BOOK I

I

“Unexpected obstacle. Please don’t come till thirtieth. Anna.”

All the way from Charing Cross to Dover the train had hammered the words

of the telegram into George Darrow’s ears, ringing every change of irony

on its commonplace syllables: rattling them out like a discharge of

musketry, letting them, one by one, drip slowly and coldly into his

brain, or shaking, tossing, transposing them like the dice in some game

of the gods of malice; and now, as he emerged from his compartment at

the pier, and stood facing the wind-swept platform and the angry sea

beyond, they leapt out at him as if from the crest of the waves, stung

and blinded him with a fresh fury of derision.

“Unexpected obstacle. Please don’t come till thirtieth. Anna.”

She had put him off at the very last moment, and for the second time:

put him off with all her sweet reasonableness, and for one of her usual

“good” reasons--he was certain that this reason, like the other, (the

visit of her husband’s uncle’s widow) would be “good”! But it was that

very certainty which chilled him. The fact of her dealing so reasonably

with their case shed an ironic light on the idea that there had been any

exceptional warmth in the greeting she had given him after their twelve

years apart.

They had found each other again, in London, some three months

previously, at a dinner at the American Embassy, and when she had caught

sight of him her smile had been like a red rose pinned on her widow’s

mourning. He still felt the throb of surprise with which, among

the stereotyped faces of the season’s diners, he had come upon her

unexpected face, with the dark hair banded above grave eyes; eyes in

which he had recognized every little curve and shadow as he would have

recognized, after half a life-time, the details of a room he had played

in as a child. And as, in the plumed starred crowd, she had stood out

for him, slender, secluded and different, so he had felt, the instant

their glances met, that he as sharply detached himself for her. All that

and more her smile had said; had said not merely “I remember,” but “I

remember just what you remember”; almost, indeed, as though her memory

had aided his, her glance flung back on their recaptured moment its

morning brightness. Certainly, when their distracted Ambassadress--with

the cry: “Oh, you know Mrs. Leath? That’s perfect, for General Farnham

has failed me”--had waved them together for the march to the dining-room,

Darrow had felt a slight pressure of the arm on his, a pressure faintly

but unmistakably emphasizing the exclamation: “Isn’t it wonderful?--In

London--in the season--in a mob?”

Little enough, on the part of most women; but it was a sign of Mrs.

Leath’s quality that every movement, every syllable, told with her. Even

in the old days, as an intent grave-eyed girl, she had seldom misplaced

her light strokes; and Darrow, on meeting her again, had immediately

felt how much finer and surer an instrument of expression she had

become.

Their evening together had been a long confirmation of this feeling. She

had talked to him, shyly yet frankly, of what had happened to her during

the years when they had so strangely failed to meet. She had told him

of her marriage to Fraser Leath, and of her subsequent life in France,

where her husband’s mother, left a widow in his youth, had been

re-married to the Marquis de Chantelle, and where, partly in consequence

of this second union, the son had permanently settled himself. She had

spoken also, with an intense eagerness of affection, of her little girl

Effie, who was now nine years old, and, in a strain hardly less tender,

of Owen Leath, the charming clever young stepson whom her husband’s

death had left to her care...

A porter, stumbling against Darrow’s bags, roused him to the fact that

he still obstructed the platform, inert and encumbering as his luggage.

“Crossing, sir?”

Was he crossing? He really didn’t know; but for lack of any more

compelling impulse he followed the porter to the luggage van, singled

out his property, and turned to march behind it down the gang-way. As

the fierce wind shouldered him, building up a crystal wall against his

efforts, he felt anew the derision of his case.

“Nasty weather to cross, sir,” the porter threw back at him as they beat

their way down the narrow walk to the pier. Nasty weather, indeed; but

luckily, as it had turned out, there was no earthly reason why Darrow

should cross.

While he pushed on in the wake of his luggage his thoughts slipped back

into the old groove. He had once or twice run across the man whom Anna

Summers had preferred to him, and since he had met her again he had been

exercising his imagination on the picture of what her married life must

have been. Her husband had struck him as a characteristic specimen of

the kind of American as to whom one is not quite clear whether he

lives in Europe in order to cultivate an art, or cultivates an art as a

pretext for living in Europe. Mr. Leath’s art was water-colour painting,

but he practised it furtively, almost clandestinely, with the disdain of

a man of the world for anything bordering on the professional, while

he devoted himself more openly, and with religious seriousness, to the

collection of enamelled snuff-boxes. He was blond and well-dressed, with

the physical distinction that comes from having a straight figure, a

thin nose, and the habit of looking slightly disgusted--as who should

not, in a world where authentic snuff-boxes were growing daily harder to

find, and the market was flooded with flagrant forgeries?

Darrow had often wondered what possibilities of communion there could

have been between Mr. Leath and his wife. Now he concluded that there

had probably been none. Mrs. Leath’s words gave no hint of her husband’s

having failed to justify her choice; but her very reticence betrayed

her. She spoke of him with a kind of impersonal seriousness, as if he

had been a character in a novel or a figure in history; and what she

said sounded as though it had been learned by heart and slightly dulled

by repetition. This fact immensely increased Darrow’s impression that

his meeting with her had annihilated the intervening years. She, who was

always so elusive and inaccessible, had grown suddenly communicative and

kind: had opened the doors of her past, and tacitly left him to draw his

own conclusions. As a result, he had taken leave of her with the

sense that he was a being singled out and privileged, to whom she had

entrusted something precious to keep. It was her happiness in their

meeting that she had given him, had frankly left him to do with as he

willed; and the frankness of the gesture doubled the beauty of the gift.

Their next meeting had prolonged and deepened the impression. They had

found each other again, a few days later, in an old country house full

of books and pictures, in the soft landscape of southern England.

The presence of a large party, with all its aimless and agitated

displacements, had served only to isolate the pair and give them (at

least to the young man’s fancy) a deeper feeling of communion, and their

days there had been like some musical prelude, where the instruments,

breathing low, seem to hold back the waves of sound that press against

them.

Mrs. Leath, on this occasion, was no less kind than before; but she

contrived to make him understand that what was so inevitably coming was

not to come too soon. It was not that she showed any hesitation as to

the issue, but rather that she seemed to wish not to miss any stage in

the gradual reflowering of their intimacy.

Darrow, for his part, was content to wait if she wished it. He

remembered that once, in America, when she was a girl, and he had

gone to stay with her family in the country, she had been out when he

arrived, and her mother had told him to look for her in the garden. She

was not in the garden, but beyond it he had seen her approaching down a

long shady path. Without hastening her step she had smiled and signed to

him to wait; and charmed by the lights and shadows that played upon her

as she moved, and by the pleasure of watching her slow advance toward

him, he had obeyed her and stood still. And so she seemed now to be

walking to him down the years, the light and shade of old memories and

new hopes playing variously on her, and each step giving him the vision

of a different grace. She did not waver or turn aside; he knew she would

come straight to where he stood; but something in her eyes said “Wait”,

and again he obeyed and waited.

On the fourth day an unexpected event threw out his calculations.

Summoned to town by the arrival in England of her husband’s mother, she

left without giving Darrow the chance he had counted on, and he cursed

himself for a dilatory blunderer. Still, his disappointment was tempered

by the certainty of being with her again before she left for France;

and they did in fact see each other in London. There, however, the

atmosphere had changed with the conditions. He could not say that she

avoided him, or even that she was a shade less glad to see him; but

she was beset by family duties and, as he thought, a little too readily

resigned to them.

The Marquise de Chantelle, as Darrow soon perceived, had the same

mild formidableness as the late Mr. Leath: a sort of insistent

self-effacement before which every one about her gave way. It was

perhaps the shadow of this lady’s presence--pervasive even during her

actual brief eclipses--that subdued and silenced Mrs. Leath. The latter

was, moreover, preoccupied about her stepson, who, soon after receiving

his degree at Harvard, had been rescued from a stormy love-affair, and

finally, after some months of troubled drifting, had yielded to his

step-mother’s counsel and gone up to Oxford for a year of supplementary

study. Thither Mrs. Leath went once or twice to visit him, and her

remaining days were packed with family obligations: getting, as she

phrased it, “frocks and governesses” for her little girl, who had

been left in France, and having to devote the remaining hours to long

shopping expeditions with her mother-in-law. Nevertheless, during her

brief escapes from duty, Darrow had had time to feel her safe in the

custody of his devotion, set apart for some inevitable hour; and the

last evening, at the theatre, between the overshadowing Marquise and the

unsuspicious Owen, they had had an almost decisive exchange of words.

Now, in the rattle of the wind about his ears, Darrow continued to

hear the mocking echo of her message: “Unexpected obstacle.” In such an

existence as Mrs. Leath’s, at once so ordered and so exposed, he knew

how small a complication might assume the magnitude of an “obstacle;”

yet, even allowing as impartially as his state of mind permitted for

the fact that, with her mother-in-law always, and her stepson

intermittently, under her roof, her lot involved a hundred small

accommodations generally foreign to the freedom of widowhood--even so,

he could not but think that the very ingenuity bred of such conditions

might have helped her to find a way out of them. No, her “reason”,

whatever it was, could, in this case, be nothing but a pretext; unless

he leaned to the less flattering alternative that any reason seemed good

enough for postponing him! Certainly, if her welcome had meant what he

imagined, she could not, for the second time within a few weeks,

have submitted so tamely to the disarrangement of their plans; a

disarrangement which--his official duties considered--might, for all she

knew, result in his not being able to go to her for months.

“Please don’t come till thirtieth.” The thirtieth--and it was now the

fifteenth! She flung back the fortnight on his hands as if he had been

an idler indifferent to dates, instead of an active young diplomatist

who, to respond to her call, had had to hew his way through a very

jungle of engagements! “Please don’t come till thirtieth.” That was all.

Not the shadow of an excuse or a regret; not even the perfunctory “have

written” with which it is usual to soften such blows. She didn’t want

him, and had taken the shortest way to tell him so. Even in his first

moment of exasperation it struck him as characteristic that she should

not have padded her postponement with a fib. Certainly her moral angles

were not draped!

“If I asked her to marry me, she’d have refused in the same language.

But thank heaven I haven’t!” he reflected.

These considerations, which had been with him every yard of the way from

London, reached a climax of irony as he was drawn into the crowd on the

pier. It did not soften his feelings to remember that, but for her lack

of forethought, he might, at this harsh end of the stormy May day, have

been sitting before his club fire in London instead of shivering in the

damp human herd on the pier. Admitting the sex’s traditional right to

change, she might at least have advised him of hers by telegraphing

directly to his rooms. But in spite of their exchange of letters she

had apparently failed to note his address, and a breathless emissary had

rushed from the Embassy to pitch her telegram into his compartment as

the train was moving from the station.

Yes, he had given her chance enough to learn where he lived; and this

minor proof of her indifference became, as he jammed his way through the

crowd, the main point of his grievance against her and of his derision

of himself. Half way down the pier the prod of an umbrella increased his

exasperation by rousing him to the fact that it was raining. Instantly

the narrow ledge became a battle-ground of thrusting, slanting, parrying

domes. The wind rose with the rain, and the harried wretches exposed to

this double assault wreaked on their neighbours the vengeance they could

not take on the elements.

Darrow, whose healthy enjoyment of life made him in general a good

traveller, tolerant of agglutinated humanity, felt himself obscurely

outraged by these promiscuous contacts. It was as though all the people

about him had taken his measure and known his plight; as though they

were contemptuously bumping and shoving him like the inconsiderable

thing he had become. “She doesn’t want you, doesn’t want you, doesn’t

want you,” their umbrellas and their elbows seemed to say.

He had rashly vowed, when the telegram was flung into his window: “At

any rate I won’t turn back”--as though it might cause the sender a

malicious joy to have him retrace his steps rather than keep on to

Paris! Now he perceived the absurdity of the vow, and thanked his stars

that he need not plunge, to no purpose, into the fury of waves outside

the harbour.

With this thought in his mind he turned back to look for his porter;

but the contiguity of dripping umbrellas made signalling impossible and,

perceiving that he had lost sight of the man, he scrambled up again to

the platform. As he reached it, a descending umbrella caught him in the

collar-bone; and the next moment, bent sideways by the wind, it turned

inside out and soared up, kite-wise, at the end of a helpless female

arm.

Darrow caught the umbrella, lowered its inverted ribs, and looked up at

the face it exposed to him.

