to make his full effect before the return of an enlightened and possibly
enlightening Dick. "No, I thought of this big house, with only us three
in it, and I said 'I'll bring her home.' Edith will love her. Edith will
give her friendship, advice, guidance. She will even give her something
to wear instead of the unsuitable things she has on. And what do I
find?" He paused and looked around dramatically and warningly as Dick,
with a beautified grin, returned. "Does Edith open her heart to her?
No. Does Edith open her arms to her? No. All that Edith opens to her is
the door which leads--who can tell where, whither?"
"I can tell," said Dick, "it leads right straight to my little diggings.
If Edith throws her out, I'll take her in."
"Oh, noble, noble man," ejaculated John remembering the emotional woman,
"but ah! that must not be. I took her hand in mine--by the way, did I
tell you, she has beautiful little hands, not at all what I should have
expected."
"You did not," said Dick. "And now that'll be about all from you. You're
just about through."
"My opinion is," said Edith darkly, "that you are both either crazy or
worse."
"Go down and see her for yourself," urged Dick, "so quiet, so
reserved--hush! hark! she's coming up. Now be nice to her whatever you
feel! I'll be taking her away in a minute or two."
But it was Mary Van Plank who came in. Mary, all blooming and glowing
from the cold.
"Who's that in the reception-room?" she asked when the greetings were
over and she was warming her slender hands before the fire. "She's the
prettiest dear. She was standing at the window and she smiled so sweetly
at me as I came up the steps."
John looked at Dick.
"Yes," admitted that unabashed delinquent, "I left her at the window
when I came up."
"Alas! poor child," sighed John, looking out into the night. "She'll be
there soon."
"What is she going out for at this time?" Mary demanded. "I quite
thought that she, too, had come to dinner. Who is she, Mrs. Sedyard?"
Upon her mother's helpless silence, Edith broke in with the story as
she felt she knew it. Union Square, the discharged shopgirl, John's
quixotic conduct. And John watched Mary with a lover's eye. He had not
intended that she should be involved. A moment of her displeasure, even
upon mistaken grounds, was no part of his idea of a joke.
But there was no displeasure in Mary's lovely face.
"Why, of course, he brought her home," she echoed Edith's indignant
peroration. "What else could he do?"
"Well, for one thing he could have taken her to the Margaret Louise
Home, that branch of the Y.W.C.A., on Sixteenth Street, only a few
blocks from where he found her."
"Oh! Edith," Mary remonstrated. "The Maggie Lou! And you know they would
not admit her. Who would take a friendless girl to any sort of an
institution at this season? John couldn't have done it! I think he's an
old dear to bring her right straight home. Let's go down and talk to
her. She must be wondering why we all leave her so long alone."
"No, you don't," said Dick. "Edith didn't tell you the whole story. The
girl," and he drew himself up to a dignity based on John's, "is under
_my_ protection."
"Your protection!" repeated his amazed sister.
"Precisely. _My_ protection. Edith declines to receive this helpless
child. Therefore, I have offered her the shelter of my roof."
"His roof," explained Mary to Mrs. Sedyard, "is the floor of the hall
bedroom above his. It measures about nine by six. So the thing to do,
since of course, Dick is only talking nonsense, is to let me take the
girl around to the studio until John and I can plan an uninstitutional
future for her."
"You may do just as you please," said Edith coldly. "I have given my
opinion as to what should be done with her. It has been considered, by
persons more experienced than you, the opinion of an expert. Girls of
her history and standards are not desirable inmates for well-ordered
homes. I shall have nothing to do with her."
"How about it, Mary?" asked her brother. "Are you willing to risk her in
the high-art atmosphere of the studio?"
"I'm glad to," Mary answered. "It's not often that one gets a chance of
being a little useful, and doesn't the Christmas Carol say, 'Good will
to men.' I'm going down to see her now."
"You're a darling," cried John. "True blue right through. Now, we'll all
go down and arrange the transfer. But, first, I want to give Edith one
more chance. Do you finally and unreservedly--"
"I do," said Edith promptly.
"And you, Mary, are you sure of yourself? Suppose that, when you see
her, you change your mind?"
"I've given my word,", she answered. "I promise to take her."
"That's all I want," said John.
