Amalasuntha, in one of Mrs. Manford's least successfully made-over

dresses, came in looking shabby and humble--always a bad sign. And of

course it was Michelangelo's debts. Racing, baccara, and a woman ... a

Russian princess; oh, my dear, _authentic_, quite! Wouldn't Pauline like

to see her picture from the "Prattler"? She and Michelangelo had been

snapped together in bathing tights at the Lido.

No--Pauline wouldn't. She turned from the proffered effigy with a

disgust evidently surprising to the Marchesa, whose own prejudices were

different, and who could grasp other people's only piece-meal, one at a

time, like a lesson in mnemonics.

"Oh, my boy doesn't do things by halves," the Marchesa averred, still

feeling that the occasion was one for boasting.

Pauline leaned back wearily. "I'm as sorry for you as I can be,

Amalasuntha; but Michelangelo is not a baby, and if he can't be made to

understand that a poor man who wants to spend money must first earn

it--"

"Oh, but he does, darling! Venturino and I have always dinned it into

him. And last year he tried his best to marry that one-eyed Miss Oxbaum

from Oregon, he really did."

"I said _earn_," Pauline interposed. "We don't consider that marrying for

money is earning it--"

"Oh, mercy--don't you? Not sometimes?" breathed the Marchesa.

"What I mean by earning is going into an office--is--"

"Ah, just so! It was what I said to Dexter last night. It is what

Venturino and I most long for: that Dexter should take Michelangelo into

his office. That would solve every difficulty. And once Michelangelo is

here I'm sure he will succeed. No one is more clever, you know: only, in

Rome, young men are in greater danger--there are more temptations--"

Pauline pursed her lips. "I suppose there are." But, since temptations

are the privilege of metropolises, she thought it rather impertinent of

Amalasuntha to suggest that there were more in a one-horse little place

like Rome than in New York; though in a different mood she would have

been the first to pronounce the Italian capital a sink of iniquity, and

New York the model and prototype of the pure American city. All these

contradictions, which usually sat lightly on her, made her head ache

today, and she continued, nervously: "Take Michelangelo into his office!

But what preparations has he had, what training? Has he ever studied for

the law?"

"No; I don't think he has, darling; but he _would_; I can promise you he

would," the Marchesa declared, in the tone of one saying: "In such

straits, he would become a street-cleaner."

Pauline smiled faintly. "I don't think you understand. The law is a

_profession_." (Dexter had told her that.) "It requires years of training,

of preparation. Michelangelo would have to take a degree at Harvard or

Columbia first. But perhaps"--a glance at her wrist-watch told her that

her next engagement impended--"perhaps Dexter could suggest some other

kind of employment. I don't know, of course... I can't promise...

But meanwhile ..." She turned to her writing-table, and a cheque

passed between them, too small to make a perceptible impression on

Michelangelo's deficit, but large enough for Amalasuntha to murmur: "How

you do spoil me, darling! Well--for the boy's sake I accept in all

simplicity. And about the reception for the Cardinal--I'm sure a cable

to Venturino will arrange it. Would that kind Maisie send it off, and

sign my name?"

It was well after three o'clock when Pauline came down the Lindons'

door-step and said to her chauffeur: "To Mr. Wyant's." And she had still

to crowd in her eurythmic exercises (put off from the morning), and be

ready at half-past four, bathed, waved and apparelled, for the Mothers'

Day Meeting, which was to take place in her own ball-room, with a giant

tea to follow.

Certainly, no amount of "mental deep-breathing," and all the other

exercises in serenity, could combat the nervous apprehension produced by

this breathless New York life. Today she really felt it to be too much

for her: she leaned back and closed her lids with a sigh. But she was

jerked back to consciousness by the traffic-control signal, which had

immobilized the motor just when every moment was so precious. The result

of every one's being in such a hurry to get everywhere was that nobody

could get anywhere. She looked across the triple row of motors in line

with hers, and saw in each (as if in a vista of mirrors) an expensively

dressed woman like herself, leaning forward in the same attitude of

repressed impatience, the same nervous frown of hurry on her brow.

Oh, if only she could remember to relax!

But how could one, with everything going wrong as it was today? The

visit to Fanny Lindon had been an utter failure. Pauline had apparently

overestimated her influence on the Lindons, and that discovery in itself

was rather mortifying. To be told that the Mahatma business was "a

family affair"--and thus be given to understand that she was no longer

of the family! Pauline, in her own mind, had never completely ceased to

be a Wyant. She thought herself still entitled to such shadowy

prerogatives as the name afforded, and was surprised that the Wyants

should not think so too. After all, she kept Amalasuntha for them--no

slight charge!

But Mrs. Lindon had merely said it was "all too painful"--and had ended,

surprisingly: "Dexter himself has specially asked us not to say

anything."

The implication was: "If you want to find out, go to him!"--when of

course Fanny knew well enough that lawyers' and doctors' wives are the

last people to get at their clients' secrets.

Pauline rose to her feet, offended, and not averse from showing it.

"Well, my dear, I can only say that if it's so awful that you can't tell

_me_, I rather wonder at your wanting to tell Tom, Dick and Harry. Have

you thought of that?"

Oh, yes, she had, Mrs. Lindon wailed. "But Grant says it's a duty ...

and so does Dexter..."

Pauline permitted herself a faint smile. "Dexter naturally takes the

lawyer's view: that's _his_ duty."

Mrs. Lindon's mind was not alert for innuendos. "Yes; he says we _ought_

to," she merely repeated.

A sudden lassitude overcame Pauline. "At least send Grant to me

first--let me talk to him."

But to herself she said: "My only hope now is to get at them through

Arthur." And she looked anxiously out of the motor, watching for the

signal to shift.

Everything at Arthur Wyant's was swept and garnished for her approach.

One felt that cousin Eleanor, whisking the stray cigarette-ends into the

fire, and giving the sofa cushions a last shake, had slipped out of the

back door as Mrs. Manford entered by the front.

Wyant greeted her with his usual rather overdone cordiality. He had

never quite acquired the note on which discarded husbands should welcome

condescending wives. In this respect Pauline was his superior. She had

found the exact blend of gravity with sisterly friendliness; and the

need of having to ask about his health always helped her over the first

moments.

"Oh, you see--still mummified." He pointed to the leg stretched out in

front of him. "Couldn't even see Amalasuntha to the door--"

"Amalasuntha? Has she been here?"

"Yes. Asked herself to lunch. Rather a to-do for me; I'm not used to

entertaining distinguished foreigners, especially when they have to

picnic on a tray at my elbow. But she took it all very good-naturedly."

"I should think so," Pauline murmured; adding inwardly: "Trust

Amalasuntha not to pay for her own lunch."

"Yes; she's in great feather. Said you'd been so kind to her--as usual."

Pauline sounded the proper deprecation.

"She's awfully pleased at your having promised that Manford would give

Michelangelo a leg up if he comes out to try his luck in New York."

"Promised? Well--not quite. But I did say Dexter would do what he could.

It seems the only way left of disposing of Michelangelo."

Wyant leaned back, a smile twitching under his moustache. "Yes--that

young man's a scourge. And I begin to see why. Did you see his picture

in bathing tights with the latest lady?"

Pauline waved away the suggestion. How like Arthur not to realize, even

yet, that such things disgusted her!

"Well, he's the best looking piece of human sculpture I've seen since I

last went through the Vatican galleries. Regular Apollo. Funny, the

Albany Wyants having a hand in turning out a heathen divinity. I was

showing the picture to Manford just now, and telling him the fond

mother's comment."

Pauline looked up quickly. "Has Dexter been here too?"

"Yes; trying to give _me_ a leg up." He glanced at his bandages. "Rather

more difficult, that. I must get it down first--to the floor. But

Manford's awfully kind too--it's catching. He wants me to go off with

Jim, down to that island of his, and get a fortnight's real sunshine.

Says he can get Jim off by a little wirepulling, some time just before

Easter, he thinks. It's tempting--"

Pauline smiled: she was always pleased when the two men spoke of each

other in that tone; and certainly it _was_ kind of Dexter to offer the

hospitality of his southern island to poor Arthur... She thought how

easy life would be if only every one were kind and simple.

"But about Michelangelo: I was going to tell you what is worrying

Amalasuntha. Of course what she means by Michelangelo's going into

business in America is marrying an heiress--"

"Oh, of course. And I daresay he will."

"Exactly. She's got her eye on one already. You haven't guessed? Nona!"

Pauline's sense of humour was not unfailing, but this relaxed her taut

nerves, and she laughed. "Poor Michelangelo!"

"I thought it wouldn't worry you. But what is worrying Amalasuntha is

that he won't be let--"

"Be let?"

"By Lita. Her theory is that Lita will fall madly in love with

Michelangelo as soon as she lays eyes on him--and that when they've had

one dance together she'll be lost. And Amalasuntha, for that

reason--though she daren't tell you so--thinks it might really be

cheaper in the end to pay Michelangelo's debts than to import him. As

she says, it's for the family to decide, now she's warned them."

Their laughter mingled. It was the first time, perhaps, since they had

been young together; as a rule, their encounters were untinged with

levity.

But Pauline dismissed the laugh hurriedly for the Grant Lindons. At the

name Wyant's eyes lit up: it was as if she had placed an appetizing

morsel before a listless convalescent.

"But you're the very person to tell me all about it--or, no, you can't,

of course, if Manford's going to take it up. But no matter--after all,

it's public property by this time. Seen this morning's 'Looker-on'--with

pictures? Here, where--" In the stack of illustrated papers always at

his elbow he could never find the one he wanted, and now began to toss

over "Prattlers," "Listeners" and others with helpless hand. How that

little symptom of inefficiency took her back to the old days, when his

perpetual disorder, and his persistent belief that he could always put

his hand on everything, used to be such a strain on her nerves!

"Pictures?" she gasped.

"Rather. The nigger himself, in turban and ritual togs; and a lot of

mixed nudes doing leg-work round a _patio_. The place looks like a Palm

Beach Hotel. Fanny Lindon's in a stew because she's recognized Bee in

the picture. She says she's going to have the man in jail if they spend

their last penny on it. Hullo--here it is, after all."

Pauline shrank back. Would people never stop trying to show her

disgusting photographs? She articulated: "You haven't seen Fanny Lindon

too?"

"Haven't I? She spent the morning here. She told Amalasuntha

everything."

Pauline, with a great effort, controlled her rising anger. "How idiotic!

Now it _will_ be spread to all the winds!" She saw Fanny and Amalasuntha

gloatingly exchanging the images of their progenies' dishonour. It was

too indecent ... and the old New Yorker was as shameless as the

demoralized foreigner.

"I didn't know Fanny had been here before me. I've just left her. I've

been trying to persuade her to stop; to hush up the whole business

before it's too late. I suppose you gave her the same advice?"

Wyant's face clouded: he looked perplexedly at his former wife, and she

saw he had lost all sense of the impropriety and folly of the affair in

his famished enjoyment of its spicy details.

"I don't know--I understood it _was_ too late; and that Manford was urging

them to do it."

Pauline made a slight movement of impatience. "Dexter--of course! When

he sees a 'case'! I suppose lawyers are all alike. At any rate, I can't

make him understand..." She broke off, suddenly aware that the rôles

were reversed, and that for the first time she was disparaging her

second husband to her first. "Besides," she hurried on, "it's no affair

of Dexter's if the Lindons choose to dishonour their child publicly.

They're not _his_ relations; Bee is not _his_ cousin's daughter. But you

and I--how can we help feeling differently? Bee and Nona and Jim were all

brought up together. You must help me to stop this scandal! You must

send for Grant Lindon at once. He's sure to listen to you ... you've

always had a great influence on Grant..."

She found herself, in her extremity, using the very arguments she had

addressed to Manford, and she saw at once that in this case they were

more effective. Wyant drew himself up stiffly with a faint smile of

satisfaction. Involuntarily he ran a thin gouty hand through his hair,

and tried for a glimpse of himself in the mirror.

"Think so--really? Of course when Grant was a boy he used to consider me

a great fellow. But now ... who remembers me in my dingy corner?"

Pauline rose with her clear wintry smile. "A good many of us, it seems.

You tell me I'm the third lady to call on you today! You know well

enough, Arthur--" she brushed the name in lightly, on the extreme tip of

her smile--"that the opinion of people like you still counts in New

York, even in these times. Imagine what your mother would have felt at

the idea of Fanny and Bee figuring in all the daily headlines, with

reporters and photographers in a queue on the doorstep! I'm glad she

hasn't lived to see it."

