It was queer that such a mood of calm lucidity had come out of the fury

of hate with which he rushed from her house. If it had not, he would

have gone mad--smashed something, done something irretrievable. And

instead here he was, calmly contemplating his own folly and hers! He

must go on seeing her, of course; there was more reason than ever for

seeing her; but there would be no danger in it now, only help for

her--and perhaps healing for him. To this new mood he clung as to an

inviolable refuge. The turmoil and torment of the last months could

never reach him again: he had found a way out, an escape. The relief of

being quiet, of avoiding a conflict, of settling everything without

effusion of blood, stole over him like the spell of the drug-taker's

syringe. Poor little Lita ... never again to be adored (thank heaven),

but, oh, so much the more to be helped and pitied...

This deceptive serenity had come to him during his call on Mrs.

Landish--come from her very insensibility to any of the standards he

lived by. He had gone there--he saw it now--moved by the cruel masculine

desire to know the worst about a fallen idol. What he called the

determination to "face things"--what was it but the savage longing to

accumulate all the evidence against poor Lita? Give up the Mahatma

investigation? Never! All the more reason now for going on with it; for

exposing the whole blackguardly business, opening poor Jim's eyes to his

wife's past (better now than later), and helping him to get on his feet

again, start fresh, and recover his faith in life and happiness. For of

course poor Jim would be the chief sufferer... Damn the woman! She

wanted to get rid of Jim, did she? Well, here was her chance--only it

would be the other way round. The tables would be turned on her. She'd

see--! This in his first blind outbreak of rage; but by the time he

reached Mrs. Landish's door the old legal shrewdness had come to his

rescue, and he had understood that a public scandal was unnecessary, and

therefore to be avoided. Easy enough to get rid of Lita without that.

With such evidence as he would soon possess they could make any

conditions they chose. Jim would keep the boy, and the whole thing be

settled quietly--but on their terms, not hers! She would be only too

thankful to clear out bag and baggage--clean out of all their lives.

Faugh--to think he had delegated his own Nona to look after her ...

the thought sickened him.

And then, in the end, it had all come out so differently. He needed his

hard tramp around the Park to see just why.

It was Mrs. Landish's own attitude--her silly rambling irresponsibility,

so like an elderly parody of Lita's youthful carelessness. Mrs. Landish

had met Manford's stern interrogations by the vague reply that he

mustn't ever come to _her_ for dates and figures and statistics: that

facts meant nothing to her, that the only thing she cared for was

Inspiration, Genius, the Divine Fire, or whatever he chose to call it.

Perhaps she'd done wrong, but she had sacrificed everything, all her

life, to her worship of genius. She was always hunting for it

everywhere, and it was because, from the first, she had felt a touch of

it in Lita that she had been so devoted to the child. Didn't Manford

feel it in Lita too? Of course she, Mrs. Landish, had dreamed of another

sort of marriage for her niece ... Oh, but Manford mustn't

misunderstand! Jim was perfect--_too_ perfect. That was the trouble.

Manford surely guessed the meaning of that "too"? Such absolute

reliability, such complete devotion, were sometimes more of a strain to

the artistic temperament than scenes and infidelities. And Lita was

first and foremost an artist, born to live in the world of art--in quite

other values--a fourth-dimensional world, as it were. It wasn't fair to

judge her in her present surroundings, ideal as they were in one way--a

way that unfortunately didn't happen to be hers! Mrs. Landish persisted

in assuming Manford's complete comprehension ... "If Jim could only be

made to understand as you do; to see that ordinary standards don't apply

to these rare natures... Why, has the child told you what Klawhammer

has offered her to turn _one film_ for him, before even having seen her

dance, just on the strength of what Jack Staley and Ardwin had told

him?"

Ah--there it was! The truth was out. Mrs. Landish, always in debt, and

always full of crazy schemes for wasting more money, had seen a gold

mine in the exploitation of her niece's gifts. The divorce, instead of

frightening her, delighted her. Manford smiled as he thought how little

she would be moved by Pauline's threat to cut off the young couple.

Pauline sometimes forgot that, even in her own family, her authority was

not absolute. She could certainly not compete financially with

Hollywood, and Mrs. Landish's eyes were on Hollywood.

"Dear Mr. Manford--but you look shocked! Absolutely shocked! Does the

screen really frighten you? How funny!" Mrs. Landish, drawing her

rambling eyebrows together, seemed trying to picture the inner darkness

of such a state. "But surely you know the smartest people are going in

for it? Why, the Marchesa di San Fedele was showing me the other day a

photograph of that beautiful son of hers--one of those really _Greek_

beings in bathing tights--and telling me that Klawhammer, who had seen

it, had authorized her to cable him to come out to Hollywood on trial,

all expenses paid. It seems they can almost always recognize the

eurythmic people at a glance. Funny, wouldn't it be, if Michelangelo and

Lita turned out to be the future Valentino and--"

He didn't remember the rest of the rigmarole. He could only recall

shouting out, with futile vehemence: "My wife and I will do everything

to prevent a divorce--" and leaving his astonished hostess on a threat

of which he knew the uselessness as well as she did.

That was the air in which Lita had grown up, those were the gods of

Viking Court! Yet Manford had stormed instead of pitying, been furious

instead of tolerant, risked disaster for Lita and Jim instead of taking

calm control of the situation. The vision of Lita Wyant and Michelangelo

as future film stars, "featured" jointly on every hoarding from Maine to

California, had sent the blood to his head. Through a mist of rage he

had seen the monstrous pictures and conjectured the loathsome

letter-press. And no one would do more than look and laugh! At the

thought, he felt the destructive ire of the man who finds his private

desires pitted against the tendencies of his age. Well, they would see,

that was all: he would show them!

The resolve to act brought relief to his straining imagination. Once

again he felt himself seated at his office desk, all his professional

authority between him and his helpless interlocutors, and impressive

words and skilful arguments ordering themselves automatically in his

mind. After all, he was the head of his family--in some degree even of

Wyant's family.

XVI

PAULINE'S nervousness had gradually subsided. About the Rivingtons--why,

after all, it wasn't such a bad idea to show them that, with a man of

Manford's importance, one must take one's chance of getting him, and

make the best of it if he failed one at the last. "Professional

engagement; oh, yes, entirely unexpected; extremely important; so

dreadfully sorry, but you know lawyers are not their own masters..."

It had been rather pleasant to say that to a flustered Mrs. Rivington,

stammering: "Oh, but _couldn't_ he ...? But we'll wait ... we'll dine

at half-past nine..." Pleasant also to add: "He must reserve his whole

evening, I'm afraid," and then hang up, and lean back at leisure, while

Mrs. Rivington (how Pauline pictured it!) dashed down in her

dressing-gown and crimping pins to re-arrange a table to which as much

thought had been given as if a feudal aristocracy were to sit at it.

To Pauline the fact that Manford wanted to be alone with her made even

such renunciations easy. How many years had passed since he had

expressed such a wish? And did she owe his tardy return to the Mahatma

and reduced hips, or the Inspirational Healer and renewed optimism? If

only a woman could guess what inclined a man's heart to her, what

withdrew it! Pauline, if she had had the standardizing of life, would

have begun with human hearts, and had them turned out in series, all

alike, rather than let them come into being haphazard, cranky amateurish

things that you couldn't count on, or start up again if anything went

wrong...

Just a touch of rouge? Well, perhaps her maid was right. She _did_ look

rather pale and drawn. Mrs. Herman Toy put it on with a trowel ...

apparently that was what men liked... Pauline shed a faint bloom on

her cheeks and ran her clever fingers through her prettily waved hair,

wondering again, as she did so, if it wouldn't be better to bob it. Then

the mauve tea-gown, the Chinese amethysts, and those silver sandals that

made her feet so slender. She looked at herself with a sigh of pleasure.

Dinner was to be served in the boudoir.

Manford was very late; it was ten o'clock before coffee and liqueurs

were put on the low stand by the fire, and the little dinner-table was

noiselessly removed. The fire glowed invitingly, and he sank into the

armchair his wife pushed forward with a sound like a murmur of content.

"Such a day--" he said, passing his hand across his forehead as if to

brush away a tangle of legal problems.

"You do too much, Dexter; you really do. I know how wonderfully young

you are for your age, but still--." She broke off, dimly perceiving

that, in spite of the flattering exordium, this allusion to his age was

not quite welcome.

"Nothing to do with age," he growled. "Everybody who does anything at

all does too much." (Did he mean to imply that she did nothing?)

"The nervous strain--" she began, once more wondering if this were not

the moment to slip in a word of Alvah Loft. But though Manford had

wished to be with her he had apparently no desire to listen to her. It

was all her own fault, she felt. If only she had known how to reveal the

secret tremors that were rippling through her! There were women not

half as clever and tactful--not younger, either, nor even as

good-looking--who would have known at once what to say, or how to spell

the mute syllables of soul-telegraphy. If her husband had wanted

facts--a good confidential talk about the new burglar-alarm, or a clear

and careful analysis of the engine-house bills, or the heating system

for the swimming pool--she could have found just the confidential and

tender accent for such topics. Intimacy, to her, meant the tireless

discussion of facts, not necessarily of a domestic order, but definite

and palpable facts. For her part she was ready for anything, from Birth

Control to neo-impressionism: she flattered herself that few women had a

wider range. In confidential moments she preferred the homelier themes,

and would have enjoyed best of all being tender and gay about the coal

cellar, or reticent and brave about the leak in the boiler; but she was

ready to deal with anything as long as it was a fact, something with

substance and outline, as to which one could have an opinion and a line

of conduct. What paralyzed her was the sense that, apart from his

profession, her husband didn't care for facts, and that nothing was less

likely to rouse his interest than burglar-alarm wiring, or the last new

thing in electric ranges. Obviously, one must take men as they were,

wilful, moody and mysterious; but she would have given the world to be

told (since for all her application she had never discovered) what those

other women said who could talk to a man about nothing.

