II

On Saturday morning Lee telephoned to his office, found nothing that

required his immediate attention there and, the brief-case again in

evidence, stayed at Eastlake. Fanny, too, with her hair severely plain

and an air of practical accomplishment, was occupied with her day book.

She kept this faithfully; but Lee couldn't decide whether the obvious

labor or her pleasure in the accomplishment were uppermost. She

addressed the day book with a frowning concentration, supplementary

additions and subtractions on stray fragments of paper, which at times

brought him with an offer of assistance to her shoulder. But this she

resolutely declined--she must, she insisted, maintain her obligation

along with his. However, Fanny, like all other women, he thought, was

entirely ignorant of the principle of which money was no more than a

symbol: she saw it not as an obligation, or implied power, but as an

actuality, pouring from a central inexhaustible place of bright ringing

gold and crisp currency.

However, Fanny had always been accustomed to the ease of its possession,

familiar with it; and that had stamped her with its superiority of

finish. How necessary, he continued, money was to women; or, rather, to

the women who engaged his imagination; and women were usually the first

consideration, the jewelled rewards, of wealth. As he visualized, dwelt

on, them, their magnetic grace of feeling and body was uppermost: sturdy

utilitarian women in the kitchen, red-faced maids dusting his stairs,

heavily breasted nurses, mothers, wives at their petty accounts--he

ended abruptly a mental period escaping from the bounds of propriety.

What he meant, all that he meant, was that beauty should be the main

consideration. Lee applied himself to far different values; and, before

he had finished, lunch was ready.

“I have been thinking half the morning about Claire and Peyton,” Fanny

told him; “I do feel that we exaggerated the situation last night; it

all seemed more immediate, bigger, than it will turn out. Heavens, as

you said, they can't do anything, nothing can happen.”

He was still inclined to believe that. “There is a tremendous lot of

talk and no result; yes--no one really does a thing. They want to, and

that's all it comes to.”

Fanny cast a glance of repressed attention at him across a lower

center-piece. “If you could be whatever you wanted, what and where, what

would you choose?” she asked.

“Here, with you and the children,” his voice replied without hesitation.

The youth of her expression was happily stained by a flush. He meant it,

Lee told himself sharply. But about Peyton--

“Of course, he was drunk last night, and he said nothing conclusive; he

was only wretchedly unhappy--wished he had been killed in the war and

all the romantic rest.”

“It is too much for me,” Fanny decided generally; “but I am glad that

I was young when I was; being alive was quite simple then. I am

comparatively young, Lee, 'way under forty--well, two years--but you

can't realize how things have changed in such a short while. The women

we knew didn't even smoke then. Wasn't it only five or six years ago

they were first allowed to in nice cafés? And, not simply that, men

didn't, either, when they were with us. We used to go to Cape May; they

called the dances hops; and do you, oh, do you, remember the bathing

suits?”

“I am not so certain about any great change,” he objected. “I seem to

recall--”

“Horrid people will always be horrid!” she exclaimed. “I knew one or two

very fast girls; but they were different about it from now, it was only

whispered around and condemned, and it's shouted out today. I wish I had

known you sooner; I would have done a lot better than your mother. I'd

like to have had you, Lee, as a little boy; but I suppose you're enough

that yet.”

His opposition to Fanny's maternal manner, directed at him, was stronger

than customary; she seemed to accept in herself every responsibility for

him; as though, whenever his actions were unfortunate, it had been

due to her imperfect control. With practically no experience of life,

guarded from its threatening aspects, her attitude was that, not without

patience, she brought him with relative safety through a maze in which

otherwise he'd be lost. This was evident now in what he felt to be the

complacency of her voice and expression; and a perverse impulse grew in

him to combat and shatter her blind satisfaction. Lee subdued this, in

the merest decency; but the effort left him thoroughly irritated. He

found, finally, an outlet for his annoyance in the restlessness of

Helena; and he ordered her from the table.

This show of paternal discipline Fanny met with lowered eyes and a

silence that endured until Gregory had walked sedately from the room;

then she reminded Lee that he must never, absolutely never, correct his

children when he was in an ill temper.

“That's nonsense,” he returned shortly; “you ought to see that because

it's impossible. Even theoretically I don't agree with you--a child can

understand a punishment in which there is some warmth. You are dealing

with a little animal and not a reasonable being.” To this Fanny replied

that her children were not animals.

“Really, Fanny, you don't know what you are talking about,” he asserted;

“we are all, men and women and children and giraffes, animals. You might

look that up in the dictionary.”

“I haven't any need to,” she observed, with a calmness that further

tried him. “If the dictionary says that it isn't a very good one. And

if you are trying to tell me that Helena and Gregory are no better than

giraffes you're sillier than usual.”

“That isn't in the least what I said,” Lee retorted, with widely

separated words. “I wasn't speaking of the comparative but of the

absolute. It is a fact that we are animals, more responsible and with

greater powers than the others, but animals, animals.”

“Then what is an animal?” Fanny demanded.

“A mammal.”

A marked expression of distaste invaded her. “It has a nasty sound,” she

admitted with her instinctive recoiling from life. “I don't see how we

got on this subject anyhow, it's too much like sex. It seems you are

able to discuss nothing else.”

“It is only nasty in your mind,” he declared.

“That's exactly like you, you all over, to blame things on me. It's

convenient, I must say, but not fair nor true: it was you who got in a

wicked temper and sent Helena, who was feeling miserable, away.”

“You always say the children are sick when they misbehave.”

“I wish I could be as sure of you as I was of that,” she answered

quickly; “for instance, when you go out in automobiles at the dances

with women.”

“Now, we are beginning,” he told her with emphasis; “we never had an

argument that didn't degenerate into this; and I'm sick of it.”

“I thought I was the one who was sick of it,” Fanny complained; “I

wonder that I don't just let you go.”

“I wish you would,” he said, rising; “I give you my word, I'd rather

be damned comfortably than have this endless trouble.” In a position of

unassailable quiet behind his papers he told himself that the scene with

Fanny had been particularly vain because, underneath, he agreed with

her opinion about the casual expression of small emotions; he no longer

wanted it any more than she did. Yes, at last they were one there. And

yet he felt further from her even than before--whatever his marriage

hadn't satisfied, that he had stilled in minor ways, was now without

check. The truth was that it had increased, become more serious,

insistent.

The tangible facts, the letters and memoranda, before him, retreated and

came back to his consciousness. Tobacco worms had been boring through

his cigars, and destroyed a third of the box. Helena passed, affecting

a grievance out of any proportion to its cause in him. Outside, the

country was flooded with a deceptive golden radiance; and he remembered,

suddenly, that Alice Lucian had told him to bring Fanny to the Club and

a tea that afternoon, which she was giving for Mina Raff. He repeated

this to his wife, in a conciliatory regret at his forgetfulness; and she

replied that if he cared to go she would come over later for him in the

car. Lee, standing at a window, thought he wouldn't; but, adding

that Peyton would be there, he decided that, in view of the possible

developments, his presence might be wise.

* * * * *

The early gloom gathered familiarly in the long main room of the

clubhouse; the fire cast out fanwise and undependable flickering

light upon the relaxed figures; it shone on tea cups, sparkled in rich

translucent preserves, and glimmered through a glass sugar bowl. It was

all, practically, Lee Randon reflected, as it had been before and would

be again. How few things, out of a worldful, the ordinary individual

saw, saw--that was--to comprehend, to experience: a limited number of

interiors, certain roads and streets, fields and views. He made his way

through life blinded to the customary and unaware of the strange; summer

was hot and winter, usually, cold; the spring became green under

rain; winds blew and the leaves fell in fall--of how much more was he

conscious?

It was the same with regard to people; he, Lee Randon, knew a

great many, or rather, he could repeat their names, recognize their

superficial features at sight. But to say that he actually knew

them--that was nonsense! Why, he was almost totally ignorant of himself.

How much could he explain of Fanny's late state of mind? She had done

all that was possible to make it clear to him; with little result. Fanny

was an extraordinarily honest person; or, damn it, she seemed to be. He

had a reputation for truthfulness; but how much of what was in his mind

would he admit to his wife? The discrepancy between what he appeared

and what he felt himself to be, what he thought and what published, was

enormous, astounding.

There, as well, was Peyton Morris; Lee would have sworn that he

understood him thoroughly--a character as simple, as obvious as Fanny's.

But here was Morris seated with Mina Raff on the stairs to the upper

floor, beyond the radius of the fire; and, though they were not ten feet

away, he could not hear a word of what they were saying. At intervals

there was an indistinct murmur, nothing more. Claire, at Lee Randon's

side, was sitting with her chin high and a gaze concentrated on the

twisting flames: talking generally had fallen into a pause.

The door from without opened, Fanny entered, and there was a momentary

revival of animation. “Is Lee here?” she demanded; “but I know he is.

The fire is just as attractive at home, yet, even with nothing to do,

he'll hardly wait to give it a poke. Where's Peyton?”

“On the stairs,” someone answered casually.

There was a movement, and Mina Raff approached. “It's so hot here,” she

asserted.

“It is warmer out,” Fanny informed her; “I wonder what the weather is in

New York?”

“I can't say, I'm sure; but I shall discover tomorrow morning. I have to

be back as early as possible. Then--work, work, work.”

“Mina has been made a star,” Peyton Morris announced. But he stopped

awkwardly, apparently conscious of the warmth, the largeness, in his

voice. Fanny whispered to Lee that it was quite too outrageous. In

return, he asked, “What?” and, indignant, she drew away from him.

The conversation died again. Lee Randon could see Mina Raff's profile,

held darkly against the glow; her lips and chin were firm. “Where,”

Anette asked her, “shall you stay when you get back--at Savina Grove's?”

No, Mina replied, her hours would be too long and uncertain to allow

that; probably she would be at the Plaza. Lee had heard the Groves' name

mentioned before in connection with Mina Raff; and he made an effort

to recall the reason. The Groves--it was the William Loyd Groves--were

rather important people, financially and socially; and one of them, yes,

that was it, was related to Mina, but which he didn't know.

More came back to him: Mina Raff's parents had died when she was a young

girl, and the Groves had rescued her from the undistinguished evils of

improvidence; she had lived with them until, against their intensest

objections, she had gone into moving pictures. Probably the Groves'

opposition had lasted until Mina's success; or, in other words, their

support had been withheld from her through the period when it had been

most needed.

Yes, the girl had a determined mouth. If he, Lee Randon, had followed

his first inclinations--were they in the way of literature?--how

different his life would have been. Mina Raff had been stronger, more

selfish, than her environment: selfishness and success were synonymous.