She knew that Wyant's facile irony always melted before an emotional

appeal, especially if made in his mother's name. He blinked unsteadily,

and flung away the "Looker-on."

"You're dead right: they're a pack of fools. There are no standards

left. I'll do what I can; I'll telephone to Grant to look in on his way

home this evening... I say, Pauline: what's the truth of it all,

anyhow? If I'm to give him a talking to I ought to know." His eyes again

lit up with curiosity.

"Truth of it? There isn't any--it's the silliest mare's-nest! Why, I'm

going to Dawnside for a rest-cure next month, while Dexter's

tarpon-fishing. The Mahatma is worlds above all this tattle--it's for

the Lindons I'm anxious, not him."

The paper thrown aside by Wyant had dropped to the floor, face upward at

a full-page picture--_the_ picture. Pauline, on her way out, mechanically

yielded to her instinct for universal tidying, and bent to pick it up;

bent and looked. Her eyes were still keen; passing over the noxious

caption "Dawnside Co-Eds," they immediately singled out Bee Lindon from

the capering round; then travelled on, amazed, to another denuded nymph ...

whose face, whose movements... Incredible! ... For a second

Pauline refused to accept what her eyes reported. Sick and unnerved, she

folded the picture away and laid the magazine on a table.

"Oh, don't bother about picking up that paper. Sorry there's no one to

show you out!" she heard Wyant calling. She went downstairs, blind,

unbelieving, hardly knowing how she got into her motor.

Barely time to get home, change, and be in the Chair, her address before

her, when the Mothers arrived in their multitude...

IX

WELL, perhaps Dexter would understand _now_ the need of hushing up the

Grant Lindons... The picture might be a libel, of course--such things,

Pauline knew, could be patched up out of quite unrelated photographs.

The dancing circle might have been skilfully fitted into the Dawnside

_patio_, and goodness knew what shameless creatures have supplied the

bodies of the dancers. Dexter had often told her that it was a common

blackmailing trick.

Even if the photograph were genuine, Pauline could understand and make

allowances. She had never seen anything of the kind herself at

Dawnside--heaven forbid!--but whenever she had gone there for a lecture,

or a new course of exercises, she had suspected that the bare

whitewashed room, with its throned Buddha, which received her and other

like-minded ladies of her age, all active, earnest and eager for

self-improvement, had not let them very far into the mystery. Beyond,

perhaps, were other rites, other settings: why not? Wasn't everybody

talking about "the return to Nature," and ridiculing the American

prudery in which the minds and bodies of her generation had been

swaddled? The Mahatma was one of the leaders of the new movement: the

Return to Purity, he called it. He was always celebrating the nobility

of the human body, and praising the ease of the loose Oriental dress

compared with the constricting western garb: but Pauline had supposed

the draperies he advocated to be longer and less transparent; above all,

she had not expected familiar faces above those insufficient scarves...

But here she was at her own door. There was just time to be ready for

the Mothers; none in which to telephone to Dexter, or buy up the whole

edition of the "Looker-on" (fantastic vision!), or try and get hold of

its editor, who had once dined with her, and was rather a friend of

Lita's. All these possibilities and impossibilities raced through her

brain to the maddening tune of "too late" while she slipped off her

street-dress and sat twitching with impatience under the maid's

readjustment of her ruffled head. The gown prepared for the meeting,

rich, matronly and just the least bit old-fashioned--very different from

the one designed for the Birth Control committee--lay spread out beside

the copy of her speech, and Maisie Bruss, who had been hovering within

call, dashed back breathless from a peep over the stairs.

"They're arriving--"

"Oh, Maisie, rush down! Say I'm telephoning--"

Her incurable sincerity made her unhook the receiver and call out

Manford's office number. Almost instantly she heard him. "Dexter, this

Mahatma investigation must be stopped! Don't ask me why--there isn't

time. Only promise--"

She heard his impatient laugh.

"No?"

"Impossible," came back.

She supposed she had hung up the receiver, fastened on her jewelled

"Motherhood" badge, slipped on rings and bracelets as usual. But she

remembered nothing clearly until she found herself on the platform at

the end of the packed ball-room, looking across rows and rows of earnest

confiding faces, with lips and eyes prepared for the admiring reception

of her "message." She was considered a very good speaker: she knew how

to reach the type of woman represented by this imposing

assemblage--delegates from small towns all over the country, united by a

common faith in the infinite extent of human benevolence and the

incalculable resources of American hygiene. Something of the moral

simplicity of her own bringing-up brought her close to these women, who

had flocked to the great perfidious city serenely unaware of its being

anything more, or other, than the gigantic setting of a Mothers'

Meeting. Pauline, at such times, saw the world through their eyes, and

was animated by a genuine ardour for the cause of motherhood and

domesticity.

As she turned toward her audience a factitious serenity descended on

her. She felt in control of herself and of the situation. She spoke.

"Personality--first and last, and at all costs. I've begun my talk to

you with that one word because it seems to me to sum up our whole case.

Personality--room to develop in: not only elbow-room but body-room and

soul-room, and plenty of both. That's what every human being has a right

to. No more effaced wives, no more drudging mothers, no more human

slaves crushed by the eternal round of housekeeping and child-bearing--"

She stopped, drew a quick breath, met Nona's astonished gaze over rows

of bewildered eye-glasses, and felt herself plunging into an abyss. But

she caught at the edge, and saved herself from the plunge--

"That's what our antagonists say--the women who are afraid to be

mothers, ashamed to be mothers, the women who put their enjoyment and

their convenience and what they call their happiness before the

mysterious heaven-sent joy, the glorious privilege, of bringing children

into the world--"

A round of applause from the reassured mothers. She had done it! She had

pulled off her effect from the very jaws of disaster. Only the swift

instinct of recovery had enabled her, before it was too late, to pass

off the first sentences of her other address, her Birth Control speech,

as the bold exordium of her hymn to motherhood! She paused a moment,

still inwardly breathless, yet already sure enough of herself to smile

back at Nona across her unsuspecting audience--sure enough to note that

her paradoxical opening had had a much greater effect than she could

have hoped to produce by the phrases with which she had meant to begin.

A hint for future oratory--

Only--the inward nervousness subsisted. The discovery that she could

lose not only her self-control but her memory, the very sense of what

she was saying, was like a hand of ice pointing to an undecipherable

warning.

Nervousness, fatigue, brain-exhaustion ... had her fight against them

been vain? What was the use of all the months and years of patient

Taylorized effort against the natural human fate: against anxiety,

sorrow, old age--if their menace was to reappear whenever events slipped

from her control?

The address ended in applause and admiring exclamations. She had won her

way straight to those trustful hearts, still full of personal memories

of a rude laborious life, or in which its stout tradition lingered on in

spite of motors, money and the final word in plumbing.

Pauline, after the dispersal of the Mothers, had gone up to her room

still dazed by the narrowness of her escape. Thank heaven she had a free

hour! She threw herself on her lounge and turned her gaze inward upon

herself: an exercise for which she seldom had the leisure.

Now that she knew she was safe, and had done nothing to discredit

herself or the cause, she could penetrate an inch or two farther into

the motive power of her activities; and what she saw there frightened

her. To be Chairman of the Mothers' Day Association, and a speaker at

the Birth Control banquet! It did not need her daughter's derisive

chuckle to give her the measure of her inconsequence. Yet to reconcile

these contradictions had seemed as simple as to invite the Chief Rabbi

and the Bishop of New York to meet Amalasuntha's Cardinal. Did not the

Mahatma teach that, to the initiated, all discords were resolved into a

higher harmony? When her hurried attention had been turned for a moment

on the seeming inconsistency of encouraging natality and teaching how to

restrict it, she had felt it was sufficient answer to say that the two

categories of people appealed to were entirely different, and could not

be "reached" in the same way. In ethics, as in advertising, the main

thing was to get at your public. Hitherto this argument had satisfied

her. Feeling there was much to be said on both sides, she had thrown

herself with equal zeal into the propagation of both doctrines; but now,

surveying her attempt with a chastened eye, she doubted its expediency.

Maisie Bruss, appearing with notes and telephone messages, seemed to

reflect this doubt in her small buttoned-up face.

"Oh, Maisie! Is there anything important? I'm dead tired." It was an

admission she did not often make.

"Nothing much. Three or four papers have 'phoned for copies of your

address. It was a great success."

A faint glow of satisfaction wavered through Pauline's perplexities. She

did not pretend to eloquence; she knew her children smiled at her

syntax. Yet she had reached the hearts of her audience, and who could

deny that that was success?

"Oh, Maisie--I don't think it's good enough to appear in print ..."

The secretary smiled, made a short-hand memorandum, and went on: "The

Marchesa telephoned that her son is sailing on Wednesday--and I've sent

off her cable about the Cardinal, answer paid."

"Sailing on Wednesday? But it can't be--the day after tomorrow!" Pauline

raised herself on an anxious elbow. She had warned her husband, and he

wouldn't listen. "Telephone downstairs, please, Maisie--find out if Mr.

Manford has come in." But she knew well enough what the answer would be.

Nowadays, whenever there was anything serious to be talked over, Dexter

found some excuse for avoiding her. She lay back, her lids dropped over

her tired eyes, and waited for the answer: "Mr. Manford isn't in yet."

Something had come over Dexter lately: no closing of her eyes would shut

that out! She supposed it was over-work--the usual reason. Rich men's

doctors always said they were over-worked when they became cross and

trying at home.

"Dinner at the Toys' at 8.30." Miss Bruss continued her recital; and

Pauline drew in her lips on a faintly bitter smile. At the Toys'--he

wouldn't forget that! Whenever there was a woman who attracted him ...

why, Lita even ... she'd seen him in a flutter once when he was going

to the cinema with Lita, and thought she had forgotten to call for him!

He had stamped up and down, watch in hand... Well, she supposed it was

one of the symptoms of middle age: a passing phase. She could afford to

be generous, after twenty years of his devotion; and she meant to be.

Men didn't grow old as gracefully as women--she knew enough not to nag

him about his little flirtations, and was really rather grateful to that

silly Gladys Toy for making a fuss over him.

But when it came to serious matters, like this of the Mahatma, it was

different, Dexter owed it to her to treat her opinions with more

consideration--a woman whose oratory was sought for by a dozen

newspapers! And that tiresome business of Michelangelo; another problem

he had obstinately shirked. Discouragement closed in on Pauline. Of what

use were eurythmics, cold douches, mental deep-breathings and all the

other panaceas?

If things went on like this she would have to have her face lifted.

X

IT was exasperating, the way the Vollard girl lurked and ogled...

Undoubtedly she was their best typist: mechanically perfect, with a

smattering of French and Italian useful in linguistic emergencies. There

could be no question of replacing her. But, apart from her job, what a

poor Poll! And always--there was no denying it, the office smiled over

it--always finding excuses to intrude on Manford's privacy: a hurry

trunk-call, a signature forgotten, a final question to ask, a message

from one of the other members of the firm ... she seized her pretexts

cleverly... And when she left him nowadays, he always got up, squared

his shoulders, studied himself critically in the mirror over the

mantelpiece, and hated her the more for having caused him to do anything

so silly.

This afternoon her excuse had been flimsier than usual: a new point to

be noted against her. "One of the gentlemen left it on his desk. There's

a picture in it that'll amuse you. Oh, you don't mind my bringing it

in?" she gasped.

Manford was just leaving; overcoat on, hat and stick in hand. He

muttered: "Oh, thanks," and took the "Looker-on" in order to cut short

her effusions. A picture that might amuse him! The simpleton...

Probably some of those elaborate "artistic" studies of the Cedarledge

gardens. He remembered that his wife had allowed the "Looker-on"

photographers to take them last summer. She thought it a duty: it might

help to spread the love of gardening (another of her hobbies); and

besides it was undemocratic to refuse to share one's private privileges

with the multitude. He knew all her catch-words and had reached the

point of wondering how much she would have valued her privileges had the

multitude not been there to share them.

He thrust the magazine under his arm, and threw it down, half an hour

later, in Lita Wyant's boudoir. It was so quiet and shadowy there that

he was almost glad Lita was not in, though sometimes her unpunctuality

annoyed him. This evening, after the rush and confusion of the day, he

found it soothing to await her in this half-lit room, with its heaped-up

cushions still showing where she had leaned, and the veiled light on two

arums in a dark bowl. Wherever Lita was, there were some of those smooth

sculptural arums.

