Beatrice took occasion to go to see Mary within the next few days. In
a particularly fetching costume of green satin with fly-away sleeves
steadied by silver tassels and a black hat aglow with iridescent
plumes she surprised Mary at an hour when Steve would be absent. On
this occasion Beatrice dressed to dazzle and intimidate one of her own
sex. But the result was unsatisfactory. She found Mary quite passable
in cloud-blue organdie, a contented look in her gray eyes.
Her own satin costume and plumed bonnet seemed a trifle theatrical.
She wished she had worn her trimmest tailored effect to impress upon
this tall young woman that no one else could wear tailor things so
well as Mrs. Beatrice O'Valley if she chose to do so.
"What can I do for Mrs. O'Valley?" Mary said, almost patronizingly,
Beatrice fancied.
"I came in to say hello. I've neglected you lately. But you have been
so horrid about not coming to see my gardens that you deserve to be
neglected." Her dove-coloured eyes watched Mary closely. "Besides, I
want to get something for Mr. O'Valley's desk--as a surprise. You must
help me because, as I have realized, you know so much more about him
than I do.... There, am I not generous?"
"Very." Mary surmised that something of greater importance lay behind
the call than showing off the satin costume or selecting a surprise
for Steve.
"What do you suggest? I'm such a frivolous person my husband never
tells me his affairs or wishes. The rugs might be in rags and he would
never ask me to replenish. I understand now so much more clearly than
ever before why business men and women are prone to fall in love with
each other; they see each other so constantly under tests of each
one's abilities. They have to ask each other favours and grant them.
Sometimes it is a loan of a pencil sharpener, more often it must be
the aid of the other fellow's brain to help solve a problem. And they
are so shut away from my world. I'm just the pretty mischief-maker who
squanders the dollars, and by and by, when self-pity sets in, they
find there is a mutual bond of admiration and sympathy. Quite a step
toward love, isn't it? As I came in here to-day I could not help
thinking of how beautifully you keep business house for my husband.
Why, Mary Faithful, aren't you afraid I am going to be jealous?" She
was laughing, but the intention was to have the laugh blow away and
the sting of the truth remain.
Mary knew this--and Beatrice knew that she did. So trying to make
herself as formidable as a bunch of nettles Mary took heed to answer:
"I'm afraid you have been reading novels--the ones where the business
woman grows paler and more interesting looking each day and somehow
happens to be wearing a tempting little chiffon frock when the firm
fails and the young and handsome junior partner takes refuge in her
office and proceeds to brandish a gun and say farewell to the world.
You see, you don't come down to play with us enough to know what
prosaic rows there are over pencil sharpeners or who has spirited away
the drinking cup or why the window must be six inches from the top
because So-and-so has muscular rheumatism. I don't think you are fair,
Mrs. O'Valley, and I'm going to risk being quite unpopular by telling
you that you have no right to say such things even in jest."
Mary's eyes were very honest and her face seemed even firmer of chin
as she leaned her elbows on her desk, looking up at this pretty
figurine in satin and plumes.
"Do you fancy it is any fun to go to work at thirteen or fourteen? To
rush through breakfast to stand in a crowded car, to have to make your
heart very small as the Chinese say, in order to appreciate the
pennies and keep them until they become dollars--when all of you longs
to play Lady Bountiful? To rub elbows with untruthful mischief-makers,
coarse-mouthed foremen, impossible young fools who wish to flirt with
you and whom you do not dare to rebuke too sharply; to take your
hurried noon hour with little food and less fresh air and come back to
the daily grind; to walk home or hang on to the tag end of a
street-car strap and finally get to your room or your home so tired in
body and mind that you wish you had no soul, protesting faintly
against girls and women having to be in business?
"No, I don't think you do realize. Or to run errands icy-cold days,
down slushy streets or slippery hills? To carry great bundles of
such daintiness as you are wearing and leave them at the doors of
big houses such as your own, numbed, hungry, envious--and not
understanding the wherefore of it? To catch glimpses of warm halls,
the sound of a piano playing in a flower-scented salon, to see girls
your own age in dainty silk dresses sitting in the window and looking
at you curiously as you go down the steps? Oh, I could tell you a
great deal more, Mrs. O'Valley."