* * * * *
"How could you, John? How could you?" sobbed Edith. "How could you tell
us--?"
"I told you nothing but the absolute truth. I meant her to be your
Christmas present, but you have resigned her 'with all her works and all
her pomps' to Mary."
"Ah! but if I refuse to take her from Edith?" Mary suggested.
"Then I get her," answered Dick blithely, "and she'd be safer with me. I
know what you two girls are thinking of. You are going to borrow her
clothes and make a Cinderella of her. They are what you care about. But
I love her for herself, her useless hands, her golden hair, her lovely
smile--well, no, I guess we'll cut out the smile," he corrected when
Maudie, agitated by the appraising hands of the two girls, swung her
head completely round and beamed impartially upon the whole assembly.
"It don't look just sincere to me."
But there was no insincerity about Maudie. She was just as
sweet-tempered as she looked. Uncomplainingly, she allowed herself to be
despoiled of her finery and wrapped in a sheet while Mary wriggled
ecstatically in the heavenly blue dress, pinned the plumed hat on her
own bright head and threw the muff into a corner of the darkened
drawing-room when she found that it interfered with the free expression
of her gratitude to John.
And some months later when the trousseau was in progress, the once
despised Christmas guest, now a member in good-standing of Mary's
household, did tireless service, smilingly, in the sewing-room.
"WHO IS SYLVIA?"
"Lemon, I think," said Miss Knowles, in defiance of the knowledge, born
of many afternoons, that he preferred cream. She took a keen and
mischievous pleasure in annoying this hot-tempered young man, and she
generally succeeded. But to-day he was not to be diverted from the
purpose which, at the very moment of his entrance, she had divined.
"Nothing, thank you," he answered. "I'll not have any tea. I came in
only for a moment to tell you that I'm going to be married."
"Again?" she asked calmly, as though he had predicted a slight fall of
snow. But her calm did not communicate itself to him.
"Again?" he repeated hotly. "What do you mean by 'again?'"
"Now, Jimmie," she remonstrated, as she settled herself more
comfortably among her pillows and centered all her apparent attention
upon a fragile cup and a small but troublesome sandwich, "don't be
savage. I only mean that you always tell me so when you find an
opportunity. That you even manufacture opportunities--some of them out
of most unlikely material. A chance meeting in a cross-town car; an
especially _forte_ place in an opera; the moment when a bishop is saying
grace or a host telling his favorite story. And yet you expect me to be
surprised to hear it now! Here in my own deserted drawing-room with the
fire lighted and the lamps turned low. You forget that one is allowed to
remember."
"You allow yourself to forget when you choose and to remember when you
wish: You are--"
"And to whom are you going to be married? To the same girl? Do you
know, I think she is not worthy of you?"
"She is not," he acquiesced, and she, for a passing moment, seemed
disconcerted. "Yet she is," he continued, cheered by this slight
triumph, "the most persistent, industrious and deserving of all the
young persons who, attracted by my great position and vast wealth, are
pressing themselves or being pressed by designing relatives upon my
notice."
His hostess laughed softly.
"Make allowances for them," she pleaded. "You know very few men can
rival your advantages. The sixth son of a retired yet respectable stock
broker, and an income of four thousand a year derived from a small but
increasing--shall we say increasing--?"
"Diminishing; incredible as it may seem, diminishing."
"From a small but diminishing law practice. And with these you must
mention your greatest charm."
"Which is?"
"Your humility, your modesty, your lack of self-assertiveness. Do you
think she recognizes that? It is so difficult to fully appreciate your
humility."
Jimmie grinned. "She's up to it," said he. "She knows all about it.
She's as clever, as keen, as clear-sighted."
"Is she, perhaps, pleasing to the eye?" asked Miss Knowles idly. "Clever
women are often so--well, so--"
Jimmie gazed at her across the little tea-table. He filled his eyes with
her. And, since his heart was in his eyes, he filled that, too. After a
moment he made solemn answer:
"She is the most beautiful woman God ever made."
"Ah, now," said Miss Knowles, returning her cup to its fellows and
turning her face, and her mind, more entirely to him, "now we grow
interesting. Describe her to me."
"Again?" Jimmie plagiarized.
"Yes, again. Tell me, what is she like?"
