over-stuffed type, he performed the amenities.
“Mrs. Grant, this is Tommy Squire, my roommate at school. Tommy’s from
Richmond.”
Mrs. Grant was very happy to meet a friend of Carl Twist’s. Tommy
accepted the three longest fingers of the drooping hand which she
extended to him with the manner of an operatic duchess, and managed
to convey his gratitude for the honor. As a further concession Mrs.
Grant propounded the unique theory that winters in the North were
apt to be _much_ colder than those in Virginia--“Don’t _you_ find it
so, Mr. Squire?” When the two had unanimously ratified her sagacious
observation, the audience was over.
The club’s lounge and dining-room had been thrown into one; the
tables, later to be drawn out for supper, were massed in a corner, and
elaborate decorations festooned the walls. Under the rose and grey of
the low-beamed ceiling the whirl and color and indiscriminate noise of
unleashed exuberance of the first of the holiday dances throbbed and
spun to the music. There were men and girls from the universities, from
prep. schools and finishing schools, and a seasoning of those who had
graduated or dropped out. Most of them had returned within the week,
and each time that the music stopped there were numerous impromptu,
frenzied reunions, as friends parted for an age of three and a half
months simulated paroxysms of joy at seeing one another, with shrieks
and calls and kisses and much waggling hand-shaking--as the sex or the
innate histrionics of the participants impelled them.
In the interval of music Tommy was introduced to the privates of the
stag-line, remembering mismated fragments of names, and receiving the
bone-crushing grip which is every youth’s obsession, until his own
shoulders sagged, and his throat became dry with repeating “How do you
do.”
“I’d better introduce you to some girls, now,” Carl decided mercifully.
A couple brushed past, engrossed in the intricacies of a new dance. The
girl caught Tommy’s interest.
“Who’s that?” he asked.
Carl laughed softly. “So soon?” he said. “That’s Millicent Grant, for
whom the party’s being given. She goes to Dobbs; as a relaxation, I
guess. Her real business is the Male; making men fall for her, dangle a
while, and then dropping them. Thinks she’s wasted on the small field
this town offers. Look out for her. She’s shallow as the deuce, but
hard to get away from.”
“No danger,” said Tommy. “I didn’t appear so interested as to get all
this biography, I hope!”
“You’ll hear it soon enough. She enjoys being the talk of the town;
local Barbara Neave, as it were. Come and meet her.”
Followed by Tommy, Carl threaded his way through the dancers, stepped
with nonchalant expertness on the toes of a stag about to precede him,
and cut in.
“Hello, Millicent! Come and be introduced to Tommy Squire, coming Big
Man at school, who does me the honor of being my roommate for the
exclusive right of wearing my ties.”
Tommy smiled formally at his friend’s brilliance, made an inward
notation that he liked her eyes when she smiled, and acknowledged the
presentation.
When Carl had removed himself, they danced.
Then followed the conventional small-talk of two members of the
warring sexes when both are engaged in “making an impression”. They
both followed youth’s greatest diversion, staying in school the while
dodging its exactions and embracing its pleasures, and acquiring not
education, but the equally essential atmosphere. It developed that
he was a junior, she in the final year of finishing school; that he
played football, but had failed to win a letter (though he confessed
with pardonable pride having played eight minutes in a Big Game when
the first-string tackle had been carried off the field); that she
_adored_ football; that she likewise _adored_ a number of things; dogs
(but not the messy kind); fraternity pins, and Eastern men (this was
a pardonable error; she made flattering concessions to the Southern
variety, when Tommy found the opportunity to tell her where he came
from); that she _adored_--a great many more things.
In short, they simply chattered, as a man and a girl have always
done, on first meeting. Later stages of acquaintanceship bring long
silences, either from undisguised boredom or an adolescent spiritual
understanding. Now, silence was a gaping hole in the garment of
etiquette, to be patched with endless talk.
They were soon cut in on.
