CHAPTER XXXII

_BOOK I_

I

MISS BRUSS, the perfect secretary, received Nona Manford at the door of

her mother's boudoir ("the office," Mrs. Manford's children called it)

with a gesture of the kindliest denial.

"She wants to, you know, dear--your mother always wants to see you,"

pleaded Maisie Bruss, in a voice which seemed to be thinned and

sharpened by continuous telephoning. Miss Bruss, attached to Mrs.

Manford's service since shortly after the latter's second marriage, had

known Nona from her childhood, and was privileged, even now that she was

"out," to treat her with a certain benevolent familiarity--benevolence

being the note of the Manford household.

"But look at her list--just for this morning!" the secretary continued,

handing over a tall morocco-framed tablet, on which was inscribed, in

the colourless secretarial hand: "7.30 Mental uplift. 7.45 Breakfast. 8.

Psycho-analysis. 8.15 See cook. 8.30 Silent Meditation. 8.45 Facial

massage. 9. Man with Persian miniatures. 9.15 Correspondence. 9.30

Manicure. 9.45 Eurythmic exercises. 10. Hair waved. 10.15 Sit for bust.

10.30 Receive Mothers' Day deputation. 11. Dancing lesson. 11.30 Birth

Control committee at Mrs.----"

"The manicure is there now, late as usual. That's what martyrizes your

mother; everybody's being so unpunctual. This New York life is killing

her."

"I'm not unpunctual," said Nona Manford, leaning in the doorway.

"No; and a miracle, too! The way you girls keep up your dancing all

night. You and Lita--what times you two do have!" Miss Bruss was

becoming almost maternal. "But just run your eye down that list--. You

see your mother didn't _expect_ to see you before lunch; now did she?"

Nona shook her head. "No; but you might perhaps squeeze me in."

It was said in a friendly, a reasonable tone; on both sides the matter

was being examined with an evident desire for impartiality and

good-will. Nona was used to her mother's engagements; used to being

squeezed in between faith-healers, art-dealers, social service workers

and manicures. When Mrs. Manford did see her children she was perfect to

them; but in this killing New York life, with its ever-multiplying

duties and responsibilities, if her family had been allowed to tumble in

at all hours and devour her time, her nervous system simply couldn't

have stood it--and how many duties would have been left undone!

Mrs. Manford's motto had always been: "There's a time for everything."

But there were moments when this optimistic view failed her, and she

began to think there wasn't. This morning, for instance, as Miss Bruss

pointed out, she had had to tell the new French sculptor who had been

all the rage in New York for the last month that she wouldn't be able to

sit to him for more than fifteen minutes, on account of the Birth

Control committee meeting at 11.30 at Mrs.----

Nona seldom assisted at these meetings, her own time being--through

force of habit rather than real inclination--so fully taken up with

exercise, athletics and the ceaseless rush from thrill to thrill which

was supposed to be the happy privilege of youth. But she had had

glimpses enough of the scene: of the audience of bright elderly women,

with snowy hair, eurythmic movements, and finely-wrinkled over-massaged

faces on which a smile of glassy benevolence sat like their rimless

pince-nez. They were all inexorably earnest, aimlessly kind and

fathomlessly pure; and all rather too well-dressed, except the

"prominent woman" of the occasion, who usually wore dowdy clothes, and

had steel-rimmed spectacles and straggling wisps of hair. Whatever the

question dealt with, these ladies always seemed to be the same, and

always advocated with equal zeal Birth Control and unlimited maternity,

free love or the return to the traditions of the American home; and

neither they nor Mrs. Manford seemed aware that there was anything

contradictory in these doctrines. All they knew was that they were

determined to force certain persons to do things that those persons

preferred not to do. Nona, glancing down the serried list, recalled a

saying of her mother's former husband, Arthur Wyant: "Your mother and

her friends would like to teach the whole world how to say its prayers

and brush its teeth."

The girl had laughed, as she could never help laughing at Wyant's

sallies; but in reality she admired her mother's zeal, though she

sometimes wondered if it were not a little too promiscuous. Nona was the

daughter of Mrs. Manford's second marriage, and her own father, Dexter

Manford, who had had to make his way in the world, had taught her to

revere activity as a virtue in itself; his tone in speaking of Pauline's

zeal was very different from Wyant's. He had been brought up to think

there was a virtue in work _per se_, even if it served no more useful

purpose than the revolving of a squirrel in a wheel. "Perhaps your

mother tries to cover too much ground; but it's very fine of her, you

know--she never spares herself."

"Nor us!" Nona sometimes felt tempted to add; but Manford's admiration

was contagious. Yes; Nona did admire her mother's altruistic energy; but

she knew well enough that neither she nor her brother's wife Lita would

ever follow such an example--she no more than Lita. They belonged to

another generation: to the bewildered disenchanted young people who had

grown up since the Great War, whose energies were more spasmodic and

less definitely directed, and who, above all, wanted a more personal

outlet for them. "Bother earthquakes in Bolivia!" Lita had once

whispered to Nona, when Mrs. Manford had convoked the bright elderly

women to deal with a seismic disaster at the other end of the world, the

repetition of which these ladies somehow felt could be avoided if they

sent out a commission immediately to teach the Bolivians to do something

they didn't want to do--not to _believe_ in earthquakes, for instance.

The young people certainly felt no corresponding desire to set the

houses of others in order. Why shouldn't the Bolivians have earthquakes

if they chose to live in Bolivia? And why must Pauline Manford lie awake

over it in New York, and have to learn a new set of Mahatma exercises to

dispel the resulting wrinkles? "I suppose if we feel like that it's

really because we're too lazy to care," Nona reflected, with her

incorrigible honesty.

She turned from Miss Bruss with a slight shrug. "Oh, well," she

murmured.

"You know, pet," Miss Bruss volunteered, "things always get worse as the

season goes on; and the last fortnight in February is the worst of all,

especially with Easter coming as early as it does this year. I never

_could_ see why they picked out such an awkward date for Easter: perhaps

those Florida hotel people did it. Why, your poor mother wasn't even

able to see your father this morning before he went down town, though

she thinks it's _all wrong_ to let him go off to his office like that,

without finding time for a quiet little chat first... Just a cheery

word to put him in the right mood for the day... Oh, by the way, my

dear, I wonder if you happen to have heard him say if he's dining at

home tonight? Because you know he never _does_ remember to leave word

about his plans, and if he hasn't, I'd better telephone to the office to

remind him that it's the night of the big dinner for the Marchesa--"

"Well, I don't think father's dining at home," said the girl

indifferently.

"Not--not--not? Oh, my gracious!" clucked Miss Bruss, dashing across the

room to the telephone on her own private desk.

The engagement-list had slipped from her hands, and Nona Manford,

picking it up, ran her glance over it. She read: "4 P.M. See A.--4.30

P.M. Musical: Torfried Lobb."

"4 P.M. See A." Nona had been almost sure it was Mrs. Manford's day for

going to see her divorced husband, Arthur Wyant, the effaced mysterious

person always designated on Mrs. Manford's lists as "A," and hence known

to her children as "Exhibit A." It was rather a bore, for Nona had meant

to go and see him herself at about that hour, and she always timed her

visits so that they should not clash with Mrs. Manford's, not because

the latter disapproved of Nona's friendship with Arthur Wyant (she

thought it "beautiful" of the girl to show him so much kindness), but

because Wyant and Nona were agreed that on these occasions the presence

of the former Mrs. Wyant spoilt their fun. But there was nothing to do

about it. Mrs. Manford's plans were unchangeable. Even illness and death

barely caused a ripple in them. One might as well have tried to bring

down one of the Pyramids by poking it with a parasol as attempt to

disarrange the close mosaic of Mrs. Manford's engagement-list. Mrs.

Manford herself couldn't have done it; not with the best will in the

world; and Mrs. Manford's will, as her children and all her household

knew, was the best in the world.

Nona Manford moved away with a final shrug. She had wanted to speak to

her mother about something rather important; something she had caught a

startled glimpse of, the evening before, in the queer little half-formed

mind of her sister-in-law Lita, the wife of her half-brother Jim

Wyant--the Lita with whom, as Miss Bruss remarked, she, Nona, danced

away the nights. There was nobody on earth as dear to Nona as that same

Jim, her elder by six or seven years, and who had been brother, comrade,

guardian, almost father to her--her own father, Dexter Manford, who was

so clever, capable and kind, being almost always too busy at the office,

or too firmly requisitioned by Mrs. Manford, when he was at home, to be

able to spare much time for his daughter.

Jim, bless him, always had time; no doubt that was what his mother meant

when she called him lazy--as lazy as his father, she had once added,

with one of her rare flashes of impatience. Nothing so conduced to

impatience in Mrs. Manford as the thought of anybody's having the least

fraction of unapportioned time and not immediately planning to do

something with it. If only they could have given it to _her_! And Jim, who

loved and admired her (as all her family did) was always conscientiously

trying to fill his days, or to conceal from her their occasional

vacuity. But he had a way of not being in a hurry, and this had been all

to the good for little Nona, who could always count on him to ride or

walk with her, to slip off with her to a concert or a "movie," or, more

pleasantly still, just to _be there_--idling in the big untenanted library

of Cedarledge, the place in the country, or in his untidy study on the

third floor of the town house, and ready to answer questions, help her

to look up hard words in dictionaries, mend her golf-sticks, or get a

thorn out of her Sealyham's paw. Jim was wonderful with his hands: he

could repair clocks, start up mechanical toys, make fascinating models

of houses or gardens, apply a tourniquet, scramble eggs, mimic his

mother's visitors--preferably the "earnest" ones who held forth about

"causes" or "messages" in her gilded drawing-rooms--and make delicious

coloured maps of imaginary continents, concerning which Nona wrote

interminable stories. And of all these gifts he had, alas, made no

particular use as yet--except to enchant his little half-sister.

It had been just the same, Nona knew, with his father: poor useless

"Exhibit A"! Mrs. Manford said it was their "old New York blood"--she

spoke of them with mingled contempt and pride, as if they were the last

of the Capetians, exhausted by a thousand years of sovereignty. Her own

red corpuscles were tinged with a more plebeian dye. Her progenitors had

mined in Pennsylvania and made bicycles at Exploit, and now gave their

name to one of the most popular automobiles in the United States. Not

that other ingredients were lacking in her hereditary make-up: her

mother was said to have contributed southern gentility by being a Pascal

of Tallahassee. Mrs. Manford, in certain moods, spoke of "The Pascals of

Tallahassee" as if they accounted for all that was noblest in her; but

when she was exhorting Jim to action it was her father's blood that she

invoked. "After all, in spite of the Pascal tradition, there is no shame

in being in trade. My father's father came over from Scotland with two

sixpences in his pocket ..." and Mrs. Manford would glance with

pardonable pride at the glorious Gainsborough over the dining-room

mantelpiece (which she sometimes almost mistook for an ancestral

portrait), and at her healthy handsome family sitting about the

dinner-table laden with Georgian silver and orchids from her own

hot-houses.

From the threshold, Nona called back to Miss Bruss: "Please tell mother

I shall probably be lunching with Jim and Lita--" but Miss Bruss was

passionately saying to an unseen interlocutor: "Oh, but Mr. Rigley, but

you _must_ make Mr. Manford understand that Mrs. Manford counts on him for

dinner this evening... The dinner-dance for the Marchesa, you know..."

The marriage of her half-brother had been Nona Manford's first real

sorrow. Not that she had disapproved of his choice: how could any one

take that funny irresponsible little Lita Cliffe seriously enough to

disapprove of her? The sisters-in-law were soon the best of friends; if

Nona had a fault to find with Lita, it was that she didn't worship the

incomparable Jim as blindly as his sister did. But then Lita was made to

be worshipped, not to worship; that was manifest in the calm gaze of her

long narrow nut-coloured eyes, in the hieratic fixity of her lovely

smile, in the very shape of her hands, so slim yet dimpled, hands which

had never grown up, and which drooped from her wrists as if listlessly

waiting to be kissed, or lay like rare shells or upcurved

magnolia-petals on the cushions luxuriously piled about her indolent

body.

The Jim Wyants had been married for nearly two years now; the baby was

six months old; the pair were beginning to be regarded as one of the

"old couples" of their set, one of the settled landmarks in the

matrimonial quicksands of New York. Nona's love for her brother was too

disinterested for her not to rejoice in this: above all things she

wanted her old Jim to be happy, and happy she was sure he was--or had

been until lately. The mere getting away from Mrs. Manford's iron rule

had been a greater relief than he himself perhaps guessed. And then he

was still the foremost of Lita's worshippers; still enchanted by the

childish whims, the unpunctuality, the irresponsibility, which made life

with her such a thrillingly unsettled business after the clock-work

routine of his mother's perfect establishment.

All this Nona rejoiced in; but she ached at times with the loneliness of

the perfect establishment, now that Jim, its one disturbing element, had

left. Jim guessed her loneliness, she was sure: it was he who encouraged

the growing intimacy between his wife and his half-sister, and tried to

make the latter feel that his house was another home to her.