Yet, as a human quality, it was more hated, more reviled, than any

other. Its opposite was held as the perfect, the heavenly, ethics of

conduct. To be sacrificed, that was the accepted essence of Christ;

fineness came through relinquishment. He didn't believe it, he told

himself fiercely; something deep, integral, in him revolted absolutely.

Mina Raff had been wholly justified; the very people who had thrown

all their weight against her admitted it fully. It was only when such a

self-belief was without compensating result, value, that it was wrong.

But who could say what any outcome would be? Some people took the chance

and others didn't; he had not. Then the question came up of whether he

had not failed as it was? No one would agree with him that it might be

failure; he hadn't called it that. Suddenly, vehemently, he wished

that he could grow old at once, in a second; anything to quiet the

restlessness at his heart.

Lee had a conviction that he ought to decide the case of the individual

against the world, the feeling that it was of the greatest importance

to him; but for centuries men had considered, without answer, just that.

The thing to do was to live, not to think; for it was possible that

those who thought, weighed causes and results, hardly lived at all in

the sense he meant. All the people he knew were cautious before they

were anything else; they existed primarily for their stomachs. The

widely advertised beauty of self sacrifice was golden only when it

adorned like a halo the heads of others. That was natural, inevitable

to the struggle for survival; it didn't answer Lee's question, which, he

felt, was of the spirit rather than the body.

“It's getting late,” Fanny said briskly. There was a general movement,

sighs and the settling of skirts. The lights were switched on, and the

fire, that had been a source of magic, became nothing more than ugly

grey charring logs with a few thin tongues of flame. Lee, with his

wife, stopped to say good-bye to Mina Raff; Fanny's manner was bright,

conventional; as palpably insincere to the other woman, Lee was certain,

as it was to him. He said:

“I hope your new picture will go well.”

“Thank you,” she responded, her slight hand lingeringly holding his;

“perhaps you will like me better on the screen than in reality.”

“Could you tell me which was which?”

She hesitated. “Three months ago, yes, but not now; I'm not sure of

myself.”

“That was positively indecent,” Fanny observed afterward; “she is as

bold as brass. I hope I am not as big a fool as Claire.”

“Claire and you are very different,” he told her; “I have an idea that

she is doing whatever is possible. But then we don't know what we

are talking about: it's fairly evident that Peyton and Mina Raff are

interested in each other, they may be in love; and, if they are, what

does that mean? It isn't your feeling for the children or mine for you;

they are both love; yet what is it?”

“It is God in us,” Fanny said gravely; “and keeps us all, Helena and

Gregory and you and me, safely together.”

She seldom spoke to him of religion, but it dwelt closely, vitally,

within her, and not as an inherited abstraction or correct social

observation, but definitely personal in its intercommunication. Lee

Randon had none at all; and in her rare references to it he could only

preserve an awkward silence. That had always been a bar between his

family and himself, particularly with the children: he was obliged

to maintain an endless hypocrisy about the miracles, the dogmas and

affairs, of Sunday school and the church. As a child he had been so

filled with a literal Presbyterian imagery that, when a degree of reason

discarded figures of speech seen as concrete actualities, nothing had

been left. With the lapse of a purely pictorial heaven and hell, the

loss of eternal white choirs and caldrons of the unrepentant, only earth

remained.

* * * * *

He could recall in gloomy detail his early impression of Paradise: it

was a sombre plain floating cloud-like in air, with, doubling through

it, an unspeakable sluggish river of blood; God, bearded and frowning in

the severity of chronic judgment, dominated from an architectural throne

a throng of the saved in straight garments and sandalled feet; and, in

the foreground, a lamb with a halo and an uplifted cross was intent on

the baptism of individuals issuing unaccountably white from the thickly

crimson flood.

Yet his children, in a modified Episcopalian form, were being taught the

same thing: the Mosaic God; Christ Jesus who took unto Himself the sin

of the world; the rugged disciple, St. Peter and the loving disciple,

St. John. The sky, they learned, was the habitation of light-winged

angels. The ark was still reported on its memorable voyage, with its

providential pairs of animals gathered from every zone, but there was

a growing reticence about Jonah. The persistence of such credulity, Lee

thought, was depressing; just as the churches, leaning on the broken

support of a charity they were held to dispense, were a commentary on

the poverty of the minds and spirits of men.

Yes, the necessity of charging Helena and Gregory with such assurances,

their rigid bending into mental forms, large and small, in which he

had no confidence, put Lee outside the solidity of his family. In the

instruction, the influences, widely held paramount in the welding of

polite Christian characters, Fanny was indefatigable--the piece of

silver firmly clasped in the hand for collection, the courtesy

when addressed by elders, the convention that nature, birds, were

sentimentally beneficent. When Gregory brought out these convictions,

lessons, in his indescribably fresh eager tones, Lee listened with a

helpless disapproval.

Everything, it seemed to Lee Randon, increased the position of

self-delusion at the expense of what he felt to be reality. His doubts,

for example, were real; with no will, no effort on his part, they

invaded his mind ceaselessly. Cytherea's disturbing charm was real, as

definite as Fanny's quiet actuality. However, he wasn't interested in

an abstract arraignment of life, but intent only on the truth about

himself. Lee wanted to discharge fully his duty to existence--in the

more inglorious phrase, he didn't want to make a fool of himself--and

yet it was growing more difficult all the while to distinguish folly

from sense.

This affair, if it did exist, of Peyton's with Mina Raff wasn't so

easily determined as Fanny insisted. Perhaps, like his own, Peyton

Morris' life had been restricted by artificial barriers thrown about the

rebellious integrity of his fundamental being. Few children could

stand out against the combined forces of the older world; but it was

conceivable that, later, like a chrysalis, they might burst the hard,

superimposed skin and emerge triumphant.

That damned problem of self-sacrifice!

How much claim had men upon each other? What did children gain who

sacrificed their lives for their parents? It was supposed to bring them

nobility; but, at the same time, didn't it develop in the parents the

utmost callous selfishness; didn't the latter, as their needs were

exclusively consulted, grow more exacting, unreasonable? Was not love

itself the most unreasonable and exacting thing imaginable?

Once surrendered to it, the tyranny of a beloved subject was absolute:

Lee told himself that the emotion he was considering--the most sacred

of earthly ties--ignominiously resembled the properties of fly paper. He

turned abruptly from that graceless thought: it was a great deal warmer,

and a mist, curiously tangible in the night, was rising through the bare

branches of the maple trees.

“I am going to talk to Claire,” Fanny said firmly.

“It would do both of you no good,” he informed her; “besides, you'll

have to take so much for granted.”

“Claire will tell me.”

“I wonder?” They were in their room, preparing for bed; Fanny, with

her hair spread in a thin brown tide over the chaste shoulders of her

nightgown, was incredibly like a girl. The mechanical sweep of her hand

with a brush kept a brief sleeve falling back from the thinness of her

arm. How delicately methodical she was--an indispensable quality in

the repeated trying contacts, the lost privacy, of marriage. So much

depended upon the very elusiveness which the security of possession,

habit, destroyed.

“This love,” he continued his speculations aloud, “isn't at all

understood--we are ignorant about it in spite of endless experience and

reports and poetry. Take us,” he had one of his dangerous impulses of

complete honesty, “before we were married, while we were engaged, we

had an impracticable romantic attraction for each other. I know that

I thought of you all the time, day and night; and, just because you

existed, the whole world was full of prismatic colors; it was as though

an orchestra were playing continually and I were floating on the finest

music. You were like a figure in heaven that drew me up to you.

“Well, that lasted quite a while into our marriage; at first I had

an even greater emotion. Then, as Helena and Gregory were born, it

changed.” Midway in the brushing of her hair Fanny was motionless

and intent. “I don't say it decreased, Fanny, that it lost any of its

importance; but it did change; and in you as well as me. It wasn't

as prismatic, as musical, and there's no use contradicting me. I can

explain it best for myself by saying that my feeling for you became

largely tenderness.”

“Oh!” Fanny exclaimed, in a little lifting gasp; “oh, and that

tenderness,” her cheeks were bright with sudden color, “why, it is no

more than pity.”

“That isn't just,” he replied; “unless you want to speak of pity at its

very best. No, that won't do: my affection for you is made of all our

experiences, our lives and emotions, together. We are tied by a thousand

strings--common disappointments and joy and sickness and hope and pain

and heaven knows what else. We're held by habit, too, and convenience

and the opinion of society. Certainly it is no smaller than the first,”

he argued, but more to himself than to Fanny; “that was nothing but a

state of mind, of spirit; you can't live on music.”

“Don't you think you have said enough for one night?” she asked, in

a calm voice belied by the angry sparkle of her eyes, the faint

irrepressible trembling of her lips. “Do you think I want to hear that

it is only convention and our neighbors that keep you with me? You have

no right to insist that your horridness is true of me, either. I--I

could hear music, if you would let me.” She sank on the little cushioned

bench before her dressing table, where her youthfulness took on a

piercing aspect of misery. Fanny's declaration, not far from tears,

that she was just as she had always been was admirably upheld by her

appealing presence.

The tenderness he had admitted, reduced by a perceptive impatience and

the sense of having been wholly, wilfully, misunderstood, carried him

over to her. He took Fanny, with her face strained away from him, into

his arms. “Don't be an idiot,” he begged softly; “you ought to be used

to my talking by now. Let me go on, it can't come to anything--” She

stiffened in his embrace:

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing, nothing,” he answered shortly, releasing her; “where is all

that certainty you assured me of? If you go on like this I shall never

be able to tell you my thoughts, discuss problems with you; and it seems

to me that's very necessary.”

“It has been lately,” she spoke in a metallic voice; “nothing satisfies

you any more; and I suppose I should have been prepared to have you say

things to me, too. But I'm not; you might even find that I am not the

idiot you suspect.”

“I was giving you a chance to prove that,” he pointed out.

“Now you have discovered the fatal truth you can save yourself more

trouble in the future.” She emphatically switched off a light beside

her, leaving him standing in a sole unsparing illumination. Yet in her

extreme resentment she was, he recognized, rubbing Vaseline into her

finger nails, her final nightly rite. Then there was silence where

once he had kissed her with a reluctance to lose her in even the short

oblivion of sleep.