Carl returned from the arduous task of dancing with his own sister
(a task only to her brother; she, too, held court), and found Tommy
marooned in the stag line. He introduced him to other girls, in whom
Tommy found varying charm. Carl’s sister, a mature child of seventeen,
wanted to know, “_Honestly_ now,” whether Carl drank at school.
Tommy lied like a good roommate. He reflected philosophically on the
oddness of sisters who went out constantly with men who drank, and yet
expected total abstinence from their brothers. It was a reversal of
the older custom of brothers who demanded impeccable behavior of their
sisters; and yet--
Millicent passed. He cut-in. When they had danced half a dozen steps he
lost her to another stag.
She was annoyed, and the pressure of her hand as they parted was a
little more than casual artifice. Millicent had early finished her
appraisal of the men at the party. She knew that she was destined to
meet most of them night after night for the next two weeks, and she
planned eventualities. She planned to have half a dozen affairs; the
holiday-loves, more evanescent even than summer-loves, that dwindled,
after the two weeks, from special-delivery letters into abrupt
silence. There would be one or two proposals, perhaps, in the last
days--there had been three, at the end of the summer at Minnetonka.
She catalogued the men, slowly: Eddie Pearson, nice enough--too nice,
insipid; Orme Waldon, whom no amount of snubbing would rebuff; Stewart
Holmes, whose egotism was such that he believed all girls secretly
longed for his attentions; and so on. These were the last three of the
summer’s garnerings. She wanted some one _new_. Tommy Squire. He seemed
worth thinking about. Rather wise--he’d need angling to draw in. Idly
she planned manoeuvres.
Tommy cut-in again. She used the old effective artifice of asking him
to keep her tiny handkerchief and vanity-case in his pocket. When she
caught his eye, he was to understand that they were needed. Tommy
smiled to himself. He understood.
But Millicent did not need to use her vanity-case very often. Tommy
kept on cutting-in. However, his manner was not gratifying. He was
pleasant, impersonal, quizzical. He told her that she was rather the
most attractive girl there--and added, thoughtfully, that there were
lots more beautiful girls, in Richmond.
“You’re absolutely _rude_, Mr. Squire!” Millicent wanted to be placated.
He drew her out, and with skillful questions, sped with occasional
compliments, he exposed her vanity. When she realized that, she
retaliated--they understood one another, distantly still, and far
beneath the surface of conversation.
As he continued to cut in--alternating, rather from politeness, with
Carl’s sister Joan--the stags, in a tacit agreement, let him have her
more and more to himself. Joan did not like that. It was ahead of her
plans.
At supper Millicent saw to it that they were paired together. Looking
distastefully at the noisy tables, where already the customary
table-jokes were under way--spoons being laid in rows so that a tap
on one sent another into a glass of water, and misappropriation of
the salt and pepper (Bardy Cless and Evelyn Preston leading on the
humorists), she feared that she might lose him there to Joan Twist.
“Let’s go outside and have our supper in a car,” she suggested.
“There’s no room here.”
Tommy, politely overlooking the numerous empty places, was entirely
willing. He got cake and sandwiches, and two plates with cups of coffee
and chicken patties, and together they sped across the street to a
parked limousine that stood almost in the shadow of the cathedral.
He told her, in the course of the next few minutes, that she was
_quite_ as lovely as any girl in Richmond. The darkness, and
Millicent’s bare shoulder close against him, were effective.
And he was pleasantly surprised when he found that she had no desire to
be kissed.
“Why, I’ve only known you for two hours,” she said, dropping lightly
out of the car. “And besides, mother will be mad _again_ when she finds
that I’m not having supper at my own party. Last year Dick Cole and I
drove down to the chicken shack, and mother almost passed away when we
came back, eating drumsticks!”
They both forgot the débris of their supper, but later, after the party
was over, a very angry matron discovered it when she sat in a plate of
chicken, on entering her car to go home.
Long past midnight Millicent sat before her dressing table, thinking.
