By Joseph Hergesheimer

_For_ DOROTHY _Charming in the present and Secure with the past_

I

It was, probably, Lee Randon realized, the last time he would play golf

that year. He concluded this standing on a shorn hill about which the

country was spread in sere diminishing tones to the grey horizon. Below,

a stream held a cold glimmer in a meadow of brown, frost-killed grass;

and the wind, the bitter flaws where Lee stood, was thinly scattered

with soft crystals of snow. He was alone, no one would play with him

so late in the season, and there had been no boy present to carry his

clubs. Yes, this was the last time he'd try it until spring: Peyton

Morris, who had married Lee's niece and was at least fourteen years his

junior, had been justified in a refusal which, at its expression, had

made Lee cross.

At worse than forty-five, he had told Morris curtly, he was more active

than the young men hardly out of the universities. To this Peyton had

replied that undoubtedly Lee had more energy than he; personally he felt

as old as--as Egypt. Ridiculous, Lee decided, trying to make up his mind

whether he might continue playing or return, beaten by November, to the

clubhouse. In the end, with numb fingers, he picked up his ball, and

walked slowly back over the empty course. The wind, now, was behind him,

and increasingly comfortable he grew reflective:

The comparison of Peyton Morris's age with his, recalling the fact,

to be precise, of his forty-seven years, created a vague questioning

dissatisfaction. Suddenly he saw himself--a comfortable body in a

comfortable existence, a happy existence, he added sharply--objectively;

and the stout figure in knickerbockers, rough stockings, a yellow

buckskin jacket and checked cap pulled over a face which, he felt,

was brightly red, surprised and a little annoyed him. In the abrupt

appearance of this image it seemed that there had been no transitional

years between his slender youth and the present. He had an absurd

momentary impression that an act of malicious magic had in a second

transformed him into a shape decidedly too heavy for grace. His

breathing, where the ground turned upward, was even slightly labored.

It was, Lee thought with all the intensity of an original discovery,

devilish unpleasant to grow old; to die progressively on one's feet,

he elaborated the fact. That was what happened to a man--his liver

thickened, his teeth went, his veins became brittle pipes of lime. Worse

than all that, his potency, the spirit and heat of living, met without

any renewal its inescapable winter. This might, did, occur while his

being was rebellious with vain hope. Today, in spite of the slight

clogging of his breath, his body's loss of flexibility, his imagination

was as vigorous, as curious, as ever ... take that nonsense about the

doll, which, in a recalled classical allusion, he had privately named

Cytherea. Peyton Morris would never have entered into that!

Lee Randon, on one of his infrequent trips to New York, had seen it in

a confectioner's window on Fifth Avenue, and instantly it had captivated

his attention, brought him to a halt. The doll, beautifully dressed in

the belled skirt of the eighteen-forties, wore plum-colored silk with a

bodice and wide short sleeves of pale yellow and, crossed on the breast,

a strip of black Spanish lace that fell to the hem of the skirt.

It wasn't, of course, the clothes that attracted him--he only grew

conscious of them perhaps a month later--but the wilful charm, the

enigmatic fascination, of the still face. The eyes were long and half

closed under finely arched brows, there was a minute patch at the

right corner of a pale scarlet, smiling mouth; a pointed chin marked an

elusive oval beneath black hair drawn down upon a long slim neck, hair

to which was pinned an odd headdress of old gilt with, at the back,

pendent ornamental strands of gold-glass beads.

Insistently conventional, selectly ordinary, in appearance, the stick

with a pig-skin handle hanging from his left arm, he had studied the

doll with a deepening interest. Never in life, he told himself, had he

seen a woman with such a magnetic and disturbing charm. Fixed in intent

regard he became conscious that, strangely, rather than small the figure

seemed diminished by a distance which yet left every feature clear.

With this he grew satirical at himself; and, moving resolutely down

the Avenue, treated his absorption with ridicule. But the vision of the

face, the smile, the narrowed eyes, persisted in his mind; the truth

was that they troubled him; and within three blocks he had turned. The

second view intensified rather than lessened his feeling, and he walked

quickly into the shop odorous with burned sugar. The doll was removed

from the window--it had come from Paris, he learned--and, after a

single covert glance, he bought it, for, he needlessly informed the girl

wrapping it in an unwieldy light package, his daughter.

To his secret satisfaction, Helena, who was twelve, hadn't been strongly

prepossessed; and the doll--though Lee Randon no longer thought of it

as merely that--left downstairs, had been finally placed on the white

over-mantel of the fireplace by the dining-room door.

There, when he was alone, he very often stopped to gaze at the figure;

and, during such a moment of speculative abstraction, he had, from the

memories of early reading, called her Cytherea. That, Lee remembered

vaguely, was the Cytheranian name of the mysterious goddess of love,

Venus, of the principle, the passion, of life stirring in plants and

men. But in the shape above him it had been strangely modified from an

apparently original purpose, made infinitely difficult if not impossible

of understanding. His Cytherea bore the traces, the results, of old and

lost and polished civilizations; there was about her even a breath of

immemorial China. It mingled with a suggestion of Venice, the eighteenth

century Venice of the princes of Naxos--how curiously she brought back

tags of discarded reading!--and of the rococo Viennese court. This much

he grasped; but the secret of her fascination, of what, at heart, she

represented, what in her had happened to love, entirely escaped him.

Lee was interested in this, he reassured his normal intelligence,

because really it bore upon him, upon the whole of his married life with

Fanny. He wasn't, merely, the victim of a vagrant obsession, the tyranny

of a threatening fixed idea. No, the question advanced without answer

by Cytherea was not confined to her, it had very decidedly entered into

him, and touched, practically, everyone he knew, everyone, that was, who

had a trace of imagination. Existence had been enormously upset, in

a manner at once incalculable and clear, by the late war. Why, for

example, the present spirit of restlessness should particularly affect

the relation of men and women he couldn't begin to grasp. Not, he added

immediately, again, that it had clouded or shaken his happiness.

It had only given him the desire, the safe necessity, to comprehend the

powerful emotion that held Fanny and him secure against any accident

to their love. To their love! The repetition, against his contrary

intention, took on the accent of a challenge. However, he proceeded

mentally, it wasn't the unassailable fact that was challenged, but the

indefinable word love. Admiration, affection, passion, were clear in

their meanings--but love! His brow contracted in a frown spreading in a

shadowy doubt over his face when he saw that he had almost reached the

clubhouse; its long steep-pitched bulk lay directly across the path of

dusk, approaching from the east; and a ruddy flicker in the glass doors

on the veranda showed that a fire had been lighted. To his left, down

over the dead sod and beyond a road, he could see the broad low façade

of his house with its terraced lawn and aged stripped maples. There,

too, a window was bright on the first floor: probably Fanny was hearing

the children's lessons.

* * * * *

That cheerful interior he completely visualized: Fanny, in the nicest

possible attire, sitting in the curly-maple rocking-chair, her slippered

feet--she had a premonition of rheumatism--elevated on the collapsible

stool she carried about with her; and Helena and Gregory hanging on

her knees. Gregory, of course, had tomorrow's task easily in hand, with

another star for a day's good conduct in school; but Helena, shining

in the gold and flush of her radiant inattention, would know nothing.

Helena, Lee Randon acknowledged, spelled atrociously. If it weren't for

the clubs and his spiked shoes he'd turn and go home directly, himself

supervise the children's efforts at education. But Fanny did it much

better than he; Helena and Gregory were closer to her; while they

volunteered endless personal and trivial admissions to her, he had to

ask them, detail by detail, what they were doing.

After he had changed his shoes and secured the latticed steel door of

his locker he went up to the main room of the clubhouse, where, on the

long divan before the open fire, he found Peyton Morris lounging with

Anette Sherwin by a low tea table. The hot water, they informed Lee

comfortably, was cold, inviting him by implication to ring for more; and

then they returned to the conversation he had interrupted. Anette said:

“I asked her from Friday till Monday, over the dance, you see; but she

wired she couldn't be sure. They are going to begin rehearsing at any

minute, and then shoot--it is shoot, isn't it?--the picture. What did

she tell you at the Plaza?”

“The same thing,” Peyton replied moodily. “I only saw her for a scrappy

dinner; she couldn't even wait for coffee, but rushed up to a conference

with her director.”

They were, Lee knew, talking about Mina Raff, a friend of Anette's

earlier summers by the sea who was beginning to be highly successful in

the more serious moving pictures. He had met her a number of years ago,

in Eastlake, but he retained no clear impression of her; and, admitting

that he hadn't gone to see her in a picture, wondered aloud at her

sudden fame. Peyton Morris glanced at him, frowning; he seemed at the

point of vigorous speech, then said nothing.

“Mina is lovely now, Lee,” Anette spoke in his place; “you will realize

that at once. She's like a--a wistful April moon, or corn silk.”

“I like black hair,” Randon asserted.

“That's amusing, when you think Fanny's is quite brown,” Anette replied.

“Whom have you been meeting with black hair? There's none I can remember

in Eastlake.”

“There isn't anybody in particular,” Lee reassured her; “it is just

an idea of mine.” He had a vision of intense black hair swept about an

enigmatic still smile, of an old gilt headdress. “Mina Raff must have

developed if she gets half the pay advertised.”

“She'll get twice that when this contract expires,” Peyton put in; “and

that will be increased again. No one on the screen can touch her.” He

made these declarations in a manner both shadowed and aggressive. Lee

observed that he held a cigarette in one hand and a match in the other

with no effort at conjunction.

“Mina simply tells you everything,” Anette continued. “If she comes you

must do your best. It's perfectly marvelous, with so much else, that she

even considers it. I couldn't budge her when she was practically free.”

“How is Claire?” Randon abruptly demanded.

“She's all right,” her husband returned; “a little offhand, but no more

than usual. I want her to go to the West Indies and take Ira but she

won't listen. Why anyone who doesn't have to stay through these rotten

winters I can't imagine.” A flaming log brought out his handsomely

proportioned face, the clear grey eyes, the light carefully brushed hair

and stubborn chin. Peyton was a striking if slightly sullen appearing

youth--yet he must be on the mark of thirty--and it was undeniable that

he was well thought of generally. At his university, Princeton, he had

belonged to a most select club; his family, his prospects, even

his present--junior partner in a young but successful firm of bond

brokers--were beyond reproach. Yet Lee Randon was aware that he had

never completely liked Peyton.