When she came, the stillness would hardly be disturbed. She had a way of

deepening it by her presence: noise and hurry died on her threshold. And

this evening all the house was quiet. Manford, as usual, had tiptoed up

to take a look at the baby, in the night nursery where there were such

cool silver-coloured walls, and white hyacinths in pots of silvery

lustre. The baby slept, a round pink Hercules with defiant rosy curls,

his pink hands clenched on the coverlet. Even the nurse by the lamp sat

quiet and silver-coloured as a brooding pigeon.

A house without fixed hours, engagements, obligations ... where none

of the clocks went, and nobody was late, because there was no particular

time for anything to happen. Absurd, of course, maddeningly

unpractical--but how restful after a crowded day! And what a miracle to

have achieved, in the tight pattern of New York's tasks and

pleasures--in the very place which seemed doomed to collapse and vanish

if ever its clocks should stop!

These late visits had begun by Manford's dropping in on the way home for

a look at the baby. He liked babies in their cribs, and especially this

fat rascal of Jim's. Next to Nona, there was no one he cared for as much

as Jim; and seeing Jim happily married, doing well at his bank, and with

that funny little chap upstairs, stirred in the older man all his old

regrets that he had no son.

Jim seldom got back early enough to assist at these visits; and Lita

too, at first, was generally out. But in the last few months Manford had

more often found her--or at least, having fallen into the habit of

lingering over a cigarette in her boudoir, had managed to get a glimpse

of her before going on to that other house where all the clocks struck

simultaneously, and the week's engagements, in Maisie Bruss's hand,

jumped out at him as he entered his study.

This evening he felt more than usually tired--of his day, his work, his

life, himself--oh, especially himself; so tired that, the deep armchair

aiding, he slipped into a half-doze in which the quietness crept up

round him like a tide.

He woke with a start, imagining that Lita had entered, and feeling the

elderly man's discomfiture when beauty finds him napping... But the

room was empty: a movement of his own had merely knocked Miss Vollard's

magazine to the floor. He remembered having brought it in to show Lita

the photographs of Cedarledge which he supposed it to contain. Would

there be time? He consulted his watch--an anachronism in that house--lit

another cigarette, and leaned back contentedly. He knew that as soon as

he got home Pauline, who had telephoned again that afternoon about the

Mahatma, would contrive to corner him and reopen the tiresome question,

together with another, which threatened to be almost equally tiresome,

about paying that rotten Michelangelo's debts. "If we don't, we shall

have him here on our hands: Amalasuntha is convinced you'll take him

into the firm. You'd better come home in time to talk things over--."

Always talking over, interfering, adjusting! He had enough of that in

his profession. Pity Pauline wasn't a lawyer: she might have worked off

her steam in office hours. He would sit quietly where he was, taking

care to reach his house only just in time to dress and join her in the

motor. They were dining out, he couldn't remember where.

For a moment his wife's figure stood out before him in brilliant stony

relief, like a photograph seen through a stereopticon; then it vanished

in the mist of his well-being, the indolence engendered by waiting there

alone and undisturbed for Lita. Queer creature, Lita! His lips twitched

into a reminiscent smile. One day she had come up noiselessly behind him

and surprised him by a light kiss on his hair. He had thought it was

Nona... Since then he had sometimes feigned to doze while he waited;

but she had never kissed him again...

What sort of a life did she really lead, he wondered? And what did she

make of Jim, now the novelty was over? He could think of no two people

who seemed less made for each other. But you never could tell with a

woman. Jim was young and adoring; and there was that red-headed boy...

Luckily Lita liked Nona, and the two were a good deal together. Nona was

as safe as a bank--and as jolly as a cricket. Everything was sure to be

right when she was there. But there were all the other hours, intervals

that Manford had no way of accounting for; and Pauline always said the

girl had had a queer bringing-up, as indeed any girl must have had at

the hands of Mrs. Percy Landish. Pauline had objected to the marriage on

that ground, though the modern mother's respect for the independence of

her children had reduced her objection to mere shadowy hints of which

Jim, in his transports, took no heed.

Manford also disliked the girl at first, and deplored Jim's choice. He

thought Lita positively ugly, with her high cheekbones, her too small

head, her glaring clothes and conceited lackadaisical airs. Then, as

time passed, and the marriage appeared after all to be turning out well,

he tried to interest himself in her for Jim's sake, to see in her what

Jim apparently did. But the change had not come till the boy's birth.

Then, as she lay in her pillows, a new shadowiness under her golden

lashes, one petal of a hand hollowed under the little red head at her

side, the vision struck to his heart. The enchantment did not last; he

never recaptured it; there were days when what he called her "beauty

airs" exasperated him, others when he was chilled by her triviality. But

she never bored him, never ceased to excite in him a sort of irritated

interest. He told himself that it was because one could never be sure

what she was up to; speculating on what went on behind that smooth round

forehead and those elusive eyes became his most absorbing occupation.

At first he used to be glad when Nona turned up, and when Jim came in

from his bank, fagged but happy, and the three young people sat talking

nonsense, and letting Manford smoke and listen. But gradually he had

fallen into the way of avoiding Nona's days, and of coming earlier

(extricating himself with difficulty from his professional engagements),

so that he might find Lita alone before Jim arrived.

Lately she had seemed restless, vaguely impatient with things; and

Manford was determined to win her confidence and get at the riddle

behind that smooth round brow. He could not bear the idea that Jim's

marriage might turn out to be a mere unsuccessful adventure, like so

many others. Lita must be made to understand what a treasure she

possessed, and how easily she might lose it. Lita Cliffe--Mrs. Percy

Landish's niece--to have had the luck to marry Jim Wyant, and to risk

estranging him! What fools women were! If she could be got away from the

pack of frauds and flatterers who surrounded her, Manford felt sure he

could bring her to her senses. Sometimes, in her quiet moods, she seemed

to depend on his judgment, to defer rather touchingly to what he said...

The thing would be to coax her from jazz and night-clubs, and the

pseudo-artistic rabble of house-decorators, cinema stars and theatrical

riff-raff who had invaded her life, to get her back to country joys,

golf and tennis and boating, all the healthy outdoor activities. She

liked them well enough when there were no others available. She had

owned to Manford that she was sick of the rush and needed a rest; had

half promised to come to Cedarledge with the boy for Easter. Jim would

be taking his father down to the island off the Georgia coast; and Jim's

being away might be a good thing. These modern young women soon tired of

what they were used to; Lita would appreciate her husband all the more

after a separation.

Well, only a few weeks more, and perhaps it would come true. She had

never seen the Cedarledge dogwood in bud, the woods trembling into

green. Manford, smiling at the vision, stooped to pick up the

"Looker-on" and refresh his memory.

But it wasn't the right number: there were no gardens in it. Why had

Miss Vollard given it to him? As he fluttered the pages they dropped

open at: "Oriental Sage in Native Garb"--. Oh, damn the Mahatma!

"Dawnside Co-Eds"--oh, damn...

He stood up to thrust the paper under one of the heavily-shaded lamps.

At home, where Pauline and reason ruled, the lighting was disposed in

such a way that one could always read without moving from one's chair;

but in this ridiculous house, where no one ever opened a book, the lamps

were so perversely placed, and so deeply shrouded, that one had to hold

one's paper under the shade to make out anything.

He scrutinized the picture, shrugged away his disgusted recognition of

Bee Lindon, looked again and straightened his eye-glasses on his nose to

be doubly sure--the lawyer's instinct of accuracy prevailing over a

furious inward tremor.

He walked to the door, and then turned back and stood irresolute. To

study the picture he had lifted the border of the lampshade, and the

light struck crudely on the statue above Lita's divan; the statue of

which Pauline (to her children's amusement) always said a little

apprehensively that she supposed it must be Cubist. Manford had hardly

noticed the figure before, except to wonder why the young people admired

ugliness: half lost in the shadows of the niche, it seemed a mere bundle

of lumpy limbs. Now, in the glare--"Ah, you carrion, you!" He clenched

his fist at it. "_That's_ what they want--that's their brutish idol!" The

words came stammering from him in a blur of rage. It was on Jim's

account ... the shock, the degradation... The paper slipped to the

floor, and he dropped into his seat again.

Slowly his mind worked its way back through the disgust and confusion.

Pauline had been right: what could one expect from a girl brought up in

that Landish house? Very likely no one had ever thought of asking where

she was, where she had been--Mrs. Landish, absorbed in her own silly

affairs, would be the last person to know.

Well, what of that? The modern girl was always free, was expected to

know how to use her freedom. Nona's independence had been as

scrupulously respected as Jim's; she had had her full share of the

perpetual modern agitations. Yet Nona was firm as a rock: a man's heart

could build on her. If a woman was naturally straight, jazz and

night-clubs couldn't make her crooked...

True, in Nona's case there had been Pauline's influence: Pauline who,

whatever her faults, was always good-humoured and usually wise with her

children. The proof was that, while they laughed at her, they adored

her: he had to do her that justice. At the thought of Pauline a breath

of freshness and honesty swept through him. He had been unfair to her

lately, critical, irritable. He had been absorbing a slow poison, the

poison emanating from this dusky self-conscious room, with all its

pernicious implications. His first impression of Lita, when he had

thought her ugly and pretentious, rushed back on him, dissipating the

enchantment.

"Oh, I'm glad you waited--" She was there before him, her little

heart-shaped face deep in its furs, like a bird on the nest. "I wanted

to see you today; I _willed_ you to wait." She stood there, her head

slightly on one side, distilling her gaze through half-parted lids like

some rare golden liquid.

Manford stared back. Her entrance had tangled up the words in his

throat: he stood before her choked with denunciation and invective. And

then it occurred to him how much easier it was just to say nothing--and

to go. Of course he meant to go. It was no business of his: Jim Wyant

was not his son. Thank God he could wash his hands of the whole affair.

He mumbled: "Dining out. Can't wait."

"Oh, but you must!" Her hand was on his arm, as light as a petal. "I

want you." He could just see the twinkle of small round teeth as her

upper lip lifted... "Can't ... can't." He tried to disengage his

voice, as if that too were tangled up in her.

He moved away toward the door. The "Looker-on" lay on the floor between

them. So much the better; she would find it when he was gone! She would

understand then why he hadn't waited. And no fear of Jim's getting hold

of the paper; trust her to make it disappear!

"Why, what's that?" She bent her supple height to pick it up and moved

to the lamp, her face alight.

"You darling, you--did you bring me this? What luck! I've been all over

the place hunting for a copy--the whole edition's sold out. I had the

original photograph somewhere, but couldn't put my hand on it."

She had reached the fatal page; she was spreading it open. Her smile

caressed it; her mouth looked like a pink pod bursting on a row of

pearly seeds. She turned to Manford almost tenderly. "After you

prevented my going to Ardwin's I had to swear to send this to

Klawhammer, to show that I really _can_ dance. Tommy telephoned at

daylight that Klawhammer was off to Hollywood, and that when I chucked

last night they all said it was because I knew I couldn't come up to the

scratch." She held out the picture with an air of pride. "Doesn't look

much like it, does it? ... Why, what are you staring at? Didn't you

know I was going in for the movies? Immobility was never my strong

point..." She threw the paper down, and began to undo her furs with a

lazy smile, sketching a dance step as she did so. "Why do you look so

shocked? If I don't do that I shall run away with Michelangelo. I

suppose you know that Amalasuntha's importing him? I can't stick this

sort of thing much longer... Besides, we've all got a right to

self-expression, haven't we?"

Manford continued to look at her. He hardly heard what she was saying,

in the sickness of realizing what she was. Those were the thoughts, the

dreams, behind those temples on which the light laid such pearly

circles!

He said slowly: "This picture--it's true, then? You've been there?"

"Dawnside? Bless you--where'd you suppose I learnt to dance? Aunt Kitty

used to plant me out there whenever she wanted to go off on her

own--which was pretty frequently." She had tossed off her hat, slipped

out of her furs, and lowered the flounce of the lamp-shade; and there

she stood before him in her scant slim dress, her arms, bare to the

shoulder, lifted in an amphora-gesture to her little head.

"Oh, children--but I'm bored!" she yawned.

_BOOK II_

XI

PAULINE MANFORD was losing faith in herself; she felt the need of a new

moral tonic. Could she still obtain it from the old sources?

The morning after the Toys' dinner, considering the advisability of

repairing to that small bare room at Dawnside where the Mahatma gave his

private audiences, she felt a chill of doubt. She would have preferred,

just then, not to be confronted with the sage; in going to him she

risked her husband's anger, and prudence warned her to keep out of the

coming struggle. If the Mahatma should ask her to intervene she could

only answer that she had already done so unsuccessfully; and such

admissions, while generally useless, are always painful. Yet guidance

she must have: no Papist in quest of "direction" (wasn't that what

Amalasuntha called it?) could have felt the need more acutely. Certainly

the sacrament of confession, from which Pauline's ingrained

Protestantism recoiled in horror, must have its uses at such moments.