“Wait a minute,” he said; “you can’t stay here.”

As he spoke, a surge of the crowd drove the owner of the umbrella

abruptly down on him. Darrow steadied her with extended arms, and

regaining her footing she cried out: “Oh, dear, oh, dear! It’s in

ribbons!”

Her lifted face, fresh and flushed in the driving rain, woke in him

a memory of having seen it at a distant time and in a vaguely

unsympathetic setting; but it was no moment to follow up such clues, and

the face was obviously one to make its way on its own merits.

Its possessor had dropped her bag and bundles to clutch at the tattered

umbrella. “I bought it only yesterday at the Stores; and--yes--it’s

utterly done for!” she lamented.

Darrow smiled at the intensity of her distress. It was food for the

moralist that, side by side with such catastrophes as his, human nature

was still agitating itself over its microscopic woes!

“Here’s mine if you want it!” he shouted back at her through the

shouting of the gale.

The offer caused the young lady to look at him more intently. “Why,

it’s Mr. Darrow!” she exclaimed; and then, all radiant recognition: “Oh,

thank you! We’ll share it, if you will.”

She knew him, then; and he knew her; but how and where had they met? He

put aside the problem for subsequent solution, and drawing her into a

more sheltered corner, bade her wait till he could find his porter.

When, a few minutes later, he came back with his recovered property,

and the news that the boat would not leave till the tide had turned, she

showed no concern.

“Not for two hours? How lucky--then I can find my trunk!”

Ordinarily Darrow would have felt little disposed to involve himself

in the adventure of a young female who had lost her trunk; but at the

moment he was glad of any pretext for activity. Even should he decide to

take the next up train from Dover he still had a yawning hour to fill;

and the obvious remedy was to devote it to the loveliness in distress

under his umbrella.

“You’ve lost a trunk? Let me see if I can find it.”

It pleased him that she did not return the conventional “Oh, WOULD you?”

Instead, she corrected him with a laugh--“Not a trunk, but my trunk; I’ve

no other--” and then added briskly: “You’d better first see to getting

your own things on the boat.”

This made him answer, as if to give substance to his plans by discussing

them: “I don’t actually know that I’m going over.”

“Not going over?”

“Well ... perhaps not by this boat.” Again he felt a stealing indecision.

“I may probably have to go back to London. I’m--I’m waiting ... expecting

a letter...(She’ll think me a defaulter,” he reflected.) “But meanwhile

there’s plenty of time to find your trunk.”

He picked up his companion’s bundles, and offered her an arm which

enabled her to press her slight person more closely under his umbrella;

and as, thus linked, they beat their way back to the platform, pulled

together and apart like marionettes on the wires of the wind, he

continued to wonder where he could have seen her. He had immediately

classed her as a compatriot; her small nose, her clear tints, a kind

of sketchy delicacy in her face, as though she had been brightly but

lightly washed in with water-colour, all confirmed the evidence of her

high sweet voice and of her quick incessant gestures. She was clearly an

American, but with the loose native quality strained through a closer

woof of manners: the composite product of an enquiring and adaptable

race. All this, however, did not help him to fit a name to her, for just

such instances were perpetually pouring through the London Embassy, and

the etched and angular American was becoming rarer than the fluid type.

More puzzling than the fact of his being unable to identify her was

the persistent sense connecting her with something uncomfortable and

distasteful. So pleasant a vision as that gleaming up at him between

wet brown hair and wet brown boa should have evoked only associations as

pleasing; but each effort to fit her image into his past resulted in the

same memories of boredom and a vague discomfort...

II

“Don’t you remember me now--at Mrs. Murrett’s?” She threw the question at

Darrow across a table of the quiet coffee-room to which, after a vainly

prolonged quest for her trunk, he had suggested taking her for a cup of

tea.

In this musty retreat she had removed her dripping hat, hung it on the

fender to dry, and stretched herself on tiptoe in front of the round

eagle-crowned mirror, above the mantel vases of dyed immortelles, while

she ran her fingers comb-wise through her hair. The gesture had acted on

Darrow’s numb feelings as the glow of the fire acted on his circulation;

and when he had asked: “Aren’t your feet wet, too?” and, after

frank inspection of a stout-shod sole, she had answered cheerfully:

“No--luckily I had on my new boots,” he began to feel that human

intercourse would still be tolerable if it were always as free from

formality.

The removal of his companion’s hat, besides provoking this reflection,

gave him his first full sight of her face; and this was so

favourable that the name she now pronounced fell on him with a quite

disproportionate shock of dismay.

“Oh, Mrs. Murrett’s--was it THERE?”

He remembered her now, of course: remembered her as one of the shadowy

sidling presences in the background of that awful house in Chelsea, one

of the dumb appendages of the shrieking unescapable Mrs. Murrett, into

whose talons he had fallen in the course of his head-long pursuit of

Lady Ulrica Crispin. Oh, the taste of stale follies! How insipid it was,

yet how it clung!

“I used to pass you on the stairs,” she reminded him.

Yes: he had seen her slip by--he recalled it now--as he dashed up to

the drawing-room in quest of Lady Ulrica. The thought made him steal a

longer look. How could such a face have been merged in the Murrett

mob? Its fugitive slanting lines, that lent themselves to all manner of

tender tilts and foreshortenings, had the freakish grace of some young

head of the Italian comedy. The hair stood up from her forehead in a

boyish elf-lock, and its colour matched her auburn eyes flecked with

black, and the little brown spot on her cheek, between the ear that was

meant to have a rose behind it and the chin that should have rested on

a ruff. When she smiled, the left corner of her mouth went up a little

higher than the right; and her smile began in her eyes and ran down to

her lips in two lines of light. He had dashed past that to reach Lady

Ulrica Crispin!

“But of course you wouldn’t remember me,” she was saying. “My name is

Viner--Sophy Viner.”

Not remember her? But of course he DID! He was genuinely sure of it now.

“You’re Mrs. Murrett’s niece,” he declared.

She shook her head. “No; not even that. Only her reader.”

“Her reader? Do you mean to say she ever reads?”

Miss Viner enjoyed his wonder. “Dear, no! But I wrote notes, and made up

the visiting-book, and walked the dogs, and saw bores for her.”

Darrow groaned. “That must have been rather bad!”

“Yes; but nothing like as bad as being her niece.”

“That I can well believe. I’m glad to hear,” he added, “that you put it

all in the past tense.”

She seemed to droop a little at the allusion; then she lifted her chin

with a jerk of defiance. “Yes. All is at an end between us. We’ve just

parted in tears--but not in silence!”

“Just parted? Do you mean to say you’ve been there all this time?”

“Ever since you used to come there to see Lady Ulrica? Does it seem to

you so awfully long ago?”

The unexpectedness of the thrust--as well as its doubtful taste--chilled

his growing enjoyment of her chatter. He had really been getting to

like her--had recovered, under the candid approval of her eye, his

usual sense of being a personable young man, with all the privileges

pertaining to the state, instead of the anonymous rag of humanity he

had felt himself in the crowd on the pier. It annoyed him, at that

particular moment, to be reminded that naturalness is not always

consonant with taste.

She seemed to guess his thought. “You don’t like my saying that you came

for Lady Ulrica?” she asked, leaning over the table to pour herself a

second cup of tea.

He liked her quickness, at any rate. “It’s better,” he laughed, “than

your thinking I came for Mrs. Murrett!”

“Oh, we never thought anybody came for Mrs. Murrett! It was always for

something else: the music, or the cook--when there was a good one--or

the other people; generally ONE of the other people.”

“I see.”

She was amusing, and that, in his present mood, was more to his purpose

than the exact shade of her taste. It was odd, too, to discover suddenly

that the blurred tapestry of Mrs. Murrett’s background had all the while

been alive and full of eyes. Now, with a pair of them looking into his,

he was conscious of a queer reversal of perspective.

“Who were the ‘we’? Were you a cloud of witnesses?”

“There were a good many of us.” She smiled. “Let me see--who was there

in your time? Mrs. Bolt--and Mademoiselle--and Professor Didymus and

the Polish Countess. Don’t you remember the Polish Countess? She

crystal-gazed, and played accompaniments, and Mrs. Murrett chucked her

because Mrs. Didymus accused her of hypnotizing the Professor. But of

course you don’t remember. We were all invisible to you; but we could

see. And we all used to wonder about you----”

Again Darrow felt a redness in the temples. “What about me?”

“Well--whether it was you or she who...”

He winced, but hid his disapproval. It made the time pass to listen to

her.

“And what, if one may ask, was your conclusion?”

“Well, Mrs. Bolt and Mademoiselle and the Countess naturally thought it

was SHE; but Professor Didymus and Jimmy Brance--especially Jimmy----”

“Just a moment: who on earth is Jimmy Brance?”

She exclaimed in wonder: “You WERE absorbed--not to remember Jimmy

Brance! He must have been right about you, after all.” She let her

amused scrutiny dwell on him. “But how could you? She was false from

head to foot!”

“False----?” In spite of time and satiety, the male instinct of

ownership rose up and repudiated the charge.

Miss Viner caught his look and laughed. “Oh, I only meant externally!

You see, she often used to come to my room after tennis, or to touch

up in the evenings, when they were going on; and I assure you she took

apart like a puzzle. In fact I used to say to Jimmy--just to make him

wild--: ‘I’ll bet you anything you like there’s nothing wrong, because

I know she’d never dare un--’” She broke the word in two, and her quick

blush made her face like a shallow-petalled rose shading to the deeper

pink of the centre.

The situation was saved, for Darrow, by an abrupt rush of memories, and

he gave way to a mirth which she as frankly echoed. “Of course,” she

gasped through her laughter, “I only said it to tease Jimmy----”

Her amusement obscurely annoyed him. “Oh, you’re all alike!” he

exclaimed, moved by an unaccountable sense of disappointment.

She caught him up in a flash--she didn’t miss things! “You say that

because you think I’m spiteful and envious? Yes--I was envious of Lady

Ulrica...Oh, not on account of you or Jimmy Brance! Simply because

she had almost all the things I’ve always wanted: clothes and fun and

motors, and admiration and yachting and Paris--why, Paris alone would be

enough!--And how do you suppose a girl can see that sort of thing about

her day after day, and never wonder why some women, who don’t seem to

have any more right to it, have it all tumbled into their laps, while

others are writing dinner invitations, and straightening out accounts,

and copying visiting lists, and finishing golf-stockings, and matching

ribbons, and seeing that the dogs get their sulphur? One looks in one’s

glass, after all!”

She launched the closing words at him on a cry that lifted them above

the petulance of vanity; but his sense of her words was lost in the

surprise of her face. Under the flying clouds of her excitement it was

no longer a shallow flower-cup but a darkening gleaming mirror that

might give back strange depths of feeling. The girl had stuff in her--he

saw it; and she seemed to catch the perception in his eyes.

“That’s the kind of education I got at Mrs. Murrett’s--and I never had

any other,” she said with a shrug.

“Good Lord--were you there so long?”

“Five years. I stuck it out longer than any of the others.” She spoke as

though it were something to be proud of.

“Well, thank God you’re out of it now!”

Again a just perceptible shadow crossed her face. “Yes--I’m out of it

now fast enough.”

“And what--if I may ask--are you doing next?”

She brooded a moment behind drooped lids; then, with a touch of hauteur:

“I’m going to Paris: to study for the stage.”

“The stage?” Darrow stared at her, dismayed. All his confused

contradictory impressions assumed a new aspect at this announcement; and

to hide his surprise he added lightly: “Ah--then you will have Paris,

after all!”

“Hardly Lady Ulrica’s Paris. It s not likely to be roses, roses all the

way.”

“It’s not, indeed.” Real compassion prompted him to continue: “Have you

any--any influence you can count on?”

She gave a somewhat flippant little laugh. “None but my own. I’ve never

had any other to count on.”

He passed over the obvious reply. “But have you any idea how the

profession is over-crowded? I know I’m trite----”

“I’ve a very clear idea. But I couldn’t go on as I was.”

“Of course not. But since, as you say, you’d stuck it out longer than

any of the others, couldn’t you at least have held on till you were sure

of some kind of an opening?”

She made no reply for a moment; then she turned a listless glance to the

rain-beaten window. “Oughtn’t we be starting?” she asked, with a lofty

assumption of indifference that might have been Lady Ulrica’s.