"Well?"
"Eventually some of us survive and some do not--which is another
story! Those of us who do, who endure such days that we may go to
night school, and who wear mended gloves and queer hats, forgoing the
cheap joys of our associates--we do forge ahead and grow grimmer of
heart and graver of soul. We realize that we are earning everything we
are getting--perhaps more--only we cannot get the recognition we
deserve. We are quite different from what you stay-at-home women
fancy. Tempting chiffon frocks and love affairs de luxe with handsome
junior partners are farthest from our thoughts. We plan for lonely old
age--a home and an annuity, a trip to Europe or some other Carcassonne
of our thwarted selves. We revel in things as you women do--but we
revel in them because people are shut away from us. You women shut
away people that you may revel in things.
"All this time the handsome junior partners and so on for whom we keep
business house and through propinquity are supposed to love--they have
fallen in love with sheltered girls such as your own self, and
everything is quite as it ought to be. Now do you really think the
capable business women of to-day are letting their abilities be spent
in useless rebellion against their fate and loving the members of the
firm in Victorian fashion or doing their work intelligently and
earning their wage? I hardly think there is room for an argument. You
must understand that the years of errand girl, night school, underpaid
clerk have taken out of us a certain capacity for enjoyment which you
women have had emphasized. But thank God it has also taken from us a
capacity for hysterical suffering, for going on the rocks when we see
some joy we crave yet know can never be ours!"
"Oh!" Beatrice murmured, wishing Steve would come in or else Mary be
called to the telephone. "Oh----"
"But I do think there is a certain justice developed among modern
business women which home women do not comprehend as a rule. Oh, not
that I underestimate the home women or the sheltered women. There is a
distinction between the two--but I say that the business woman who
earns a man's wage and does his work has a certain squareness, for
want of a better term, which makes her say, 'If I earn something it is
mine and I shall not hesitate thus to label it. Look out--any one who
tries to take it from me!' Do you see?"
Mary paused, annoyed at what she had been prevailed upon to say, and
wondering if by good fortune her opinions had been delivered to empty
ears.
"So you think you would fight for something to which you felt
entitled?"
"Perhaps." The gray eyes had a warrior's strength in them. "Fight, win
it, and then spend no time in sentimental regrets. We learn one thing
that all women should learn in this great age of selection: That you
must earn the things you win, and that if you do so you will most
likely keep them."
"And if you felt that you had earned something--and another woman had
not--you would play off the conqueror and take the spoils?"
"If I felt it the right thing to do."
Feeling as confused as a bank cashier when caught studying a railroad
map Mary hastened to suggest a picture of Beatrice handsomely framed
as a surprise for Steve. She was sure he would like nothing any
better.
Beatrice felt chirked up upon hearing this. She told herself that
Trudy was an inveterate gossip and this queer young person must be
thinking aloud about revolutions in Russia or something like that;
anything else was too absurd. So she repeated her invitation to come
to see the gardens with their jewel-like pools and riotous masses of
colour, and went on her way to select a most gorgeous frame for a most
gorgeous portrait of herself.
Steve expressed his thanks for the surprise picture quite properly,
and after giving it a few days of prominence on his desk he relegated
it to a shelf beside a weather-beaten map of the Great Lakes which had
always been in the office.
And here another phase of the Gorgeous Girl's effort to do something
and exercise her faculties occurred. Though she regarded Trudy's
gossip as absurd she did not forget it. No woman would. It lay in
waiting until the right moment.
Her father's illness and Steve's worried look as he came home each
night caused Beatrice to cast about for something noble and remarkable
to do. The conclusion she reached was that it was her duty to
retrench; she was not going to have floor-scrubbing duchesses corner
all the economy feats. She would make it the mode to live simply,
even be penurious in some ways--now that she had the Villa Rosa and a
season's budget of frocks. She began looking over the monthly bills in
deadly earnest. The result was a blinding headache which prevented her
going in to see her father. She retired to her room in cream lace with
endless strings of coral, and left word for Steve to drop in on his
way to his own room.
"Deary, I've been too extravagant," she began faintly as he opened the
door. She reached out her hand to find his.
