III

Fanny, where the Groves were concerned, was utterly opposed to the

plan which, Lee gathered, Claire had half supported. “It's really too

foolish,” his wife told him; “what can Mrs. Grove and you have to say

to each other? And you won't get anywhere with Mina Raff. Indeed, Lee, I

think it isn't quite dignified of you.”

“That won't bother me,” he replied indulgently. “I was wondering--you

haven't been away for so long--if you'd come with me. This other affair

wouldn't take half a day: you could buy clothes and there are the

theatres.”

“I'd love to.” She hesitated. “When did you mean to go?” But, when

he said the following noon, she discovered that that didn't allow her

enough time for preparations. “You don't realize how much there is to do

here, getting the servants and the children satisfactorily arranged. You

might telephone me after you're there; and, if you didn't come back at

once, perhaps I could manage it.”

Lee telegraphed Mrs. William Loyd Grove of his intention; and, with a

table put up at his seat in the Pullman car for New York, he occupied

himself opportunely with the reports of his varied profitable concerns.

He had had a reply, sufficiently cordial, to his telegram, arranging for

him to go directly to the Groves' house; but that he had declined; and

when he gave the driver of a taxi-cab the address on East Sixty-sixth

Street it was past four and the appropriate hour for afternoon tea.

The house, non-committal on the outside--except for the perceived

elaboration of the window draperies within--was, Lee saw at once, a

rich undisturbed accumulation of the decorative traditions of the

eighteen-eighties. The hall was dark, with a ceiling and elaborate

panels of black walnut and a high dull silver paper. The reception room

into which he was shown, by a maid, was jungle-like in its hangings and

deep-tufted upholstery of maroon and royal blue velvets, its lace and

twisted cords with heavy tassels, and hassocks crowded on the sombrely

brilliant rugs sacred in mosques. There was a mantle in colored marbles,

cabinets of fretted ebony, tables of onyx and floriated ormolu, ivories

and ornaments of Benares brass and olivewood.

In the close incongruity of this preserved Victorianism Mrs. William

Loyd Grove, when she appeared soon after, startled Lee Randon by her

complete expression of a severely modern air. She was dressed for the

street in a very light brown suit, rigidly simple, with a small black

three-cornered hat, a sable skin about her neck, and highly polished

English brogues with gaiters. Mrs. Grove was thin--no, he corrected that

impression, she was slight--her face, broad at the temples, narrowed

gracefully to her chin; her eyes were a darker blue than the velvet;

and her skin at once was evenly pale and had a suggestion of transparent

warmth. The slender firm hand she extended, her bearing and the glimpse

of a round throat, had lost none of the slender flexibility of youth.

“The first thing I must do,” she told him in an unsympathetic, almost

harsh, voice, “is to say that I agree with you entirely about this

house. It's beyond speech. But William won't have it touched. Probably

you are not familiar with the stubborn traditions of old New Yorkers.

Of course, when Mrs. Simeon Grove was alive, it was hopeless; but I

did think, when she died, that something could be done. You can see how

wrong I was--William can't be budged.”

She was, he silently continued his conclusions, past forty, but by not

more than a year, or a year and a half. All that her signature suggested

was true: she was more forcible, decisive, than he had expected. Money

and place, with an individual authentic strength of personality, gave

her voice its accent of finality, her words their abruptness, her manner

an unending ease.

“Mina said she might be here,” Mrs. Grove went on, from an uncomfortable

Jacobean chair, “if something or other happened at the studio. But I see

she is not, and I am relieved.”

“Mrs. Morris regretted she couldn't come,” Lee told her inanely; and his

hostess replied:

“I can't at all say that I believe you--I was so upset I couldn't resist

the attempt. But I hope she understood that it was absolutely impossible

for me to go to Eastlake.”

He nodded, a shade annoyed by the briskness of her attack.

“We are immensely concerned about Mina,” Mrs. Grove went on. “You

see, with our son killed in the Lafayette Escadrille early in the war,

practically she has been our only child. She is a daughter of a cousin

of William's. Mina, I must admit, has become very difficult; I suppose

because of her genius. She is perfectly amenable about everything in the

world, until her mind gets set, like concrete, and then she is out of

reach. Tell me a little about Mr. and Mrs. Morris.”

Lee Randon spoke sharply for a minute or two, and a frown gathered on

his hearer's brow. “Why,” she observed, “it is worse than I had hoped.

But I should have guessed from the name--Peyton Morris. I am very sorry;

you are fond of her, of Claire, that is evident.”

“I should not have come here for any other reason,” he admitted. “I am

not much of a meddler: it is so dangerous for everyone concerned. Then

it might be that this was the best for all three of them.”

“What a curious, contradictory thing for you to say,” she commented,

studying him. “You mustn't let William hear that; he's far worse than I

am.”

“I don't mean we can proceed from that attitude,” Lee explained, “it was

a sort of digression. I want to do whatever is possible to break it up;

yes, purely for Claire.”

“I hope we may succeed.” Her voice showed doubt. “William isn't always

tactful, and I've told him again and again he's taking the wrong

tone with Mina. What a pity the Morrises have turned out thoroughly

nice--don't tell me your Claire didn't curse me, I know these girls--it

is so much easier to deal with vulgar people. I can see now what it was

in the young man that captured Mina, she'd like that type--the masculine

with an air of fine linen.” The tea-table was rolled up to them. “If you

would rather have Scotch or rye it's here,” she informed him. “But even

the tea, you'll notice, is in a glass with rum; positively, soon no one

will look at soup unless it's served as a highball.”

Lee Randon did prefer Scotch: none better, he discovered, was to be

imagined; the ice was frozen into precisely the right size; and the

cigars before him, a special Corona, the Shepheard's Hotel cigarettes,

carried the luxury of comfort to its last perfection. Mrs. Grove smoked

in an abstracted long-accustomed manner. “Well,” she demanded, “what is

there we can do?”

“I rather trusted you to find that.”

“How can I? What hold have we on her? Mina is getting this nonsensical

weekly sum; her contract runs for two years yet; and then it will

be worse. Outrageous! I tell her she isn't worth it. And, now, this

tiresome Morris has money, too; and you say he's as bad as Mina. Have

you talked to her about Mrs. Morris? Mina is strangely sensitive, and,

if you can find it, has a very tender heart.”

“I might do that over here,” he suggested. “In Eastlake it wasn't

possible. You've discouraged me, though; I suppose I had the idea that

you could lock her up on bread and water.”

She laughed. “An army of Minnesota kitchen maids would break into the

house; millions of people have voted Mina their favorite; when she is

out with me the most odious crowds positively stop my car. I won't

go with her any more where she can be recognized.” Lee rose, and his

expression showed his increasing sense of the uselessness of their

efforts.

“You mustn't give up,” she said quickly; “you never can tell about Mina.

You will come here for dinner, certainly; I'll send the car to your

hotel at seven-thirty, and you will bring your bag. We can't argue over

that, can we? William will enjoy having you very much. Do you mind my

saying he'll be relieved? He is such a Knickerbocker. I needn't add, Mr.

Randon, that you shall be entirely free: whenever you want to go

down town Adamson will take you.” The exact moulding of her body was

insolent. “Well, then, for the moment--” She gave him no chance at

refusal, but, with the curtness of her hand, the apparent vanishing of

all knowledge of his presence, dismissed him before he was aware of it

to the adroitness of the maid in the hall putting him into his overcoat.

* * * * *

In a double room at his hotel, repacking the articles of toilet he had

spread around the bathroom, Lee thought, but without heat, damn

that Grove woman. He didn't want to go to the Grove house, it would

complicate things with Fanny; and, if William did enjoy him, Lee Randon,

would he enjoy William? It was questionable in the present state of his

mind. Dinner, a servant at the Groves' informed him, would be at eight.

His bag was swiftly and skillfully unpacked for him--this always annoyed

Lee--and the water was turned into the tub. His room, richly draped

and oppressive as the one downstairs, had a bed with a high carved oak

headboard from which a heavy canopy, again of velvet and again crimson,

reached to the floor at its foot; and by the side of the bed ran a long

cushion over which he repeatedly stumbled.

His immediate necessity was to telephone Fanny; she was delighted at the

sound of his voice; but, when he told her what had happened, where he

was, an increasing irritation crept into her voice. “I can't understand

it at all,” he heard her say, so clearly that it reconstructed her,

expression and probable dress and setting, completely. “You asked me to

come over and shop, and go to the theatre with you; and now that I have

everything arranged, even Christopher pacified, you go to the Groves'.

It seems to me most peculiar.”

He couldn't help it, he replied, with a slight responsive sharpening of

his own speech; he had driven to the hotel, where he had secured their

room, and Mrs. Grove had made it impossible for him to stay there.

When he left--it would be late tomorrow or early the next day, Lee

thought--she could meet him and do as they planned. But Fanny refused to

agree: it would, now, be a needless expense. No, the other was what she

had eagerly looked forward to. Lee, drawing her attention once more to

the fact that it wasn't possible, was answered by so long a silence that

he concluded she had hung up the receiver.

“Have a good time,” Fanny said at last; “you will, anyhow, with the Raff

woman. I suppose Mrs. Grove, who seems to get everything she wants, is

fascinating as well.”

“Indeed, I don't know, Fanny!” he exclaimed, his patience almost

exhausted. “It hasn't occurred to me to think about her. I'm sorry you

won't do what I suggest; it's not different from what we first thought

of.”

“Good-bye,” she answered reluctantly; “the children are here and send

their love. They'd like to speak to you, but probably you're in a

hurry.”

“I may be late for dinner now,” he admitted.

The receiver in his house was abruptly, unmistakably, replaced. No one

else, and for so little perceptible cause, could make him as mad as

Fanny frequently did. He put on his waistcoat, changed his money

from the trousers on the bed to those he was wearing, in a formless

indignation. This wasn't his fault, he repeated; positively, judged by

her manner, he might be doing something wrong. Fanny even managed to

convey a doubt of Mrs. Grove, Mrs. William Loyd Grove. But she couldn't

see how ridiculous that was.

William Grove Lee liked negatively; there was, patently, nothing in

him to create an active response. His short heavy body was faultlessly

clothed; his heavy face, with its moustache twisted into points, the

clouded purple of his cheeks contradicted by the penetration of a

steadily focussed gaze, expressed nothing more than a niceness of

balance between self-indulgence, tempered by exercise, games in open

air, and a far from negligible administration of the resources he had

inherited.

“You are a relative of the Morrises?” he asked Lee, turning from

the menu set before him in a miniature silver frame. This Lee Randon

admitted, and Grove's eyebrows mounted. “Can't anything be done with the

young man?”

“How are you succeeding with the young woman?” Lee returned.

“Oh, women--” William Grove waved his hand; “you can't argue with women.

Mina wants her Peyton--if that's his name; God knows I've heard it

enough--and there's no more to that.”

“It begins to look as though she'd get him,” Lee observed; “I must say

we haven't got far with Morris.”