Darrow, surprised by the change, but accepting her rebuff as a phase of

what he guessed to be a confused and tormented mood, rose from his seat

and lifted her jacket from the chair-back on which she had hung it to

dry. As he held it toward her she looked up at him quickly.

“The truth is, we quarrelled,” she broke out, “and I left last night

without my dinner--and without my salary.”

“Ah--” he groaned, with a sharp perception of all the sordid dangers

that might attend such a break with Mrs. Murrett.

“And without a character!” she added, as she slipped her arms into the

jacket. “And without a trunk, as it appears--but didn’t you say that,

before going, there’d be time for another look at the station?”

There was time for another look at the station; but the look again

resulted in disappointment, since her trunk was nowhere to be found in

the huge heap disgorged by the newly-arrived London express. The fact

caused Miss Viner a moment’s perturbation; but she promptly adjusted

herself to the necessity of proceeding on her journey, and her decision

confirmed Darrow’s vague resolve to go to Paris instead of retracing his

way to London.

Miss Viner seemed cheered at the prospect of his company, and sustained

by his offer to telegraph to Charing Cross for the missing trunk; and

he left her to wait in the fly while he hastened back to the telegraph

office. The enquiry despatched, he was turning away from the desk when

another thought struck him and he went back and indited a message to his

servant in London: “If any letters with French post-mark received since

departure forward immediately to Terminus Hotel Gare du Nord Paris.”

Then he rejoined Miss Viner, and they drove off through the rain to the

pier.

III

Almost as soon as the train left Calais her head had dropped back into

the corner, and she had fallen asleep.

Sitting opposite, in the compartment from which he had contrived to have

other travellers excluded, Darrow looked at her curiously. He had never

seen a face that changed so quickly. A moment since it had danced like

a field of daisies in a summer breeze; now, under the pallid oscillating

light of the lamp overhead, it wore the hard stamp of experience, as of

a soft thing chilled into shape before its curves had rounded: and it

moved him to see that care already stole upon her when she slept.

The story she had imparted to him in the wheezing shaking cabin, and at

the Calais buffet--where he had insisted on offering her the dinner

she had missed at Mrs. Murrett’s--had given a distincter outline to

her figure. From the moment of entering the New York boarding-school to

which a preoccupied guardian had hastily consigned her after the death

of her parents, she had found herself alone in a busy and indifferent

world. Her youthful history might, in fact, have been summed up in

the statement that everybody had been too busy to look after her. Her

guardian, a drudge in a big banking house, was absorbed by “the office”;

the guardian’s wife, by her health and her religion; and an elder

sister, Laura, married, unmarried, remarried, and pursuing, through all

these alternating phases, some vaguely “artistic” ideal on which the

guardian and his wife looked askance, had (as Darrow conjectured) taken

their disapproval as a pretext for not troubling herself about

poor Sophy, to whom--perhaps for this reason--she had remained the

incarnation of remote romantic possibilities.

In the course of time a sudden “stroke” of the guardian’s had thrown his

personal affairs into a state of confusion from which--after his widely

lamented death--it became evident that it would not be possible to

extricate his ward’s inheritance. No one deplored this more sincerely

than his widow, who saw in it one more proof of her husband’s life

having been sacrificed to the innumerable duties imposed on him, and who

could hardly--but for the counsels of religion--have brought herself to

pardon the young girl for her indirect share in hastening his end. Sophy

did not resent this point of view. She was really much sorrier for her

guardian’s death than for the loss of her insignificant fortune. The

latter had represented only the means of holding her in bondage, and

its disappearance was the occasion of her immediate plunge into the

wide bright sea of life surrounding the island--of her captivity. She had

first landed--thanks to the intervention of the ladies who had directed

her education--in a Fifth Avenue school-room where, for a few months,

she acted as a buffer between three autocratic infants and their

bodyguard of nurses and teachers. The too-pressing attentions of their

father’s valet had caused her to fly this sheltered spot, against the

express advice of her educational superiors, who implied that, in their

own case, refinement and self-respect had always sufficed to keep the

most ungovernable passions at bay. The experience of the guardian’s

widow having been precisely similar, and the deplorable precedent of

Laura’s career being present to all their minds, none of these ladies

felt any obligation to intervene farther in Sophy’s affairs; and she was

accordingly left to her own resources.

A schoolmate from the Rocky Mountains, who was taking her father and

mother to Europe, had suggested Sophy’s accompanying them, and “going

round” with her while her progenitors, in the care of the courier,

nursed their ailments at a fashionable bath. Darrow gathered that the

“going round” with Mamie Hoke was a varied and diverting process; but

this relatively brilliant phase of Sophy’s career was cut short by

the elopement of the inconsiderate Mamie with a “matinee idol” who had

followed her from New York, and by the precipitate return of her parents

to negotiate for the repurchase of their child.

It was then--after an interval of repose with compassionate but

impecunious American friends in Paris--that Miss Viner had been drawn

into the turbid current of Mrs. Murrett’s career. The impecunious

compatriots had found Mrs. Murrett for her, and it was partly on

their account (because they were such dears, and so unconscious, poor

confiding things, of what they were letting her in for) that Sophy had

stuck it out so long in the dreadful house in Chelsea. The Farlows, she

explained to Darrow, were the best friends she had ever had (and the

only ones who had ever “been decent” about Laura, whom they had seen

once, and intensely admired); but even after twenty years of Paris they

were the most incorrigibly inexperienced angels, and quite persuaded

that Mrs. Murrett was a woman of great intellectual eminence, and the

house at Chelsea “the last of the salons”--Darrow knew what she meant?

And she hadn’t liked to undeceive them, knowing that to do so would be

virtually to throw herself back on their hands, and feeling, moreover,

after her previous experiences, the urgent need of gaining, at any cost,

a name for stability; besides which--she threw it off with a slight

laugh--no other chance, in all these years, had happened to come to her.

She had brushed in this outline of her career with light rapid strokes,

and in a tone of fatalism oddly untinged by bitterness. Darrow perceived

that she classified people according to their greater or less “luck” in

life, but she appeared to harbour no resentment against the undefined

power which dispensed the gift in such unequal measure. Things came

one’s way or they didn’t; and meanwhile one could only look on, and make

the most of small compensations, such as watching “the show” at Mrs.

Murrett’s, and talking over the Lady Ulricas and other footlight

figures. And at any moment, of course, a turn of the kaleidoscope might

suddenly toss a bright spangle into the grey pattern of one’s days.

This light-hearted philosophy was not without charm to a young man

accustomed to more traditional views. George Darrow had had a fairly

varied experience of feminine types, but the women he had frequented had

either been pronouncedly “ladies” or they had not. Grateful to both for

ministering to the more complex masculine nature, and disposed to

assume that they had been evolved, if not designed, to that end, he

had instinctively kept the two groups apart in his mind, avoiding that

intermediate society which attempts to conciliate both theories of life.

“Bohemianism” seemed to him a cheaper convention than the other two, and

he liked, above all, people who went as far as they could in their own

line--liked his “ladies” and their rivals to be equally unashamed of

showing for exactly what they were. He had not indeed--the fact of Lady

Ulrica was there to remind him--been without his experience of a third

type; but that experience had left him with a contemptuous distaste for

the woman who uses the privileges of one class to shelter the customs of

another.

As to young girls, he had never thought much about them since his early

love for the girl who had become Mrs. Leath. That episode seemed, as

he looked back on it, to bear no more relation to reality than a pale

decorative design to the confused richness of a summer landscape. He

no longer understood the violent impulses and dreamy pauses of his own

young heart, or the inscrutable abandonments and reluctances of hers. He

had known a moment of anguish at losing her--the mad plunge of youthful

instincts against the barrier of fate; but the first wave of stronger

sensation had swept away all but the outline of their story, and the

memory of Anna Summers had made the image of the young girl sacred, but

the class uninteresting.

Such generalisations belonged, however, to an earlier stage of his

experience. The more he saw of life the more incalculable he found

it; and he had learned to yield to his impressions without feeling

the youthful need of relating them to others. It was the girl in the

opposite seat who had roused in him the dormant habit of comparison.

She was distinguished from the daughters of wealth by her avowed

acquaintance with the real business of living, a familiarity as

different as possible from their theoretical proficiency; yet it seemed

to Darrow that her experience had made her free without hardness and

self-assured without assertiveness.

The rush into Amiens, and the flash of the station lights into their

compartment, broke Miss Viner’s sleep, and without changing her position

she lifted her lids and looked at Darrow. There was neither surprise nor

bewilderment in the look. She seemed instantly conscious, not so much

of where she was, as of the fact that she was with him; and that fact

seemed enough to reassure her. She did not even turn her head to look

out; her eyes continued to rest on him with a vague smile which appeared

to light her face from within, while her lips kept their sleepy droop.

Shouts and the hurried tread of travellers came to them through the

confusing cross-lights of the platform. A head appeared at the window,

and Darrow threw himself forward to defend their solitude; but the

intruder was only a train hand going his round of inspection. He passed

on, and the lights and cries of the station dropped away, merged in a

wider haze and a hollower resonance, as the train gathered itself up

with a long shake and rolled out again into the darkness.

Miss Viner’s head sank back against the cushion, pushing out a dusky

wave of hair above her forehead. The swaying of the train loosened a

lock over her ear, and she shook it back with a movement like a boy’s,

while her gaze still rested on her companion.

“You’re not too tired?”

She shook her head with a smile.

“We shall be in before midnight. We’re very nearly on time.” He verified

the statement by holding up his watch to the lamp.

She nodded dreamily. “It’s all right. I telegraphed Mrs. Farlow that

they mustn’t think of coming to the station; but they’ll have told the

concierge to look out for me.”

“You’ll let me drive you there?”

She nodded again, and her eyes closed. It was very pleasant to Darrow

that she made no effort to talk or to dissemble her sleepiness. He sat

watching her till the upper lashes met and mingled with the lower,

and their blent shadow lay on her cheek; then he stood up and drew the

curtain over the lamp, drowning the compartment in a bluish twilight.

As he sank back into his seat he thought how differently Anna

Summers--or even Anna Leath--would have behaved. She would not have

talked too much; she would not have been either restless or embarrassed;

but her adaptability, her appropriateness, would not have been

nature but “tact.” The oddness of the situation would have made sleep

impossible, or, if weariness had overcome her for a moment, she would

have waked with a start, wondering where she was, and how she had come

there, and if her hair were tidy; and nothing short of hairpins and a

glass would have restored her self-possession...

The reflection set him wondering whether the “sheltered” girl’s

bringing-up might not unfit her for all subsequent contact with life.

How much nearer to it had Mrs. Leath been brought by marriage and

motherhood, and the passage of fourteen years? What were all her

reticences and evasions but the result of the deadening process of

forming a “lady”? The freshness he had marvelled at was like the

unnatural whiteness of flowers forced in the dark.

As he looked back at their few days together he saw that their

intercourse had been marked, on her part, by the same hesitations and

reserves which had chilled their earlier intimacy. Once more they had

had their hour together and she had wasted it. As in her girlhood, her

eyes had made promises which her lips were afraid to keep. She was still

afraid of life, of its ruthlessness, its danger and mystery. She was

still the petted little girl who cannot be left alone in the dark...His

memory flew back to their youthful story, and long-forgotten details

took shape before him. How frail and faint the picture was! They seemed,

he and she, like the ghostly lovers of the Grecian Urn, forever pursuing

without ever clasping each other. To this day he did not quite know

what had parted them: the break had been as fortuitous as the fluttering

apart of two seed-vessels on a wave of summer air...

The very slightness, vagueness, of the memory gave it an added

poignancy. He felt the mystic pang of the parent for a child which

has just breathed and died. Why had it happened thus, when the least

shifting of influences might have made it all so different? If she had

been given to him then he would have put warmth in her veins and light

in her eyes: would have made her a woman through and through. Musing

thus, he had the sense of waste that is the bitterest harvest of

experience. A love like his might have given her the divine gift of

self-renewal; and now he saw her fated to wane into old age repeating

the same gestures, echoing the words she had always heard, and

perhaps never guessing that, just outside her glazed and curtained

consciousness, life rolled away, a vast blackness starred with lights,

like the night landscape beyond the windows of the train.

The engine lowered its speed for the passage through a sleeping station.

In the light of the platform lamp Darrow looked across at his companion.