Lita had always been amiably disposed toward Nona. The two, though so

fundamentally different, were nearly of an age, and united by the

prevailing passion for every form of sport. Lita, in spite of her soft

curled-up attitudes, was not only a tireless dancer but a brilliant if

uncertain tennis-player, and an adventurous rider to hounds. Between her

hours of lolling, and smoking amber-scented cigarettes, every moment of

her life was crammed with dancing, riding or games. During the two or

three months before the baby's birth, when Lita had been reduced to

partial inactivity, Nona had rather feared that her perpetual

craving for new "thrills" might lead to some insidious form of

time-killing--some of the drinking or drugging that went on among the

young women of their set; but Lita had sunk into a state of smiling

animal patience, as if the mysterious work going on in her tender young

body had a sacred significance for her, and it was enough to lie still

and let it happen. All she asked was that nothing should "hurt" her: she

had the blind dread of physical pain common also to most of the young

women of her set. But all that was so easily managed nowadays: Mrs.

Manford (who took charge of the business, Lita being an orphan) of

course knew the most perfect "Twilight Sleep" establishment in the

country, installed Lita in its most luxurious suite, and filled her

rooms with spring flowers, hot-house fruits, new novels and all the

latest picture-papers--and Lita drifted into motherhood as lightly and

unperceivingly as if the wax doll which suddenly appeared in the cradle

at her bedside had been brought there in one of the big bunches of

hot-house roses that she found every morning on her pillow.

"Of course there ought to be no Pain ... nothing but Beauty... It

ought to be one of the loveliest, most poetic things in the world to

have a baby," Mrs. Manford declared, in that bright efficient voice

which made loveliness and poetry sound like the attributes of an

advanced industrialism, and babies something to be turned out in series

like Fords. And Jim's joy in his son had been unbounded; and Lita really

hadn't minded in the least.

II

THE Marchesa was something which happened at irregular but inevitable

moments in Mrs. Manford's life.

Most people would have regarded the Marchesa as a disturbance; some as a

distinct inconvenience; the pessimistic as a misfortune. It was a matter

of conscious pride to Mrs. Manford that, while recognizing these

elements in the case, she had always contrived to make out of it

something not only showy but even enviable.

For, after all, if your husband (even an ex-husband) has a first cousin

called Amalasuntha degli Duchi di Lucera, who has married the Marchese

Venturino di San Fedele, of one of the great Neapolitan families, it

seems stupid and wasteful not to make some use of such a conjunction of

names and situations, and to remember only (as the Wyants did) that when

Amalasuntha came to New York it was always to get money, or to get her

dreadful son out of a new scrape, or to consult the family lawyers as to

some new way of guarding the remains of her fortune against Venturino's

systematic depredations.

Mrs. Manford knew in advance the hopelessness of these quests--all of

them, that is, except that which consisted in borrowing money from

herself. She always lent Amalasuntha two or three thousand dollars (and

put it down to the profit-and-loss column of her carefully-kept private

accounts); she even gave the Marchesa her own last year's clothes,

cleverly retouched; and in return she expected Amalasuntha to shed on

the Manford entertainments that exotic lustre which the near relative of

a Duke who is also a grandee of Spain and a great dignitary of the Papal

Court trails with her through the dustiest by-ways, even if her mother

has been a mere Mary Wyant of Albany.

Mrs. Manford had been successful. The Marchesa, without taking thought,

fell naturally into the part assigned to her. In her stormy and

uncertain life, New York, where her rich relations lived, and from which

she always came back with a few thousand dollars, and clothes that could

be made to last a year, and good advice about putting the screws on

Venturino, was like a foretaste of heaven. "Live there? Carina, _no_! It

is too--too uneventful. As heaven must be. But everybody is celestially

kind ... and Venturino has learnt that there are certain things my

American relations will not tolerate..." Such was Amalasuntha's

version of her visits to New York, when she recounted them in the

drawing-rooms of Rome, Naples or St. Moritz; whereas in New York, quite

carelessly and unthinkingly--for no one was simpler at heart than

Amalasuntha--she pronounced names, and raised suggestions, which cast a

romantic glow of unreality over a world bounded by Wall Street on the

south and Long Island in most other directions; and in this glow Pauline

Manford was always eager to sun her other guests.

"My husband's cousin" (become, since the divorce from Wyant "my son's

cousin") was still, after twenty-seven years, a useful social card. The

Marchesa di San Fedele, now a woman of fifty, was still, in Pauline's

set, a pretext for dinners, a means of paying off social scores, a small

but steady luminary in the uncertain New York heavens. Pauline could

never see her rather forlorn wisp of a figure, always clothed in

careless unnoticeable black (even when she wore Mrs. Manford's old

dresses), without a vision of echoing Roman staircases, of the torchlit

arrival of Cardinals at the Lucera receptions, of a great fresco-like

background of Popes, princes, dilapidated palaces, cypress-guarded

villas, scandals, tragedies, and interminable feuds about inheritances.

"It's all so dreadful--the wicked lives those great Roman families lead.

After all, poor Amalasuntha has good American blood in her--her mother

was a Wyant; yes--Mary Wyant married Prince Ottaviano di Lago Negro, the

Duke of Lucera's son, who used to be at the Italian Legation in

Washington; but what is Amalasuntha to do, in a country where there's no

divorce, and a woman just has to put up with _everything_? The Pope has

been most kind; he sides entirely with Amalasuntha. But Venturino's

people are very powerful too--a great Neapolitan family--yes, Cardinal

Ravello is Venturino's uncle ... so that altogether it's been dreadful

for Amalasuntha ... and such an oasis to her, coming back to her own

people..."

Pauline Manford was quite sincere in believing that it was dreadful for

Amalasuntha. Pauline herself could conceive of nothing more shocking

than a social organization which did not recognize divorce, and let all

kinds of domestic evils fester undisturbed, instead of having people's

lives disinfected and whitewashed at regular intervals, like the cellar.

But while Mrs. Manford thought all this--in fact, in the very act of

thinking it--she remembered that Cardinal Ravello, Venturino's uncle,

had been mentioned as one of the probable delegates to the Roman

Catholic Congress which was to meet at Baltimore that winter, and

wondered whether an evening party for his Eminence could not be

organized with Amalasuntha's help; even got as far as considering the

effect of torch-bearing footmen (in silk stockings) lining the Manford

staircase--which was of marble, thank goodness!--and of Dexter Manford

and Jim receiving the Prince of the Church on the doorstep, and walking

upstairs backward carrying silver candelabra; though Pauline wasn't sure

she could persuade them to go as far as that.

Pauline felt no more inconsistency in this double train of thought than

she did in shuddering at the crimes of the Roman Church and longing to

receive one of its dignitaries with all the proper ceremonial. She was

used to such rapid adjustments, and proud of the fact that whole

categories of contradictory opinions lay down together in her mind as

peacefully as the Happy Families exhibited by strolling circuses. And of

course, if the Cardinal _did_ come to her house, she would show her

American independence by inviting also the Bishop of New York--her own

Episcopal Bishop--and possibly the Chief Rabbi (also a friend of hers),

and certainly that wonderful much-slandered "Mahatma" in whom she still

so thoroughly believed...

But the word pulled her up short. Yes; certainly she believed in the

"Mahatma." She had every reason to. Standing before the tall threefold

mirror in her dressing-room, she glanced into the huge bathroom

beyond--which looked like a biological laboratory, with its white tiles,

polished pipes, weighing machines, mysterious appliances for douches,

gymnastics and "physical culture"--and recalled with gratitude that it

was certainly those eurythmic exercises of the Mahatma's ("holy

ecstasy," he called them) which had reduced her hips after everything

else had failed. And this gratitude for the reduction of her hips was

exactly on the same plane, in her neat card-catalogued mind, with her

enthusiastic faith in his wonderful mystical teachings about

Self-Annihilation, Anterior Existence and Astral Affinities ... all so

incomprehensible and so pure... Yes; she would certainly ask the

Mahatma. It would do the Cardinal good to have a talk with him. She

could almost hear his Eminence saying, in a voice shaken by emotion:

"Mrs. Manford, I want to thank you for making me know that Wonderful

Man. If it hadn't been for you--"

Ah, she did like people who said to her: "If it hadn't been for you--!"

The telephone on her dressing-table rang. Miss Bruss had switched on

from the boudoir. Mrs. Manford, as she unhooked the receiver, cast a

nervous glance at the clock. She was already seven minutes late for her

Marcel-waving, and--

Ah: it was Dexter's voice! Automatically she composed her face to a

wifely smile, and her voice to a corresponding intonation. "Yes?

Pauline, dear. Oh--about dinner tonight? Why, you know, Amalasuntha...

You say you're going to the theatre with Jim and Lita? But, Dexter, you

can't! They're dining here--Jim and Lita are. But _of course_... Yes, it

must have been a mistake; Lita's so flighty... I know..." (The smile

grew a little pinched; the voice echoed it. Then, patiently): "Yes; what

else? ... _Oh_... oh, Dexter... what do you mean? ... The Mahatma?

_What_? I don't understand!"

But she did. She was conscious of turning white under her discreet

cosmetics. Somewhere in the depths of her there had lurked for the last

weeks an unexpressed fear of this very thing: a fear that the people who

were opposed to the teaching of the Hindu sage--New York's great

"spiritual uplift" of the last two years--were gaining power and

beginning to be a menace. And here was Dexter Manford actually saying

something about having been asked to conduct an investigation into the

state of things at the Mahatma's "School of Oriental Thought," in which

all sorts of unpleasantness might be involved. Of course Dexter never

said much about professional matters on the telephone; he did not, to

his wife's thinking, say enough about them when he got home. But what

little she now gathered made her feel positively ill.

"Oh, Dexter, but I must see you about this! At once! You couldn't come

back to lunch, I suppose? Not possibly? No--this evening there'll be no

chance. Why, the dinner for Amalasuntha--oh, please don't forget it

_again_!"

With one hand on the receiver, she reached with the other for her

engagement-list (the duplicate of Miss Bruss's), and ran a nervous

unseeing eye over it. A scandal--another scandal! It mustn't be. She

loathed scandals. And besides, she did believe in the Mahatma. He had

"vision." From the moment when she had picked up that word in a magazine

article she had felt she had a complete answer about him...

"But I must see you before this evening, Dexter. Wait! I'm looking over

my engagements." She came to "4 P.M. See A. 4.30 Musical--Torfried

Lobb." No; she couldn't give up Torfried Lobb: she was one of the fifty

or sixty ladies who had "discovered" him the previous winter, and she

knew he counted on her presence at his recital. Well, then--for once "A"

must be sacrificed.

"Listen, Dexter; if I were to come to the office at 4? Yes; sharp. Is

that right? And don't do anything till I see you--promise!"

She hung up with a sigh of relief. She would try to readjust things so

as to see "A" the next day; though readjusting her list in the height of

the season was as exhausting as a major operation.

In her momentary irritation she was almost inclined to feel as if it

were Arthur's fault for figuring on that day's list, and thus unsettling

all her arrangements. Poor Arthur--from the first he had been one of her

failures. She had a little cemetery of them--a very small one--planted

over with quick-growing things, so that you might have walked all

through her life and not noticed there were any graves in it. To the

inexperienced Pauline of thirty years ago, fresh from the factory-smoke

of Exploit, Arthur Wyant had symbolized the tempting contrast between a

city absorbed in making money and a society bent on enjoying it. Such a

brilliant figure--and nothing to show for it! She didn't know exactly

what she had expected, her own ideal of manly achievement being at that

time solely based on the power of getting rich faster than your

neighbours--which Arthur would certainly never do. His father-in-law at

Exploit had seen at a glance that it was no use taking him into the

motor-business, and had remarked philosophically to Pauline: "Better

just regard him as a piece of jewellery: I guess we can afford it."

But jewellery must at least be brilliant; and Arthur had somehow--faded.

At one time she had hoped he might play a part in state politics--with

Washington and its enticing diplomatic society at the end of the

vista--but he shrugged that away as contemptuously as what he called

"trade." At Cedarledge he farmed a little, fussed over the accounts, and

muddled away her money till she replaced him by a trained

superintendent; and in town he spent hours playing bridge at his club,

took an intermittent interest in racing, and went and sat every

afternoon with his mother, old Mrs. Wyant, in the dreary house near

Stuyvesant Square which had never been "done over," and was still lit by

Carcel lamps.

An obstacle and a disappointment; that was what he had always been.

Still, she would have borne with his inadequacy, his resultless

planning, dreaming and dawdling, even his growing tendency to drink, as

the wives of her generation were taught to bear with such failings, had

it not been for the discovery that he was also "immoral." Immorality no

high-minded woman could condone; and when, on her return from a

rest-cure in California, she found that he had drifted into a furtive

love affair with the dependent cousin who lived with his mother, every

law of self-respect known to Pauline decreed his repudiation. Old Mrs.

Wyant, horror-struck, banished the cousin and pleaded for her son:

Pauline was adamant. She addressed herself to the rising divorce-lawyer,

Dexter Manford, and in his capable hands the affair was settled rapidly,

discreetly, without scandal, wrangling or recrimination. Wyant withdrew

to his mother's house, and Pauline went to Europe, a free woman.

In the early days of the new century divorce had not become a social

institution in New York, and the blow to Wyant's pride was deeper than

Pauline had foreseen. He lived in complete retirement at his mother's,

saw his boy at the dates prescribed by the court, and sank into a sort

of premature old age which contrasted painfully--even to Pauline

herself--with her own recovered youth and elasticity. The contrast

caused her a retrospective pang, and gradually, after her second

marriage, and old Mrs. Wyant's death, she came to regard poor Arthur not

as a grievance but as a responsibility. She prided herself on never

neglecting her responsibilities, and therefore felt a not unnatural

vexation with Arthur for having figured among her engagements that day,

and thus obliged her to postpone him.