She took off the silver band around her hair, and with a brush began
to restore the fluffiness which the mode demands. A wisp which grew an
infinitesimal fraction of an inch longer, in front, than the rest she
critically snipped off with finger-nail scissors. She let her hands
rest on the table, and regarded her reflection. She was supremely
satisfied with what she saw; she always was. Her self-admiration
transcended egotism. It was impersonal. She was complacently certain
that she was the most beautiful girl in the city. The assurance of a
very few girls--and a very great number of men--was superfluous. Wilde
has said that love of oneself is a life-long romance: Millicent’s
was a passion! In the perfection of her features, a subtle coldness
of manner, a faint expression as of calculating, which her character
had betrayed into her eyes, was the nearest thing to a fault which
she could see. Such an expression must inevitably creep into the
expression of a girl who is the object of so much masculine attention
that she may--and perforce must--choose, and weigh, and reject, so
slighting the least attractive candidates. It was these who were most
aware of the expression--they remembered it vividly, in soothing their
disappointments.
Millicent picked up a lip-stick, and toyed with it. She glanced up
at the top of her mirror. There she kept a curious record. Drawn on
the level of the glass with the lip-stick, were three small hearts.
A photograph almost hid them. They were initialed--E.P., O.W., S.H.
She picked up her handkerchief, and rubbed out the last one. She was
tired of Stewart--he would be dropped; in the cool, summary manner
which was the essence of Millicent. Eddie, and Orme Waldon would
remain. Eddie was always beneficial--he played up so well when she
wanted compliments. Orme had a car which she could command, with him or
without him; and that was very useful.
When she had erased the last heart she drew a new one, larger and
apart; the photograph would completely hide it. She initialed it T.S.,
and then she sat regarding it--he had been so pointedly disinterested!
Ah, but he would learn servility; others had, before him.
* * * * *
After a few days, the members of the general “crowd” had come to see
that through accident or design Tommy and Millicent were usually
together, when both were at any given place at the same time. There
were comments; some caustic, some foolish, some wise: Carl, for
instance, was irritatingly derisive. “I told you she’d take you in!”
he told Tommy; and when Tommy serenely denied any unusual interest, he
agreed, with the reservation--“That’s all right, for _now_, you sweet
idiot, but you don’t appreciate what Millicent can do, in ten days.
Just wait!”
On Sunday afternoons a heterogeneous crowd was wont to drift over
to the Grants’, to piece together the gossip of the week. At
supper-time they regularly went through the ritual of expressing
formal astonishment at the lateness of the hour, and then reluctantly
accepting the expected invitation to stay and partake of a
buffet-supper.
When Carl and Tommy arrived they found the usual assembly. For half the
afternoon Millicent ignored Tommy, simulating a deep interest in Eddie
Pearson’s stuttered and imperfect rendition of all the jokes in the
past week’s Orpheum bill. Eddie was one of those people who insist upon
showing you how excellently they can imitate the comedian....
Tommy, on the couch, was amiably quarreling with Barbara Peart over
the literary merits of modern literature. Barbara held serious and
decided views; Tommy didn’t care a damn either way; the subject bored
him so that it was an effort to be polite. Millicent finally extricated
herself from Eddie’s imperfectly remembered humor with scant courtesy,
and sat down beside Tommy. There was satisfaction in taking him away
from Barbara, anyway. Thereafter she directed the conversation--to
herself, inevitably.
Tommy and Carl stayed on after the rest of the crowd had left.
Millicent arranged that. Carl at first refused to accept her hints
that he too might leave; but after they had sat in silence for ten
minutes, Millicent sulking, Tommy looking into the fire and thinking
about the hunting near Richmond, and Carl professing fascination in
the automobile pages of the Sunday paper, he relented, and rose to
go. Tommy, with elaborately concealed relief, rose to accompany him.
Then Millicent took command of the situation, and said, with superb
carelessness:
“Well, drive back here and take Tommy home about eleven, because I
really must go to bed early to-night if I’m to go on that snow-shoe
trip to-morrow.”