Her head had dropped toward one shoulder, and her lips were just far

enough apart for the reflection of the upper one to deepen the colour

of the other. The jolting of the train had again shaken loose the lock

above her ear. It danced on her cheek like the flit of a brown wing over

flowers, and Darrow felt an intense desire to lean forward and put it

back behind her ear.

IV

As their motor-cab, on the way from the Gare du Nord, turned into the

central glitter of the Boulevard, Darrow had bent over to point out an

incandescent threshold.

“There!”

Above the doorway, an arch of flame flashed out the name of a great

actress, whose closing performances in a play of unusual originality

had been the theme of long articles in the Paris papers which Darrow had

tossed into their compartment at Calais.

“That’s what you must see before you’re twenty-four hours older!”

The girl followed his gesture eagerly. She was all awake and alive now,

as if the heady rumours of the streets, with their long effervescences

of light, had passed into her veins like wine.

“Cerdine? Is that where she acts?” She put her head out of the window,

straining back for a glimpse of the sacred threshold. As they flew past

it she sank into her seat with a satisfied sigh.

“It’s delicious enough just to KNOW she’s there! I’ve never seen her,

you know. When I was here with Mamie Hoke we never went anywhere but to

the music halls, because she couldn’t understand any French; and when

I came back afterward to the Farlows’ I was dead broke, and couldn’t

afford the play, and neither could they; so the only chance we had was

when friends of theirs invited us--and once it was to see a tragedy by

a Roumanian lady, and the other time it was for ‘L’Ami Fritz’ at the

Francais.”

Darrow laughed. “You must do better than that now. ‘Le Vertige’ is a

fine thing, and Cerdine gets some wonderful effects out of it. You

must come with me tomorrow evening to see it--with your friends, of

course.--That is,” he added, “if there’s any sort of chance of getting

seats.”

The flash of a street lamp lit up her radiant face. “Oh, will you really

take us? What fun to think that it’s tomorrow already!”

It was wonderfully pleasant to be able to give such pleasure. Darrow was

not rich, but it was almost impossible for him to picture the state of

persons with tastes and perceptions like his own, to whom an evening at

the theatre was an unattainable indulgence. There floated through his

mind an answer of Mrs. Leath’s to his enquiry whether she had seen the

play in question. “No. I meant to, of course, but one is so overwhelmed

with things in Paris. And then I’m rather sick of Cerdine--one is always

being dragged to see her.”

That, among the people he frequented, was the usual attitude toward such

opportunities. There were too many, they were a nuisance, one had to

defend one’s self! He even remembered wondering, at the moment,

whether to a really fine taste the exceptional thing could ever become

indifferent through habit; whether the appetite for beauty was so soon

dulled that it could be kept alive only by privation. Here, at any rate,

was a fine chance to experiment with such a hunger: he almost wished he

might stay on in Paris long enough to take the measure of Miss Viner’s

receptivity.

She was still dwelling on his promise, “It’s too beautiful of you! Oh,

don’t you THINK you’ll be able to get seats?” And then, after a pause of

brimming appreciation: “I wonder if you’ll think me horrid?--but it may

be my only chance; and if you can’t get places for us all, wouldn’t you

perhaps just take ME? After all, the Farlows may have seen it!”

He had not, of course, thought her horrid, but only the more engaging,

for being so natural, and so unashamed of showing the frank greed of her

famished youth. “Oh, you shall go somehow!” he had gaily promised her;

and she had dropped back with a sigh of pleasure as their cab passed

into the dimly-lit streets of the Farlows’ quarter beyond the Seine...

This little passage came back to him the next morning, as he opened his

hotel window on the early roar of the Northern Terminus.

The girl was there, in the room next to him. That had been the first

point in his waking consciousness. The second was a sense of relief at

the obligation imposed on him by this unexpected turn of everts. To

wake to the necessity of action, to postpone perforce the fruitless

contemplation of his private grievance, was cause enough for gratitude,

even if the small adventure in which he found himself involved had not,

on its own merits, roused an instinctive curiosity to see it through.

When he and his companion, the night before, had reached the Farlows’

door in the rue de la Chaise, it was only to find, after repeated

assaults on its panels, that the Farlows were no longer there. They

had moved away the week before, not only from their apartment but from

Paris; and Miss Viner’s breach with Mrs. Murrett had been too sudden to

permit her letter and telegram to overtake them. Both communications,

no doubt, still reposed in a pigeon-hole of the loge; but its custodian,

when drawn from his lair, sulkily declined to let Miss Viner verify the

fact, and only flung out, in return for Darrow’s bribe, the statement

that the Americans had gone to Joigny.

To pursue them there at that hour was manifestly impossible, and Miss

Viner, disturbed but not disconcerted by this new obstacle, had quite

simply acceded to Darrow’s suggestion that she should return for what

remained of the night to the hotel where he had sent his luggage.

The drive back through the dark hush before dawn, with the nocturnal

blaze of the Boulevard fading around them like the false lights of

a magician’s palace, had so played on her impressionability that she

seemed to give no farther thought to her own predicament. Darrow noticed

that she did not feel the beauty and mystery of the spectacle as much

as its pressure of human significance, all its hidden implications

of emotion and adventure. As they passed the shadowy colonnade of the

Francais, remote and temple-like in the paling lights, he felt a clutch

on his arm, and heard the cry: “There are things THERE that I want so

desperately to see!” and all the way back to the hotel she continued to

question him, with shrewd precision and an artless thirst for detail,

about the theatrical life of Paris. He was struck afresh, as he

listened, by the way in which her naturalness eased the situation of

constraint, leaving to it only a pleasant savour of good fellowship. It

was the kind of episode that one might, in advance, have characterized

as “awkward”, yet that was proving, in the event, as much outside such

definitions as a sunrise stroll with a dryad in a dew-drenched forest;

and Darrow reflected that mankind would never have needed to invent tact

if it had not first invented social complications.

It had been understood, with his good-night to Miss Viner, that the next

morning he was to look up the Joigny trains, and see her safely to

the station; but, while he breakfasted and waited for a time-table, he

recalled again her cry of joy at the prospect of seeing Cerdine. It was

certainly a pity, since that most elusive and incalculable of artists

was leaving the next week for South America, to miss what might be a

last sight of her in her greatest part; and Darrow, having dressed and

made the requisite excerpts from the time-table, decided to carry the

result of his deliberations to his neighbour’s door.

It instantly opened at his knock, and she came forth looking as if she

had been plunged into some sparkling element which had curled up all her

drooping tendrils and wrapped her in a shimmer of fresh leaves.

“Well, what do you think of me?” she cried; and with a hand at her waist

she spun about as if to show off some miracle of Parisian dress-making.

“I think the missing trunk has come--and that it was worth waiting for!”

“You DO like my dress?”

“I adore it! I always adore new dresses--why, you don’t mean to say it’s

NOT a new one?”

She laughed out her triumph.

“No, no, no! My trunk hasn’t come, and this is only my old rag of

yesterday--but I never knew the trick to fail!” And, as he stared: “You

see,” she joyously explained, “I’ve always had to dress in all kinds of

dreary left-overs, and sometimes, when everybody else was smart and

new, it used to make me awfully miserable. So one day, when Mrs. Murrett

dragged me down unexpectedly to fill a place at dinner, I suddenly

thought I’d try spinning around like that, and say to every one: ‘WELL,

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF ME?’ And, do you know, they were all taken in,

including Mrs. Murrett, who didn’t recognize my old turned and dyed

rags, and told me afterward it was awfully bad form to dress as if I

were somebody that people would expect to know! And ever since, whenever

I’ve particularly wanted to look nice, I’ve just asked people what they

thought of my new frock; and they’re always, always taken in!”

She dramatized her explanation so vividly that Darrow felt as if his

point were gained.

“Ah, but this confirms your vocation--of course,” he cried, “you must

see Cerdine!” and, seeing her face fall at this reminder of the change

in her prospects, he hastened to set forth his plan. As he did so, he

saw how easy it was to explain things to her. She would either accept

his suggestion, or she would not: but at least she would waste no time

in protestations and objections, or any vain sacrifice to the idols of

conformity. The conviction that one could, on any given point, almost

predicate this of her, gave him the sense of having advanced far enough

in her intimacy to urge his arguments against a hasty pursuit of her

friends.

Yes, it would certainly be foolish--she at once agreed--in the case

of such dear indefinite angels as the Farlows, to dash off after them

without more positive proof that they were established at Joigny, and

so established that they could take her in. She owned it was but too

probable that they had gone there to “cut down”, and might be doing so

in quarters too contracted to receive her; and it would be unfair, on

that chance, to impose herself on them unannounced. The simplest way of

getting farther light on the question would be to go back to the rue de

la Chaise, where, at that more conversable hour, the concierge might be

less chary of detail; and she could decide on her next step in the light

of such facts as he imparted.

Point by point, she fell in with the suggestion, recognizing, in the

light of their unexplained flight, that the Farlows might indeed be in a

situation on which one could not too rashly intrude. Her concern for her

friends seemed to have effaced all thought of herself, and this little

indication of character gave Darrow a quite disproportionate pleasure.

She agreed that it would be well to go at once to the rue de la Chaise,

but met his proposal that they should drive by the declaration that it

was a “waste” not to walk in Paris; so they set off on foot through the

cheerful tumult of the streets.

The walk was long enough for him to learn many things about her. The

storm of the previous night had cleared the air, and Paris shone in

morning beauty under a sky that was all broad wet washes of white and

blue; but Darrow again noticed that her visual sensitiveness was less

keen than her feeling for what he was sure the good Farlows--whom he

already seemed to know--would have called “the human interest.” She

seemed hardly conscious of sensations of form and colour, or of any

imaginative suggestion, and the spectacle before them--always, in

its scenic splendour, so moving to her companion--broke up, under her

scrutiny, into a thousand minor points: the things in the shops, the

types of character and manner of occupation shown in the passing faces,

the street signs, the names of the hotels they passed, the motley

brightness of the flower-carts, the identity of the churches and public

buildings that caught her eye. But what she liked best, he divined, was

the mere fact of being free to walk abroad in the bright air, her

tongue rattling on as it pleased, while her feet kept time to the mighty

orchestration of the city’s sounds. Her delight in the fresh air, in

the freedom, light and sparkle of the morning, gave him a sudden insight

into her stifled past; nor was it indifferent to him to perceive

how much his presence evidently added to her enjoyment. If only as a

sympathetic ear, he guessed what he must be worth to her. The girl

had been dying for some one to talk to, some one before whom she could

unfold and shake out to the light her poor little shut-away emotions.

Years of repression were revealed in her sudden burst of confidence; and

the pity she inspired made Darrow long to fill her few free hours to the

brim.

She had the gift of rapid definition, and his questions as to the life

she had led with the Farlows, during the interregnum between the Hoke

and Murrett eras, called up before him a queer little corner of Parisian

existence. The Farlows themselves--he a painter, she a “magazine

writer”--rose before him in all their incorruptible simplicity: an

elderly New England couple, with vague yearnings for enfranchisement,

who lived in Paris as if it were a Massachusetts suburb, and dwelt

hopefully on the “higher side” of the Gallic nature. With equal

vividness she set before him the component figures of the circle from

which Mrs. Farlow drew the “Inner Glimpses of French Life” appearing

over her name in a leading New England journal: the Roumanian lady who

had sent them tickets for her tragedy, an elderly French gentleman

who, on the strength of a week’s stay at Folkestone, translated English

fiction for the provincial press, a lady from Wichita, Kansas, who

advocated free love and the abolition of the corset, a clergyman’s

widow from Torquay who had written an “English Ladies’ Guide to Foreign

Galleries” and a Russian sculptor who lived on nuts and was “almost

certainly” an anarchist. It was this nucleus, and its outer ring

of musical, architectural and other American students, which posed

successively to Mrs. Farlow’s versatile fancy as a centre of “University

Life”, a “Salon of the Faubourg St. Germain”, a group of Parisian

“Intellectuals” or a “Cross-section of Montmartre”; but even her faculty

for extracting from it the most varied literary effects had not sufficed

to create a permanent demand for the “Inner Glimpses”, and there

were days when--Mr. Farlow’s landscapes being equally unmarketable--a

temporary withdrawal to the country (subsequently utilized as “Peeps

into Chateau Life”) became necessary to the courageous couple.