His exterior was too hard, too obviously certain, to allow any

penetration of the inevitable human and personal irregularities beneath.

It might be possible that he was all of a piece of the conventional

stereotyped proprieties; but Lee couldn't imagine Claire marrying or

holding to a man so empty, or, rather, so dully solid. Claire he admired

without reservation--a girl who had become a wife, a mother, with no

loss of her vivid character. Her attitude toward Ira, now four years

old--wholly different from Fanny's manner with her children--was lightly

humorous; publicly she treated her obligations as jokes; but actually,

Lee knew, she was indefatigable.

This was a type of high spirits, of highly bred courage, to which he was

entirely delivered. Fanny was a perfect mother, a remarkably fine wife,

but she bore an evident sense of her responsibilities. She wasn't so

good-looking as Claire, who at times was almost beautiful; but Fanny had

a very decided kind of attractiveness which Lee Randon wished she would

more bring out. She was a little too serious. He didn't actually

want her to drink and swear in public, that wouldn't become her; but

something of that sort, he felt, might help her. At times, when she had

had more than her customary cocktail and a half, he saw in her a promise

of what he desired.

God knew he wasn't criticizing Fanny, he hastened to reassure even

himself: how could he, in the face of all she had brought him--the

freedom of money and undeviating devotion and their two splendid

children? His house was as absolute in its restrained luxury of taste

as was the unfailing attention to his comfort. It was purely for her

own happiness that he wanted her to be, well--a little gayer. She was

already developing a tendency to sit serenely on the veranda of the club

through the dances, to encourage others rather than take an active part

herself.

Expanding in the glow of the fire and hot strong tea he forgot all about

his uncomfortable premonitions of age. Now it seemed to him that he had

never been younger in the sense of being merely alive; after the tonic

of the cold his nerves were strung like steel, his blood was in a full

tide. Lee was aware of a marked sense of pleasure at the closeness to

him of Anette; settling back, she willingly, voluntarily, leaned her

firm elastic body against him; her legs, as evident in woolen stockings

as his own, were thrust frankly out toward the flames.

“I'll meet her,” he heard Peyton say, and realized that they were still

talking about Mina Raff. She wouldn't attract him, Lee Randon, in the

least, he was sure of that ... no wistful April moon. What, then, did

engage him? He was unable to say, he didn't know. It was something

intangible, a charm without definite form; and his thoughts returned to

Cytherea--if he could grasp the secret of her fascination he would be

able to settle a great many disturbing feelings and needs. Yes, what

she mutely expressed was what, beneath his comprehension, he had come

to long for. He had never recognized it as the property of any woman nor

satisfied it in himself.

Here, certainly, his loyalty, his affection for Fanny, weren't damaged;

he was, he thought, beyond assault there. It was only that, together

with his fidelity to his wife, an increasing uneasiness possessed him,

an unabated separate interest in life, in women. He was searching for

something essential, he couldn't discover what; but, dismissing the

problem of how he'd act if he found it, the profound conviction remained

that when his hopeful quest was over then indeed he'd be old, finished,

drained. Lee Randon secretly cherished, jealously guarded, that

restless, vital reaching for the indefinable perfection of his hidden

desire. For a flash it was almost perceptible in Anette, her head

half-buried in the darkness of the divan behind the rise and fall of her

breasts in a close sweater of Jaeger wool.

* * * * *

She stirred, smiled at him absently, and, with Peyton's assistance,

rose. The long room, unlighted except for the fire, was lost in

obscurity; the blackness against the window-panes was absolute. Outside,

however, Lee found a lingering glint of day; the snow had stopped, but

the wind had increased and was blowing over the open expanse of the

course in the high gaunt key of winter. His house, across the road,

showed regular cheerful rectangles of orange illumination: he always

returned to it with a feeling of relief and pleasant anticipation, but

he was very far from sharing Fanny's passionate attachment to their

home. Away--on past trips to the Michigan iron ore fields and now on

shorter journeys to eastern financial centers--he never thought of it,

he was absorbed by business.

But in that he wasn't alone, it was true of the majority of successful

men he knew over forty; they saw their wives, their homes, they

thought of their families, only in the intervals of their tyrannical

occupations. He, in reality, was rather better there than most, for

he occasionally stayed out at Eastlake to play golf; he was locally

interested, active, in the small town of Fanny's birth. Other men--

He made a calculation of how much time a practising lawyer saw his wife:

certainly he was out of the house before nine--Lee knew lawyers who were

in their offices at seven-thirty--and he was hardly back until after

five. Nine hours absent daily through the week; and it was probable that

he was in bed by eleven, up at seven--seven hours' sleep; of the eight

hours left in twenty-four half if not two-thirds of the Sundays and

some part of the others were devoted to a recreation; and this took no

account of the briefcases brought home, the thought and contributary

preoccupations.

More than that, his mind, his hopes and planning, were constantly

directed toward his legal concerns; the wife of such a man filled about

the position of his golf or billiards. Lee Randon had never analyzed

this before, and the result amazed him. With younger men, of course, it

was different; they had more time and interest for their homes, their

wives and children. Everything constantly shifted, changed, perished;

all, that was, but the unintelligible spurring need beyond any

accomplishment.

In him it was almost as though there were--or, perhaps, had been--two

distinct, opposed processes of thought, two different personalities, a

fact still admirably illustrated by his private interest in the doll,

in Cytherea. Much younger he had been fond of music, of opera and then

symphony concerts, and his university years had been devoted to a wide

indiscriminate reading: sitting until morning with college men of poetic

tendencies, he had discussed the intricacies of conduct in the light of

beauty rather than prudence. This followed him shyly into the world,

the offices of the Magnolia Iron Works; where, he had told himself

optimistically, he was but finding a temporary competence. What, when

he should be free to follow his inclination, he'd do, Lee never

particularized; it was in the clouds nebulous and bright, and

accompanied by music. His dream left him imperceptibly, its vagueness

killed partly by the superior reality of pig iron and ore and partly

because he never had anyone with whom to talk it over; he could find no

sympathy to keep it alive.

That it wasn't very robust was evident; and yet, throughout his youth,

it had been his main source of incentive. No one, in the Magnolia works,

knew the difference between the Glucks, Alma and Christopher, nor read

anything but the most current of magazines. At intervals Lee had found

a woman who responded to the inner side of him, and together they swept

into an aesthetic emotional debauch; but they came inevitably, in the

surrounding ugliness of thought and ascribed motives, to humiliating

and ugly ends; and he drifted with increasing rapidity to his present

financial and material sanity.

What remained of the other was hardly more than a rare accelerated

heart-beat at a chord of music like the memory of a lost happiness, or

at the sea shimmering with morning. He never spoke of it now, not

even to Fanny; although it was possible that he might be doing her

understanding an injustice. Fanny, generally, was a woman in whom the

best of sense triumphed; Fanny was practical. It was she who saw that

the furnace pipes were inspected, the chimney flues cleaned before

winter; and who had the tomato frames properly laid away in the

stable. Problems of drainage, of controversies with the neighbors, were

instinctively brought to her, and she met and disposed of them with an

unfailing vigorous good judgment.

A remarkable companion, he told himself; he had been a fortunate

man. She was at once conventional and an individual: Fanny never, for

example, wore the underclothes of colored crepe de chines, the elaborate

trifles, Lee saw in the shop windows, nightgowns of sheer exposure and

candy-like ribbons; hers were always of fine white cambric, scalloped,

perhaps, or with chaste embroidery, but nothing more. Neither did she

use perfumes of any sort, there was no array of ornamental bottles on

her dressing-table, no sachet among her handkerchiefs, her cambric was

not laid in scented flannel. Her dressing, a little severe, perhaps--she

liked tailored suits with crisp linen waists and blue serge with no more

than a touch of color--was otherwise faultless in choice and order; and,

it might be that she was wholly wise: Fanny was thin and, for a woman,

tall, with square erectly held shoulders. Her face was thin, too, almost

bony, and that magnified, emphasized, the open bright blueness of her

eyes; all her spirit, her integrity and beauty, were gathered in them;

her hair was pale and quite scanty.

Yes, Fanny's eyes were her principal attraction, they were forever

startling, contrasted with the rest, not only remarkable in shade

but, as well, in light; in her quick unreasoning tempers, the only

perceptible flaw of her character, they sparkled with brilliancy.

The tempers, Lee decided, descending the narrow stony road from

the club-house to his gate, were an unavoidable part of her special

qualities: her quick decisiveness, her sharp recognitions of right

and her obdurate condemnation of wrong--these distinctions were never

obscured in Fanny--necessitated a finality of judgment open to anger

at any contrary position. Aside from that she was as secure, as

predictable, as any heavenly orbit; her love for him, beginning before

marriage, had quietly and constantly increased; her usual mood was

moulded to his need; nothing had ever contested the supremacy of his

place with her.

Lee swung open the white wicket that broke the middle of his border

hedge and went up the path over the broad lawn; the house, an admirable

copy of locally colonial dwellings, was a yellow stucco, with a porch on

his left and the dining-room at the extreme right. Beyond the porch was

the square of the formal garden, indistinguishable at this season, and

the garage, the driveway, were hidden at the back. He mounted the broad

steps of field stone at the terrace, but, in place of going directly

in under the main portico, turned aside to the porch, past the dim bare

forms of the old maples. Just as he had anticipated, the glass door

showed him Fanny sitting in the maple slatted-back rocking-chair;

Gregory, in blue, was present, but Helena not to be seen.

His wife's hands were lying idly in her lap, and she was gazing into

nothingness with an expression he had never before noticed, there was

a faint troubled doubt on her brow, a questioning expression about her

eyes. As he stood momentarily quiet he saw her hands slowly clasp until

he felt that they were rigid, and her mouth became pinched; her face

seemed actually hard. Gregory spoke to her, with his fat fingers on her

sleeve, but she made no reply, paid no attention to him. Lee could hear

Gregory's demanding voice; and then, gathering herself, Fanny sighed

deeply and smiled at her boy. She was wearing her pearls, her rings

sparkled in glittering prisms; and, as he opened the door, Lee Randon

wondered if he had forgotten an engagement to go out for dinner?