Moving back to the dressing-table she caught her reflection in the tall

triple glass. Again those fine wrinkles about lids and lips, those

vertical lines between the eyes! She would not permit it; no, not for a

moment. She commanded herself: "Now, Pauline, _stop worrying_. You know

perfectly well there's no such thing as worry; it's only dyspepsia or

want of exercise, and everything's really all right--" in the insincere

tone of a mother soothing a bruised baby.

She looked again, and fancied the wrinkles were really fainter, the

vertical lines less deep. Once more she saw before her an erect athletic

woman, with all her hair and all her teeth, and just a hint of rouge

(because "people did it") brightening a still fresh complexion; saw her

small symmetrical features, the black brows drawn with a light stroke

over handsome directly-gazing gray eyes, the abundant whitening hair

which still responded so crisply to the waver's wand, the firmly planted

feet with arched insteps rising to slim ankles.

How absurd, how unlike herself, to be upset by that foolish news! She

would look in on Dexter and settle the Mahatma business in five minutes.

If there was to be a scandal she wasn't going to have Dexter mixed up in

it--above all not against the Mahatma. She could never forget that it

was the Mahatma who had first told her she was psychic.

The maid opened an inner door an inch or two to say rebukingly: "Madam,

the hair-dresser; and Miss Bruss asked me to remind you--"

"Yes, yes, yes," Mrs. Manford responded hastily; repeating below her

breath, as she flung herself into her kimono and settled down before her

toilet-table: "Now, I forbid you to let yourself feel hurried! You _know_

there's no such thing as hurry."

But her eye again turned anxiously to the little clock among her

scent-bottles, and she wondered if she might not save time by dictating

to Maisie Bruss while she was being waved and manicured. She envied

women who had no sense of responsibility--like Jim's little Lita. As for

herself, the only world she knew rested on her shoulders.

III

AT a quarter past one, when Nona arrived at her half-brother's house,

she was told that Mrs. Wyant was not yet down.

"And Mr. Wyant not yet up, I suppose? From his office, I mean," she

added, as the young butler looked his surprise.

Pauline Manford had been very generous at the time of her son's

marriage. She was relieved at his settling down, and at his seeming to

understand that marriage connoted the choice of a profession, and the

adoption of what people called regular habits. Not that Jim's

irregularities had ever been such as the phrase habitually suggests.

They had chiefly consisted in his not being able to make up his mind

what to do with his life (so like his poor father, that!), in his always

forgetting what time it was, or what engagements his mother had made for

him, in his wanting a chemical laboratory fitted up for him at

Cedarledge, and then, when it was all done, using it first as a kennel

for breeding fox-terriers and then as a quiet place to practise the

violin.

Nona knew how sorely these vacillations had tried her mother, and how

reassured Mrs. Manford had been when the young man, in the heat of his

infatuation for Lita, had vowed that if she would have him he would turn

to and grind in an office like all the other husbands.

_Lita have him_! Lita Cliffe, a portionless orphan, with no one to guide

her in the world but a harum-scarum and somewhat blown-upon aunt, the

"impossible" Mrs. Percy Landish! Mrs. Manford smiled at her son's

modesty while she applauded his good resolutions. "This experience has

made a man of dear Jim," she said, mildly triumphing in the latest

confirmation of her optimism. "If only it lasts--!" she added, relapsing

into human uncertainty.

"Oh, it will, mother; you'll see; as long as Lita doesn't get tired of

him," Nona had assured her.

"As long--? But, my dear child, why should Lita ever get tired of him?

You seem to forget what a miracle it was that a girl like Lita, with no

one but poor Kitty Landish to look after her, should ever have got such

a husband!"

Nona held her ground. "Well--just look about you, mother! Don't they

almost all get tired of each other? And when they do, will anything ever

stop their having another try? Think of your big dinners! Doesn't Maisie

always have to make out a list of previous marriages as long as a

cross-word puzzle, to prevent your calling people by the wrong names?"

Mrs. Manford waved away the challenge. "Jim and Lita are not like that;

and I don't like your way of speaking of divorce, Nona," she had added,

rather weakly for her--since, as Nona might have reminded her, her own

way of speaking of divorce varied disconcertingly with the time, the

place and the divorce.

The young girl had leisure to recall this discussion while she sat and

waited for her brother and his wife. In the freshly decorated and

studiously empty house there seemed to be no one to welcome her. The

baby (whom she had first enquired for) was asleep, his mother hardly

awake, and the head of the house still "at the office." Nona looked

about the drawing-room and wondered--the habit was growing on her.

The drawing-room (it suddenly occurred to her) was very expressive of

the modern marriage state. It looked, for all its studied effects, its

rather nervous attention to "values," complementary colours, and the

things the modern decorator lies awake over, more like the waiting-room

of a glorified railway station than the setting of an established way of

life. Nothing in it seemed at home or at ease--from the early kakemono

of a bearded sage, on walls of pale buff silk, to the three mourning

irises isolated in a white Sung vase in the desert of an otherwise empty

table. The only life in the room was contributed by the agitations of

the exotic goldfish in a huge spherical aquarium; and they too were but

transients, since Lita insisted on having the aquarium illuminated night

and day with electric bulbs, and the sleepless fish were always dying

off and having to be replaced.

Mrs. Manford had paid for the house and its decoration. It was not what

she would have wished for herself--she had not yet quite caught up with

the new bareness and selectiveness. But neither would she have wished

the young couple to live in the opulent setting of tapestries and

"period" furniture which she herself preferred. Above all she wanted

them to keep up; to do what the other young couples were doing; she had

even digested--in one huge terrified gulp--Lita's black boudoir, with

its welter of ebony velvet cushions overlooked by a statue as to which

Mrs. Manford could only minimize the indecency by saying that she

understood it was Cubist. But she did think it unkind--after all she had

done--to have Nona suggest that Lita might get tired of Jim!

The idea had never really troubled Nona--at least not till lately. Even

now she had nothing definite in her mind. Nothing beyond the vague

question: what would a woman like Lita be likely to do if she suddenly

grew tired of the life she was leading? But that question kept coming

back so often that she had really wanted, that morning, to consult her

mother about it; for who else was there to consult? Arthur Wyant? Why,

poor Arthur had never been able to manage his own poor little concerns

with any sort of common sense or consistency; and at the suggestion that

any one might tire of Jim he would be as indignant as Mrs. Manford, and

without her power of controlling her emotions.

Dexter Manford? Well--Dexter Manford's daughter had to admit that it

really wasn't his business if his step-son's marriage threatened to be a

failure; and besides, Nona knew how overwhelmed with work her father

always was, and hesitated to lay this extra burden on him. For it would

be a burden. Manford was very fond of Jim (as indeed they all were), and

had been extremely kind to him. It was entirely owing to Manford's

influence that Jim, who was regarded as vague and unreliable, had got

such a good berth in the Amalgamated Trust Co.; and Manford had been

much pleased at the way in which the boy had stuck to his job. Just like

Jim, Nona thought tenderly--if ever you could induce him to do anything

at all, he always did it with such marvellous neatness and persistency.

And the incentive of working for Lita and the boy was enough to anchor

him to his task for life.

A new scent--unrecognizable but exquisite. In its wake came Lita Wyant,

half-dancing, half-drifting, fastening a necklace, humming a tune, her

little round head, with the goldfish-coloured hair, the mother-of-pearl

complexion and screwed-up auburn eyes, turning sideways like a bird's on

her long throat. She was astonished but delighted to see Nona,

indifferent to her husband's non-arrival, and utterly unaware that lunch

had been waiting for half an hour.

"I had a sandwich and a cocktail after my exercises. I don't suppose

it's time for me to be hungry again," she conjectured. "But perhaps you

are, you poor child. Have you been waiting long?"

"Not much! I know you too well to be punctual," Nona laughed.

Lita widened her eyes. "Are you suggesting that I'm not? Well, then, how

about your ideal brother?"

"He's down town working to keep a roof over your head and your son's."

Lita shrugged. "Oh, a roof--I don't care much for roofs, do you--or is

it _rooves_? Not this one, at any rate." She caught Nona by the shoulders,

held her at arm's-length, and with tilted head and persuasively narrowed

eyes, demanded: "This room is _awful_, isn't it? Now acknowledge that it

is! And Jim won't give me the money to do it over."

"Do it over? But, Lita, you did it exactly as you pleased two years

ago!"

"Two years ago? Do you mean to say you like anything that you liked two

years ago?"

"Yes--you!" Nona retorted: adding rather helplessly: "And, besides,

everybody admires the room so much--." She stopped, feeling that she was

talking exactly like her mother.

Lita's little hands dropped in a gesture of despair. "That's just it!

_Everybody_ admires it. Even Mrs. Manford does. And when you think what

sort of things _Everybody_ admires! What's the use of pretending, Nona?

It's the typical _cliché_ drawing-room. Every one of the couples who were

married the year we were has one like it. The first time Tommy Ardwin

saw it--you know he's the new decorator--he said: 'Gracious, how

familiar all this seems!' and began to whistle '_Home, Sweet Home_'!"

"But of course he would, you simpleton! When what he wants is to be

asked to do it over!"

Lita heaved a sigh. "If he only could! Perhaps he might reconcile me to

this house. But I don't believe anybody could do that." She glanced

about her with an air of ineffable disgust. "I'd like to throw

everything in it into the street. I've been so bored here."

Nona laughed. "You'd be bored anywhere. I wish another Tommy Ardwin

would come along and tell you what an old _cliché_ being bored is."

"An old _cliché_? Why shouldn't it be? When life itself is such a bore?

You can't redecorate life!"

"If you could, what would you begin by throwing into the street? The

baby?"

Lita's eyes woke to fire. "Don't be an idiot! You know I adore my baby."

"Well--then Jim?"

"You know I adore my Jim!" echoed the young wife, mimicking her own

emotion.

"Hullo--that sounds ominous!" Jim Wyant came in, clearing the air with

his fresh good-humoured presence. "I fear my bride when she says she

adores me," he said, taking Nona into a brotherly embrace.

As he stood there, sturdy and tawny, a trifle undersized, with his

bright blue eyes and short blunt-nosed face, in which everything was so

handsomely modelled and yet so safe and sober, Nona fell again to her

dangerous wondering. Something had gone out of his face--all the wild

uncertain things, the violin, model-making, inventing, dreaming,

vacillating--everything she had best loved except the twinkle in his

sobered eyes. Whatever else was left now was all plain utility. Well,

better so, no doubt--when one looked at Lita! Her glance caught her

sister-in-law's face in a mirror between two panels, and the reflection

of her own beside it; she winced a little at the contrast. At her best

she had none of that milky translucence, or of the long lines which made

Lita seem in perpetual motion, as a tremor of air lives in certain

trees. Though Nona was as tall and nearly as slim, she seemed to herself

to be built, while Lita was spun of spray and sunlight. Perhaps it was

Nona's general brownness--she had Dexter Manford's brown crinkled hair,

his strong black lashes setting her rather usual-looking gray eyes; and

the texture of her dusky healthy skin, compared to Lita's, seemed rough

and opaque. The comparison added to her general vague sense of

discouragement. "It's not one of my beauty days," she thought.

Jim was drawing her arm through his. "Come along, my girl. Is there

going to be any lunch?" he queried, turning toward the dining-room.

"Oh, probably. In this house the same things always happen every day,"

Lita averred with a slight grimace.

"Well, I'm glad lunch does--on the days when I can make a dash up-town

for it."

"On others Lita eats goldfish food," Nona laughed.

"Luncheon is served, madam," the butler announced.

The meal, as usual under Lita's roof, was one in which delicacies

alternated with delays. Mrs. Manford would have been driven out of her

mind by the uncertainties of the service and the incoherence of the

_menu_; but she would have admitted that no one did a pilaff better than

Lita's cook. Gastronomic refinements were wasted on Jim, whose

indifference to the possession of the Wyant madeira was one of his

father's severest trials. ("I shouldn't have been surprised if _you_

hadn't cared, Nona; after all, you're a Manford; but that a Wyant

shouldn't have a respect for old wine!" Arthur Wyant often lamented to

her.) As for Lita, she either nibbled languidly at new health foods, or

made ravenous inroads into the most indigestible dish presented to her.

To-day she leaned back, dumb and indifferent, while Jim devoured what

was put before him as if unaware that it was anything but canned beef;

and Nona watched the two under guarded lids.

The telephone tinkled, and the butler announced: "Mr. Manford, madam."

Nona Manford looked up. "For me?"

"No, miss; Mrs. Wyant."

Lita was on her feet, suddenly animated. "Oh, all right... Don't wait

for me," she flung over her shoulder as she made for the door.

"Have the receiver brought in here," Jim suggested; but she brushed by

without heeding.

"That's something new--Lita sprinting for the telephone!" Jim laughed.

"And to talk to father!" For the life of her, Nona could not have told

why she stopped short with a vague sense of embarrassment. Dexter

Manford had always been very kind to his stepson's wife; but then

everybody was kind to Lita.

Jim's head was bent over the pilaff; he took it down in quick

undiscerning mouthfuls.

"Well, I hope he's saying something that will amuse her: nothing seems

to, nowadays."