Five years of Mrs. Murrett’s world, while increasing Sophy’s tenderness

for the Farlows, had left her with few illusions as to their power of

advancing her fortunes; and she did not conceal from Darrow that

her theatrical projects were of the vaguest. They hung mainly on the

problematical good-will of an ancient comedienne, with whom Mrs. Farlow

had a slight acquaintance (extensively utilized in “Stars of the French

Footlights” and “Behind the Scenes at the Francais”), and who had once,

with signs of approval, heard Miss Viner recite the Nuit de Mai.

“But of course I know how much that’s worth,” the girl broke off, with

one of her flashes of shrewdness. “And besides, it isn’t likely that a

poor old fossil like Mme. Dolle could get anybody to listen to her now,

even if she really thought I had talent. But she might introduce me to

people; or at least give me a few tips. If I could manage to earn enough

to pay for lessons I’d go straight to some of the big people and work

with them. I’m rather hoping the Farlows may find me a chance of that

kind--an engagement with some American family in Paris who would want to

be ‘gone round’ with like the Hokes, and who’d leave me time enough to

study.”

In the rue de la Chaise they learned little except the exact address

of the Farlows, and the fact that they had sub-let their flat before

leaving. This information obtained, Darrow proposed to Miss Viner that

they should stroll along the quays to a little restaurant looking out on

the Seine, and there, over the plat du jour, consider the next step

to be taken. The long walk had given her cheeks a glow indicative of

wholesome hunger, and she made no difficulty about satisfying it in

Darrow’s company. Regaining the river they walked on in the direction

of Notre Dame, delayed now and again by the young man’s irresistible

tendency to linger over the bookstalls, and by his ever-fresh response

to the shifting beauties of the scene. For two years his eyes had been

subdued to the atmospheric effects of London, to the mysterious fusion

of darkly-piled city and low-lying bituminous sky; and the transparency

of the French air, which left the green gardens and silvery stones so

classically clear yet so softly harmonized, struck him as having a kind

of conscious intelligence. Every line of the architecture, every arch

of the bridges, the very sweep of the strong bright river between them,

while contributing to this effect, sent forth each a separate appeal

to some sensitive memory; so that, for Darrow, a walk through the Paris

streets was always like the unrolling of a vast tapestry from which

countless stored fragrances were shaken out.

It was a proof of the richness and multiplicity of the spectacle that

it served, without incongruity, for so different a purpose as the

background of Miss Viner’s enjoyment. As a mere drop-scene for her

personal adventure it was just as much in its place as in the evocation

of great perspectives of feeling. For her, as he again perceived when

they were seated at their table in a low window above the Seine, Paris

was “Paris” by virtue of all its entertaining details, its endless

ingenuities of pleasantness. Where else, for instance, could one

find the dear little dishes of hors d’oeuvre, the symmetrically-laid

anchovies and radishes, the thin golden shells of butter, or the wood

strawberries and brown jars of cream that gave to their repast the last

refinement of rusticity? Hadn’t he noticed, she asked, that cooking

always expressed the national character, and that French food was

clever and amusing just because the people were? And in private houses,

everywhere, how the dishes always resembled the talk--how the very

same platitudes seemed to go into people’s mouths and come out of them?

Couldn’t he see just what kind of menu it would make, if a fairy waved a

wand and suddenly turned the conversation at a London dinner into joints

and puddings? She always thought it a good sign when people liked Irish

stew; it meant that they enjoyed changes and surprises, and taking life

as it came; and such a beautiful Parisian version of the dish as the

navarin that was just being set before them was like the very best kind

of talk--the kind when one could never tell before-hand just what was

going to be said!

Darrow, as he watched her enjoyment of their innocent feast, wondered if

her vividness and vivacity were signs of her calling. She was the kind

of girl in whom certain people would instantly have recognized the

histrionic gift. But experience had led him to think that, except at the

creative moment, the divine flame burns low in its possessors. The one

or two really intelligent actresses he had known had struck him, in

conversation, as either bovine or primitively “jolly”. He had a notion

that, save in the mind of genius, the creative process absorbs too

much of the whole stuff of being to leave much surplus for personal

expression; and the girl before him, with her changing face and flexible

fancies, seemed destined to work in life itself rather than in any of

its counterfeits.

The coffee and liqueurs were already on the table when her mind suddenly

sprang back to the Farlows. She jumped up with one of her subversive

movements and declared that she must telegraph at once. Darrow called

for writing materials and room was made at her elbow for the parched

ink-bottle and saturated blotter of the Parisian restaurant; but the

mere sight of these jaded implements seemed to paralyze Miss Viner’s

faculties. She hung over the telegraph-form with anxiously-drawn brow,

the tip of the pen-handle pressed against her lip; and at length she

raised her troubled eyes to Darrow’s.

“I simply can’t think how to say it.”

“What--that you’re staying over to see Cerdine?”

“But AM I--am I, really?” The joy of it flamed over her face.

Darrow looked at his watch. “You could hardly get an answer to your

telegram in time to take a train to Joigny this afternoon, even if you

found your friends could have you.”

She mused for a moment, tapping her lip with the pen. “But I must let

them know I’m here. I must find out as soon as possible if they CAN,

have me.” She laid the pen down despairingly. “I never COULD write a

telegram!” she sighed.

“Try a letter, then and tell them you’ll arrive tomorrow.”

This suggestion produced immediate relief, and she gave an energetic dab

at the ink-bottle; but after another interval of uncertain scratching

she paused again. “Oh, it’s fearful! I don’t know what on earth to say. I

wouldn’t for the world have them know how beastly Mrs. Murrett’s been.”

Darrow did not think it necessary to answer. It was no business of his,

after all. He lit a cigar and leaned back in his seat, letting his eyes

take their fill of indolent pleasure. In the throes of invention she

had pushed back her hat, loosening the stray lock which had invited his

touch the night before. After looking at it for a while he stood up and

wandered to the window.

Behind him he heard her pen scrape on.

“I don’t want to worry them--I’m so certain they’ve got bothers of their

own.” The faltering scratches ceased again. “I wish I weren’t such an

idiot about writing: all the words get frightened and scurry away when

I try to catch them.” He glanced back at her with a smile as she bent

above her task like a school-girl struggling with a “composition.” Her

flushed cheek and frowning brow showed that her difficulty was genuine

and not an artless device to draw him to her side. She was really

powerless to put her thoughts in writing, and the inability seemed

characteristic of her quick impressionable mind, and of the incessant

come-and-go of her sensations. He thought of Anna Leath’s letters, or

rather of the few he had received, years ago, from the girl who had been

Anna Summers. He saw the slender firm strokes of the pen, recalled the

clear structure of the phrases, and, by an abrupt association of ideas,

remembered that, at that very hour, just such a document might be

awaiting him at the hotel.

What if it were there, indeed, and had brought him a complete

explanation of her telegram? The revulsion of feeling produced by this

thought made him look at the girl with sudden impatience. She struck him

as positively stupid, and he wondered how he could have wasted half his

day with her, when all the while Mrs. Leath’s letter might be lying on

his table. At that moment, if he could have chosen, he would have left

his companion on the spot; but he had her on his hands, and must accept

the consequences.

Some odd intuition seemed to make her conscious of his change of mood,

for she sprang from her seat, crumpling the letter in her hand.

“I’m too stupid; but I won’t keep you any longer. I’ll go back to the

hotel and write there.”

Her colour deepened, and for the first time, as their eyes met, he

noticed a faint embarrassment in hers. Could it be that his nearness

was, after all, the cause of her confusion? The thought turned his vague

impatience with her into a definite resentment toward himself. There was

really no excuse for his having blundered into such an adventure. Why

had he not shipped the girl off to Joigny by the evening train, instead

of urging her to delay, and using Cerdine as a pretext? Paris was full

of people he knew, and his annoyance was increased by the thought that

some friend of Mrs. Leath’s might see him at the play, and report his

presence there with a suspiciously good-looking companion. The idea was

distinctly disagreeable: he did not want the woman he adored to think he

could forget her for a moment. And by this time he had fully persuaded

himself that a letter from her was awaiting him, and had even gone so

far as to imagine that its contents might annul the writer’s telegraphed

injunction, and call him to her side at once...

V

At the porter’s desk a brief “Pas de lettres” fell destructively on the

fabric of these hopes. Mrs. Leath had not written--she had not taken the

trouble to explain her telegram. Darrow turned away with a sharp pang

of humiliation. Her frugal silence mocked his prodigality of hopes and

fears. He had put his question to the porter once before, on returning

to the hotel after luncheon; and now, coming back again in the late

afternoon, he was met by the same denial. The second post was in, and

had brought him nothing.

A glance at his watch showed that he had barely time to dress before

taking Miss Viner out to dine; but as he turned to the lift a new

thought struck him, and hurrying back into the hall he dashed off

another telegram to his servant: “Have you forwarded any letter with

French postmark today? Telegraph answer Terminus.”

Some kind of reply would be certain to reach him on his return from the

theatre, and he would then know definitely whether Mrs. Leath meant

to write or not. He hastened up to his room and dressed with a lighter

heart.

Miss Viner’s vagrant trunk had finally found its way to its owner;

and, clad in such modest splendour as it furnished, she shone at Darrow

across their restaurant table. In the reaction of his wounded vanity he

found her prettier and more interesting than before. Her dress, sloping

away from the throat, showed the graceful set of her head on its slender

neck, and the wide brim of her hat arched above her hair like a dusky

halo. Pleasure danced in her eyes and on her lips, and as she shone on

him between the candle-shades Darrow felt that he should not be at all

sorry to be seen with her in public. He even sent a careless glance

about him in the vague hope that it might fall on an acquaintance.

At the theatre her vivacity sank into a breathless hush, and she sat

intent in her corner of their baignoire, with the gaze of a neophyte

about to be initiated into the sacred mysteries. Darrow placed himself

behind her, that he might catch her profile between himself and the

stage. He was touched by the youthful seriousness of her expression. In

spite of the experiences she must have had, and of the twenty-four

years to which she owned, she struck him as intrinsically young; and he

wondered how so evanescent a quality could have been preserved in the

desiccating Murrett air. As the play progressed he noticed that her

immobility was traversed by swift flashes of perception. She was not

missing anything, and her intensity of attention when Cerdine was on the

stage drew an anxious line between her brows.

After the first act she remained for a few minutes rapt and motionless;

then she turned to her companion with a quick patter of questions. He

gathered from them that she had been less interested in following

the general drift of the play than in observing the details of its

interpretation. Every gesture and inflection of the great actress’s

had been marked and analyzed; and Darrow felt a secret gratification in

being appealed to as an authority on the histrionic art. His interest in

it had hitherto been merely that of the cultivated young man curious of

all forms of artistic expression; but in reply to her questions he found

things to say about it which evidently struck his listener as impressive

and original, and with which he himself was not, on the whole,

dissatisfied. Miss Viner was much more concerned to hear his views

than to express her own, and the deference with which she received his

comments called from him more ideas about the theatre than he had ever

supposed himself to possess.

With the second act she began to give more attention to the development

of the play, though her interest was excited rather by what she called

“the story” than by the conflict of character producing it. Oddly

combined with her sharp apprehension of things theatrical, her knowledge

of technical “dodges” and green-room precedents, her glibness about

“lines” and “curtains”, was the primitive simplicity of her attitude

toward the tale itself, as toward something that was “really happening”

and at which one assisted as at a street-accident or a quarrel overheard

in the next room. She wanted to know if Darrow thought the lovers

“really would” be involved in the catastrophe that threatened them,

and when he reminded her that his predictions were disqualified by his

having already seen the play, she exclaimed: “Oh, then, please don’t

tell me what’s going to happen!” and the next moment was questioning

him about Cerdine’s theatrical situation and her private history. On the

latter point some of her enquiries were of a kind that it is not in

the habit of young girls to make, or even to know how to make; but her

apparent unconsciousness of the fact seemed rather to reflect on her

past associates than on herself.

When the second act was over, Darrow suggested their taking a turn

in the foyer; and seated on one of its cramped red velvet sofas they

watched the crowd surge up and down in a glare of lights and gilding.

Then, as she complained of the heat, he led her through the press to the

congested cafe at the foot of the stairs, where orangeades were thrust

at them between the shoulders of packed consommateurs and Darrow,

lighting a cigarette while she sucked her straw, knew the primitive

complacency of the man at whose companion other men stare.

On a corner of their table lay a smeared copy of a theatrical journal.

It caught Sophy’s eye and after poring over the page she looked up with

an excited exclamation.