Manford lit a cigar and stared into the fire. "It's about that fool

Amalasuntha," he began at length, addressing his words to the logs.

The name jerked Pauline back to reality. Here was a fact--hard, knobby

and uncomfortable! And she had actually forgotten it in the confused

pleasure of their tête-à-tête! So he had only come home to talk to

her about Amalasuntha. She tried to keep the flatness out of her: "Yes,

dear?"

He continued, still fixed on the fire: "You may not know that we've had

a narrow escape."

"A narrow escape?"

"That damned Michelangelo--his mother was importing him this very week.

The cable had gone. If I hadn't put a stop to it we'd have been saddled

with him for life."

Pauline's breath failed her. She listened with straining ears.

"You haven't seen her, then--she hasn't told you?" Manford continued.

"She was getting him out on her own responsibility to turn a film for

Klawhammer. Simply that! By the mercy of heaven I headed her off--but we

hadn't a minute to lose."

In her bewilderment at this outburst, and at what it revealed, Pauline

continued to sit speechless. "Michelangelo--Klawhammer? I didn't know!

But wouldn't it have been the best solution, perhaps?"

"Solution--of what? Don't you think one member of the family on the

screen's enough at a time? Or would it have looked prettier to see him

and Lita featured together on every hoarding in the country? My God--I

thought I'd done the right thing in acting for you ... there was no

time to consult you ... but if _you_ don't care, why should I? He's none

of _my_ family ... and she isn't either, for that matter."

He had swung round from the hearth, and faced her for the first time,

his brows contracted, the veins swelling on his temples, his hands

grasping his knees as if to constrain himself not to start up in

righteous indignation. He was evidently deeply disturbed, yet his anger,

she felt, was only the unconscious mask of another emotion--an emotion

she could not divine. His vehemence, and the sense of moving in complete

obscurity, had an intimidating effect on her.

"I don't quite understand, Dexter. Amalasuntha was here today. She said

nothing about films, or Klawhammer; but she did say that you'd made it

unnecessary for Michelangelo to come to America."

"Didn't she say how?"

"She said something about--paying his debts."

Manford stood up and went to lean against the mantelpiece. He looked

down on his wife, who in her turn kept her eyes on the embers.

"Well--you didn't suppose I made that offer till I saw we were up

against it, did you?"

His voice rose again angrily, but a cautious glance at his face showed

her that its tormented lines were damp with perspiration. Her immediate

thought was that he must be ill, that she ought to take his

temperature--she always responded by first-aid impulses to any contact

with human distress. But no, after all, it was not that: he was unhappy,

that was it, he was desperately unhappy. But why? Was it because he

feared he had exceeded his rights in pledging her to such an extent, in

acting for her when there was no time to consult her? Apparently the

idea of the discord between Lita and Jim, and Lita's thirst for scenic

notoriety, had shocked him deeply--much more, in reality, than they had

Pauline. If so, his impulse had been a natural one, and eminently in

keeping with those Wyant traditions with which (at suitable moments) she

continued to identify herself. Yes: she began to understand his thinking

it would be odious to her to see the names of her son's wife and this

worthless Italian cousin emblazoned over every Picture Palace in the

land. She felt moved by his regard for her feelings. After all, as he

said, Lita and Michelangelo were no relations of his; he could easily

have washed his hands of the whole affair.

"I'm sure what you've done must be right, Dexter; you know I always

trust your judgment. Only--I wish you'd explain..."

"Explain what?" Her mild reply seemed to provoke a new wave of

exasperation. "The only way to stop his coming was to pay his debts.

They're very heavy. I had no right to commit you; I acknowledge it."

She took a deep breath, the figure of Michelangelo's liabilities blazing

out before her as on a giant blackboard. Then: "You had every right,

Dexter," she said. "I'm glad you did it."

He stood silent, his head bent, twisting between his fingers the cigar

he had forgotten to relight. It was as if he had been startled out of

speech by the promptness of her acquiescence, and would have found it

easier to go on arguing and justifying himself.

"That's--very handsome of you, Pauline," he said at length.

"Oh, no--why? You did it out of regard for me, I know. Only--perhaps you

won't mind our talking things over a little. About ways and means ..."

she added, seeing his forehead gloom again.

"Ways and means--oh, certainly. But please understand that I don't

expect you to shoulder the whole sum. I've had two big fees lately; I've

already arranged--"

She interrupted him quickly. "It's not your affair, Dexter. You're

awfully generous, always; but I couldn't think of letting you--"

"It _is_ my affair; it's all of our affair. I don't want this nasty

notoriety any more than you do ... and Jim's happiness wrecked into

the bargain..."

"You're awfully generous," she repeated.

"It's first of all a question of helping Jim and Lita. If that young ass

came over here with a contract from Klawhammer in his pocket there'd be

no holding her. And once that gang get hold of a woman..." He spoke

with a kind of breathless irritation, as though it were incredible that

Pauline should still not understand.

"It's very fine of you, dear," she could only murmur.

A pause followed, during which, for the first time, she could assemble

her thoughts and try to take in the situation. Dexter had bought off

Michelangelo to keep one more disturbing element out of the family

complication; perhaps also to relieve himself of the bother of having on

his hands, at close quarters, an idle and mischief-making young man.

That was comprehensible. But if his first object had been the securing

of Jim's peace of mind, might not the same end have been achieved, more

satisfactorily to every one but Michelangelo, by his uniting with

Pauline to increase Jim's allowance, and thus giving Lita the amusement

and distraction of having a lot more money to spend? Even at such a

moment, Pauline's practical sense of values made it hard for her to

accept the idea of putting so many good thousands into the pockets of

Michelangelo's creditors. She was naturally generous; but no matter how

she disposed of her fortune, she could never forget that it had been

money--and how much money it had been--before it became something else.

For her it was never transmuted, but only exchanged.

"You're not satisfied--you don't think I did right?" Manford began

again.

"I don't say that, Dexter. I'm only wondering--. Supposing we'd given

the money to Jim instead? Lita could have done her house over ... or

built a bungalow in Florida ... or bought jewels with it... She's so

easily amused."

"Easily amused!" He broke into a hard laugh. "Why, that amount of money

wouldn't amuse her for a week!" His face took on a look of grim

introspection. "She wants the universe--or her idea of it. A woman with

an offer from Klawhammer dangling in front of her! Mrs. Landish told me

the figure--those people could buy us all out and not know it."

Pauline's heart sank. Apparently he knew things about Lita of which she

was still ignorant. "I hadn't heard the offer had actually been made.

But if it has, and she wants to accept, how can we stop her?"

Manford had thrown himself down into his armchair. He got up again,

relit his cigar, and walked across the room and back before answering.

"I don't know that we can. And I don't know how we can. But I want to

try... I want _time_ to try... Don't you see, Pauline? The child--we

mustn't be hard on her. Her beginnings were damnable... Perhaps you

know--yes? That cursèd Mahatma place?" Pauline winced, and looked away

from him. He had seen the photograph, then! And heaven knows what more

he had discovered in the course of his investigations for the Lindons...

A sudden light glared out at her. It was for Jim's sake and Lita's

that he had dropped the case--sacrificed his convictions, his sense of

the duty of exposing a social evil! She faltered: "I do know ... a

little..."

"Well, a little's enough. Swine--! And that's the rotten atmosphere she

was brought up in. But she's not bad, Pauline ... there's something

still to be done with her ... give me time ... time..." He stopped

abruptly, as if the "me" had slipped out by mistake. "We must all stand

shoulder to shoulder to put up this fight for her," he corrected himself

with a touch of forensic emphasis.

"Of course, dear, of course," Pauline murmured.

"When we get her to ourselves at Cedarledge, you and Nona and I...

It's just as well Jim's going off, by the way. He's got her nerves on

edge; Jim's a trifle dense at times, you know... And, above all, this

whole business, Klawhammer and all, must be kept from him. We'll all

hold our tongues till the thing blows over, eh?"

"Of course," she again assented. "But supposing Lita asks to speak to

me?"

"Well, let her speak--listen to what she has to say..." He stopped,

and then added, in a rough unsteady voice: "Only don't be hard on her.

You won't, will you? No matter what rot she talks. The child's never had

half a chance."

"How could you think I should, Dexter?"

"No; no; I don't." He stood up, and sent a slow unseeing gaze about the

room. The gaze took in his wife, and rested on her long enough to make

her feel that she was no more to him--mauve tea-gown, Chinese amethysts,

touch of rouge and silver sandals--than a sheet of glass through which

he was staring: staring at what? She had never before felt so

inexistent.

"Well--I'm dog-tired--down and out," he said with one of his sudden

jerks, shaking his shoulders and turning toward the door. He did not

remember to say goodnight to her: how should he have, when she was no

longer there for him?

After the door had closed, Pauline in her turn looked slowly about the

room. It was as if she were taking stock of the havoc wrought by an

earthquake; but nothing about her showed any sign of disorder except the

armchair her husband had pushed back, the rug his movement had

displaced.

With instinctive precision she straightened the rug, and rolled the

armchair back into its proper corner. Then she went up to a mirror and

attentively scrutinized herself. The light was unbecoming, perhaps ...

the shade of the adjacent wall-candle had slipped out of place. She

readjusted it ... yes, that was better! But of course, at nearly

midnight--and after such a day!--a woman was bound to look a little

drawn. Automatically her lips shaped the familiar: "Pauline, don't

worry: there's nothing in the world to worry about." But the rouge had

vanished from the lips, their thin line looked blue and arid. She turned

from the unpleasing sight, putting out one light after another on the

way to her dressing-room.

As she bent to extinguish the last lamp its light struck a tall framed

photograph: Lita's latest portrait. Lita had the gift of posing--the

lines she fell into always had an unconscious eloquence. And that little

round face, as sleek as the inside of a shell; the slanting eyes, the

budding mouth ... men, no doubt, would think it all enchanting.