"She is like," he began so deliberately that his hostess, leaning
forward, hung upon his words, "she is exactly like--nothing." The
hostess sat back. "There was never anything in the least like her. To
begin with, she is fair and young and slim. She is tall enough, and
small enough and her eyes are gray and black and blue."
"She sounds disreputable, your paragon."
"And her eyes," he insisted, "are gray in the sunlight, blue in the
lamplight, and black by the light of the moon."
"And in the firelight?"
He rose to kick the logs into a greater brightness; and when he had
studied her glowing face until it glowed even more brightly, he
answered:
"In the firelight they are--wonderful. She has--did I tell you?--the
whitest and smallest of teeth."
"They're so much worn this year," she laughed, and wondered the while
what evil instinct tempted her to play this dangerous game; why she
could not refrain from peering into the deeper places of his nature to
see if her image were still there and still supreme? Why should she,
almost involuntarily, work to create and foster an emotion upon which
she set no store, which indeed, only amused her in its milder
manifestations and frightened her when it grew intense? He showed
symptoms of unwelcome seriousness now, but she would have none of it.
"Go on," she urged. "Unless you give her a few more features she will be
like little Red Riding Hood's grandmother."
"And she has," he proceeded obediently, "eyebrows and eyelashes--"
"One might have guessed them."
"--beyond the common, long and dark and soft. The rest of her face is
the only possible setting for her eyes. It is perfection."
"And is she gentle, womanly, tender? Is she, I so often wonder, good
enough to you?"
"She treats me hundreds of times better than I deserve."
"Doesn't she rather swindle you? Doesn't she let you squander your
time?"--she glanced at the clock--"your substance?"--she bent to lay her
cheek against the violets at her breast--"your affection upon her--?"
"And how could she be kinder? And when I marry her--"
"And _if_," Miss Knowles amended.
"There's no question about it," he retorted. "She knows that I shall
marry her." Miss Knowles looked unconvinced. "She knows that she will
marry me." Miss Knowles looked rebellious. "She knows that I shall never
marry anyone else." Miss Knowles took that apparently for granted.
"Dear boy!" said she.
"That I have waited seven years for her."
"Poor boy!" said she.
"That I shall wait seven more for her."
"Silly boy!" said she.
"And so I stopped this afternoon to tell her that I'm coming home to
marry her in two or three months."
"Coming home?" she questioned with not much interest. "Where are you
going?"
"To Japan on a little business trip. One of the big houses wants to get
some papers and testimony and that sort of thing out of a man who is
living in a backwoods village there for his health--and his liberty.
None of their own men can afford time to go. And I got the chance, a
very good one for me--but I tire you."
"No; oh, no," said Miss Knowles politely. "You are very interesting."
"Then you shouldn't fidget and yawn. You lay yourself open to
misinterpretation. To continue: a very great chance for me. The firm is
a big firm, the case is a big case, and it will be a great thing for me
to be heard of in connection with it."
"Some nasty scandal, of course."
"Not exactly. It is the Drewitt case. I wonder if you heard anything
about it."
"For three months after the thing happened," she assured him with a
flattering accession of interest, "I heard nothing about anything else.
Poor, dear father knew him, to his cost, you know. I heard that there
was to be a new investigation and another attempt at a settlement. And
now you're going to interview the man! And you're going to Japan! Oh,
the colossal luck of some people! You will write to me--won't you?--as
soon as you see him, and tell me all about him. How he looks, what he
says, how he justifies himself. O Jimmie, dear Jimmie, you will surely
write to me?"
"Naturally," said Jimmie, and his thin, young face looked happier than
it had at any other time since the beginning of this conversation;
happier than it had in many preceding conversations with this very
unsatisfying but charming interlocutor. "I always do. Sometimes when
your mood has been particularly, well, unreceptive, I have thought of
going away so that I might write to you. Perhaps I could write more
convincingly than I can talk." A cheering condition of things for a
lawyer, he reflected.
"But this is a different and much more particular thing," she insisted
with a cruelty of which her interest made her unconscious. "I have a
sort of a right to know on account of poor, dear father. I shall make a
list of questions and you will answer them fully, won't you? Then I
shall be the only woman in New York to know the true inwardness of the
Drewitt affair. When do you start?"