* * * * *

Throughout Monday, at his office, Lee Randon thought at uncomfortable

intervals of the late incipient scenes with Fanny. They had

quarrels--who hadn't?--but they had usually ended in Fanny shedding some

tears that warmly recemented their deep affections. This latter time,

however, she had not wept--at the point of dissolving into the

old surrender she had turned away from him, both in reality and

metaphorically, and fallen asleep in an unexpected cold reserve. He was

sorry, for it brought into their relationship a definite new quality of

difference. He was aware of the thorough inconsistency of his attitude

toward their marriage; again two opposed forces were present in

him--one, Fanny, as, bound to her, he knew and cherished; and the

other--the devil take the other!

He was organizing a new company, and, figuring impatiently, he pressed

the button for Mrs. Wald, his secretary. She appeared at once and

quietly, her notebook and pencil ready, took a place at his side. “Run

this out, please, Mrs. Wald,” and an involved financial transaction

followed. What he wanted to ascertain was, with a preferred stock

bearing eight per cent at a stated capitalization, and the gift of a

bonus of common, share for share, how much pie would remain to be cut up

between a Mr. Hadly, Sanford, and himself? The woman worked rapidly,

in long columns of minute neat figures. “About thirty-four thousand

dollars, each, Mr. Randon,” she announced almost directly. “Is that

close enough; or do you want it to the fraction?”

“Good enough; send Miss Mathews in.”

Almost anyone on his staff, Lee reflected, knew more about the processes

of his business than he did; he supplied the energy, the responsibility

of the decisions, more than the brains of his organization; and

it perfected the details. The stenographer, Miss Mathews, was very

elaborately blonde, very personable; and, dictating to her, Lee Randon

remembered the advice given him by a large wielder of labor and finance.

“Lee,” he had said, touching him with the emphasis of a finger, “never

play around with an employee or a client.”

He, John Lenning Partins, had been a man of eccentric humors, and--like

all individuals who supported heavy mental burdens, inordinately taxed

their brains--he had his hours, unknown to the investing public, of

erratic, but the word was erotic, conduct. On more than one occasion

he had peremptorily telegraphed for Lee to join him at some unexpected

place, for a party. Once, following a ball at the Grand Opera House, in

Paris, they had motored in a taxi-cab, with charming company, to Calais.

During that short stay in France John Partins had spent, flung variously

away, four hundred thousand dollars.

The industrious, the clerks, efficient women like Mrs. Wald, the

middle-aged lawyers in his office, were rewarded...by a pension. It

was all very strange, upside down: what rot that was about the infinite

capacity for taking pains! He supposed it wouldn't do to make this

public, the tritest maxims were safer for the majority; but it was too

bad; it spread the eternal hypocrisies of living. He asked Miss Mathews:

“You're not thinking of getting married, are you? Because if you do I'll

have your young man deported; I simply won't let go of you.”

“I don't see any signs of it, Mr. Randon,” she replied, half serious and

half smiling; “my mother thinks it's awful, but I'm not in any hurry.

There are men I know, who might like me; they show me a very good time;

but somehow I am not anxious. I guess in a way it's the other married

girls I see: either they housework at home, and I couldn't be bothered

with that; or they are in an office and, somehow, that seems wrong,

too. I want so much,” she admitted; “and with what clothes cost now it's

terrible.”

“Moralists and social investigators would call you a bad girl,” he told

her; “but I agree with you; get your pretty hats and suits, and smart

shoes, as long as you are able. You're not a bit better in a kitchen

than you are here, taking dictation from me; and I am not sure you would

be more valuable at home with a child or two. You are a very unusual

stenographer, rapid and accurate, and you have a good mind in addition

to your figure. Why should you lose all that at once, give it up, for

the accidents of cholera infantum and a man, as likely as not, with a

consumptive lung?”

“But what about love, Mr. Randon? That's what throws me off. Some say

it's the only thing in life.”

“I'm damned if I know,” he admitted, leaning back from his wide

flat-topped desk. “I hear the same thing, and I am rather inclined to

believe it. But I have an idea that it is very different from what most

people insist; I don't think it is very useful around the house; it has

more to do with the pretty hat than with a dishpan. If you fall in

love go after the thing itself, then; don't hesitate about tomorrow

or yesterday; and, above all else, don't ask yourself if it will last;

that's immaterial.”

“You make it sound wild enough,” she commented, rising.

“The wilder the better,” he insisted; “if it is not delirious it's

nothing.”

The road and countryside over which he returned in the motor sedan,

partly frozen, were streaked by rills of muddy surface water; the sky,

which appeared definitely to rest on the surrounding hills, was grey

with a faint suffusion of yellow at the western horizon. It was all as

dreary, as sodden, as possible. Eastlake, appearing beyond a shoulder of

bare woods, showed a monotonous scattering of wet black roofs, raw

brick chimneys, at the end of a long paved highway glistening with steel

tracks.

Lee Randon was weary, depressed: nothing in his life, in any existence,

offered the least recompense for the misfortune of having been born. He

left his car at the entrance of his dwelling; Christopher, the gardener,

came sloshing over the sod to take it into the garage; and, within, he

found the dinner-table set for three. “It's Claire,” his wife informed

him; “she called up not half an hour ago to ask if she could come.

Peyton was away over night, she said, and she wanted to see us.” He went

on up to his room, inattentive even to Claire's possible troubles.

He dressed slowly, automatically, and descended to the fire-lit space

that held Cytherea in her mocking, her becoming, aloofness. In the

brightly illuminated room beyond the hall Helena and Gregory were

playing parchesi--Gregory firmly grasped the cup from which he intently

rolled the dice; Helena shook the fair hair from her eyes and, it

immediately developed, moved a pink marker farther than proper.

“You only got seven!” Gregory exclaimed; “and you took it nine right on

that safety.”

“What if I did?” she returned undisturbed. “I guess a girl can make a

mistake without having somebody yell at her. Your manners aren't very

good.”

“Yes, they are, too,” he asserted, aggrieved; “I have to tell you if

you move to a safety where you don't belong.” He shook the dice from the

cup. “Now, see there--that just brings me to your man, and I can send

him home.”

“I don't care,” Helena informed him; “it's a young sort of game, anyhow.

Now I'm wearing waists and buttoned skirts I'd just as leaves write a

letter to Margaret West with no boys in it at all.”

She left the parchesi board, and crossed the room to the piano, where

she stood turning over sheets of music with a successful appearance of

critical interest. Gregory, silently struggling with the injustice of

this, gazed up with a shadowed brow at Lee. “I was going to beat her,”

he said, “I was almost home, and she went away. She just got up like

nothing was happening.” Helena put in, “Neither there was.” Lee Randon

took her place. “You can beat me instead,” he proposed. His interest

in the game, he felt, was as false as Helena's pretended musical

preoccupation; but he rolled the dice and shifted the counters, under

Gregory's undeviating scrutiny, with the conviction that parchesi was

not conspicuously different from the other more resounding movements of

the world and its affairs. Gregory easily vanquished him, and Lee rose

with a curt, unwarranted nod of dismissal.

* * * * *

Freezing cocktails in the pewter pitcher, in the repetition of minor

duties which, Lee Randon thought, now constituted four-fifths of his

life, he told himself that Claire Morris had never looked better: she

was wearing a dress of a soft negative blue material, high about her

throat, with glimpses of bright embroidery that brought out her darkly

vivid personality. Claire had a slim low-breasted figure, gracefully

broad shoulders; and her face, it might be because of its definite,

almost sharp, outline, held the stamp of decided opinions. Claire's

appearance, he recognized, her bearing, gave an impression of arrogance

which, however, was only superficially true--she could be very

disagreeable in situations, with people, that she found inferior,

brutally casual and unsympathetic; but more privately, intimately, she

was remarkably simple-hearted, free from reserve. She was related to Lee

through her father, a good blood, he told himself; but her mother had

brought her a concentration of what particular vigorous aristocracy--an

unlimited habit of luxury without the responsibility of acknowledged

place--the land afforded.

The drinks had been consumed, the soup disposed of, when Claire said

abruptly, “Peyton is going to leave me.”

Although, in a way, Lee had been prepared for such an announcement, the

actuality upset him extremely. Fanny gasped, and then nodded warningly

toward the waitress, leaving the dining-room; at any conceivable

disaster, he reflected, Fanny would consider the proprieties.

“When did he tell you?” Fanny demanded.

“He didn't,” Claire replied; “I told him. It was a great relief to both

of us.”

“Say what you like outside,” Lee put in vigorously; “but at least with

us be honest.”

“I am, quite,” she assured him; “naturally I don't want Peyton to go--I

happen to love him. And there's Ira. But it was an impossible position;

it couldn't go on, Peyton was absolutely wretched, we both were; and

so I ended it. I laid out all his best silk pajamas so that he'd look

smart--”

“How can you?” Fanny cried; “oh, how can you? It is too wicked, all too

horrible, for words. I don't think you are advanced or superior, Claire,

you failed him and yourself both. It's perfectly amazing to me, after

the men you have met, that you don't know them. You must keep them going

in the right direction; you can't let them stop, or look around, once;

I only learned that lately, but it is so. They haven't an idea of what

they want, and they try everything. Then if you let a man go he is the

first to blame you; it's like winking at murder.”

“How could I keep him when he didn't want to stay?” Claire asked

wearily; “I am not too moral, but I couldn't quite manage that. Then

what you say might do for some men, but not Peyton. You see, he has

always been very pure; all his friends at Princeton were like that; they

were proud of it and very severe on the other. And afterwards, when he

went into the city, it was the same; Peyton would get drunk any number

of times with any number of men, but, as he said, he was off women. The

stage door, it seems, is very old-fashioned now.

“When we were engaged, and he told me that he was really pure, I was

simply mad with happiness. I thought it was such a marvelous thing for

a girl to find. I still think that; and yet, I don't know. If he were

different, had had more experience, perhaps this wouldn't have hit him

so hard. He would have kissed his Mina on the porch, outside the dance,

and come home.”

“As for that Raff woman--” Fanny stopped, at a loss for a term to

express her disgust.

“Why not?” Claire asked. “She wanted Peyton and went after him: he isn't

for her art, I believe, but for herself. I haven't talked to her; I

can't make up my mind about that. Probably it would do no good. Peyton

is splendidly healthy; it won't be necessary to tell her anything about

draughts and stomach bands.”

“Claire, you're utterly, tragically wrong,” Fanny wailed. “I wish I

could shake sense into you. Up to a point this is your fault; you are

behaving in a criminally foolish way.”

“What do you think Claire should do?” Lee asked his wife.