Pauline, with slow steps, went on into the big shining dressing-room,

and to the bathroom beyond, all ablaze with white tiling and silvered

taps and tubes. It was the hour of her evening uplift exercises, the

final relaxing of body and soul before she slept. Sternly she addressed

herself to relaxation.

XVII

WHAT was the sense of it all?

Nona, sitting up in bed two days after her nocturnal visit to the

Housetop, swept the interval with a desolate eye. She had made her

great, her final, refusal. She had sacrificed herself, sacrificed

Heuston, to the stupid ideal of an obstinate woman who managed to

impress people by dressing up her egotism in formulas of philanthropy

and piety. Because Aggie was forever going to church, and bossing the

committees of Old Women's Homes and Rest-cures for Consumptives, she was

allowed a license of cruelty which would have damned the frivolous.

Destroying two lives to preserve her own ideal of purity! It was like

the horrible ailing old men in history books, who used to bathe in human

blood to restore their vitality. Every one agreed that there was nothing

such a clever sensitive fellow as Stanley Heuston mightn't have made of

his life if he'd married a different kind of woman. As it was, he had

just drifted: tried the law, dabbled in literary reviewing, taken a turn

at municipal politics, another at scientific farming, and dropped one

experiment after another to sink, at thirty-five, into a disillusioned

idler who killed time with cards and drink and motor-speeding. She

didn't believe he ever opened a book nowadays: he was living on the

dwindling capital of his early enthusiasms. But, as for what people

called his "fastness," she knew it was merely the inevitable opposition

to Aggie's virtues. And it wasn't as if there had been children. Nona

always ached for the bewildered progeny suddenly bundled from one home

to another when their parents embarked on a new conjugal experiment; she

could never have bought her happiness by a massacre of innocents. But to

be sacrificed to a sterile union--as sterile spiritually as

physically--to miss youth and love because of Agnes Heuston's notion of

her duty to the elderly clergyman she called God!

That woman he said he was going off with... Nona had pretended she

didn't know, had opened incredulous eyes at the announcement. But of

course she knew; everybody knew; it was Cleo Merrick. She had been

"after him" for the last two years, she hadn't a rag of reputation to

lose, and would jump at the idea of a few jolly weeks with a man like

Heuston, even if he got away from her afterward. But he wouldn't--of

course he never would! Poor Stan--Cleo Merrick's noise, her cheek, her

vulgarity: how warm and life-giving they would seem as a change from the

frigidarium he called home! She would hold him by her very cheapness:

her recklessness would seem like generosity, her glitter like heat.

Ah--how Nona could have shown him the difference! She shut her eyes and

felt his lips on her lids; and her lids became lips. Wherever he touched

her, a mouth blossomed... Did he know that? Had he never guessed?

She jumped out of bed, ran into her dressing-room, began to bathe and

dress with feverish haste. She wouldn't telephone him--Aggie had long

ears. She wouldn't send a "special delivery"--Aggie had sharp eyes. She

would just summon him by a telegram: a safe anonymous telegram. She

would dash out of the house and get it off herself, without even waiting

for her cup of coffee to be brought.

"Come and see me any time today. I was too stupid the other night." Yes;

he would understand that. She needn't even sign it...

On the threshold of her room, the telegram crumpled in her hand, the

telephone bell arrested her. Stanley, surely; he must have felt the same

need that she had! She fumbled uncertainly with the receiver; the tears

were running down her cheeks. She had waited too long; she had exacted

the impossible of herself. "Yes--yes? It's you, darling?" She laughed it

out through her weeping.

"What's that? It's Jim. That you, Nona?" a quiet voice came back. When

had Jim's voice ever been anything but quiet?

"Oh, Jim, dear!" She gulped down tears and laughter. "Yes--what is it?

How awfully early you are!"

"Hope I didn't wake you? Can I drop in on my way down town?"

"Of course. When? How soon?"

"Now. In two minutes. I've got to be at the office before nine."

"All right. In two minutes. Come straight up."

She hung up the receiver, and thrust the telegram aside. No time to rush

out with it now. She would see Jim first, and send off her message when

he left. Now that her decision was taken she felt tranquil and able to

wait. But anxiety about Jim rose and swelled in her again. She

reproached herself for having given him so little thought for the last

two days. Since her parting from Stan on the doorstep in the rainy night

everything but her fate and his had grown remote and almost indifferent

to her. Well; it was natural enough--only perhaps she had better not be

so glib about Aggie Heuston's selfishness! Of course everybody who was

in love was selfish; and Aggie, according to her lights, was in love.

Her love was bleak and cramped, like everything about her; a sort of

fleshless bony affair, like the repulsive plates in anatomical manuals.

But in reality those barren arms were stretched toward Stanley, though

she imagined they were lifted to God... What a hideous mystery life

was! And yet Pauline and her friends persisted in regarding it as a

Sunday school picnic, with lemonade and sponge cake as its supreme

rewards...

Here was Jim at her sitting-room door. Nona held out her arms, and

slanted a glance at him as he bent his cheek to her kiss. Was the cheek

rather sallower than usual? Well, that didn't mean much: he and she were

always a yellow pair when they were worried!

"What's up, old man? No--this armchair's more comfortable. Had your

coffee?"

He let her change the armchair, but declined the coffee. He had

breakfasted before starting, he said--but she knew Lita's household, and

didn't believe him.

"Anything wrong with Exhibit A?"

"Wrong? No. That is..." She had put the question at random, in the

vague hope of gaining time before Lita's name was introduced; and now

she had the sense of having unwittingly touched on another problem.

"That is--well, he's nervous and fidgety again: you've noticed?"

"I've noticed."

"Imagining things--. What a complicated world our ancestors lived in,

didn't they?"

"Well, I don't know. Mother's world always seems to me alarmingly

simple."

He considered. "Yes--that's pioneering and motor-building, I suppose.

It's the old New York blood that's so clogged with taboos. Poor father

always wants me to behave like a Knight of the Round Table."

Nona lifted her eyebrows with an effort of memory. "How did they

behave?"

"They were always hitting some other fellow over the head."

She felt a little catch in her throat. "Who--particularly--does he want

you to hit over the head?"

"Oh, we haven't got as far as that yet. It's just the general principle.

Anybody who looks too hard at Lita."

"You _would_ have to be hitting about! Everybody looks hard at Lita. How

in the world can she help it?"

"That's what I tell him. But he says I haven't got the feelings of a

gentleman. Guts, he means, I suppose." He leaned back, crossing his arms

wearily behind his back, his sallow face with heavy-lidded eyes tilted

to the ceiling. "Do you suppose Lita feels that too?" he suddenly flung

at his sister.

"That you ought to break people's heads for her? She'd be the first to

laugh at you!"

"So I told him. But he says women despise a man who isn't jealous."

Nona sat silent, instinctively turning her eyes from his troubled face.

"Why should you be jealous?" she asked at length.

He shifted his position, stretched his arms along his knees, and brought

his eyes down to a level with hers. There was something pathetic, she

thought, in such youthful blueness blurred with uncomprehended pain.

"I suppose it's never got much to do with reasons," he said, very low.

"No; that's why it's so silly--and ungenerous."

"It doesn't matter what it is. She doesn't care a hang if I'm jealous or

if I'm not. She doesn't care anything about me. I've simply ceased to

exist for her."

"Well, then you can't be in her way."

"It seems I am, though. Because I do exist, for the world; and as the

boy's father. And the mere idea gets on her nerves."

Nona laughed a little bitterly. "She wants a good deal of elbow-room,

doesn't she? And how does she propose to eliminate you?"

"Oh, that's easy. Divorce."

There was a silence between the two. This was how it sounded--that

simple reasonable request--on the lips of the other partner, the partner

who still had a stake in the affair! Lately she seemed to have forgotten

that side of the question; but how hideously it grimaced at her now,

behind the lines of this boyish face wrung with a man's misery!

"Old Jim--it hurts such a lot?"

He jerked away from her outstretched hand. "Hurt? A fellow can stand

being hurt. It can't hurt more than feeling her chained to me. But if

she goes--what does she go to?"

Ah--that was it! Through the scorch and cloud of his own suffering he

had seen it, it was the centre of his pain. Nona glanced down absently

at her slim young hands--so helpless and inexperienced looking. All

these tangled cross-threads of life, inextricably and fatally

interwoven; how were a girl's hands to unravel them?

"I suppose she's talked to you--told you her ideas?" he asked.

Nona nodded.

"Well, what's to be done: can you tell me?"

"She mustn't go--we mustn't let her."

"But if she stays--stays hating me?"

"Oh, Jim, not _hating_--!"

"You know well enough that she gets to hate anything that doesn't amuse

her."

"But there's the baby. The baby still amuses her."

He looked at her, surprised. "Ah, that's what father says: he calls the

baby, poor old chap, my hostage. What rot! As if I'd take her baby from

her--and just because she cares for it. If I don't know how to keep her,

I don't see that I've got any right to keep her child."

That was the new idea of marriage, the view of Nona's contemporaries; it

had been her own a few hours since. Now, seeing it in operation, she

wondered if it still were. It was one thing to theorize on the

detachability of human beings, another to watch them torn apart by the

bleeding roots. This botanist who had recently discovered that plants

were susceptible to pain, and that transplanting was a major

operation--might he not, if he turned his attention to modern men and

women, find the same thing to be still true of a few of them?

"Oh Jim, how I wish you didn't care so!" The words slipped out unawares:

they were the last she had meant to speak aloud.

Her brother turned to her; the ghost of his old smile drew up his lip.

"Good old girl!" he mocked her--then his face dropped into his hands,

and he sat huddled against the armchair, his shaken shoulder-blades

warding off her touch.

It didn't last more than a minute; but it was the real, the only answer.

He _did_ care so; nothing could alter it. She looked on stupidly, admitted

for the first time to this world-old anguish rooted under all the

restless moods of man.