“Extraordinary.”

It was Mrs. Grove who spoke. She was dressed in grey, a gown cut away

from sheer points on her shoulders, with a girdle of small gilt roses,

her hair in a binding of grey brocade and amber ornaments; and above her

elbows were bands of dull intricately pierced gold.

“I wonder what it's all about?”

Lee gazed at her with a new interest. “So do I,” he acknowledged; “I was

thinking of that, really, before this happened: what is it all about?”

“I can answer that readily enough,” Grove assured them; “anyone could

with a little consideration. They saw too much of each other; they ran

their heads into the noose. Trouble always follows. I don't care who

they are, but if you throw two fairly young people of opposite sex

together in circumstances any way out of the ordinary, you have a

situation to meet. Mina has been spoiled by so much publicity; her

emotions are constantly over-strung; and she thinks, if she wants it,

that she can have the moon.”

“You believe that, I know, William,” his wife commented; “I have often

heard you say so. But what is your opinion, Mr. Randon--have you reached

one and is a conclusion possible?”

“I can't answer any of your questions,” he admitted; “perhaps this is

one of the things that must be experienced to be understood; certainly

it hasn't a great deal to do with the mind.” He turned to William Grove,

“Your view has a lot to recommend it, even if it solves nothing. Suppose

you are right--what then?”

“I don't pretend to go that far,” Grove protested; “I am not answering

the questions of the universe. Savina has an idea there's a mystery in

it, a quality hidden from reason; and I want to knock that on the

head. It's a law of nature, that's all; keep away from it if you want

security. I can't imagine people of breeding--you will have to overlook

this, Mr. Randon, on the account of Morris--getting so far down the

slide. It belongs to another class entirely, one without traditions or

practical wisdom. Yet, I suppose it is the general tone of the day:

they think they can handle fire with impunity, like children with parlor

matches.”

“It can't, altogether, be accounted for so easily,” Lee decided. “The

whole affair has been so lied about, and juggled to suit different

climates and people, that hardly any of the original impulse is left on

view. What do you think would happen if for a while we'd lose our ideas

of what was right and wrong in love?”

“Pandemonium,” Grove replied promptly.

“Not if people were more responsible, William,” Savina Grove added; “not

for the superior. But then, all laws and order were made for the good of

the mob. I don't need the policeman I see in the streets; and, really,

I haven't a scrap more use for policeman-like regulations; I could

regulate myself--”

“And there,” he interrupted, “is where Mina fails; she can't run herself

for a damn; she ought to have a nurse. Your theories contradict each

other, as well--you say one thing and do quite differently.”

She was silent at this, gazing at her hands, the beautifully made

pointed fingers bare of rings. On their backs the veins, blue-violet,

were visible; and there was a delicate tracery inside the bend of her

arms. But her face, Lee reflected, was too passive, too inanimate; her

lack of color was unvaried by any visible trace of emotion, life. She

was, in fact, plain if not actually ugly; her mouth was too large; on

the street, without the saving distinction of her dress, he wouldn't

have noticed her.

But what, above the rest, engaged him was her resemblance to someone

he knew but couldn't recall. What woman, seen lately, had Mrs. Grove's

still, intent face, her pointed chin and long throat? She lifted her

hand, and the gesture, the suspended grace of the wrist, was familiar to

him. Finally Lee Randon, unable to satisfy his curiosity, exasperated

at the usual vain stupidity of such comparisons, gave up the effort.

William Grove informed Lee that he might accompany him to his club,

stay, or go as he willed. Mrs. Grove, it developed, would be at home,

where, if he chose, they might pursue the cause of Lee Randon's presence

there.

* * * * *

There was, Lee soon grasped, very little that was useful to be said.

They repeated what had been gone over before. Mrs. Grove explained again

Mina Raff's unpredictable qualities, and he spoke of Peyton and Claire

Morris. Beyond the admission of their surrender, Peyton's and hers, to

each other, Mina had told the Groves nothing; Savina Grove was ignorant

of what they intended. That it would begin at once was evident. “William

is always a little annoyed by my contradictory character,” she observed,

gazing down at her slippers. They were grey, slight like a glove, on

slight arched feet that held his attention. The conversation about

the situation before them, expanded to its farthest limits, inevitably

dragged; they said the same things, in hardly varied words, a third

and even a fourth time; and then Lee's interest in it wholly deserted

him--he could excite himself about Mina no longer.

This left him confronted with himself and Mrs. Grove. A clock on the

stairway struck ten. Her face hadn't a vestige of cordiality, and he

wondered if she were fatigued, merely polite in remaining in the room

with him? She needn't inconvenience herself on his account! It was

pleasant enough at the Groves'; without doubt--in her own world--she was

a woman of consequence, but he wasn't carried away by the privilege of

studying her indifferent silences. Then she completely surprised him:

“I suppose you have been to all the cafés and revues you ever want to

see; but I almost never get to them; and it occurred to me that, if

you didn't too much mind, we might go. What do you think--is it utterly

foolish?”

On the contrary, he assured her, it would amuse him immensely. Lee

Randon said this so convincingly that she rose at once. To be with

Mrs. William Loyd Grove at Malmaison--that, of all the places possible,

presented itself at once--would furnish him with an uncommon evening.

Consequently, driving smoothly over Fifth Avenue, a strange black river

of solidified asphalt strung with fixed moons, in answer to her query,

he proposed Malmaison, and the directions were transmitted into the

ivory mouth-piece beside her. At the moment when the day was most

threatened it had shown a new and most promising development. Over the

grey dress Mrs. Grove wore a cloak with a subdued gold shimmer, her hat

was hardly more than the spread wing of a bird across the pallor of

her face, and the deep folds of the gloves on her wrists emphasized the

slender charm of her arms. No young--younger woman, he decided, could

compete with her in the worldly, the sophisticated, attractiveness she

commanded: on the plane of absolute civilization she was supreme. In

the semi-gloom of the closed car, sunken in her voluminous wrap of

dull gold, with a high-bridged nose visible, a hand in its dead-white

covering pressed into the cushion, she satisfied his every aesthetic

requirement. Women, he reflected, should be primarily a show on a stage

carefully set for the purpose of their loveliness. Not many men, and

scarcely more women--so few were lovely--would agree with him there.

Argument would confront him with the moral and natural beauty of

maternity; very well, in such instincts, he thought with a resignation

quite cheerful, he was lacking. Birth, self-oblivion, was no longer

the end of his dream-like existence. Lee Randon wanted to find the

justification, preserve the integrity, of his personality, and not lose

it. Yes, if nature, as it seemed fully reasonable, had intended the

other, something incalculable had upset its plans; for what now stirred

Lee had nothing to do with breeding. Long-continued thought, instead

of making his questioning clearer, endlessly complicated it. There was

always a possibility, which he was willing to consider, that he was

lacking in sheer normality; and that, therefore, his doubts, no more

than neurasthenic, were without any value.

He was ready to face this, but unable, finally, to accept it, to dismiss

himself so cheaply. Whatever it was, troubling his imagination, was too

perceptible at the hearts of other men. It wasn't new, singular, in him;

nor had he borrowed it from any book or philosophy: it had so happened

that he had never read a paragraph, satisfactory to him in the

slightest, about the emotional sum of a man and a woman. What he read he

couldn't believe; it was a paste of moralistic lies; either that or the

writer had no greater power of explication than he. But, while he might

deny a fundamental irregularity, the majority of men, secretly delivered

to one thing, would preach virtuously at him the other. He recalled

how universal were the traces of dissatisfaction he had noticed; an

uneasiness of the masculine world that resembled a harborful of ships

which, lying long and placidly at anchor, began in a rising wind to stir

and pull at their hawser chains.

Lee didn't mean that this restlessness was confined to men; simply he

was intent on his own problem. The automobile turned into a cross-town

street; they met, entered, a mass of cars held at Broadway, advanced a

few feet, stopped, went on, and, twisting through the traffic, reached

Malmaison. He left his outer things at the door, but Mrs. Grove kept her

cloak, and they mounted in an elevator to the café floor. The place was

crowded with brightly filled tables surrounding the rectangular open

dancing space, and Lee signalled for a captain. That experienced

individual, with a covert glance at Lee Randon's companion, a hand

folded about a sum of money that would have paid the butcher for a week

at Eastlake, found, however, exactly what they wanted; and Mrs. Grove's

dominating slimness emerged by degrees, like a rare flower from leaves

of quiet gold.

They sat facing each other. At a table on Lee's left, on a floor a

foot higher, sat a woman, Spanish in color, with a face like a crumpled

petunia. The girls of a larger party, beyond Savina Grove, were young,

with the vigorous nakedness of their shoulders and backs traced by black

cobwebs of lace. The music began, and they left to dance; the deserted

tables bore their drinks undisturbed while the floor was choked by

slowly revolving figures distilling from the rhythm frank gratification.

There was an honesty of intention, the admission that life and nights

were short, lacking in the fever at the Eastlake dancing; here, rather

than unsettled restraint, was the determination to spend every excited

nerve on sensation, to obtain the last drop from glasses the contents

and odors of which uniquely resembled the drinks of pre-prohibition.

These girls, consciously animating their shapely bodies with the

allurement if not the ends of creation, prostitutes of both temperament

and fact, were, Lee Randon decided, calmer--yes, safer--in mind and

purpose than were his most admirable friends.

Certainly they were better defined, more logically placed than, for

example, Mrs. William Loyd Grove--her dress, her powdering and perfume,

the warm metal clasped about the softness of her arms, and the indicated

purpose about them, were not worlds apart. But the latter met its

announced intention; it was dissipated--normally--in satiety. But, where

Mrs. Grove was concerned ... Lee speculated. She was evidently highly

engaged, not a shade repelled, by what she saw; in a cool manner she

drew his gaze to a specially scarlet and effective dress:

“With her figure it's very successful,” she commented.

What struck him immediately was that the proportions she had pointed out

and her own were identical; and Lee had a vision of Mrs. Grove in the

dress they were studying. The same thing, it appeared, was in her

mind. “Well,” she challenged him, “I could, you know.” This he admitted

discreetly, and asked her if she cared to dance.

“Why not?”

In his arms she was at once light and perceivable; everything a part of

her was exquisitely finished; he discovered more and more surely that

she was flesh and blood, and not, as he had regarded her, an insulated

social mechanism. Leaving the dancing floor, she was careless, in the

manner everywhere evident, in the disposition of her skirt. Lee had come

prepared for the pleasure to be had from on-looking; but he had become

the most oblivious of all the active participants. After a second brief

understanding with the captain, another quickly-disposed currency note,

there was the familiar smothered uncorking of champagne by his ear. To

Lee Randon's lavishness Mrs. Grove gave no attention, and he was obliged

to banish a petty chagrin by the knowledge that he had fully met the

obligations of her presence. The propping of her elbows on the table,

her casual gazing over the lifted rim of her glass, her silences, all

admitted him to her own unremarked, her exclusive and inalienable,

privilege.