She turned to him, a flood of speech on her lips; but, suddenly, she

suppressed it; the expression, the lines, of concern were banished

from her face. “There is so much,” she replied equably; “they haven't

discussed it enough; why, it ought to take a year, two, before they

reached such a decision. Peyton can't know his mind, nor Claire hers.

And Ira, that darling innocent little child.”

“Damn Ira!” Claire Morris exclaimed.

“You mustn't,” Fanny asserted; “you're not yourself. Mina Raff should

be burned alive, something terrible done to her.” Fanny's voice had the

hard cold edge of fanatical conviction. “If she had come into my house

making trouble.... But that couldn't have happened; I'd have known at

once.”

“You are more feminine than I am,” Claire told her. “I see this in a

very detached manner, as if it didn't concern me. I suppose I can't

realize that it has happened to us. It has! But if you are right, Fanny,

and it's necessary to treat a man like a green hunter, then this was

bound to occur. I couldn't do anything so--so humiliating; he could bolt

sooner or later. I did the best I knew how: I was amusing as possible

and always looked well enough. I never bothered Peyton about himself and

encouraged him to keep as much of his freedom as possible.

“I don't believe in the other,” she said to Fanny Randon in a sharp

accession of rebellion; “it is degrading, and I won't live that way, I

won't put up with it. If he wants to go, to be with Mina Raff, how in

God's name can I stop it? I won't have him in my bed with another woman

in his heart; I made that clear to you. And I can't have him hot and

cold--now all Mina and then the sanctity of his home. I've never had a

house of that kind; it was christened, like a ship, with champagne.

“I have never cared for domestic things. I'd rather wear a dinner-gown

than an apron; I'd a damn sight rather spin a roulette wheel than rock a

cradle. And, perhaps, Peyton wanted a housewife; though heaven knows he

hasn't turned to one. It's her blonde, no bland, charm and destructive

air of innocence. I've admitted and understood too much; but I couldn't

help it--my mother and grandmother, all that lot, were the same way,

and went after things themselves. The men hated sham and sentimentality;

they asked, and gave, nothing.”

Fanny, it was evident, was growing impatient at what was not without its

challenge of her character and expressed convictions. “I do agree with

you, Claire, that we are not alike,” she admitted. Her voice bore a

perceptible note of complacency, of superior strength and position.

“Just last week I was telling Lee that I belonged before the war--things

were so different then, and, apparently, it's only in my house they

haven't changed. We are frightfully behind the times, and you'd be

surprised at how glad we are. It was your mother's father, wasn't it,

who fell in love with the Spanish woman while he was in the Embassy

at Seville? My family weren't people of public connections, although

a great-aunt married Senator Carlinton; but they had the highest

principles.”

“They were lucky,” Claire Morris replied indifferently; “I am beginning

to think it isn't what you have so much as what happens to it. Anyhow,

Peyton is going away with Mina Raff, and I am sorry for him; he's so

young and so certain; but this has shaken him. Peyton's a snob, really,

like the rest of his friends, and Mina's crowd won't have that for a

moment: he can't go through her world judging men by their slang and

by whom they knew at college. I envy him, it will be a tremendously

interesting experience.” If her eyes were particularly brilliant it was

because they were surrounded by an extreme darkness. Her voice, commonly

no more than a little rough in its deliberate forthrightness, was high

and metallic. She gave Lee the heroic impression that no most mighty

tempest would ever see her robbed of her erect defiance. It was at once

her weakness and strength that she could be broken but not bent.

* * * * *

After dinner Claire, who was staying with the Randons until tomorrow,

played picquet with Lee; and his wife, her shapely feet elevated above

the possible airs of the floor, continued to draw threads from the

handkerchiefs she was making for Christmas. Claire played very well and,

at five cents a point, he had to watch the game. On a specially big

hand she piqued and repiqued. “That,” she declared, “will pay you for

caputting me.” The jargon of their preoccupation, “A point of six; yes,

to the ace; paid; and a quatorze, kings,” was the only sound until Fanny

rose, decidedly. “I am going to bed.” She hesitated at the door. “I hope

you'll be comfortable, Claire: I had some club soda and rye put in your

room, since you like it so well. Don't be too late, please, Lee; it

makes you tired starting so early in the morning.”

“You'll have to forgive me,” Claire said, when Fanny had gone; “but I

don't--I never did--like women.”

“Do you think any more of men, now?”

“Heavens, yes. I wish I could find someone to blame for what has

happened, Peyton specially, but I can't, not to save my life. It seems

so hopelessly inevitable. I don't want you to suppose I'm not unhappy,

Lee; or that I care only a little for Peyton. I love him very much; I

needed him, and my love, more than I can explain. As Fanny as good as

told me, I am a wild bird; anything, almost, with what is behind me, may

happen. It was just the irony of chance that this affair caught Peyton,

the immaculate, instead of me. I was awfully glad that I had an anchor

that seemed so strong; in my own faulty way I adored everything I had; I

wanted to be tranquil, and it had a look of security.”

“It isn't over, Claire,” Lee asserted. “I haven't seen that young fool

yet.”

“Please don't bother him; and it's too much to drag out the moralities

on my account.”

“Moralities!” he echoed indignantly, “who said a word about them? I'm

not interested in morals. Lord, Claire, how little you know me. And

as for bothering him, he'll have to put up with that. He has invited a

certain amount of it.”

They forgot the game and faced each other across the disordered cards.

“If I won't argue with him,” she insisted, “you can't. But we needn't

discuss it--he won't listen to you, Peyton's all gone. I never saw such

a complete wreck.”

“He can't avoid it,” Lee went on; “I'll have to do it if it is only for

myself; I am most infernally curious about the whole works. I want to

find out what it's about.”

“If you mean love, he can't tell you; he hasn't had enough experience to

express it. You might do better with me.”

“No, I want it from the man; a woman's feeling, even yours, would do

me no good. You see, this has always been explored, accounted for,

condemned, written about, from the feminine side. Where the man is

considered it is always in the most damnable light. If, in the novels, a

man leaves his home he is a rascal of the darkest sort, and his end is a

remorse no one would care to invite. That may be, but I am not prepared

to say. No, dear Claire, I am not considering it in preparation for

anything; I want to know; that's all.”

“The books are stuff, of course,” she agreed. “The grandfather of mine

who was killed in Madrid--it wasn't Seville--must have had a gorgeous

time: a love affair with one of the most beautiful women alive. It

lasted five months before it was found out and ended; and his wife and

he had been sick of living together. After it was over she was pleased

at being connected with such a celebrated scandal; it made her better

looking by reflected loveliness. She was rather second class, I believe,

and particularly fancied the duchess part.”

“It wouldn't be like that in the current novels, or even in the better:

either your grandparent or the duchess would be a villainous person, and

the other a victim. I'm inclined to think that most of the ideas about

life and conduct are lifted from cheap fiction. They have the look of

it. But that realization wouldn't help us, with the world entirely on

the other side.”

“No, it isn't,” Claire objected; “and it's getting less so all around

us. Perhaps men haven't changed much, yet; but you don't hear the women

talk as I do. I don't like them, as I said; they are too damned skulking

for me; but they are gathering a lot more sense in a short while.”

“I don't agree with you there,” he replied; “you are getting your own

infinitesimal world confused with the real overwhelming majority; you

haven't an idea how it feels and, in particular, of what it thinks

of you, smoking and gambling and damning your fate. It may be largely

envy--personally I am convinced it is--but they have you ticketed

straight for hell just the same.”

“It doesn't interest me.” Claire increasingly showed the strain, the

unhappiness, through which she was parsing. Nor did it him, he ended

lamely, except in the abstract. This at once had the elements of a lie

and the unelaborate truth; he couldn't see how his curiosity applied

to him, and yet he was intent on its solving. The fixed mobile smile of

Cytherea flashed into his thoughts. His perpetual restlessness struck

through him.

His attitude toward the Morrises was largely dictated by his fondness

for Claire. He had determined what, exactly, he would say to Peyton.

Yet, as a fact, he returned to his former assertion to Fanny; the boy

would make it difficult, if not impossible, to discuss such intimate

relationships. And as Claire had pointed out, the very openness

of Peyton's life would make him exceptionally far to reach; he was

particularly youthful in his hardness, his confidence in his acts and

friends and beliefs; yet all that couldn't help but be upset now.

“Fanny will think I have designs on you,” Claire remarked; “go up when

you like. I am not a bit sleepy.”

Lee had no intention of going to bed then, and told her so. It seemed to

him that, perhaps, with Claire, he might discover something that would

set his questioning at rest. Vain delusion. He asked what her plans

were:

“I'll stay in Eastlake for the winter, and, in March, go to Italy, to

give Peyton his divorce--Florence; I lived a while at Arcetri; it's very

lovely.”

He had a momentary experimental vision of a small yellow villa among

the olives of the Florentine hills, of crumbling pink walls with

emerald green lizards along the stones, of myrtles and remarkable

lilies-of-the-valley. Twenty years ago it would have drawn him

irresistibly; but not now; he wanted--where his wants were articulate--a

far different thing. It had nothing to do with Italy, or any other

country; his intentness had been withdrawn from the surfaces of life,

however charming; they had plunged into the profounder mysteries of

being. Lee had gained nothing if not a certain freedom from exterior

circumstance; his implied revolt against trivialities, if it did no

other good, had at least liberated him from the furniture of existence.

However, it had begun to appear that this was not an unmixed blessing;

he had the uncomfortable sensation of having put out, on a limitless

sea, in a very little boat too late to arrive at any far hidden

desirable coast.

Claire shivered, and, discovering that she was cold, he insisted on

her going upstairs. “To my pure sheets,” she said, with a touch of her

familiar daring. Left alone, Lee was depressed by the hour; the room,

his house, seemed strange, meaningless, to him. There was a menace in

the unnatural stillness; Fanny's unfinished handkerchief, her stool,

were without the warmth of familiar association. It might have been a

place into which he had wandered by accident, where he didn't belong,

wouldn't stay. It was inconceivable that, above him, his wife and

children were sleeping; the ceiling, the supine heavy bodies, seemed to

sag until they rested on his shoulders; he was, like Atlas, holding

the whole house up. It was with acute difficulty that he shook off the

illusion, the weight. From outside came the thin howling of a dog, and

it, too, seemed to hold a remote and desperate interrogation.

* * * * *

He slept badly, in short broken stretches, with the Morrises constantly

in his mind; and what, in the slightest dislocation of reality, was

dream and what waking he couldn't determine; at times his vision

seemed to hold both--a door, the irrevocable door, swung open, the end

impended, but he was unable to see the faces of the man and woman;

when he looked anxiously a blind spot intervened. The morning found him

unrefreshed, impatient; and he was glad that his early breakfast was

solitary; Lee didn't want then to see either Claire or Fanny, he was in

no mood to discuss Peyton's seizure. That, it seemed to Lee Randon, was

exactly what had happened to the younger man--Peyton had gone within the

region of a contagious fever that had run through all his blood.