It was on the tip of Nona's tongue to rejoin: "Oh, yes; it amuses her to

say that nothing amuses her." But she looked at her brother's face,

faintly troubled under its surface serenity, and refrained.

Instead, she remarked on the beauty of the two yellow arums in a bronze

jar reflected in the mahogany of the dining-table. "Lita has a genius

for flowers."

"And for everything else--when she chooses!"

The door opened and Lita sauntered back and dropped into her seat. She

shook her head disdainfully at the proffered pilaff. There was a pause.

"Well--what's the news?" Jim asked.

His wife arched her exquisite brows. "News? I expect you to provide

that. I'm only just awake."

"I mean--" But he broke off, and signed to the butler to remove his

plate. There was another pause; then Lita's little head turned on its

long interrogative neck toward Nona. "It seems we're banqueting tonight

at the Palazzo Manford. Did you know?"

"Did I know? Why, Lita! I've heard of nothing else for weeks. It's the

annual feast for the Marchesa."

"I was never told," said Lita calmly. "I'm afraid I'm engaged."

Jim lifted his head with a jerk. "You were told a fortnight ago."

"Oh, a fortnight! That's too long to remember anything. It's like Nona's

telling me that I ought to admire my drawing-room because I admired it

two years ago."

Her husband reddened to the roots of his tawny hair. "Don't you admire

it?" he asked, with a sort of juvenile dismay.

"There; Lita'll be happy now--she's produced her effect!" Nona laughed a

little nervously.

Lita joined in the laugh. "Isn't he like his mother?" she shrugged.

Jim was silent, and his sister guessed that he was afraid to insist on

the dinner engagement lest he should increase his wife's determination

to ignore it. The same motive kept Nona from saying anything more; and

the lunch ended in a clatter of talk about other things. But what

puzzled Nona was that her father's communication to Lita should have

concerned the fact that she was dining at his house that night. It was

unlike Dexter Manford to remember the fact himself (as Miss Bruss's

frantic telephoning had testified), and still more unlike him to remind

his wife's guests, even if he knew who they were to be--which he seldom

did. Nona pondered. "They must have been going somewhere together--he

told me he was engaged tonight--and Lita's in a temper because they

can't. But then she's in a temper about everything today." Nona tried to

make that cover all her perplexities. She wondered if it did as much for

Jim.

IV

IT would have been hard, Nona Manford thought, to find a greater

contrast than between Lita Wyant's house and that at which, two hours

later, she descended from Lita Wyant's smart Brewster.

"You won't come, Lita?" The girl paused, her hand on the motor door.

"He'd like it awfully."

Lita shook off the suggestion. "I'm not in the humour."

"But he's such fun--he can be better company than anybody."

"Oh, for you he's a fad--for me he's a duty; and I don't happen to feel

like duties." Lita waved one of her flower-hands and was off.

Nona mounted the pock-marked brown steps. The house was old Mrs.

Wyant's, a faded derelict habitation in a street past which fashion and

business had long since flowed. After his mother's death Wyant, from

motives of economy, had divided it into small flats. He kept one for

himself, and in the one overhead lived his mother's former companion,

the dependent cousin who had been the cause of his divorce. Wyant had

never married her; he had never deserted her; that, to Nona's mind, gave

one a fair notion of his character. When he was ill--and he had

developed, rather early, a queer sort of nervous hypochondria--the

cousin came downstairs and nursed him; when he was well his visitors

never saw her. But she was reported to attend to his mending, keep some

sort of order in his accounts, and prevent his falling a prey to the

unscrupulous. Pauline Manford said it was probably for the best. She

herself would have thought it natural, and in fact proper, that her

former husband should have married his cousin; as he had not, she

preferred to decide that since the divorce they had been "only friends."

The Wyant code was always a puzzle to her. She never met the cousin when

she called on her former husband; but Jim, two or three times a year,

made it a point to ring the bell of the upper flat, and at Christmas

sent its invisible tenant an azalea.

Nona ran up the stairs to Wyant's door. On the threshold a thin

gray-haired lady with a shadowy face awaited her.

"Come in, do. He's got the gout, and can't get up to open the door, and

I had to send the cook out to get something tempting for his dinner."

"Oh, thank you, cousin Eleanor." The girl looked sympathetically into

the other's dimly tragic eyes. "Poor Exhibit A! I'm sorry he's ill

again."

"He's been--imprudent. But the worst of it's over. It will brighten him

up to see you. Your cousin Stanley's there."

"Is he?" Nona half drew back, feeling herself faintly redden.

"He'll be going soon. Mr. Wyant will be disappointed if you don't go

in."

"But of course I'm going in."

The older woman smiled a worn smile, and vanished upstairs while Nona

slipped off her furs. The girl knew it would be useless to urge cousin

Eleanor to stay. If one wished to see her one had to ring at her own

door.

Arthur Wyant's shabby sitting-room was full of February sunshine,

illustrated magazines, newspapers and cigar ashes. There were some books

on shelves, shabby also: Wyant had apparently once cared for them, and

his talk was still coloured by traces of early cultivation, especially

when visitors like Nona or Stan Heuston were with him. But the range of

his allusions suggested that he must have stopped reading years ago.

Even novels were too great a strain on his attention. As far back as

Nona could remember he had fared only on the popular magazines,

picture-papers and the weekly purveyors of social scandal. He took an

intense interest in the private affairs of the world he had ceased to

frequent, though he always ridiculed this interest in talking to Nona or

Heuston.

While he sat there, deep in his armchair, with bent shoulders, sunk head

and clumsy bandaged foot, Nona saw him, as she always did, as taller,

slimmer, more handsomely upstanding than any man she had ever known. He

stooped now, even when he was on his feet; he was prematurely aged; and

the fact perhaps helped to connect him with vanished institutions to

which only his first youth could have belonged.

To Nona, at any rate, he would always be the Arthur Wyant of the

race-meeting group in the yellowing photograph on his mantelpiece: clad

in the gray frock-coat and topper of the early 'eighties, and tallest in

a tall line of the similarly garbed, behind ladies with puffed sleeves

and little hats tilting forward on elaborate hair. How peaceful, smiling

and unhurried they all seemed! Nona never looked at them without a pang

of regret that she had not been born in those spacious days of dogcarts,

victorias, leisurely tennis and afternoon calls...

Wyant's face, even more than his figure, related him to that past: the

small shapely head, the crisp hair grown thin on a narrow slanting

forehead, the eyes in which a twinkle still lingered, eyes probably blue

when the hair was brown, but now faded with the rest, and the slight

fair moustache above an uncertain ironic mouth.

A romantic figure; or rather the faded photograph of one. Yes; perhaps

Arthur Wyant had always been faded--like a charming reflection in a

sallow mirror. And all that length of limb and beauty of port had been

meant for some other man, a man to whom the things had really happened

which Wyant had only dreamed.

His visitor, though of the same stock, could never have inspired such

conjectures. Stanley Heuston was much younger--in the middle

thirties--and most things about him were middling: height, complexion,

features. But he had a strong forehead, his mouth was curved for power

and mockery, and only his small quick eyes betrayed the uncertainty and

lassitude inherited from a Wyant mother.

Wyant, at Nona's approach, held out a dry feverish hand. "Well, this is

luck! Stan was just getting ready to fly at your mother's approach, and

you turn up instead!"

Heuston got to his feet, and greeted Nona somewhat ceremoniously.

"Perhaps I'd better fly all the same," he said in a singularly agreeable

voice. His eyes were intent on the girl's.

She made a slight gesture, not so much to detain or dismiss as to

signify her complete indifference. "Isn't mother coming presently?" she

said, addressing the question to Wyant.

"No; I'm moved on till tomorrow. There must have been some big upheaval

to make her change her plans at the last minute. Sit down and tell us

all about it."

"I don't know of any upheaval. There's only the dinner-dance for

Amalasuntha this evening."

"Oh, but that sort of thing is in your mother's stride. You underrate

her capacity. Stan has been giving me a hint of something a good deal

more volcanic."

Nona felt an inward tremor; was she going to hear Lita's name? She

turned her glance on Heuston with a certain hostility.

"Oh, Stan's hints--."

"You see what Nona thinks of my views on cities and men," Heuston

shrugged. He had remained on his feet, as though about to take leave;

but once again the girl felt his eager eyes beseeching her.

"Are you waiting to walk home with me? You needn't. I'm going to stay

for hours," she said, smiling across him at Wyant as she settled down

into one of the chintz armchairs.

"Aren't you a little hard on him?" Wyant suggested, when the door had

closed on their visitor. "It's not exactly a crime to want to walk home

with you."

Nona made an impatient gesture. "Stan bores me."

"Ah, well, I suppose he's not enough of a novelty. Or not up-to-date

enough; _your_ dates. Some of his ideas seem to me pretty subversive; but

I suppose in your set and Lita's a young man who doesn't jazz all day

and drink all night--or vice versa--is a back number."

The girl did not take this up, and after a moment Wyant continued, in

his half-mocking half-querulous voice: "Or is it that he isn't 'psychic'

enough? That's the latest, isn't it? When you're not high-kicking you're

all high-thinking; and that reminds me of Stan's news--"

"Yes?" Nona brought it out between parched lips. Her gaze turned from

Wyant to the coals smouldering in the grate. She did not want to face

any one just then.

"Well, it seems there's going to be a gigantic muck-raking--one of the

worst we've had yet. Into this Mahatma business; you know, the nigger

chap your mother's always talking about. There's a hint of it in the

last number of the 'Looker-on'; here ... where is it? Never mind,

though. What it says isn't a patch on the real facts, Stan tells me. It

seems the goings-on in that School of Oriental Thought--what does he

call the place: Dawnside?--have reached such a point that the Grant

Lindons, whose girl has been making a 'retreat' there, or whatever they

call it, are out to have a thorough probing. They say the police don't

want to move because so many people we know are mixed up in it; but

Lindon's back is up, and he swears he won't rest till he gets the case

before the Grand Jury..."

As Wyant talked, the weight lifted from Nona's breast. Much she cared

for the Mahatma, or for the Grant Lindons! Stuffy old-fashioned

people--she didn't wonder Bee Lindon had broken away from such

parents--though she was a silly fool, no doubt. Besides, the Mahatma

certainly had reduced Mrs. Manford's hips--and made her less nervous

too: for Mrs. Manford sometimes was nervous, in spite of her breathless

pursuit of repose. Not, of course, in the same querulous uncontrolled

way as poor Arthur Wyant, who had never been taught poise, or mental

uplift, or being in tune with the Infinite; but rather as one agitated

by the incessant effort to be calm. And in that respect the Mahatma's

rhythmic exercises had without doubt been helpful. No; Nona didn't care

a fig for scandals about the School of Oriental Thought. And the relief

of finding that the subject she had dreaded to hear broached had

probably never even come to Wyant's ears, gave her a reaction of

light-heartedness.

There were moments when Nona felt oppressed by responsibilities and

anxieties not of her age, apprehensions that she could not shake off and

yet had not enough experience of life to know how to meet. One or two of

her girl friends--in the brief intervals between whirls and thrills--had

confessed to the same vague disquietude. It was as if, in the beaming

determination of the middle-aged, one and all of them, to ignore sorrow

and evil, "think them away" as superannuated bogies, survivals of some

obsolete European superstition unworthy of enlightened Americans, to

whom plumbing and dentistry had given higher standards, and bi-focal

glasses a clearer view of the universe--as if the demons the elder

generation ignored, baulked of their natural prey, had cast their hungry

shadow over the young. After all, somebody in every family had to

remember now and then that such things as wickedness, suffering and

death had not yet been banished from the earth; and with all those

bright-complexioned white-haired mothers mailed in massage and optimism,

and behaving as if they had never heard of anything but the Good and the

Beautiful, perhaps their children had to serve as vicarious sacrifices.

There were hours when Nona Manford, bewildered little Iphigenia,

uneasily argued in this way: others when youth and inexperience

reasserted themselves, and the load slipped from her, and she wondered

why she didn't always believe, like her elders, that one had only to be

brisk, benevolent and fond to prevail against the powers of darkness.

She felt this relief now; but a vague restlessness remained with her,

and to ease it, and prove to herself that she was not nervous, she

mentioned to Wyant that she had just been lunching with Jim and Lita.

Wyant brightened, as he always did at his son's name. "Poor old Jim! He

dropped in yesterday, and I thought he looked overworked! I sometimes

wonder if that father of yours hasn't put more hustle into him than a

Wyant can assimilate." Wyant spoke good-humouredly; his first bitterness

against the man who had supplanted him (a sentiment regarded by Pauline

as barbarous and mediæval) had gradually been swallowed up in gratitude

for Dexter Manford's kindness to Jim. The oddly-assorted trio, Wyant,

Pauline and her new husband, had been drawn into a kind of inarticulate

understanding by their mutual tenderness for the progeny of the two

marriages, and Manford loved Jim almost as much as Wyant loved Nona.

"Oh, well," the girl said, "Jim always does everything with all his

might. And now that he's doing it for Lita and the baby, he's got to

keep on, whether he wants to or not."

"I suppose so. But why do you say 'whether'?" Wyant questioned with

one of his disconcerting flashes. "Doesn't he want to?"

Nona was vexed at her slip. "Of course. I only meant that he used to be

rather changeable in his tastes, and that getting married has given him

an object."