* * * * *

She still, however, retained her personal remoteness from him; what

she gave belonged to him, in their situation, conventionally; it had no

greater significance; and, forming nearly all of the duty of life,

her life, she discharged her responsibility beautifully. She wasn't,

certainly, gay in the sense most familiar to him--Anette, in the same

circumstances, would have radiated a bubbling sensual pleasure, indulged

in a surface impropriety; any girl around them would have given more

than Mrs. Grove; everything, probably. But he preferred the penetrating

judgments, the superior mental freedom, of his companion. If she

were interested in a prostitute, she didn't, with a laborious

self-consciousness, avoid that term; she was neither obviously aware of

those fragile vessels of pleasure nor ignorant of them; indeed, Lee told

himself, she was more a part of their world, however continent she might

remain, than she was of Fanny's.

Fanny, here, would have been equally fascinated and shocked; but,

essentially, she'd be hurt; and, at the same time, rebellious with the

innate resentment of the pure, the contained, for the free. She would

never have agreed to the champagne, either; they would have ordered

lemonades or claret cup; and, by midnight, gone back to the hotel. It

was now past two o'clock. There was no lessening in the vigor of the

dancing, the laughter, or in the stream of laden trays; no trace of

fatigue in Mrs. Grove. She had the determined resilience of a woman

approaching, perhaps, the decline, but not yet in it; of one who had

danced into innumerable sun-rises from the night before, destroying many

dozens of pairs of satin slippers.

When it occurred to her to gather up the petal-like folds of her cloak,

get her hands into the gloves rolled back on her wrists, it was nearer

three than two. A hollow voice on the street called the number of the

Grove automobile, the door closed smoothly on them, and again she was

absorbed into the cushions and her wrap. But there was a change in his

feeling for her, an indefinable but potent boundary had been crossed:

they had looked together, informally, at life, at passion, and the

resulting sympathy had, finally, put aside the merely casual. Lee

lighted a cigarette, and, without speech, she took it from him,

transferred it to her own lips.

Eastlake and Fanny, Helena and Gregory, seemed very remote; a quality of

his being suppressed at home here possessed him completely: in a black

silk evening waistcoat, with no responsibilities, no thought of time

or work, he was, lightly and wholly, an idler in a polite sphere. The

orchids in their glass holder, dimly visible before him, were a

symbol of his purely decorative engagement with life. Now Lee couldn't

reconcile himself to the knowledge that this was no more than an

interlude--with music--in his other, married existence. It was as

unsubstantial as an evening's performance, in temporary finery, of a

high comedy of manners.

Savina Grove said, “It has been surprisingly nice.”

“Hasn't it,” he agreed; “and, when you spoke, I was trying to realize

that it will be so soon over.”

Immediately after he cursed himself for a blunder, a stupid error in

emphasis, from which she drew perceptibly away. She extinguished the

cigarette, his cigarette, and that, as well, added to the distance

between them.

“I should go back to Eastlake tomorrow afternoon,” he observed, in a

manner which he made entirely detached. To that she objected that he

would not see Mina Raff, nothing would be accomplished. “She might have

dinner with you tomorrow night,” she thought; “Mina gets back to the

Plaza a little before seven. But we can call the studio.”

In view of what he had already done, Mrs. Grove's proposal seemed

unavoidably reasonable. He would telephone Fanny again in the morning

and explain. Fanny, his wife! Well, he continued, as though he were

angrily retorting to a criticism from without, no man ever better

realized the splendid qualities of his wife. That was beyond

contradiction; and he sharply added that not Fanny, but the role of a

wife, a housewife, was under observation. Mrs. Grove was married, but

that didn't keep her from the Malmaison, at what Eastlake disapprovingly

called all hours of the night. She had no aspect of a servitude which,

while it promised the most unlimited future rewards, took the present

grace, the charm, from women. That--the consequent loss or gain--was

open to question; but the fact remained: for the majority of women

marriage was fatal to their persons. Only the rich, the fortunate and

the unamenable escaped.

“In a very few minutes now,” Mrs. Grove said, “you will be able to

sleep.”

“I've never been wider awake,” he protested; “I was thinking of how

marriage submerged most women while you escaped.”

She laughed quietly, incomprehensibly.

“Well,” he insisted, aggrieved, “haven't you?”

She leaned toward him; almost, he told himself, there was a flash of

animation on her immobile face. “Escape, what do you mean by that?” she

demanded. “Does anyone escape--will young Morris and Mina? And you?”

“Oh, not I,” he replied, thrown off his mental balance by the rapid

attack of her questioning; “I am tied in a thousand ways. But you

surprise me.”

“I could,” she remarked, coldly, returning to her corner. “Your

self-satisfaction makes me rage, How do you dare, knowing nothing, to

decide what I am and what I can do? You're like William, everyone I

meet--so sure for others.”

“No, I'm not,” he contradicted her with a rude energy; “and, after

all, I didn't accuse you of much that was serious. I only said you were

apparently above the circumstances that spoil so many women.”

“It isn't necessary to repeat yourself,” she reminded him disagreeably;

“I have a trace of memory.”

“And with it,” he answered, “a very unpleasant temper.”

“Quite so,” she agreed, once more calm; “you seem fated to tell me about

myself. I don't mind, and it gives you such a feeling of wisdom.” The

car stopped before the Grove house and, within, her good-night was

indifferent even for her. What, he wondered, what the devil, had upset

her? He had never encountered a more incomprehensible display of the

arrogantly feminine.

In his room, however, re-establishing his sense of comfort, he found, on

a low table by the bed, a choice of whiskies, charged water, cigarettes,

nectarines, orange-brown mangoes, and black Belgian grapes, Attached

to an electric plug was a small coffee percolator; for the morning, Lee

gathered. His pajamas, his dressing gown and slippers, were conveniently

laid at his hand. He was, in fact, so comfortable that he had no desire

to get into bed; and he sat smoking, over a tall drink, speculating

about his hostess. Perhaps she had difficulties with the obdurate

correctness of William; but Mrs. Grove would have been too well-steeled

there to show any resentment to a virtual stranger; no, whatever it was

lay within herself. He gave it up, since, he proclaimed aloud, it didn't

touch him.

The opened windows admitted the vast unsubdued clamor of New York; the

immeasurable force of the city seemed to press in upon the room, upon

his thoughts. How different it was from the open countryside, the quiet

scene, of his home in Eastlake. There the lowing of a chance cow robbed

of her calf, her udder aching, the diminishing barking of dogs and the

birds--sparrows in winter and robins in the spring--were the only sounds

that disturbed the dark. In the morning the farmer above Lee rolled the

milk down the road, past his window, on a carrier, and the milk cans

made a sudden rattle and ringing. Then Christopher washed the porches.

Fanny, no matter how late she had been up the night before, was dressed

by eight o'clock, and put fresh flowers in the vase. He hazarded the

guess that Mrs. Grove was often in bed until past noon; here servants

renewed the great hot-house roses with long stems, the elaborate flowers

on the dining-table.

In the morning, as he had foreseen, the percolator was connected, cream

and sugar placed beside it; and before his shaving was over, he had a

cup of coffee with a cigarette casting up its fragrant smoke from the

saucer. His shoes might have been lacquered from the heighth of the

lustre rubbed into them; a voice the perfection of trained sympathetic

concern inquired for the exacted details of the suspended preparation of

his eggs.

* * * * *

His dinner engagement with Mina Raff, arranged through her secretary,

was for fifteen minutes past seven; and, meanwhile, as Mrs. Grove had

offered, Adamson drove Lee down-town. The afternoon had nearly gone

before he returned to East Sixty-sixth Street; but the maid at the door

told him that there was tea up in the library. This he found to be

a long gloomy room finished in a style which, he decided, might be

massively Babylonian. A ponderous table for the support of weightless

trifles filled the middle of the rug; there were deep chairs of roan

leather, with an immense sofa like the lounge of a club or steamer; low

bookcases with leaded glass; and windows the upper panes of which were

stained in peacock colors and geometrical design.

The tea things were on a wagon beside the center table; there were

a number of used cups and crumpled napkins, and whiskey glasses, in

evidence, but Mrs. Grove was alone. She had been about to have them

removed, she told him, when he rang. “No, I am not in a hurry; and it's

such a disagreeable day you ought to have a highball.”

She was in black, a dress that he found unbecoming, with a collar high

about her throat and wide sleeves heavily embroidered in carmine. “You

will hate that one,” she said of the chair he selected; “I can't think

why chairs have to be so very uncomfortable--these either swallow you

whole or, like a toboggan slide, drop you on the floor.” Lee drew up a

tabourette for his glass and ash tray. The banal idea struck him that,

although he had met Mrs. Grove only yesterday, he knew her well; rather

he had a sense of ease, of the familiar, with her. The sole evidence

she gave of an agreement in his feeling was that she almost totally

neglected to talk. She smoked, absorbed in a frowning abstraction. A

floor lamp behind them was lighted, and there was an illumination at

the mantel, but the depths of the library were wrapped in obscurity: its

sombreness had increased, the air was heavy with the dust of leather, a

vague funereal oppressiveness.

Lee's sense of familiarity increased, but his ease left him, driven

away by the strength of a feeling not exactly of being at home but of

returning to an old powerful influence. Mrs. Grove's head was in shadow.

There was a stir at the door, and William Grove entered. He was, he told

Lee civilly, glad that Adamson had been of use. “I walk whenever it's

possible,” he proceeded; “but that way you wouldn't have reached Beaver

Street yet. Nothing to drink, thanks, Savina, but a cigarette--” Lee

Randon reached forward with the silver box and, inadvertently, he

pressed into Mrs. Grove's knee. He heard a thin clatter, there was a

minute hot splash on his hand, and he realized that she had dropped her

spoon. She sat rigidly, half turned toward the light, with a face that

shocked him: it was not merely pale, but white, drawn and harsh, and her

eyes, losing every vestige of ordinary expression, stared at him in a

set black intensity.

“I'm sorry,” Lee Randon said mechanically, and he offered the cigarette

box to the other man; but, internally, he was consumed with anger.

The woman positively was a fool to mistake his awkwardness; he hadn't

supposed that anyone could be so super-sensitive and suspicious; and it

damaged his pride that, clearly, she should consider him capable of such

a juvenile proceeding. Lee rose and excused himself stiffly, explaining

that it was time for him to dress; and, in his room, telephoning Fanny,

he determined to leave New York, the Groves, as early as possible in the

morning.

Fanny responded from Eastlake in a tone of unending patience; nothing he

could do, her voice intimated, would exhaust her first consideration of

him; she wouldn't--how could she?--question the wisdom of his decisions,

even when they seemed, but, of course, only to her faulty understanding,

incomprehensible.

“You make it sound as though I were over here on an errand of my own,”

he protested cheerfully; “I'd rather be in Eastlake.”

