As the train neared Tarrytown, Imogen Willard began to wonder why she
had consented to be one of Flavia's house party at all. She had not felt
enthusiastic about it since leaving the city, and was experiencing a
prolonged ebb of purpose, a current of chilling indecision, under
which she vainly sought for the motive which had induced her to accept
Flavia's invitation.
Perhaps it was a vague curiosity to see Flavia's husband, who had been
the magician of her childhood and the hero of innumerable Arabian fairy
tales. Perhaps it was a desire to see M. Roux, whom Flavia had announced
as the especial attraction of the occasion. Perhaps it was a wish to
study that remarkable woman in her own setting.
Imogen admitted a mild curiosity concerning Flavia. She was in the habit
of taking people rather seriously, but somehow found it impossible to
take Flavia so, because of the very vehemence and insistence with which
Flavia demanded it. Submerged in her studies, Imogen had, of late years,
seen very little of Flavia; but Flavia, in her hurried visits to New
York, between her excursions from studio to studio--her luncheons with
this lady who had to play at a matinee, and her dinners with that singer
who had an evening concert--had seen enough of her friend's handsome
daughter to conceive for her an inclination of such violence and
assurance as only Flavia could afford. The fact that Imogen had shown
rather marked capacity in certain esoteric lines of scholarship, and
had decided to specialize in a well-sounding branch of philology at
the Ecole des Chartes, had fairly placed her in that category of
“interesting people” whom Flavia considered her natural affinities, and
lawful prey.
When Imogen stepped upon the station platform she was immediately
appropriated by her hostess, whose commanding figure and assurance of
attire she had recognized from a distance. She was hurried into a high
tilbury and Flavia, taking the driver's cushion beside her, gathered up
the reins with an experienced hand.
“My dear girl,” she remarked, as she turned the horses up the street, “I
was afraid the train might be late. M. Roux insisted upon coming up by
boat and did not arrive until after seven.”
“To think of M. Roux's being in this part of the world at all, and
subject to the vicissitudes of river boats! Why in the world did he come
over?” queried Imogen with lively interest. “He is the sort of man who
must dissolve and become a shadow outside of Paris.”
“Oh, we have a houseful of the most interesting people,” said Flavia,
professionally. “We have actually managed to get Ivan Schemetzkin. He
was ill in California at the close of his concert tour, you know, and he
is recuperating with us, after his wearing journey from the coast. Then
there is Jules Martel, the painter; Signor Donati, the tenor; Professor
Schotte, who has dug up Assyria, you know; Restzhoff, the Russian
chemist; Alcee Buisson, the philologist; Frank Wellington, the novelist;
and Will Maidenwood, the editor of _Woman_. Then there is my second
cousin, Jemima Broadwood, who made such a hit in Pinero's comedy last
winter, and Frau Lichtenfeld. _Have_ you read her?”
Imogen confessed her utter ignorance of Frau Lichtenfeld, and Flavia
went on.
“Well, she is a most remarkable person; one of those advanced German
women, a militant iconoclast, and this drive will not be long enough to
permit of my telling you her history. Such a story! Her novels were the
talk of all Germany when I was there last, and several of them have been
suppressed--an honor in Germany, I understand. 'At Whose Door' has been
translated. I am so unfortunate as not to read German.”
“I'm all excitement at the prospect of meeting Miss Broadwood,”
said Imogen. “I've seen her in nearly everything she does. Her stage
personality is delightful. She always reminds me of a nice, clean,
pink-and-white boy who has just had his cold bath, and come down all
aglow for a run before breakfast.”
“Yes, but isn't it unfortunate that she will limit herself to those
minor comedy parts that are so little appreciated in this country? One
ought to be satisfied with nothing less than the best, ought one?” The
peculiar, breathy tone in which Flavia always uttered that word “best,”
the most worn in her vocabulary, always jarred on Imogen and always made
her obdurate.
“I don't at all agree with you,” she said reservedly. “I thought
everyone admitted that the most remarkable thing about Miss Broadwood is
her admirable sense of fitness, which is rare enough in her profession.”
Flavia could not endure being contradicted; she always seemed to regard
it in the light of a defeat, and usually colored unbecomingly. Now she
changed the subject.
“Look, my dear,” she cried, “there is Frau Lichtenfeld now, coming to
meet us. Doesn't she look as if she had just escaped out of Valhalla?
She is actually over six feet.”
Imogen saw a woman of immense stature, in a very short skirt and a
broad, flapping sun hat, striding down the hillside at a long, swinging
gait. The refugee from Valhalla approached, panting. Her heavy, Teutonic
features were scarlet from the rigor of her exercise, and her hair,
under her flapping sun hat, was tightly befrizzled about her brow. She
fixed her sharp little eyes upon Imogen and extended both her hands.
“So this is the little friend?” she cried, in a rolling baritone.
Imogen was quite as tall as her hostess; but everything, she reflected,
is comparative. After the introduction Flavia apologized.
“I wish I could ask you to drive up with us, Frau Lichtenfeld.”
“Ah, no!” cried the giantess, drooping her head in humorous caricature
of a time-honored pose of the heroines of sentimental romances. “It has
never been my fate to be fitted into corners. I have never known the
sweet privileges of the tiny.”
Laughing, Flavia started the ponies, and the colossal woman, standing
in the middle of the dusty road, took off her wide hat and waved them
a farewell which, in scope of gesture, recalled the salute of a plumed
cavalier.
When they arrived at the house, Imogen looked about her with keen
curiosity, for this was veritably the work of Flavia's hands, the
materialization of hopes long deferred. They passed directly into a
large, square hall with a gallery on three sides, studio fashion. This
opened at one end into a Dutch breakfast room, beyond which was the
large dining room. At the other end of the hall was the music room.
There was a smoking room, which one entered through the library
behind the staircase. On the second floor there was the same general
arrangement: a square hall, and, opening from it, the guest chambers,
or, as Miss Broadwood termed them, the “cages.”
When Imogen went to her room, the guests had begun to return from their
various afternoon excursions. Boys were gliding through the halls with
ice water, covered trays, and flowers, colliding with maids and valets
who carried shoes and other articles of wearing apparel. Yet, all this
was done in response to inaudible bells, on felt soles, and in hushed
voices, so that there was very little confusion about it.