* * * * *

He asked at once if this were so, but found that they were staying at

home. She regarded him still, he realized, a little withdrawn in

the abstraction he had surprised. This, because it was so uncommon,

disturbed him, and he demanded what was worrying her.

“Nothing, really. What made you suppose I was bothered?” Her reply was

instinctive; and then, after a pause, she continued, more insecurely, “I

was only thinking about some things.... Lee,” she inquired, “you love me

very much, don't you?”

“Why, of course,” he spoke almost impatiently.

“That is all I have, you see,” she admitted; “and that was what was in

my mind. The other women I know are so different; they seem to have so

many more interests than I, and to care less for them than I do for my

one. It is exactly as though I belonged before the war and they came

afterwards. It is true--I am old-fashioned. Well, I don't care if you

don't! But, just the same, it's a problem; I don't want to be out of the

times or narrow; and yet I can't, I don't know how, and I honestly don't

want to, change.

“It wouldn't be any better if I smoked more cigarettes or drank more

gin, that would be silly.” Lee was startled by the similarity of her

words to his unformed thought. “No one likes fun better than I do, but

the fun now is so different,” her voice had the sound of a wail, “it's

nothing but legs and getting kissed by anybody but your husband. I don't

want other men to kiss me, Lee, only you. And I want you to be glad

about that, to care for it more than anything else. You do, don't you?”

Again she hesitated, and again he assured her, in a species of

annoyance, of his feeling.

“It's because I adore you,” Fanny insisted; “it may be awfully foolish

and ark-like to say, but you're all I want, absolutely.” Her manner grew

indignant. “Some women at tea today laughed at me. They did nothing but

describe how they held their husbands' affections; actually that, as

though it were difficult, necessary; the details were sickening, and

reminded me of that old joke about leaving off your wedding ring. It

was all too horrid! And, underneath, they were bitter and vindictive,

yes--they were uneasy, afraid of something, of somebody, and treated

every good-looking woman as a dangerous enemy. I couldn't live like

that, I'd rather die: I told them they didn't trust the men they were

married to.”

“What did they say to that?” Lee asked, standing in the door.

“Agreed with me. Alice Lucian said I was damned well right she didn't

trust hers. She loved him, too, but she didn't propose to take any

liberties with the sanctity of her bed. They all thought Claire was a

fool to let Peyton see Mina Raff like that in New York--the way to avoid

trouble was to make sure it couldn't begin. Has Peyton said anything

to you about Mina Raff? She is perfectly stunning, of course, and an

actress.”

“Not to me,” Lee told her; then he recalled the prolonged attention to

Mina Raff on the divan at the Club. “What if he is crazy about her?” he

observed indifferently; “it can't come to anything. It won't hurt Claire

if Peyton sits out a few dances with a public idol.”

“I shouldn't think so either, but the others were so positive. I just

told them how happy we are together and how devoted you are--fifteen

marvelous years, Lee. It was plain that they envied us.” She rose and

came close to him, her widely-opened candid blue eyes level with his

gaze. “Not the slightest atom must ever come between us,” she said; “I

couldn't stand it, I've been spoiled. I won't have to, will I, Lee? Lee,

kiss me.”

He met the clinging thin passionate purity of her mouth. “No, certainly

not, never,” he muttered, extraordinarily stirred. He asserted to

himself that he would make no such fatal mistake. The other, the errant

fancy, was no more than a vagrant unimportant impulse. “Don't let these

women, who cat around, upset you; probably they are thinking not so much

about their husbands as they are of themselves. I've seen that Alice

Lucian parked out in a limousine during a dance, and she was going right

to it.”

“It is foolish of me,” Fanny agreed, “and not complimentary to our love.

I have kept you so long over nothing that you will be late for dinner.

I don't care!” Her manner bore a foreign trace of abandon in its radiant

happiness; and, with spread fingers on his back, she propelled him

toward the stairs. But, in their room, he failed to change his clothes:

he sat lost in a concentration of thought, of summoned determination.

The interior, with dotted white Swiss curtains at the large windows,

both an anomaly and an improvement on the architectural origin, was

furnished largely in dull rubbed mahogany, the beds had high slender

fluted posts, snowy ruffled canopies and counterpanes stitched in a

primitive design. He possessed an inlaid chest of drawers across from

the graceful low-boy used by Fanny as a dressing-table; there was a bed

stand with brass-tipped feet, a Duncan Fyfe, she declared; split hickory

chairs painted a dark claret color; small hooked rugs on the waxed

floor; and, against the mirror on his chest of drawers, a big photograph

of Fanny and the two children in the window-seat of the living room.

A dinner shirt lay in readiness on the bed, the red morocco boxes that

held his moonstone cuff links and studs were evident, but he ignored

those provisions for his ease. There was a strange, a different and

unaccountable, uneasiness, a marked discomfort, at his heart. The burden

of it was that he had a very great deal of which, it might well be, he

wasn't worthy. In Fanny, he told himself, as against everything else

discoverable, he had the utmost priceless security life could offer.

Outside the brightness and warmth and charm of their house the November

night was slashed by a black homeless wind.

Her sureness, undeniably, was founded on the inalterable strength of

her convictions; against that sustaining power, it occurred to him, the

correctness of her beliefs might be relatively unimportant. Could any

more be required of a faith than its ability, like a life preserver on

water, to hold an individual safe from sinking? Strangely enough, the

one or two greatly powerful men with whom he had come in contact were

like Fanny, prejudiced, closed against all opinions contrary to their

own, impatient of doubt and self-questioning.

Fanny, Lee Randon recognized, was indefatigable in her efforts to form

him in her own unassailable mould; she insisted in the most trivial, and

often tiresome, ways, that he should reach and maintain her standards.

He had been in return, more often than not, rebellious, humorously or

with a suspicion of annoyance; but now, suddenly, it seemed to him that

just that, the limitation of Fanny's determined attitude, was, perhaps,

the most desirable thing possible. If it were possible of acquisition!

Such a certainty wasn't his naturally--those two diverse strains in him

again; but one, he added, had been practically obliterated. The first

step in such a course of practical wisdom would be to put Cytherea out

of his life, dislodge her finally from his thoughts, and the over-mantel

downstairs. This, diplomatically with the doll, he could, of course,

do now, whenever he chose. With that, and whatever it represented,

accomplished, Lee had a premonition, his life would be secure, placid.

The disturbance caused by Fanny's searching tenderness subsided a

little; and, as it dwindled, the other restlessness, the sense, yes--of

wasted possibilities and years, once more grew evident. By God, if Fanny

insisted on being, at any cost, herself, it would be unreasonable in her

not to recognize the same need in him. But Lee was obliged to add the

old and familiar and increasingly heavy provision: any individuality of

being, of desire, must not be allowed to impair the validity of their

common existence, their marriage. Fanny had an advantage over him there,

for all her aspirations turned inward to their love, their home and

children; and his ... but if he knew their goal he could have beaten

life.

* * * * *

Footfalls approaching over the hall--the maid to tell him dinner was

served--brought him sharply to his feet, and he hurried down to where

Fanny, who liked to do such things, had finished lighting the candles on

the table. In reply to the glance of interrogation at his inappropriate

clothes he explained that, trivially occupied, he had been unaware of

the flight of time. Throughout dinner Fanny and he said little; their

children had a supper at six o'clock, and at seven were sent to bed;

so there were commonly but two at the other table. He had an occasional

glimpse of his wife, behind a high centerpiece of late chrysanthemums,

the color of bright copper pennies and hardly larger; and he was struck,

as he was so often, by Fanny's youthful appearance; but that wasn't,

he decided, so much because of her actual person--although since her

marriage she had shown practically no change--as from a spirit of

rigorous purity; she was, in spite of everything, Lee realized,

completely virginal in mind.

The way she sat and walked, with her elbows close to her body and her

high square shoulders carried forward, gave her an air of eagerness, of

youthful hurry. Perhaps she grew more easily tired now than formerly;

her face then seemed thinner than ever, the temples sunken and

cheek-bones evident, and her eyes startling in their size and blueness

and prominence. She kept, too, the almost shrinking delicacy of a girl's

mind: Fanny never repeated stories not sufficiently saved from the gross

by their humor. Her private severity with women who did, he felt, was

too extreme. The truth was that she regarded the mechanism of nature

with distaste; Fanny was never lost, never abandoned, in passion--Lee

Randon had wondered if she regarded that as more than a duty, the

discharge of a moral, if not actually a religious, obligation. It was

certain that she was clothed in a sense of bodily shame, of instinctive

extreme modesty, which no situation or degree of feeling could destroy.

He understood, however, that he could not have Fanny as she was,

immeasurably fine, without accepting all the implications of her

character--other qualities, which he might desire, would as well bring

their defects. Lee didn't for a second want a wife like Anette. His

admiration for Fanny was, fundamentally, enormous. He was glad that

there was nothing hidden in his life which could seriously disturb her;

nothing, that was, irrevocable. Which had he been--wise or fortunate, or

only trivial? Perhaps, everything considered, merely fortunate; and

he wondered how she would have met an infidelity of his? He put his

question in the past tense because now, Lee congratulated himself, all

the danger was passed: forty-seven, with responsibilities that increased

every month in importance, and swiftly growing children; the hair above

his ears was patched with grey.

“I don't like that centerpiece,” Fanny observed, “I can't see you.

Still, it's as well, I suppose, since you didn't change. You look so

much better in dark clothes, Lee, thinner.”

“You shouldn't make me so comfortable.”

“You'd see to that, anyhow; men always do. Honestly, Alice Lucian was a

scream this afternoon, she said that she hated and distrusted all men;

yet I'm sure no one could be more considerate or dependable than Warner.

Now, if she had a husband like George Willard--”

“What would you do,” Lee asked, “if I spent my spare time with the very

young ones?”

“I'd have a doctor see you,” she replied coolly. “What in the world put

that in your head? Haven't you everything here a man could want? That's

exactly what they were talking about; it's so--so idiotic. Those

younger girls ought to be smacked and put to bed, with their one-piece

swimming-suits and shimmying. They give a very misleading impression.”