So Tommy stayed. The conversation was not animated. Millicent made poor
progress. Presently, when the conversation reached Millicent in its
usual course, she asked him whether he liked bobbed-hair. He did, on
certain girls. She obviously expected to be told that she was one; if
not the chief one. He told her so.
The next step would be for him to stretch his arm along the back of the
couch, above her shoulders, and comment upon its fluffiness. Tommy took
his cue admirably. He stirred her hair with his fingers, and he did not
withdraw his arm. Millicent had drawn imperceptibly closer. The fire
in the grate had burned down to a drowsy glow, leaving the room in the
semi-darkness of late winter twilight. Now her head swayed toward him.
The moment was propitious. Tommy knew it. He had been cast as leading
man in just such a scene before. He knew that the next move was his....
And rather unexpectedly he made it. Very deliberately he got up, walked
over to the table, took up a cigarette and lit it. Neither of them
spoke. The silence was unnatural. A tension filled the air. There was
nothing to say.
The sound of a horn on the driveway saved the situation.
“That must be Carl,” Tommy said quickly. “Sounds as if he might be in a
hurry. Don’t get up; I’ll just grab my things in the hall. Good-night,
Millicent--awfully good time.”
He went out, a little breathlessly, before she could speak or get up.
Millicent was furious; furious at Tommy, who had snubbed her with
such ironic insolence; furious at herself, who had engineered her
own humiliation. The climax of her planning had come to ignominious
failure. Consuming anger filled her. For a moment she wondered whether
his manner would betray anything of the breach to the rest of the
crowd, on the snowshoe trip, the next day. Paul Lyle, in making up the
party, had paired them as a matter of course. Millicent knew what the
crowd was saying: and she would not be made ridiculous in their eyes,
now. Before Tommy went back to school he must propose, and the crowd
must know that he had.
She repeated that, mentally. The words were like italics on a page.
* * * * *
There was no perceptible difference in their attitude the next morning.
The snowshoe trip to Paul Lyle’s cabin on the St. Croix River had been
abandoned, because a vagary of the thermometer had brought balmy winds
and a thaw, overnight.
Tommy was relieved. The trip had been planned in his honor, and he had
had to feign a deep interest in Northern sports; actually he had had a
distinct premonition that he was due to make a general ass of himself
on snowshoes.
It was decided that they should drive up to the cabin for dinner,
instead. They found the cabin mired in slush, and with a leaking roof,
but a crackling fire in the stone hearth, and the uncertain melodies
from a small phonograph which some one unearthed, put them all in high
spirits. When they had tired of dancing over the uneven floors they
constituted themselves into an exploring party, and wandered down to
the river and out on the soft ice.
Presently, Providence took a hand.
Millicent, who had run ahead of the rest, shrieked suddenly, balanced
wildly for an instant, and fell into an air-hole in the ice.
It took but a very few moments to lift her out, and take her up to the
cabin, but in that period she had been seriously chilled from exposure
in the icy water. The men had done all that they could. Mary Skinner,
small and frail, took command. Millicent was put to bed, before the
hearth, bordering on the line of unconsciousness. A doctor was on the
way. They could only wait.
Tommy was dazed. Millicent had suddenly became a great deal to him. The
play of excited emotion, suddenly released, will do that. He sat on the
steps, unmindful of his own damp clothes. Millicent’s light sweater was
in his hands. Why, he wondered inconsistently, out of all this crowd of
girls did it have to be Millicent who should be endangered?
“Tommy’s taking it pretty hard, I guess,” some one said. “He thinks an
awful lot of Millicent.”
And for the first time, he did.
* * * * *
When the doctor had come, and given Millicent a hypodermic, they
wrapped her carefully in rugs, and drove slowly back to town.
She would have to stay in bed for a week or so, that was all, the
doctor said.