But to whom, if not to the Mahatma, could she confess?

Dexter had gone down town without asking to see her; she had been sure

he would, after their drive to and from the Toys' the evening before.

When he was in one of his moods of clenched silence--they were becoming

more frequent, she had remarked--she knew the uselessness of

interfering. Echoes of the Freudian doctrine, perhaps rather confusedly

apprehended, had strengthened her faith in the salutariness of "talking

things over," and she longed to urge this remedy again on Dexter; but

the last time she had done so he had wounded her by replying that he

preferred an aperient. And in his present mood of stony inaccessibility

he might say something even coarser.

She sat in her boudoir, painfully oppressed by an hour of unexpected

leisure. The facial-massage artist had the grippe, and had notified her

only at the last moment. To be sure, she had skipped her "Silent

Meditation" that morning; but she did not feel in the mood for it now.

And besides, an hour is too long for meditation--an hour is too long for

anything. Now that she had one to herself, for the first time in years,

she didn't in the least know what to do with it. That was something

which no one had ever thought of teaching her; and the sense of being

surrounded by a sudden void, into which she could reach out on all sides

without touching an engagement or an obligation, produced in her a sort

of mental dizziness. She had taken plenty of rest-cures, of course; all

one's friends did. But during a rest-cure one was always busy resting;

every minute was crammed with passive activities; one never had this

queer sense of inoccupation, never had to face an absolutely featureless

expanse of time. It made her feel as if the world had rushed by and

forgotten her. An hour--why, there was no way of measuring the length of

an empty hour! It stretched away into infinity like the endless road in

a nightmare; it gaped before her like the slippery sides of an abyss.

Nervously she began to wonder what she could do to fill it--if there

were not some new picture show or dressmakers' opening or hygienic

exhibition that she might cram into it before the minute hand switched

round to her next engagement. She took up her list to see what that

engagement was.

"11.45. Mrs. Swoffer."

Oh, to be sure ... Mrs. Swoffer. Maisie had reminded her that morning.

The relief was instantaneous. Only, who _was_ Mrs. Swoffer? Was she the

President of the Militant Pacifists' League, or the Heroes' Day

delegate, or the exponent of the New Religion of Hope, or the woman who

had discovered a wonderful trick for taking the wrinkles out of the

corners of your eyes? Maisie was out on an urgent commission, and could

not be consulted; but whatever Mrs. Swoffer's errand was, her arrival

would be welcome--especially if she came before her hour. And she did.

She was a small plump woman of indefinite age, with faded blond hair and

rambling features held together by a pair of urgent eye-glasses. She

asked if she might hold Pauline's hand just a moment while she looked at

her and reverenced her--and Pauline, on learning that this was the

result of reading her Mothers' Day speech in the morning papers, acceded

not unwillingly.

Not that that was what Mrs. Swoffer had come for; she said it was just a

flower she wanted to gather on the way. A rose with the dew on it--she

took off her glasses and wiped them, as if to show where the dew had

come from. "You speak for so _many_ of us," she breathed, and recovered

Pauline's hand for another pressure.

But she _had_ come for the children, all the same; and that was really

coming for the mothers, wasn't it? Only she wanted to reach the mothers

through the children--reversing the usual process. Mrs. Swoffer said she

believed in reversing almost everything. Standing on your head was one

of the most restorative physical exercises, and she believed it was the

same mentally and morally. It was a good thing to stand one's _soul_

upside down. And so she'd come about the children...

The point was to form a League--a huge International League of

Mothers--against the dreadful old practice of telling children they

were naughty. Had Mrs. Manford ever stopped to think what an abominable

thing it was to suggest to a pure innocent child that there was such a

thing in the world as Being Naughty? What did it open the door to? Why,

to the idea of Wickedness, the most awful idea in the whole world.

Of course Mrs. Manford would see at once what getting rid of the idea of

Wickedness would lead to. How could there be bad men if there were no

bad children? And how could there be bad children if children were never

allowed to know that such a thing as badness existed? There was a

splendid woman--Orba Clapp; no doubt Mrs. Manford had heard of her?--who

was getting up a gigantic world-wide movement to boycott the

manufacturers and sellers of all military toys, tin soldiers, cannon,

toy rifles, water-pistols and so on. It was a grand beginning, and

several governments had joined the movement already: the Philippines,

Mrs. Swoffer thought, and possibly Montenegro. But that seemed to her

only a beginning: much as she loved and revered Orba Clapp, she couldn't

honestly say that she thought the scheme went deep enough. She, Mrs.

Swoffer, wanted to go right down to the soul: the collective soul of all

the little children. The great Teacher, Alvah Loft--she supposed Mrs.

Manford knew about _him_? No? She was surprised that a woman like Mrs.

Manford--"one of our beacon-lights"--hadn't heard of Alvah Loft. She

herself owed everything to him. No one had helped her as he had: he had

pulled her out of the very depths of scepticism. But didn't Mrs. Manford

know his books, even: "Spiritual Vacuum-Cleaning" and "Beyond God"?

Pauline had grown a little listless while the children were to the fore.

She would help, of course; lend her name; subscribe. But that string had

been so often twanged that it gave out rather a deadened note: whereas

the name of a new Messiah immediately roused her. "Beyond God" was a

tremendous title; she would get Maisie to telephone for the books at

once. But what exactly did Alvah Loft teach?

Mrs. Swoffer's eye-glasses flashed with inspiration. "He doesn't teach:

he absolutely refuses to be regarded as a _teacher_. He says there are too

many already. He's an Inspirational Healer. What he does is to act on

you--on your spirit. He simply relieves you of your frustrations."

Frustrations! Pauline was fascinated by the word. Not that it was new to

her. Her vocabulary was fairly large, far more so, indeed, than that of

her daughter's friends, whose range was strictly limited to sport and

dancing; but whenever she heard a familiar word used as if it had some

unsuspected and occult significance it fascinated her like a phial

containing a new remedy.

Mrs. Swoffer's glasses were following Pauline's thoughts as they formed.

"Will you let me speak to you as I would to an old friend? The moment I

took your hand I _knew_ you were suffering from frustrations. To any

disciple of Alvah Loft's the symptoms are unmistakeable. Sometimes I

almost wish I didn't see it all so clearly ... it gives one such a

longing to help..."

Pauline murmured: "I _do_ want help."

"Of course you do," Mrs. Swoffer purred, "and you want _his_ help. Don't

you know those wonderful shoe-shops where they stock every size and

shape the human foot can require? I tell Alvah Loft he's like that; he's

got a cure for everybody's frustrations. Of course," she added, "there

isn't time for everybody; he has to choose. But he would take you at

once." She drew back, and her glasses seemed to suck Pauline down as if

they had been quicksands. "You're psychic," she softly pronounced.

"I believe I am," Pauline acknowledged. "But--"

"Yes; I know; those frustrations! All the things you think you ought to

do, _and can't_; that's it, isn't it?" Mrs. Swoffer stood up. "Dear

friend, come with me. Don't look at your watch. Just come!"

An hour later Pauline, refreshed and invigorated, descended the

Inspirational Healer's brown-stone doorstep with a springing step. It

had been worth while breaking three or four engagements to regain that

feeling of moral freedom. Why had she never heard of Alvah Loft before?

His method was so much simpler than the Mahatma's: no eurythmics,

gymnastics, community life, no mental deep-breathing, or long words to

remember. Alvah Loft simply took out your frustrations as if they'd been

adenoids; it didn't last ten minutes, and was perfectly painless.

Pauline had always felt that the Messiah who should reduce his message

to tabloid form would outdistance all the others; and Alvah Loft had

done it. He just received you in a boarding-house back-parlour, with

bunches of pampas-grass on the mantelpiece, while rows of patients sat

in the front room waiting their turn. You told him what was bothering

you, and he said it was just a frustration, and he could relieve you of

it, and make it so that it didn't exist, by five minutes of silent

communion. And he sat and held you by the wrist, very lightly, as if he

were taking your temperature, and told you to keep your eyes on the Ella

Wheeler Wilcox line-a-day on the wall over his head. After it was over

he said: "You're a good subject. The frustrations are all out. Go home,

and you'll hear something good before dinner. Twenty-five dollars." And

a pasty-faced young man with pale hair, who was waiting in the passage,

added: "Pass on, please," and steered Pauline out by the elbow.

Of course she wasn't naturally credulous; she prided herself on always

testing everything by reason. But it _was_ marvellous, how light she felt

as she went down the steps! The buoyancy persisted all day, perhaps

strengthened by an attentive study of the reports of the Mothers' Day

Meeting, laid out by the vigilant Maisie for perusal. Alvah Loft had

told her that she would hear of something good before dinner, and when,

late in the afternoon, she went up to her boudoir, she glanced

expectantly at the writing-table, as if revelation might be there. It

was, in the shape of a telephone message.

"Mr. Manford will be at home by seven. He would like to see you for a

few minutes before dinner."

It was nearly seven, and Pauline settled herself by the fire and

unfolded the evening paper. She seldom had time for its perusal, but

today there might be some reference to the Mothers' Day Meeting; and her

newly-regained serenity made it actually pleasant to be sitting there

undisturbed, waiting for her husband.

"Dexter--how tired you look!" she exclaimed when he came in. It occurred

to her at once that she might possibly insinuate an allusion to the new

healer; but wisdom counselled a waiting policy, and she laid down her

paper and smiled expectantly.

Manford gave his shoulders their usual impatient shake. "Everybody looks

tired at the end of a New York day; I suppose it's what New York is

for." He sat down in the armchair facing hers, and stared at the fire.

"I wanted to see you to talk about plans--a rearrangement," he began.

"It's so hard to find a quiet minute."

"Yes; but there's no hurry now. The Delavans don't dine till half-past

eight."

"Oh, are we dining there?" He reached for a cigarette.

She couldn't help saying: "I'm sure you smoke too much, Dexter. The

irritation produced by the paper--"

"Yes; I know. But what I wanted to say is: I should like you to ask Lita

and the boy to Cedarledge while Jim and Wyant are at the island."

This was a surprise; but she met it with unmoved composure. "Of course,

if you like. But do you think Lita'll go, all alone? You'll be off

tarpon-fishing, Nona is going to Asheville for a fortnight's change, and

I had intended--" She pulled up suddenly. She had meant, of course, to

take her rest-cure at Dawnside.

Manford sat frowning and studying the fire. "Why shouldn't we all go to

Cedarledge instead?" he began. "Somebody ought to look after Lita while

Jim's away; in fact, I don't believe he'll go with Wyant if we don't.

She's dead-beat, and doesn't know it, and with all the fools she has

about her the only way to ensure her getting a real rest is to carry her

off to the country with the boy."

Pauline's face lit up with a blissful incredulity. "Oh, Dexter--would

you really come to Cedarledge for Easter? How splendid! Of course I'll

give up my rest-cure. As you say, there's no place like the country."

She was already raising an inward hymn to Alvah Loft. An Easter holiday

in the country, all together--how long it was since that had happened!

She had always thought it her duty to urge Dexter to get away from the

family when he had the chance; to travel or shoot or fish, and not feel

himself chained to her side. And here at last was her reward--of his own

accord he was proposing that they should all be together for a quiet

fortnight. A softness came about her heart: the stiff armour of her

self-constraint seemed loosened, and she saw the fire through a luminous

blur. "It will be lovely," she murmured.

Manford lit another cigarette, and sat puffing it in silence. It seemed

as though a weight had been lifted from him too; yet his face was still

heavy and preoccupied. Perhaps before their talk was over she might be

able to say a word about Alvah Loft; she was so sure that Dexter would

see everything differently if only he could be relieved of his

frustrations.

At length he said: "I don't see why this should interfere with your

arrangements, though. Hadn't you meant to go somewhere for a rest-cure?"

He had thought of that too! She felt a fresh tremor of gratitude. How

wicked she had been ever to doubt the designs of Providence, and the

resolving of all discords in the Higher Harmony!

"Oh, my rest-cure doesn't matter; being with you all at Cedarledge will

be the best kind of rest."

His obvious solicitude for her was more soothing than any medicine, more

magical even than Alvah Loft's silent communion. Perhaps the one thing

she had lacked, in all these years, was to feel that some one was

worrying about her as she worried about the universe.

"It's awfully unselfish of you, Pauline. But running a big house is

never restful. Nona will give up Asheville and come to Cedarledge to

look after us; you mustn't change your plans."