"How very old-fashioned! You _are_ old-fashioned, you know, my child; in

spite of the jazz. I suppose that's what I've done for _you_, in exchange

for Manford's modernizing Jim. Not much of an exchange, I'm afraid. But

how long do you suppose Lita will care about being an object to Jim?"

"Why shouldn't she care? She'd go on caring about the baby, even if ... not

that I mean..."

"Oh, I know. That's a great baby. Queer, you know--I can see he's going

to have the Wyant nose and forehead. It's about all we've left to give.

But look here--haven't you really heard anything more about the Mahatma?

I thought that Lindon girl was a pal of yours. Now listen--"

When Nona Manford emerged into the street she was not surprised to meet

Stanley Heuston strolling toward her across Stuyvesant Square. Neither

surprised, nor altogether sorry; do what she would, she could never

quite repress the sense of ease and well-being that his nearness gave.

And yet half the time they were together she always spent in being angry

with him and wishing him away. If only the relation between them had

been as simple as that between herself and Jim! And it might have

been--ought to have been--seeing that Heuston was Jim's cousin, and

nearly twice her age; yes, and had been married before she left the

schoolroom. Really, her exasperation was justified. Yet no one

understood her as well as Stanley; not even Jim, who was so much dearer

and more lovable. Life was a confusing business to Nona Manford.

"How absurd! I asked you not to wait. I suppose you think I'm not old

enough to be out alone after dark."

"That hadn't occurred to me; and I'm not waiting to walk home with you,"

Heuston rejoined with some asperity. "But I do want to say two words,"

he added, his voice breaking into persuasion.

Nona stopped, her heels firmly set on the pavement. "The same old two?"

"No. Besides, there are three of those. You never _could_ count." He

hesitated: "This time it's only about Arthur--"

"Why; what's the matter?" The sense of apprehension woke in her again.

What if Wyant really had begun to suspect that there was something, an

imponderable something, wrong between Jim and Lita, and had been too

shrewd to let Nona detect his suspicion?

"Haven't you noticed? He looks like the devil. He's been drinking again.

Eleanor spoke to me--"

"Oh, dear." There it was--all the responsibilities and worries always

closed in on Nona! But this one, after all, was relatively bearable.

"What can I do, Stan? I can't imagine why you come to _me_!"

He smiled a little, in his queer derisive way. "Doesn't everybody? The

fact is--I didn't want to bother Jim."

She was silent. She understood; but she resented his knowing that she

understood.

"Jim has got to be bothered. He's got to look after his father."

"Yes; but I-- Oh, look here, Nona; won't you see?"

"See what?"

"Why--that if Jim is worried about his father now--Jim's a queer chap;

he's tried his hand at fifty things, and never stuck to one; and if he

gets a shock now, on top of everything else--"

Nona felt her lips grow hard: all her pride and tenderness for her

brother stiffened into ice about her heart.

"I don't know what you mean. Jim's grown up--he's got to face things."

"Yes; I know. I've been told the same thing about myself. But there are

things one doesn't ever have a chance to face in this slippery sliding

modern world, because they don't come out into the open. They just lurk

and peep and mouth. My case exactly. What on earth is there about Aggie

that a fellow can _face_?"

Nona stopped short with a jerk. "We don't happen to be talking about you

and Aggie," she said.

"Oh, well; I was merely using myself as an example. But there are plenty

of others to choose from."

Her voice broke into anger. "I don't imagine you're comparing your

married life to Jim's?"

"Lord, no. God forbid!" He burst into a dry laugh. "When I think of

Aggie's life and Lita's--!"

"Never mind about Lita's life. What do you know about it, anyhow? Oh,

Stan, why are we quarrelling again?" She felt the tears in her throat.

"What you wanted was only to tell me about poor Arthur. And I'd guessed

that myself--I know something ought to be done. But _what_? How on earth

can I tell? I'm always being asked by everybody what ought to be done ...

and sometimes I feel too young to be always the one to judge, to

decide..."

Heuston stood watching her in silence. Suddenly he took her hand and

drew it through his arm. She did not resist, and thus linked they walked

on slowly and without further speech through the cold deserted streets.

As they approached more populous regions she freed her arm from his, and

signalled to a taxi.

"May I come?"

"No. I'm going to meet Lita at the Cubist Cabaret. I promised to be

there by four."

"Oh, all right." He looked at her irresolutely as the taxi drew up. "I

wish to God I could always be on hand to help you when you're bothered!"

She shook her head.

"Never?"

"Not while Aggie--"

"That means never."

"Then never." She held out her hand, but he had turned and was already

striding off in the opposite direction. She threw the address to the

chauffeur and got in.

"Yes; I suppose it _is_ never," she said to herself. After all, instead of

helping her with the Wyant problem, Stan had only brought her another:

his own--and hers. As long as Aggie Heuston, a sort of lay nun, absorbed

in High Church practices and the exercise of a bleak but efficient

philanthropy, continued to set her face against divorce, Nona would not

admit that Heuston had any right to force it upon her. "It's her way of

loving him," the girl said to herself for the hundredth time. "She wants

to keep him for herself too--though she doesn't know it; but she does

above all want to save him. And she thinks that's the way to do it. I

rather admire her for thinking that there is a way to save people..."

She pushed that problem once more into the back of her mind, and turned

her thoughts toward the other and far more pressing one: that of poor

Arthur Wyant's growing infirmity. Stanley was probably right in not

wanting to speak to Jim about it at that particular moment--though how

did Stanley know about Jim's troubles, and what did he know?--and she

herself, after all, was perhaps the only person to deal with Arthur

Wyant. Another interval of anxious consideration made her decide that

the best way would be to seek her father's advice. After an hour's

dancing she would feel better, more alive and competent, and there would

still be time to dash down to Manford's office, the only place--as she

knew by experience--where Manford was ever likely to have time for her.

V

THE door of his private office clicked on a withdrawing client, and

Dexter Manford, giving his vigorous shoulders a shake, rose from his

desk and stood irresolute.

"I must get out to Cedarledge for some golf on Saturday," he thought. He

lived among people who regarded golf as a universal panacea, and in a

world which believed in panaceas.

As he stood there, his glance lit on the looking-glass above the mantel

and he mustered his image impatiently. Queer thing, for a man of his age

to gape at himself in a looking-glass like a dago dancing-master! He saw

a swarthy straight-nosed face, dark crinkling hair with a dash of gray

on the temples, dark eyes under brows that were beginning to beetle

across a deep vertical cleft. Complexion turning from ruddy to sallow;

eyes heavy--would he put his tongue out next? The matter with him was...

He dropped back into his desk-chair and unhooked the telephone receiver.

"Mrs. James Wyant? Yes... Oh--_out_? You're sure? And you don't know

when she'll be back? Who? Yes; Mr. Manford. I had a message for Mrs.

Wyant. No matter."

He hung up and leaned back, stretching his legs under the table and

staring moodily at the heap of letters and legal papers in the

morocco-lined baskets set out before him.

"I look ten years older than my age," he thought. Yet that last new

type-writer, Miss Vollard, or whatever her name was, really behaved as

if ... was always looking at him when she thought he wasn't looking...

"Oh, what rot!" he exclaimed.

His day had been as all his days were now: a starting in with a great

sense of pressure, importance and authority--and a drop at the close

into staleness and futility.

The evening before, he had stopped to see his doctor and been told that

he was over-working, and needed a nerve-tonic and a change of scene.

"Cruise to the West Indies, or something of the sort. Couldn't you get

away for three or four weeks? No? Well, more golf then, anyhow."

Getting away from things; the perpetual evasion, moral, mental,

physical, which he heard preached, and saw practised, everywhere about

him, except where money-making was concerned! He, Dexter Manford, who

had been brought up on a Minnesota farm, paid his own way through the

State College at Delos, and his subsequent course in the Harvard Law

School; and who, ever since, had been working at the top of his pitch

with no more sense of strain, no more desire for evasion (shirking, he

called it) than a healthy able-bodied man of fifty had a right to feel!

If his task had been mere money-getting he might have known--and

acknowledged--weariness. But he gloried in his profession, in its

labours and difficulties as well as its rewards, it satisfied him

intellectually and gave him that calm sense of mastery--mastery over

himself and others--known only to those who are doing what they were

born to do.

Of course, at every stage of his career--and never more than now, on its

slippery pinnacle--he had suffered the thousand irritations inseparable

from a hard-working life: the trifles which waste one's time, the fools

who consume one's patience, the tricky failure of the best-laid plans,

the endless labour of rolling human stupidity up the steep hill of

understanding. But until lately these things had been a stimulus: it had

amused him to shake off trifles, baffle bores, circumvent failure, and

exercise his mental muscles in persuading stupid people to do

intelligent things. There was pioneer blood in him: he was used to

starting out every morning to hack his way through a fresh growth of

prejudices and obstacles; and though he liked his big retaining fees he

liked arguing a case even better.

Professionally, he was used to intellectual loneliness, and no longer

minded it. Outside of his profession he had a brain above the average,

but a general education hardly up to it; and the discrepancy between

what he would have been capable of enjoying had his mind been prepared

for it, and what it could actually take in, made him modest and almost

shy in what he considered cultivated society. He had long believed his

wife to be cultivated because she had fits of book-buying and there was

an expensively bound library in the New York house. In his raw youth, in

the old Delos days, he had got together a little library of his own in

which Robert Ingersoll's lectures represented science, the sermons of

the Reverend Frank Gunsaulus of Chicago, theology, John Burroughs,

natural history, and Jared Sparks and Bancroft almost the whole of

history. He had gradually discovered the inadequacy of these guides, but

without ever having done much to replace them. Now and then, when he was

not too tired, and had the rare chance of a quiet evening, he picked up

a book from Pauline's table; but the works she acquired were so

heterogeneous, and of such unequal value, that he rarely found one worth

reading. Mrs. Tallentyre's "Voltaire" had been a revelation: he

discovered, to his surprise, that he had never really known who Voltaire

was, or what sort of a world he had lived in, and why his name had

survived it. After that, Manford decided to start in on a course of

European history, and got as far as taking the first volume of Macaulay

up to bed. But he was tired at night, and found Macaulay's periods too

long (though their eloquence appealed to his forensic instinct): and

there had never been time for that course of history.

In his early wedded days, before he knew much of his wife's world, he

had dreamed of quiet evenings at home, when Pauline would read

instructive books aloud while he sat by the fire and turned over his

briefs in some quiet inner chamber of his mind. But Pauline had never

known any one who wanted to be read aloud to except children getting

over infantile complaints. She regarded the desire almost as a symptom

of illness, and decided that Dexter needed "rousing," and that she must

do more to amuse him. As soon as she was able after Nona's birth she

girt herself up for this new duty; and from that day Manford's life, out

of office hours, had been one of almost incessant social activity. At

first the endless going out had bewildered, then for a while amused and

flattered him, then gradually grown to be a soothing routine, a sort of

mild drug-taking after the high pressure of professional hours; but of

late it had become simply a bore, a duty to be persisted in because--as

he had at last discovered--Pauline could not live without it. After

twenty years of marriage he was only just beginning to exercise his

intellectual acumen on his wife.

The thought of Pauline made him glance at his clock: she would be coming

in a moment. He unhooked the receiver again, and named, impatiently, the

same number as before. "Out, you say? Still?" (The same stupid voice

making the same stupid answer!) "Oh, no; no matter. I say _it's no

matter_," he almost shouted, replacing the receiver. Of all idiotic

servants--!

Miss Vollard, the susceptible type-writer, shot a shingled head around

the door, said "_All_ right" with an envious sigh to some one outside, and

effaced herself before the brisk entrance of her employer's wife.

Manford got to his feet.

"Well, my dear--" He pushed an armchair near the fire, solicitous, still

a little awed by her presence--the beautiful Mrs. Wyant who had deigned

to marry him. Pauline, throwing back her furs, cast a quick

house-keeping glance about her. The scent she used always reminded him

of a superior disinfectant; and in another moment, he knew, she would

find some pretext for assuring herself, by the application of a gloved

finger-tip, that there was no dust on desk or mantelpiece. She had very

nearly obliged him, when he moved into his new office, to have concave

surbases, as in a hospital ward or a hygienic nursery. She had adopted

with enthusiasm the idea of the concave tiling fitted to every cove and

angle, so that there were no corners anywhere to catch the dust.

People's lives ought to be like that: with no corners in them. She

wanted to de-microbe life.

But, in the case of his own office, Manford had resisted; and now, he

understood, the fad had gone to the scrap-heap--with how many others!

"Not too near the fire." Pauline pushed her armchair back and glanced up

to see if the ceiling ventilators were working. "You _do_ renew the air at

regular intervals? I'm sure everything depends on that; that and

thought-direction. What the Mahatma calls mental deep-breathing." She

smiled persuasively. "You look tired, Dexter ... tired and drawn."

"Oh, rot!--A cigarette?"

She shook her small resolute head. "You forget that he's cured me of

that too--the Mahatma. Dexter," she exclaimed suddenly, "I'm sure it's

this silly business of the Grant Lindons' that's worrying you. I want to

talk to you about it--to clear it up with you. It's out of the question

that you should be mixed up in it."

Manford had gone back to his desk-chair. Habit made him feel more at

home there, in fuller possession of himself; Pauline, in the seat facing

him, the light full on her, seemed no more than a client to be advised,

or an opponent to be talked over. He knew she felt the difference too.