He lost the course of her speech in considering how little of themselves

women, old and young, showed each other. If Fanny meant, if she for a

moment thought, where the girls they were discussing came in, that there

was smoke without fire.... It was all devilish strange, the present day,

disturbing. The young men, since the war, had grown sober, and the

older men resembled George Willard. The exploding of so much powder, the

release of such naked passions, had over-thrown the balance of conduct

and pressure. How fortunate, he thought again, he was in having Fanny.

They moved into the enclosure by the fire-place, where Cytherea was

remote in shadow against the chimney, and through the hall to the living

room for coffee. His wife placed the portable stool under her feet, and

silence enveloped them. At intervals the clear treble of the children's

voices was audible from above, and once Fanny called up for them to be

quiet. The room was large, it filled that end of the lower floor, and

Lee's gaze idly rested on the smoke of his cigar, veiling the grand

piano in the far corner. There were no overhead lights, the plugs for

the lamps were set in the baseboard, and the radiance was pleasantly

diffused, warm and subdued: the dull immaculately white paint of the

bookshelves on his left, silver frames on a table, harmonious fabrics

and spots of color, consciously and sub-consciously spread a restful

pattern. In reply to his comment Fanny acknowledged that she had seen

the snow; she hated winter, she proceeded, and thought that if it turned

out as bad as last year they might get away to Cuba and see Daniel.

Daniel was Lee's brother, four years his junior, an administrador of a

sugar estancia in the Province of Camagüey; a man who, absorbed in his

crops and his adopted Spanish-tropical civilization, rarely returned to

the United States. This projected trip to Cuba they had discussed for

many Novembers; every year Fanny and he promised each other that,

early in February, they would actually go; and preparatory letters were

exchanged with Daniel Randon; but it always came to nothing. Either

it was impossible for Fanny to leave the children, the house, or the

servants, or Lee's affairs were in need of close supervision.

Suddenly it annoyed him to discuss again, uselessly, Camagüey; it

had become only a vain pretence, a sustained mirage, of escape from

disagreeable days. While it was hot in Cuba, Daniel maintained, the

trade wind coming with evening made the nights cool; it was far more

comfortable, summer and winter, at La Quinta than in Eastlake. Cuba,

he made it seem, Havana and the colonias of cane, the coast and the

interior, was a place with none of the drawbacks of a northern land or

society; there were, certainly, conventions--the Spanish were a very

punctilious people--but they operated in a conveniently definite, Daniel

might almost say a sensible masculine, manner. He had not gone into

any further detail, but had sunk into his celebrated immobility of

expression. Lee, therefore, had drawn his own, natural, conclusions; he

had come to regard Cuba in the same light as that of the early Castilian

adventurers--an El Dorado, but of freedom rather than gold.

A perverse restlessness settled upon him, and he put down his coffee cup

abruptly; the contentment in his surroundings vanished. Lee wanted to

be somewhere else, see something different, not so--so tranquil,

so complacently delivered to the uneventful. Fanny, he told himself

resentfully, would be satisfied to sit exactly where she was for a year.

She met his fleet scrutiny with a faint smile. Her face wouldn't be

greatly changed by old age, by death. She was like that, inside and out.

Whirling ungracious fancies passed through his brain. He shook his head,

and Fanny instantly demanded, “What is it, Lee, what is worrying you?”

Nothing, he replied, but she continued to study him until, giving it up,

she turned to the approaching dance; there would be a dinner at the Club

before it, and forty people from out of town had accepted. They must all

have a perfect time, she declared. Gregory could be heard laughing, and,

with a sense of relief, of escape, he volunteered to go up and see what

kept the children roused. He would only make them worse, Fanny observed,

he was as fidgety as Helena; but her tone carried to him her compelling

affection.

* * * * *

The darkened room where Helena and Gregory slept held a cold glimmering

whiteness; and the light he switched on showed a most sanitary bareness

and two severe iron beds. There was a moment's stillness as he entered,

the scrutiny of two rosy faces framed in blanket and sheet--there were

no pillows--and then there was a delighted vociferous recognition of his

presence.

“You must sit on my bed,” Helena insisted.

“No, mine!” Gregory cried; and, as he settled by his daughter, “For

every minute you're there, father, you must sit here. Guess what I have

with me.” Lee Randon had no idea, and Gregory produced a willow switch.

“That's for anybody who isn't good.”

There was a wriggle down under the blanket, and Lee leaned forward; “Are

those your feet?” he demanded; “do you go that far down, are you that

tall?”

“Gracious, that's nothing,” Helena cut in; “just see where I go.” He

discovered that her active toes were almost under the end bar of the

bed. The covers were moulded by her firm body. In a few years, he

thought with a constricted throat, Helena would be grown up, flung

into the complex troubles of maturity. However, he knew, life wouldn't

greatly upset her--she had a calmness more stolid than Fanny's together

with his own sharpened sensibilities: it was probable that she would

marry soon.

Gregory was different; while Helena, in small ways, was unamenable, he

was as good as the gold stars he continually got for admirable

conduct. He had a deliberate, careful mind and, already, a sense of

responsibilities. He spoke slowly, giving the impression that the

selection of words was a heavy business; where Helena's speech came in

careless rushes. Gregory, too, Lee Randon told himself, would not be at

a loss later. The two children actually demanded very little from him

now beyond the love they took for granted and its obvious return. But,

for his part, did he give them much, indeed, any more? Was there, Lee

wondered, a deficiency in his sense of parenthood?

He knew men all of whose labor was for their children; they slaved to

have comfortable sums against their children's futures; they schemed and

talked, often fatuously, for and about their sons and, in lesser degree,

daughters. They were, in short, wholly absorbed, no more than parents;

at the advent of a family they lost individuality, ambition, initiative;

nature trapped them, blotted them out; it used them for its great

purpose and then cast them aside, just as corporations used men for a

single task and dropped them when their productiveness was over.

But he wasn't like that, it might well be unfortunately. His

personality, his peculiar needs, had survived marriage; the vague

longings of youth had not been entirely killed. They were still potent

and still nameless; they had refused to be gathered into a definition as

exact as ambition. Lee had moved to Gregory's bed, and was holding one

of the small warm hands, inattentive to the eager clamor of voices.

Perhaps his ambition had vanished when he had left the first plan of his

future for the more tangible second: there wasn't much in the material

industry of iron founding, nor in his present wider activities, to

satisfy the imagination.

Taking the place of that, he had an uncommon amount of energy, vitality,

a force of some kind or other. Whatever he undertook he followed with a

full vigorous sweep; he was successful in convincing a large proportion

of the people with whom he dealt that their ends were the same as his;

and here, as well, chance, fate, had been with Lee--no one, practically,

had lost through a belief in him.

His situation today, he wholly and gladly admitted, had resulted from

the money Fanny brought him. Until his marriage he had been confined to

the Magnolia Iron Works; of which, it was conceivable, he would in time

be manager, maybe, much later, part owner. But, with fresh resources,

he tried fresh fields, investments, purchases, every one of which

prospered. He owned or operated or controlled an extraordinary diversity

of industries--a bottling works for nonalcoholic beverages, a small

structural steel plant, the Eastlake daily paper--a property that

returned forty per cent on his capital--a box works, purchased before

the war, with an output that had leaped, almost over night, from

thousands to millions, a well-known cigarette--

His energies, forever turning from routine paths and stereotyped

preoccupations, took him vividly into countless phases of existence.

He had accumulated nearly a million dollars and Fanny's affairs had

benefited greatly; his administration of her money had been rigid:

but--for whatever it was worth--his wife had, in liberating him from the

company of the super-hot cupolas, made it all possible.

A fist, now, was softly pounding him; and Gregory's voice threatened

tears. “What is it?” Lee Randon asked. “You will have to excuse me, I

was thinking.”

The narrative which followed, the confused history of a two and a half

dollar gold-piece finally taken from Gregory by his mother, was broken

into by Helena's irrepressible contempt at his youthfulness.

“He thinks the money is gone,” she explained, “because Mother put it in

the bank for him. I told him when he got it there would be a lot more,

but he just wouldn't listen to me. No matter what anybody said it was no

good.”

“Well,” Gregory inquired, “how much more?”

“I don't know, silly; but packs.”

“Seventy-seven dollars?”

“That depends on how long you leave it in the bank,” Lee instructed him.

“If you didn't ask for it for twenty years--”

“But I want it next Thursday,” Gregory hotly interrupted; “won't it be

any bigger then?”

“He does nothing but ask and ask questions,” Helena added. Lee patted

Gregory's cheek:

“Don't let Helena discourage you. If I don't put the light out your

mother will make me go to bed.”

There were breathless delighted giggles at the thought of that

absurdity. He leaned over his son. “Kiss me!” Helena cried. “Now kiss

me,” Gregory echoed. “Kiss me back again--”

The light went out with a sharp click, and the room was once more a

glimmering darkness, blanched and cold. The ruddy faces of the children,

their bright hair, even their voices, were subdued. Fanny, apparently,

hadn't moved; the light at her shoulder was reflected in the cut

steel buckles of her slippers; she had slight but graceful ankles. He

recognized this, drawing a sheaf of reports from his brief-case; but,

after a perfunctory glance, he dropped them beside him on the floor.

“Really, Lee, your condition is getting dreadful,” Fanny observed; “you

are too nervous for words. Go in and look at that doll you brought

from New York. She ought to teach you repose even if I can't.” A swift

concern shadowed her eyes. “Are you doing too much, do you think? It

isn't necessary, you know. We have plenty. I don't understand why you

will go so hard at all those fool concerns of yours. There might be a

mortgage on us, from the way you work.”

The latter part of her speech he forgot in the calling of his attention

to Cytherea. Fanny had said that the doll might tranquilize him. The

opposite was more probable--Cytherea, what could be more disturbing?

Fanny hadn't noticed her smile, the long half-closed eyes, the

expression of malicious tenderness, if such a thing were possible, the

pale seductiveness of her wrists and hands, the finger nails

stained with vermilion. He tried to imagine a woman like that, warm,

no--burning, with life. It seemed to Lee the doll became animated in a

whisper of cool silk, but he couldn't invent a place, a society, into

which she fitted. Not Eastlake, certainly, nor New York ... perhaps

Cuba. What a vanity of nonsense his thoughts had led him back into:

Cytherea, a thing of wax, was on the over-mantel beyond the hall; Cuba

beyond the sea.