She smiled a little. "But I _must_, dear; because I'd meant to go to

Dawnside, and now, of course, in any case--"

Manford stood up and went and leaned against the chimney-piece. "Well,

that will be all right," he said.

"All right?"

He was absently turning about in his hand a little bronze statuette.

"Yes. If you think the fellow does you good. I've been thinking over

what you said the other day; and I've decided to advise the Lindons not

to act ... too precipitately..." He coughed and put the statuette

back on the mantelshelf. "They've abandoned the idea..."

"Oh, Dexter--" She started to her feet, her eyes brimming. He had

actually thought over what she had said to him--when, at the time, he

had seemed so obdurate and sneering! Her heart trembled with a happy

wonder in which love and satisfied vanity were subtly mingled. Perhaps,

after all, what her life had really needed was something much simpler

than all the complicated things she had put into it.

"I'm so glad," she murmured, not knowing what else to say. She wanted to

hold out her arms, to win from him some answering gesture. But he was

already glancing at his watch. "That's all right. Jove, though--we'll be

late for dinner... Opera afterward, isn't there?"

The door closed on him. For a moment or two she stood still, awed by the

sense of some strange presence in the room, something as fresh and

strong as a spring gale. It must be happiness, she thought.

XII

"YES; this morning I think you _can_ see her. She seems ever so much

better; not in such a fearful hurry, I mean."

Pauline, from her dressing-room, overheard Maisie Bruss. She smiled at

the description of herself, sent a thought of gratitude to Alvah Loft,

and called out: "Is that Nona? I'll be there in a minute. Just finishing

my exercises..."

She appeared, fresh and tingling, draped in a restful dove-coloured

wrapper, and offered Nona a smooth cheek. Miss Bruss had vanished, and

mother and daughter had to themselves the sunny room, full of flowers

and the scent of a wood-fire.

"How wonderful you look, mother! All made over. Have you been trying

some new exercises?"

Pauline smiled and pulled up the soft eiderdown coverlet at the foot of

her lounge. She sank comfortably back among her cushions.

"No, dear: it's just--understanding a little better, I think."

"Understanding?"

"Yes; that things _always_ come out right if one just keeps on being brave

and trustful."

"Oh--." She fancied she caught a note of disappointment in Nona's voice.

Poor Nona--her mother had long been aware that she had no enthusiasm, no

transports of faith. She took after her father. How tired and sallow she

looked in the morning light, perched on the arm of a chair, her long

legs dangling!

"You really ought to try to believe that yourself, darling," said

Pauline brightly.

Nona gave one of her father's shrugs. "Perhaps I will when I have more

time."

"But one can always _make_ time, dear." ("Just as I do," the smile

suggested.) "You look thoroughly fagged out, Nona. I do wish you'd go to

the wonderful new man I've just--"

"All right, mother. Only, this morning I haven't come to talk about

myself. It's Lita."

"Lita?"

"I've been wanting to speak to you about her for a long time. Haven't

you noticed anything?"

Pauline still wore her alert and sympathizing smile. "Tell me what,

dear--let's talk it all over."

Nona's brows were drawn in a troubled frown. "I'm afraid Jim's

not happy," she said.

"Jim? But, darling, he's been so dreadfully over-worked--that's the

trouble. Your father spoke to me about it the other day. He's sending

Jim and Arthur down to the island next month for a good long rest."

"Yes; it's awfully nice of father. But it's not that--it's Lita," Nona

doggedly repeated.

A faint shadow brushed Pauline's cloudless horizon; but she resolutely

turned her eyes from it. "Tell me what you think is wrong."

"Why, that she's bored stiff--says she's going to chuck the whole thing.

She says the life she's leading prevents her expressing her

personality."

"Good gracious--she dares?" Pauline sat bolt upright, the torn garment

of her serenity fluttering away like a wisp of vapour. Was there never

to be any peace for her, she wondered? She had a movement of passionate

rebellion--then a terror lest it should imperil Alvah Loft's mental

surgery. After a physical operation the patient's repose was always

carefully guarded--but no one thought of sparing _her_, though she had

just been subjected to so radical an extirpation. She looked almost

irritably at Nona.

"Don't you think you sometimes imagine things, my pet? Of course, the

more we yield to suggestions of pain and distress the more--"

"Yes; I know. But this isn't a suggestion, it's a fact. Lita says she's

got to express her personality, or she'll do something dreadful. And if

she does it will break Jim's heart."

Pauline leaned back, vaguely fortified by so definite a menace. It was

laughable to think of Lita Cliffe's threatening to do something dreadful

to a Wyant!

"Don't you think she's just over-excited, perhaps? She leads such a

crazy sort of life--all you children do. And she hasn't been very strong

since the baby's birth. I believe she needs a good rest as much as Jim

does. And you know your father has been so wise about that; he's going

to persuade her to go to Cedarledge for two or three weeks while Jim's

in Georgia."

Nona remained unimpressed. "Lita won't go to Cedarledge alone--you know

she won't."

"She won't have to, dear. Your father has thought of that too; he finds

time to think of everything."

"Who's going, then?"

"We _all_ are. At least, your father hopes you will; and he's giving up

his tarpon-fishing on purpose to join us."

"Father is?" Nona stood up, her gaze suddenly fixed on her mother.

"Your father's wonderful," Pauline triumphed.

"Yes, I know." The girl's voice flagged again. "But all this is weeks

away. And meanwhile I'm afraid--I'm afraid."

"Little girls mustn't be afraid. If you are, send Lita to _me_. I'm sure

it's just a case of frustration--"

"Frustration?"

"Yes; the new psychological thing. I'll take her with me to see Alvah

Loft. He's the great Inspirational Healer. I've only had three

treatments, and it's miraculous. It doesn't take ten minutes, and all

one's burdens are lifted." Pauline threw back her head with a sigh which

seemed to luxuriate in the remembrance of her own release. "I wish I

could take you _all_ to him!" she said.

"Well, perhaps you'd better begin with Lita." Nona was half-smiling too,

but it was what her mother secretly called her disintegrating smile. "I

wish the poor child were more constructive--but I suppose she's

inherited her father's legal mind," Pauline thought.

Nona stood before her irresolutely. "You know, mother, if things do go

wrong Jim will never get over it."

"There you are again--jumping at the conclusion that things will go

wrong! As for Lita, to me it's a clear case of frustration. She says she

wants to express her personality? Well, every one has the right to do

that--I should think it wrong of me to interfere. That wouldn't be the

way to make Jim happy. What Lita needs is to have her frustrations

removed. That will open her eyes to her happiness, and make her see what

a perfect home she has. I wonder where my engagement-list is? Maisie! ...

Oh, here..." She ran her eyes rapidly over the tablet. "I'll see

Lita tomorrow--I'll make a point of it. We'll have a friendly simple

talk--perfectly frank and affectionate. Let me see: at what time should

I be likely to find her? ... And, no, of course not, darling; I

wouldn't think of saying a word to Jim. But your father--surely I may

speak to your father?"

Nona hesitated. "I think father knows about it--as much as he need," she

answered, her hand on the door.

"Ah, your father always knows everything," Pauline placidly acquiesced.

The prospect of the talk with her daughter-in-law barely ruffled her

new-found peace. It was a pity Lita was restless; but nowadays all the

young people were restless. Perhaps it would be as well to say a word to

Kitty Landish; flighty and inconsequent as she was, it might open her

eyes to find that she was likely to have her niece back on her hands.

Mrs. Percy Landish's hands were always full to overflowing with her own

difficulties. A succession of ingenious theories of life, and the

relentless pursuit of originality, had landed her in a state of chronic

embarrassment, pecuniary, social and sentimental. The announcement that

Lita was tired of Jim, and threatened to leave him, would fall like a

bombshell on that precarious roof which figured in the New York

Directory as somewhere in the East Hundreds, but was recorded in the

"Social Register" as No. 1 Viking Court. Mrs. Landish's last fad had

been to establish herself on the banks of the East River, which she and

a group of friends had adorned with a cluster of reinforced-cement

bungalows, first christened El Patio, but altered to Viking Court after

Mrs. Landish had read in an illustrated weekly that the Vikings, who had

discovered America ages before Columbus, had not, as previously

supposed, effected their first landing at Vineyard Haven, but at a spot

not far from the site of her dwelling. Cement, at an early stage, is

malleable, and the Alhambra _motifs_ had hastily given way to others from

the prows of Nordic ships, from silver torques and Runic inscriptions,

the latter easily contrived out of Arabic _sourats_ from the Koran. Before

these new ornaments were dry, Mrs. Landish and her friends were camping

on the historic spot; and after four years of occupancy they were

camping still, in Mrs. Manford's sense of the word.

A hurried telephone call had assured Pauline that she could see Mrs.

Landish directly after lunch; and at two o'clock her motor drove up to

Viking Court, which opened on a dilapidated river-front and was

cynically overlooked by tall tenement houses with an underpinning of

delicatessen stores.

Mrs. Landish was nowhere to be found. She had had to go out to lunch, a

melancholy maid-servant said, because the cook had just given notice;

but she would doubtless soon be back. With gingerly steps Pauline

entered the "living-room," so called (as visitors were unfailingly

reminded) because Mrs. Landish ate, painted, modelled in clay,

sculptured in wood, and received her friends there. The Vikings, she

added, had lived in that way. But today all traces of these varied

activities had disappeared, and the room was austerely empty. Mrs.

Landish's last hobby was for what she called "purism," and her chief

desire to make everything in her surroundings conform to the habits and

industries of a mythical past. Ever since she had created Viking Court

she had been trying to obtain rushes for the floor: but as the Eastern

States of America did not produce the particular variety of rush which

the Vikings were said to have used she had at last decided to have rugs

woven on handlooms in Abyssinia, some one having assured her that an

inscription referring to trade-relations between the Vikings and the

kingdom of Prester John had been discovered in the ruins of Petra.

The difficulty of having these rugs made according to designs of the

period caused the cement floor of Mrs. Landish's living-room to remain

permanently bare, and most of the furniture having now been removed, the

room had all the appearance of a garage, the more so as Mrs. Landish's

latest protégé, a young cabaret-artist who performed on a motor-siren,

had been suffered to stable his cycle in one corner.

In addition to this vehicle, the room contained only a few

relentless-looking oak chairs, a long table bearing an hour-glass (for

clocks would have been an anachronism), and a scrap of dusty velvet

nailed on the cement wall, as to which Mrs. Landish explained that it

was a bit of a sixth century Coptic vestment, and that the nuns of a

Basilian convent in Thessaly were reproducing it for eventual curtains

and chair-cushions. "It may take fifty years." Mrs. Landish always

added, "but I would rather go without it than live with anything less

perfect."

The void into which Pauline advanced gave prominence to the figure of a

man who stood with his back to her, looking through the window at what

was to be a garden when Viking horticulture was revived. Meanwhile it

was fully occupied by neighbouring cats and by swirls of wind-borne

rubbish.

The visitor, duskily blocked against a sullen March sky, was at first

not recognizable; but half way toward him Pauline exclaimed: "Dexter!"

He turned, and his surprise met hers.

"I never dreamed of its being you!" she said.

He faced her with a certain defiant jauntiness. "Why not?"

"Because I never saw you here before. I've tried often enough to get you

to come--"

"Oh, to lunch or dine!" He sent a grimace about the room. "I never

thought that was among my duties."

She did not take this up, and a moment's silence hung between them.

Finally Manford said: "I came about Lita."

Pauline felt a rush of relief. Her husband's voice had been harsh and

impatient: she saw that her arrival had mysteriously put him out. But if

anxiety about Lita were the cause of his visit it not only explained his

perturbation but showed his revived solicitude for herself. She sent

back another benediction to the Inspirational Healer, so sweet it was to

find that she and Dexter were once more moved by the same impulses.

"It's awfully kind of you, dear. How funny that we should meet on the

same errand!"

He stared: "Why, have you--?"

"Come about Lita? Well, yes. She's been getting rather out of hand,

hasn't she? Of course a divorce would kill poor Jim--otherwise I

shouldn't so much mind--"

"A divorce?"

"Nona tells me it's Lita's idea. Foolish child! I'm to have a talk with

her this afternoon. I came here first to see if Kitty's influence--"

"Oh: Kitty's influence!"

"Yes; I know." She broke off, and glanced quickly at Manford. "But if

you don't believe in her influence, why did you come here yourself?"

The question seemed to take her husband by surprise, and he met it by a

somewhat rigid smile. How old he looked in the hard slaty light! The

crisp hair was almost as thin on his temples as higher up. If only he

would try that wonderful new "Radio-scalp"! "And he used to be so

handsome!" his wife said to herself, with the rush of vitality she

always felt when she noted the marks of fatigue or age in her

contemporaries. Manford and Nona, she reflected, had the same way of

turning sallow and heavy-cheeked when they were under any physical or

moral strain.