Flavia had at last built her house and hewn out her seven pillars; there
could be no doubt, now, that the asylum for talent, the sanatorium of
the arts, so long projected, was an accomplished fact. Her ambition
had long ago outgrown the dimensions of her house on Prairie Avenue;
besides, she had bitterly complained that in Chicago traditions were
against her. Her project had been delayed by Arthur's doggedly standing
out for the Michigan woods, but Flavia knew well enough that certain of
the _rarae aves_--“the best”--could not be lured so far away from the
seaport, so she declared herself for the historic Hudson and knew no
retreat. The establishing of a New York office had at length overthrown
Arthur's last valid objection to quitting the lake country for three
months of the year; and Arthur could be wearied into anything, as those
who knew him knew.
Flavia's house was the mirror of her exultation; it was a temple to the
gods of Victory, a sort of triumphal arch. In her earlier days she had
swallowed experiences that would have unmanned one of less torrential
enthusiasm or blind pertinacity. But, of late years, her determination
had told; she saw less and less of those mysterious persons with
mysterious obstacles in their path and mysterious grievances against the
world, who had once frequented her house on Prairie Avenue. In the stead
of this multitude of the unarrived, she had now the few, the select,
“the best.” Of all that band of indigent retainers who had once fed at
her board like the suitors in the halls of Penelope, only Alcee Buisson
still retained his right of entree. He alone had remembered that
ambition hath a knapsack at his back, wherein he puts alms to oblivion,
and he alone had been considerate enough to do what Flavia had expected
of him, and give his name a current value in the world. Then, as
Miss Broadwood put it, “he was her first real one,”--and Flavia, like
Mohammed, could remember her first believer.
“The House of Song,” as Miss Broadwood had called it, was the outcome
of Flavia's more exalted strategies. A woman who made less a point of
sympathizing with their delicate organisms, might have sought to plunge
these phosphorescent pieces into the tepid bath of domestic life;
but Flavia's discernment was deeper. This must be a refuge where the
shrinking soul, the sensitive brain, should be unconstrained; where
the caprice of fancy should outweigh the civil code, if necessary. She
considered that this much Arthur owed her; for she, in her turn, had
made concessions. Flavia had, indeed, quite an equipment of epigrams
to the effect that our century creates the iron genii which evolve its
fairy tales: but the fact that her husband's name was annually painted
upon some ten thousand threshing machines in reality contributed very
little to her happiness.
Arthur Hamilton was born and had spent his boyhood in the West Indies,
and physically he had never lost the brand of the tropics. His father,
after inventing the machine which bore his name, had returned to the
States to patent and manufacture it. After leaving college, Arthur had
spent five years ranching in the West and traveling abroad. Upon his
father's death he had returned to Chicago and, to the astonishment of
all his friends, had taken up the business--without any demonstration
of enthusiasm, but with quiet perseverance, marked ability, and amazing
industry. Why or how a self-sufficient, rather ascetic man of thirty,
indifferent in manner, wholly negative in all other personal relations,
should have doggedly wooed and finally married Flavia Malcolm was a
problem that had vexed older heads than Imogen's.
While Imogen was dressing she heard a knock at her door, and a young
woman entered whom she at once recognized as Jemima Broadwood--“Jimmy”
Broadwood she was called by people in her own profession. While there
was something unmistakably professional in her frank _savoir-faire_,
“Jimmy's” was one of those faces to which the rouge never seems to
stick. Her eyes were keen and gray as a windy April sky, and so far from
having been seared by calcium lights, you might have fancied they had
never looked on anything less bucolic than growing fields and country
fairs. She wore her thick, brown hair short and parted at the side; and,
rather than hinting at freakishness, this seemed admirably in keeping
with her fresh, boyish countenance. She extended to Imogen a large,
well-shaped hand which it was a pleasure to clasp.
“Ah! You are Miss Willard, and I see I need not introduce myself. Flavia
said you were kind enough to express a wish to meet me, and I preferred
to meet you alone. Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Why, certainly not,” said Imogen, somewhat disconcerted and looking
hurriedly about for matches.
“There, be calm, I'm always prepared,” said Miss Broadwood, checking
Imogen's flurry with a soothing gesture, and producing an oddly
fashioned silver match-case from some mysterious recess in her dinner
gown. She sat down in a deep chair, crossed her patent-leather Oxfords,
and lit her cigarette. “This matchbox,” she went on meditatively, “once
belonged to a Prussian officer. He shot himself in his bathtub, and I
bought it at the sale of his effects.”
Imogen had not yet found any suitable reply to make to this rather
irrelevant confidence, when Miss Broadwood turned to her cordially: “I'm
awfully glad you've come, Miss Willard, though I've not quite decided
why you did it. I wanted very much to meet you. Flavia gave me your
thesis to read.”
“Why, how funny!” ejaculated Imogen.
“On the contrary,” remarked Miss Broadwood. “I thought it decidedly
lacked humor.”
“I meant,” stammered Imogen, beginning to feel very much like Alice
in Wonderland, “I meant that I thought it rather strange Mrs. Hamilton
should fancy you would be interested.”
Miss Broadwood laughed heartily. “Now, don't let my rudeness frighten
you. Really, I found it very interesting, and no end impressive. You
see, most people in my profession are good for absolutely nothing else,
and, therefore, they have a deep and abiding conviction that in some
other line they might have shone. Strange to say, scholarship is the
object of our envious and particular admiration. Anything in type
impresses us greatly; that's why so many of us marry authors or
newspapermen and lead miserable lives.” Miss Broadwood saw that she had
rather disconcerted Imogen, and blithely tacked in another direction.
“You see,” she went on, tossing aside her half-consumed cigarette, “some
years ago Flavia would not have deemed me worthy to open the pages of
your thesis--nor to be one of her house party of the chosen, for that
matter. I've Pinero to thank for both pleasures. It all depends on the
class of business I'm playing whether I'm in favor or not. Flavia is
my second cousin, you know, so I can say whatever disagreeable things I
choose with perfect good grace. I'm quite desperate for someone to laugh
with, so I'm going to fasten myself upon you--for, of course, one can't
expect any of these gypsy-dago people to see anything funny. I don't
intend you shall lose the humor of the situation. What do you think of
Flavia's infirmary for the arts, anyway?”
“Well, it's rather too soon for me to have any opinion at all,” said
Imogen, as she again turned to her dressing. “So far, you are the only
one of the artists I've met.”
“One of them?” echoed Miss Broadwood. “One of the _artists_? My offense
may be rank, my dear, but I really don't deserve that. Come, now,
whatever badges of my tribe I may bear upon me, just let me divest you
of any notion that I take myself seriously.”