The smoke of another cigar, precisely in the manner of the one before,

hung between him and the piano. His wife settled contentedly in the

curly maple rocker, her rings flashing in the swift drawing of threads

from a square of linen.

* * * * *

Early in the morning Lee Randon drove himself, in a Ford sedan, to a

station on the main line of a railway which bore him into the city and

his office. It was nine miles from Eastlake to the station, where he

left the car for his return; and, under ordinary circumstances, he

accomplished the distance in twenty minutes. The road was good and lay

through open rolling country, grazing and farmed land; he knew its every

aspect thoroughly, each hill and turning and old stone house, in the

pale green of early spring with the flushed petals of the apple blossoms

falling on the dark ploughed ground; yellow with grain; a sweeping

stubble with the corn shocked in which rabbit hunters, brown like the

sheaves, called to their dogs.

Now it was sombre and, in the morning and evening, wrapped in blue mist;

the air had the thick damp coldness usually precipitated in snow; the

cattle, gathered about the fodder spread in the fields, were huddled

against the rising winds. The smoke of a chimney was flattened on a

low roof; and Lee, who had sometimes wished that he were a part of the

measured countryside life, had a sudden feeling of revolt from such

binding circumstances. He wasn't surprised, this morning, that it was

difficult to get men to work in the comparative loneliness of the farms,

or that farmers' sons went continually to the cities.

When they couldn't get there they crowded into their borough towns, into

Eastlake, at every opportunity, attracted by the gaiety, the lights, the

stir, the contact with humanity. Before prohibition they had drunk at

the hotel bars, and driven home, with discordant laughter and the urged

clatter of hoofs, to the silence of star-lit fields. The buggies had

gone; High Street, on Saturday night, was filled with automobiles;

there was practically no drunkenness; but there was no lessening in the

restless seeking stream of men, the curiosity of the women with folded

hands and tightly folded lips.

They all wanted a mitigation of a life which, fundamentally, did not

fill them; they had an absorbing labor, love and home and children,

the church, yet they were unsatisfied. They were discontented with

the primary facts of existence, the serious phases, and wanted, above

everything, tinsel and laughter. If a girl passing on the street smiled

boldly at such youths they were fired with triumph and happiness; they

nudged each other violently and made brazen declarations which, faced by

the girls, escaped in disconcerted laughter. Their language--and this,

too, was a revolt--was like the sweepings of the cow barns.

Life, it occurred to Lee Randon, in this connection, was amazingly

muddled; and he wondered what would happen if the restraint, since it

was no better than sham, should be swept away, and men acknowledged what

they so largely were? A fresh standard, a new set of values, would have

to be established. But before that could be accomplished an underlying

motive must be discovered. That he searched for in himself; suppose he

were absolutely free, not tomorrow, that evening, but now--

Would he go to the office, to the affairs of the Zenith cigarette, and,

once there, would he come home again--the four thirty-seven train and

the Ford in the shed by the station? Lee couldn't answer this finally. A

road led over the hills on the right, beyond a horizon of trees. He knew

it for only a short distance; where ultimately it led he had no idea.

But it was an enticing way, and he had an idiotic impulse to turn aside,

follow it, and never come back any more. Actually he almost cut in, and

he had to swing the car sharply to the left.

If he had been in trouble or debt, if his life had been a failure, he

would have understood his impulse; but as it was, with Fanny and Helena

and Gregory, all his flourishing affairs--why, it was insanity! However,

what absorbed him in his present state of mind, of inquiry, was its

honesty; nothing could be served by conventional protests and

nice sentiments. Lee had long wanted to escape from life, from the

accumulating limiting circumstances. Or was it death he tried to avoid?

What became clearest was that, of all the things which had happened to

him, he would not, at the beginning, have deliberately chosen any. One,

it seemed, bred by the other, had overtaken him, fastened upon him,

while he was asleep. Lee knew a man who, because of his light strength

and mastery of horses, had spent a prolonged youth riding in gentlemen's

steeplechases for the great Virginia stables; a career of racing silk

and odds and danger, of highly ornamental women and champagne, of

paddocks and formal halls and surreptitious little ante-rooms. That he

envied; and, recalling his safe ignominious usefulness during the war,

he envied the young half-drunk aviators sweeping in reckless arcs above

the fortified German cities.

Or was it, again, only youth that he lamented, conscious of its slipping

supinely from his grasp? Yet, if that were all, why was he rebellious

about the present, the future, rather than the past? Lee Randon wasn't

looking back in a self-indulgent melancholy. Nor was he an isolated,

peculiar being; yes, all the men he knew had, more or less, his own

feeling; he could think of none, even half intelligent, who was happy.

Each had Lee's aspect of having been forced into a consummation he would

not have selected, of something temporary, hurried, apologetic.

He thought more specially of men celebrated in great industries, who

had accumulated power beyond measure, millions almost beyond count--what

extravagantly mad outlets they turned to! The captains of steel, of

finance, were old, spent, before they were fifty, broken by machinery

and strain in mid-life, by a responsibility in which they were like pig

iron in an open hearth furnace. What man would choose to crumble, to

find his brain paralysed, at forty-five or six? Such labor was a form

of desperation, of drowning, forgetting, an affair at best an implied

failure.

That was the strength, the anodyne, of drink, of cocktails, that they

spread a glittering transformation about crass reality; people danced

at stated times, in hot crowded rooms, because life was pedestrian; they

were sick of walking in an ugly meaningless clamor and wanted to move to

music, to wear pearl studs and fragile slippers and floating chiffons.

“The whole damned business is a mess,” he said aloud. Then, reaching the

city, he threw himself with a familiar vigor into the activities he had

challenged.

Returning over the familiar road, in his small closed car, he was

quieter mentally, critical of his useless dissatisfaction; he was making

needless trouble for himself. Small things filled his thoughts, among

them the question of how much gin would be consumed by the cocktail

party Fanny and he were having before the dinner dance at the Country

Club. Peyton and Claire Morris, Anette and, if she came, Mina Raff, with

two men, and the Lucians. Perhaps twelve in all; two quarts. The Country

Club dances, principally made up of people who had known each other long

and intimately, decidedly needed an impetus; society was rather dreadful

without rum. Anette was an attractive girl; she had beautiful legs;

but they were hardly better than Fanny's; why in the name of God was he

captivated by Anette's casual ankles and indifferent to his wife's?

Women's legs--they were even no longer hidden--were only a reasonable

anatomical provision exactly shared by men. Why, he particularized, did

he prefer them in silk stockings rather than bare, and in black more

than bright colors? Anette's had never failed to excite his imagination,

but Alice Lucian's, graceful enough, were without interest for him. How

stupid was the spectacle of women in tights! Short bathing skirts left

him cold, but the unexpected, the casual, the vagaries of fashion

and the wind, were unfailingly potential. Humiliating, he thought, a

curiosity that should be left with the fresh experience of youth; but

it wasn't--comic opera with its choruses and the burlesque stage were

principally the extravagances of middle age.

* * * * *

The orange juice and square bottles of clear gin, the array of glasses

and ice-filled pewter pitcher in which Lee mixed his drinks, were

standing conveniently on a table in the small reception room. Fanny,

in a lavender dress with a very full skirt decorated with erratically

placed pale yellow flowers, had everything in readiness. “Mina Raff

came,” she announced, as he descended the stairs. “Anette telephoned. To

be quite frank I didn't much care whether she did or didn't. She used to

be too stiff, too selfish, I thought; and I never liked Anette.”

“Nothing but prejudice, that,” he replied decidedly. “Anette has a

very good head. You have just heard stories from envious women.” He was

careful to say nothing about her legs. “I haven't found her the least

bit out of the way; and she thinks a lot of you.”

“Bosh,” Fanny said inattentively; “I know what she thinks of me. I am

surprised, Lee, that you do so well, because really you are nothing

but an impressionable old fool.” She touched him affectionately on the

cheek, “But I can take care of you and Anette too.”

He didn't in the slightest wish to be taken care of in the manner she

indicated; yet there was nothing he could answer; and, at the sound of

a motor on the drive, he turned toward the entrance at the back. It was

the Lucians; and as he greeted them the whole small company swept into

the house. Claire, with her narrow dark vivid face, wore diagonals of

black and grey, with a long trailing girdle of soft blues and pinks. She

came up at once to Lee and kissed him with a warm friendliness. “Have

you seen Mina Raff?” she asked; “she's wonderful.”

As Claire spoke Lee Randon saw the woman who was becoming such a noted

personality. She was slim, neither tall nor short--Peyton Morris was

removing a voluminous white cloak with dull red stripes and a high

collar of fox. He had been wrong in his remembrance of her, for her

loveliness was beyond challenge. Yes, a wistful April moon described her

very well: Mina Raff was ashen blonde, her face was a very pure oval,

and her large eyes, the delicate slightly drooping mouth, held an

expression of devastating sweetness.

She came forward promptly, and yet with a little touching air of

hesitation, and accused him, in a serious low voice, of having forgotten

her. That, he returned, was ridiculous, an impossibility. Pictures

of her were in all the magazines. Close by her he recognized that the

sweetness was far from sugary; there were indications of a determination

that reached stubbornness; already there were faint lines--skilfully

covered--at the corners of her eyes, and she was palpably, physically,

weary. It was that, he decided, which gave her the wistful charm. That

and something more. She was considered, he knew, and by the judges best

qualified, to have a very sure and perfect talent; and he had no doubt

that that possession stamped and qualified her.

He was obliged to attend to the cocktails; and, at his back, a gay

chatter of voices rose. He had fleeting impressions of very different

people: a strange man in naval uniform with the insignia of a commander;

Anette in a scanty sheath of satin from which an airy skirt spread

to the left like a fan; Alice Lucian sitting on the steps with George

Willard: Frank Carver remote and lost in his bitter thoughts; Elsie

Wayland with the gold halo of an income almost a dollar a minute.

Mina Raff, with Peyton Morris at her shoulder, smiled at him. “What

an adorable house,” she pronounced; “I wish I could have it near the

studio.” She waved Peyton away unceremoniously, “Come, everybody has

had enough drinks, and show it to me.” They passed through the hall,

and into the quiet of the space beyond, lighted by a single unobtrusive

lamp. “What a satisfactory fireplace!” she exclaimed in her faint key,

as though, Lee thought, her silent acting were depriving her of voice.