Jim got up, shook back his rumpled hair, and reached for a cigarette.

"That's _that_. And now, my child, what can I do? What I'd honestly like,

if she wants her freedom, is to give it to her, and yet be able to go on

looking after her. But I don't see how that can be worked out. Father

says it's madness. He says I'm a morbid coward and talk like the people

in the Russian novels. He wants to speak to her himself--"

"Oh, no! He and she don't talk the same language..."

Jim paused, pulling absently at his cigarette, and measuring the room

with uncertain steps. "That's what I feel. But there's _your_ father; he's

been so awfully good to us; and his ideas are less archaic..."

Nona had turned away and was looking unseeingly out of the window. She

moved back hastily. "No!"

He looked surprised. "You think he wouldn't understand either?"

"I don't mean that... But, after all, it's not his job... Have you

spoken to mother?"

"Mother? Oh, she always thinks everything's all right. She'd give me a

cheque, and tell me to buy Lita a new motor or to let her do over the

drawing-room."

Nona pondered this answer, which was no more than the echo of her own

thoughts. "All the same, Jim: mother's mother. She's always been awfully

good to both of us, and you can't let this go on without her knowing,

without consulting her. She has a right to your confidence--she has a

right to hear what Lita has to say."

He remained silent, as if indifferent. His mother's glittering optimism

was a hard surface for grief and failure to fling themselves on. "What's

the use?" he grumbled.

"Let me consult her, then: at least let me see how she takes it."

He threw away his cigarette and looked at his watch. "I've got to run;

it's nearly nine." He laid a hand on his sister's shoulder. "Whatever

you like, old girl. But don't imagine it's going to be any use."

She put her arms about him, and he submitted to her kiss. "Give me

time," she said, not knowing what else to answer.

After he had gone she sat motionless, weighed down with

half-comprehended misery. This business of living--how right she had

been to feel, in her ignorance, what a tortured tangle it was! Where,

for instance, did one's own self end and one's neighbour's begin? And

how tell the locked tendrils apart in the delicate process of

disentanglement? Her precocious half-knowledge of the human dilemma was

combined with a youthful belief that the duration of pain was

proportioned to its intensity. And at that moment she would have hated

any one who had tried to persuade her of the contrary. The only

honourable thing about suffering was that it should not abdicate before

indifference.

She got up, and her glance fell on the telegram which she had pushed

aside when her brother entered. She still had her hat on, her feet were

turned toward the door. But the door seemed to open into a gray

unpeopled world suddenly shorn of its magic. She moved back into the

room and tore up the telegram.

XVIII

"LITA? But of course I'll talk to Lita--" Mrs. Manford, resting one

elbow on her littered desk, smiled up encouragingly at her daughter. On

the desk lay the final version of the Birth Control speech, mastered and

canalized by the skilful Maisie. The result was so pleasing that Pauline

would have liked to read it aloud to Nona, had the latter not worn her

look of concentrated care. It was a pity, Pauline thought, that Nona

should let herself go at her age to these moods of anxiety and

discouragement.

Pauline herself, fortified by her morning exercises, and by a "double

treatment" ($50) from Alvah Loft, had soared once more above her own

perplexities. She had not had time for a word alone with her husband

since their strange talk of the previous evening; but already the doubts

and uncertainties produced by that talk had been dispelled. Of course

Dexter had been moody and irritable: wasn't her family always piling up

one worry on him after another? He had always loved Jim as much as he

did Nona; and now this menace to Jim's happiness, and the unpleasantness

about Lita, combined with Amalasuntha's barefaced demands, and the

threatened arrival of the troublesome Michelangelo--such a weight of

domestic problems was enough to unnerve a man already overburdened with

professional cares.

"But of course I'll talk to Lita, dear; I always meant to. The silly

goose! I've waited only because your father--"

Nona's heavy eyebrows ran together like Manford's. "Father?"

"Oh, he's helping us so splendidly about it. And he asked me to wait; to

do nothing in a hurry..."

Nona seemed to turn this over. "All the same--I think you ought to hear

what Lita has to say. She's trying to persuade Jim to let her divorce

him; and he thinks he ought to, if he can't make her happy."

"But he _must_ make her happy! I'll talk to Jim too," cried Pauline with a

gay determination.

"I'd try Lita first, mother. Ask her to postpone her decision. If we can

get her to come to Cedarledge for a few weeks' rest--"

"Yes; that's what your father says."

"But I don't think father ought to give up his fishing to join us.

Haven't you noticed how tired he looks? He ought to get away from all of

us for a few weeks. Why shouldn't you and I look after Lita?"

Pauline's enthusiasm drooped. It was really no business of Nona's to

give her mother advice about the management of her father. These modern

girls--pity Nona didn't marry, and try managing a husband of her own!

"Your father loves Cedarledge. It's quite his own idea to go there. He

thinks Easter in the country with us all will be more restful than

California. I haven't influenced him in the least to give up his

fishing."

"Oh, I didn't suppose you had." Nona seemed to lose interest in the

discussion, and her mother took advantage of the fact to add, with a

gentle side-glance at her watch: "Is there anything else, dear? Because

I've got to go over my Birth Control speech, and at eleven there's a

delegation from--"

Nona's eyes had followed her glance to the scattered pages on the desk.

"Are you really going to preside at that Birth Control dinner, mother?"

"Preside? Why not? I happen to be chairman," Pauline answered with a

faint touch of acerbity.

"I know. Only--the other day you were preaching unlimited families.

Don't the two speeches come rather close together? You might expose

yourself to some newspaper chaff if any one put you in parallel

columns."

Pauline felt herself turning pale. Her lips tightened, and for a moment

she was conscious of a sort of blur in her brain. This girl ... it was

preposterous that she shouldn't understand! And always wanting reasons

and explanations at a moment's notice! To be subjected, under one's own

roof, to such a perpetual inquisition... There was nothing she

disliked so much as questions to which she had not had time to prepare

the answers.

"I don't think you always grasp things, Nona." The words were feeble,

but they were the first that came.

"I'm afraid I don't, mother."

"Then, perhaps--I just suggest it--you oughtn't to be quite so ready to

criticize. You seem to imagine there is a contradiction in my belonging

to these two groups of ... of thought..."

"They do seem to contradict each other."

"Not in reality. The principles are different, of course; but, you see,

they are meant to apply to--to different categories of people. It's all

a little difficult to explain to any one as young as you are ... a

girl naturally can't be expected to know..."

"Oh, what we girls don't know, mother!"

"Well, dear, I've always approved of outspokenness on such matters. The

real nastiness is in covering things up. But all the same, age and

experience _do_ teach one... You children mustn't hope to get at all

your elders' reasons..." That sounded firm yet friendly, and as she

spoke she felt herself on safer ground. "I wish there were time to go

into it all with you now; but if I'm to keep up with today's

engagements, and crowd in a talk with Lita besides--Maisie! Will you

call up Mrs. Jim?"

Maisie answered from the other room: "The delegation of the League For

Discovering Genius is waiting downstairs, Mrs. Manford--"

"Oh, to be sure! This is rather an important movement, Nona; a new

thing. I do believe there's something helpful to be done for genius.

They're just organizing their first drive: I heard of it through that

wonderful Mrs. Swoffer. You wouldn't care to come down and see the

delegation with me? No ... I sometimes think you'd be happier if you

interested yourself a little more in other people ... in all the big

humanitarian movements that make one so proud to be an American. Don't

you think it's glorious to belong to the only country where everybody is

absolutely free, and yet we're all made to do exactly what is best for

us? I say that somewhere in my speech... Well, I promise to have my

talk with Lita before dinner; whatever happens, I'll squeeze her in. And

you and Jim needn't be afraid of my saying anything to set her against

us. Your father has impressed that on me already. After all, I've always

preached the respect of every one's personality; only Lita must begin by

respecting Jim's."

Fresh from a stimulating encounter with Mrs. Swoffer and the encouragers

of genius, Pauline was able to face with a smiling composure her meeting

with her daughter-in-law. Every contact with the humanitarian movements

distinguishing her native country from the selfish _laissez faire_ and

cynical indifference of Europe filled her with a new optimism, and shed

a reassuring light on all her private cares. America really seemed to

have an immediate answer for everything, from the treatment of the

mentally deficient to the elucidation of the profoundest religious

mysteries. In such an atmosphere of universal simplification, how could

one's personal problems not be solved? "The great thing is to believe

that they _will_ be," as Mrs. Swoffer said, à propos of the finding of

funds for the new League For Discovering Genius. The remark was so

stimulating to Pauline that she immediately drew a large cheque, and

accepted the chairmanship of the committee; and it was on the favouring

breeze of the League's applause that she sailed, at the tea-hour, into

Lita's boudoir.

"It seems simpler just to ask her for a cup of tea--as if I were

dropping in to see the baby," Pauline had reflected; and as Lita was not

yet at home, there was time to turn her pretext into a reality.

Upstairs, in the blue and silver nursery, her sharp eye detected many

small negligences under the artistic surface: soiled towels lying about,

a half-empty glass of milk with a drowned fly in it, dead and decaying

flowers in the æsthetic flowerpots, and not a single ventilator open in

the upper window-panes. She made a mental note of these items, but

resolved not to touch on them in her talk with Lita. At Cedarledge,

where the nurse would be under her own eye, nursery hygiene could be

more tactfully imparted...

The black boudoir was still empty when Pauline returned to it, but she

was armed with patience, and sat down to wait. The armchairs were much

too low to be comfortable and she hated the semi-obscurity of the veiled

lamps. How could one possibly occupy one's time in a pitch-dark room

with seats that one had to sprawl in as if they were deck-chairs? She

thought the room so ugly and dreary that she could hardly blame Lita for

wanting to do it over. "I'll give her a cheque for it at once," she

reflected indulgently. "All young people begin by making mistakes of

this kind." She remembered with a little shiver the set of imitation

tapestry armchairs that she had insisted on buying for her drawing-room

when she had married Wyant. Perhaps it would be a good move to greet

Lita with the offer of the cheque...