Imogen turned from the mirror in blank astonishment and sat down on the
arm of a chair, facing her visitor. “I can't fathom you at all,
Miss Broadwood,” she said frankly. “Why shouldn't you take yourself
seriously? What's the use of beating about the bush? Surely you know
that you are one of the few players on this side of the water who have
at all the spirit of natural or ingenuous comedy?”
“Thank you, my dear. Now we are quite even about the thesis, aren't
we? Oh, did you mean it? Well, you _are_ a clever girl. But you see it
doesn't do to permit oneself to look at it in that light. If we do, we
always go to pieces and waste our substance astarring as the unhappy
daughter of the Capulets. But there, I hear Flavia coming to take you
down; and just remember I'm not one of them--the artists, I mean.”
Flavia conducted Imogen and Miss Broadwood downstairs. As they reached
the lower hall they heard voices from the music room, and dim figures
were lurking in the shadows under the gallery, but their hostess led
straight to the smoking room. The June evening was chilly, and a fire
had been lighted in the fireplace. Through the deepening dusk, the
firelight flickered upon the pipes and curious weapons on the wall and
threw an orange glow over the Turkish hangings. One side of the smoking
room was entirely of glass, separating it from the conservatory, which
was flooded with white light from the electric bulbs. There was about
the darkened room some suggestion of certain chambers in the Arabian
Nights, opening on a court of palms. Perhaps it was partially this
memory-evoking suggestion that caused Imogen to start so violently when
she saw dimly, in a blur of shadow, the figure of a man, who sat smoking
in a low, deep chair before the fire. He was long, and thin, and brown.
His long, nerveless hands drooped from the arms of his chair. A brown
mustache shaded his mouth, and his eyes were sleepy and apathetic. When
Imogen entered he rose indolently and gave her his hand, his manner
barely courteous.
“I am glad you arrived promptly, Miss Willard,” he said with an
indifferent drawl. “Flavia was afraid you might be late. You had a
pleasant ride up, I hope?”
“Oh, very, thank you, Mr. Hamilton,” she replied, feeling that he did
not particularly care whether she replied at all.
Flavia explained that she had not yet had time to dress for dinner,
as she had been attending to Mr. Will Maidenwood, who had become faint
after hurting his finger in an obdurate window, and immediately excused
herself As she left, Hamilton turned to Miss Broadwood with a rather
spiritless smile.
“Well, Jimmy,” he remarked, “I brought up a piano box full of fireworks
for the boys. How do you suppose we'll manage to keep them until the
Fourth?”
“We can't, unless we steel ourselves to deny there are any on the
premises,” said Miss Broadwood, seating herself on a low stool by
Hamilton's chair and leaning back against the mantel. “Have you seen
Helen, and has she told you the tragedy of the tooth?”
“She met me at the station, with her tooth wrapped up in tissue paper.
I had tea with her an hour ago. Better sit down, Miss Willard;” he rose
and pushed a chair toward Imogen, who was standing peering into the
conservatory. “We are scheduled to dine at seven, but they seldom get
around before eight.”
By this time Imogen had made out that here the plural pronoun, third
person, always referred to the artists. As Hamilton's manner did not
spur one to cordial intercourse, and as his attention seemed directed
to Miss Broadwood, insofar as it could be said to be directed to anyone,
she sat down facing the conservatory and watched him, unable to decide
in how far he was identical with the man who had first met Flavia
Malcolm in her mother's house, twelve years ago. Did he at all remember
having known her as a little girl, and why did his indifference hurt her
so, after all these years? Had some remnant of her childish affection
for him gone on living, somewhere down in the sealed caves of her
consciousness, and had she really expected to find it possible to be
fond of him again? Suddenly she saw a light in the man's sleepy eyes,
an unmistakable expression of interest and pleasure that fairly startled
her. She turned quickly in the direction of his glance, and saw Flavia,
just entering, dressed for dinner and lit by the effulgence of her most
radiant manner. Most people considered Flavia handsome, and there was
no gainsaying that she carried her five-and-thirty years splendidly. Her
figure had never grown matronly, and her face was of the sort that does
not show wear. Its blond tints were as fresh and enduring as enamel--and
quite as hard. Its usual expression was one of tense, often strained,
animation, which compressed her lips nervously. A perfect scream of
animation, Miss Broadwood had called it, created and maintained by
sheer, indomitable force of will. Flavia's appearance on any scene
whatever made a ripple, caused a certain agitation and recognition, and,
among impressionable people, a certain uneasiness, For all her sparkling
assurance of manner, Flavia was certainly always ill at ease and, even
more certainly, anxious. She seemed not convinced of the established
order of material things, seemed always trying to conceal her feeling
that walls might crumble, chasms open, or the fabric of her life fly
to the winds in irretrievable entanglement. At least this was the
impression Imogen got from that note in Flavia which was so manifestly
false.
Hamilton's keen, quick, satisfied glance at his wife had recalled to
Imogen all her inventory of speculations about them. She looked at him
with compassionate surprise. As a child she had never permitted herself
to believe that Hamilton cared at all for the woman who had taken him
away from her; and since she had begun to think about them again, it
had never occurred to her that anyone could become attached to Flavia in
that deeply personal and exclusive sense. It seemed quite as irrational
as trying to possess oneself of Broadway at noon.
When they went out to dinner Imogen realized the completeness of
Flavia's triumph. They were people of one name, mostly, like kings;
people whose names stirred the imagination like a romance or a melody.
With the notable exception of M. Roux, Imogen had seen most of them
before, either in concert halls or lecture rooms; but they looked
noticeably older and dimmer than she remembered them.
Opposite her sat Schemetzkin, the Russian pianist, a short, corpulent
man, with an apoplectic face and purplish skin, his thick, iron-gray
hair tossed back from his forehead. Next to the German giantess sat the
Italian tenor--the tiniest of men--pale, with soft, light hair, much
in disorder, very red lips, and fingers yellowed by cigarettes. Frau
Lichtenfeld shone in a gown of emerald green, fitting so closely as to
enhance her natural floridness. However, to do the good lady justice,
let her attire be never so modest, it gave an effect of barbaric
splendor. At her left sat Herr Schotte, the Assyriologist, whose
features were effectually concealed by the convergence of his hair and
beard, and whose glasses were continually falling into his plate.
This gentleman had removed more tons of earth in the course of his
explorations than had any of his confreres, and his vigorous attack upon
his food seemed to suggest the strenuous nature of his accustomed toil.