Helena, she told him, had been bad again; there was a recognized

opinion between them that, while Gregory was like his mother, Helena

surprisingly resembled Lee Randon. “Well, don't be too severe,” he

said. Someone had to be, the reply came, faint and indistinct. “Is there

anything else?” he asked. Of course, how stupid, she was keeping him;

the sound was now open and colored with self-reproach. She was so sorry.

“Damn!” Lee exclaimed, leaving the telephone with the feeling that Fanny

had repelled his affection. Women were beyond him.

In this mood he was unprepared for the appearance of Mina Raff,

immediately after his name was sent up to her rooms, on the minute

arranged. What, next, about her occurred to him was the evidence of her

weariness. A short and extremely romantic veil hung from the close

brim of her hat--with her head bent forward she gazed at him seriously

through the ornamental filaments; her chin raised, the intent regard of

her celebrated eyes was unhampered. She didn't care where they went, she

replied to his question, except that she preferred a quiet place, where

they could talk.

The St. Regis, he thought, would best answer this requirement; and he

had started toward the taxi-cab stand when she informed him that she had

kept her car. It was larger and more elaborately fitted than the Grove

limousine; in its deep upholstery, its silk curtains and velvet carpet

and gold mounted vanities, Mina Raff was remarkably child-like, small;

her face, brightening at intervals in the rapidly passing lights

outside, was touched by pathos; she seemed crushed by the size, the

swiftness and complexity, of her automobile, and by the gathering

imperious weight of her fame. She was still, however, appealingly

simple; no matter what she might do it would be invested with the aspect

of innocence which, admirable for her art, never for an instant deserted

her personality.

Lee Randon, who liked her better with each accumulating minute, wondered

why he was completely outside the disturbance of her charm. As a young

man, he concluded, he would have been lost in a passionate devotion

to her. Mina realized to the last possible indefinite grace the ideal,

always a silver abstraction, of youth; the old worn simile of an April

moon, distinguished in her case by the qualification, wistful, was

the most complete description of her he possessed. Young men--Peyton

Morris--were worshippers of the moon, the unattainable; and when they

happily attained a reality they hid it in iridescent fancy.

What now formed Lee's vision had, together with no less a mystery, a

greater warmth and implied reality from him. Cytherea and Mina Raff

shared nothing; somehow the latter lacked the magnetism essential to the

stirring of his desire. This, perhaps, was inevitable to his age, to the

swift passage of that young idealism: after forty, the nebulous became a

need for sensuous reality. Certain phases of Mina, as well, were

utterly those of a child--she had the eluding sweetness, the flower-like

indifference, of Helena, of a temperamental virginity so absolute that

it was incapable of understanding or communicating an emotional

fever. But, in the degree of her genius, she was above, superior to,

experience; it was not, for her, necessary; she was not changed by

it, but changed it into herself, into the validity of whatever she

intrinsically was.

His thoughts returned to the unfortunate occurrence in the library at

the Groves'; his indignation at Mrs. Grove was complicated, puzzled, by

the whole loss of the detached self-possession which, he had thought,

was her most persistent characteristic. Her expression, in memory,

specially baffled him; under other, accountable, circumstances he should

have said that it was a look of suffering, of drawn pain. He couldn't

recall the appearance of a shade of anger; yet the spoon had fallen

as if from a hand numb with--with resentment. No other deduction was

possible. He wished it were permissible to speak to her again about

what--but obviously--had been no more than an accident; he objected to

leaving such a ridiculous misconception of himself lodged permanently in

her mind. But he couldn't bring it up again; and, after all, it mattered

very little. Mrs. Grove was welcome to whatever flattering of her

seductiveness her pride demanded. When he had dispatched, with Mina

Raff, his duty to Claire, succeeded or failed--the latter, he added, was

of course inevitable--he'd return to Eastlake and the Groves would go

out of his life.

The curtain of what he had thought of as a play, an interlude, would

fall heavily, conclusively, and the music end.

* * * * *

At the St. Regis he chose the more informal dining-room with panellings

and high columns of wood, and medallions in white marble. It was neither

full nor empty, and they were conducted to a table set for two. Lee was

conscious of heads turning, and of a faint running whisper--Mina Raff

had been recognized. However, without any exhibited consciousness of

this, she addressed herself to him with a pretty exclusion; and,

pausing to explain her indifference to food, she left the selection of

everything but the salad to Lee; she had, she admitted, a preference

for alligator pears cut into small cubes with a French dressing. That

disposed of, he turned to her:

“I noticed, at the Plaza, that you are hard at it.”

“Indeed, yes,” she replied; “but we are still only rehearsing; not a

scene has been shot. You see, that makes it all so expensive; I want to

do as well as possible for the men who have money and confidence in me.”

This, from her manner, her deceptive look of fragility everywhere

drooping with regret, was patent. What she said, thought, felt, was

magnificently reflected, given visibility, by her fluid being. “But you

haven't come over here to talk to me about that,” she said directly;

“you want me to give up Peyton.”

He nodded, relieved that she had made the introduction of his purpose so

easy.

“I ought to tell you, before we begin,” she warned him, “that I can't.

Nothing can convince me that we are wrong. We didn't try to have this

happen, we did all we could--but it was too late--to prevent it,” Mina

Raff repeated Peyton's own assurance to him. “Things were taken out

of our hands. Why I went to Eastlake I don't know, it was dreadfully

inconvenient, and my director did what he could to keep me working.

But, as you know, I persisted. Why?” She stopped and regarded him

imploringly, through the romantic veil. “I haven't the smallest idea,”

she continued. “Peyton had seen me again in New York; I knew then that

I meant a lot to him; but it couldn't have happened if I hadn't stayed

with Anette.”

Her voice, her wonderment, he thought, were colored by superstition.

Evidently, up to a certain point, she had resisted, and then--how

charming it must have been for Morris--she collapsed. She had convinced

herself that they were intended for each other. Lee asked, “How well do

you know Peyton?”

“Not at all in the way you do,” she admitted candidly; “I understand him

only with my heart. But isn't that everything? I know that he is very

pure, and doesn't ordinarily care for women--usually I have no feeling

about men--and that he played football at Princeton and is very strong.

You have no idea, Mr. Randon, how different he is from the men I am

thrown with! There are some actors, of course, who are very fine,

wonderful to work with; but the ones not quite so finished.... It's

natural, for many reasons, in a woman to act; but there is something,

well--something, about men acting, as a rule; don't you agree?”

Lee did, and told her so with a growing pleasure in the rightness of her

perceptions. “Peyton is altogether different from the men of the stage,”

he developed her observation; “and it is a capital thing he did play

football; for, in the next year or so, until he grows used to your

life, he'll have a collection of men to knock down. I'd like to tell you

whatever I have discovered about him, for your own consideration, and

Peyton is a snob. That isn't necessarily a term of contempt; with him

it simply means that he is impatient, doubtful, at what he doesn't know.

And first under that head come the arts; they have no existence for him

or his friends. A play or a book pleases him or it doesn't, he approves

of its limiting conventional morals, or violently condemns what he

thinks is looseness, and that's the extent of his interest.”

Mina Raff gazed at him blankly, this time from under the scallops of

the veil. “That is hard to believe,” she objected; “he talks to me

beautifully about my pictures and a future on the stage. He says that I

am going to revolutionize moving pictures--”

“I don't question that,” he put in; “but did Peyton show you how it

would be done?”

She hesitated, gracefully lowering her potent gaze.

“Probably,” Lee Randon added keenly, “it was to happen because you were

so excessively beautiful.” There was no reply to this. “I don't need

to tell you,” he admitted, “that I did my best to discourage him; and

I pointed out that the time must come when you would fancy, no, need,

someone else.”

“Oh, that was cruel!” she cried softly; “and it isn't, it won't be true.

Do you think, just because I happen to be an actress, that I can't be

faithful?”

“It is all a question of degree,” he instructed her, “of talent or

genius. Talent may be faithful to a number of things--a man or a country

or even an ideal; but the only fidelity of genius is to itself.”

“I hadn't thought of that,” she reflected, sadly.

“Why should you?” he demanded; “you are being natural; I am the

disturbance, the conventional voice sentimentally reading from the

call book. But you don't have those in moving pictures: it would be a

sentimentally stupid director. You must believe me: your acting will

always be incomprehensible to Peyton: he will approve of the results

and raise hell--for the comparatively short time he will last--with the

means. Tell me this: together with his conviction that you'd carry the

stage up into heaven, didn't he speak of your retiring?”

The faint smile about her lips was a sufficient answer. That smile, he

recognized, pensive and unlingering, served a wide and practical variety

of purposes. “In the end,” he insisted, “Peyton will want to take you to

a home in a correct suburb; that conception he'll never get away from.”

She answered:

“And what if I liked that, wanted it? You mustn't think my life is

entirely joyful.”

“I don't,” he as promptly assured her; “but you will never get away

from it; you will never sit contentedly through long afternoons playing

bridge; you're cursed, if you want to call it that.”

“I saw Peyton's child,” she said at a tangent. “He had hold of the

nurse's apron in such a funny decided fist. I wanted to hug him, but

I remembered that it wasn't the thing to do. She has that,” a shade of

defiance darkened her voice at her reference to Claire.

“Babies are no longer overwhelmingly important,” Lee retorted; “not

in the face of emotion itself; they have become a sort of unavoidable,

almost an undesirable by-product.”

“They won't be with me,” Mina Raff promised.

It was evident to him that she saw herself in the role of a mother; her

face had a tender maternal glamour, her eyes were misted with sentiment;

a superb actress. “A baby of my own,” she whispered; “a baby and a house

and Peyton.”

“Nothing duller could be imagined.” Momentarily he lost his

self-restraint. “You have something inimitable, supremely valuable, and

you are dreaming like a rabbit. If you must be a mother, be that one on

the screen, for the thrilling of millions of limited minds.”

“He seemed to like me.” She had paid no attention to him, back again in

the thought of the Morrises' son.

“If he did,” Lee dryly added; “he will very soon get over it; Ira won't

love you conspicuously.”

“Why--why that never entered my head,” Mina was startled; “but, yes, how

could he? And I can't bear to have anyone, the most insignificant person

alive, hate me. It makes me too wretched to sleep. They will have to

understand, be generous; I'll explain so it is entirely clear to them.”

Her voice bore an actual note of fear, her delicate lips trembled

uncontrollably.

“You can't blame them, Ira and his mother, if they refuse to listen.

Eastlake as a town will dispense with you; and Claire's family--it

is really quite notable--will have their say wherever they live, in

Charleston and London and Spain. When Ira is grown up and, in his turn,

has children, they will be very bitter about your memory. However,

publicly, I suppose it will do you more good than harm. The public loves

such scandal; but, with that advertisement, the other will continue. It

isn't logical, I'll admit; except for Claire I should support you. That

is where, and only where, I am dragged into your privacy. And, too, for

your sake, it would have been better if you had hit on a different sort

of man, one without the background of such stubborn traditions. You

will have to fight them both in him--where they, too, may come to blame

you--and about you. There is a strain of narrow intolerance through all

that blood.”