So far he had managed to preserve his professional privacy and his

professional authority. What he did "at the office" was clouded over,

for his family, by the vague word "business," which meant that a man

didn't want to be bothered. Pauline had never really distinguished

between practising the law and manufacturing motors; nor had Manford

encouraged her to. But today he suspected that she meant her

interference to go to the extreme limit which her well-known "tact"

would permit.

"You must not be mixed up in this investigation. Why not hand it over to

somebody else? Alfred Cosby, or that new Jew who's so clever? The

Lindons would accept any one you recommended; unless, of course," she

continued, "you could persuade them to drop it, which would be so much

better. I'm sure you could, Dexter; you always know what to say--and

your opinion carries such weight. Besides, what is it they complain of?

Some nonsense of Bee's, I've no doubt--she took a rest-cure at the

School. If they'd brought the girl up properly there'd have been no

trouble. Look at Nona!"

"Oh--Nona!" Manford gave a laugh of pride. Nona was the one warm rich

spot in his life: the corner on which the sun always shone. Fancy

comparing that degenerate fool of a Bee Lindon to his Nona, and

imagining that "bringing-up" made the difference! Still, he had to admit

that Pauline--always admirable--had been especially so as a mother. Yet

she too was bitten with this theosophical virus!

He lounged back, hands in pockets, one leg swinging, instinctively

seeking an easier attitude as his moral ease diminished.

"My dear, it's always been understood, hasn't it, that what goes on in

this office is between me and my clients, and not--"

"Oh, nonsense, Dexter!" She seldom took that tone: he saw that she was

losing her self-control. "Look here: I make it a rule never to

interfere; you've just said so. Well--if I interfere now, it's because

I've a right to--because it's a duty! The Lindons are my son's cousins:

Fanny Lindon was a Wyant. Isn't that reason enough?"

"It was one of the Lindons' reasons. They appealed to me on that very

ground."

Pauline gave an irritated laugh. "How like Fanny! Always pushing in and

claiming things. I wonder such an argument took you in. Do consider,

Dexter! I won't for a minute admit that there can be anything wrong

about the Mahatma; but supposing there were..." She drew herself up,

her lips tightening. "I hope I know how to respect professional secrecy,

and I don't ask you to repeat their nasty insinuations; in fact, as you

know, I always take particular pains to avoid hearing anything painful

or offensive. But, supposing there were any ground for what they say; do

they realize how the publicity is going to affect Bee's reputation? And

how shall you feel if you set the police at work and find them

publishing the name of a girl who is Jim's cousin, and a friend of your

own daughter's?"

Manford moved restlessly in his chair, and in so doing caught his

reflexion in the mirror, and saw that his jaw had lost its stern

professional cast. He made an attempt to recover it, but unsuccessfully.

"But all this is too absurd," Pauline continued on a smoother note. "The

Mahatma and his friends have nothing to fear. Whose judgment would you

sooner trust: mine, or poor Fanny's? What really bothers me is your

allowing the Lindons to drag you into an affair which is going to

discredit them, and not the Mahatma." She smiled her bright frosty

smile. "You know how proud I am of your professional prestige: I should

hate to have you associated with a failure." She paused, and he saw that

she meant to rest on that.

"This is a pretty bad business. The Lindons have got their proofs all

right," he said.

Pauline reddened, and her face lost its look of undaunted serenity. "How

can you believe such rubbish, Dexter? If you're going to take Fanny

Lindon's word against mine--"

"It's not a question of your word or hers. Lindon is fully documented:

he didn't come to me till he was. I'm sorry, Pauline; but you've been

deceived. This man has got to be shown up, and the Lindons have had the

pluck to do what everybody else has shirked."

Pauline's angry colour had faded. She got up and stood before her

husband, distressed and uncertain; then, with a visible effort at

self-command, she seated herself again, and locked her hands about her

gold-mounted bag.

"Then you'd rather the scandal, if there is one, should be paraded

before the world? Who will gain by that except the newspaper reporters,

and the people who want to drag down society? And how shall you feel if

Nona is called as a witness--or Lita?"

"Oh, nonsense--" He stopped abruptly, and got up too. The discussion was

lasting longer than he had intended, and he could not find the word to

end it. His mind felt suddenly empty--empty of arguments and formulas.

"I don't know why you persist in bringing in Nona--or Lita--"

"I don't; it's you. You will, that is, if you take this case. Bee and

Nona have been intimate since they were babies, and Bee is always at

Lita's. Don't you suppose the Mahatma's lawyers will make use of that if

you _oblige_ him to fight? You may say you're prepared for it; and I

admire your courage--but I can't share it. The idea that our children

may be involved simply sickens me."

"Neither Nona nor Lita has ever had anything to do with this charlatan

and his humbug, as far as I know," said Manford irritably.

"Nona has attended his eurythmic classes at our house, and gone to his

lectures with me: at one time they interested her intensely." Pauline

paused. "About Lita I don't know: I know so little about Lita's life

before her marriage."

"It was presumably that of any of Nona's other girl friends."

"Presumably. Kitty Landish might enlighten us. But of course, if it

_was_--" he noted her faintly sceptical emphasis--"I don't admit that that

would preclude Lita's having known the Mahatma, or believed in him. And

you must remember, Dexter, that I should be the most deeply involved of

all! I mean to take a rest-cure at Dawnside in March." She gave the

little playful laugh with which she had been used, in old times, to

ridicule the naughtiness of her children.

Manford drummed on his blotting-pad. "Look here, suppose we drop this

for the present--"

She glanced at her wrist-watch. "If you can spare the time--"

"Spare the time?"

She answered softly: "I'm not going away till you've promised."

Manford could remember the day when that tone--so feminine under its

firmness--would have had the power to shake him. Pauline, in her wifely

dealings, so seldom invoked the prerogative of her grace, her

competence, her persuasiveness, that when she did he had once found it

hard to resist. But that day was past. Under his admiration for

her brains, and his esteem for her character, he had felt, of

late, a stealing boredom. She was too clever, too efficient, too

uniformly sagacious and serene. Perhaps his own growing sense of

power--professional and social--had secretly undermined his awe of hers,

made him feel himself first her equal, then ever so little her superior.

He began to detect something obtuse in that unfaltering competence. And

as his professional authority grew he had become more jealous of

interference with it. His wife ought at least to have understood that!

If her famous tact were going to fail her, what would be left, he asked

himself?

"Look here, Pauline, you know all this is useless. In professional

matters no one else can judge for me. I'm busy this afternoon; I'm sure

you are too--"

She settled more deeply into her armchair. "Never too busy for you,

Dexter."

"Thank you, dear. But the time I ask you to give me is outside of

business hours," he rejoined with a slight smile.

"Then I'm dismissed?" She smiled back. "I understand; you needn't ring!"

She rose with recovered serenity and laid a light hand on his shoulder.

"Sorry to have bothered you; I don't often, do I? All I ask is that you

should think over--"

He lifted the hand to his lips. "Of course, of course." Now that she was

going he could say it.

"I'm forgiven?"

He smiled: "You're forgiven;" and from the threshold she called, almost

gaily: "Don't forget tonight--Amalasuntha!"

His brow clouded as he returned to his chair; and oddly enough--he was

aware of the oddness--it was clouded not by the tiresome scene he had

been through, but by his wife's reminder. "Damn that dinner," he swore

to himself.

He turned to the telephone, unhooked it for the third time, and called

for the same number.

That evening, as he slipped the key into his front-door, Dexter Manford

felt the oppression of all that lay behind it. He never entered his

house without a slight consciousness of the importance of the act--never

completely took for granted the resounding vestibule, the big hall with

its marble staircase ascending to all the light and warmth and luxury

which skill could devise, money buy, and Pauline's ingenuity combine in

a harmonious whole. He had not yet forgotten the day when, after one of

his first legal successes, he had installed a bathroom in his mother's

house at Delos, and all the neighbours had driven in from miles around

to see it.

But luxury, and above all comfort, had never weighed on him; he was too

busy to think much about them, and sure enough of himself and his powers

to accept them as his right. It was not the splendour of his house that

oppressed him but the sense of the corporative bonds it imposed. It

seemed part of an elaborate social and domestic structure, put together

with the baffling ingenuity of certain bird's-nests of which he had seen

the pictures. His own career, Pauline's multiple activities, the problem

of poor Arthur Wyant, Nona, Jim, Lita Wyant, the Mahatma, the tiresome

Grant Lindons, the perennial and inevitable Amalasuntha, for whom the

house was being illuminated tonight--all were strands woven into the

very pile of the carpet he trod on his way up the stairs. As he passed

the dining-room he saw, through half-open doors, the glitter of glass

and silver, a shirt-sleeved man placing bowls of roses down the long

table, and Maisie Bruss, wan but undaunted, dealing out dinner cards to

Powder, the English butler.

VI

PAULINE MANFORD sent a satisfied glance down the table.

It was on such occasions that she visibly reaped her reward. No one else

in New York had so accomplished a cook, such smoothly running service, a

dinner-table so softly yet brightly lit, or such skill in grouping about

it persons not only eminent in wealth or fashion, but likely to find

pleasure in each other's society.

The intimate reunion, of the not-more-than-the-Muses kind, was not

Pauline's affair. She was aware of this, and seldom made the

attempt--though, when she did, she was never able to discover why it was

not a success. But in the organizing and administering of a big dinner

she was conscious of mastery. Not the stupid big dinner of old days,

when the "crowned heads" used to be treated like a caste apart, and

everlastingly invited to meet each other through a whole monotonous

season: Pauline was too modern for that. She excelled in a judicious

blending of Wall Street and Bohemia, and her particular art lay in her

selection of the latter element. Of course there were Bohemians and

Bohemians; as she had once remarked to Nona, people weren't always

amusing just because they were clever, or dull just because they were

rich--though at the last clause Nona had screwed up her nose

incredulously... Well, even Nona would be satisfied tonight, Pauline

thought. It wasn't everybody who would have been bold enough to ask a

social reformer like Parker Greg with the very people least disposed to

encourage social reform, nor a young composer like Torfried Lobb (a

disciple of "The Six") with all those stolid opera-goers, nor that

disturbing Tommy Ardwin, the Cubist decorator, with the owners of the

most expensive "period houses" in Fifth Avenue.

Pauline was not a bit afraid of such combinations. She knew in advance

that at one of her dinners everything would "go"--it always did. And her

success amused and exhilarated her so much that, even tonight, though

she had come down oppressed with problems, they slipped from her before

she even had time to remind herself that they were nonexistent. She had

only to look at the faces gathered about that subdued radiance of old

silver and scattered flowers to be sure of it. There, at the other end

of the table, was her husband's dark head, comely and resolute in its

vigorous middle-age; on his right the Marchesa di San Fedele, the famous

San Fedele pearls illuminating her inconspicuous black; on his left the

handsome Mrs. Herman Toy, magnanimously placed there by Pauline because

she knew that Manford was said to be "taken" by her, and she wanted him

to be in good-humour that evening. To measure her own competence she had

only to take in this group, already settling down to an evening's

enjoyment, and then let her glance travel on to the others, the young

and handsome women, the well-dressed confident-looking men. Nona, grave

yet eager, was talking to Manford's legal rival, the brilliant Alfred

Cosby, who was known to have said she was the cleverest girl in New

York. Lita, cool and aloof, drooped her head slightly to listen to

Torfried Lobb, the composer; Jim gazed across the table at Lita as if

his adoration made every intervening obstacle transparent; Aggie

Heuston, whose coldness certainly made her look distinguished, though

people complained that she was dull, dispensed occasional monosyllables

to the ponderous Herman Toy; and Stanley Heuston, leaning back with that

faint dry smile which Pauline found irritating because it was so

inscrutable, kept his eyes discreetly but steadily on Nona. Dear good

Stan, always like a brother to Nona! People who knew him well said he

wasn't as sardonic as he looked.

It was a world after Pauline's heart--a world such as she believed its

Maker meant it to be. She turned to the Bishop on her right, wondering

if he shared her satisfaction, and encountered a glance of

understanding.

"So refreshing to be among old friends... This is one of the few

houses left... Always such a pleasure to meet the dear Marchesa; I

hope she has better reports of her son? Wretched business, I'm afraid.

My dear Mrs. Manford, I wonder if you know how blessed you are in your

children? That wise little Nona, who is going to make some man so happy

one of these days--not Cosby, no? Too much difference in age? And your

steady Jim and his idol ... yes, I know it doesn't become my cloth to

speak indulgently of idolatry. But happy marriages are so rare nowadays:

where else could one find such examples as there are about this table?

Your Jim and his Lita, and my good friend Heuston with that saint of a

wife--" The Bishop paused, as if, even on so privileged an occasion, he

was put to it to prolong the list. "Well, you've given them the example..."

He stopped again, probably remembering that his hostess's

matrimonial bliss was built on the ruins of her first husband's. But in

divorcing she had invoked a cause which even the Church recognizes; and

the Bishop proceeded serenely: "_Her children shall rise up and call her

blessed_--yes, dear friend, you must let me say it."

The words were balm to Pauline. Every syllable carried conviction: all

was right with her world and the Bishop's! Why did she ever need any

other spiritual guidance than that of her own creed? She felt a twinge

of regret at having so involved herself with the Mahatma. Yet what did

Episcopal Bishops know of "holy ecstasy"? And could any number of Church

services have reduced her hips? After all, there was room for all the

creeds in her easy rosy world. And the thought led her straight to her

other preoccupation: the reception for the Cardinal. She resolved to

secure the Bishop's approval at once. After that, of course the Chief

Rabbi would have to come. And what a lesson in tolerance and good-will

to the discordant world she was trying to reform!