His eyes were small and deeply set, and his forehead bulged fiercely
above his eyes in a bony ridge. His heavy brows completed the leonine
suggestion of his face. Even to Imogen, who knew something of his work
and greatly respected it, he was entirely too reminiscent of the Stone
Age to be altogether an agreeable dinner companion. He seemed, indeed,
to have absorbed something of the savagery of those early types of life
which he continually studied.
Frank Wellington, the young Kansas man who had been two years out of
Harvard and had published three historical novels, sat next to Mr. Will
Maidenwood, who was still pale from his recent sufferings and carried
his hand bandaged. They took little part in the general conversation,
but, like the lion and the unicorn, were always at it, discussing,
every time they met, whether there were or were not passages in Mr.
Wellington's works which should be eliminated, out of consideration
for the Young Person. Wellington had fallen into the hands of a great
American syndicate which most effectually befriended struggling authors
whose struggles were in the right direction, and which had guaranteed
to make him famous before he was thirty. Feeling the security of his
position he stoutly defended those passages which jarred upon the
sensitive nerves of the young editor of _Woman_. Maidenwood, in the
smoothest of voices, urged the necessity of the author's recognizing
certain restrictions at the outset, and Miss Broadwood, who joined the
argument quite without invitation or encouragement, seconded him with
pointed and malicious remarks which caused the young editor manifest
discomfort. Restzhoff, the chemist, demanded the attention of the entire
company for his exposition of his devices for manufacturing ice cream
from vegetable oils and for administering drugs in bonbons.
Flavia, always noticeably restless at dinner, was somewhat apathetic
toward the advocate of peptonized chocolate and was plainly concerned
about the sudden departure of M. Roux, who had announced that it would
be necessary for him to leave tomorrow. M. Emile Roux, who sat at
Flavia's right, was a man in middle life and quite bald, clearly without
personal vanity, though his publishers preferred to circulate only those
of his portraits taken in his ambrosial youth. Imogen was considerably
shocked at his unlikeness to the slender, black-stocked Rolla he had
looked at twenty. He had declined into the florid, settled heaviness of
indifference and approaching age. There was, however, a certain look of
durability and solidity about him; the look of a man who has earned the
right to be fat and bald, and even silent at dinner if he chooses.
Throughout the discussion between Wellington and Will Maidenwood, though
they invited his participation, he remained silent, betraying no sign
either of interest or contempt. Since his arrival he had directed most
of his conversation to Hamilton, who had never read one of his twelve
great novels. This perplexed and troubled Flavia. On the night of his
arrival Jules Martel had enthusiastically declared, “There are schools
and schools, manners and manners; but Roux is Roux, and Paris sets
its watches by his clock.” Flavia had already repeated this remark to
Imogen. It haunted her, and each time she quoted it she was impressed
anew.
Flavia shifted the conversation uneasily, evidently exasperated and
excited by her repeated failures to draw the novelist out. “Monsieur
Roux,” she began abruptly, with her most animated smile, “I remember so
well a statement I read some years ago in your 'Mes Etudes des Femmes'
to the effect that you had never met a really intellectual woman. May I
ask, without being impertinent, whether that assertion still represents
your experience?”
“I meant, madam,” said the novelist conservatively, “intellectual in
a sense very special, as we say of men in whom the purely intellectual
functions seem almost independent.”
“And you still think a woman so constituted a mythical personage?”
persisted Flavia, nodding her head encouragingly.
“_Une Meduse_, madam, who, if she were discovered, would transmute us
all into stone,” said the novelist, bowing gravely. “If she existed at
all,” he added deliberately, “it was my business to find her, and
she has cost me many a vain pilgrimage. Like Rudel of Tripoli, I have
crossed seas and penetrated deserts to seek her out. I have, indeed,
encountered women of learning whose industry I have been compelled
to respect; many who have possessed beauty and charm and perplexing
cleverness; a few with remarkable information and a sort of fatal
facility.”
“And Mrs. Browning, George Eliot, and your own Mme. Dudevant?” queried
Flavia with that fervid enthusiasm with which she could, on occasion,
utter things simply incomprehensible for their banality--at her feats of
this sort Miss Broadwood was wont to sit breathless with admiration.
“Madam, while the intellect was undeniably present in the performances
of those women, it was only the stick of the rocket. Although this
woman has eluded me I have studied her conditions and perturbances as
astronomers conjecture the orbits of planets they have never seen.
if she exists, she is probably neither an artist nor a woman with a
mission, but an obscure personage, with imperative intellectual needs,
who absorbs rather than produces.”
Flavia, still nodding nervously, fixed a strained glance of
interrogation upon M. Roux. “Then you think she would be a woman whose
first necessity would be to know, whose instincts would be satisfied
only with the best, who could draw from others; appreciative, merely?”
The novelist lifted his dull eyes to his interlocutress with an
untranslatable smile and a slight inclination of his shoulders. “Exactly
so; you are really remarkable, madam,” he added, in a tone of cold
astonishment.
After dinner the guests took their coffee in the music room, where
Schemetzkin sat down at the piano to drum ragtime, and give his
celebrated imitation of the boardingschool girl's execution of Chopin.
He flatly refused to play anything more serious, and would practice only
in the morning, when he had the music room to himself. Hamilton and M.
Roux repaired to the smoking room to discuss the necessity of extending
the tax on manufactured articles in France--one of those conversations
which particularly exasperated Flavia.
After Schemetzkin had grimaced and tortured the keyboard with malicious
vulgarities for half an hour, Signor Donati, to put an end to his
torture, consented to sing, and Flavia and Imogen went to fetch Arthur
to play his accompaniments. Hamilton rose with an annoyed look and
placed his cigarette on the mantel. “Why yes, Flavia, I'll accompany
him, provided he sings something with a melody, Italian arias or
ballads, and provided the recital is not interminable.”
“You will join us, M. Roux?”
“Thank you, but I have some letters to write,” replied the novelist,
bowing.
As Flavia had remarked to Imogen, “Arthur really played accompaniments
remarkably well.” To hear him recalled vividly the days of her
childhood, when he always used to spend his business vacations at her
mother's home in Maine. He had possessed for her that almost hypnotic
influence which young men sometimes exert upon little girls. It was a
sort of phantom love affair, subjective and fanciful, a precocity of
instinct, like that tender and maternal concern which some little girls
feel for their dolls. Yet this childish infatuation is capable of
all the depressions and exaltations of love itself, it has its bitter
jealousies, cruel disappointments, its exacting caprices.