* * * * *

Mina Raff's eyes fluttered like two clear brown butterflies which,

preparing to settle, had been rudely disturbed. Then her mouth was

compressed, it grew firm and firmer, obdurate; as though an internal

struggle, evident in her tense immobility, had been decided against

what was being powerfully urged upon her. A conviction that here, too,

finally, he had failed, was in possession of Lee Randon, when he saw the

determination drain from her face: it assumed a child's expression of

unreasoning primitive dread. She drew a hand across her forehead.

“I shall have to think,” she told him; “I am very much upset. It makes

me cold, what you said. Why did you come to New York and talk to me like

this? Oh, I wish Peyton were here; he'd answer you; he isn't a coward

like me.”

“Since you are so tired, and I've been so very objectionable, I think

perhaps you had better go back to your hotel,” Lee proposed. “It's

after ten.” She rose immediately, but had to remain until the waiter was

summoned with their account. In her limousine she seemed smaller, more

lost in her fate and money, than before. She resembled a crushed and

lovely flower; and Lee reflected that it was a shame no one was there

to revive her. Mina Raff, at the Plaza, insisted, holding his hand in

a mingled thoughtfulness and pictorial misery, on sending him to the

Groves'; and his last glimpse of her, over his shoulder, was of a slight

figure hurled into upper expensive mansions by an express elevator.

A car not the Groves' was outside their house; and, as Lee was passing

the drawing-room doors, William Grove called him in. He found there a

Dr. Davencott and his wife, obviously on terms of close intimacy with

the house. The physician was a thickly-built man with an abrupt manner

continually employed in sallies of a vigorous but not unkindly humor.

Lee gathered that his practice was large and select; and he quickly

saw the reason, the explanation, of this: Dr. Davencott had carried the

tonic impatience of earlier years among inconsequential people into a

sphere where bullying was a novelty with a direct traceable salutary

effect. But whatever harshness was visible in him was tempered by his

wife, who was New England, Boston itself, at its best. She had a grave

charm, a wit, rather than humor, which irradiated her seriousness, and

gave even her tentative remarks an air of valuable finality.

To this Mrs. Grove contributed little. She practically avoided speaking

to Lee Randon; and he was certain that she was, cheaply and inexcusably,

offended at him. Then, in moving, her gaze caught his, their eyes held

fixed; and, as he looked, the expression he had seen on her face that

afternoon in the library, drawn and white with staring black eyes, came

upon her. It amazed him so much that he, too, sat regarding her in an

intentness which took no account of the others. One of Mrs. Grove's

hands, half hidden in green tulle, was clenched. She breathed in an

audible sigh and, with what appeared to be a wrenching effort, turned

from him to the general conversation.

Lee Randon, losing his first impression of her attitude, was totally

unable to comprehend the more difficult state that had its place.

A possible explanation he dismissed before it had crystallized into

thought. At the same time, the restlessness which had left him for the

past twenty-four hours returned, more insistent than ever. He felt that

it would be impossible to remain seated, calmly talking, for another

minute. The conversation of the Davencotts that had so engaged him now

only sounded like a senseless clatter of words and unendurable laughter.

He wished they would go; that all of them except Savina Grove would

vanish; but why he wanted her to stay, why he wished to be alone with

her, and what, in such a circumstance, he would say, were all mysteries.

Lee determined to rise and make his bow, to escape; he was aware of

an indefinable oppression, like that he had often experienced during

a heavy electric storm; he had the absurd illusion that a bolt of

lightning.... Lee Randon didn't stir: he sat listening with a set smile,

automatic small speech, and a heart with an unsteady rising pound.

The Doctor's stories, he thought, went on unsupportably; his wife was

wise, correct, just, to a hair's breadth. Good God, when would they

go? Now--there was a break in the conversation--he would rise and say

good-night. Probably they wanted to discuss things more personal than

his presence allowed and were waiting for just that. He was aware that

Mrs. Grove's gaze, as though against her resolute effort, was moving

toward him; but, quite desperately, he avoided it; he gazed up at a

chandelier of glittering and coruscating glass and down at a smooth

carpet with Chinese ideographs on a light background. He heard the

flexible vibration of the pleasure traffic on Fifth Avenue; and, perhaps

because it was so different, it reminded him of the ringing milk cans in

the early morning by his house.

Lee Randon made a sharp effort to rouse himself from what threatened to

be a stupor faintly lurid with conceptions of insanity; and the result

of this mental drawing himself erect was even more startling, more

disconcerting, than his previous condition. It came from the realization

that what animated Mrs. Grove was passion. This was incredible, but it

was true; he had never before seen, nor imagined, such an instant

sultry storm of emotions held precariously in check. Beyond measure it

surprised and baffled and agitated him. He understood now that sense

of impending lightning; and, at the same time, he had a sense that

a peremptory brass gong had been struck beside him, and that he was

deafened by the reverberations. Mrs. Grove's still pallid face, her

contained, almost precise, manner, took on a new meaning--he saw them,

fantastically, as a volcanic crust that, under observation, had hardened

against the fire within. Then he was at a loss to grasp why he, Lee

Randon, was permitted to see so much.

His thoughts returned to himself--the voices of the Davencotts, of

William Loyd Grove, echoed from a distance on his hearing--and he tried

to re-arrange his bearing toward his unsought discovery: this was of

enormous importance. He must at once regulate his approach to Mrs.

Grove, get himself firmly in hand; the situation, for him particularly,

had far-reaching unpredictable possibilities. For all her exactness,

Savina Grove had a very exclusive and definite attractiveness; and,

faced by such a dilemma, Lee had the best of reasons for doubting the

ultimate regularity of his response.

But he was, he thought, mentally halting, racing absurdly to unjustified

conclusions; nothing, naturally, disturbing would arise; but that

assurance, the heights of reason, soon faded. There could be no doubt of

the cause of Mrs. Grove's blanched staring: just as there was no evasion

of the danger created by no more than his scant recognition. Passion

discovered was a thousand diameters increased; mutually admitted, it

swept aside all opposition. Lee Randon, however, had no intention of

involving himself there while, ironically, he was engaged in securing

for Claire Morris her husband; he didn't propose to compromise his ease

of mind with William Grove's wife. There was, as well, the chance that

she was a little unbalanced; progressing, he might involve himself in

a regrettable, a tragic, fix. He would not progress, that was all there

was to that! Lee felt better, freer already, at this resolution; he

wasn't, he protested inwardly, a seducer of women; the end itself, the

consummation, of seduction, was without tyrannical power over him. Lee

wasn't materially, patiently, sensual in that uncomplicated manner. No,

his restlessness was more mysterious, situated deeper, than that; it

wasn't so readily satisfied, drugged, dismissed. The fact struck him

that it had little or no animal urgency; and in this, it might be, he

was less lucky than unlucky.

Mrs. Davencott rose and resumed her wrap, retained with her on the back

of the chair. Lee met the pleasant decisiveness of her capable hand, the

doctor grasped his fingers with a robust witticism; and he was replying

to the Davencotts' geniality when he had a glimpse of Mrs. Grove's face

turned slightly from him: the curve of her cheek met the pointed chin

and the graceful contour of her exposed long throat; there was the

shadow of a tormenting smile on the pale vermilion of her lips, in her

half closed eyes; her hair, in that light, was black. A sensation of

coldness, a spiritual shiver, went through Lee Randon; the resemblance

that had eluded him was mercilessly clear--it was to the doll, to

Cytherea.

* * * * *

When Dr. Davencott and his wife had gone Lee sank back into his chair,

more disorganized by his culminating discovery than by any of the

extraordinary conditions that had preceded it. Its quality of the

unexpected, however, wasn't enough to account for the profound effect on

him; that was buried in the secret of instinctive recognitions. “Well,

the thing for me to do is to go to bed,” he said aloud, but it was no

more than an unconvinced mutter, addressed to the indeterminate region

of his feet. Savina Grove was standing by the door, in the place,

the position, in which she had said good-bye to the Davencotts. Her

flamboyant tulle skirt, contrasted with the tightly-fitting upper part

of her dress, gave her, now, in the sombre crowded furnishings, the rich

draped brocades, of the room, an aspect of mid-Victorian unreality.

“It is for me, as well,” she agreed, but so long after he had spoken

that the connection between their remarks was almost lost. However,

neither of them made a movement to leave the drawing-room, Savina Grove

returned slowly to her chair. “No one, I think, has ever found it out

like that.” Her remark was without intelligible preliminary, but he

grasped her meaning at once. “How you happened to stir it in me I have

no idea--” she stopped and looked at him intently. “A terrible accident!

I would have done anything, gone any distance, to avoid it. I am unable,

with you, to pretend--that's curious--and that in itself gives me a

feeling of helplessness. All sorts of impossible things are coming into

my head to say to you. I mustn't.” Her voice was brittle.

“There is no need for you to say what would make you miserable,” he

replied. “I am not in a position to question you; at the same time I

can't pretend--perhaps the safest thing of all--not to understand what,

entirely against your will, I've seen. I am very much, very naturally,

disturbed by it; but you have nothing to worry about.”

“You say that because you don't know, you can't possibly think, what

goes on here,” she pressed a hand to her breast. “Why,” her words were

blurred in a mounting panic, “I have lost my sense of shame with you.

It's gone.” She gazed despairingly around as if she expected to see that

restraining quality embodied and recoverable in the propriety of the

room. “I'm frightened,” she gasped. Lee rose instinctively, and moved

toward her with a gesture of reassurance, but she cried, “Don't! don't!

don't!” three times with an increasing dread. He went back to his chair.

“Now I have to--I want to--tell you about it,” she went on rapidly; “it

has always been in me as long as I can remember, when I was hardly more

than a child sitting alone; and I have always been afraid and ashamed.

The nicest thing to call it is feeling; but in such an insane degree;

at night it comes over me in waves, like a warm sea. I wanted and wanted

love. But not in the little amounts that satisfied the others--the men

and girls together. I couldn't do any of the small things they did with

safety: this--this feeling would sweep up over me and I'd think I was

going to die.

“All that I had inherited and been told made me sure that I was horridly

immodest; I wouldn't, if it could be helped at all, let anyone see

inside me; I couldn't have men touch me; and whenever I began to like

one I ran. It was disgusting, I was brought up to believe; I thought

there was something wrong with me, that I was a bad girl; and I

struggled, oh, for days on end, to keep it hidden.”

It was strange, Lee told himself, that marriage, the birth of her son,

hadn't made her more happily normal; and, as if she had perceived his

thoughts, she added, “Even from William. It would have shocked him,

sickened him, really, more than the rest. He had to dominate me, be

masculine, and I had to be modest, pursued--when I could have killed

him.” Her emotion swept her to her feet. “But I was, he thought, proper;

although it tore and beat and pounded me till I was more often ill than

not. Young William nearly grew up and, because of him, I was sure I had

controlled it; but he was killed. Still, in five or six years it would

be over; and now you, I--”

“Nothing has happened,” he heavily reiterated; “nothing has or can

happen. We are neither of us completely young; and, as you say, in a few

years all will be over, solved. We are both, it seems, happily married.”