Manford said: "I came to ask Mrs. Landish to help us get Lita away for

Easter. I thought she might put in a word--"

It was Pauline's turn to smile. "Perhaps she might. What I came for was

to say that if Lita doesn't quiet down and behave reasonably she may

find herself thrown on her aunt's hands again. I think that will produce

an effect on Kitty. I shall make it perfectly clear that they are not to

count on me financially if Lita leaves Jim." She glanced brightly at

Manford, instinctively awaiting his approval.

But the expected response did not come. His face grew blurred and

uncertain, and for a moment he said nothing. Then he muttered: "It's all

very unfortunate ... a stupid muddle..."

Pauline caught the change in his tone. It suggested that her last

remark, instead of pleasing him, had raised between them one of those

invisible barriers against which she had so often bruised her

perceptions. And just as she had thought that he and she were really in

touch again!

"We mustn't be hard on her ... we mustn't judge her without hearing

both sides ..." he went on.

"But of course not." It was just the sort of thing she wanted him to

say, but not in the voice in which he said it. The voice was full of

hesitation and embarrassment. Could it be her presence which embarrassed

him? With Manford one could never tell. She suggested, almost timidly:

"But why shouldn't I leave you to see Kitty alone? Perhaps we needn't

both..."

His look of relief was unconcealable; but her bright resolution rose

above the shock. "You'll do it so much better," she encouraged him.

"Oh, I don't know. But perhaps two of us ... looks rather like the

Third Degree, doesn't it?"

She assented nervously: "All I want is to smooth things over..."

He gave an acquiescent nod, and followed her as she moved toward the

door. "Perhaps, though--look here, Pauline--"

She sparkled with responsiveness.

"Hadn't you better wait before sending for Lita? It may not be

necessary, if--"

Her first impulse was to agree; but she thought of the Inspirational

Healer. "You can trust me to behave with tact, dear; but I'm sure it

will help Lita to talk things out, and perhaps I shall know better than

Kitty how to get at her... Lita and I have always been good friends,

and there's a wonderful new man I want to persuade her to see ... some

one really psychic..."

Manford's lips narrowed in a smile; again she had a confused sense of

new deserts widening between them. Why had he again become suddenly

sardonic and remote? She had no time to consider, for the new gospel of

frustrations was surging to her lips.

"_Not_ a teacher; he repudiates all doctrines, and simply _acts_ on you.

He--"

"Pauline darling! Dexter! Have you been waiting long? Oh, dear--my

hour-glass seems to be quite empty!"

Mrs. Percy Landish was there, slipping toward them with a sort of aerial

shuffle, as if she had blown in on a March gust. Her tall swaying figure

produced, at a distance, an effect of stateliness which vanished as she

approached, as if she had suddenly got out of focus. Her face was like

an unfinished sketch, to which the artist had given heaps of fair hair,

a lovely nose, expressive eyes, and no mouth. She laid down some vague

parcels and shook the hour-glass irritably, as if it had been at fault.

"How dear of you!" she said to her visitors. "I don't often get you

together in my eyrie."

The expression puzzled Pauline, who knew that in poetry an eyrie was an

eagle's nest, and wondered how this term could be applied to a cement

bungalow in the East Hundreds... But there was no time to pursue such

speculations.

Mrs. Landish was looking helplessly about her. "It's cold--you're both

freezing, I'm afraid?" Her eyes rested tragically on the empty hearth.

"The fact is, I can't have a fire because my andirons are _wrong_."

"Not high enough? The chimney doesn't draw, you mean?" Pauline in such

emergencies was in her element; she would have risen from her deathbed

to show a new housemaid how to build a fire. But Mrs. Landish shook her

head with the look of a woman who never expects to be understood by

other women.

"No, dear; I mean they were not of the period. I always suspected it,

and Dr. Ygrid Bjornsted, the great authority on Nordic art, who was here

the other day, told me that the only existing pair is in the Museum at

Christiania. So I have sent an order to have them copied. But you _are_

cold, Pauline! Shall we go and sit in the kitchen? We shall be quite by

ourselves, because the cook has just given notice."

Pauline drew her furs around her in silent protest at this new insanity.

"We shall be very well here, Kitty. I suppose you know it's about

Lita--"

Mrs. Landish seemed to drift back to them from incalculable distances.

"Lita? Has Klawhammer really engaged her? It was for his 'Herodias,'

wasn't it?" She was all enthusiasm and participation.

Pauline's heart sank. She had caught the irritated jut of Manford's

brows. No--it was useless to try to make Kitty understand; and foolish

to risk her husband's displeasure by staying in this icy room for such a

purpose. She wrapped herself in sweetness as in her sables. "It's

something much more serious than that cinema nonsense. But I'm going to

leave it to Dexter to explain. He will do it ever so much better than I

could... Yes, Kitty dear, I remember there's a step missing in the

vestibule. Please don't bother to see me out--you know Dexter's minutes

are precious." She thrust Mrs. Landish softly back into the room, and

made her way unattended across the hall. As she did so, the living-room

door, the lock of which had responded reluctantly to her handling, swung

open again, and she heard Manford ask, in his dry cross-examining voice:

"Will you please tell me exactly when and for how long Lita was at

Dawnside, Mrs. Landish?"

XIII

"I BELIEVE it's the first time in a month that I've heard Nona laugh,"

Stanley Heuston said with a touch of irony--or was it simply envy?

Nona was still in the whirlpool of her laugh. She struggled to its edge

only to be caught back, with retrospective sobs and gasps, into its

central coil. "It was too screamingly funny," she flung at them out of

the vortex.

She was perched sideways, as her way was, on the arm of the big chintz

sofa in Arthur Wyant's sitting-room. Wyant was stretched out in his

usual armchair, behind a crumby messy tea-table, on the other side of

which sat his son and Stanley Heuston.

"She didn't hesitate for more than half a second--just long enough to

catch my eye--then round she jerked, grabbed hold of her last word and

fitted it into a beautiful new appeal to the Mothers. Oh--oh--oh! If you

could have seen them!"

"I can." Jim's face suddenly became broad, mild and earnestly peering.

He caught up a pair of his father's eye-glasses, adjusted them to his

blunt nose, and murmured in a soft feminine drawl: "Mrs. Manford is one

of our deepest-souled women. She has a vital message for all Mothers."

Wyant leaned back and laughed. His laugh was a contagious chuckle,

easily provoked and spreading in circles like a full spring. Jim gave a

large shout at his own mimicry, and Heuston joined the chorus on a dry

note that neither spread nor echoed, but seemed suddenly to set bounds

to their mirth. Nona felt a momentary resentment of his tone. Was he

implying that they were ridiculing their mother? They weren't, they were

only admiring her in their own way, which had always been humorous and

half-parental. Stan ought to have understood by this time--and have

guessed why Nona, at this moment, caught at any pretext to make Jim

laugh, to make everything in their joint lives appear to him normal and

jolly. But Stanley always seemed to see beyond a joke, even when he was

in the very middle of it. He was like that about everything in life;

forever walking around things, weighing and measuring them, and making

his disenchanted calculations. Poor fellow--well, no wonder!

Jim got up, the glasses still clinging to his blunt nose. He gathered an

imaginary cloak about him, picked up inexistent gloves and vanity-bag,

and tapped his head as if he were settling a feathered hat. The laughter

waxed again, and Wyant chuckled: "I wish you young fools would come

oftener. It would cure me a lot quicker than being shipped off to

Georgia." He turned half-apologetically to Nona. "Not that I'm not

awfully glad of the chance--"

"I know, Exhibit dear. It'll be jolly enough when you get down there,

you and Jim."

"Yes; I only wish you were coming too. Why don't you?"

Jim's features returned to their normal cast, and he removed the

eye-glasses. "Because mother and Manford have planned to carry off Lita

and the kid to Cedarledge at the same time. Good scheme, isn't it? I

wish I could be in both places at once. We're all of us fed up with New

York."

His father glanced at him. "Look here, my boy, there's no difficulty

about your being in the same place as your wife. I can take my old bones

down to Georgia without your help, since Manford's kind enough to invite

me."

"Thanks a lot, dad; but part of Lita's holiday is getting away from

domestic cares, and I'm the principal one. She has to order dinner for

me. And I don't say I shan't like my holiday too ... sand and sun, any

amount of 'em. That's my size at present. No more superhuman efforts."

He stretched his arms over his head with a yawn.

"But I thought Manford was off to the south too--to his tarpon? Isn't

this Cedarledge idea new?"

"It's part of his general kindness. He wanted me to go with an easy

mind, so he's chucked his fishing and mobilized the whole group to go

and lead the simple life at Cedarledge with Lita."

Wyant's sallow cheek-bones reddened slightly. "It's awfully kind, as you

say; but if my going south is to result in upsetting everybody else's

arrangements--"

"Oh, rot, father." Jim spoke with sudden irritability. "Manford would

hate it if you chucked now; wouldn't he, Nona? And I do want Lita to get

away somewhere, and I'd rather it was to Cedarledge than anywhere." The

clock struck, and he pulled himself out of his chair. Nona noticed with

a pang how slack and half-hearted all his movements were. "Jove--I must

jump!" he said. "We're due at some cabaret show that begins early; and I

believe we dine at Ardwin's first, with a bunch of freaks. By-bye, Nona...

Stan... Goodbye, father. Only a fortnight now before we cut it

all!"

The door shut after him on a silence. Wyant reached for his pipe and

filled it. Heuston stared at the tea-table. Suddenly Wyant questioned:

"Look here--why is Jim being shipped off to the island with me when his

wife's going to Cedarledge?"

Nona dropped from her sofa-arm and settled into an armchair. "Simply for

the reasons he told you. They both want a holiday from each other."

"I don't believe Jim really wants one from Lita."

"Well, so much the worse for Jim. Lita's temporarily tired of dancing

and domesticity, and the doctor says she ought to go off for a while by

herself."

Wyant was slowly drawing at his pipe. At length he said: "Your mother's

doctor told her that once; and she never came back."

Nona's colour rose through her pale cheeks to her very forehead. The

motions of her blood were not impetuous, and she now felt herself

blushing for having blushed. It was unlike Wyant to say that--unlike his

tradition of reticence and decency, which had always joined with

Pauline's breezy optimism in relegating to silence and non-existence

whatever it was painful or even awkward to discuss. For years the dual

family had lived on the assumption that they were all the best friends

in the world, and the vocabulary of that convention had become their

natural idiom.

Stanley Heuston seemed to catch the constraint in the air. He got up as

if to go. "I suppose we're dining somewhere too--." He pronounced the

"we" without conviction, for every one knew that he and his wife seldom

went out together.

Wyant raised a detaining hand. "Don't go, Stan. Nona and I have no

secrets--if we had, you should share them. Why do you look so savage,

Nona? I suppose I've said something stupid... Fact is, I'm

old-fashioned; and this idea of people who've chosen to live together

having perpetually to get away from each other... When I remember my

father and mother, for sixty-odd years... New York in winter, Hudson

in summer... Staple topics: snow for six months, mosquitoes the other.

I suppose that's the reason your generation have got the fidgets!"

Nona laughed. "It's a good enough reason; and anyhow there's nothing to

be done about it."

Wyant frowned. "Nothing to be done about it--in Lita's case? I hope you

don't mean that. My son--God, if ever a man has slaved for a woman, made

himself a fool for her..."

Heuston's dry voice cut the diatribe. "Well, sir, you wouldn't deprive

him of man's peculiar privilege: the right to make a fool of himself?"

Wyant sank back grumbling among his cushions. "I don't understand you,

any of you," he said, as if secretly relieved by the admission.

"Well, Exhibit dear, strictly speaking you don't have to. We're old

enough to run the show for ourselves, and all you've got to do is to

look on from the front row and admire us," said Nona, bending to him

with a caress.

In the street she found herself walking silently at Heuston's side.

These weekly meetings with him at Wyant's were becoming a tacit

arrangement: the one thing in her life that gave it meaning. She thought

with a smile of her mother's affirmation that everything always came out

right if only one kept on being brave and trustful, and wondered where,

under that formula, her relation to Stanley Heuston could be fitted in.

It was anything but brave--letting herself drift into these continual

meetings, and refusing to accept their consequences. Yet every nerve in

her told her that these moments were the best thing in life, the one

thing she couldn't do without: just to be near him, to hear his cold

voice, to say something to provoke his disenchanted laugh; or, better

still, to walk by him as now without talking, with a furtive glance now

and then at his profile, ironic, dissatisfied, defiant--yes, and so weak

under the defiance... The fact that she judged and still loved showed

that her malady was mortal.