Summer after summer she had awaited his coming and wept at his
departure, indifferent to the gayer young men who had called her their
sweetheart and laughed at everything she said. Although Hamilton never
said so, she had been always quite sure that he was fond of her. When
he pulled her up the river to hunt for fairy knolls shut about by low,
hanging willows, he was often silent for an hour at a time, yet she
never felt he was bored or was neglecting her. He would lie in the sand
smoking, his eyes half-closed, watching her play, and she was always
conscious that she was entertaining him. Sometimes he would take a copy
of “Alice in Wonderland” in his pocket, and no one could read it as he
could, laughing at her with his dark eyes, when anything amused him.
No one else could laugh so, with just their eyes, and without moving a
muscle of their face. Though he usually smiled at passages that seemed
not at all funny to the child, she always laughed gleefully, because he
was so seldom moved to mirth that any such demonstration delighted her
and she took the credit of it entirely to herself Her own inclination
had been for serious stories, with sad endings, like the Little Mermaid,
which he had once told her in an unguarded moment when she had a cold,
and was put to bed early on her birthday night and cried because she
could not have her party. But he highly disapproved of this preference,
and had called it a morbid taste, and always shook his finger at her
when she asked for the story. When she had been particularly good, or
particularly neglected by other people, then he would sometimes melt
and tell her the story, and never laugh at her if she enjoyed the “sad
ending” even to tears. When Flavia had taken him away and he came no
more, she wept inconsolably for the space of two weeks, and refused
to learn her lessons. Then she found the story of the Little Mermaid
herself, and forgot him.
Imogen had discovered at dinner that he could still smile at one
secretly, out of his eyes, and that he had the old manner of outwardly
seeming bored, but letting you know that he was not. She was intensely
curious about his exact state of feeling toward his wife, and more
curious still to catch a sense of his final adjustment to the conditions
of life in general. This, she could not help feeling, she might get
again--if she could have him alone for an hour, in some place where
there was a little river and a sandy cove bordered by drooping willows,
and a blue sky seen through white sycamore boughs.
That evening, before retiring, Flavia entered her husband's room, where
he sat in his smoking jacket, in one of his favorite low chairs.
“I suppose it's a grave responsibility to bring an ardent, serious young
thing like Imogen here among all these fascinating personages,” she
remarked reflectively. “But, after all, one can never tell. These grave,
silent girls have their own charm, even for facile people.”
“Oh, so that is your plan?” queried her husband dryly. “I was wondering
why you got her up here. She doesn't seem to mix well with the faciles.
At least, so it struck me.”
Flavia paid no heed to this jeering remark, but repeated, “No, after
all, it may not be a bad thing.”
“Then do consign her to that shaken reed, the tenor,” said her husband
yawning. “I remember she used to have a taste for the pathetic.”
“And then,” remarked Flavia coquettishly, “after all, I owe her mother a
return in kind. She was not afraid to trifle with destiny.”
But Hamilton was asleep in his chair.
Next morning Imogen found only Miss Broadwood in the breakfast room.
“Good morning, my dear girl, whatever are you doing up so early? They
never breakfast before eleven. Most of them take their coffee in their
room. Take this place by me.”
Miss Broadwood looked particularly fresh and encouraging in her blue
serge walking skirt, her open jacket displaying an expanse of stiff,
white shirt bosom, dotted with some almost imperceptible figure, and
a dark blue-and-white necktie, neatly knotted under her wide, rolling
collar. She wore a white rosebud in the lapel of her coat, and decidedly
she seemed more than ever like a nice, clean boy on his holiday. Imogen
was just hoping that they would breakfast alone when Miss Broadwood
exclaimed, “Ah, there comes Arthur with the children. That's the reward
of early rising in this house; you never get to see the youngsters at
any other time.”
Hamilton entered, followed by two dark, handsome little boys. The girl,
who was very tiny, blonde like her mother, and exceedingly frail, he
carried in his arms. The boys came up and said good morning with an ease
and cheerfulness uncommon, even in well-bred children, but the little
girl hid her face on her father's shoulder.
“She's a shy little lady,” he explained as he put her gently down in her
chair. “I'm afraid she's like her father; she can't seem to get used to
meeting people. And you, Miss Willard, did you dream of the White Rabbit
or the Little Mermaid?”
“Oh, I dreamed of them all! All the personages of that buried
civilization,” cried Imogen, delighted that his estranged manner of the
night before had entirely vanished and feeling that, somehow, the old
confidential relations had been restored during the night.
“Come, William,” said Miss Broadwood, turning to the younger of the two
boys, “and what did you dream about?”
“We dreamed,” said William gravely--he was the more assertive of the two
and always spoke for both--“we dreamed that there were fireworks hidden
in the basement of the carriage house; lots and lots of fireworks.”
His elder brother looked up at him with apprehensive astonishment, while
Miss Broadwood hastily put her napkin to her lips and Hamilton dropped
his eyes. “If little boys dream things, they are so apt not to come
true,” he reflected sadly. This shook even the redoubtable William, and
he glanced nervously at his brother. “But do things vanish just because
they have been dreamed?” he objected.
“Generally that is the very best reason for their vanishing,” said
Arthur gravely.
“But, Father, people can't help what they dream,” remonstrated Edward
gently.
“Oh, come! You're making these children talk like a Maeterlinck
dialogue,” laughed Miss Broadwood.
Flavia presently entered, a book in her hand, and bade them all good
morning. “Come, little people, which story shall it be this morning?”
she asked winningly. Greatly excited, the children followed her into
the garden. “She does then, sometimes,” murmured Imogen as they left the
breakfast room.
“Oh, yes, to be sure,” said Miss Broadwood cheerfully. “She reads a
story to them every morning in the most picturesque part of the garden.
The mother of the Gracchi, you know. She does so long, she says, for the
time when they will be intellectual companions for her. What do you say
to a walk over the hills?”
As they left the house they met Frau Lichtenfeld and the bushy
Herr Schotte--the professor cut an astonishing figure in golf
stockings--returning from a walk and engaged in an animated conversation
on the tendencies of German fiction.
“Aren't they the most attractive little children,” exclaimed Imogen as
they wound down the road toward the river.
“Yes, and you must not fail to tell Flavia that you think so. She will
look at you in a sort of startled way and say, 'Yes, aren't they?' and
maybe she will go off and hunt them up and have tea with them, to fully
appreciate them. She is awfully afraid of missing anything good, is
Flavia. The way those youngsters manage to conceal their guilty presence
in the House of Song is a wonder.”
“But don't any of the artist-folk fancy children?” asked Imogen.
“Yes, they just fancy them and no more. The chemist remarked the other
day that children are like certain salts which need not be actualized
because the formulae are quite sufficient for practical purposes. I
don't see how even Flavia can endure to have that man about.”