He brought a chair over beside the chaise-longue and sat down
obediently, holding the small, fragrant fingers in his own. "I'd be
mighty glad if you felt you could live more simply."
"You duck! Just what I'm about to do. I'm going to be the loveliest
Queen Calico you ever did see--I've no doubt but what I'll be making
you a beefsteak pudding before long."
Steve smiled. "Who will take this castle of gloom from under us?"
"Oh! We may as well stay here--I don't mean that sort of retrenching--I
mean in other ways. I'm not going to give expensive bridge parties
or keep three motors and a saddle horse--I can't ride any more,
anyway--and I'm not going to have a professional reader for papa.
Aunt Belle, you, and I can manage that--that will take fifteen dollars
a week from the expenses. Besides, I am going to have three-course
dinners from now on--no game, fish, or extra sweet. That will make a
difference--in time. I shall not buy the new dinner set I had
halfway ordered--it was wonderful, of course, but I have no right to
use money for nonsense. Papa can give it to me for my birthday if he
wants to. Gifts don't count, do they, Stevuns?
"Then there is the servant question. Now cook is seventy-five dollars
a month; the three maids are fifty each, besides all they steal and
waste; the laundress and her helper, the chauffeur and all the garden
men; the food, light, heat--to say nothing of extra expenses; my
parties and trips and the enormous bills for taxes and upkeep that
papa pays--I'm afraid to say how much it comes to each month. But it
is going to stop! Then my clothes--I'm just ashamed to think--while
you, poor dear, exist on nothing----Oh, thank you, Elsie." A maid had
brought in a supper tray.
"I didn't want to come downstairs, so I sent for some lunch." She
watched Steve's amused expression. "Aunt Belle gets on my nerves and
unless we are having people in, the room is too big to have a family
meal."
On the tray was a dish heaped with tartlettes aux fruits, cornets a la
creme, babas au rhum, petits fours, madeleines, and Napoleons. There
was another dish filled with marrons glaces and malaga grapes
preserved in sugar. A few faint wedges of bread and butter pointed the
way to the pot of iced chocolate and the pitcher of whipped cream.
"Well," Steve ventured, looking at the tray, "I'm afraid I don't
agree----"
"I know your ideas. You think I ought to be frying chops for you and
giving praise because I have a nineteen-dollar near-taffeta dress. I
can just see you walking round a two-by-four back yard measuring the
corn and putting the watermelons into eiderdown sleeping bags so they
won't freeze; then telling everyone at the shop what an ideal home
life you lead! No, deary, I'm retrenching because it's a novelty, and
you would like to retrench----"
"Because I may be forced to do so. I hate to worry you--I never mean
to unless there is no other way out--but I must warn you that the
abnormal war conditions are no longer inflating business and everyone
is watching his step. I cannot take your father's place; he carved it
out step by step. I fairly aeroplaned to the top and found that while
I was sitting there in fancied security other people were busy
chopping down the steps and I should find myself having a great old
fall down to earth. Now----"
"Don't tell any more things," she murmured, deep in a fruit tart. "I
can't understand. You are a big, strong man. Go keep your fortune; let
me play. I'll retrench for fun, and you must love me for it."
"But you are not sincere," he protested. "You don't earn anything. You
don't save anything----"
Beatrice sat upright, laying aside her plate and fork. "So you believe
that, too," she half whispered.
"See here," Steve added, in desperation. "I wish we were back in the
apartment--or a simple house. I wish we kept a cook and a maid and you
had a simple outfit of clothes and a simple routine. I wish we were
just folks--you know the sort--you don't find them any place else but
America--it's a tremendous chance to be just folks if you would only
realize. I feel as if this were a soap-bubble castle, as if we were
deliberately playing a wrong game all round."
"You tell papa," she begged; "and if he thinks I'm unhappy he will
write me another check."
"Then the retrenching is to be the elimination of the
fifteen-dollar-a-week professional reader, who needs the work and
earns the money, and two courses from our already aldermanic meals?
What else?"
"I shall send the silver to the bank and use plate. The smartest
people do that. I shall make aunty embroider my monograms; she can as
well as not--the last were frightfully expensive. I'm going to bargain
sales after this, and take cook and drive out to the Polish market.