Yet, at dinner, to his surprise, Fanny said very little about what had

entirely occupied their thoughts; she was quiet, reserved; her attitude

was marked by a careful dignity. Her gaze, even more than commonly,

rested on her husband. “I had a wretched night, too,” she told him; “my

head is like a kite. I've thought and thought until my brain aches, it

is so full. But there are some things I decided; and if you don't agree

with them I'm sorry; because, Lee, I am right, I am indeed.”

“Of course you are,” he replied; “but, possibly, only for yourself. I

mean, for instance, that you can't be sure you're right for Claire.”

“No, no, that's just the same as saying there isn't any right or wrong

at all, and you know better. Yes, what I am certain about is duty; you

must do that before everything else. Peyton's duty is to Claire and

their child. It is as clear as this soup. Nothing else matters so much,

or at all. Why, Lee, the world is made up of people doing their duty;

what, I'd like to know, would become of it if they didn't? You don't

seem to realize it, but there are loads of obligations I get dreadfully

tired of, like the Social Service when it is my month to follow the

accounts, and visits to Annie Hazard who has a cancer of the stomach and

is dying, and thinking every day what to get you and the children and

the servants to eat. Suppose, some morning, I didn't stir, but just

rested in bed--what would happen? What did happen last winter when I

had pleurisy? Why, the whole house went to pieces, and, when you

weren't worrying about me, while I was getting well, you were the

most uncomfortable man imaginable. I don't want you to think I am

complaining, or that I don't love every minute and stick and stone of my

home and life; I do. But you seem to forget about me ... that's because

the house goes along so smoothly. It would be a good lesson if you had

to live with some other woman for a while.”

“I'm sure every word is so,” he returned; “no one could have a better

wife; you've spoiled me outrageously; I feel like that pig Christopher

has in a pen out by the stable.”

“You might think of something nicer to say,” she protested. “You're not

easy to live with, either,” Fanny continued; “you hardly ever agree with

what other people think; and you curse fearfully. I wish you wouldn't

swear like that, Lee. I object to it very much in Claire; I can't help

believing that she thinks it is smart or funny. And you encourage her.

If Claire had been different--no, don't interrupt me--this would never

have happened. You may say what you like about her good breeding: she's

been too flippant. I felt that last night. Claire doesn't accept her

obligations seriously enough. She's kept herself lovely looking, but

that isn't the whole thing.”

“What is the whole thing?” he demanded.

“I've told you, but you won't listen--duty.”

“You put that above all the rest?”

Fanny hesitated. “I said my head hurt because I've thought so much. Love

and duty, yes; I see them as the same. Duty without love would be hard,

and there isn't any love without duty.” Fanny evidently grew aware of

her threatening incoherence. “It isn't necessary to tell you in so many

words,” she said defensively; “you are only being contrary.”

“You have explained yourself beautifully,” he hastened to assure her; “I

am the person who is at sea.”

“Why, Lee!” she exclaimed, surprised; “I don't know anyone who is so

decided. That's what makes me raging, you're so dogmatic. There, that

is a splendid word. Don't eat that apple, it isn't baked; I can see from

here.” She rang. “Varney,” Fanny addressed the maid, “take Mr. Randon's

apple out and see if there isn't another better done, please. I warned

you about that; he can't eat them uncooked.”

“Let me keep it,” he protested; “it might have an excellent effect on my

disposition.”

“Don't interfere, Lee,” she responded coldly: “yes, Varney. It's really

idiotic of you,” she turned to him; “you are not a boy any more, you're

not even a young man, and you can't take liberties with your digestion.

You are quite like Helena with her prayers--if she feels very well she's

apt to forget them, but if she's sick she says them as hard as possible.

I wish she were like Gregory.”

“Gregory and you are cut out of the same gold cloth,” Lee Randon

pronounced.

“That was lovely of you, Lee.” Fanny radiated happiness. “No one could

say anything prettier to his old wife.” Dinner was over, and, rising,

she walked around the table and laid a confident arm on his shoulders.

The knife-like tenderness which, principally, he had for her overwhelmed

him; and he held Fanny against him in a silent and straining embrace.

For that reason he was annoyed at himself when, sitting through an

uneventful evening, his simile of the pig, enormously fat, sleepily

contented, in its pen, returned to him. It wasn't that he found an

actual analogy between the pig and life, individuals, on a higher plane,

so much as that he was vaguely disturbed by the impression that there

was an ultimate similitude between him, Lee Randon, and a fattened

somnolence of existence.

After all, were his individual opinions and doubts expressed in a manner

forceful enough to diversify him from a porcine apathy? The pig, secure

against the inequalities of fate and weather, wallowed through life with

a dull fullness of food as regular as the solar course. Christopher was

his wife. Now that, Lee told himself, with a vision of the gardener's

moustache, sadly drooping and stained with tobacco, his pale doubtful

gaze, was inexcusable. He abruptly directed his thoughts to Peyton

and Claire Morris; how exact Claire had been in the expression of her

personality! What, he grasped, was different in her from other women was

precisely that; together with an astonishing lack of sentimental bias,

it operated with the cutting realism of a surgeon's blade. She had, as

well, courage.

That was the result of her heritage; and he wondered if all strong

traits were the action of superior blood strayed into expected and

unexpected places? It was probable, but not susceptible of proof. The

pig's blood was that of the best registered Berkshire. God damn the pig!

He asked Fanny if she had heard any further particulars of the proposed

rearrangement of the Morrises' lives; when they were to separate;

but she knew no more than he. “I hope he doesn't come here,” she said

vigorously: “I should refuse to speak to him or have him at my table.

Outrageous! I can't make out why you take it so coolly. Mina Raff's a

rotten immoral woman; it doesn't matter how it's arranged. Why,” she

gasped, “she can be no more than Peyton's mistress, no better than the

women on the street.”

“That is so,” he agreed. But his following question of the accepted

badness of mistresses and streetwalkers he wisely kept to himself.

Were they darker than the shadow cast by the inelastic institution of

matrimony? At one time prostitutes were greatly honored; but that had

passed, he was convinced, forever; and this, on the whole, he

concluded, was fortunate; for, perhaps, if prostitution were thoroughly

discredited, marriage might, in some Elysian future, be swept of most of

its rubbish. Houses of prostitution, mistresses, like charity, absorbed

and dissipated a great deal of the dissatisfaction inseparable from the

present misconceptions of love and society. The first move, obviously,

in stopping war was the suppression of such ameliorating forces as

the Red Cross; and, conversely, with complete unions, infidelity would

languish and disappear.

* * * * *

He thought of this further in the darkened theatre to which, driven by

his growing curiosity, he had gone to see Mina Raff in the leading part

of a moving picture. It was a new version, in a new medium, of an old

and perennial melodrama; but, too late for the opening scenes, the story

for the moment was incomprehensible to him. However, it had to do with

the misadventures of a simple country girl in what, obviously, was

the conventional idea of a most sophisticated and urbane society.

Lee waited, and not vainly, to see the feminine grub transformed, by

brilliant clothes, into a butterfly easily surpassing all the select

glittering creatures of the city; and he told himself that, personally,

he vastly preferred Mina Raff in her plainest dress.

It was strange--seeing her there; while, in fact, she was in New York

with far different things occupying her thoughts. Here she was no more

than an illusion, a pattern, without substance, of projected light

and shade; she had neither voice nor warmth nor color; only the most

primitive minds could be carried away, lost, in the convention of her

flat mobile effigy! Yet, after a little, he found that he as well was

absorbed in the atmosphere of emotional verity she created. It was

clear to him now that not the Mina Raff in New York, but this, was the

important reality. In herself she was little compared to what she so

miraculously did. Then--the final step in a surrender, however much

he hated the word, to art--he forgot Mina Raff completely. He lost her

partly in his own mental processes and partly in the unhappy girl she

was portraying:

It was an uncomplicated story of betrayal, of a marriage that was no

marriage, and the birth, in circumstances of wretched loneliness, of

an illegitimate baby. The father annoyed Lee excessively; he was the

anciently familiar inaccurate shape of conventionalized lust without

an identifying human trait. Not for a second did Lee believe in his

grease-pencilled incontinence and perfidy; but the child he seduced,

incidents of the seduction charged with the beauty of pity, thronged

Lee's mind with sensations and ideas. However, it was the world

surrounding the central motive, the action, that most engaged him;

hardly a trait of generosity dignified it; and, exaggeratedly as a

universal meanness and self-righteous cruelty was shown, it scarcely

departed, he felt, from the truth.

Why was it that virtue, continence, corroded the heart? Why did people

who, through predilection, went to churches, regard those who didn't

with such an insistent animosity? Why did the church itself seek to

obliterate--as though they were a breathing menace--all who stood

outside its doors? There was something terribly wrong in the reaction of

life to religion, or in the religion that was applied to life. It

began, in the symbolical person of Christ, with, at least, a measure

of generosity; but that had been long lost. Now the bitterness of the

religious rather resembled envy.

In the picture flickering on the screen the girl who had suffered the

agonies of birth sat, with her baby on her young lap, in the forlorn

room of a village boarding house. The baby was sick, a doctor had left

shortly before, and one minute clenched hand rested on the mother's bare

breast. Lee found himself gazing fixedly at the girl's face: trouble

slowly clouded it, the trouble was invaded by fear, a terrible question.

He realized that the hand was growing cold--the baby was dead.

Waves of suffering passed darkly over the mother, incredulity swiftly

followed by a frozen knowledge; she tried with her lips, her mouth, to

breath life into the flesh already meaningless, lost to her. Then the

tragedy of existence drew her face into a mask universal and timeless,

a staring tearless shocked regard as white and inhuman as plaster of

Paris. Emotion choked at Lee's throat; and, in a sense of shame at

having been so shaken, he admitted that Mina Raff had an extraordinary

ability: he evaded the impressive reality by a return to the trivial

fact. In the gloom there was only a scattering of applause, a failure

of approbation caused either by an excess of emotion in the audience,

or--this he thought more probable--a general uneasiness before a great

moment of life. The crowded theatre was wholly relieved, itself again,

in a succeeding passage of trivial clowning.