"Oh, well--it won't last; nothing lasts for our lot," she murmured to

herself without conviction. "Or at the worst it will only last as long

as I do; and that's a date I can fix as I choose."

What nonsense, though, to talk like that, when all those others needed

her: Jim and his silly Lita, her father, yes, even her proud

self-confident father, and poor old Exhibit A and her mother who was so

sure that nothing would ever go wrong again, now she had found a new

Healer! Yes; they all needed help, though they didn't know it, and Fate

seemed to have put her, Nona, at the very point where all their lives

intersected, as a First-Aid station is put at the dangerous turn of a

race-course, or a points-man at the shunting point of a big junction.

"Look here, Nona: my dinner-engagement was a fable. Would the heavens

fall if you and I went and dined somewhere by ourselves, just as we

are?"

"Oh, Stan--" Her heart gave a leap of joy. In these free days, when the

young came and went as they chose, who would have believed that these

two had never yet given themselves a stolen evening? Perhaps it was just

because it was so easy. Only difficult things tempted Nona, and the

difficult thing was always to say "No."

Yet was it? She stole a glance at Heuston's profile, as a street-lamp

touched it, saw the set lips already preparing a taunt at her refusal,

and wondered if saying no to everything required as much courage as she

liked to think. What if moral cowardice were the core of her boasted

superiority? She didn't want to be "like the others"--but was there

anything to be proud of in that? Perhaps her disinterestedness was only

a subtler vanity, not unrelated, say, to Lita's refusal to let a friend

copy her new dresses, or Bee Lindon's perpetual craving to scandalize a

world sated with scandals. Exhibitionists, one and all of them, as the

psycho-analysts said--and, in her present mood, moral exhibitionism

seemed to her the meanest form of the display.

"How mid-Victorian, Stan!" she laughed. "As if there were any heavens to

fall! Where shall we go? It will be the greatest fun. Isn't there rather

a good little Italian restaurant somewhere near here? And afterward

there's that nigger dancing at the Housetop."

"Come along, then!"

She felt as little and light as a wisp of straw carried out into the

rushing darkness of a sea splashed with millions of stars. Just the

thought of a friendly evening, an evening of simple comradeship, could

do that; could give her back her youth, yes, and the courage to

persevere. She put her hand through his arm, and knew by his silence

that he was thinking her thoughts. That was the final touch of magic.

"You really want to go to the Housetop?" he questioned, leaning back to

light his cigar with a leisurely air, as if there need never again be

any hurrying about anything. Their dinner at the little Italian restaurant

was nearly over. They had conscientiously explored the _paste_, the

_frutte di mare_, the _fritture_ and the cheese-and-tomato mixtures, and

were ending up with a foaming _sabaione_. The room was low-ceilinged, hot,

and crowded with jolly noisy people, mostly Italians, over whom, at

unnoticed intervals, an olive-tinted musician with blue-white eyeballs

showered trills and twangings. His music did not interrupt the

conversation, but merely obliged the diners to shout a little louder; a

pretext of which they joyfully availed themselves. Nona, at first, had

found the noise a delicious shelter for her talk with Heuston; but now

it was beginning to stifle her. "Let's get some fresh air first," she

said.

"All right. We'll walk for a while."

They pushed back their chairs, wormed a way through the packed tables,

got into their wraps, and stepped out of the swinging doors into long

streamers of watery lamplight. The douche of a cold rain received them.

"Oh, dear--the Housetop, then!" Nona grumbled. How sweet the rain would

have been under the budding trees of Cedarledge! But here, in these

degraded streets...

Heuston caught a passing taxi. "A turn, first--just round the Park?"

"No; the Housetop."

He leaned back and lit a cigarette. "You know I'm going to get myself

divorced: it's all settled," he announced.

"Settled--with Aggie?"

"No: not yet. But with the lady I'm going off with. My word of honour. I

am; next week."

Nona gave an incredulous laugh. "So this is good-bye?"

"Very nearly."

"Poor Stan!"

"Nona ... listen ... look here..."

She took his hand. "Stan, hang next week!"

"Nona--?"

She shook her head, but let her hand lie in his.

"No questions--no plans. Just being together," she pleaded.

He held her in silence and their lips met. "Then why not--?"

"No: the Housetop--the Housetop!" she cried, pulling herself out of his

arms.

"Why, you're crying!"

"I'm not! It's the rain. It's--"

"Nona!"

"Stan, you know it's no earthly use."

"Life's so rotten--"

"Not like this."

"This? This--what?"

She struggled out of another enfolding, put her head out of the window,

and cried: "The Housetop!"

They found a corner at the back of the crowded floor. Nona blinked a

little in the dazzle of light-garlands, the fumes of smoke, the clash of

noise and colours. But there he and she sat, close together, hidden in

their irresistible happiness, and though his lips had their moody twist

she knew the same softness was in his veins as in hers, isolating them

from the crowd as completely as if they had still been in the darkness

of the taxi. That was the way she must take her life, she supposed;

piece-meal, a tiny scrap of sweetness at a time, and never more than a

scrap--never once! Well--it would be worse still if there were no

moments like this, short and cruel as they seemed when they came.

The Housetop was packed. The low balcony crammed with fashionable people

overhung them like a wreath of ripe fruits, peachy and white and golden,

made of painted faces, bare arms, jewels, brocades and fantastic furs.

It was the music-hall of the moment.

The curtain shot up, and the little auditorium was plunged in shadow.

Nona could leave her hand in Heuston's. On the stage--a New Orleans

cotton-market--black dancers tossed and capered. They were like ripe

fruits too, black figs flung about in hot sunshine, falling to earth

with crimson bursts of laughter splitting open on white teeth, and

bounding up again into golden clouds of cotton-dust. It was all warm and

jolly and inconsequent. The audience forgot to smoke and chatter: little

murmurs of enjoyment rippled over it.

The curtain descended, the light-garlands blossomed out, and once more

floor and balcony were all sound and movement.

"Why, there's Lita up there in the balcony," Nona exclaimed, "just above

the stage. Don't you see--with Ardwin, and Jack Staley, and Bee Lindon,

and that awful Keiler woman?"

She had drawn her hand away at the sight of the box full. "I don't see

Jim with them after all. Oh, how I hate that crowd!" All the ugly and

disquieting realities she had put from her swept back with a rush. If

only she could have had her one evening away from them! "I didn't think

we should find them here--I thought Lita had been last week."

"Well, don't that crowd always keep on going to the same shows over and

over again? There's nothing they hate as much as novelty--they're so fed

up with it! And besides, what on earth do you care? They won't bother

us."

She wavered a moment, and then said: "You see, Lita always bothers me."

"Why? Anything new?"

"She says she's tired of everything, Jim included, and is going to chuck

it, and go in for the cinema."

"Oh, that--?" He manifested no surprise. "Well, isn't it where she

belongs?"

"Perhaps--but Jim!"

"Poor Jim. We've all got to swallow our dose one day or another."

"Yes; but I can't bear it. Not for Jim. Look here, Stan--I'm going up

there to join them," she suddenly declared.

"Oh, nonsense, Nona; they don't want you. And besides I hate that crowd

as much as you do... I don't want you mixed up with it. That cad

Staley, and the Keiler woman..."

She gave a dry laugh. "Afraid they'll compromise me?"

"Oh, rot! But what's the use of their even knowing you're here? They'll

hate your butting in, Lita worst of all."

"Stan, I'm going up to them."

"Oh, damn it. You always--"

She had got up and was pushing away the little table in front of them.

But suddenly she stopped and sat down again. For a moment or two she did

not speak, nor look at Heuston. She had seen the massive outline of a

familiar figure rising from a seat near the front and planting itself

there for a slow gaze about the audience.

"Hallo--your father? I didn't know he patronized this kind of show,"

Heuston said.

Nona groped for a careless voice, and found it. "Father? So it is! Oh,

he's really very frivolous--my influence, I'm afraid." The voice sounded

sharp and rattling in her own ears. "How funny, though! You don't happen

to see mother and Amalasuntha anywhere? That would make the family party

complete."

She could not take her eyes from her father. How queer he looked--how

different! Strained and vigilant; she didn't know how else to put it.

And yet tired, inexpressibly tired, as if with some profound inner

fatigue which made him straighten himself a little too rigidly, and

throw back his head with a masterful young-mannish air as he scanned the

balcony just above him. He stood there for a few moments, letting the

lights and the eyes concentrate on him, as if lending himself to the

display with a certain distant tolerance; then he began to move toward

one of the exits. But half way he stopped, turned with his dogged jerk

of the shoulders, and made for a gangway leading up to the balcony.

"Hullo," Heuston exclaimed. "Is he going up to Lita?"

Nona gave a little laugh. "I might have known it! How like father--when

he undertakes anything!"

"Undertakes what?"

"Why, looking after Lita. He probably found out at the last minute that

Jim couldn't come, and made up his mind to replace him. Isn't it

splendid, how he's helping us? I know he loathes this sort of place--and

the people she's with. But he told me we oughtn't to lose our influence

on her, we ought to keep tight hold of her--"

"I see."

Nona had risen again and was beginning to move toward the passageway.

Heuston followed her, and she smiled back at him over her shoulder. She

felt as if she must cram every cranny in their talk with more words. The

silence which had enclosed them as in a crystal globe had been

splintered to atoms, and had left them stammering and exposed.

"Well, I needn't go up to Lita after all; she really doesn't require two

dragons. Thank goodness, father has replaced me, and I don't have to be

with that crew ... just this evening," she whispered, slipping her arm

through Heuston's. "I should have hated to have it end in that way." By

this time they were out in the street.

On the wet pavement he detained her. "Nona, how is it going to end?"

"Why, by your driving me home, I hope. It's too wet to walk, worse

luck."

He gave a resigned shrug, called a taxi, wavered a moment, and jumped in

after her. "I don't know why I come," he grumbled.

She kept a bright hold on herself, lit a cigarette at his lighter, and

chattered resolutely of the show till the motor turned the corner of her

street.

"Well, my child, it's really good-bye now. I'm off next week with the

other lady," Heuston said as they stopped before the Manford door. He

paid the taxi and helped her out, and she stood in the rain in front of

him. "I don't come back till Aggie divorces me, you understand," he

continued.

"She won't!"

"She'll have to."

"It's hideous--doing it in that way."

"Not as hideous as the kind of life I'm leading."

She made no answer, and he followed her silently up the doorstep while

she fumbled for her latchkey. She was trembling now with weariness and

disappointment, and a feverish thirst for the one more kiss she was

resolved he should not take.

"Other people get their freedom. I don't see why I shouldn't have mine,"

he insisted.

"Not in that way, Stan! You mustn't. It's too horrible."

"That way? You know there's no other."

She turned the latchkey, and the ponderous vestibule door swung inward.

"If you do, don't imagine I'll ever marry you!" she cried out as she

crossed the threshold; and he flung back furiously: "Wait till I ask

you!" and plunged away into the rain.

XIV

PAULINE MANFORD left Mrs. Landish's door with the uncomfortable sense of

having swallowed a new frustration. In this crowded life of hers they

were as difficult to avoid as germs--and there was not always time to

have them extirpated!

Manford had evidently found out about Lita's Dawnside frequentations;

found it out, no doubt, as Pauline had, by seeing her photograph in that

loathsome dancing group in the "Looker-on." Well, perhaps it was best

that he should know; it would certainly confirm his resolve to stop any

action against the Mahatma.

Only--if he had induced the Lindons to drop the investigation, why was

he still preoccupied by it? Why had he gone to Mrs. Landish to make that

particular inquiry about Lita? Pauline would have liked to shake off the

memory of his voice, and of the barely disguised impatience with which

he had waited for her to go before putting his question. Confronted by

this new riddle (when there were already so many others in her path) she

felt a reasonless exasperation against the broken doorknob which had let

her into the secret. If only Kitty Landish, instead of dreaming about

Mesopotamian embroideries, would send for a locksmith and keep her house

in repair!

All day Pauline was oppressed by the nervous apprehension that Manford

might have changed his mind about dropping the investigation. If there

had been time she would have gone to Alvah Loft for relief; she had

managed so far to squeeze in a daily _séance_, and had come to depend on

it as "addicts" do on their morphia. The very brevity of the treatment,

and the blunt negative face and indifferent monosyllables of the Healer,

were subtly stimulating after the verbiage and flummery of his

predecessors. Such stern economy of means impressed Pauline in much the

same way as a new labour-saving device; she liked everything the better

for being a short-cut to something else, and even spiritual communion

for resembling an improved form of stenography. As Mrs. Swoffer said,

Alvah Loft was really the Busy Man's Christ.