Somehow Lita's appearance, when she at length arrived, made the idea

seem less happy. Lita had a way of looking as if she didn't much care

what one did to please her; for a young woman who spent so much money

she made very little effort to cajole it out of her benefactors.

"Hullo," she said; "I didn't know you were here. Am I late, I wonder?"

Pauline greeted her with a light kiss. "How can you ever tell if you

are? I don't believe there's a clock in the house."

"Yes, there is; in the nursery," said Lita.

"Well, my dear, that one's stopped," rejoined her mother-in-law,

smiling.

"You've been seeing the boy? Oh, then you haven't missed me," Lita

smiled back as she loosened her furs and tossed off her hat. She ran her

hands through her goldfish-coloured hair, and flung herself down on a

pile of cushions. "Tea's coming sooner or later, I suppose. Unless--a

cocktail? No? Wouldn't you be more comfortable on the floor?" she

suggested to her mother-in-law.

Every whalebone in Pauline's perfectly fitting elastic girdle contracted

apprehensively. "Thank you; I'm very well here." She assumed as willowy

an attitude as the treacherous seat permitted, and added: "I'm so glad

to have the chance of a little talk. In this rushing life we all tend to

lose sight of each other, don't we? But I hear about you so constantly

from Nona that I feel we're very close even when we don't meet. Nona's

devoted to you--we all are."

"That's awfully sweet of you," said Lita with her air of radiant

indifference.

"Well, my dear, we hope you reciprocate," Pauline sparkled, stretching a

maternal hand to the young shoulder at her knee.

Lita slanted her head backward with a slight laugh. Mrs. Manford had

never thought her pretty, but today the mere freshness of her parted

lips, their rosy lining, the unspoilt curves of her cheek and long white

throat, stung the older woman to reluctant admiration.

"Am I expected to be devoted to you _all_?" Lita questioned.

"No, dear; only to Jim."

"Oh--" said Jim's wife, her smile contracting to a faint grimace.

Pauline leaned forward earnestly. "I won't pretend not to know something

of what's been happening. I came here today to talk things over with

you, quietly and affectionately--like an older sister. Try not to think

of me as a mother-in-law!"

Lita's slim eyebrows went up ironically. "Oh, I'm not afraid of

mothers-in-law; they're not as permanent as they used to be."

Pauline took a quick breath; she caught the impertinence under the

banter, but she called her famous tact to the rescue.

"I'm glad you're not afraid of me, because I want you to tell me

perfectly frankly what it is that's bothering you ... you and Jim..."

"Nothing is bothering me particularly; but I suppose I'm bothering Jim,"

said Lita lightly.

"You're doing more than that, dear; you're making him desperately

unhappy. This talk of wanting to separate--"

Lita rose on her elbow among the cushions, and levelled her eyes on Mrs.

Manford. They looked as clear and shallow as the most expensive topazes.

"Separations are idiotic. What I want is a hundred per cent New York

divorce. And he could let me have it just as easily..."

"Lita! You don't know how wretched it makes me to hear you say such

things."

"Does it? Sorry! But it's Jim's own fault. Heaps of other girls would

jump at him if he was free. And if I'm bored, what's the use of trying

to keep me? What on earth can we do about it, either of us? You can't

take out an insurance against boredom."

"But why should you be bored? With everything on earth..." Pauline

waved a hand at the circumjacent luxuries.

"Well; that's it, I suppose. Always the same old everything!"

The mother-in-law softened her voice to murmur temptingly: "Of course,

if it's this house you're tired of... Nona told me something about

your wanting to redecorate some of the rooms; and I can understand, for

instance, that this one..."

"Oh, this is the only one I don't utterly loathe. But I'm not divorcing

Jim on account of the house," Lita answered, with a faint smile which

seemed perverse to Pauline.

"Then what is the reason? I don't understand."

"I'm not much good at reasons. I want a new deal, that's all."

Pauline struggled against her rising indignation. To sit and hear this

chit of a Cliffe girl speak of husband and home as if it were a matter

of course to discard them like last year's fashions! But she was

determined not to allow her feelings to master her. "If you had only

yourself to think of, what should you do?" she asked.

"Do? Be myself, I suppose! I can't be, here. I'm a sort of all-round

fake. I--"

"We none of us want you to be that--Jim least of all. He wants you to

feel perfectly free to express your personality."

"Here--in this house?" Her contemptuous gesture seemed to tumble it down

like a pack of cards. "And looking at him across the dinner-table every

night of my life?"

Pauline paused; then she said gently: "And can you face giving up your

baby?"

"Baby? Why should I? You don't suppose I'd ever give up my baby?"

"Then you mean to ask Jim to give up his wife and child, and to assume

all the blame as well?"

"Oh, dear, no. Where's the blame? I don't see any! All I want is a new

deal," repeated Lita doggedly.

"My dear, I'm sure you don't know what you're saying. Your husband has

the misfortune to be passionately in love with you. The divorce you talk

of so lightly would nearly kill him. Even if he doesn't interest you any

longer, he did once. Oughtn't you to take that into account?"

Lita seemed to ponder. Then she said: "But oughtn't he to take into

account that he doesn't interest me any longer?"

Pauline made a final effort at self-control. "Yes, dear; if it's really

so. But if he goes away for a time... You know he's to have a long

holiday soon, and my husband has arranged to have him go down with Mr.

Wyant to the island. All I ask is that you shouldn't decide anything

till he comes back. See how you feel about him when he's been away for

two or three weeks. Perhaps you've been too much together--perhaps New

York has got too much on both your nerves. At any rate, do let him go

off on his holiday without the heartbreak of feeling it's good-bye...

My husband begs you to do this. You know he loves Jim as if he were his

son--"

Lita was still leaning on her elbow. "Well--isn't he?" she said in her

cool silvery voice, with innocently widened eyes.

For an instant the significance of the retort escaped Pauline. When it

reached her she felt as humiliated as if she had been caught concealing

a guilty secret. She opened her lips, but no sound came from them. She

sat wordless, torn between the desire to box her daughter-in-law's ears,

and to rush in tears from the house.

"Lita ..." she gasped ... "this insult..."

Lita sat up, her eyes full of a slightly humorous compunction. "Oh, no!

An insult! Why? I've always thought it would be so wonderful to have a

love-child. I supposed that was why you both worshipped Jim. And now he

isn't even that!" She shrugged her slim shoulders, and held her hands

out penitently. "I _am_ sorry to have said the wrong thing--honestly I am!

But it just shows we can never understand each other. For me the real

wickedness is to go on living with a man you don't love. And now I've

offended you by supposing you once felt in the same way yourself..."

Pauline slowly rose to her feet: she felt stiff and shrunken. "You

haven't offended me--I'm not going to allow myself to be offended. I'd

rather think we don't understand each other, as you say. But surely it's

not too late to try. I don't want to discuss things with you; I don't

want to nag or argue; I only want you to wait, to come with the baby to

Cedarledge, and spend a few quiet weeks with us. Nona will be there, and

my husband ... there'll be no reproaches, no questions ... but we'll

do our best to make you happy..."

Lita, with her funny twisted smile, moved toward her mother-in-law.

"Why, you're actually crying! I don't believe you do that often, do

you?" She bent forward and put a light kiss on Pauline's shrinking

cheek. "All right--I'll come to Cedarledge. I am dead-beat and fed-up,

and I daresay it'll do me a lot of good to lie up for a while..."

Pauline, for a moment, made no answer: she merely laid her lips on the

girl's cheek, a little timidly, as if it had been made of something

excessively thin and brittle.

"We shall all be very glad," she said.

On the doorstep, in the motor, she continued to move in the resonance of

the outrageous question: "_Well_--_isn't he_?" The violence of her recoil

left her wondering what use there was in trying to patch up a bond

founded on such a notion of marriage. Would not Jim, as his wife so

lightly suggested, run more chance of happiness if he could choose

again? Surely there must still be some decent right-minded girls brought

up in the old way ... like Aggie Heuston, say! But Pauline's

imagination shivered away from that too... Perhaps, after all, her own

principles were really obsolete to her children. Only, what was to take

their place? Human nature had not changed as fast as social usage, and

if Jim's wife left him nothing could prevent his suffering in the same

old way.

It was all very baffling and disturbing, and Pauline did not feel as

sure as she usually did that the question could be disposed of by

ignoring it. Still, on the drive home her thoughts cleared as she

reflected that she had gained her main point--for the time, at any rate.

Manford had enjoined her not to estrange or frighten Lita, and the two

women had parted with a kiss. Manford had insisted that Lita should be

induced to take no final decision till after her stay at Cedarledge; and

to this also she had acquiesced. Pauline, on looking back, began to be

struck by the promptness of Lita's surrender, and correspondingly

impressed by her own skill in manœuvring. There _was_ something, after

all, in these exercises of the will, these smiling resolves to ignore or

dominate whatever was obstructive or unpleasant! She had gained with an

almost startling ease the point which Jim and Manford and Nona had

vainly struggled for. And perhaps Lita's horrid insinuation had not been

a voluntary impertinence, but merely the unconscious avowal of new

standards. The young people nowadays, for all their long words and

scientific realism, were really more like children than ever...

In Pauline's boudoir, Nona, curled up on the hearth, her chin in her

hands, raised her head at her mother's approach. To Pauline the

knowledge that she was awaited, and that she brought with her the secret

of defeat or victory, gave back the healing sense of authority.

"It's all right, darling," she announced; "just a little summer shower;

I always told you there was nothing to worry about." And she added with

a smile: "You see, Nona, some people _do_ still listen when your old

mother talks to them."