Hatred pursued the youthful informally maternal figure: that,

eventually, she was saved by the love of an individual was small before

the opposed mass--women surrounded her with vitriolic whispers, women

turned her maliciously from house to house, a woman had betrayed her.

Finally the tide of Christianity rose, burst, in a biblical father

who drove her into a night of snow that was a triumph of the actual

substituted for the cut paper of stage convention. That she would be

rescued, no doubt was permitted; and Lee took no part in the storm of

applause which greeted this act of satisfactory heroics.

The other spirit had appalled him: in his state of mental doubt--it

might equally have been a condition of obscure hope--he had been rudely

shoved toward pessimism; the converse of the announced purpose of the

picture. The audience, for one thing, was so depressingly wrong in the

placing of its merriment: it laughed delightedly at a gaunt feminine

vindictiveness hurrying through the snow on an errand of destruction.

The fact that the girl's maternity was transcendent in a generous and

confident heart, made lovely by spiritual passion, escaped everyone. The

phrase, spiritual passion, had occurred to him without forethought

and he wondered if it were permissible, if it meant anything? It did

decidedly to him; he told himself further that it was the fusion of

the body and all the aspirations called spirit in one supreme act of

feeling.

It had been his and Fanny's ... at first. Then the spirit, though it

had lingered in other relationships, had deserted the consummation of

passion. That hadn't grown perfunctory, but it became a thing more and

more strictly of the flesh; with this it was less thrilling. There, he

believed, they were not singular; or, anyhow, he wasn't; he saw what he

was convinced was the same failure in the men past youth about him. But

in Fanny there was, he recognized, that fierce if narrow singleness of

impulse, of purity. His thoughts of other women were not innocent of

provocative conjecture--Anette's sinuous body, now as dead to him as

Alohabad, recurred to his mind--but in this Fanny was utterly loyal.

Yes, she had, a thing impossible for any man he had known, a mental

singleness of desire.

Was it that which had in her an affinity with the oppressors of the

picture, which made her, mechanically, the vigorously enlisted enemy

of the actual Mina Raff? It startled him a little to realize that

Fanny--for all her marked superiority--was definitely arrayed with the

righteous mob. She was sorry for those who failed in the discharge of

duty to God and man, and she worked untiringly to reinstate them--in

her good opinion. That was it, and it was no more! All such attempted

salvation resolved itself into the mere effort to drag men up to the

complacent plane of the incidental savior.

This recognition took a great deal of the vigor from his intended

conversation with Peyton Morris: anything in the way of patronage,

he reflected, would be as useless as it would be false. But he had no

impulse to forego his purpose; he was engaged to help Claire who was

too proud to help herself; yes, by heaven, and too right for the least

humiliation. If Claire suffered, it must be because the world was too

inferior for hope of any kind.

Lee was not unaware of the incongruity of his position, for he was

equally ignoring the needs of two others, Peyton and Mina Raff. It was

evident to him now, since he had seen her in a picture, that she was

well worth the greatest consideration. She lay outside the stream of

ordinary responsibilities. What held him steady was the belief that she

and Peyton were not so important to each other as they thought; Claire

needed him more badly than Mina. There was a possibility--no, it was

probable--that Claire deserted would develop into an individual as empty

and as vacantly sounding as a drum. She had said as much. Her heritage,

together with its splendors of courage and charm, signally carried that

menace.

* * * * *

So much, joined to what already was thronging his thoughts, brought

Lee's mind to resemble the sheet of an enormous ledger covered with a

jumble of figures apparently beyond any reduction to an answer. He was

considering Claire and Mina Raff, Mina and Claire, at a hunt breakfast

at Willing Spencer's in Nantbrook Valley, north of Eastlake, when,

with a plate of food in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, he

collided with Peyton Morris, his face pinched and his eyes dull from

a lack of rest. The Spencer house was sparely furnished, a square

unimpressive dwelling principally adapted to the early summers of its

energetic children; and Peyton and Lee Randon allowed themselves to be

crowded into the bare angle formed by a high inner door.

“Claire told you,” the younger said.

“Yes,” Lee replied briefly. It wouldn't, after all, be difficult to talk

to Peyton; he was obviously miserable from the necessity of suppressing

what absorbed his entire consciousness.

“Well, I suppose you think there's nothing to be said for me,” his voice

was defiant; “and that I ought to be shot.”

“Very much to the contrary,” Lee asserted; “there is so much to say

that it's difficult to know where to begin. With another situation

practically the same, I might have agreed with you thoroughly; but, with

Claire and what I have gathered of you, in this special one I can't.”

“It isn't absolutely necessary,” the other pointed out; “Mina and I will

have a lot to ignore.”

“The first thing you'll have to manage,” Lee observed sharply, “is to

grow up. You are not in a place to be helped by leather-headed satire

and visions of solitary grandeur. My interest comes only from Claire and

some personal curiosity; Mina Raff doesn't require anyone's assistance.

Of you all, her position is clearest. I don't know if you can be brought

to see it, but this is only incidental, a momentary indulgence, with

her.”

“What you don't seem to get,” Peyton told him, with a brutally cold

face, “is that I may smash you; now, where you are.”

“That was possible,” Lee agreed; “and you are right--I had overlooked

it. I think that's passed, though; I'm going to keep on as if it were.

Why, you young fool, you seem to have no conception, none in the world,

of what you propose to do. In a week, in your frame of mind, you'd have

a hundred fights; there would be time for nothing else but knocking out

the men who insulted you. You'll collapse over Sunday if you are not

absolutely and totally impervious to everything and everybody. The only

way you can throw the world over is to ignore it; while you appear to

have the idea that it should put a rose in your buttonhole.”

“You don't have to tell me it's going to be stiff,” Peyton Morris

asserted gloomily. “I can take care of that. Claire and Ira are the hard

part. Lee, if anyone a year ago had said that I was like this, that

I was even capable of it, I'd have ruined him. God, what a thing to

happen! I want you to understand that we, Mina and I, didn't have a

particle to do with it--it just flatly occurred. I had seen her only

three times when it was too late; and if you think I didn't try to break

it, and myself, too--”

Lee nodded. “Certainly. Why not, since it's bound to knock you on the

head? You've been very unfortunate: I can't imagine a man to whom this

would come worse.”

“If I can make Mina happy I don't care about myself.”

“Of course, that is understood,” Lee Randon returned impatiently; “it

is nothing but sentimental rot, all the same. If you are not contented,

easy in mind, how can she be happy? You have got to believe entirely in

what you are doing, it must be right to you on every possible side; and

you can't make that grade, Peyton; you are too conventional underneath.”

“Sink your spurs in me,” he said doggedly; “it's funny when you really

think about it. Why, only a little while ago, if I had heard of a man

doing this, I would have beaten him up just on general principles:

running away from his wife and child, with another woman, an actress,

that's what it is! I tell myself that, but the words haven't a trace of

meaning or importance. Somehow, they don't seem to apply to me, to us;

they can say what they like, but Mina isn't wicked. She--she loves me,

Lee; and, suddenly, that swept everything else out of sight.

“But go back to me--you realize that I was rather in favor of what I

was, what I had. Brandenhouse is a good school and my crowd ran it. We

were pretty abrupt with boys who whored about; and, at Princeton, well,

we thought we were it. We were, still, there; and I got a heavy idea of

what I liked and was like. We were very damned honorable and the icing

on the cake generally. That was good after I left college, too; but

what's the use of going into it; I was in the same old Brandenhouse

surrounding. The war split us wide open. Or I thought it did; but, Lee,

by God, I don't believe it changed a thing. I got my touch of concussion

early, Ira was born, and, and--”

“Disaster,” Lee Randon pronounced shortly.

“Call it that if you choose; there isn't much use in calling it at all:

it simply is.”

“With someone else, yes; but with you, no, not finally; you haven't

the character and disposition to get away with it. You don't, secretly,

approve of yourself, Peyton; and that will be fatal. The truth is that,

while you want this now, in a year, or two years, or five, you'll demand

the other. You think it is going to be different from everything else

in heaven and earth, you're convinced it's going to stay all in the sky;

but it will be on the solid familiar ground. Understand again--it isn't

your plan I'm attacking; but your ability; that and your real ignorance

of Mina Raff.

“If you imagine for an instant that this love will be bigger than her

work, if you suppose that, against her acting, it will last, you are

an idiot for your pains. If I don't know the side of her you do, I have

become fairly familiar with one you haven't dreamed of. She is a greater

actress than people yet recognize, principally because of the general

doubt about moving pictures; but that recognition will come, and, when

it does, you will be swept out of sight.

“No, you haven't the slightest suspicion of what it is about; that side

of her, and it's very nearly the whole woman, is a blank. She admitted

to me that she couldn't understand it herself. But what she is doing is

dragging into her genius what it needs. She loves you now, and tomorrow

she'll love a Belgian violinist, a great engineer, a Spanish prince at

San Sebastian. How will you take sitting in the salon and hearing them

padding around over your head? It's no good your getting mad at me; I am

not blaming Mina Raff; you are. I admire her tremendously.

“In the beginning I said she could watch out for herself, and I

intimated that I was reasonably indifferent to what happened to you: it

is Claire I am concerned about. Unfortunately for her, and without much

reason, she loves you too. When Mina is done with you and you stray

back, from, perhaps, South America, Claire won't be here. I don't

mean that she will have gone away, or be dead in the familiar sense.

I haven't any doubt but that she would live with you again--she is not

small-minded and she's far more unconventional than you--what there was

of her.”

“If you or anyone else thinks that I don't admire Claire--” he stopped

desperately. “We won't get far talking,” Peyton added; “even if all you

have said is a fact. You can't hit on much that I've missed. You might

just as well curse me and let me go.”

“Nothing of the sort,” Lee Randon returned equably; “that's exactly what

I have no intention of doing. In the interest of Claire I must try to

open your eyes.” The younger man said indignantly:

“You talk as though I were a day-old kitten. It's cursed impertinent: I

don't seem to remember asking for so much advice.”

* * * * *

Throughout their conversation they were both holding the plates of

sausage and scrambled eggs, from which rose a pungent odor, inevitable

to the occasion. And, in a silence which fell upon them, Lee realized

the absurdity of their position behind the door. “We can't keep this

up,” he declared, and moved into the eddying throng, the intermingling

ceaseless conversations. Almost at once Peyton Morris disappeared, and

Lee found Fanny at his shoulder. Neither of them fox-hunted, although

they hacked a great deal over the country roads and fields, and they

had ridden to the Spencers' that morning. Fanny wore dark brown and a

flattened hunting derby which, with her hair in a short braid tied by a

stiff black ribbon, was particularly becoming. She was, he told himself,

with her face positively animated, sparkling, from talk, unusually

attractive. Fanny was like that--at times she was singularly engaging.