“They’re giving Oedipe tomorrow afternoon at the Francais! I suppose

you’ve seen it heaps and heaps of times?”

He smiled back at her. “You must see it too. We’ll go tomorrow.”

She sighed at his suggestion, but without discarding it. “How can I? The

last train for Joigny leaves at four.”

“But you don’t know yet that your friends will want you.”

“I shall know tomorrow early. I asked Mrs. Farlow to telegraph as soon

as she got my letter.” A twinge of compunction shot through Darrow. Her

words recalled to him that on their return to the hotel after luncheon

she had given him her letter to post, and that he had never thought of

it again. No doubt it was still in the pocket of the coat he had taken

off when he dressed for dinner. In his perturbation he pushed back his

chair, and the movement made her look up at him.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Only--you know I don’t fancy that letter can have caught this

afternoon’s post.”

“Not caught it? Why not?”

“Why, I’m afraid it will have been too late.” He bent his head to light

another cigarette.

She struck her hands together with a gesture which, to his amusement, he

noticed she had caught from Cerdine.

“Oh, dear, I hadn’t thought of that! But surely it will reach them in

the morning?”

“Some time in the morning, I suppose. You know the French provincial

post is never in a hurry. I don’t believe your letter would have been

delivered this evening in any case.” As this idea occurred to him he

felt himself almost absolved.

“Perhaps, then, I ought to have telegraphed?”

“I’ll telegraph for you in the morning if you say so.”

The bell announcing the close of the entr’-acte shrilled through the

cafe, and she sprang to her feet.

“Oh, come, come! We mustn’t miss it!”

Instantly forgetful of the Farlows, she slipped her arm through his and

turned to push her way back to the theatre.

As soon as the curtain went up she as promptly forgot her companion.

Watching her from the corner to which he had returned, Darrow saw that

great waves of sensation were beating deliciously against her brain. It

was as though every starved sensibility were throwing out feelers to the

mounting tide; as though everything she was seeing, hearing, imagining,

rushed in to fill the void of all she had always been denied.

Darrow, as he observed her, again felt a detached enjoyment in her

pleasure. She was an extraordinary conductor of sensation: she seemed to

transmit it physically, in emanations that set the blood dancing in his

veins. He had not often had the opportunity of studying the effects of a

perfectly fresh impression on so responsive a temperament, and he felt a

fleeting desire to make its chords vibrate for his own amusement.

At the end of the next act she discovered with dismay that in their

transit to the cafe she had lost the beautiful pictured programme he

had bought for her. She wanted to go back and hunt for it, but Darrow

assured her that he would have no trouble in getting her another. When

he went out in quest of it she followed him protestingly to the door of

the box, and he saw that she was distressed at the thought of his having

to spend an additional franc for her. This frugality smote Darrow by its

contrast to her natural bright profusion; and again he felt the desire

to right so clumsy an injustice.

When he returned to the box she was still standing in the doorway,

and he noticed that his were not the only eyes attracted to her. Then

another impression sharply diverted his attention. Above the fagged

faces of the Parisian crowd he had caught the fresh fair countenance

of Owen Leath signalling a joyful recognition. The young man, slim and

eager, had detached himself from two companions of his own type, and

was seeking to push through the press to his step-mother’s friend. The

encounter, to Darrow, could hardly have been more inopportune; it woke

in him a confusion of feelings of which only the uppermost was allayed

by seeing Sophy Viner, as if instinctively warned, melt back into the

shadow of their box.

A minute later Owen Leath was at his side. “I was sure it was you! Such

luck to run across you! Won’t you come off with us to supper after it’s

over? Montmartre, or wherever else you please. Those two chaps over

there are friends of mine, at the Beaux Arts; both of them rather good

fellows--and we’d be so glad----”

For half a second Darrow read in his hospitable eye the termination “if

you’d bring the lady too”; then it deflected into: “We’d all be so glad

if you’d come.”

Darrow, excusing himself with thanks, lingered on for a few minutes’

chat, in which every word, and every tone of his companion’s voice, was

like a sharp light flashed into aching eyes. He was glad when the bell

called the audience to their seats, and young Leath left him with the

friendly question: “We’ll see you at Givre later on?”

When he rejoined Miss Viner, Darrow’s first care was to find out, by a

rapid inspection of the house, whether Owen Leath’s seat had given him a

view of their box. But the young man was not visible from it, and Darrow

concluded that he had been recognized in the corridor and not at his

companion’s side. He scarcely knew why it seemed to him so important

that this point should be settled; certainly his sense of reassurance

was less due to regard for Miss Viner than to the persistent vision of

grave offended eyes...

During the drive back to the hotel this vision was persistently kept

before him by the thought that the evening post might have brought a

letter from Mrs. Leath. Even if no letter had yet come, his servant

might have telegraphed to say that one was on its way; and at the

thought his interest in the girl at his side again cooled to the

fraternal, the almost fatherly. She was no more to him, after all, than

an appealing young creature to whom it was mildly agreeable to have

offered an evening’s diversion; and when, as they rolled into the

illuminated court of the hotel, she turned with a quick movement which

brought her happy face close to his, he leaned away, affecting to be

absorbed in opening the door of the cab.

At the desk the night porter, after a vain search through the

pigeon-holes, was disposed to think that a letter or telegram had in

fact been sent up for the gentleman; and Darrow, at the announcement,

could hardly wait to ascend to his room. Upstairs, he and his companion

had the long dimly-lit corridor to themselves, and Sophy paused on her

threshold, gathering up in one hand the pale folds of her cloak, while

she held the other out to Darrow.

“If the telegram comes early I shall be off by the first train; so I

suppose this is good-bye,” she said, her eyes dimmed by a little shadow

of regret.

Darrow, with a renewed start of contrition, perceived that he had again

forgotten her letter; and as their hands met he vowed to himself that

the moment she had left him he would dash down stairs to post it.

“Oh, I’ll see you in the morning, of course!”

A tremor of pleasure crossed her face as he stood before her, smiling a

little uncertainly.

“At any rate,” she said, “I want to thank you now for my good day.”

He felt in her hand the same tremor he had seen in her face. “But it’s

YOU, on the contrary--” he began, lifting the hand to his lips.

As he dropped it, and their eyes met, something passed through hers that

was like a light carried rapidly behind a curtained window.

“Good night; you must be awfully tired,” he said with a friendly

abruptness, turning away without even waiting to see her pass into her

room. He unlocked his door, and stumbling over the threshold groped in

the darkness for the electric button. The light showed him a telegram on

the table, and he forgot everything else as he caught it up.

“No letter from France,” the message read.

It fell from Darrow’s hand to the floor, and he dropped into a chair

by the table and sat gazing at the dingy drab and olive pattern of

the carpet. She had not written, then; she had not written, and it

was manifest now that she did not mean to write. If she had had any

intention of explaining her telegram she would certainly, within

twenty-four hours, have followed it up by a letter. But she evidently

did not intend to explain it, and her silence could mean only that she

had no explanation to give, or else that she was too indifferent to be

aware that one was needed.

Darrow, face to face with these alternatives, felt a recrudescence of

boyish misery. It was no longer his hurt vanity that cried out. He told

himself that he could have borne an equal amount of pain, if only it had

left Mrs. Leath’s image untouched; but he could not bear to think of her

as trivial or insincere. The thought was so intolerable that he felt a

blind desire to punish some one else for the pain it caused him.

As he sat moodily staring at the carpet its silly intricacies melted

into a blur from which the eyes of Mrs. Leath again looked out at him.

He saw the fine sweep of her brows, and the deep look beneath them as

she had turned from him on their last evening in London. “This will be

good-bye, then,” she had said; and it occurred to him that her parting

phrase had been the same as Sophy Viner’s.

At the thought he jumped to his feet and took down from its hook the

coat in which he had left Miss Viner’s letter. The clock marked the

third quarter after midnight, and he knew it would make no difference

if he went down to the post-box now or early the next morning; but he

wanted to clear his conscience, and having found the letter he went to

the door.

A sound in the next room made him pause. He had become conscious again

that, a few feet off, on the other side of a thin partition, a small

keen flame of life was quivering and agitating the air. Sophy’s face

came back to him insistently. It was as vivid now as Mrs. Leath’s had

been a moment earlier. He recalled with a faint smile of retrospective

pleasure the girl’s enjoyment of her evening, and the innumerable fine

feelers of sensation she had thrown out to its impressions.

It gave him a curiously close sense of her presence to think that at

that moment she was living over her enjoyment as intensely as he was

living over his unhappiness. His own case was irremediable, but it was

easy enough to give her a few more hours of pleasure. And did she not

perhaps secretly expect it of him? After all, if she had been very

anxious to join her friends she would have telegraphed them on reaching

Paris, instead of writing. He wondered now that he had not been struck

at the moment by so artless a device to gain more time. The fact of her

having practised it did not make him think less well of her; it merely

strengthened the impulse to use his opportunity. She was starving, poor

child, for a little amusement, a little personal life--why not give

her the chance of another day in Paris? If he did so, should he not be

merely falling in with her own hopes?

At the thought his sympathy for her revived. She became of absorbing

interest to him as an escape from himself and an object about which his

thwarted activities could cluster. He felt less drearily alone because

of her being there, on the other side of the door, and in his gratitude

to her for giving him this relief he began, with indolent amusement, to

plan new ways of detaining her. He dropped back into his chair, lit a

cigar, and smiled a little at the image of her smiling face. He tried to

imagine what incident of the day she was likely to be recalling at that

particular moment, and what part he probably played in it. That it

was not a small part he was certain, and the knowledge was undeniably

pleasant.

Now and then a sound from her room brought before him more vividly

the reality of the situation and the strangeness of the vast swarming

solitude in which he and she were momentarily isolated, amid long lines

of rooms each holding its separate secret. The nearness of all these

other mysteries enclosing theirs gave Darrow a more intimate sense of

the girl’s presence, and through the fumes of his cigar his imagination

continued to follow her to and fro, traced the curve of her slim young

arms as she raised them to undo her hair, pictured the sliding down of

her dress to the waist and then to the knees, and the whiteness of her

feet as she slipped across the floor to bed...

He stood up and shook himself with a yawn, throwing away the end of

his cigar. His glance, in following it, lit on the telegram which had

dropped to the floor. The sounds in the next room had ceased, and once

more he felt alone and unhappy.

Opening the window, he folded his arms on the sill and looked out on the

vast light-spangled mass of the city, and then up at the dark sky, in

which the morning planet stood.

VI

At the Theatre Francais, the next afternoon, Darrow yawned and fidgeted

in his seat.

The day was warm, the theatre crowded and airless, and the performance,

it seemed to him, intolerably bad. He stole a glance at his companion,

wondering if she shared his feelings. Her rapt profile betrayed no

unrest, but politeness might have caused her to feign an interest that

she did not feel. He leaned back impatiently, stifling another yawn,

and trying to fix his attention on the stage. Great things were going

forward there, and he was not insensible to the stern beauties of the

ancient drama. But the interpretation of the play seemed to him as

airless and lifeless as the atmosphere of the theatre. The players were

the same whom he had often applauded in those very parts, and perhaps

that fact added to the impression of staleness and conventionality

produced by their performance. Surely it was time to infuse new blood

into the veins of the moribund art. He had the impression that the

ghosts of actors were giving a spectral performance on the shores of

Styx.

Certainly it was not the most profitable way for a young man with a

pretty companion to pass the golden hours of a spring afternoon. The

freshness of the face at his side, reflecting the freshness of the

season, suggested dapplings of sunlight through new leaves, the sound of

a brook in the grass, the ripple of tree-shadows over breezy meadows...

When at length the fateful march of the cothurns was stayed by the

single pause in the play, and Darrow had led Miss Viner out on the

balcony overhanging the square before the theatre, he turned to see if

she shared his feelings. But the rapturous look she gave him checked the

depreciation on his lips.

“Oh, why did you bring me out here? One ought to creep away and sit in

the dark till it begins again!”

“Is THAT the way they made you feel?”

“Didn’t they _YOU?_...As if the gods were there all the while, just behind

them, pulling the strings?” Her hands were pressed against the railing,

her face shining and darkening under the wing-beats of successive

impressions.

Darrow smiled in enjoyment of her pleasure. After all, he had felt all

that, long ago; perhaps it was his own fault, rather than that of the

actors, that the poetry of the play seemed to have evaporated...But no,

he had been right in judging the performance to be dull and stale:

it was simply his companion’s inexperience, her lack of occasions to

compare and estimate, that made her think it brilliant.