She sank onto the cushioned bench against the partition. “How did they

feel, do you suppose--the people, the men and women, who belonged to

such things?” As Lee watched her it seemed that she grew more remote,

shadowy, like a memory of long vanished beauty made before his eyes

from the shifting firelight and immaterial shadows. Mina Raff lost her

reality in an unreal charm that compressed his heart. The atmosphere

around her stirred with re-created dead emotions. Then:

“Ah!” she cried softly, unexpectedly, “what a wonderful doll.” She rose,

with a graceful gesture of her hands up to where Cytherea rested. “Where

did you get her? But that doesn't matter: do you suppose, would it be

possible for me, could I buy her?”

“I'm sorry,” Lee answered promptly; “we can't do without her. She

belongs to Helena,” he lied.

“But not to a child,” Mina Raff protested, with what, in her, was

animation and color; “it has a wicked, irresistible beauty.” She gazed

with a sudden flash of penetration at Lee Randon. “Are you sure it's

your daughter's?” she asked, once more repressed, negative. “Are you

quite certain it is not yours and you are in love with it?”

He laughed uncomfortably. “You seem to think I'm insane--”

“No,” she replied, “but you might, perhaps, be about that.” Her voice

was as impersonal as an oracle's. “You would be better off without her

in your house; she might easily ruin it. No common infidelity could be

half as dangerous. How blind women are--your wife would keep that about

and yet divorce you for kissing a servant. What did you call her?”

“Cytherea.”

“I don't know what that means.”

He told her, and she studied him in a brief masked appraisal. “Do you

know,” she went on, “that I get four hundred letters a week from men;

they are put everywhere, sometimes in my bed; and last week a man killed

himself because I wouldn't see him. You'd think that he had all a man

wanted from life; yet, in his library, with his secretary waiting for

him, he.... Why?” she demanded, questioning him with her subdued magic.

“Have you ever cared for any of them?” he asked indirectly.

“I'm not sure,” she replied, with an evident honesty; “I am trying to

make up my mind now. But I hope not, it will bring so much trouble. I

do all I can to avoid that; I really hate to hurt people. If it happens,

though, what can you do? Which is worse--to damage others or yourself?

Of course, underneath I am entirely selfish; I have to be; I always was.

Art is the most exhausting thing that is. But I don't know a great deal

about it; other people, who act rather badly, can explain so fully.”

From where Lee sat he could see Cytherea; the unsteady light fell on the

gilt headdress, the black hair and the pale disturbing smile. She seemed

to have paused in a slow graceful walk, waiting, with that wisdom at

once satirical and tender, for him. Together, slowly, deliberately, they

would move away from the known, the commonplace, the bound, into the

unknown--dark gardens and white marble and the murmur of an ultramarine

sea. He was rudely disturbed by the entrance of Anette and Peyton

Morris. “We're so sorry,” Anette said in an exaggerated air of apology;

“come on away, Peyton.” But the latter told Lee that Fanny was looking

for him. “We are ready to go over to the Club; it's ten minutes past

eight.”

Mina Raff gazed up at the doll. “I have an idea the devil made you,” she

declared.

“You are to go with us, Mina,” Peyton told her; “if you will get your

cloak--” The two women left, and Morris demanded:

“What was that damned rot about the doll?”

“Miss Raff wanted it.”

“Well, why not?”

Lee Randon turned away coldly. “Little girls can't have everything they

put their eyes on.” Morris muttered, and Lee asked, “What's that?” The

other failed to reply, but his remark had sounded remarkably like,

“She can.” Going, Lee looked back involuntarily: he hadn't, after all,

imagined Cytherea's quality, Mina Raff had recognized it, too; the dance

had lost its attraction for him.

* * * * *

The automobiles started in a concentration of accelerated gasoline

explosions, their headlights sweeping across the house and plunging into

the farther night. Fanny gathered her wrap closely about her throat.

“I'm cold,” she asserted; “it was so nice at home, with the children,

and plans--I intend to take out that yellow rambler and try a climbing

American beauty rose there. What a lovely dress of Anette's; it must

be the one she's been talking about so much, that Miss Zillinger made;

really good for Eastlake. What was that man's name who was in the navy,

and did you notice his rank? The officers of the navy are a lot better

looking than army men. And Mina Raff, after all did you find her

interesting?”

“Quite. She struck me as very intelligent.” He had no wish to repeat the

conversation about Cytherea. It was queer, that; the more he considered

it the more significant it appeared to be. “Did it seem to you,” he

asked, “that Peyton was very attentive?”

“I didn't have time to notice. Do you think it's true about her getting

all that money? It looks almost wicked to me, with so many people

needing just a little. But anybody could see that she thinks only of

herself; I don't mean she isn't charitable, but in--in other ways.”

They were late, and the main floor was being emptied of a small crowd

moving into the dining-room. There the long table of the club dinner

reached from end wall to wall; and, with the scraping of chairs, a

confusion of voices, the places were filled. Lee found himself between

Bemis Fox, a younger girl familiar enough at the dances but whose

presence had only just been recognized, and Mrs. Craddock, in Eastlake

for the winter. Anette was across the board, and her lips formed the

query, “The first dance?”

Lee Randon nodded; he was measurably fond of her; he usually enjoyed a

party at which he found Anette. That she liked him was very evident; not

desperately, but enough to dispose of most restraint; she repeated to

Lee what stories, formal and informal, men told her, and she asked his

advice about situations always intimate and interesting.

The flood of voices, sustained on cocktails, rose and fell, there

were challenges down the length of the table and quickly exchanged

confidences. Bemis, publicly ingenuous, laid a light eager hand on his

arm, and Mrs. Craddock answered a question in a decided manner. The

dinner, Lee saw, was wholly characteristic of the club and its members:

they had all, practically, known each other for years, since childhood;

meeting casually on the street, in the discharge of a common living,

their greetings and conversation were based on mutual long familiarity

and recognized facts; but here, at such dances, they put on, together

with the appropriate dress, a totally other aspect.

An artificial and exotic air enveloped whatever they did and said--hardy

perennials, Lee thought, in terms Fanny's rather than his, they were

determined to transform themselves into the delicate and rare flowers

of a conservatory. Women to whom giggling was an anomaly giggled

persistently; others, the perfect forms of housewife and virtue, seemed

intent on creating the opposite engaging impression; they were all

seriously, desperately, addressed to a necessity of being as different

from their actual useful fates as possible.

The men, with the exception of the very young and the perpetually young,

were, Lee Randon knew, more annoyed than anything else; there was hardly

one of them who, with opportunity, would not have avoided the dinner as

a damned nuisance; scarcely a man would have put his stamp of approval

on that kind of entertainment. It was the women who engineered it, the

entire society of America, who had invented all the popular forms of

pleasure; it was their show, for the magnifying of their charms and the

spectacle of their gay satins and scented lace; and the men came,

paid, with a good humor, a patience, not without its resemblance to

imbecility. Women, Lee continued, constantly complained about living in

a world made by men for men; but the truth of that was very limited:

in the details, the details which, enormously multiplied, filled life,

women were omnipotent. No man could withstand the steady friction, the

inexhaustible wearing, of feminine prejudice; forever rolled in the

resistless stream of women's ambition, their men became round and smooth

and admirable, like pebbles. This, he saw, in Fanny's loving care, was

happening to him: she had spun him into the center of a silken web--

“You are not very polite,” Mrs. Craddock said.

“Are you a mind-reader,” he replied, “or haven't I heard you?”

“It doesn't matter,” she explained, “but you were so far away.”

He told her something of what had been in his thoughts, and she rewarded

him with a swift speculative interest. “I hadn't realized you were so

critical about your guinea hen,” she acknowledged. “Well, if what you

say is true, what can you do about it?”

“Nothing,” Lee returned non-committally; “I am comfortable.” This, he

instantly decided, sounded unfair to Fanny, and he substituted happy.

Mrs. Craddock obviously was not interested in the change. “I get as

tired of this as you do,” she asserted abruptly; “it's like being on a

merry-go-round someone else started and can't stop. You have no idea how

we get to hate the tunes.”

“But you mustn't forget the chance of catching a gold ring,” he reminded

her.

“It's brass,” Mrs. Craddock asserted.

The orchestra began in the other room and, though dinner was not over,

there were breaks in the table, couples dancing beyond. Anette rose, and

Lee Randon, taking her into his arms, swept out from the doorway.

“What was she talking about?” Anette demanded. “You,” he replied

experimentally. “I like her; experience has brought her some wisdom; and

she knows men, too.”

“God knows she ought to,” Anette's face was close to his, and he

caught the flash of malice in her eyes. Conscious of the flavor of an

acceptable flattery he didn't let this disturb him. “What a marvelous

dance,” she proceeded; “there must be twenty men over. But I like it

better when the porch isn't inclosed, and you can sit on the bunkers.”

How was it that she contrived to make nearly everything she said stir

his imagination? Anette had the art of investing the most trivial

comments with a suggestion of license. It was a stimulating quality, but

dangerous for her--she was past thirty with no sign of marriage on

the horizon. He wondered if she really had thrown her slipper over the

hedge? It wasn't important, Lee decided, if she had. How ludicrous it

was to judge all women, weigh their character, by the single standard

of chastity. But this much must be admitted, when that convention of

morality was broken it had no more significance than the fragments of

a coconut shell. The dance came to an end and they returned to their

vanilla mousse, coffee and cigarettes.

Some of the men were leaning over the table, drunk and noisy; a woman's

laugh was shrill, senseless. Senseless! That, for Lee Randon, described

the whole proceeding. He had looked forward to the dance with a happy

anticipation, and, now that it was here, even before he had come, he

was out of key with it. The efforts of the people about him to forget

themselves were stiff and unconvincing; their attitudes were no more

than masks held before their faces; there wasn't a genuine daring

emotion, the courage of an admitted thrill, to be found. And then, as if

to mock his understanding, he saw Peyton Morris with such a desperately

white face bent over Mina Raff that he had an impulse to reprove him for

his shameless exposure.