“What did he say?” she demanded, nodding in the direction in which

Peyton had disappeared. “I have avoided him all morning.”

“An uncommon lot for Peyton,” Lee acknowledged. “I almost think he has

been jarred out of his self-complacency. But, on the whole, that is

not possible. It's temporary with him. At one time I thought--in the

language of youth--he was going to crown me.”

“The little beast!” she exclaimed viciously. “If he had I'd have made

him sorry. I saw Claire a few minutes ago, and she asked me to tell

you, if she missed you, that she had something for you to see. Wasn't

it strange that she said nothing to me about it? I should think, in her

scrape, she'd rather turn to a woman than to a man. But Claire isn't

very feminine: I've always felt her hardness.”

“Then that's why she didn't speak to you,” Lee assented superficially.

“I'll go over tonight, after dinner. They must be pretty nearly ready to

drop the fox, and it's beginning to drizzle.”

There was, soon after that, an exodus from the back of the house to the

fields beyond. It was a very fair hunting country, rolling and clear of

brush, with grouped woods on the surrounding hills and streams in the

swales below. The clouds were broken and aqueous, and the grass held

a silver veil of fine raindrops. Only an inconsiderable part of those

present were following the hounds; the others, in a restricted variety

of sporting garb--the men in knickerbockers and gaiters or riding

breeches, the women breeched and severely coated or swathed in wide

reddish tweed capes--stood, with a scattering of umbrellas and upturned

collars, in a semi-circle on the soggy turf.

There was a baying of hounds from the direction of the stables, and

the Master swung up on a bright chestnut horse with a braided tail.

A huntsman appeared with a shuttered box, holding the fox, and an old

brown and white hound bitch, wise with many years of hunting, to follow

and establish and announce the scent. “If you are ready, Brace,” the

Master said to his huntsman, “you may drop.” A stable boy held the

hound, and, raising the shutter, Brace shook the fox out on the ground.

The animal--in view of the commotion about to pursue it--was

surprisingly small, slim flanked; proportionately the tail seemed

extravagant. “I hope the brush won't get wet,” a man behind Lee spoke;

“when it does they can't run.” As it was, the fox, obviously, was

reluctant to start; it crouched in the rough grass and glanced fleetly

around with incredibly sharp black eyes. The men shouted and flung up

their arms; but the animal was indifferent to their laudable efforts.

The hunt, Lee Randon thought, had assumed an aspect of the ridiculous;

the men and women on expensive excited horses, the pack yelping from

beyond a road, the expectant on-lookers, were mocked by the immobility

of the puzzled subject of the chase. Finally the fox obligingly moved a

few steps; it hesitated again, and then trotted forward, slipping under

a fence. Lee could follow it clearly across the next field and into the

next; its progress was unhurried, deliberate, insolent.

“Give him six minutes,” the Master decided.

When the time had gone the leash of the single hound was slipped. She

ran around in a circle, whining eagerly, her nose to the sod, and then

with a high yelp, set smartly off in a direction absolutely opposite to

that taken by the fox. She was brought back and her nose held to the hot

scent; again, with a fresh assurance, the bitch gave tongue, followed

the trail to where it went under the fence, and turned, instead of

bearing to the right, to the left. There were various exclamations. A

kennel man declared, “She knows what she's about, and the fox will swing

into Sibley's Cover.” Someone else more sceptically asserted that the

hound was a fool. Her sustained cry floated back from under the hill;

and, in another minute, the pack, the hunt, was off. The horses rose

gracefully in a sleek brown tide over the first fence; and then there

was a division--the hounds scattered and bunched and scattered, some of

the riders went to the left after the palpable course of the fox, others

pounded direct for Sibley's Cover, and the remainder reined up over the

hounds.

Although long association and familiarity had made such scenes a piece

with Lee Randon's subconsciousness, today the hunt seemed nothing more

than nonsense. He laughed, and made a remark of disparaging humor; but

he found no support. Willing Spencer, kept out of the field by a broken

collar bone, gazed at him with lifted eyebrows. Fanny and Lee turned

to their horses, held for them by a groom at a mounting block, and went

home. The rain had increased, but, not cold, Lee found it pleasant on

his face. They jogged quietly over the roads bordered with gaunt sombre

hedges, through the open countryside, into Eastlake.

Nothing, he realized, had been accomplished with Peyton Morris; the

other was too numbed, shocked, by the incredible accident that had

overtaken him to listen to reason. Lee felt that he could hardly have

said more. He wondered what Claire had to show him. Still, he wasn't

through with her husband; he had no intention of resting until every

hope was exhausted. What particularly impressed him--he must speak of it

to Peyton--was that no matter where Morris might get he would find life

monotonously the same. It was very much like mountain climbing--every

peak looked different, more iridescent and desirable, from the one

occupied; but, gazing back, that just left appeared as engaging, as

rare, as any in the distance. Every experience in the life surrounding

him was the same as all the others; no real change was offered, because

the same dull response permeated all living; no escape such as Peyton

planned was possible.

Escape, Lee Randon continued, happened within; it was not, he repeated,

a place on earth, or any possession, but a freedom, a state, of mind.

Peyton Morris, while it was quite possible for him to be destroyed, was

incapable of mental liberty, readjustments; he might drive himself on

the rocks, on the first reef where he disregarded the clamor of warning

bells and carefully charted directions, but he was no Columbus for the

discovery of a magical island, a Cuba, of spices and delectable

palms. Peyton had looked with a stolid indifference at the dangerously

fascinating, the incomprehensible, smile of Cytherea. Yes, if the young

donkey could be forced past this tempting patch of grazing, if he could

only be driven a short distance farther down the highway of custom,

Claire would be safe.

But she must be made to think that such a conclusion had been purely

the result of Peyton's reserved strength, and not of a mere negative

surrender following doubt. And, above all, there must be no appearance

of Mina Raff having, after a short trial, herself discarded him. On such

trivialities Claire's ultimate happiness might hang. Truth was once

more wholly restrained, hidden, dissimulated; the skillful shifting of

painted masks, false-faces, continued uninterrupted its progress. A new

lethargy enveloped Lee: his interest, his confidence, in what he was

trying to prevent waned. What did it matter who went and who stayed? In

the end it was the same, unprofitable and stale. All, probably, that his

thought had accomplished was to rob his ride of its glow, make flat the

taste of the whiskey and charged water he prepared. However, shortly

a pervading warmth--but it was of the spirits--brought back his lately

unfamiliar sense of well-being.

* * * * *

The Morrises lived in a large remodelled brick house, pleasantly

pseudo-classic, beyond the opposite boundary of Eastlake; and, leaving

his car in the turn of the drive past the main door, Lee walked into the

wide hall which swept from front to back, and found a small dinner party

at the stage of coffee and cigarettes. It was composed, he saw at

once, of Peyton's friends; as he entered three young men rose

punctiliously--Christian Wager, with hair growing close like a mat on a

narrow skull and a long irregular nose; Gilbert Bromhead, a round figure

and a face with the contours and expression, the fresh color, of

a pleasant and apple-like boy; and Peyton. They had been at their

university together; and, Lee Randon saw, they were making, with a

characteristic masculine innocence, an effort to secure their wives in

the same bond of affectionate understanding that held them.

Claire, who had smiled acknowledgingly with her eyes when Lee

approached, returned to a withdrawn concentration upon the section of

table-cloth immediately before her; she answered the remarks directed

to her with a temporary measure of animation vanishing at once with the

effort. Christian Wager, who was in London with a branch of an American

banking firm, had married an English girl strikingly named Evadore.

She was large, with black hair cut in a scanty bang; but beyond these

unastonishing facts there was nothing in her appearance to mark or

remember. However, a relative of hers, he had been told, distant but

authentic, had been a lady-in-waiting to the Queen. Gilbert Bromhead's

wife was southern, a small appealing compound of the essence of the

superlatively feminine.

Lee Randon, in a chair drawn up for him at the table, studied the women,

arbitrarily thrown together, with a secret entertainment. Evadore Wager

was frankly--to a degree almost Chinese--curious about the others. At

short regular intervals, in a tone of unvaried timbre and inexhaustible

surprise, she half exclaimed, “Fancy.” Claire was metallic, turned

in, with an indifference to her position that was actually rude, upon

herself. But Mrs. Gilbert Bromhead made up for any silence around her

in a seductive, low-pitched continuous talking. A part of this was

superficially addressed to Claire and the solidly amazed Evadore;

but all its underlying intention, its musical cadences and breathless

suspensions for approval, were flung at the men. The impression she

skillfully conveyed to Lee Randon, by an art which never for an

instant lost its aspect of the artless, was that he, at least, older in

experience than the rest there, alone entirely understood and engaged

her.

The men--even Peyton, temporarily--resting confident on a successful

bringing of their wives into the masculine simplicity of their common

memories and affection, said little. With eyes puckered wisely against

the cigarette smoke they made casual remarks about their present

occupations and terse references to companions and deeds of the

past. Only Peyton had been of any athletic importance; he had played

university foot-ball; and, in view of this, there was still a tinge of

respect in Bromhead's manner. A long run of Peyton's, crowned with a

glorious and winning score, was recalled. But suddenly it failed to stir

him. “How young we were then,” he observed gloomily.

Christian Wager protested. “That isn't the right tone. We were young

then, true, but Princeton was teaching us what it meant to be men.

In that game, Morris, you got something invaluable to you now, hard

endurance and fairness--”

“In my day,” Lee interposed, “the team was told to sink a heel in any

back that looked a little too good for us.”

“There were instructors like that,” Gilbert Bromhead assented; “and some

graduate coaches are pretty cunning; but they are being discredited.”

Wager largely, obliviously, passed over this interruption. “We learned

decency,” he proceeded, “in business and ideals and living; and to give

and take evenly. In the war and in civil life we were and are behind the

big issues. This new license and socialistic rant, the mental and moral

bounders, must be held down, and we are the men to do it. Yes, and I

believe in the church, the right church, we're all for that: I tell you

the country depends on the men the best colleges turn out.”

“My God, Christian, you must have made a lot of money lately,” Bromhead

observed. “You talk exactly like the president of a locomotive works.

You have been dining with the best, too; I can tell that with certainty.

Answer us this, honestly--do you mention the Royal Family in your

prayers?”

Evadore laughed. “Do you know, that's really awfully good. He does put

it on a bit, doesn't he?”