"To-morrow morning. I shall be away for perhaps three months, and then,"
doggedly, "then I'm coming home to be married. I came in to tell you."
"And if I don't quite believe you?"
"I shall postpone the ceremony. Shall we say indefinitely, some time in
the summer?"
"Not even then. Never, I think. That troublesome girl is beginning--she
feels that she ought to tell you--"
"That there is another 'another'?"
"Yes, I fear so."
"Who will be in town for the next three months?"
"Again, I fear so."
"Then that's all right," said the optimistic Jimmie. "There never was a
man--save one, oh, lady mine--who could, for three months, avoid boring
you. When he holds forth upon every subject under the sun and stars you
will think longingly of me and of the endless variety of my one topic,
'I'm going to marry you.'"
"But if he should make it his?"
"I defy him to do it. There is no guise in which he could clothe the
idea which would not remind you instantly of me. If he should be
poetical: well, so was I when we were twenty-one. If he should give you
gifts of great price: well, so did I in those Halcyon days when I had an
allowance from my Governor and toiled not. If his is an outdoor wooing,
you will inevitably remember that I taught you to ride, to skate, to
drive, and to play golf. If he should attack you musically, you will be
surprised at the number of operas we've heard together and of duets
we've sung together. And so, in the words of my friend, fellow-sufferer,
and name-sake, Mr. Yellowplush, 'You'll still remember Jeames.'"
"That's nonsense!" cried Miss Knowles. "I've tried to be fond of you--I
_am_ fond of you and accustomed to you. The fatal point is that I am
accustomed to you. You say you never bore me. Well, you don't. And that
other men do. Well, you're right. But people don't marry people simply
because they don't bore each other."
"Your meaning is clearer than your words and much more correct. This
really essential consideration is, alas, frequently not considered."
"People should marry," said Miss Knowles with a sort of consecrated
earnestness--the most deadly of all the practiced phases of her
coquetry--"for love. Now, I'm not in love with you. If I were, the very
idea of your going away would make me miserable. And do I seem
miserable? Am I lovelorn? Look at me carefully and tell the truth."
Jimmie obeyed, and the contemplation of his hostess seemed to depress him.
"No," he agreed gloomily, "you seem to bear up. No one, looking at your
face, could guess that your heart was in--was in--" Jimmie halted,
vainly searching for the poetical word. Miss Knowles supplied it.
"In torn and bleeding fragments," she supplemented. "No, Jimmie, I'm
sorry. You've laid siege to it in every known way, and yet there's not a
feather out of it."
"There are two ways," Jimmie pondered audibly, "in which I have not
wooed you. One is _à la_ cave dweller. I might knock you on the head
with a knobby club and drag you to my lair. But since my lair is some
blocks away, and since those blocks are studded with the interested
public and the uninterested police, the cave dweller's method will not
serve. There remains one other. I stand before you, so; I take your
hand, so; I may even have to kiss it, so. And I say: 'Dear one, I want
you. Every hour of my life I want you. I want you to take care of, to
work for, to be proud of. I want you to let me teach you what life
means. I want you for my dearest friend, for my everlasting sweetheart,
for my wife.' And when I've said it, I kiss your hand, so; gently, once
again, and wait for your answer."
"Dear boy," said she with an unsteady little laugh, for--as always--she
shrank from his earnestness after she had deliberately roused it, "I
wish you wouldn't talk like that. You make me feel so shallow-pated and
so small. I don't want to talk about life and knowledge and love. And I
don't want any husband at all. What makes you so tragic this afternoon?
You're spoiling our last hour together. Come, be reasonable. Tell me
what you think of Drewitt. Why do you suppose he did it? Did his wife
and daughter know?"
"You're quite sure about the other thing?"
"Unalterably sure. And, Jimmie, dear old Jimmie, there are two things I
want you to do for me. The first is, to abandon forever and forever this
'one topic' of which, you are so proud. Will you?"
"I will not," said Jimmie.
"And the second is: to fall in love with a girl on the boat. There is
always a girl on a boat. Will you?"
"I will," said Jimmie promptly. "It would be just what you deserve."
* * * * *
Miss Knowles bore the absence of her most persistent and accustomed
suitor with a fortitude not predicted by that self-confident young man.