But that afternoon there was literally not time for a treatment.

Manford's decision to spend the Easter holidays at Cedarledge

necessitated one of those campaigns of intensive preparation in which

his wife and Maisie Bruss excelled. Leading the simple life at

Cedarledge involved despatching there a part of the New York domestic

staff at least ten days in advance, testing and lighting three

complicated heating systems, going over all the bells and electric

wiring, and making sure that the elaborate sanitary arrangements were in

irreproachable order.

Nor was this all. Pauline, who prided herself on the perfect

organization of every detail of both her establishments, had lately been

studying the estimate for a new and singularly complete system of

burglar-alarm at Cedarledge, and also going over the bills for the

picturesque engine-house and up-to-date fire-engine with which she had

just endowed the village patriarchally clustered below the Cedarledge

hill. All these matters called for deep thought and swift decision; and

the fact gave her a sudden stimulus. No rest-cure in the world was as

refreshing to her as a hurried demand on her practical activity; she

thrilled to it like a war-horse to a trumpet, and compelled the fagged

Maisie to thrill in unison.

In this case their energy was redoubled by the hope that, if Manford

found everything to his liking at Cedarledge, he might take a fancy to

spending more time there. Pauline's passionate interest in plumbing and

electric wiring was suffused with a romantic glow at the thought that

they might lure her husband back to domestic intimacy. "The heating of

the new swimming-pool must be finished too, and the workmen all out of

the way--you'll have to go there next week, Maisie, and impress on

everybody that there must not be a workman visible anywhere when we

arrive."

Breathless, exultant, Pauline hurried home for a late cup of tea in her

boudoir, and settled down, pencil in hand, with plans and estimates, as

eagerly as her husband, in the early days of his legal career, used to

study the documents of a new case.

Maisie, responding as she always did to the least touch of the spur, yet

lifted a perplexed brow to murmur: "All right. But I don't see how I can

very well leave before the Birth Control dinner. You know you haven't

yet rewritten the opening passage that you used by mistake at the--"

Pauline's colour rose. Maisie's way of putting it was tactless; but the

fact remained that the opening of that unlucky speech had to be

rewritten, and that Pauline was never very sure of her syntax unless

Maisie's reinforced it. She had always meant to be cultivated--she still

thought she was when she looked at her bookshelves. But when she had to

compose a speech, though words never failed her, the mysterious

relations between them sometimes did. Wealth and extensive social

activities were obviously incompatible with a complete mastery of

grammar, and secretaries were made for such emergencies. Yes; Maisie,

fagged as she looked, could certainly not be spared till the speech was

remodelled.

The telephone, ringing from downstairs, announced that the Marchesa was

on her way up to the boudoir. Pauline's pencil fell from her hand. On

her way up! It was really too inconsiderate... Amalasuntha must be

made to understand... But there was the undaunted lady.

"The footman swore you were out, dear; but I knew from his manner that I

should find you. (With Powder, now, I never can tell.) And I simply _had_

to rush in long enough to give you a good hug." The Marchesa glanced at

Maisie, and the secretary effaced herself after another glance, this

time from her employer, which plainly warned her: "Wait in the next

room; I won't let her stay."

To her visitor Pauline murmured somewhat coldly: "I left word that I was

out because I'm desperately busy over the new plumbing and burglar-alarm

systems at Cedarledge. Dexter wants to go there for Easter, and of

course everything must be in order before we arrive..."

The Marchesa's eyes widened. "Ah, this marvellous American plumbing! I

believe you all treat yourselves to a new set of bathrooms every year.

There's only one bath at San Fedele, and my dear parents-in-law had it

covered with a wooden lid so that it could be used to do the boots on.

It's really rather convenient--and out of family feeling Venturino has

always reserved it for that purpose. But that's not what I came to talk

about. What I want is to find words for my gratitude..."

Pauline leaned back, gazing wearily at Amalasuntha's small sharp face,

which seemed to glitter with a new and mysterious varnish of prosperity.

"For what? You've thanked me already more than my little present

deserved."

The Marchesa gave her a look of puzzled retrospection. "Oh--that lovely

cheque the other day? Of course my thanks include that too. But I'm

entirely overwhelmed by your new munificence."

"My new munificence?" Pauline echoed between narrowed lips. Could this

be an adroit way of prefacing a fresh appeal? With the huge Cedarledge

estimates at her elbow she stiffened herself for refusal. Amalasuntha

must really be taught moderation.

"Well, Dexter's munificence, then--his royal promise! I left him only an

hour ago," the Marchesa cried with rising exultation.

"You mean he's found a job for Michelangelo? I'm very glad," said

Pauline, still without enthusiasm.

"No, no; something ever so much better than that. At least," the

Marchesa hastily corrected herself, "something more immediately helpful.

His debts, dear, my silly boy's debts! Dexter has promised ... has

authorized me to cable that he need not sail, as everything will be

paid. It's more, far more, than I could have hoped!" The happy mother

possessed herself of Mrs. Manford's unresponsive hand.

Pauline freed the hand abruptly. She felt the need of assimilating and

interpreting this news as rapidly as possible, without betraying undue

astonishment and yet without engaging her responsibility; but the effort

was beyond her, and she could only sit and stare. Dexter had promised to

pay Michelangelo's debts--but with whose money? And why?

"I'm sure Dexter wants to do all he can to help you about

Michelangelo--we both do. But--"

Pauline's brain was whirling; she found it impossible to go on. She knew

by heart the extent of Michelangelo's debts. Amalasuntha took care that

everyone did. She seemed to feel a sort of fatuous pride in their

enormity, and was always dinning it into her cousin's ears. Dexter, if

he had really made such a promise, must have made it in his wife's name;

and to do so without consulting her was so unlike him that the idea

deepened her bewilderment.

"Are you sure? I'm sorry, Amalasuntha--but this comes as a surprise...

Dexter and I were to talk the matter over ... to see what could be

done..."

"Darling, it's so like you to belittle your own generosity--you always

do! And so does Dexter. But in this case--well, the cable's gone; so why

deny it?" triumphed the Marchesa.

When Maisie Bruss returned, Pauline was still sitting with an idle

pencil before the pile of bills and estimates. She fixed an unseeing eye

on her secretary. "These things will have to wait. I'm dreadfully tired,

I don't know why. But I'll go over them all early tomorrow, before you

come; and--Maisie--I hate to ask it; but do you think you could get here

by eight o'clock instead of nine? There's so much to be done; and I want

to get you off to Cedarledge as soon as possible."

Maisie, a little paler and more drawn than usual, declared that of

course she would turn up at eight.

Even after she had gone Pauline did not move, or give another glance to

the papers. For the first time in her life she had an obscure sense of

moving among incomprehensible and overpowering forces. She could not, to

herself, have put it even as clearly as that--she just dimly felt that,

between her and her usual firm mastery of facts, something nebulous and

impenetrable was closing in... Nona--what if she were to consult Nona?

The girl sometimes struck her as having an uncanny gift of divination,

as getting at certain mysteries of mood and character more quickly and

clearly than her mother... "Though, when it comes to practical things,

poor child, she's not much more use than Jim..."

Jim! His name called up the other associated with it. Lita was now

another source of worry. Whichever way Pauline looked, the same choking

obscurity enveloped her. Even about Jim and Lita it clung in a dense

fog, darkening and distorting what, only a short time ago, had seemed a

daylight case of domestic harmony. Money, health, good looks, a

beautiful baby ... and now all this fuss about having to express one's

own personality. Yes; Lita's attitude was just as confusing as Dexter's.

Was Dexter trying to express his own personality too? If only they would

all talk things out with her--help her to understand, instead of moving

about her in the obscurity, like so many burglars with dark lanterns!

This image jerked her attention back to the Cedarledge estimates, and

wearily she adjusted her eye-glasses and took up her pencil...

Her maid rapped. "What dress, please, madam?" To be sure--they were

dining that evening with the Walter Rivingtons. It was the first time

they had invited Pauline since her divorce from Wyant; Mrs. Rivington's

was the only house left in which the waning traditions of old New York

still obstinately held out, and divorce was regarded as a social

disadvantage. But they had taken Manford's advice successfully in a

difficult case, and were too punctilious not to reward him in the one

way he would care about. The Rivingtons were the last step of the

Manford ladder.

"The silver moiré, and my pearls." That would be distinguished and

exclusive-looking. Pauline was thankful Dexter had definitely promised

to go with her--he was getting so restive nowadays about what he had

taken to calling her dull dinners...

The telephone again--this time Dexter's voice. Pauline listened

apprehensively, wondering if it would do to speak to him now about

Amalasuntha's extraordinary announcement, or whether it might be more

tactful to wait. He was so likely to be nervous and irritable at the end

of the day. Yes; it was in his eleventh-hour voice that he was speaking.

"Pauline--look here; I shall be kept at the office rather late. Please

put off dinner, will you? I'd like a quiet evening alone with you--"

"A quiet... But, Dexter, we're dining at the Rivingtons'. Shall I

telephone to say you may be late?"

"The Rivingtons?" His voice became remote and utterly indifferent. "No;

telephone we won't come. Chuck them... I want a talk with you alone ...

can't we dine together quietly at home?" He repeated the phrases

slowly, as if he thought she had not understood him.

Chuck the Rivingtons? It seemed like being asked to stand up in church

and deny her God. She sat speechless and let the fatal words go on

vibrating on the wire.

"Don't you hear me, Pauline? Why don't you answer? Is there something

wrong with the line?"

"No, Dexter. There's nothing wrong with the line."

"Well, then... You can explain to them ... say anything you like."

Through the dressing-room door she saw the maid laying out the silver

moiré, the chinchilla cloak, the pearls...

Explain to the Rivingtons!

"Very well, dear. What time shall I order dinner here?" she questioned

heroically.

She heard him ring off, and sat again staring into the fog, which his

words had only made more impenetrable.

XV

MANFORD, the day after his daughter had caught sight of him at the

Housetop, started out early for one of his long tramps around the Park.

He was not due at his office till ten, and he wanted first to walk

himself tired.

For some years after his marriage he had kept a horse in town, and taken

his morning constitutional in the saddle; but the daily canter over the

same bridle paths was too much like the circuit of his wife's

flower-garden. He took to his feet to make it last longer, and when

there was no time to walk had in a _masseur_ who prepared him, in the same

way as everybody else, for the long hours of sedentary hurry known as

"business." The New York routine had closed in on him, and he sometimes

felt that, for intrinsic interest, there was little to choose between

Pauline's hurry and his own. They seemed, all of them--lawyers, bankers,

brokers, railway-directors and the rest--to be cheating their inner

emptiness with activities as futile as those of the women they went home

to.

It was all wrong--something about it was fundamentally wrong. They all

had these colossal plans for acquiring power, and then, when it was

acquired, what came of it but bigger houses, more food, more motors,

more pearls, and a more self-righteous philanthropy?

The philanthropy was what he most hated: all these expensive plans for

moral forcible feeding, for compelling everybody to be cleaner,

stronger, healthier and happier than they would have been by the unaided

light of Nature. The longing to get away into a world where men and

women sinned and begot, lived and died, as they chose, without the

perpetual intervention of optimistic millionaires, had become so strong

that he sometimes felt the chain of habit would snap with his first

jerk.

That was what had secretly drawn him to Jim's wife. She was the one

person in his group to whom its catchwords meant absolutely nothing. The

others, whatever their private omissions or indulgences, dressed up

their selfish cravings in the same wordy altruism. It used to be one's

duty to one's neighbour; now it had become one's duty to one's self.

Duty, duty--always duty! But when you spoke of duty to Lita she just

widened her eyes and said: "Is that out of the Marriage Service? 'Love,

honour and obey'--such a funny combination! Who do you suppose invented

it? I believe it must have been Pauline." One could never fix her

attention on any subject beyond her own immediate satisfaction, and that

animal sincerity seemed to Manford her greatest charm. Too great a

charm ... a terrible danger. He saw it now. He thought he had gone to her

for relaxation, change--and he had just managed to pull himself up on

the edge of a precipice. But for the sickening scene of the other

evening, when he had shown her the photograph, he might, old fool that

he was, have let himself slip into sentiment; and God knows where that

tumble would have landed him. Now a passionate pity had replaced his

fatuous emotion, the baleful siren was only a misguided child, and he

was to help and save her for Jim's sake and her own.