She interrupted him to cry, “Is anyone happily married? Don't we fool

ourselves and doesn't life fool us?”

“It's the best course in a bad affair.”

“Bah!” She was infuriated at him. “You are like the others--worms in

chestnuts. It is bad because you are contented. I hate life as much as

you do, far more; but I am not satisfied; how could anyone be?”

He, too, had risen, and stood close before her. “Don't make a mistake

about me,” he warned her; “there are a great many men whom it would be

safer to tell this to. If I haven't had such a sharp struggle as you,

I've been wondering--yes, when I should have been happiest--about the

uselessness of most of living. I'm not safe at all.”

“I don't want to be safe,” she whispered.

With an involuntary and brutal movement he took her in his arms and

kissed her with a flame-like and intolerable passion. She made no effort

to avoid him, but met his embrace with an intensity that rivalled his

own. When he released her she wavered and half fell on a chair across

the low back of which her arm hung supinely. The lightning, he thought,

had struck him. Winding in and through his surging, tempestuous emotion

was an objective realization of what was happening to him: this wasn't

a comfortable, superficially sensual affair such as he had had with

Anette. He had seen, in steel mills, great shops with perspectives of

tremendous irresistible machines, and now he had the sensation of having

been thrown, whirling, among them.

Savina's head went so far back that her throat was strained in a white

bow. He kissed her again, with his hands crushing the cool metallic

filaments of the artificial flowers on her shoulders. She exclaimed,

“Oh!” in a small startled unfamiliar voice. This would not do, he told

himself deliberately, with a separate emphasis on each word. William

Grove might conceivably come in at any moment; and there was no hope,

no possibility, of his wife quickly regaining her balance; she was as

shattered, as limply weak, as though she were in a faint. “Savina,”

he said, using for the first time that name, “you must get yourself

together; I can't have you exposed like this to accident.”

She smiled wanly, in response, and then sat upright moving her body, her

arms, with an air of insuperable weariness. Her expression was dazed;

but, instinctively, she rearranged her slightly disordered hair.

“We must find out what has happened to us,” he went on, speaking with

difficulty out of the turmoil of his being. “We are not young,” he

repeated stupidly; “and not foolish. We won't let ourselves be carried

away beyond--beyond return.”

“You are so wise,” she assented, with an entire honesty of intention;

but her phrase mocked him ferociously.

The tide of his own emotion was gathering around him with the force of

a sea like that of which she had already, vividly, spoken. There was

damned little of what could be recognized as admissible wisdom in him.

Instead of that he was being inundated by a recklessness of desire that

reached Savina's desperate indifference to what, however threatening,

might overtake her. He couldn't, he hadn't the inclination to, do less.

Reaching up, she drew her fingers down his sleeves until they rested in

his gripping hands. Her palms clung to his, and then she broke away from

him:

“I want to be outraged!” Her low ringing cry seemed suppressed,

deadened, as though the damask and florid gilt and rosewood, now

inexpressibly shocked, had combined to muffle the expression, the agony,

of her body. Even Lee Randon was appalled before the nakedness left by

the tearing away of everything imposed upon her. She should have said

that, he realized, unutterably sad, long ago, to William Grove. But,

instead, she had told him; and, whatever the consequences might be, he

must meet them. He had searched for this, for the potency in which lay

the meaning of Cytherea, and he had found it. He had looked for trouble,

and it was his in the realization alone that he could not, now, go home

tomorrow morning.

* * * * *

In his room the tropical fruits and whiskey and cigarettes were by his

bed, the percolator ready for morning; and, stopping in his preparations

for the night, he mixed himself a drink and sat moodily over it. What

had happened downstairs seemed, more than anything else, astounding;

Mrs. Grove, Savina, had bewildered him with the power, the bitterness,

of her feeling. At the thought of her shaken with passionate emotion

his own nerves responded and the racing of his blood was audible in his

head. What had happened he didn't regret; dwelling on it, the memory was

almost as sharply pleasant as the reality; yet he wasn't concerned with

the present, but of the future--tomorrow.

He should, probably, get home late in the afternoon or in the evening;

and what he told himself was that he wouldn't come back to the Groves,

to Savina. The risk, the folly, was too great. Recalling his conclusions

about the attachments of men of his age, he had no illusion about the

possibly ideal character of an intimacy with William Grove's wife; she,

as well, had illuminated that beyond any obscurity of motive or

ultimate result. Lee's mind shifted to a speculation about the cause of

their--their accident. No conscious act, no desire, of his had brought

it on them; and it was evident that no conscious wish of hers had

materialized their unrestrainable kisses. Savina's life, beyond

question, must have been largely spent in hiding, combatting, her

secret--the fact that her emotion was too great for life.

However, Lee Randon didn't try to tell himself that no other man had

shared his discovery; indeed, Savina, too, had wisely avoided that

challenge to his experience and wisdom. Like her he deliberately turned

away from the past; and, in the natural chemistry of that act, the

provision for his masculine egotism, it was dissolved into nothingness.

He was concentrated on the incident in the library: dancing with her,

he had held her in a far greater, a prolonged, intimacy of contact;

something in the moment, a surprising of her defences, a slight

weariness in a struggle which must often seem to her unendurable, had

betrayed her. Nothing, then, than what had occurred, could have been

farther from his mind; he had never connected Mrs. Grove with such a

possibility; she hadn't, the truth was, at first attracted him in

that way. Now he thought that he had been blind to have missed her

resemblance to Cytherea. She was Cytherea! This, in a measure, accounted

for him, since, with so much to consider, he badly needed an accounting.

It wasn't simply, here, that he had kissed a married woman; there was

nothing revolutionary or specially threatening in that; it was the

sensation of danger, of lightning, the recognition of that profoundly

disturbing countenance, which filled him with gravity and a determined

plan of restraint.

He recalled the fact that both Peyton Morris and Mina had insisted that

they had not been responsible for what had overtaken them; at the

time he had not credited this, he was certain that some significant

preliminaries had been indulged in; but positively Savina and he had

been swept off their feet. A sense of helplessness, of the

extreme danger of existence, permeated and weakened his opposing

determination--he had no choice, no freedom of will; nothing august,

in him or outside, had come to his assistance. In addition to this, he

was--as in maturity he had always been--without a convenient recognition

of right and wrong. What he principally felt about Savina was a helpless

sense of tragedy, that and a hatred for the world, for the tepid

society, which had no use for high passion.

To have kissed her, under the circumstances, appeared to him not only

natural, but inevitable; and he was suffering from no feeling of guilt;

neither toward William Grove, in whose house he was a guest, nor to

Fanny--those widely heralded attitudes were largely a part of a public

hypocrisy which had no place in the attempted honesty of his thoughts.

Lee was merely mapping out a course in the direction of worldly wisdom.

Then, inconsistently leaving that promise of security, he reviewed every

moment, every thrilling breath, with Savina Grove after the Davencotts

had gone: he felt, in exact warm similitude, her body pressed against

his, her parted lips; he heard the little escaping “Ah!” of her fervor.

He put his glass down abruptly and tramped from wall to wall, his

unbuttoned silk waistcoat swinging about his arms. Lee Randon now cursed

himself, he cursed Savina, but most of all he cursed William Grove,

sleeping in complacent ignorance beside his wife. His imagination,

aroused and then defrauded, became violent, wilfully obscene, and

his profanity emerged from thought to rasping sound. His forehead, he

discovered, was wet, and he dropped once more into the chair by the

laden tray, took a deep drink from a fresh concoction. “This won't

do,” he said; “it's crazy.” And he resumed the comforting relief that

tomorrow would be different: he'd say good-bye to the Groves together

and, in four hours, he'd be back in Eastlake. The children, if he took

a late train, would be in bed, and Fanny, with her feet on the stool,

engaged with her fancy work.

Then his revolving thoughts took him back to the unanswered mystery

of what, actually, had happened to Savina and him. He lost her for

Cytherea, he lost Cytherea in her; the two, the immobile doll and the

woman torn with vitality, merged to confound him. In the consideration

of Savina and himself, he discovered that they, too, were alike;

yet, while he had looked for a beauty, a quality, without a name, a

substance, Savina wanted a reality every particle of which she had

experienced and achingly knew. He, more or less, was troubled by a

vision, but her necessity was recognizable in flesh. There, it might be

again, she was more fortunate, stronger, superior. It didn't matter.

No inclination to sleep drugged the activity of his mind or promised him

the release, the medicine, of a temporary oblivion. He had a recurrence

of the rebellious spirit, in which he wondered if Grove did sleep in

the same room with Savina. And then increasingly he got what he called

a hold on himself. All that troubled him seemed to lift, to melt into a

state where the hopeless was irradiated with tender memories. His

mood changed to a pervasive melancholy in which he recalled the lost

possibilities of his early ambitions, the ambitions that, without form

or encouragement, had gone down before definite developments. When he

spoke of these, tentatively, to Fanny, she always replied serenely that

she was thankful for him as he was, she would not have liked him to be

anything queer.

But if he had met Savina first, and married her, his career would have

been something else entirely; now, probably--so fiercely their

combined flame would have burned--it would be over. However, during its

course--he drew in a long audible breath. It was no good thinking

of that! He completed his preparations for the night; but he still

lingered, some of the drink remained. Lee was glad that he had grown

quieter, reflective, middle-aged; it was absurd, undignified, for him to

imitate the transports of the young. It pleased him, though, to realize

that he wasn't done, extinguished, yet; he might play court tennis--it

wasn't as violent as racquets or squash--and get back a little of his

lapsed agility; better still, he'd ride more, take three days a week,

he could well afford to, instead of only Saturday and holidays in the

country.

It was a mistake to disparage continually the life, the pleasures and

friends, he had--the friends he had gathered through long arduous years

of effort. He must grow more familiar with Helena and Gregory, too; no

one had handsomer or finer children. And there was Fanny--for one friend

of his she had ten; she was universally liked and admired. Lee was, at

last, in bed; but sleep continued to evade him. He didn't fall asleep,

but sank into a waking dose; his mind was clear, but not governed by

his conscious will; it seemed to him that there was no Savina Grove, but

only Cytherea; her smile, her fascination, everywhere followed him. A

damned funny business, life! At times its secret, the meaning of love,

was almost clear, and then, about to be freed by knowledge, his thoughts

would break, grow confused, and leave him still baffled.

Lee Randon was startled to find the brightness of morning penetrating

his eyes; ready for his bath, with the percolator choking and bubbling

in the next room, he rehearsed, reaffirmed, all that he had decided the

night before. No one was with him at the breakfast table elaborate with

repousse silver and embroidered linen and iced fruit; but, returning

upstairs, he saw Savina in her biscuit-colored suit in the library.

“William had to go to Washington,” she told him; “he left his regrets.”