Why, things are two and three cents a pound cheaper----"
Steve rose abruptly, tipping over the dainty chair as he did so. He
tried to straighten out the pinky rug and set the chair properly upon
it. Then he squared off his shoulders and dutifully stooped to kiss
his economical little helpmate.
"All right, darling," he said, glibly, feeling that Gorgeous Girls
were get-rich-quick men's albatrosses, "that will be very amusing for
you. It will tide you over until the horse-show season. Now if you
don't mind I'm going below to ask what the chances are for some roast
beef!"
Toward Christmas, when Beatrice had gone to New York with friends and
Mark Constantine discovered that dying is ever so much harder than
death, Mary told Steve that she was considering a new position, with a
firm dealing in fabrics, a firm of old and honourable reputation.
She laid the letter from her prospective employers on his desk, in
almost naive fashion. It was as if she wanted to show this was no
woman's threat but a bona-fide and businesslike proposition. And if
she blushed from sheer foolish joy at the disappointed and protesting
expression that came into his face it was small solace after the
struggle she had undergone before she made herself take this step.
"You are not going," he began, angrily. "I'm damned if you do!"
"Oh, my dear, my own dear," she murmured within. Outwardly she shook
her head briskly and added, "Yes, I am. The hours--the salary----"
"The deuce take that stuff! How much more money do you want me to pay
you? How few hours a day will you consent to work? You know so well it
has been you who have done your own slave driving. Besides, I can't
get on without you."
"You must; I haven't the right to stay."
Steve stood up, crumpling the letter in his hand. "You mean because of
what I said--that time?"
"Partly; partly because I find myself disapproving of your transactions."
"They are a safe gamble," he began, vehemently.
"Are they? I doubt it. Don't ask me to stay. I want to remain poised
and content. If I cannot be radiantly happy I can be content, the sort
of old-lavender-and-star-dust peace that used to be mine."
"Have I ever said things, made you feel or do----"
"Oh, no." As she looked at him the gray eyes turned wistful purple.
"But it is what we may say or do, Mister Penny Wise."
Steve looked at the crumpled letter. "So you are going over to staid
graybeards who deal in cotton and woollens, and play commercial nun to
the end--is that it?"
"Yes."
"And you do care?" he persisted, brutally.
"Yes," she answered, defiantly.
"Well, I don't care about fool laws--they are mighty thin stuff. I
love you," he told her with quiet emphasis.
Mary did not answer but the purple of the eyes changed back to stormy
gray.
"Why don't you say something? Abuse me, claim me----"
"I haven't the courage even if I have the right," she said, presently.
"Besides, the last year I have been loving an ideal--the Steve
O'Valley who existed one time and might still exist if other things
were equal. But in reality you are a prematurely nerve-shattered,
blundering pirate; not my Steve." She spoke his name softly. "The
failure of my ideal--and it's a little hard to live with and work
with such a failure. My hands are tied, yet my eyes see. Besides,
there is Luke to think about and care for until some other woman does
it. I cannot endure this tangle; neither can I get you out of it.
So I am going away. And I'll keep on loving my ideal and find the
old-lavender-and-star-dust sort of peace."
"You are not going!" he repeated, sharply, taking her hand. "Do you
hear? I love you. I have loved you enough to keep silent about it ever
since that day. Does it mean nothing to you?"
"Don't say it again--it is so hopeless, part of the tangle. You
haven't the faintest idea how hopeless it is; you are so involved you
cannot judge. My boy, don't you see that the whole trouble lies in
getting things you have never earned? The sort of joy you people
indulge in and try to hold as your own is a state of mind and emotion
from which no lessons may be learned--calm, stagnant pools of
superlative surface pleasure. No one learns things worth while when
he is too happy or too successful. That is why success is a wiser and
more enduring thing when it comes at middle age. The young man or
woman has not been tried out, has not had to struggle and discover
personal limitations. It's the struggle that brings the wisdom.