“I have always been rather curious to know what Arthur thinks of it
all,” remarked Imogen cautiously.
“Thinks of it!” ejaculated Miss Broadwood. “Why, my dear, what would any
man think of having his house turned into an hotel, habited by freaks
who discharge his servants, borrow his money, and insult his neighbors?
This place is shunned like a lazaretto!”
“Well, then, why does he--why does he--” persisted Imogen.
“Bah!” interrupted Miss Broadwood impatiently, “why did he in the first
place? That's the question.”
“Marry her, you mean?” said Imogen coloring.
“Exactly so,” said Miss Broadwood sharply, as she snapped the lid of her
matchbox.
“I suppose that is a question rather beyond us, and certainly one which
we cannot discuss,” said Imogen. “But his toleration on this one point
puzzles me, quite apart from other complications.”
“Toleration? Why this point, as you call it, simply is Flavia. Who could
conceive of her without it? I don't know where it's all going to end,
I'm sure, and I'm equally sure that, if it were not for Arthur,
I shouldn't care,” declared Miss Broadwood, drawing her shoulders
together.
“But will it end at all, now?”
“Such an absurd state of things can't go on indefinitely. A man isn't
going to see his wife make a guy of herself forever, is he? Chaos
has already begun in the servants' quarters. There are six different
languages spoken there now. You see, it's all on an entirely false
basis. Flavia hasn't the slightest notion of what these people are
really like, their good and their bad alike escape her. They, on the
other hand, can't imagine what she is driving at. Now, Arthur is worse
off than either faction; he is not in the fairy story in that he sees
these people exactly as they are, _but_ he is utterly unable to see
Flavia as they see her. There you have the situation. Why can't he see
her as we do? My dear, that has kept me awake o' nights. This man who
has thought so much and lived so much, who is naturally a critic, really
takes Flavia at very nearly her own estimate. But now I am entering upon
a wilderness. From a brief acquaintance with her you can know nothing of
the icy fastnesses of Flavia's self-esteem. It's like St. Peter's; you
can't realize its magnitude at once. You have to grow into a sense of
it by living under its shadow. It has perplexed even Emile Roux, that
merciless dissector of egoism. She has puzzled him the more because he
saw at a glance what some of them do not perceive at once, and what will
be mercifully concealed from Arthur until the trump sounds; namely, that
all Flavia's artists have done or ever will do means exactly as much to
her as a symphony means to an oyster; that there is no bridge by which
the significance of any work of art could be conveyed to her.”
“Then, in the name of goodness, why does she bother?” gasped Imogen.
“She is pretty, wealthy, well-established; why should she bother?”
“That's what M. Roux has kept asking himself. I can't pretend to analyze
it. She reads papers on the Literary Landmarks of Paris, the Loves of
the Poets, and that sort of thing, to clubs out in Chicago. To Flavia
it is more necessary to be called clever than to breathe. I would give a
good deal to know that glum Frenchman's diagnosis. He has been
watching her out of those fishy eyes of his as a biologist watches a
hemisphereless frog.”
For several days after M. Roux's departure Flavia gave an embarrassing
share of her attention to Imogen. Embarrassing, because Imogen had the
feeling of being energetically and futilely explored, she knew not for
what. She felt herself under the globe of an air pump, expected to yield
up something. When she confined the conversation to matters of general
interest Flavia conveyed to her with some pique that her one endeavor
in life had been to fit herself to converse with her friends upon those
things which vitally interested them. “One has no right to accept their
best from people unless one gives, isn't it so? I want to be able to
give--!” she declared vaguely. Yet whenever Imogen strove to pay her
tithes and plunged bravely into her plans for study next winter, Flavia
grew absent-minded and interrupted her by amazing generalizations or
by such embarrassing questions as, “And these grim studies really have
charm for you; you are quite buried in them; they make other things seem
light and ephemeral?”
“I rather feel as though I had got in here under false pretenses,”
Imogen confided to Miss Broadwood. “I'm sure I don't know what it is
that she wants of me.”
“Ah,” chuckled Jemima, “you are not equal to these heart to heart talks
with Flavia. You utterly fail to communicate to her the atmosphere of
that untroubled joy in which you dwell. You must remember that she gets
no feeling out of things herself, and she demands that you impart yours
to her by some process of psychic transmission. I once met a blind girl,
blind from birth, who could discuss the peculiarities of the Barbizon
school with just Flavia's glibness and enthusiasm. Ordinarily Flavia
knows how to get what she wants from people, and her memory is
wonderful. One evening I heard her giving Frau Lichtenfeld some random
impressions about Hedda Gabler which she extracted from me five years
ago; giving them with an impassioned conviction of which I was never
guilty. But I have known other people who could appropriate your stories
and opinions; Flavia is infinitely more subtle than that; she can
soak up the very thrash and drift of your daydreams, and take the very
thrills off your back, as it were.”
After some days of unsuccessful effort, Flavia withdrew herself, and
Imogen found Hamilton ready to catch her when she was tossed afield.
He seemed only to have been awaiting this crisis, and at once their
old intimacy reestablished itself as a thing inevitable and beautifully
prepared for. She convinced herself that she had not been mistaken in
him, despite all the doubts that had come up in later years, and this
renewal of faith set more than one question thumping in her brain. “How
did he, how can he?” she kept repeating with a tinge of her childish
resentment, “what right had he to waste anything so fine?”
When Imogen and Arthur were returning from a walk before luncheon one
morning about a week after M. Roux's departure, they noticed an absorbed
group before one of the hall windows. Herr Schotte and Restzhoff sat
on the window seat with a newspaper between them, while Wellington,
Schemetzkin, and Will Maidenwood looked over their shoulders. They
seemed intensely interested, Herr Schotte occasionally pounding his
knees with his fists in ebullitions of barbaric glee. When imogen
entered the hall, however, the men were all sauntering toward the
breakfast room and the paper was lying innocently on the divan. During
luncheon the personnel of that window group were unwontedly animated and
agreeable all save Schemetzkin, whose stare was blanker than ever, as
though Roux's mantle of insulting indifference had fallen upon him, in
addition to his own oblivious self-absorption. Will Maidenwood seemed
embarrassed and annoyed; the chemist employed himself with making polite
speeches to Hamilton. Flavia did not come down to lunch--and there was
a malicious gleam under Herr Schotte's eyebrows. Frank Wellington
announced nervously that an imperative letter from his protecting
syndicate summoned him to the city.