She danced and drove, lunched and dined, rode and flirted with
undiminished zest, bringing, each day, new energy and determination to
the task of enjoying herself.
The enjoyment of her neighbors seemed less important. She preferred that
her part in the cotillion should be observed by a frieze of unculled
wall-flowers. A drive was always pleasanter if it were preceded by a
skirmish with her mother in which Miss Knowles should come off
victorious with the victoria, while Mrs. Knowles accepted the _coup de
grâce_ and the coupé. A flirtation--if her languid, seeming innocent
monopoly of a man's time and thoughts could be called by so gross a
name--was more satisfying if it implied the breaking of vows and hearts
and the mad jealousy of some less gifted sister; if it had, like a
Russian folk song, a sob and a wail running through it.
Jimmie had never approved of these amusements and had never hesitated to
express his opinion of them in terms which were intelligible even to her
vanity. From the days when they had played together in the park she had
dreaded his honesty and feared his judgments. "You're such a poacher,
Sylvia," he told her once, "such an inveterate, diabolical Fly-by-Night,
Will-o'-the-Wisp poacher. I sometimes think you'd condescend to take a
shot at me if you didn't know that I'm fair game. But you like to kill
two birds with one stone; smash two hearts with one smile."
During the weeks immediately following the departure of her mentor she
devoted herself whole-heartedly to her favorite form of sport. Besides
her unscrupulousness she was armed with her grandfather's name, the
riches of her dead father, her own beauty, and a mind capable of much
better things. And, since Jimmie's presence would have seriously
interfered with the pleasures of the chase, she was rather glad than
otherwise that he was not there to see--and comment.
Her mother bore his absence with a like stoicism. That astute matron had
long and silently deprecated the regularity with which her Louis Quinze
had groaned beneath one hundred and eighty pounds of ineligibility, the
frequency with which a tall troup horse of spectacular gait and
snortings could be descried beside her daughter's English hunter in the
park, the strange chain of coincidence by which at theater, house party,
dinner, or even church, Jimmie smiling and unabashed, would find his
way to her daughter's side and monopolize her daughter's attention.
In the excitement of the first stages of one of her expeditions into
another's territory, Jimmie's first letter arrived. It was mailed at
Honolulu, and consisted obediently of the cryptic statement: "There is
no girl on the boat. She is a widow, but lots of fun." And it changed
the character of the invasion from a harmless survey of the land to a
determined attack upon its fortresses. And so Gilbert Stevenson,
millionaire dock owner, veteran of many seasons and more campaigns,
found himself engaged to Miss Sylvia Knowles just when, after a long and
careful courtship, he had decided to bestow his hand and name upon the
daughter of the retired senior partner of his firm: "that dear little
girl of old Marvin's," as he described the lady of his choice, "his only
child and a good child, too." He bore his surprise and honors with a
courteous pomposity. Miss Knowles bore the situation with restraint and
decorum. But that "dear little girl of old Marvin's" could not bring
herself to bear it at all and wept away her modest claims to prettiness
and spirit in one desolate month.
Like many a humbler poacher, Sylvia Knowles found an embarrassment in
disposing of her victims after she had bagged them, and Mr. Gilbert
Stevenson was peculiarly difficult in this regard. She did not want to
keep him. In fact, the engagement upon which she was enduring
congratulations had been as surprising to her as to her fiancé. And the
methodical manifestations of his regard contrasted wearyingly with the
erratic events in another friendship in which nothing was to be counted
upon except the unaccountable. So that when vanquished suitors withdrew
discomfited and returned to renew an earlier allegiance or to swear a
new one; when "that good child of old Marvin's" had withdrawn her
pitiful little face and her disappointment into the remote fastness of
settlement work; when her mother resigned all claims upon the victoria
and loudly affirmed her preference for the brougham, then things in
general--and Mr. Stevenson in particular--began to bore Miss Knowles,
and she began to look forward, with an emotion which would have
surprised her betrothed, to foreign mails and letters. She considerately
spared Mr. Stevenson this disquieting intelligence, having found him in
matters of honor and rectitude as archaic and as fastidious as Jimmie
himself. "Has a nasty suspicious mind," she reflected, "and a nasty
jealous disposition. I wonder if he will expect me to give up all my
friends when I marry him."