XIX

IF only Aggie Heuston had changed those sour-apple curtains in the front

drawing-room, Nona thought--if she had substituted deep upholstered

armchairs for the hostile gilt seats, and put books in the marqueterie

cabinets in place of blue china dogs and Dresden shepherdesses,

everything in three lives might have been different...

But Aggie had probably never noticed the colour of the curtains or the

angularity of the furniture. She had certainly never missed the books.

She had accepted the house as it came to her from her parents, who in

turn had taken it over, in all its dreary frivolity, from their father

and mother. It embodied the New York luxury of the 'seventies in every

ponderous detail, from the huge cabbage roses of the Aubusson carpet to

the triple layer of curtains designed to protect the aristocracy of the

brown-stone age from the plebeian intrusion of light and air.

"Funny," Nona thought again--"that all this ugliness should prick me

like nettles, and matter no more to Aggie than if it were in the next

street. She's a saint, I know. But what I want to find is a saint who

hates ugly furniture, and yet lives among it with a smile. What's the

merit, if you never see it?" She addressed herself to a closer

inspection of one of the cabinets, in which Aggie's filial piety had

preserved her mother's velvet and silver spectacle-case, and her

father's ivory opera-glasses, in combination with an alabaster Leaning

Tower and a miniature copy of Carlo Dolci's Magdalen.

Queer dead rubbish--but queerer still that, at that moment and in that

house, Nona's uncanny detachment should permit her to smile at it! Where

indeed--she wondered again--did one's own personality end, and that of

others, of people, landscapes, chairs or spectacle-cases, begin? Ever

since she had received, the night before, Aggie's stiff and agonized

little note, which might have been composed by a child with a

tooth-ache, Nona had been apprehensively asking herself if her

personality didn't even include certain shreds and fibres of Aggie. It

was all such an inextricable tangle...

Here she came. Nona heard the dry click of her steps on the stairs and

across the polished bareness of the hall. She had written: "If you could

make it perfectly convenient to call--" Aggie's nearest approach to a

friendly summons! And as she opened the door, and advanced over the

cabbage roses, Nona saw that her narrow face, with the eyes too close

together, and the large pale pink mouth with straight edges, was

sharpened by a new distress.

"It's very kind of you to come, Nona--" she began in her clear

painstaking voice.

"Oh, nonsense, Aggie! Do drop all that. Of course I know what it's

about."

Aggie turned noticeably paler; but her training as a hostess prevailing

over her emotion, she pushed forward a gilt chair. "Do sit down." She

placed herself in an adjoining sofa corner. Overhead, Aggie's

grandmother, in a voluted gilt frame, held a Brussels lace handkerchief

in her hand, and leaned one ruffled elbow on a velvet table-cover

fringed with knobby tassels.

"You say you know--" Aggie began.

"Of course."

"Stanley--he's told you?"

Nona's nerves were beginning to jump and squirm like a bundle of young

vipers. Was she going to be able to stand much more of these paralyzing

preliminaries?

"Oh, yes: he's told me."

Aggie dropped her lids and stared down at her narrow white hands. Then a

premonitory twitch ran along her lips and drew her forehead into little

wrinkles of perplexity.

"I don't want you to think I've any cause of complaint against

Stanley--none whatever. There has never been a single unkind word...

We've always lived together on the most perfect terms..."

Feeling that some form of response was required of her, Nona emitted a

vague murmur.

"Only now--he's--he's left me," Aggie concluded, the words wrung out of

her in laboured syllables. She raised one hand and smoothed back a flat

strand of hair which had strayed across her forehead.

Nona was silent. She sat with her eyes fixed on that small twitching

mask--real face it could hardly be called, since it had probably never

before been suffered to express any emotion that was radically and

peculiarly Aggie's.

"You knew that too?" Aggie continued, in a studiously objective tone.

Nona made a sign of assent.

"He has nothing to reproach me with--nothing whatever. He expressly told

me so."

"Yes; I know. That's the worst of it."

"The worst of it?"

"Why, if he had, you might have had a good row that would have cleared

the air."

Suddenly Nona felt Aggie's eyes fixed on her with a hungry penetrating

stare. "Did you and he use to have good rows, as you call it?"

"Oh, by the hour--whenever we met!" Nona, for the life of her, could not

subdue the mocking triumph in her voice.

Aggie's lips narrowed. "You've been very great friends, I know; he's

often told me so. But if you were always quarrelling how could you

continue to respect each other?"

"I don't know that we did. At any rate, there was no time to think about

it; because there was always the making-up, you see."

"The making-up?"

"Aggie," Nona burst out abruptly, "have you never known what it was to

have a man give you a jolly good hug, and feel full enough of happiness

to scent a whole garden with it?"

Aggie lifted her lids on a glance which was almost one of terror. The

image Nona had used seemed to convey nothing to her, but the question

evidently struck her with a deadly force.

"A man--what man?"

Nona laughed. "Well, for the sake of argument--Stanley!"

"I can't imagine why you ask such queer questions, Nona. How could we

make up when we never quarrelled?"

"Is it queer to ask you if you ever loved your husband?"

"It's queer of you to ask it," said the wife simply. Nona's swift retort

died unspoken, and she felt one of her slow secret blushes creeping up

to the roots of her hair.

"I'm sorry, Aggie. I'm horribly nervous--and I suppose you are. Hadn't

we better start fresh? What was it you wanted to see me about?"

Aggie was silent for a moment, as if gathering up all her strength; then

she answered: "To tell you that if he wants to marry you I shan't oppose

a divorce any longer."

"Aggie!"

The two sat silent, opposite each other, as if they had reached a point

beyond which words could not carry their communion. Nona's mind, racing

forward, touched the extreme limit of human bliss, and then crawled back

from it bowed and broken-winged.

"But _only_ on that condition," Aggie began again, with deliberate

emphasis.

"On condition--that he marries me?"

Aggie made a motion of assent. "I have a right to impose my conditions.

And what I want is"--she faltered suddenly--"what I want is that you

should save him from Cleo Merrick..." Her level voice broke and two

tears forced their way through her lashes and fell slowly down her

cheeks.

"Save him from Cleo Merrick?" Nona fancied she heard herself laugh. Her

thoughts seemed to drag after her words as if she were labouring up hill

through a ploughed field. "Isn't it rather late in the day to make that

attempt? You say he's already gone off with her."

"He's joined her somewhere--I don't know where. He wrote from his club

before leaving. But I know they don't sail till the day after tomorrow;

and you must get him back, Nona, you must save him. It's too awful. He

can't marry her; she has a husband somewhere who refuses to divorce

her."

"Like you and Stanley!"

Aggie drew back as if she had been struck. "Oh, no, no!" She looked

despairingly at Nona. "When I tell you I don't refuse now..."

"Well, perhaps Cleo Merrick's husband may not, either."

"It's different. He's a Catholic, and his church won't let him divorce.

And it can't be annulled. Stanley's just going to live with her ...

openly ... and she'll go everywhere with him ... exactly as if they

were husband and wife ... and everybody will know that they're not."

Nona sat silent, considering with set lips and ironic mind the picture

thus pitilessly evoked. "Well, if she loves him..."

"Loves him? A woman like that!"

"She's been willing to make a sacrifice for him, at any rate. That's

where she has a pull over both of us."

"But don't you see how awful it is for them to be living together in

that way?"

"I see it's the best thing that could happen to Stanley to have found a

woman plucky enough to give him the thing he wanted--the thing you and I

both refused him."

She saw Aggie's lifeless cheek redden. "I don't know what you mean by ...

refusing..."

"I mean his happiness--that's all! You refused to divorce him, didn't

you? And I refused to do--what Cleo Merrick's doing. And here we both

are, sitting on the ruins; and that's the end of it, as far as you and I

are concerned."

"But it's not the end--it's not too late. I tell you it's not too late!

He'll leave her even now if you ask him to ... I know he will!"

Nona stood up with a dry laugh. "Thank you, Aggie. Perhaps he

would--only we shall never find out."

"Never find out? When I keep telling you--"

"Because even if I've been a coward that's no reason why I should be a

cad." Nona was buttoning her coat and clasping her fur about her neck

with quick precise movements, as if wrapping herself close against the

treacherous sweetness that was beginning to creep into her veins.

Suddenly she felt she could not remain a moment longer in that stifling

room, face to face with that stifling misery.

"The better woman's got him--let her keep him," she said.

She put out her hand, and for a moment Aggie's cold damp fingers lay in

hers. Then they were pulled away, and Aggie caught Nona by the sleeve.

"But Nona, listen! I don't understand you. Isn't it what you've always

wanted?"

"Oh, more than anything in life!" the girl cried, turning breathlessly

away.

The outer door swung shut on her, and on the steps she stood still and

looked back at the ruins on which she had pictured herself sitting with

Aggie Heuston.

"I do believe," she murmured to herself, "I know most of the new ways of

being rotten; I only wish I was sure I knew the best new way of being

decent..."

_BOOK III_

XX

AT the gates of Cedarledge Pauline lifted her head from a last hurried

study of the letters and papers Maisie Bruss had thrust into the motor.

The departure from town had been tumultuous. Up to the last minute there

had been the usual rush and trepidation, Maisie hanging on the

footboard, Powder and the maid hurrying down with final messages and

recommendations.

"Here's another batch of bills passed by the architect, Mrs. Manford.

And he asks if you'd mind--"

"Yes, yes; draw another cheque for five thousand, Maisie, and send it to

me with the others to be signed."

"And the estimates for the new orchid-house. The contractor says

building-materials are going up again next week, and he can't guarantee,

unless you telephone at once--"

"Has madame the jewel-box? I put it under the rug myself, with madame's

motor-bag."

"Thank you, Cécile. Yes, it's here."

"And is the Maison Herminie to deliver the green and gold teagown here

or--"

"Here are the proofs of the Birth Control speech, Mrs. Manford. If you

could just glance over them in the motor, and let me have them back

tonight--"

"The Marchesa, madam, has called up to ask if you and Mr. Manford can

receive her at Cedarledge for the next week-end--"

"No, Powder; say no. I'm dreadfully sorry..."