She was, Lee perceived, almost haggard, with restless hands; but

she didn't avoid his gaze. She stood by the table, one hand, gloved,

slightly behind her on it. Bending forward he kissed her more intently,

more passionately, more wholly, than ever before.

* * * * *

“I hadn't meant to do that,” he said; but his speech was only

mechanical, as though, when he had once made it up, it discharged

itself, in a condition where it was no longer valid, in spite of him.

Savina replied with a silent smile. Her drawn appearance had gone; she

was animated, sparkling, with vitality; even her body seemed fuller.

“We shall have a long unbroken day together,” she told him; “I have to

go out for an hour, and then it will begin, here, I think, with lunch.”

“I ought to be back in Eastlake,” he confessed.

“Don't think of that till it comes. Eastlake has had you a long time,

compared with a day. But there are days and days.” They kissed each

other. “I'll go now.” She kissed Lee. “Lunch will be at two.” He kissed

her. He didn't leave the library until a maid announced that lunch was

ready and the fact of her return. At the table they spoke but little;

Lee Randon was enveloped in a luxurious feeling--where Savina was

concerned--of security; there was no need to hurry; the day lengthened

out into the night and an infinity of happy minutes and opportunities.

They discussed, however, what to do with it.

“I'd like to go out to dinner,” she decided; “and then a theatre, but

nothing more serious than a spectacle: any one of the Follies. I am sick

of Carnegie Hall and pianists and William's solemn box at the Opera; and

afterwards we'll go back to that café and drink champagne and dance.”

That, he declared, with a small inner sinking at the thought of Fanny,

would be splendid. “And this afternoon--?”

“We'll be together.”

They returned to the library--more secluded from servants and callers

than the rooms on the lower floor--where, at one end of the massive

lounge, they smoked and Savina talked. “I hardly went to sleep at all,”

she admitted; “I thought of you every second. Do you think your wife

would like me?” She asked the vain question which no woman in her

situation seemed able to avoid.

“Of course,” he lied heroically.

“I want her to, although I can't, somehow, connect you with her; I

can't see you married. No doubt because I don't want to; it makes me

wretched.” She half turned in his arms, pressed hard against him, and

plunged her gaze into his.

“It often seems strange to me,” he admitted, caught in the three-fold

difficulty of the truth, his feeling for her, and a complete niceness

in whatever touched Fanny. He attempted to explain. “Everything about

my home is perfect, but, at times, and I can't make out why, it doesn't

seem mine. It might, from the way I feel, belong to another man--the

house and Fanny and the children. I stand in it all as though I had

suddenly waked from a dream, as though what were around me had lasted

somehow from the dream into life.” He repeated to her the process of his

thoughts, feelings, at once so familiar and inexplicable.

She wasn't, he found, deeply interested in his explanation; she was

careless of anything but the immediate present. Savina never mentioned

William Grove. Animated by countless tender inventive expressions of her

passion, she gave the impression of listening to the inflections of his

voice rather than attending, considering, its meanings. She was more

fully surrendered to the situation than he. The disorganized fragments

of a hundred ideas and hints poured in rapid succession, back of

his dominating emotion, through Lee's brain. He lost himself only in

waves--the similitude to the sea persisted--regular, obliterating, but

separate. Savina was far out in a tideless deep that swept the solidity

of no land.

She was plastically what he willed; blurred, drunk, with sensation, she

sat clasping rigidly the edge of his coat. But his will, he discovered,

was limited: the surges of physical desire, rising and inundating,

saturating him, broke continually and left him with the partly-formed

whirling ideas. He named, to himself, the thing that hung over them;

he considered it and put it away; he deferred the finality of

their emotion. In this he was inferior, he became even slightly

ridiculous--they couldn't continue kissing each other with the same

emphasis hour after hour, and the emphasis could not be indefinitely

multiplied; rather than meet the crescendo he drew into his region of

cental obscurity.

Lee had to do this, he reminded himself, in view of Savina's utter

surrender: he was responsible for whatever happened. Even here his

infernal queerness--that the possession of the flesh wasn't what

primarily moved him--was pursuing him: a peculiarity, he came to think,

dangerously approaching the abnormal. In addition to that, however, he

was not ready, prepared, to involve his future; for that, with Savina

Grove, was most probable to follow. Fanny was by no means absent from

his mind, his wife and certain practical realities. And, as he had told

himself before, he was not a seducer. What adventures he had accepted

had been the minor experiments of his restlessness, and they all ended

in the manner that had finished him with Anette, in dissatisfaction and

a sense of waste.

Savina stirred and sighed. “I must ring for tea,” she said regretfully;

and, while the servant arranged the pots and decanters and pitchers,

the napkins and filled dishes, Lee paced up and down, smoking. When they

were again alone her fingers stole under his arm:

“I adore you for--for everything.” She had evaded the purpose of her

speech. He wondered, with the exasperation of his over-wrought physical

suspense, if she did. His ravishment had suffered a sharp natural

decline reflected in a mental gloom. For the moment he desired nothing,

valued nothing. And, in this mood, he became talkative; he poured a

storm of pessimistic observation over Savina; and she listened with a

rapt, transported, attention. It stopped as suddenly as it had begun,

in a silence coincident with dusk. The room slowly lost its sombre color

and the sense of the confining walls; it became grey and apparently

limitless; as monotonous, Lee Randon thought, as life. He was disturbed

by a new feeling: that perversely, trivially, he had spoiled what should

have been a priceless afternoon. It would never come back; what a fool

he had been to waste in aimless talk any of the few hours which together

they owned.

He whispered this to Savina, in his arms; but she would permit no

criticism of him. It was time, she discovered, for them to dress for

their party: “I don't want you to go. Why can't you be with me? But

then, the servants! Lee, I am going to die when you leave. Tell me, how

can I live, what am I to do, without you?” Since no satisfactory reply

to that was possible, he stopped her troubled voice with a kiss. It was

remarkable how many they had exchanged.

He had the feeling, the hope, that, with nothing irrevocable

consummated, their parting would be easier; but he began to lose that

comfortable assurance. Again in his room, in the heavy choking folds of

velvet draperies, he was grave; the mere excitation of the night before

had gone. What was this, he asked himself, that he had got into? What

had Cytherea to do with it? Ungallantly the majority of his thoughts

were engaged with the possibility, the absolute necessity, of escape. By

God, he must get out of it, or rather, get it out of him! But it wasn't

too late; he could even finish the day, this delight, with safety.

Savina would recover--she had already thanked him for his self-control.

It was fortunate that she was a woman of distinction, of

responsibilities, with a delicate habit of mind; another might have

brought disaster, followed him to Eastlake. He recalled a story of

George Sand tearing off her bodice before the house of a man she loved.

Yet... why hadn't he gone quietly away, early in the morning, before

Savina was up? He was appalled at the depths to which he had fallen, the

ignominious appearance that interrogated him from the pier-glass; Lee

saw himself in the light of a coward--a cheap, safe sensation-maker.

Nothing was more contemptible. Damn it to hell, what was he? Where was

he? Either he ought to go home or not, and the not carried the fullest

possible significance. But he didn't want to do one or the other--he

wanted Cytherea, or Savina, on some absurd impracticable plane, and

Fanny too. Why couldn't he go home when home was uppermost in his

thoughts and do something else when it wasn't? Did the fact that Fanny

might happen to want him annul all his liberty in living; or, in place

of that, were they, in spirit and body, one?

* * * * *

It was inevitable to the vacillating state of his being that, finding

Savina in an exceptionally engaging black dress with floating sleeves of

sheer lace and a string of rare pearls, he should forget all his doubts

in the pleasure of their intimacy. Even now, in response to his gaze,

her face lost its usual composure and became pinched, stricken, with

feeling. Lee Randon was possessed by a recklessness that hardened him

to everything but the present moment: such times were few in existence,

hours of vivid living which alone made the dull weight of years

supportable. This belonged to Savina and him; they were accountable only

to each other. It was a sensation like the fortunate and exhilarating

effect of exactly the right amount of wine. The emotion that flooded

them had freed Lee from responsibility; sharpening one set of

perceptions, it had obliterated the others, creating a spirit of holiday

from which nothing prosaic, utilitarian, should detract.

They hadn't yet decided where to go for dinner; and, drawing aside

into a small reception room to embrace and consider, they selected the

Lafayette, because its Continental air assisted the illusion of their

escape from all that was familiar and perfunctory. Their table, by

a railing overlooking the sweep of the salle à manger, was precisely

placed for their happiness. It was so narrow that the heels of Savina's

slippers were sharply pressed into his insteps; when her hand fell

forward it rested on his. Lee ordered a great deal, of which very little

was eaten; the hors d'oeuvre appeared and vanished, followed by the

soup and an entrée; a casserole spread the savory odor of its contents

between them; the salad was crisply, palely green, and ignored; and,

before it seemed humanly possible, he had his cigar and was stirring the

French coffee.

“Shall we be late for the theatre?” he asked indifferently.

“I haven't the least interest in it,” Savina assured him; “I can't

imagine why we bought the seats. Why did we, Lee, when we have each

other?”

“Our own private Folly.” He smiled at her.

“Not that,” she reproved him; “I can't bear to think of it in a small

way. Why, it will be all I'll ever have--I shall never think of anyone

else like this again; and you'll go back, you'll go away. But I hope

you won't forget me, not at once--you must keep me in your heart for a

little.”

“I'll never be able to get you out,” he declared.

“You want to, then, and I am--” She lost control of herself as though

she had passed into a hypnosis, uniquely frozen with passion, incapable

of movement, of the accommodation of her sight; her breathing was slow,

almost imperceptible in its shallowness. “I am a part of you,” Savina

went on when she had recovered. “It would kill me if I weren't. But it

does mean something.” Her heel cut until he thought he was bleeding.

“What?” he asked, through the thin azure smoke of the cigar. She shook

her head contentedly:

“I don't care; I have--now, anyway--what I wish, what I've always wished

for--you. I didn't know it was you right away, how could I? Not even

when we had tea, and talked about Mina and your young Morris, that first

afternoon. It was the next day before I understood. Why wasn't it long

long ago, when I was a girl, twelve years old? Yes, quite that early.

Isn't it queer, Lee, how I have been troubled by love? It bothers hardly

anyone else, it scarcely touches the rest. There is a lot of talk

about it, but, all the while, people detest it. They are always wearing

dresses and pretentions they can't afford to have mussed. It--I am still

talking of love, Lee darling--breaks up their silly society and morals

... like a strong light thrown on something shabby.”

Once more he had the feeling that, before the actuality of Savina's

tragic necessity, his own speculations were merely visionary,

immaterial; yet he tried to put them into words, to explain, so far as

he was able, what it was in him that was hers. But he did this omitting,

perhaps, the foundation of all that he was trying to say--he didn't

speak of Cytherea. He avoided putting the doll into words because he

could think of none that would make his meaning, his attachment, clear.