Tommy’s first floral offering came the next morning, and in the course
of the following days he sent almost everything in the florist’s
stock, from corsage bouquets to funeral lilies. He came himself, and
stayed interminably, until Mr. Grant, ordinarily a mild-mannered and
ponderously humored man, observed with unwonted choler that “If that
young man comes any earlier, I shall have to give him my place at the
breakfast table!” His wife, who looked upon Tommy with that eye of
wisdom which mothers with marriageable daughters possess, was more
kindly disposed. Tommy, in the parlance of her sphere, was an excellent
“catch”. He might see Millicent as often as he liked.
Millicent prolonged her stay in bed. She was aware that she made rather
a charming invalid, and throned in her bed she received a gratifying
court.
The wise commenters became positive.
“Millicent’s really in love, this time,” they said, “and their
engagement will be announced before Tommy goes back to school.”
Tommy, the drawling and indifferent, had given way to Tommy, the
intense and devoted. Millicent was aware of her victory.
The hearts with E.P. and O.W. had gone. Tommy’s, hidden by the
photograph, reigned alone. Perhaps, she thought idly, after they were
married she would have it cut into the glass. It was a pretty fancy.
She toyed with the idea, toyed with it as she did with everything in
her life; a languid, fickle amusement.
The day before Tommy and Carl were to go back to school Millicent got
up. She was paler, and more ethereally beautiful, she decided, with
characteristic candor. The sweet peas which he had sent that morning
looked rather well on her.
She wondered, as she pinned them on, whether he would propose to-day or
wait until the last.
He was nervous; a little haggard, too, she noticed, when he came, and
she knew that he would propose to-day. Her triumph was at hand, but
suddenly she knew that she wanted more time to think. She must make him
wait until to-morrow.
They were on the couch again. He kissed her, and in the moment that
their lips touched it came to her that Tommy was realty infatuated--but
in another moment the old doubt had returned, and when he said:
“Millicent, dear, I’ve only known you--” she stopped him, with a
breathless flutter, and said, “To-morrow, Tommy, to-morrow afternoon; I
_can’t_ tell you to-day!”... And she ran out of the room.
Millicent did not appear at supper. She was locked in her room, her
head buried in her arms on the dressing-table, thinking; half crying.
It was the only crisis which had ever come into her life. Always before
she had left this to the man; her own way had continued serenely
untroubled. Once, in a fit of fancy, she reached up as if to erase the
heart, but she did not complete the gesture.
The next morning dragged slowly by.
After lunch Millicent went to her desk, and in a fit of caprice wrote
a letter. She read it, and started to tear it up. Then she changed her
mind, and left it, sealed, on her desk. It was a quarter past two.
Tommy ought to arrive very soon.
She walked over to the pier-glass in the hall. Dispassionately she
admired her beauty. She thought that she had never seen anyone so
lovely. Others might be merely beautiful, hers was distinctive. Beauty
was a power in itself; and when coupled with intellect--the power it
might wield was infinite. Great beauties had made history--many of them
had had humbler beginnings, by far, than she. She felt in that moment
that she too might have been destined to rule.... French novels had
taught her these things--and had failed to instil a sense of personal
absurdity.
Egotism was her greatest fault; she looked upon it as her highest
virtue.
Her thought came back to Tommy. No man had ever been so much in love
with her as he was. And he represented so many desirable things. He was
appealingly good looking. He was wealthy in his own right, Carl had
told her. Life with him would be tranquil and luxurious.... It might
grow dull.
* * * * *
She heard him on the walk. She stood there, frozen, as he came up the
steps. He rang the bell, and in that instant decision came. The maid
was coming through to open the door. Millicent snatched the sealed
letter from her desk, and handed it to her.
“Give this to Mr. Squire,” she said, and while the maid gazed stupidly
at her, she laughed, half hysterically, and ran up the stairs.
In her room she heard Tommy come in, heard the murmur of the maid’s
voice, and then, after a pause longer than she had ever endured, she
heard the door close upon him. She waited until she could not hear his
footsteps longer--then she walked over to the mirror, and rubbed out
the heart.