Nona, half-way down the table, viewed its guests from another angle. She

had come back depressed rather than fortified from her flying visit to

her father. There were days when Manford liked to be "surprised" at the

office; when he and his daughter had their little jokes together over

these clandestine visits. But this one had not come off in that spirit.

She had found Manford tired and slightly irritable; Nona, before he had

time to tell her of her mother's visit, caught a lingering whiff of

Pauline's cool hygienic scent, and wondered nervously what could have

happened to make Mrs. Manford break through her tightly packed

engagements, and dash down to her husband's office. It was of course to

that emergency that she had sacrificed poor Exhibit A--little guessing

his relief at the postponement. But what could have obliged her to see

Manford so suddenly, when they were to meet at dinner that evening?

The girl had asked no questions: she knew that Manford, true to his

profession, preferred putting them. And her chief object, of course, had

been to get him to help her about Arthur Wyant. That, she perceived, at

first added to his irritation: was he Wyant's keeper, he wanted to know?

But he broke off before the next question: "Why the devil can't his own

son look after him?" She had seen that question on his very lips; but

they shut down on it, and he rose from his chair with a shrug. "Poor

devil--if you think I can be of any use? All right, then--I'll drop in

on him tomorrow." He and Wyant, ever since the divorce, had met whenever

Jim's fate was to be discussed; Wyant felt a sort of humiliated

gratitude for Manford's generosity to his son. "Not the money, you know,

Nona--damn the money! But taking such an interest in him; helping him to

find himself: appreciating him, hang it! He understands Jim a hundred

times better than your mother ever did..." On this basis the two men

came together now and then in a spirit of tolerant understanding...

Nona recalled her father's face as it had been when she left him:

worried, fagged, yet with that twinkle of gaiety his eyes always had

when he looked at her. Now, smoothed out, smiling, slightly replete, it

was hard as stone. "Like his own death-mask," the girl thought; "as if

he'd done with everything, once for all.--And the way those two women

bore him! Mummy put Gladys Toy next to him as a reward--for what?" She

smiled at her mother's simplicity in imagining that he was having what

Pauline called a "harmless flirtation" with Mrs. Herman Toy. That lady's

obvious charms were no more to him, Nona suspected, than those of the

florid Bathsheba in the tapestry behind his chair. But Pauline had

evidently had some special reason--over and above her usual diffused

benevolence--for wanting to put Manford in a good humour. "The Mahatma,

probably." Nona knew how her mother hated a fuss: how vulgar and

unchristian she always thought it. And it would certainly be

inconvenient to give up the rest-cure at Dawnside she had planned for

March, when Manford was to go off tarpon-fishing.

Nona's glance, in the intervals of talk with her neighbours, travelled

farther, lit on Jim's good-humoured wistful face--Jim was always wistful

at his mother's banquets--and flitted on to Aggie Heuston's precise

little mask, where everything was narrow and perpendicular, like the

head of a saint squeezed into a cathedral niche. But the girl's eyes did

not linger, for as they rested on Aggie they abruptly met the latter's

gaze. Aggie had been furtively scrutinizing her, and the discovery gave

Nona a faint shock. In another instant Mrs. Heuston turned to Parker

Greg, the interesting young social reformer whom Pauline had

thoughtfully placed next to her, with the optimistic idea that all

persons interested in improving the world must therefore be in the

fullest sympathy. Nona, knowing Parker Greg's views, smiled at that too.

Aggie, she was sure, would feel much safer with her other neighbour, Mr.

Herman Toy, who thought, on all subjects, just what all his fellow

capitalists did.

Nona caught Stan Heuston's smile, and knew he had read her thought; but

from him too she turned. The last thing she wanted was that he should

guess her real opinion of his wife. Something deep down and dogged in

Nona always, when it came to the touch, made her avert her feet from the

line of least resistance.

Manford lent an absent ear first to one neighbour, then the other. Mrs.

Toy was saying, in her flat uncadenced voice, like tepid water running

into a bath: "I don't see how people can live without lifts in their

houses, do you? But perhaps it's because I've never had to. Father's

house had the first electric lift at Climax. Once, in England, we went

to stay with the Duke of Humber, at Humber Castle--one of those huge

parties, royalties and everything--golf and polo all day, and a ball

every night; and, will you believe it, _we had to walk up and down

stairs_! I don't know what English people are made of. I suppose they've

never been used to what we call comfort. The second day I told Herman I

couldn't stand those awful slippery stairs after two rounds of golf, and

dancing till four in the morning. It was simply destroying my heart--the

doctor has warned me so often! I wanted to leave right away--but Herman

said it would offend the Duke. The Duke's such a sweet old man. But, any

way, I made Herman promise me a sapphire and emerald _plaque_ from

Cartier's before I'd agree to stick it out..."

The Marchesa's little ferret face with sharp impassioned eyes darted

conversationally forward. "The Duke of Humber? I know him so well. Dear

old man! Ah, you also stayed at Humber? So often he invites me. We are

related ... yes, through his first wife, whose mother was a Venturini

of the Calabrian branch: Donna Ottaviana. Yes. Another sister, Donna

Rosmunda, the beauty of the family, married the Duke of Lepanto ... a

mediatized prince..."

She stopped, and Manford read in her eyes the hasty inward

interrogation: "Will they think that expression queer? I'm not sure

myself just what 'mediatized' means. And these Americans! They stick at

nothing, but they're shocked at everything." Aloud she continued: "A

mediatized prince--but a man of the _very highest_ character."

"Oh--" murmured Mrs. Toy, puzzled but obviously relieved.

Manford's attention, tugging at its moorings, had broken loose again and

was off and away.

The how-many-eth dinner did that make this winter? And no end in sight!

How could Pauline stand it? Why did she want to stand it? All those

rest-cures, massages, rhythmic exercises, devised to restore the health

of people who would have been as sound as bells if only they had led

normal lives! Like that fool of a woman spreading her blond splendours

so uselessly at his side, who couldn't walk upstairs because she had

danced all night! Pauline was just like that--never walked upstairs, and

then had to do gymnastics, and have osteopathy, and call in Hindu sages,

to prevent her muscles from getting atrophied... He had a vision of

his mother, out on the Minnesota farm, before they moved into Delos--saw

her sowing, digging potatoes, feeding chickens; saw her kneading,

baking, cooking, washing, mending, catching and harnessing the

half-broken colt to drive twelve miles in the snow for the doctor, one

day when all the men were away, and his little sister had been so badly

scalded... And there the old lady sat at Delos, in her nice little

brick house, in her hale and hearty old age, built to outlive them

all.--Wasn't that perhaps the kind of life Manford himself had been

meant for? Farming on a big scale, with all the modern appliances his

forbears had lacked, outdoing everybody in the county, marketing his

goods at the big centres, and cutting a swathe in state politics like

his elder brother? Using his brains, muscles, the whole of him, body and

soul, to do real things, bring about real results in the world, instead

of all this artificial activity, this spinning around faster and faster

in the void, and having to be continually rested and doctored to make up

for exertions that led to nothing, nothing, nothing...

"Of course we all know _you_ could tell us if you would. Everybody knows

the Lindons have gone to you for advice." Mrs. Toy's large shallow eyes

floated the question toward him on a sea-blue wave of curiosity. "Not a

word of truth? Oh, of course you have to say that! But everybody has

been expecting there'd be trouble soon..."

And, in a whisper, from the Marchesa's side: "Teasing you about that

mysterious Mahatma? Foolish woman! As long as dear Pauline believes in

him, I'm satisfied. That was what I was saying to Pauline before dinner:

'Whatever you and Dexter approve of, I approve of.' That's the reason

why I'm so anxious to have my poor boy come to New York ... my

Michelangelo! If only you could see him I know you'd grow as fond of him

as you are of our dear Jim: perhaps even take him into your office...

Ah, that, dear Dexter, has always been my dream!"

... What sort of a life, after all, if not this one? For of course

that dream of a Western farm was all rubbish. What he really wanted was

a life in which professional interests as far-reaching and absorbing as

his own were somehow impossibly combined with great stretches of country

quiet, books, horses and children--ah, children! Boys of his

own--teaching them all sorts of country things; taking them for long

trudges, telling them about trees and plants and birds--watching the

squirrels, feeding the robins and thrushes in winter; and coming home in

the dusk to firelight, lamplight, a tea-table groaning with jolly

things, all the boys and girls (girls too, more little Nonas) grouped

around, hungry and tingling from their long tramp--and a woman lifting a

calm face from her book: a woman who looked so absurdly young to be

their mother; so--

"You're looking at Jim's wife?" The Marchesa broke in. "No wonder! _Très

en beauté_, our Lita!--that dress, the very same colour as her hair, and

those Indian emeralds ... how clever of her! But a little difficult to

talk to? Little too silent? No? Ah, not to _you_, perhaps--her dear

father! Father-in-law, I mean--"

Silent! The word sent him off again. For in that other world, so ringing

with children's laughter, children's wrangles, and all the healthy

blustering noises of country life in a big family, there would somehow,

underneath it all, be a great pool of silence, a reservoir on which one

could always draw and flood one's soul with peace. The vision was vague

and contradictory, but it all seemed to meet and mingle in the woman's

eyes...

Pauline was signalling from her table-end. He rose and offered his arm

to the Marchesa.

In the hall the strains of the famous Somaliland orchestra bumped and

tossed downstairs from the ball-room to meet them. The ladies, headed by

Mrs. Toy, flocked to the mirror-lined lift dissembled behind forced

lilacs and Japanese plums; but Amalasuntha, on Manford's arm, set her

blunt black slipper on the marble tread.

"I'm used to Roman palaces!"

VII

"AT least you'll take a turn?" Heuston said; and Nona, yielding, joined

the dancers balancing with slow steps about the shining floor.

Dancing meant nothing; it was like breathing; what would one be doing if

one weren't dancing? She could not refuse without seeming singular; it

was simpler to acquiesce, and lose one's self among the couples absorbed

in the same complicated ritual.

The floor was full, but not crowded: Pauline always saw to that. It was

easy to calculate in advance, for every one she asked always accepted,

and she and Maisie Bruss, in making out the list, allotted the requisite

space per couple as carefully as if they had been counting cubic feet in

a hospital. The ventilation was perfect too; neither draughts nor

stuffiness. One had almost the sense of dancing out of doors, under some

equable southern sky. Nona, aware of what it cost to produce this

illusion, marvelled once more at her tireless mother.

"Isn't she wonderful?"

Mrs. Manford, fresh, erect, a faint line of diamonds in her hair, stood

in the doorway, her slim foot advanced toward the dancers.

"Perennially! Ah--she's going to dance. With Cosby."

"Yes. I wish she wouldn't."

"Wouldn't with Cosby?"

"Dear, no. In general."

Nona and Heuston had seated themselves, and were watching from their

corner the weaving of hallucinatory patterns by interjoined revolving

feet.

"I see. You think she dances with a Purpose?"

The girl smiled. "Awfully well--like everything else she does. But as if

it were something between going to church and drilling a scout brigade.

Mother's too--too tidy to dance."

"Well--this is different," murmured Heuston.

The floor had cleared as if by magic before the advance of a long slim

pair: Lita Wyant and Tommy Ardwin. The decorator, tall and supple, had

the conventional dancer's silhouette; but he was no more than a

silhouette, a shadow on the wall. All the light and music in the room

had passed into the translucent creature in his arms. He seemed to Nona

like some one who has gone into a spring wood and come back carrying a

long branch of silver blossom.

"Good heavens! _Quelle plastique_!" piped the Marchesa over Nona's

shoulder.

The two had the floor to themselves: every one else had stopped dancing.

But Lita and her partner seemed unaware of it. Her sole affair was to

shower radiance, his to attune his lines to hers. Her face was a small

still flower on a swaying stalk; all her expression was in her body, in

that long _legato_ movement like a weaving of grasses under a breeze, a

looping of little waves on the shore.

"Look at Jim!" Heuston laughed. Jim Wyant, from a doorway, drank the

vision thirstily. "Surely," his eyes seemed to triumph, "this justifies

the Cubist Cabaret, and all the rest of her crazes."

Lita, swaying near him, dropped a smile, and floated off on the bright

ripples of her beauty.

Abruptly the music stopped. Nona glanced across the room and saw Mrs.

Manford move away from the musicians' balcony, over which the conductor

had just leaned down to speak to her.

There was a short interval; then the orchestra broke into a fox-trot and

the floor filled again. Mrs. Manford swept by with a set smile--"the

kind she snaps on with her tiara," Nona thought. Well, perhaps it was

rather bad form of Lita to monopolize the floor at her mother-in-law's

ball; but was it the poor girl's fault if she danced so well that all

the others stopped to gaze?

Ardwin came up to Nona. "Oh, no," Heuston protested under his breath. "I

wanted--"

"There's Aggie signalling."

The girl's arm was already on Ardwin's shoulder. As they circled toward

the middle of the room, Nona said: "You show off Lita's dancing

marvellously."