"Very good, madam. I understand it was to bring a favourable answer from

the Cardinal--"

"Oh; very well. I'll see. I'll telephone from Cedarledge."

"Please, madam, Mr. Wyant's just telephoned--"

"Mr. Wyant, Powder?"

"Mr. Arthur Wyant, madam. To ask--"

"But Mr. Wyant and Mr. James were to have started for Georgia last

night."

"Yes, madam; but Mr. James was detained by business, and now Mr. Arthur

Wyant asks if you'll please ring up before they leave tonight."

"Very well. (What can have happened, Nona? You don't know?) Say I've

started for Cedarledge, Powder; I'll ring up from there. Yes; that's

all."

"Mrs. Manford, wait! Here are two more telegrams, and a special--"

"Take care, Maisie; you'll slip and break your leg..."

"Yes; but Mrs. Manford! The special is from Mrs. Swoffer. She says the

committee have just discovered a new genius, and they're calling an

emergency meeting for tomorrow afternoon at three, and couldn't you

possibly--"

"No, no, Maisie--I can't! Say I've _left_--"

The waves of agitation were slow in subsiding. A glimpse, down a side

street, of the Marchesa's cheap boarding-house-hotel, revived them; and

so did the flash past the inscrutable "Dawnside," aloof on its height

above the Hudson. But as the motor slid over the wide suburban

Boulevards, and out into the budding country, with the roar and menace

of the city fading harmlessly away on the horizon, Pauline's serenity

gradually stole back.

Nona, at her side, sat silent; and the mother was grateful for that

silence. She had noticed that the girl had looked pale and drawn for the

last fortnight; but that was just another proof of how much they all

needed the quiet of Cedarledge.

"You don't know why Jim and his father have put off starting, Nona?"

"No idea, mother. Probably business of Jim's, as Powder said."

"Do you know why his father wants to telephone me?"

"Not a bit. Probably it's not important. I'll call up this evening."

"Oh, if you would, dear! I'm really tired."

There was a pause, and then Nona questioned: "Have you noticed Maisie,

mother? She's pretty tired too."

"Yes; poor Maisie! Preparing Cedarledge has been rather a rush for her,

I'm afraid--"

"It's not only that. She's just been told that her mother has a cancer."

"Oh, poor child! How dreadful! She never said a word to me--"

"No, she wouldn't."

"But, Nona, have you told her to see Disterman _at once_? Perhaps an

immediate operation ... you must call her up as soon as we arrive.

Tell her, of course, that I'll bear all the expenses--"

After that they both relapsed into silence.

These domestic tragedies happened now and then. One would have given the

world to avert them; but when one couldn't one was always ready to foot

the bill... Pauline wished that she had known ... had had time to

say a kindly word to poor Maisie... Perhaps she would have to give her

a week off; or at least a couple of days, while she settled her mother

in the hospital. At least, if Disterman advised an operation...

It was dreadful, how rushed one always was. Pauline would have liked to

go and see poor Mrs. Bruss herself. But there were Dexter and Lita and

the baby all arriving the day after tomorrow, and only just time to put

the last touches to Cedarledge before they came. And Pauline herself was

desperately tired, though she had taken a "triple treatment" from Alvah

Loft ($100) that very morning.

She always meant to be kind to every one dependent on her; it was only

time that lacked--always time! Dependents and all, they were swept away

with her in the same ceaseless rush. When now and then one of them

dropped by the way she was sorry, and sent back first aid, and did all

she could; but the rush never stopped; it couldn't stop; when one did a

kindness one could only fling it at its object and whirl by.

The blessèd peace of the country! Pauline drew a deep breath of

content. Never before had she approached Cedarledge with so complete a

sense of possessorship. The place was really of her own making, for

though the house had been built and the grounds laid out years before

she had acquired the property, she had stamped her will and her wealth

on every feature. Pauline was persuaded that she was fond of the

country--but what she was really fond of was doing things to the

country, and owning, with this object, as many acres of it as possible.

And so it had come about that every year the Cedarledge estate had

pushed the encircling landscape farther back, and substituted for its

miles of golden-rod and birch and maple more acres of glossy lawn, and

more specimen limes and oaks and cut-leaved beeches, domed over more and

more windings of expensive shrubbery.

From the farthest gate it was now a drive of two miles to the house, and

Pauline found even this too short for her minutely detailed appreciation

of what lay between her and her threshold. In the village, the glint of

the gilt weathercock on the new half-timbered engine-house; under a rich

slope of pasture-land the recently enlarged dairy-farm; then woods of

hemlock and dogwood; acres of rhododendron, azalea and mountain laurel

acclimatized about a hidden lake; a glimpse of Japanese water-gardens

fringed with cherry bloom and catkins; open lawns, spreading trees, the

long brick house-front and its terraces, and through a sculptured

archway the Dutch garden with dwarf topiary work and endless files of

bulbs about the commander's baton of a stately sundial.

To Pauline each tree, shrub, water-course, herbaceous border, meant not

only itself, but the surveying of grades, transporting of soil,

tunnelling for drainage, conducting of water, the business

correspondence and paying of bills, which had preceded its existence;

and she would have cared for it far less--perhaps not at all--had it

sprung into being unassisted, like the random shadbushes and wild cherry

trees beyond the gates.

The faint spring loveliness reached her somehow, in long washes of pale

green, and the blurred mauve of budding vegetation; but her eyes could

not linger on any particular beauty without its dissolving into soil,

manure, nurserymen's catalogues, and bills again--bills. It had all cost

a terrible lot of money; but she was proud of that too--to her it was

part of the beauty, part of the exquisite order and suitability which

reigned as much in the simulated wildness of the rhododendron glen as in

the geometrical lines of the Dutch garden.

"Seventy-five thousand bulbs this year!" she thought, as the motor swept

by the sculptured gateway, just giving and withdrawing a flash of turf

sheeted with amber and lilac, in a setting of twisted and scalloped

evergreens.

Twenty-five thousand more bulbs than last year ... that was how she

liked it to be. It was exhilarating to spend more money each year, to be

always enlarging and improving, in small ways as well as great, to face

unexpected demands with promptness and energy, beat down exorbitant

charges, struggle through difficult moments, and come out at the end of

the year tired but victorious, with improvements made, bills paid, and a

reassuring balance in the bank. To Pauline that was "life."

And how her expenditure at Cedarledge was justifying itself! Her

husband, drawn by its fresh loveliness, had voluntarily given up his

annual trip to California, the excitement of tarpon-fishing, the

independence of bachelorhood--all to spend a quiet month in the country

with his wife and children. Pauline felt that even the twenty-five

thousand additional bulbs had had a part in shaping his decision. And

what would he say when he saw the new bathrooms, assisted at the village

fire-drill, and plunged into the artificially warmed waters of the new

swimming pool? A mist of happiness rose to her eyes as she looked out on

the spring-misted landscape.

Nona had not followed her mother into the house. Her dogs at her heels,

she plunged down hill to the woods and lake. She knew nothing of what

Cedarledge had cost, but little of the labour of its making. It was

simply the world of her childhood, and she could see it from no other

angle, nor imagine it as ever having been different. To her it had

always worn the same enchantment, stretched to the same remote

distances. At nineteen it was almost the last illusion she had left.

In the path by the lake she felt herself drawn back under the old spell.

Those budding branches, the smell of black peaty soil quivering with

life, the woodlands faintly starred with dogwood, all were the setting

of childish adventures, old games with Jim, Indian camps on the

willow-fringed island, and innocent descents among the rhododendrons to

boat or bathe by moonlight.

The old skiff had escaped Mrs. Manford's annual "doing-up" and still

leaked through the same rusty seams. Pushing out upon the lake, Nona

leaned on the oars and let the great mockery of the spring dilate her

heart...

Manford questioned: "All right, eh? Warm enough? Not going too fast? The

air's still sharp up here in the hills;" and Lita settled down beside

him into one of the deep silences that enfolded her as softly as her

furs. By turning his head a little he could just see the tip of her nose

and the curve of her upper lip between hat-brim and silver fox; and the

sense of her, so close and so still, sunk in that warm animal hush which

he always found so restful, dispelled his last uneasiness, and made her

presence at his side seem as safe and natural as his own daughter's.

"Just as well you sent the boy by train, though--I foresaw I'd get off

too late to suit the young gentleman's hours."

She curled down more deeply at his side, with a contented laugh.

Manford, intent on the steering wheel, restrained the impulse to lay a

hand over hers, and kept his profile steadily turned to her. It was

wonderful, how successfully his plan was working out ... how

reasonable she'd been about it in the end. Poor child! No doubt she

would always be reasonable with people who knew how to treat her. And he

flattered himself that he did. It hadn't been easy, just at first--but

now he'd struck the right note and meant to hold it. Not paternal,

exactly: she would have been the first to laugh at anything as

old-fashioned as that. Heavy fathers had gone out with the rest of the

_tremolo_ effects. No; but elder brotherly. That was it. The same free and

friendly relation which existed, say, between Jim and Nona. Why, he had

actually tried chaffing Lita, and she hadn't minded--he had made fun of

that ridiculous Ardwin, and she had just laughed and shrugged. That

little shrug--when her white shoulder, as the dress slipped from it,

seemed to be pushing up into a wing! There was something birdlike and

floating in all her motions... Poor child, poor little girl... He

really felt like her elder brother; and his looking-glass told him that

he didn't look much too old for the part...

The sense of having just grazed something dark and lurid, which had

threatened to submerge them, gave him an added feeling of security, a

holiday feeling, as if life stretched before him as safe and open as his

coming fortnight at Cedarledge. How glad he was that he had given up his

tarpon-fishing, managed to pack Jim and Wyant off to Georgia, and

secured this peaceful interval in which to look about him and take stock

of things before the grind began again!