After luncheon the men went to the golf links, and Imogen, at the first
opportunity, possessed herself of the newspaper which had been left on
the divan. One of the first things that caught her eye was an article
headed “Roux on Tuft Hunters; The Advanced American Woman as He Sees
Her; Aggressive, Superficial, and Insincere.” The entire interview was
nothing more nor less than a satiric characterization of Flavia, aquiver
with irritation and vitriolic malice. No one could mistake it; it was
done with all his deftness of portraiture. Imogen had not finished the
article when she heard a footstep, and clutching the paper she started
precipitately toward the stairway as Arthur entered. He put out his
hand, looking critically at her distressed face.
“Wait a moment, Miss Willard,” he said peremptorily, “I want to see
whether we can find what it was that so interested our friends this
morning. Give me the paper, please.”
Imogen grew quite white as he opened the journal. She reached forward
and crumpled it with her hands. “Please don't, please don't,” she
pleaded; “it's something I don't want you to see. Oh, why will you? it's
just something low and despicable that you can't notice.”
Arthur had gently loosed her hands, and he pointed her to a chair. He
lit a cigar and read the article through without comment. When he had
finished it he walked to the fireplace, struck a match, and tossed the
flaming journal between the brass andirons.
“You are right,” he remarked as he came back, dusting his hands with his
handkerchief. “It's quite impossible to comment. There are extremes of
blackguardism for which we have no name. The only thing necessary is to
see that Flavia gets no wind of this. This seems to be my cue to act;
poor girl.”
Imogen looked at him tearfully; she could only murmur, “Oh, why did you
read it!”
Hamilton laughed spiritlessly. “Come, don't you worry about it. You
always took other people's troubles too seriously. When you were little
and all the world was gay and everybody happy, you must needs get the
Little Mermaid's troubles to grieve over. Come with me into the music
room. You remember the musical setting I once made you for the Lay of
the Jabberwock? I was trying it over the other night, long after you
were in bed, and I decided it was quite as fine as the Erl-King music.
How I wish I could give you some of the cake that Alice ate and make you
a little girl again. Then, when you had got through the glass door into
the little garden, you could call to me, perhaps, and tell me all the
fine things that were going on there. What a pity it is that you ever
grew up!” he added, laughing; and Imogen, too, was thinking just that.
At dinner that evening, Flavia, with fatal persistence, insisted upon
turning the conversation to M. Roux. She had been reading one of his
novels and had remembered anew that Paris set its watches by his clock.
Imogen surmised that she was tortured by a feeling that she had not
sufficiently appreciated him while she had had him. When she first
mentioned his name she was answered only by the pall of silence that
fell over the company. Then everyone began to talk at once, as though
to correct a false position. They spoke of him with a fervid, defiant
admiration, with the sort of hot praise that covers a double purpose.
Imogen fancied she could see that they felt a kind of relief at what the
man had done, even those who despised him for doing it; that they felt
a spiteful hate against Flavia, as though she had tricked them, and a
certain contempt for themselves that they had been beguiled. She was
reminded of the fury of the crowd in the fairy tale, when once the child
had called out that the king was in his night clothes. Surely these
people knew no more about Flavia than they had known before, but the
mere fact that the thing had been said altered the situation. Flavia,
meanwhile, sat chattering amiably, pathetically unconscious of her
nakedness.
Hamilton lounged, fingering the stem of his wineglass, gazing down the
table at one face after another and studying the various degrees
of self-consciousness they exhibited. Imogen's eyes followed his,
fearfully. When a lull came in the spasmodic flow of conversation,
Arthur, leaning back in his chair, remarked deliberately, “As for M.
Roux, his very profession places him in that class of men whom society
has never been able to accept unconditionally because it has never been
able to assume that they have any ordered notion of taste. He and
his ilk remain, with the mountebanks and snake charmers, people
indispensable to our civilization, but wholly unreclaimed by it; people
whom we receive, but whose invitations we do not accept.”
Fortunately for Flavia, this mine was not exploded until just before the
coffee was brought. Her laughter was pitiful to hear; it echoed through
the silent room as in a vault, while she made some tremulously light
remark about her husband's drollery, grim as a jest from the dying. No
one responded and she sat nodding her head like a mechanical toy and
smiling her white, set smile through her teeth, until Alcee Buisson and
Frau Lichtenfeld came to her support.
After dinner the guests retired immediately to their rooms, and Imogen
went upstairs on tiptoe, feeling the echo of breakage and the dust of
crumbling in the air. She wondered whether Flavia's habitual note of
uneasiness were not, in a manner, prophetic, and a sort of unconscious
premonition, after all. She sat down to write a letter, but she found
herself so nervous, her head so hot and her hands so cold, that she
soon abandoned the effort, just as she was about to seek Miss Broadwood,
Flavia entered and embraced her hysterically.
“My dearest girl,” she began, “was there ever such an unfortunate and
incomprehensible speech made before? Of course it is scarcely necessary
to explain to you poor Arthur's lack of tact, and that he meant nothing.
But they! Can they be expected to understand? He will feel wretchedly
about it when he realizes what he has done, but in the meantime? And M.
Roux, of all men! When we were so fortunate as to get him, and he made
himself so unreservedly agreeable, and I fancied that, in his way,
Arthur quite admired him. My dear, you have no idea what that speech has
done. Schemetzkin and Herr Schotte have already sent me word that they
must leave us tomorrow. Such a thing from a host!” Flavia paused, choked
by tears of vexation and despair.
Imogen was thoroughly disconcerted; this was the first time she had ever
seen Flavia betray any personal emotion which was indubitably genuine.
She replied with what consolation she could. “Need they take it
personally at all? It was a mere observation upon a class of people--”
“Which he knows nothing whatever about, and with whom he has no
sympathy,” interrupted Flavia. “Ah, my dear, you could not be _expected_
to understand. You can't realize, knowing Arthur as you do, his entire
lack of any aesthetic sense whatever. He is absolutely _nil_, stone deaf
and stark blind, on that side. He doesn't mean to be brutal, it is
just the brutality of utter ignorance. They always feel it--they are so
sensitive to unsympathetic influences, you know; they know it the moment
they come into the house. I have spent my life apologizing for him and
struggling to conceal it; but in spite of me, he wounds them; his very
attitude, even in silence, offends them. Heavens! Do I not know? Is
it not perpetually and forever wounding me? But there has never been
anything so dreadful as this--never! If I could conceive of any possible
motive, even!”