Instead, he cut in on their dancing and carried her to the other end of

the floor. “I don't know why you did that,” she complained; “you don't

like me. But you can dance, and with Peyton it's a little like rushing

down a football field. There! Shall we drop the encore and go outside?

My wrap is on a chair in the corner.”

* * * * *

“I don't go to parties,” she explained; “I am only here on Anette's

account. That was Oscar Hammerstein's idea--he wouldn't let his

actresses even ride in a public car; he said that mystery was a part

of their value, and that people wouldn't pay to see them if they were

always on the streets. Beside, I am tired all the time; you can't

possibly know how hard I work; a hundred times harder than you, for

instance.”

“I've been told that about moving pictures.”

“The glare of the silver-foil reflectors is unbearable,” she looked up,

with a pointed and famous effect. “But you don't like me?”

“I do; aside from that, though, I'm not sure; probably because you are

so remote and cold.”

“Thank God!” she replied. “You haven't stopped to think where I'd be

if I weren't. And yet, no one, in their work, is supposed to be more

emotional. It's funny, and I don't pretend to understand. The trouble

with me is that I have no life of my own: ever since I was sixteen

I've done what directors told me, for the public; it is time I had some

private feelings.”

“It must be a nuisance,” he agreed.

Another dance began, but neither of them stirred; from where Lee sat the

long doors were panels of shifting colors and movement. The music

beat, fluctuated, in erratic bars. A deep unhappiness possessed him,

an appalling loneliness that sometimes descended on him in crowds. Even

Fanny, the thought of his children, could not banish it. Above the drum

he thought he could hear the sibilant dissatisfaction of the throng

striving for an eternity of youth. The glass about the porch, blotted

with night, was icy cold, but it was hot within; the steam pipes were

heated to their full capacity, and the women's painted and powdered

faces were streaked--their assumption of vitality and color was running

from them.

“Hideous,” Mina Raff said with a small grimace. She had the strange

ability of catching his unexpressed thoughts and putting them into

words. “Women,” she went on, “spend all their money and half their lives

trying to look well, and you'd suppose they would learn something, but

they don't.”

“What do women dress for?” he demanded; “is it to make themselves

seductive to men or to have other women admire and envy them?”

“Both,” she answered, “but mostly it's a sort of competition with men

for the prize. I'll tell you something about us if you like--we are

not made of sugar and spice and other pleasant bits, but only of two:

prostitute and mother. Not, of course, separately, or in equal parts;

some of us have more of one, others more of the other. That girl across

the table from you is all prostitute, the married woman you were talking

to is both, quite evenly divided; your wife is a mother, even with her

remarkable eyes.” She stopped his obvious inquiry:

“I am an artist, and no one has yet discovered what that is. Do you

remember the straw you used to get with a glass of soda water? You see,

often I think I'm like that, a thing for bright colors to pour through.

It's very discouraging. There is Peyton, and he'll want to dance.” She

rose, slipping out of her cloak.

Lee Randon saw Fanny not far away, and he dropped into a chair beside

her. “Well,” he asked, “how is it going?”

“It seems all right,” she told him, with one of her engaging smiles. “I

was surprised that you talked so long to Mina Raff; I had the idea you

didn't like her.” Women, he reflected, were uncanny. “Three women are

just plastered up in the dressing-room,” she continued; “Sophie Tane

ruined her dress completely, and Crystal Willard has been sobbing for

an hour. Lee, there are horrid bruises on her arm--do you think he is

brutal?”

He told her not to bother about the Willards, and then rose to get a

chair for Claire Morris. “Peyton is simply fascinated,” Claire asserted

lightly. “This Mina ought to have something handsome for giving him such

a splendid time. She is a lovely wench, Lee.”

“You have it over her like a tent, Claire,” he insisted; “you're lovely

and human both.”

“Thank you, darling; I'm human, fast enough, now that the drink is

dying. I believe for the first time in my life I am ready to leave

a dance before the last flourish of the music. Fanny, we are getting

older; it's hideous but so. We're getting on, but our young men are

gayer every day.”

Fanny Randon's smile, her expression, were secure.

This made Lee restive, and, patting her hand, he left to dance with

Alice Lucian. “When this is over,” she informed him, “we'll get Anette

and George, and go out to my car. There is a Thermos bottle of cocktails

hidden under the seat.” The girl who had sat at Lee's right was dancing

with a tall fair-haired boy in a corner. Entirely oblivious of the rest

of the room, they were advancing two matched steps and then retreating,

their eyes tightly shut and cheeks together. A man fell in the middle

of the floor, catching his partner's skirt and tearing it from the

waistband. Everywhere the mad effort at escape!

Lee Randon lost his impression of the triviality of the occasion: they

all seemed desperately searching for that something he had lost and

which was overwhelmingly important to him; and all the while the music

stuttered and mocked and confused a tragic need. Or it was like a

momentary release from deadly confinement, a respite that, by its rare

intoxication, drove the participants into forms of incredulous cramped

abandon. Positively, he thought, they were grasping at light, at color,

at the commonplace sounds of a few instruments, as though they were

incalculable treasures. Alice, when she danced, held her head back with

eyes half closed; and suddenly, with her mouth a little parted, she,

too, had a look of Cytherea, a flash of the withheld beauty which filled

him with restlessness.

It startled him, and, sub-consciously, his arm tightened about her. She

responded immediately, with an accelerated breath, and the resemblance

was gone. Greatly to his relief, a man cut in on them, and once more he

found himself dancing with Anette. She asked him, in a murmurous warmth,

if he liked her, at all. And, with a new and surprising, a distasteful,

sense of lying, he replied that he did, tremendously. No, a feeling in

him, automatic and strange, responded--not Anette! He wanted to leave

her, to leave everyone here, and go. For what? At the same time he

realized that he would stay, and go out, drink, in the Lucians' car. He

had a haunting impression, familiar to him in the past weeks, that he

was betraying an essential quality of his being.

Yet along with this his other consciousness, his interest in Anette,

lingered; it existed in him tangibly, a thing of the flesh, not to be

denied. She was all prostitute, Mina Raff had said, using the word in

a general sense rather than particularly, without an obvious condemning

morality. Indeed, it might easily be converted into a term of praise,

for what, necessarily, it described was the incentive that forever drove

men out to difficult accomplishment, to anything rather than ease. Good

or bad, bad or good--which, such magic or maternity, was which?

“What are you thinking about?”

“It would take years to tell you.”

“I wish ... you might; but I didn't mean to say that, to let you know--”

“You didn't let me know anything,” he broke into her period impatiently.

“If we get on together isn't that enough? It's really not necessary

to hide ourselves behind a lot of pretentious words. And what we feel

tonight hasn't a thing to do with tomorrow; probably then we'll be

entirely different; how can it matter?”

“It does, though, because you might hate me tomorrow for being myself

tonight. What you think of me has to be big enough to guard against

that. You hurt me, Lee, very much, talking in that way.”

* * * * *

Alice Lucian, with George Willard, passed them and nodded significantly

toward the entrance. “You will need a cloak,” Lee told Anette;

“it's blowing colder and colder.” She vanished up the stairs, to

the dressing-rooms, while Lee stood waiting with Willard. He didn't

especially like the latter, a man with an exuberant loud friendliness, a

good nature, that served as a cover for a facilely predatory sensuality.

He was continually taking hold of feminine arms, bending close over

dinner dresses; and he used--with a show of humorous frankness--his long

knowledge of the girls of Eastlake as a reason for kissing them on every

possible occasion.

Anette and Alice appeared, with their wraps turned to exhibit the silk

linings, bright like their dresses; and, at a favorable moment, they

slipped out into the malice of the wind beating on them from the

darkness. Anette was pressed tightly against Lee, Alice and George

Willard were vaguely ahead; and, after a short breathless distance,

they were in the protection of the shed. The Lucians' automobile had

an elaborate enclosed body: shutting the doors they were completely

comfortable, unobserved and warm. “No,” Alice directed, “don't put on

the light; I can find it. There! We'll have to use the cap for a glass.”

The aluminum top of the bottle was filled and refilled; the frigid

gin and orange juice brought Lee Randon a glow of careless well-being,

irresponsibility.

The others had gone to the front seat, where they were squeezed into a

remarkably small space. Anette sat leaning forward, her chin propped in

her left hand and the right lightly resting on Lee's knee. A loose board

in the shed kept up an exasperating clatter. A match flared and Willard

lighted a cigarette. It was curious about Alice--only in the last year,

and for no reason Lee could discover, had she done things such as

this. Perhaps, with no children, and the money Warner had accumulated

comparatively lately, she hadn't enough to do. Of course, Warner, a

splendid individual, could not be called entertaining; he was totally

absorbed in his business, often away at the wood-pulp mill, in the

Laurentian Mountains, in which he had a large interest.

Warner Lucian had nearly all the principal virtues--integrity,

generosity, courage, and he was as single in mind as Willard was

dubious; but, in spite of so much, it was clear that he had begun

to weary Alice. She was publicly indifferent to him, careless of his

wishes; she had even complained to Lee about her husband's good conduct,

explaining that if he would only have what she termed an affair he would

be more human.

“I am still very cross at you.” Anette spoke out of a gloom in which her

face was barely distinguishable. “You took all the niceness out of our

friendship and made it seem horrid; just as though you had pulled off my

clothes; I--I haven't the same feeling about you.”

His effort at honesty, at discovering the mystery of profound disturbing

needs, had been vain. Gathering Anette in his arms Lee kissed her.

She rested there for a moment; then, with her hands against his chest,

pushed him away. “I can't, now,” she told him; “somehow it's all

spoiled. It seemed as though you were studying me disapprovingly. I'm

not just bad, you know.”

“I don't think you are bad at all,” he replied irritably; “you brought

that into it. Why, in the name of heaven, should I?”

“Fanny doesn't like me,” she said at a tangent.

“Who put that in your head?”

“Fanny. She's hardly civil.”

“If you mean she's jealous, she isn't.”

“You hardly need to add that. Of course, I realize Fanny Randon couldn't

be jealous of me. Good Lord, no! Why should she be? No one would give me

a thought.”

Anette, wholly irrational, was furious. Damn women, anyway! It was

impossible to get along with them, since they hadn't a grain of reason.