He replied, in his high-pitched confident voice: "Oh, it's only a

question of giving her her head and not butting in. She and I each have

our own line of self-expression: it would be stupid to mix them. If only

I could get her to dance just once for Serge Klawhammer; he's scouring

the globe to find somebody to do the new 'Herodias' they're going to

turn at Hollywood. People are fed up with the odalisque style, and with

my help Lita could evolve something different. She's half promised to

come round to my place tonight after supper and see Klawhammer. Just six

or seven of the enlightened--wonder if you'd join us? He's tearing back

to Hollywood tomorrow."

"Is Lita really coming?"

"Well, she said yes and no, and ended on yes."

"All right--I will." Nona hated Ardwin, his sleekness, suppleness,

assurance, the group he ruled, the fashions he set, the doctrines he

professed--hated them so passionately and undiscerningly that it seemed

to her that at last she had her hand on her clue. That was it, of

course! Ardwin and his crew were trying to persuade Lita to go into the

movies; that accounted for her restlessness and irritability, her

growing distaste for her humdrum life. Nona drew a breath of relief.

After all, if it were only that--!

The dance over, she freed herself and slipped through the throng in

quest of Jim. Should she ask him to take her to Ardwin's? No: simply

tell him that she and Lita were off for a final spin at the decorator's

studio, where there would be more room and less fuss than at Pauline's.

Jim would laugh and approve, provided she and Lita went together; no use

saying anything about Klawhammer and his absurd "Herodias."

"Jim? But, my dear, Jim went home long ago. I don't blame the poor boy,"

Mrs. Manford sighed, waylaid by her daughter, "because I know he has to

be at the office so early; and it must be awfully boring, standing about

all night and not dancing. But, darling, you must really help me to find

your father. Supper's ready, and I can't imagine..."

The Marchesa's ferret face slipped between them as she trotted by on Mr.

Toy's commodious arm.

"Dear Dexter? I saw him not five minutes ago, seeing off that wonderful

Lita--"

"Lita? Lita gone too?" Nona watched the struggle between her mother's

disciplined features and twitching nerves. "What impossible children I

have!" A smile triumphed over her discomfiture. "I do hope there's

nothing wrong with the baby? Nona, slip down and tell your father he

must come up. Oh, Stanley, dear, all my men seem to have deserted me. Do

find Mrs. Toy and take her in to supper..."

In the hall below there was no Dexter. Nona cast about a glance for

Powder, the pale resigned butler, who had followed Mrs. Manford through

all her vicissitudes and triumphs, seemingly concerned about nothing but

the condition of his plate and the discipline of his footmen. Powder

knew everything, and had an answer to everything; but he was engaged at

the moment in the vast operation of making terrapin and champagne appear

simultaneously on eighty-five small tables, and was not to be found in

the hall. Nona ran her eye along the line of footmen behind the piled-up

furs, found one who belonged to the house, and heard that Mr. Manford

had left a few minutes earlier. His motor had been waiting for him, and

was now gone. Mrs. James Wyant was with him, the man thought. "He's

taken her to Ardwin's, of course. Poor father! After an evening of Mrs.

Toy and Amalasuntha--who can wonder? If only mother would see how her

big parties bore him!" But Nona's mother would never see that.

"It's just my indestructible faith in my own genius--nothing else,"

Ardwin was proclaiming in his jumpy falsetto as Nona entered the

high-perched studio where he gathered his group of the enlightened.

These privileged persons, in the absence of chairs, had disposed

themselves on the cushions and mattresses scattered about a floor

painted to imitate a cunning perspective of black and white marble. Tall

lamps under black domes shed their light on bare shoulders, heads sleek

or tousled, and a lavish show of flesh-coloured legs and sandalled feet.

Ardwin, unbosoming himself to a devotee, held up a guttering

church-candle to a canvas which simulated a window open on a geometrical

representation of brick walls, fire escapes and back-yards. "Sham? Oh,

of course. I had the real window blocked up. It looked out on that

stupid old 'night-piece' of Brooklyn Bridge and the East River.

Everybody who came here said: 'A Whistler nocturne!' and I got so bored.

Besides, it was _really there_: and I hate things that are really where

you think they are. They're as tiresome as truthful people. Everything

in art should be false. Everything in life should be art. _Ergo_,

everything in life should be false: complexions, teeth, hair, wives ...

specially wives. Oh, Miss Manford, that you? Do come in. Mislaid

Lita?"

"Isn't she here?"

"_Is_ she?" He pivoted about on the company. When he was not dancing he

looked, with his small snaky head and too square shoulders, like a cross

between a Japanese waiter and a full-page advertisement for silk

underwear. "_Is_ Lita here? Any of you fellows got her dissembled about

your persons? Now, then, out with her! Jossie Keiler, _you_'re not Mrs.

James Wyant disguised as a dryad, are you?" There was a general guffaw

as Miss Jossie Keiler, the octoroon pianist, scrambled to her pudgy feet

and assembled a series of sausage arms and bolster legs in a provocative

pose. "Knew I'd get found out," she lisped.

A short man with a deceptively blond head, thick lips under a stubby

blond moustache, and eyes like needles behind tortoiseshell-rimmed

glasses, stood before the fire, bulging a glossy shirtfront and

solitaire pearl toward the company. "Don't this lady dance?" he

enquired, in a voice like melted butter, a few drops of which seemed to

trickle down his lips and be licked back at intervals behind a thickly

ringed hand.

"Miss Manford? Bet she does! Come along, Nona; shed your togs and let's

show Mr. Klawhammer here present that Lita's not the only peb--"

"Gracious! Wait till I get into the saddle!" screamed Miss Keiler, tiny

hands like blueish mice darting out at the keyboard from the end of her

bludgeon arms.

Nona perched herself on the edge of a refectory table. "Thanks. I'm not

a candidate for 'Herodias.' My sister-in-law is sure to turn up in a

minute."

Even Mrs. Dexter Manford's perfectly run house was not a particularly

appetizing place to return to at four o'clock on the morning after a

dance. The last motor was gone, the last overcoat and opera cloak had

vanished from hall and dressing-rooms, and only one hanging lamp lit the

dusky tapestries and the monumental balustrade of the staircase. But

empty cocktail glasses and ravaged cigar-boxes littered the hall tables,

wisps of torn tulle and trampled orchids strewed the stair-carpet, and

the thicket of forced lilacs and Japanese plums in front of the lift

drooped mournfully in the hot air. Nona, letting herself in with her

latch-key, scanned the scene with a feeling of disgust. What was it all

for, and what was left when it was over? Only a huge clearing-up for

Maisie and the servants, and a new list to make out for the next time...

She remembered mild spring nights at Cedarledge, when she was a little

girl, and she and Jim used to slip downstairs in stocking feet, go to

the lake, loose the canoe, and drift on a silver path among islets

fringed with budding dogwood. She hurried on past the desecrated shrubs.

Above, the house was dark but for a line of light under the library

door. Funny--at that hour; her father must still be up. Very likely he

too had just come in. She was passing on when the door opened and

Manford called her.

"'Pon my soul, Nona! That you? I supposed you were in bed long ago."

One of the green-shaded lamps lit the big writing-table. Manford's

armchair was drawn up to it, an empty glass and half-consumed cigarette

near by, the evening paper sprawled on the floor.

"Was that you I heard coming in? Do you know what time it is?"

"Yes; worse luck! I've been scouring the town after Lita."

"_Lita_?"

"Waiting for her for hours at Tommy Ardwin's. Such a crew! He told me

she was going there to dance for Klawhammer, the Hollywood man, and I

didn't want her to go alone--"

Manford's face darkened. He lit another cigarette and turned to his

daughter impatiently.

"What the devil made you believe such a yarn? Klawhammer--!"

Nona stood facing him; their eyes met, and he turned away with a shrug

to reach for a match.

"I believed it because, just afterward, the servants told me that Lita

had left, and as they said you'd gone with her I supposed you'd taken

her to Ardwin's, not knowing that I meant to join her there."

"Ah; I see." He lit the cigarette and puffed at it for a moment or two,

deliberately. "You're quite right to think she needs looking after," he

began again, in a changed tone. "Somebody's got to take on the job,

since her husband seems to have washed his hands of it."

"Father! You know perfectly well that if Jim took on that job--running

after Lita all night from one cabaret to another--he'd lose the other,

the one that keeps them going. Nobody could carry on both."

"Hullo, spitfire! Hands off our brother!"

"Rather." She leaned against the table, her eyes still on him. "And when

Ardwin told me about this Klawhammer film--didn't Lita mention it to

you?"

He appeared to consider. "She did say Ardwin was bothering her about

something of the kind; so when I found Jim had gone I took her home

myself."

"Ah--you took her home?"

Manford, settling himself back in his armchair, met the surprise in her

voice unconcernedly. "Why, of course. Did you really see me letting her

make a show of herself? Sorry you think that's my way of looking after

her."

Nona, perched on the arm of his chair, enclosed him in a happy hug. "You

goose, you!" she sighed; but the epithet was not for her father.

She poured herself a glass of cherry brandy, dropped a kiss on his

thinning hair, and ran up to her room humming Miss Jossie Keiler's

jazz-tune. Perhaps after all it wasn't such a rotten world.

VIII

THE morning after a party in her own house Pauline Manford always

accorded herself an extra half-hour's rest; but on this occasion she

employed it in lying awake and wearily reckoning up the next day's

tasks. Disenchantment had succeeded to the night's glamour. The glamour

of balls never did last: they so quickly became a matter for those

domestic undertakers, the charwomen, housemaids and electricians. And in

this case the taste of pleasure had soured early. When the doors were

thrown open on the beflowered supper tables not one of the hostess's

family was left to marshal the guests to their places! Her husband, her

daughter and son, her son's wife--all had deserted her. It needed, in

that chill morning vigil, all Pauline's self-control to banish the

memory. Not that she wanted any of them to feel under any

obligation--she was all for personal freedom, self-expression, or

whatever they called it nowadays--but still, a ball was a ball, a host

was a host. It was too bad of Dexter, really; and of Jim too. On Lita of

course no one could count: that was part of the pose people found so

fascinating. But Jim--Jim and Nona to forsake her! What a ridiculous

position it had put her in--but no, she mustn't think of that now, or

those nasty little wrinkles would creep back about her eyes. The

masseuse had warned her... Gracious! At what time was the masseuse

due? She stretched out her hand, turned on the light by the bed (for the

windows were still closely darkened), and reached for what Maisie Bruss

called the night-list: an upright porcelain tablet on which the

secretary recorded, for nocturnal study, the principal "fixtures" of the

coming day.

Today they were so numerous that Miss Bruss's tight script had hardly

contrived to squeeze them in. Foremost, of course, poor Exhibit A, moved

on from yesterday; then a mysterious appointment with Amalasuntha, just

before lunch: something urgent, she had hinted. Today of all days!

Amalasuntha was so tactless at times. And then that Mahatma business:

since Dexter was inflexible, his wife had made up her mind to appeal to

the Lindons. It would be awkward, undoubtedly--and she did so hate

things that were awkward. Any form of untidiness, moral or material, was

unpleasant to her; but something must be done, and at once. She herself

hardly knew why she felt so apprehensive, so determined that the matter

should have no sequel; except that, if anything _did_ go wrong, it would

upset all her plans for a rest-cure, for new exercises, for all sorts of

promised ways of prolonging youth, activity and slenderness, and would

oblige her to find a new Messiah who would tell her she was psychic.

But the most pressing item on her list was her address that very

afternoon to the National Mothers' Day Association--or, no; wasn't it

the Birth Control League? Nonsense! That was her speech at the banquet

next week: a big affair at the St. Regis for a group of International

Birth-controllers. Wakeful as she felt, she must be half asleep to have

muddled up her engagements like that! She extinguished the lamp and sank

hopefully to her pillow--perhaps now sleep would really come. But her

bed-lamp seemed to have a double switch, and putting it out in the room

only turned it on in her head.

Well, she would try reciting scraps of her Mothers' Day address: she

seldom spoke in public, but when she did she took the affair seriously,

and tried to be at once winning and impressive. She and Maisie had gone

carefully over the typed copy; and she was sure it was all right; but

she liked getting the more effective passages by heart--it brought her

nearer to her audience to lean forward and speak intimately, without

having to revert every few minutes to the text.

"Was there ever a hearth or a heart--a mother's heart--that wasn't big

enough for all the babies God wants it to hold? Of course there are days

when the mother is so fagged out that she thinks she'd give the world if

there were nothing at all to do in the nursery, and she could just sit

still with folded hands. But the only time when there's nothing at all

for a mother to do in the nursery is when there's a little coffin there.

It's all quiet enough _then_ ... as some of us here know..." (Pause,

and a few tears in the audience.) "Not that we want the modern mother to

wear herself out: no indeed! The babies themselves haven't any use for

worn-out mothers! And the first thing to be considered is what the

babies want, isn't it?" (Pause--smiles in the audience)...

What on earth was Amalasuntha coming to bother her about? More money, of

course--but she really couldn't pay all that wretched Michelangelo's

debts. There would soon be debts nearer home if Lita went on dressing so

extravagantly, and perpetually having her jewellery reset. It cost

almost as much nowadays to reset jewels as to buy new ones, and those

emeralds...

At that hour of the morning things did tend to look ash-coloured; and

she felt that her optimism had never been so sorely strained since the

year when she had had to read Proust, learn a new dance-step, master

Oriental philosophy, and decide whether she should really bob her hair,

or only do it to look so. She had come victoriously through those

ordeals; but what if worse lay ahead?