“I was afraid you were bored and wanted to come away.”

“BORED?” She made a little aggrieved grimace. “You mean you thought me

too ignorant and stupid to appreciate it?”

“No; not that.” The hand nearest him still lay on the railing of the

balcony, and he covered it for a moment with his. As he did so he saw

the colour rise and tremble in her cheek.

“Tell me just what you think,” he said, bending his head a little, and

only half-aware of his words.

She did not turn her face to his, but began to talk rapidly, trying

to convey something of what she felt. But she was evidently unused to

analyzing her aesthetic emotions, and the tumultuous rush of the drama

seemed to have left her in a state of panting wonder, as though it had

been a storm or some other natural cataclysm. She had no literary or

historic associations to which to attach her impressions: her education

had evidently not comprised a course in Greek literature. But she felt

what would probably have been unperceived by many a young lady who had

taken a first in classics: the ineluctable fatality of the tale, the

dread sway in it of the same mysterious “luck” which pulled the threads

of her own small destiny. It was not literature to her, it was fact: as

actual, as near by, as what was happening to her at the moment and what

the next hour held in store. Seen in this light, the play regained for

Darrow its supreme and poignant reality. He pierced to the heart of

its significance through all the artificial accretions with which his

theories of art and the conventions of the stage had clothed it, and saw

it as he had never seen it: as life.

After this there could be no question of flight, and he took her back to

the theatre, content to receive his own sensations through the medium of

hers. But with the continuation of the play, and the oppression of the

heavy air, his attention again began to wander, straying back over the

incidents of the morning.

He had been with Sophy Viner all day, and he was surprised to find

how quickly the time had gone. She had hardly attempted, as the hours

passed, to conceal her satisfaction on finding that no telegram came

from the Farlows. “They’ll have written,” she had simply said; and her

mind had at once flown on to the golden prospect of an afternoon at the

theatre. The intervening hours had been disposed of in a stroll through

the lively streets, and a repast, luxuriously lingered over, under

the chestnut-boughs of a restaurant in the Champs Elysees. Everything

entertained and interested her, and Darrow remarked, with an amused

detachment, that she was not insensible to the impression her charms

produced. Yet there was no hard edge of vanity in her sense of her

prettiness: she seemed simply to be aware of it as a note in the general

harmony, and to enjoy sounding the note as a singer enjoys singing.

After luncheon, as they sat over their coffee, she had again asked

an immense number of questions and delivered herself of a remarkable

variety of opinions. Her questions testified to a wholesome and

comprehensive human curiosity, and her comments showed, like her

face and her whole attitude, an odd mingling of precocious wisdom and

disarming ignorance. When she talked to him about “life”--the word was

often on her lips--she seemed to him like a child playing with a tiger’s

cub; and he said to himself that some day the child would grow up--and

so would the tiger. Meanwhile, such expertness qualified by such candour

made it impossible to guess the extent of her personal experience, or

to estimate its effect on her character. She might be any one of a dozen

definable types, or she might--more disconcertingly to her companion and

more perilously to herself--be a shifting and uncrystallized mixture of

them all.

Her talk, as usual, had promptly reverted to the stage. She was eager

to learn about every form of dramatic expression which the metropolis

of things theatrical had to offer, and her curiosity ranged from the

official temples of the art to its less hallowed haunts. Her searching

enquiries about a play whose production, on one of the latter scenes,

had provoked a considerable amount of scandal, led Darrow to throw out

laughingly: “To see THAT you’ll have to wait till you’re married!” and

his answer had sent her off at a tangent.

“Oh, I never mean to marry,” she had rejoined in a tone of youthful

finality.

“I seem to have heard that before!”

“Yes; from girls who’ve only got to choose!” Her eyes had grown suddenly

almost old. “I’d like you to see the only men who’ve ever wanted to

marry me! One was the doctor on the steamer, when I came abroad with the

Hokes: he’d been cashiered from the navy for drunkenness. The other was

a deaf widower with three grown-up daughters, who kept a clock-shop in

Bayswater!--Besides,” she rambled on, “I’m not so sure that I believe

in marriage. You see I’m all for self-development and the chance to live

one’s life. I’m awfully modern, you know.”

It was just when she proclaimed herself most awfully modern that she

struck him as most helplessly backward; yet the moment after, without

any bravado, or apparent desire to assume an attitude, she would

propound some social axiom which could have been gathered only in the

bitter soil of experience.

All these things came back to him as he sat beside her in the theatre

and watched her ingenuous absorption. It was on “the story” that her

mind was fixed, and in life also, he suspected, it would always be “the

story”, rather than its remoter imaginative issues, that would hold her.

He did not believe there were ever any echoes in her soul...

There was no question, however, that what she felt was felt with

intensity: to the actual, the immediate, she spread vibrating strings.

When the play was over, and they came out once more into the sunlight,

Darrow looked down at her with a smile.

“Well?” he asked.

She made no answer. Her dark gaze seemed to rest on him without seeing

him. Her cheeks and lips were pale, and the loose hair under her

hat-brim clung to her forehead in damp rings. She looked like a young

priestess still dazed by the fumes of the cavern.

“You poor child--it’s been almost too much for you!”

She shook her head with a vague smile.

“Come,” he went on, putting his hand on her arm, “let’s jump into a taxi

and get some air and sunshine. Look, there are hours of daylight left;

and see what a night it’s going to be!”

He pointed over their heads, to where a white moon hung in the misty

blue above the roofs of the rue de Rivoli.

She made no answer, and he signed to a motor-cab, calling out to the

driver: “To the Bois!”

As the carriage turned toward the Tuileries she roused herself. “I must

go first to the hotel. There may be a message--at any rate I must decide

on something.”

Darrow saw that the reality of the situation had suddenly forced itself

upon her. “I MUST decide on something,” she repeated.

He would have liked to postpone the return, to persuade her to drive

directly to the Bois for dinner. It would have been easy enough to

remind her that she could not start for Joigny that evening, and that

therefore it was of no moment whether she received the Farlows’ answer

then or a few hours later; but for some reason he hesitated to use this

argument, which had come so naturally to him the day before. After all,

he knew she would find nothing at the hotel--so what did it matter if

they went there?

The porter, interrogated, was not sure. He himself had received nothing

for the lady, but in his absence his subordinate might have sent a

letter upstairs.

Darrow and Sophy mounted together in the lift, and the young man, while

she went into her room, unlocked his own door and glanced at the empty

table. For him at least no message had come; and on her threshold, a

moment later, she met him with the expected: “No--there’s nothing!”

He feigned an unregretful surprise. “So much the better! And now, shall

we drive out somewhere? Or would you rather take a boat to Bellevue?

Have you ever dined there, on the terrace, by moonlight? It’s not at all

bad. And there’s no earthly use in sitting here waiting.”

She stood before him in perplexity.

“But when I wrote yesterday I asked them to telegraph. I suppose they’re

horribly hard up, the poor dears, and they thought a letter would do

as well as a telegram.” The colour had risen to her face. “That’s why I

wrote instead of telegraphing; I haven’t a penny to spare myself!”

Nothing she could have said could have filled her listener with a deeper

contrition. He felt the red in his own face as he recalled the motive

with which he had credited her in his midnight musings. But that motive,

after all, had simply been trumped up to justify his own disloyalty: he

had never really believed in it. The reflection deepened his confusion,

and he would have liked to take her hand in his and confess the

injustice he had done her.

She may have interpreted his change of colour as an involuntary protest

at being initiated into such shabby details, for she went on with a

laugh: “I suppose you can hardly understand what it means to have to

stop and think whether one can afford a telegram? But I’ve always had to

consider such things. And I mustn’t stay here any longer now--I must try

to get a night train for Joigny. Even if the Farlows can’t take me in,

I can go to the hotel: it will cost less than staying here.” She paused

again and then exclaimed: “I ought to have thought of that sooner; I

ought to have telegraphed yesterday! But I was sure I should hear from

them today; and I wanted--oh, I DID so awfully want to stay!” She threw

a troubled look at Darrow. “Do you happen to remember,” she asked, “what

time it was when you posted my letter?”

VII

Darrow was still standing on her threshold. As she put the question he

entered the room and closed the door behind him.

His heart was beating a little faster than usual and he had no clear

idea of what he was about to do or say, beyond the definite conviction

that, whatever passing impulse of expiation moved him, he would not be

fool enough to tell her that he had not sent her letter. He knew that

most wrongdoing works, on the whole, less mischief than its useless

confession; and this was clearly a case where a passing folly might be

turned, by avowal, into a serious offense.

“I’m so sorry--so sorry; but you must let me help you...You will let me

help you?” he said.

He took her hands and pressed them together between his, counting on a

friendly touch to help out the insufficiency of words. He felt her yield

slightly to his clasp, and hurried on without giving her time to answer.

“Isn’t it a pity to spoil our good time together by regretting anything

you might have done to prevent our having it?”

She drew back, freeing her hands. Her face, losing its look of appealing

confidence, was suddenly sharpened by distrust.

“You didn’t forget to post my letter?”

Darrow stood before her, constrained and ashamed, and ever more keenly

aware that the betrayal of his distress must be a greater offense than

its concealment.

“What an insinuation!” he cried, throwing out his hands with a laugh.

Her face instantly melted to laughter. “Well, then--I WON’T be sorry; I

won’t regret anything except that our good time is over!”

The words were so unexpected that they routed all his resolves. If she

had gone on doubting him he could probably have gone on deceiving her;

but her unhesitating acceptance of his word made him hate the part he

was playing. At the same moment a doubt shot up its serpent-head in his

own bosom. Was it not he rather than she who was childishly trustful?

Was she not almost too ready to take his word, and dismiss once for all

the tiresome question of the letter? Considering what her experiences

must have been, such trustfulness seemed open to suspicion. But the

moment his eyes fell on her he was ashamed of the thought, and knew it

for what it really was: another pretext to lessen his own delinquency.

“Why should our good time be over?” he asked. “Why shouldn’t it last a

little longer?”

She looked up, her lips parted in surprise; but before she could speak

he went on: “I want you to stay with me--I want you, just for a few

days, to have all the things you’ve never had. It’s not always May

and Paris--why not make the most of them now? You know me--we’re not

strangers--why shouldn’t you treat me like a friend?”

While he spoke she had drawn away a little, but her hand still lay in

his. She was pale, and her eyes were fixed on him in a gaze in which

there was neither distrust or resentment, but only an ingenuous wonder.

He was extraordinarily touched by her expression.

“Oh, do! You must. Listen: to prove that I’m sincere I’ll tell

you...I’ll tell you I didn’t post your letter...I didn’t post it because

I wanted so much to give you a few good hours ... and because I couldn’t

bear to have you go.”

He had the feeling that the words were being uttered in spite of him by

some malicious witness of the scene, and yet that he was not sorry to

have them spoken.

The girl had listened to him in silence. She remained motionless for a

moment after he had ceased to speak; then she snatched away her hand.

“You didn’t post my letter? You kept it back on purpose? And you tell

me so NOW, to prove to me that I’d better put myself under your

protection?” She burst into a laugh that had in it all the piercing

echoes of her Murrett past, and her face, at the same moment, underwent

the same change, shrinking into a small malevolent white mask in which

the eyes burned black. “Thank you--thank you most awfully for

telling me! And for all your other kind intentions! The plan’s

delightful--really quite delightful, and I’m extremely flattered and

obliged.”

She dropped into a seat beside her dressing-table, resting her chin on

her lifted hands, and laughing out at him under the elf-lock which had

shaken itself down over her eyes.

Her outburst did not offend the young man; its immediate effect was that

of allaying his agitation. The theatrical touch in her manner made his

offense seem more venial than he had thought it a moment before.

He drew up a chair and sat down beside her. “After all,” he said, in a

tone of good-humoured protest, “I needn’t have told you I’d kept back

your letter; and my telling you seems rather strong proof that I hadn’t

any very nefarious designs on you.”