Lee couldn't, very well, across the remnants of dinner, admit to Savina

that a doll bought out of a confectioner's window on Fifth Avenue so

deeply influenced him. He hadn't lost Cytherea in Savina so much as,

vitalized, he had found her. And, while he had surrendered completely

to the woman and emotion, at the same time the immaterial aspect of his

search, if he could so concretely define it, persisted. The difference

between Savina and himself was this: while she was immersed,

obliterated, satisfied, in her passion, a part of him, however small,

stayed aside. It didn't control him, but simply went along, like a

diminutive and wondering child he had by the hand.

Cytherea, at this moment, would be softly illuminated by the shifting

glow of the fire and, remote in her magical perspective, would seem at

the point of moving, of beckoning for him with her lifted hand.

“What were you seeing in the smoke?” Savina asked; and he replied with

an adequate truth, “You.”

“Why not just look at me, then, instead of staring?”

“I see you everywhere.”

“Adorable,” she whispered.

No such name, no terms of endearment, occurred to him for her; why, he

didn't know; but they had no place in his present situation. He had to

think of Savina as removed from whatever had described and touched

other special women. The words which had always been the indispensable

property of such affairs were now distasteful to him. They seemed to

have a smoothly false, a brassy, ring; while he was fully, even gaily,

committed, he had a necessity to make his relationship with Savina Grove

wholly honest. As he paid the account she asked him if he were rich.

“Your husband wouldn't think so,” he replied; “yet I am doing well

enough; I can afford dinner and the theatre.”

“I wish you had a very great deal of money.”

“Why?” He gazed at her curiously.

“It's so useful,” Savina told him generally; but that, he felt, was not

completely what was in her mind. “What I have,” she went on, “is quite

separate from William's. It is my mother's estate.”

“My brother, Daniel, has done very well in Cuba,” Lee commented. Savina

was interested:

“I have never been there; cooler climates are supposed to suit my heart

better; but I know I should love it--the close burning days and intense

nights.”

“Daniel tells me there's usually the trade wind at night.” His voice

reflected his lack of concern.

“I have a feeling,” she persisted, “that I am more of Havana than I am,

for example, of Islesboro. Something in the tropics and the people,

the Spanish! Those dancing girls in gorgeous shawls, they haven't any

clothes underneath; and that nakedness, the violence of their passions,

the danger and the knives and the windows with iron bars, stir me. It's

all so different from New York. I want to burn up with a red flower in

my hair and not cool into stagnation.”

They were in her closed automobile, where it was faintly scented by

roses yellow and not crimson. She sat upright, withdrawn from him, with

her hands clenched in her lap. How she opposed every quality of Mina

Raff's; what a contradiction the two women, equally vital, presented.

And Fanny, perhaps no less forceful, was still another individual. Lee

Randon was appalled at the power lying in the fragile persons of women.

It controlled the changeless and fateful elements of life; while the

strength of men, it occurred to him further, was concerned with such

secondary affairs as individual ambitions and a struggle eternally

condemned to failure.

Savina relaxed, every instinct and nerve turned toward him, but they

were at the theatre.

The performance had been on, an usher told them, for almost three

quarters of an hour. Their seats were in the fifth row, the middle;

and there was an obscured resentful stirring as they took their places.

Plunged into darkness, their hands and shoulders and knees met. Savina,

scarcely above her breath, said “Ah!” uncontrollably; she was so charged

with emotion that her body seemed to vibrate, a bewildering warmness

stole through him from her; and once more, finally, he sank into

questionless depths. The brightness of the stage, at first, had no more

form nor meaning than the whirling pattern of a kaleidoscope, against

which the people around him were unsubstantial silhouettes, blind to the

ardor that merged Savina and him into one sentient form alone in a world

of shadows.

* * * * *

The spectacle on the stage, Russian in motive, was set in harmonized

barbaric color--violent movements under a diffused light: in the

background immobile peasant-like figures held tall many-branched

candlesticks; there were profane gold mitres, vivid stripes and morocco

leather; cambric chemises slipping from breasts and the revelation of

white thighs. It floated, like a vision of men's desire realized in

beautiful and morbid symbols, above the darkened audience; it took what,

in the throng, was imperfect, fragmentary, and spent, but still strong,

brutal, formless, and converted it into a lovely and sterile pantomime.

Yet there was no sterility in what had, primarily, animated it; the

change, it seemed, had been from use to ornament, from purpose to a

delight with no issue beyond that. Over it there hung, for Lee Randon,

the pale radiance of Cytherea.

Other visions and spectacles followed, they melted one into the next,

sensations roused by the flexible plaited thongs of desire. Lee,

stupefied in the heavy air of his own sensuality, saw the pictorial life

on the stage as an accompaniment, the visualization, of his obsession.

It was over suddenly, with a massing of form and sound; Lee and Savina

Grove were pitilessly drowned in light. Crushed together in the crowded,

slowly emptying aisle, her pliable body, under its wrap, followed his

every movement.

On the street, getting into the automobile, she directed Adamson to

drive through the park. “I don't want to go to the Malmaison,” she told

Lee. Her ungloved fingers worked a link from his cuff and her hand crept

up his arm. The murmur of her voice was ceaseless, like a low running

and running over melodious keys. Then, in a tone no louder, but changed,

unexpected, she said:

“Lee, I love you.”

It startled him; its effect was profound--now that it had been said he

was completely delivered to his gathering sense of the inevitable.

It secured, like a noose, all his intentions; he was neither glad nor

sorry; what was the use? His own feeling--if this were love and what

love was--eluded him. Above every other recognition, though, was a

consciousness of impending event. What happened now, in the car rapidly

approaching Central Park, was unimportant, without power to contain

him in its moment. They turned in at the Fifty-ninth Street entrance:

through the glass there was a shifting panorama of black branches,

deserted walks and benches and secretive water. He saw vaguely the

Belvedere, the Esplanade fountain, and the formal length of the Mall,

together with--flung against the sky--the multitudinous lighted windows

of Central Park West, the high rippling shimmer of the monumental lifted

electric signs on Broadway. Other cars passed, swift and soundless,

he saw their occupants and then they were gone: an aged man whose grey

countenance might have been moulded in sand with a frigid trained nurse;

a couple desperately embracing in a taxi-cab; a knot of chattering women

in dinner dresses and open furs; another alone, painted, at once hard

and conciliatory, hurrying to an appointment.

The tension, his suspense, increased until he thought it must burst

out the windows. Between the shudders and the kissing he kept wondering

when.... It was Savina, at the speaking-tube, who commanded their

return. They left the Park for Fifth Avenue, Sixty-sixth Street. Lee got

out, but she didn't follow. He waited expectantly. The night had grown

very much colder. Why, in the name of God, didn't she come?

“In a moment” he heard her say faintly. But when she moved it was with

decision; there was no hesitation in her manner of mounting the stone

steps. The maid came forward as they entered, first to help Savina, and

then to take Lee's hat and coat and stick. Savina turned to him, holding

out her hand, speaking in a high steady voice:

“Thank you very much--wasn't it nice?--and good-night.” Without another

word, giving him no opportunity to speak, to reply, she turned neither

hurried nor slow to the stairway.

He was dumfounded, and showed it, he was sure, in the stupidity of his

fixed gesture of surprise. The emotion choked in his throat was bitter

with a sense of ill-treatment. To cover his confusion, he searched

obviously through his pockets for a cigarette case which he had left,

he knew, in his overcoat. Then, when the servant had retired, he

softly cursed. However, the bitterness, his anger, were soon lost in

bewilderment; that, with the appearance of resolving itself into a

further mystery, carried him up to his room. With a mixed drink on a

dressing-case, he wandered aimlessly around, his brain occupied with one

question, one possibility.

Piece by piece, at long intervals, he removed his clothes, found his

pajamas and dressing-gown, and washed. The drink he discovered later

untouched and he consumed it almost at a gulp. Lee poured out another,

and a third; but they had no effect on him.

In spite of them he suffered a mild collapse of the nerves; his hands

were without feeling, at once like marble and wet with sweat; his heart

raced. A pervading weariness and discouragement followed this. He was

in a hellish mess, he told himself fiercely. The bravado of the words

temporarily gave him more spirit; yet there was nothing he could do

but go to bed. Nothing else had been even hinted at; he turned off the

lights and opened the windows. Flares of brightness continued to pass

before his eyes, and, disinclined to the possibilities of sleep, he

propped himself up with an extra pillow. Then, illogically, he wondered

if he had locked the door; at the instant of rising to find out, he

restrained himself--if, subconsciously, he had, chance and not he had

worked; for or against him, what did it matter?

He looked at the illuminated dial of his watch; the hands, the numerals,

greenly phosphorescent, were sharp; it was midnight. After apparently an

interminable wait he looked again--six minutes past twelve. The rumble

of an elevated train approached, hung about the room, and receded. Death

could be no more dragging than this. Why, then, didn't he fall asleep?

Lee went over and over every inflection of Savina's final words to

him; in them he tried, but vainly, to find encouragement, promise, any

decision or invitation. What, in the short passage from the automobile

to the house, could have so wholly changed, frozen, her? Had she, at

that late opportunity, remembering the struggle, the tragic unrelenting

need, to keep herself aloof from passion, once more successfully fled?

Was she--he was almost dozing--Cytherea, the unobtainable?

He woke, stirred, convulsively: it was after one o'clock now. The

craving for a cigarette finally moved him; and, in the dark, he felt

around for those, the Dimitrinos, on the tray. The cigarette at an end,

he sank back on the pillows, deciding that he must take the earliest

train possible toward Eastlake. He had missed a directors' meeting

today, and there was another tomorrow that he must attend, at his

office. Then he grew quieter; the rasping of his nerves ceased; it

was as though, suddenly, they had all been loosened, the strung wires

unturned. What a remarkable adventure he had been through; not a

detail of it would ever fade from his memory--a secret alleviation for

advancing old age, impotence. And this, the most romantic occurrence of

his life, had happened when he was middle-aged, forty-seven and worse,

to be exact. He looked again at his watch, but now only from a lingering

uncertain curiosity. It was five minutes of two.

The present peace that settled over him seemed the most valuable thing

life had to offer; it was not like the end of effort, but resembled a

welcome truce, a rest with his force unimpaired, from which he would

wake to the tonic winter realities of tomorrow. An early train--

In the act of dropping, half asleep, into the position of slumber, he

halted sharply, propped up on an elbow. A sense invaded him of something

unusual, portentous, close by. There wasn't a sound, a flicker of

audible movement, a break in the curtain of dark; yet he was breathless

in a strained oppressive attention. It was impossible to say whether his

disturbance came from within or without, whether it was in his pounding

blood or in the room around him. Then he heard a soft thick settling

rustle, the sound a fur coat might make falling to the floor; and,

simultaneously, a vague slender whiteness appeared on the night. A swift

conviction fastened on him that here he had been overtaken by fate;

by what, for so long, he had invited. Out of the insubstantiality a

whispering voice spoke to him:

“Lee, where are you? It's so cold.”