“If you let Christian go on,” Peyton added, “he'll talk about the sacred

ties of Anglo-Saxon blood and tradition, with the English and American

exchange ruling the world. Gilbert, how did your artillery company get

along with the Londoners?”

“All right, if we were near a brick yard.”

Claire rose abruptly, and they drifted out to a reception room opening,

with a wide arch, beyond the hall. Gilbert Bromhead's wife hesitated;

then, confidentially, she told Lee that she adored to sit on stairs.

“Very well,” he assented; “these of the Morrises' are splendid.” He was

a step below her, and her knees and his shoulder settled together.

“I like older men so much,” she admitted what she had already

so adroitly conveyed; “patches of grey above the ears are so

distinguished.”

“Older than what?”

Apparently forgetful that her gesture included Gilbert Bromhead she

indicated the rooms that now held the others. “Young men are so head

over heels,” she particularized; “they are always disarranging things.”

She laughed, a delectable sound. “I oughtn't to have said that, and I

wouldn't--to them. I might almost tell you the story about the man

in the department store and the drawers.” Their contact was more

pronounced. “Isn't that English girl extraordinary? I didn't believe for

a minute that was her own color till I was close to it. Her hair isn't

dyed; but why does she wear that skimpy bang?” Again she laughed, a

pure golden melody. “But you admired it, I know you did; men are so

unaccountable. Could you trust her, do you think? It wasn't very nice to

make fun of her husband.” Adroitly, without the flutter of a ruffle, she

moved to a higher step, and Claire--before Lee had any premonition of

her appearance--stood below them with chocolates.

“She is rather attractive,” his companion admitted, when Claire had

gone. “She doesn't like me, or Mrs. Wager, though; and I must say she

made it plain in her own house. I've been studying her, and there is

something wrong. Is she happy with Peyton Morris? I thought he was

right nice until you came.” She turned for a better view, through the

balustrade, of the doors beyond, and then drew her skirt close so that

he could move up beside her. “It's just like a smoke-house in there,”

she reported. “I don't truthfully think cigarettes are nice for a woman;

and I wouldn't dream of taking whiskey; in the South we never. You'd

call that out of date.” She bent forward, arranging the ribbon of a

slipper, and her mouth met his in a long kiss.

“What made you suppose you could do that?” she demanded; “how did

you know I wouldn't be cross with you? But ... somehow I didn't mind.

Although you mustn't again, so publicly. I wonder why, with you, it

seemed so perfectly nice, and not at all as if I had only met you?”

There was a response to that as recognized, as exact, as the bishop's

move in chess; indeed, it was expected of him; she was hesitating,

waiting for it; but he was unable to reassure her with the conventional

sentiment. A month ago he would have commanded and developed an enticing

situation; but now, for Lee Randon, it was without possibilities, hardly

more than perfunctory. A shade of vexation invaded her bearing, and

she moved a significant infinitesimal fraction away from him. Then she

discovered a wind blowing down the stairs. “I have to take such good

care of myself,” she told Lee, preparing to descend. “It is because I am

so delicate--I can get upset at nothing. Here you are all so strong; you

have an advantage over me. Gilbert, dear,” she called from the hall, her

voice musical with tender reproach, “I can't see how you love me, you

stay away so far.”

* * * * *

“What did the little ass say to you?” Claire asked. Lee was standing

with her by the piano, and the others were around the fireplace in the

farther spaciousness. “Nothing much,” he replied. “You mean that she

never stopped. I'll admit she's skillful; but she needn't think I'm a

fool. But you will never guess what I want to tell you. My dear Lee,

that Mrs. Grove wrote me a letter. I have it here in my dress, for you

to read. It's a scream.” He took the sheet of note paper: it was grey

with an address on East Sixty-sixth Street embossed in pale vermilion,

and had an indefinable scent. The writing was decisive:

“MY DEAR MRS. MORRIS,

“It is so difficult for me to express my disturbance at what Mina Raff

has just told me, that I am asking to see you here, at my house in New

York. Engagements make it difficult for me to leave at present. I hope

you will not find this impertinent from an older woman, threatened very

much as you in her affections by an impossible calamity--”

The signature, Savina Grove, had the crispness of a name often attached

to opinions and papers of authority.

“That's rather cool,” he agreed.

“Cool! The woman's demented. No, I suppose she thinks I am an honest

wronged woman or something objectionable of the sort. I was going to

throw it away when I kept it to amuse you.”

“It does, Claire; and I'm glad to see it; impertinent as she admits it

may be, you must consider. As Mrs. Grove writes, you are both caught.”

“If you think I'll go see her you are madder still.”

“I realize you won't; but worse things could happen. It's the only

possible approach to Mina Raff; I had a chance to try Peyton, but it did

no good. It seems to me this Mina ought to have some understanding.”

Claire Morris said: “You can do it.”

He reflected. “Well, perhaps; I'm your uncle; there are no brothers,

and what other family you have is away. It might be useful. Anyhow, she

would hear a thing or two about you from me.”

“Seriously, Lee, you'd only get angry: I can see Mrs. Grove as though

she were in the room--the utmost New York self-satisfaction. And I won't

have you discussing my affairs.”

“Absurd. A thousand people will be talking about them soon if this isn't

managed. I have an idea I had better go to New York and try what can be

done there. I got along well enough with the girl herself; and perhaps,

though it's not likely, Mrs. Grove has some influence.”

“Of course, I can't stop you,” Claire said; her hand strayed over his,

on the piano. “I'm simply enraged at myself, Lee. Why, I should let him

go with cheers--except where I was sorry for him--but I can't. He is

such a sweet child; and, you see, he was all mine.”

“I can't leave before Thursday.” He considered. “I'll have a wire sent

to the Groves, say something regretful and polite about you--measles.”

“Don't bother,” she returned.

Peyton came stiffly up to them. “I happened to mention, Claire, that we

had some champagne left, and it created the intensest excitement. I told

them it would do no good, that you were keeping hold of it; but they

insisted on a look at the bottles.”

“Get them, Peyton,” she replied unhesitatingly. “I was keeping it, but

perhaps for now. This is a very appropriate time for you and me, and the

last of the cases left over from our wedding.”

An expression of pain tightened his mouth; he turned away without

further speech. “We'll have it in the dining-room,” Claire announced;

“big glasses filled with ice.” They gathered about the bare table, and

Peyton Morris ranged the dark green bottles, capped in white foil, on

the sideboard. He worked with a napkin at a cork: there was a restrained

sibilant escaping pressure, and the liquid rose in frothing bubbles

through the ice.

It was, Lee thought, a golden drink, flooded, up to a variable point,

with an inimitable gaiety. In comparison whiskey was brutalizing; sherry

was involved with a number of material accompanying pleasures; port was

purely masculine and clarets upset him; beer was a beverage and not a

delight; ale a soporific; and Rhine wines he ignored. Champagne held

in solution the rhythm of old Vienna waltzes, of ball rooms with

formal greenery, floating with passions as light as the tarleton skirts

floating about dancing feet. But it wasn't, he insisted, a wine for

indiscriminate youth--youth that couldn't distinguish between the sweet

and the dry. It was for men like himself, with memories, unrealized

dreams. Ugly women, and women who were old, and certainly prudes, should

never be given a sip.

Peyton Morris again filled all the glasses; there was a clatter of

talk, the accent of the South, about Lee; but he grew oblivious of

it. Champagne always gave Fanny a headache; neither was it a drink for

contented mothers, housewives. Contrarily, it was the ideal, the only,

wine for seductions. It belonged most especially to masked balls, divine

features vanishing under a provocative edge of black satin. He thought

of little hidden tables and fantastic dresses, fragile emotion; lips and

knees and garters. It all melted away before the intentness of Claire's

expression. Peyton was doggedly holding to the rim of the table; Gilbert

Bromhead was very close to Evadore; the black sheath of her hair had

slipped and her eyes were blank; the blanched delicate hand of the South

nearest Christian Wager had disappeared, Christian's hand on that side

could not be seen. Peyton once more filled the glasses:

“It must all go,” Claire insisted; “I won't have a drop left.”

Wager's sentimentality overflowed in approved and well-established

channels: Princeton was their mother, their sacred alma--alma mater.

Here, under Peyton's roof, they had gathered to renew ... friendships

unbroken with their wives, their true wives; oceans couldn't separate

them, nor time, nor--nor silver locks among the gold. They must come to

London next December: anniversary of mutual happiness and success. Take

the children, the sons of old Princeton, to Christmas pantomine.

“Once,” Evadore told them, “I went to a night club. Do you know what

that is, over here? I don't believe I can explain it; but there are

quantities of champagne and men and principally girls; but they're not

girls at all, if you see what I mean, not by several accidents. It would

have been splendid, but I got sick, and it turned into a ghastly mess,

mostly in the cab. That was rather thick, wasn't it?”

Claire rose, and Lee Randon heard her say, under her breath, “Oh hell”;

but there was another full bottle, and she had to sit again. He had

promised Fanny not to stay long, and, if he were coming home, she never

went to sleep until he was in the house. Lee wasn't drunk, but then,

he recognized, neither was he sober. Why should he be the latter? he

demanded seriously of himself. His glass was empty, the champagne was

all gone. Mrs. Gilbert Bromhead was perceptibly leaning on Christian

Wager, her skill blurred; Evadore's face was damply pallid, her mouth

slack; she left the table, the room, hurried and unsteady, evidently

about to repeat the thickness of the act that had marred her enjoyment

of the night club; Claire was openly contemptuous of them all.

Outside, it had grown much colder, the ruts in the road were frozen,

treacherous, but Lee Randon drove his car with a feeling of inattentive

mastery. He saw some stars, an arc light, black patches of ice; and, as

he increased his speed, he sang to an emphatic lifted hand of a being

in the South Seas who wore leaves, plenty of leaves ... But none of the

silly songs now could compare with--with the bully that, on the levees,

he was going to cut down. However, in his house, he grew quiet. “Lee,”

his wife called sleepily from their room, “you are so late, dear. I

waited the longest while for some of the addresses for our Christmas

cards. You must remember to give them to me tomorrow.”

Her voice, heavy with sleep and contentment and love, fell upon his

hearing like the sound of a pure accusing bell. He wasn't fit to have a

wife like Fanny, children as good as Helena and Gregory: he, Lee Randon,

was a damned ingrate! That bloody doll--he had threatened to put it

in the fire before--could now go where it belonged. But the hearth was

empty, cold. Cytherea, with her disdainful gaze, evaded his wavering

reach.