She met this with a shrug, but he did not give her time to answer. “My

designs,” he continued with a smile, “were not nefarious. I saw you’d

been through a bad time with Mrs. Murrett, and that there didn’t seem

to be much fun ahead for you; and I didn’t see--and I don’t yet see--the

harm of trying to give you a few hours of amusement between a depressing

past and a not particularly cheerful future.” He paused again, and then

went on, in the same tone of friendly reasonableness: “The mistake I

made was not to tell you this at once--not to ask you straight out to

give me a day or two, and let me try to make you forget all the things

that are troubling you. I was a fool not to see that if I’d put it to

you in that way you’d have accepted or refused, as you chose; but that

at least you wouldn’t have mistaken my intentions.--Intentions!” He

stood up, walked the length of the room, and turned back to where she

still sat motionless, her elbows propped on the dressing-table, her chin

on her hands. “What rubbish we talk about intentions! The truth is I

hadn’t any: I just liked being with you. Perhaps you don’t know how

extraordinarily one can like being with you...I was depressed and adrift

myself; and you made me forget my bothers; and when I found you were

going--and going back to dreariness, as I was--I didn’t see why we

shouldn’t have a few hours together first; so I left your letter in my

pocket.”

He saw her face melt as she listened, and suddenly she unclasped her

hands and leaned to him.

“But are YOU unhappy too? Oh, I never understood--I never dreamed it! I

thought you’d always had everything in the world you wanted!”

Darrow broke into a laugh at this ingenuous picture of his state. He

was ashamed of trying to better his case by an appeal to her pity, and

annoyed with himself for alluding to a subject he would rather have

kept out of his thoughts. But her look of sympathy had disarmed him; his

heart was bitter and distracted; she was near him, her eyes were shining

with compassion--he bent over her and kissed her hand.

“Forgive me--do forgive me,” he said.

She stood up with a smiling head-shake. “Oh, it’s not so often that

people try to give me any pleasure--much less two whole days of it!

I sha’n’t forget how kind you’ve been. I shall have plenty of time to

remember. But this IS good-bye, you know. I must telegraph at once to

say I’m coming.”

“To say you’re coming? Then I’m not forgiven?”

“Oh, you’re forgiven--if that’s any comfort.”

“It’s not, the very least, if your way of proving it is to go away!”

She hung her head in meditation. “But I can’t stay.--How CAN I stay?”

she broke out, as if arguing with some unseen monitor.

“Why can’t you? No one knows you’re here...No one need ever know.”

She looked up, and their eyes exchanged meanings for a rapid minute. Her

gaze was as clear as a boy’s. “Oh, it’s not THAT,” she exclaimed,

almost impatiently; “it’s not people I’m afraid of! They’ve never put

themselves out for me--why on earth should I care about them?”

He liked her directness as he had never liked it before. “Well, then,

what is it? Not ME, I hope?”

“No, not you: I like you. It’s the money! With me that’s always the root

of the matter. I could never yet afford a treat in my life!”

“Is _THAT_ all?” He laughed, relieved by her naturalness. “Look here;

since we re talking as man to man--can’t you trust me about that too?”

“Trust you? How do you mean? You’d better not trust ME!” she laughed

back sharply. “I might never be able to pay up!”

His gesture brushed aside the allusion. “Money may be the root of the

matter; it can’t be the whole of it, between friends. Don’t you think

one friend may accept a small service from another without looking too

far ahead or weighing too many chances? The question turns entirely on

what you think of me. If you like me well enough to be willing to take

a few days’ holiday with me, just for the pleasure of the thing, and the

pleasure you’ll be giving me, let’s shake hands on it. If you don’t like

me well enough we’ll shake hands too; only I shall be sorry,” he ended.

“Oh, but I shall be sorry too!” Her face, as she lifted it to his,

looked so small and young that Darrow felt a fugitive twinge of

compunction, instantly effaced by the excitement of pursuit.

“Well, then?” He stood looking down on her, his eyes persuading her.

He was now intensely aware that his nearness was having an effect which

made it less and less necessary for him to choose his words, and he went

on, more mindful of the inflections of his voice than of what he was

actually saying: “Why on earth should we say good-bye if we’re both

sorry to? Won’t you tell me your reason? It’s not a bit like you to let

anything stand in the way of your saying just what you feel. You mustn’t

mind offending me, you know!”

She hung before him like a leaf on the meeting of cross-currents, that

the next ripple may sweep forward or whirl back. Then she flung up

her head with the odd boyish movement habitual to her in moments of

excitement. “What I feel? Do you want to know what I feel? That you’re

giving me the only chance I’ve ever had!”

She turned about on her heel and, dropping into the nearest chair, sank

forward, her face hidden against the dressing-table.

Under the folds of her thin summer dress the modelling of her back and

of her lifted arms, and the slight hollow between her shoulder-blades,

recalled the faint curves of a terra-cotta statuette, some young image

of grace hardly more than sketched in the clay. Darrow, as he stood

looking at her, reflected that her character, for all its seeming

firmness, its flashing edges of “opinion”, was probably no less

immature. He had not expected her to yield so suddenly to his

suggestion, or to confess her yielding in that way. At first he was

slightly disconcerted; then he saw how her attitude simplified his own.

Her behaviour had all the indecision and awkwardness of inexperience. It

showed that she was a child after all; and all he could do--all he had

ever meant to do--was to give her a child’s holiday to look back to.

For a moment he fancied she was crying; but the next she was on her feet

and had swept round on him a face she must have turned away only to hide

the first rush of her pleasure.

For a while they shone on each other without speaking; then she sprang

to him and held out both hands.

“Is it true? Is it really true? Is it really going to happen to ME?”

He felt like answering: “You’re the very creature to whom it was bound

to happen”; but the words had a double sense that made him wince, and

instead he caught her proffered hands and stood looking at her across

the length of her arms, without attempting to bend them or to draw

her closer. He wanted her to know how her words had moved him; but his

thoughts were blurred by the rush of the same emotion that possessed

her, and his own words came with an effort.

He ended by giving her back a laugh as frank as her own, and declaring,

as he dropped her hands: “All that and more too--you’ll see!”

VIII

All day, since the late reluctant dawn, the rain had come down in

torrents. It streamed against Darrow’s high-perched windows, reduced

their vast prospect of roofs and chimneys to a black oily huddle, and

filled the room with the drab twilight of an underground aquarium.

The streams descended with the regularity of a third day’s rain, when

trimming and shuffling are over, and the weather has settled down to do

its worst. There were no variations of rhythm, no lyrical ups and downs:

the grey lines streaking the panes were as dense and uniform as a page

of unparagraphed narrative.

George Darrow had drawn his armchair to the fire. The time-table he

had been studying lay on the floor, and he sat staring with dull

acquiescence into the boundless blur of rain, which affected him like a

vast projection of his own state of mind. Then his eyes travelled slowly

about the room.

It was exactly ten days since his hurried unpacking had strewn it with

the contents of his portmanteaux. His brushes and razors were spread out

on the blotched marble of the chest of drawers. A stack of newspapers

had accumulated on the centre table under the “electrolier”, and half a

dozen paper novels lay on the mantelpiece among cigar-cases and toilet

bottles; but these traces of his passage had made no mark on the

featureless dulness of the room, its look of being the makeshift setting

of innumerable transient collocations. There was something sardonic,

almost sinister, in its appearance of having deliberately “made up” for

its anonymous part, all in noncommittal drabs and browns, with a

carpet and paper that nobody would remember, and chairs and tables as

impersonal as railway porters.

Darrow picked up the time-table and tossed it on to the table. Then he

rose to his feet, lit a cigar and went to the window. Through the rain

he could just discover the face of a clock in a tall building beyond the

railway roofs. He pulled out his watch, compared the two time-pieces,

and started the hands of his with such a rush that they flew past the

hour and he had to make them repeat the circuit more deliberately. He

felt a quite disproportionate irritation at the trifling blunder. When

he had corrected it he went back to his chair and threw himself down,

leaning back his head against his hands. Presently his cigar went out,

and he got up, hunted for the matches, lit it again and returned to his

seat.

The room was getting on his nerves. During the first few days, while

the skies were clear, he had not noticed it, or had felt for it only the

contemptuous indifference of the traveller toward a provisional shelter.

But now that he was leaving it, was looking at it for the last time,

it seemed to have taken complete possession of his mind, to be soaking

itself into him like an ugly indelible blot. Every detail pressed itself

on his notice with the familiarity of an accidental confidant: whichever

way he turned, he felt the nudge of a transient intimacy...

The one fixed point in his immediate future was that his leave was over

and that he must be back at his post in London the next morning. Within

twenty-four hours he would again be in a daylight world of recognized

activities, himself a busy, responsible, relatively necessary factor in

the big whirring social and official machine. That fixed obligation

was the fact he could think of with the least discomfort, yet for some

unaccountable reason it was the one on which he found it most difficult

to fix his thoughts. Whenever he did so, the room jerked him back into

the circle of its insistent associations. It was extraordinary with what

a microscopic minuteness of loathing he hated it all: the grimy carpet

and wallpaper, the black marble mantel-piece, the clock with a gilt

allegory under a dusty bell, the high-bolstered brown-counterpaned bed,

the framed card of printed rules under the electric light switch, and

the door of communication with the next room. He hated the door most of

all...

At the outset, he had felt no special sense of responsibility. He was

satisfied that he had struck the right note, and convinced of his power

of sustaining it. The whole incident had somehow seemed, in spite of its

vulgar setting and its inevitable prosaic propinquities, to be enacting

itself in some unmapped region outside the pale of the usual. It was not

like anything that had ever happened to him before, or in which he had

ever pictured himself as likely to be involved; but that, at first, had

seemed no argument against his fitness to deal with it.

Perhaps but for the three days’ rain he might have got away without a

doubt as to his adequacy. The rain had made all the difference. It had

thrown the whole picture out of perspective, blotted out the mystery

of the remoter planes and the enchantment of the middle distance, and

thrust into prominence every commonplace fact of the foreground. It was

the kind of situation that was not helped by being thought over; and

by the perversity of circumstance he had been forced into the unwilling

contemplation of its every aspect...

His cigar had gone out again, and he threw it into the fire and vaguely

meditated getting up to find another. But the mere act of leaving his

chair seemed to call for a greater exertion of the will than he was

capable of, and he leaned his head back with closed eyes and listened to

the drumming of the rain.

A different noise aroused him. It was the opening and closing of

the door leading from the corridor into the adjoining room. He sat

motionless, without opening his eyes; but now another sight forced

itself under his lowered lids. It was the precise photographic picture

of that other room. Everything in it rose before him and pressed itself

upon his vision with the same acuity of distinctness as the objects

surrounding him. A step sounded on the floor, and he knew which way the

step was directed, what pieces of furniture it had to skirt, where it

would probably pause, and what was likely to arrest it. He heard another

sound, and recognized it as that of a wet umbrella placed in the black

marble jamb of the chimney-piece, against the hearth. He caught the

creak of a hinge, and instantly differentiated it as that of the

wardrobe against the opposite wall. Then he heard the mouse-like squeal

of a reluctant drawer, and knew it was the upper one in the chest of

drawers beside the bed: the clatter which followed was caused by the

mahogany toilet-glass jumping on its loosened pivots...

The step crossed the floor again. It was strange how much better he knew

it than the person to whom it belonged! Now it was drawing near the door

of communication between the two rooms. He opened his eyes and looked.

The step had ceased and for a moment there was silence. Then he heard

a low knock. He made no response, and after an interval he saw that

the door handle was being tentatively turned. He closed his eyes once

more...

The door opened, and the step was in the room, coming cautiously toward

him. He kept his eyes shut, relaxing his body to feign sleep. There

was another pause, then a wavering soft advance, the rustle of a dress

behind his chair, the warmth of two hands pressed for a moment on his

lids. The palms of the hands had the lingering scent of some stuff that

he had bought on the Boulevard...He looked up and saw a letter falling

over his shoulder to his knee...

“Did I disturb you? I’m so sorry! They gave me this just now when I came

in.”

The letter, before he could catch it, had slipped between his knees to

the floor. It lay there, address upward, at his feet, and while he sat

staring down at the strong slender characters on the blue-gray envelope

an arm reached out from behind to pick it up.

“Oh, don’t--DON’T” broke from him, and he bent over and caught the arm.

The face above it was close to his.

“Don’t what?”

----“take the trouble,” he stammered.

He dropped the arm and stooped down. His grasp closed over the letter,

he fingered its thickness and weight and calculated the number of sheets

it must contain.

Suddenly he felt the pressure of the hand on his shoulder, and became

aware that the face was still leaning over him, and that in a moment he

would have to look up and kiss it...

He bent forward first and threw the unopened letter into the middle of

the fire.