“But, surely, Mrs. Hamilton, it was, after all, a mere expression of
opinion, such as we are any of us likely to venture upon any subject
whatever. It was neither more personal nor more extravagant than many of
M. Roux's remarks.”
“But, Imogen, certainly M. Roux has the right. It is a part of his
art, and that is altogether another matter. Oh, this is not the only
instance!” continued Flavia passionately, “I've always had that narrow,
bigoted prejudice to contend with. It has always held me back. But
this--!”
“I think you mistake his attitude,” replied Imogen, feeling a flush that
made her ears tingle. “That is, I fancy he is more appreciative than he
seems. A man can't be very demonstrative about those things--not if he
is a real man. I should not think you would care much about saving the
feelings of people who are too narrow to admit of any other point of
view than their own.” She stopped, finding herself in the impossible
position of attempting to explain Hamilton to his wife; a task which,
if once begun, would necessitate an entire course of enlightenment which
she doubted Flavia's ability to receive, and which she could offer only
with very poor grace.
“That's just where it stings most”--here Flavia began pacing the
floor--“it is just because they have all shown such tolerance and have
treated Arthur with such unfailing consideration that I can find no
reasonable pretext for his rancor. How can he fail to see the value of
such friendships on the children's account, if for nothing else! What
an advantage for them to grow up among such associations! Even though he
cares nothing about these things himself he might realize that. Is there
nothing I could say by way of explanation? To them, I mean? If someone
were to explain to them how unfortunately limited he is in these
things--”
“I'm afraid I cannot advise you,” said Imogen decidedly, “but that, at
least, seems to me impossible.”
Flavia took her hand and glanced at her affectionately, nodding
nervously. “Of course, dear girl, I can't ask you to be quite frank with
me. Poor child, you are trembling and your hands are icy. Poor Arthur!
But you must not judge him by this altogether; think how much he misses
in life. What a cruel shock you've had. I'll send you some sherry, Good
night, my dear.”
When Flavia shut the door Imogen burst into a fit of nervous weeping.
Next morning she awoke after a troubled and restless night. At eight
o'clock Miss Broadwood entered in a red and white striped bathrobe.
“Up, up, and see the great doom's image!” she cried, her eyes sparkling
with excitement. “The hall is full of trunks, they are packing. What
bolt has fallen? It's you, _ma cherie_, you've brought Ulysses
home again and the slaughter has begun!” she blew a cloud of smoke
triumphantly from her lips and threw herself into a chair beside the
bed.
Imogen, rising on her elbow, plunged excitedly into the story of the
Roux interview, which Miss Broadwood heard with the keenest interest,
frequently interrupting her with exclamations of delight. When Imogen
reached the dramatic scene which terminated in the destruction of the
newspaper, Miss Broadwood rose and took a turn about the room, violently
switching the tasselled cords of her bathrobe.
“Stop a moment,” she cried, “you mean to tell me that he had such a
heaven-sent means to bring her to her senses and didn't use it--that he
held such a weapon and threw it away?”
“Use it?” cried Imogen unsteadily. “Of course he didn't! He bared his
back to the tormentor, signed himself over to punishment in that speech
he made at dinner, which everyone understands but Flavia. She was here
for an hour last night and disregarded every limit of taste in her
maledictions.”
“My dear!” cried Miss Broadwood, catching her hand in inordinate delight
at the situation, “do you see what he has done? There'll be no end to
it. Why he has sacrificed himself to spare the very vanity that devours
him, put rancors in the vessels of his peace, and his eternal jewel
given to the common enemy of man, to make them kings, the seed of Banquo
kings! He is magnificent!”
“Isn't he always that?” cried Imogen hotly. “He's like a pillar of
sanity and law in this house of shams and swollen vanities, where people
stalk about with a sort of madhouse dignity, each one fancying himself a
king or a pope. If you could have heard that woman talk of him! Why,
she thinks him stupid, bigoted, blinded by middleclass prejudices. She
talked about his having no aesthetic sense and insisted that her artists
had always shown him tolerance. I don't know why it should get on my
nerves so, I'm sure, but her stupidity and assurance are enough to drive
one to the brink of collapse.”
“Yes, as opposed to his singular fineness, they are calculated to do
just that,” said Miss Broadwood gravely, wisely ignoring Imogen's tears.
“But what has been is nothing to what will be. Just wait until Flavia's
black swans have flown! You ought not to try to stick it out; that would
only make it harder for everyone. Suppose you let me telephone your
mother to wire you to come home by the evening train?”
“Anything, rather than have her come at me like that again. It puts me
in a perfectly impossible position, and he _is_ so fine!”
“Of course it does,” said Miss Broadwood sympathetically, “and there
is no good to be got from facing it. I will stay because such things
interest me, and Frau Lichtenfeld will stay because she has no money to
get away, and Buisson will stay because he feels somewhat responsible.
These complications are interesting enough to cold-blooded folk
like myself who have an eye for the dramatic element, but they are
distracting and demoralizing to young people with any serious purpose in
life.”
Miss Broadwood's counsel was all the more generous seeing that, for her,
the most interesting element of this denouement would be eliminated by
Imogen's departure. “If she goes now, she'll get over it,” soliloquized
Miss Broadwood. “If she stays, she'll be wrung for him and the hurt may
go deep enough to last. I haven't the heart to see her spoiling things
for herself.” She telephoned Mrs. Willard and helped Imogen to pack. She
even took it upon herself to break the news of Imogen's going to Arthur,
who remarked, as he rolled a cigarette in his nerveless fingers:
“Right enough, too. What should she do here with old cynics like you and
me, Jimmy? Seeing that she is brim full of dates and formulae and other
positivisms, and is so girt about with illusions that she still casts
a shadow in the sun. You've been very tender of her, haven't you? I've
watched you. And to think it may all be gone when we see her next. 'The
common fate of all things rare,' you know. What a good fellow you
are, anyway, Jimmy,” he added, putting his hands affectionately on her
shoulders.
Arthur went with them to the station. Flavia was so prostrated by the
concerted action of her guests that she was able to see Imogen only
for a moment in her darkened sleeping chamber, where she kissed her
hysterically, without lifting her head, bandaged in aromatic vinegar.
On the way to the station both Arthur and Imogen threw the burden of
keeping up appearances entirely upon Miss Broadwood, who blithely rose
to the occasion. When Hamilton carried Imogen's bag into the car, Miss
Broadwood detained her for a moment, whispering as she gave her a large,
warm handclasp, “I'll come to see you when I get back to town; and, in
the meantime, if you meet any of our artists, tell them you have left
Caius Marius among the ruins of Carthage.”