"But when you have a ready-made stock-market fortune handed to you,
and a Gorgeous Girl wife, and the world comes to fawn upon you--you
soon become intoxicated with a false sense of your own achievements
and values. It does not last--nor does it pay. Such joy periods are
merely recuperative periods. By and by something comes along and bumps
into you and you are shoved out into the struggling seas--the learning
and conquering game. It is not a sad state of affairs--but a mighty
wise one. Then how can you, who have never earned, expect a joy to be
yours forever?"
"You have struggled and earned. You have the right to love me!"
"Perhaps--but you cannot hide behind my skirts and claim the same
right. I shall give you up. Why, this is no tragedy--it is the way
many commercial nuns find their lives are cast. Commercial nuns, like
their religious sisters, serve a novitiate--their vocation being
tested out. We who find that the things of our fancy are husks leave
them behind and go on in our abilities. We are needed women to-day; we
must have recognition and respect. We possess a certain unwomanly
honesty according to old standards, which makes us say such things as
I have said to you. I love you, the ideal of you; yet I am hopeless to
realize it. I refuse to keep on making my petty moan for sympathy when
all the time the bigger part of me demands work and contentment--and
things just like Gorgeous Girls."
"But there must be a way out. I can't lose you. Do you know what it
will mean?"
"I fancy I do." The gray eyes were so maternal that Steve felt
comforted.
"Are you pushing me out of a stagnant joy pool?" he tried saying
lightly.
"Perhaps I'm heading that way when I stop serving you before all
else."
"Mary, Mary, quite contrary"--he gave her a gentle little shake--"say
it all again. Then tell me if this is a mood and you'll change your
mind and stay. You must stay--or else you don't love me."
"Eternal masculine! That we love to be beaten, cry loudly, tell our
neighbours, but we must prove our affections by crawling back to have
you kiss the bruises." She shook her head. "You cannot believe that
the world recognizes a difference between women with sentiments and
sentimental women! Why, my boy, do you know that convictions, real
convictions, do make a convict of a man, put a mental ball and chain
on him which he can never deny? I have told you my convictions--I am
convinced I should be doing wrong to both of us to stay. I shall
go--and love my ideal and spend my salary in soothing things."
"I'm not afraid of a divorce," he found himself insisting.
"Nor I. But should you get one I would not marry you."
"Not ever?" he asked.
Unconsciously they both looked at the photograph of the Gorgeous Girl
smiling down on them in serene and frivolous fashion.
"Not ever," she told him, turning away.
There was a directors' meeting, which Steve was obliged to attend. He
knew he sat about a table smoking innumerable cigars without a
coherent idea in his head as to what was being said or considered.
When he rushed back to the office Mary had gone home and left a note
tucked in his blotter. He did not know that Beatrice had dropped in
and discovered it, reading it with great satisfaction and carefully
replacing it so as to have the appearance of never having been
disturbed. All it said was:
"I shall go to the Meldrum Brothers on the fifteenth.--M. F."
He tore the note up in a despairing kind of rage and wrote Mary as
impetuous a love letter as the Gorgeous Girl had ever received. Five
minutes after writing it he tore that up, too. Then he called himself
several kinds of a fool and dashed out to order an armful of flowers
sent to her apartment. He had his supper in a grill room, to give him
a necessary interlude before he went home. He walked round and round a
city square watching the queer, shuffling old men with their trays of
needles and pins, wrinkled-faced women with fortune-telling parrots,
and silly young things prancing up and down, bent on mischief.
Something about human beings bored him; he regretted exceedingly that
he was one himself; and at the same tune he wished he might
countermand the florist's order. He took a taxi home and wondered what
apology he should make for being late. He had forgotten that there was
a dinner party!
In silver gauze with an impressive square train Beatrice greeted him,
to say he might as well remain invisible the rest of the evening, it
would look too absurd to have him appear an hour late with some clumsy
excuse--and as there was an interesting Englishman who made an
acceptable partner for her everything was taken care of. Papa, minus
the professional reader, was lonesome. He had discovered an intricate
complaint of his circulation and would welcome an audience.
With relief Steve stole away to Constantine's room and amid medicine
bottles and boxes, air cushions, hot-water bags, and detective
stories, he listened with half an ear to the reasons why his blood
count must be taken again and what horse thieves the best of doctors
were anyhow!