He was superior to her temper, indifferent to it, because he was

indifferent to her. Suddenly the charm she had had for him was gone, the

seductiveness dissolved, leaving only Anette, a fairly good-looking

girl he had known for a great while. His warm response to her was dead;

whatever she had aroused and satisfied, or left in suspense, no longer

contented him. The memory of his interest in her, the thought he had

expended, was now a cause of surprise, incomprehensible. Lee wanted to

return to the club house and Fanny.

There was an obscure indication of Alice's hands raised in the

rearrangement of her hair. George Willard half turned, facing the rear

of the car. “I can't see much,” he said, “but it is evident that you

two have been fighting. Why don't you live in peace and happiness? The

trouble's all with Lee, too, you don't have to tell me that, Anette; he

is too cursed cantankerous; and it would serve him right if you'd come

up here with us.”

Anette opened the door and an icy draft swept about their knees. “Not

yet,” Willard begged; “we won't be missed.”

“You may stay as long as you want,” Anette replied, “but I am going

back.” Positively her voice bore a trace of tears. What, what was it all

about? It was Alice who decided that they should return together: “The

bottle's empty, my hair net is fixed for the third time, and we had

better. You get out, George, please. No, I told you.”

Lee Randon welcomed the solid rushing of the wind; it swept in full

blast across the open of the golf course and made walking precarious.

Anette was lost, forgotten. If the chill air could only take the fever,

the desire, out of his mind and blood! He wished that he might be

absorbed into the night, the storm, become one with its anonymous force,

one with the trees he heard laboring on their trunks. Instead of the

safety of being a part of nature he felt that, without directions, he

had been arbitrarily set down on earth, left to wander blindly with no

knowledge of his destination or its means of accomplishment.

Fragments of a dance measure were audible, and he returned to the

pounding music, the heat, the perceptibly chlorinated perfumes and

determined activity. He went at once in search of his wife; she had

apparently not moved from the chair in which he had left her. Meeting

her slightly frowning, questioning expression he told her simply,

without premeditation or reserve, that he had been out in an automobile.

Fanny was obviously not prepared for his candor, and she studied him

with the question held on her lifted face. Then banishing that she

proceeded to scold him:

“You know how I hate you to do such things, and it seems precisely as

though my wish were nothing. It isn't because I am afraid of how you'll

act, Lee; but I will not let you make a fool of yourself. And that,

exactly, is what happens. I don't want women like Anette to have

anything on you, or to think you'll come whenever they call you. I can't

make out what it is in your character that's so--so weak. There simply

isn't any other name for it. I don't doubt you, Lee,” she repeated, in

a different, fuller voice, “I know you love me; and I am just as certain

you have never lied to me. I'm sure you haven't, in spite of what the

girls say about men.”

He was cut by an unbearably sharp, a knife-like, regret that he had

ever, with Fanny, departed from the utmost truth. Lee Randon had a

sudden vision, born of that feeling returning from the shed, of the

illimitable tranquility, the release from all triviality, of an honesty

beyond equivocation or assault. Fanny, in her way, possessed it; but

that, he saw, was made vulnerable, open to disaster, through her love

for him. It was necessary, for complete safety, to be entirely insulated

from the humanity of emotions. That condition he instinctively put from

his thoughts as being as undesirable as it was beyond realization. Lee,

with all his vitality, drew away from a conception, a figure, with the

cold immobility of death. After all, he reassured himself, he had never

essentially lied to Fanny; he had merely suppressed some unnecessary

details in order to make their existence smoother. The welcome collapse

of his small affair with Anette proved the wisdom of avoiding the

exaggeration and difficulty of explanations.

“Lee,” Fanny said, changing the direction of their thoughts, “I don't

want to bother you, but I am uneasy about Claire and Peyton. He hasn't

left Mina Raff a minute this evening. And he has such an unhappy

expression, not at all as though he were enjoying himself.”

“I noticed that,” Lee agreed; “but it will do him no good with

Mina--she's a cold potato, career's the only thing in her head.” Then

he remembered what Mina Raff had told him about her individuality, her

personal desire; and he repeated it to his wife.

“I don't think Claire is entirely wise,” she went on; “but you can't

tell her a thing. She listens as sweetly as possible and then says that

she won't interfere with Peyton. Well, someone else will. Claire has too

much reserve, she is too well-bred and quietly superior. You wait and

see if I am not right; life is very vulgar, and it will take advantage

of her.”

“I wonder if you are? Well, as you say, we shall see. If Mina Raff fixes

her mind on him there will be a lot to watch.”

“You must speak to him.”

“Now there,” Lee expostulated, “you make me sick. How--will you tell

me--can I speak to Peyton until he first says something? And when that

happens, as easily as not it may be a cable from Peru. You want to

interfere too much, Fanny, and insist that everybody follow your idea of

right.”

She retired into a silence of wisdom that merely looked down on him. Her

face was troubled, her lips tightly compressed. “What time is it?” she

asked sharply; “the ribbon of my watch is worn out. Oh, we can go home

with decency. It makes me rather sick here.”

He went below, for his hat and coat, and found the room beyond the

lockers, built as an informal café before the era of prohibition,

occupied by a number of men transferring the balance of fulness from a

row of bottles to themselves.

He accepted a drink, more for the purpose of considering Peyton Morris,

moodily abstracted by the table, than for itself. It seemed to Lee that

the young man had actually aged since the cocktail party at his house,

earlier in the evening. Peyton's mouth was hard and sullen; his brow was

corrugated. “We're going home,” Lee told him; “and it seemed to me that

an hour ago Claire was tired.”

“She didn't tell me,” Peyton responded punctiliously; “and certainly

if she's low we'll go too.” He rose promptly, and, with his outer garb,

accompanied Lee Randon. His step was uncertain, and Lee put a hand under

his elbow. “Liquored?” he asked casually.

“Not in my brain,” Peyton Morris returned: “it seems like I could never

get drunk again; but my dam' feet are all over the place. Thanks

for hanging on to me: I have an idea you are going to drop me pretty

quickly.”

“I don't want to question you,” Randon said, “or in any way force

a confidence, but, Peyton, in addition to the relationship, I am

exceptionally fond of Claire; and, since helping you is practically the

same thing as helping her--”

“I wish to Christ I had been sunk in the North Sea,” Morris broke in

bitterly.

They were up the stairs and standing on the emptied floor of an

intermission. Fanny, prepared to leave, was gazing about for him.

“You've been an age,” she cried to Lee; “and, Peyton, Claire is at last

looking for you; although she'd kill me for saying it. You had better go

outside a minute, first, and clear your head.”

He came very near to her, slightly swaying. “Fanny, you are a darling,

but you are hard; you are hard as the Commandments.”

“That is not very kind, Peyton,” she protested; “but I have some common

sense.”

“Haven't you any uncommon sense?” he begged. “That's what I want. A

little just now might save everything.”

“You must try to find out,” she informed him; “I think I have been

successful with Lee; anyhow he ought to say so.”

“I do,” Lee Randon asserted quickly. “Fanny is wonderful. If I'm of no

use go to her.”

“You don't know,” Peyton muttered; “you can have no idea.”

“What in the world was he talking about?” she asked Lee in the

automobile.

“Peyton is in love with Mina Raff,” he admitted shortly, in a pressure

of conflicting emotions.

“Lee!” she exclaimed; “are you sure? Did he say so? That is simply

frightful.”

“I imagine it's worse than you realize.”

“Do you mean--”

“Nothing actual yet,” he interrupted her impatiently; “perhaps

nothing you would bother about. But you'd be wrong. It's all in his

thoughts--some damned spoiled ideal, and as dangerous as possible.”

“Poor Claire,” she said.

“Of course, that's the thing to say,” he agreed. “The man is always a

criminal in such situations.”

“You are not trying to defend him?” she asked quietly.

“Maybe I am; I don't know. After all, we are jumping at conclusions;

Peyton was drunk. But, for heaven's sake, if either of them comes to you

don't just be moral. Try to understand what may have happened. If you

lecture them they will leave you like a shot.”

Fanny was driving, and she moved one hand from the wheel to his cheek.

“It isn't us, anyhow, Lee; and that is really all I care for. We are

closer than others, different. I don't know what I'd do if you should

die first--I couldn't move, I couldn't go on.”

“You would have the children,” he reminded her.

“They are nothing compared with you.” It was the only time she had made

such an admission, and it moved him profoundly. It at once surcharged

him with gratitude and an obscure disturbance.

“You mustn't pin so much to me,” he protested; “you ought to think of a

hundred other things.”

“I would if I could; I often try, but it is impossible. It is terrible

to care for a man the way I do for you; and that's why I am so glad you

are what you are: silly at times, ridiculously impressionable, but not

at all like George Willard, or Peyton Morris.”

He had an overwhelming impulse to explain himself in the most searching

unsparing detail to Fanny, the strange conviction that in doing it he

would anticipate, perhaps escape, grave trouble. Lee Randon realized,

however, that he would have to begin with the doll, Cytherea; and the

difficulty, the preposterousness, of trying to make that clear to his

wife, discouraged and kept him silent. No woman, and least of any the

one to whom he was married, could be trusted to understand his feeling,

his dissatisfaction in satisfaction, the restlessness at the heart of

his peace.

Fanny went up at once, but he lingered, with a cigar, in the living

room. A clock struck one. A photograph of Claire with her bridesmaids,

Peyton and his ushers, on a lawn, in the wide flowered hats of summer

and identical boutonnières, stood on a table against the wall; and

beyond was an early girlish picture of Fanny, in clothes already

absurdly out of mode. She had a pure hovering smile; the aspect of

innocence time had been powerless to change was accentuated; and her

hands managed to convey an impression of appeal. He had been, in the

phrase now current, crazy about her; he was still, he told himself

strictly. Well, he was ... yet he had kissed Anette; not for the first

time, either; but, he recognized, for the last. He was free of that!

A space, a phase, of his life was definitely behind him. A pervading

regret mingled with the relief of his escape from what he had finally

seen as a petty sensuality. The little might, in the sequence, be safer,

better, than the great. But he vigorously cast off that ignominious

idea. A sense of curious pause, stillness, enveloped Lee and surprised

him, startled him really, into sitting forward and attentive. The wind

had dropped, vanished into the night and sky: the silence without was as

utter as though Lee Randon were at the center of a vacuum.