The day before yesterday--just after Pauline's departure--it had seemed

as if all their plans would be wrecked by one of Wyant's fits of

crankiness. Wyant always enjoyed changing his mind after every one

else's was made up; and at the last moment he had telephoned to say that

he wasn't well enough to go south. He had rung up Pauline first, and

being told that she had left had communicated with Jim; and Jim,

distracted, had appealed to Manford. It was one of his father's usual

attacks of "nervousness"; cousin Eleanor had seen it coming, and tried

to cut down the whiskies-and-sodas; finally Jim begged Manford to drop

in and reason with his predecessor.

These visits always produced a profound impression on Wyant; Manford

himself, for all his professional acuteness, couldn't quite measure the

degree or guess the nature of the effect, but he felt his power, and

preserved it by seeing Wyant as seldom as possible. This time, however,

it seemed as if things might not go as smoothly as usual. Wyant, who

looked gaunt and excited, tried to carry off the encounter with the

jauntiness he always assumed in Manford's presence. "My dear fellow! Sit

down, do. Cigar? Always delighted to see my successor. Any little hints

I can give about the management of the concern--"

It was his usual note, but exaggerated, overemphasized, lacking the

Wyant touch--and he had gone on: "Though why the man who has failed

should offer advice to the man who has succeeded, I don't know. Well, in

this case it's about Jim... Yes, you're as fond of Jim as I am, I

know... Still, he's _my_ son, eh? Well, I'm not satisfied that it's a

good thing to take him away from his wife at this particular moment.

Know I'm old-fashioned, of course ... all the musty old traditions

have been superseded. You and your set have seen to that--introduced the

breezy code of the prairies... But my son's my son; he wasn't brought

up in the new way, and, damn it all, Manford, you understand; well,

no--I suppose there are some things you never _will_ understand, no matter

how devilish clever you are, and how many millions you've made."

The apple-cart had been near upsetting; but if Manford didn't understand

poor Wyant's social code he did know how to keep his temper when it was

worth while, and how to talk to a weak overexcited man who had been

drinking too hard, and who took no exercise.

"Worried about Jim, eh? Yes--I don't wonder. I am too. Fact is, Jim's

worked himself to a standstill, and I feel partly responsible for it,

for I put him onto that job at the bank, and he's been doing it too

well--overdoing it. That's the whole trouble, and that's why I feel

responsible to you all for getting him away as soon as possible, and

letting him have a complete holiday... Jim's young--a fortnight off

will straighten him out. But you're the only person who can get him away

from his wife and baby, and wherever Lita is there'll be jazz and

nonsense, and bills and bothers; that's why his mother and I have

offered to take the lady on for a while, and give him his chance. As man

to man, Wyant, I think we two ought to stand together and see this thing

through. If we do, I guarantee everything will come out right. Do you

good too--being off like that with your boy, in a good climate, loafing

on the beach and watching Jim recuperate. Wish I could run down and join

you--and I don't say I won't make a dash for it, just for a week-end, if

I can break away from the family. A-1 fishing at the island--and I know

you used to be a great fisherman. As for Lita, she'll be safe enough

with Pauline and Nona."

The trick was done.

But why think of it as a trick, when at the time he had meant every word

he spoke? Jim _was_ dead-beat--_did_ need a change--and yet could only have

been got away on the pretext of having to take his father south. Queer,

how in some inner fold of one's conscience a collection of truths could

suddenly seem to look like a tissue of lies! ... Lord, but what morbid

rubbish! Manford was on his honour to make the whole thing turn out as

true as it sounded, and he was going to. And there was an end of it. And

here was Cedarledge. The drive hadn't lasted a minute...

How lovely the place looked in the twilight, a haze of tender tints

melting into shadow, the long dark house-front already gemmed with

orange panes!

"You'll like it, won't you, Lita?" A purr of content at his elbow.

If only Pauline would have the sense to leave him alone, let him enjoy

it all in Lita's lazy inarticulate way, not cram him with statistics and

achievements, with expenditures and results. He was so tired of her

perpetual stock-taking, her perpetual rendering of accounts and

reckoning up of interest. He admired it all, of course--he admired

Pauline herself more than ever. But he longed to let himself sink into

the spring sweetness as a man might sink on a woman's breast, and just

feel her quiet hands in his hair.

"There's the dogwood! Look! Never seen it in bloom here before, have

you? It's one of our sights." He had counted a good deal on the effect

of the dogwood. "Well, here we are--Jove, but it's good to be here! Why,

child, I believe you've been asleep..." He lifted her, still

half-drowsing, from the motor--

And now, the illuminated threshold, Powder, the footmen, the inevitable

stack of letters--and Pauline.

But outside the spring dusk was secretly weaving its velvet spell. He

said to himself: "Shouldn't wonder if I slept ten hours at a stretch

tonight."

XXI

THE last day before her husband's arrival had been exhausting to

Pauline; but she could not deny that the results were worth the effort.

When had she ever before heard Dexter say on such a full note of

satisfaction: "Jove, but it's good to be back! What have you done to

make the place look so jolly?", or seen his smiling glance travel so

observantly about the big hall with its lamps and flowers and blazing

hearth? "Well, Lita, this is better than town, eh? You didn't know what

a good place Cedarledge could be! Don't rush off upstairs--they're

bringing the baby down. Come over to the fire and warm up; it's nipping

here in the hills. Hullo, Nona, you quiet mouse--didn't even see you,

curled up there in your corner..."

Yes; the arrival had been perfect. Even Lita's kiss had seemed

spontaneous. And Dexter had praised everything, noticed all the

improvements; had voluntarily announced that he meant to inspect the new

heating system and the model chicken hatchery the next morning.

"Wonderful, what a way you have of making things a hundred per cent

better when they seemed all right before! I suppose even the eggs at

breakfast tomorrow will be twice their normal size."

One such comment paid his wife for all she had done, and roused her

inventive faculty to fresh endeavour. Wasn't there something else she

could devise to provoke his praise? And the beauty of it was that it all

looked as if it had been done so easily. The casual observer would never

have suspected that the simple life at Cedarledge gave its smiling

organizer more trouble than a season of New York balls.

That also was part of Pauline's satisfaction. She even succeeded in

persuading herself, as she passed through the hall with its piled-up

golf clubs and tennis rackets, its motor coats and capes and scarves

stacked on the long table, and the muddy terriers comfortably rolled up

on chintz-cushioned settles, that it was really all as primitive and

impromptu as it looked, and that she herself had always shared her

husband's passion for stamping about in the mud in tweed and homespun.

"One of these days," she thought, "we'll give up New York altogether,

and live here all the year round, like an old-fashioned couple, and

Dexter can farm while I run the poultry-yard and dairy." Instantly her

practical imagination outlined the plan of an up-to-date chicken-farm on

a big scale, and calculated the revenues to be drawn from really

scientific methods of cheese and butter-making. Spring broilers, she

knew, were in ever-increasing demand, and there was a great call in

restaurants and hotels for the little foreign-looking cream-cheeses in

silver paper...

"The Marchesa has rung up again, madam," Powder reminded her, the second

morning at breakfast. Everybody came down to breakfast at Cedarledge; it

was part of the simple life. But it generally ended in Pauline's

throning alone behind the tea-urn, for her husband and daughter revelled

in unpunctuality when they were on a holiday, and Lita's inability to

appear before luncheon was tacitly taken for granted.

"The Marchesa?" Pauline was roused from the placid enjoyment of her

new-laid egg and dewy butter. Why was it that one could never completely

protect one's self against bores and bothers? They had done everything

they could for Amalasuntha, and were now discovering that gratitude may

take more troublesome forms than neglect.

"The Marchesa would like to consult you about the date of the Cardinal's

reception."

Ah, then it was a fact--it was really settled! A glow of satisfaction

swept away Pauline's indifference, and her sense of fairness obliged her

to admit that, for such a service, Amalasuntha had a right to a Sunday

at Cedarledge. "It will bore her to death to spend two days here alone

with the family; but she will like to be invited, and in the course of

time she'll imagine it was a big house-party," Pauline reflected.

"Very well, Powder. Please telephone that I shall expect the Marchesa

next Saturday."

That gave them, at any rate, the inside of a week to themselves. After

six days alone with his women-kind perhaps even Dexter would not be

sorry for a little society; and if so, Pauline, with the Marchesa as a

bait, could easily drum up a country-neighbour dinner. The Toys, she

happened to remember, were to be at the Greystock Country Club over

Easter. She smiled at the thought that this might have made Dexter

decide to give up California for Cedarledge. She was not afraid of Mrs.

Toy any longer, and even recognized that her presence in the

neighbourhood might be useful. Pauline could never wholly believe--at

least not for many hours together--that people could be happy in the

country without all sorts of social alleviations; and six days of quiet

seemed to her measurable only in terms of prehistoric eras. When had her

mind ever had such a perspective to range over? Knowing it could be

shortened at will she sighed contentedly, and decided to devote the

morning to the study of a new refrigerating system she had recently seen

advertised.

Dexter had not yet made his tour of inspection with her; but that was

hardly surprising. The first morning he had slept late, and lounged

about on the terrace in the balmy sunshine. In the afternoon they had

all motored to Greystock for a round of golf; and today, on coming down

to breakfast, Pauline had learned with surprise that her husband, Nona

and Lita were already off for an early canter, leaving word that they

would breakfast on the road. She did not know whether to marvel most at

Lita's having been coaxed out of bed before breakfast, or at Dexter's

taking to the saddle after so many years. Certainly the Cedarledge air

was wonderfully bracing and rejuvenating; she herself was feeling its

effects. And though she would have liked to show her husband all the

improvements she felt no impatience, but only a quiet satisfaction in

the success of her plans. If they could give Jim back a contented Lita

the object of their holiday would be attained; and in a glow of optimism

she sat down at her writing-table and dashed off a joyful letter to her

son.

"Dexter is wonderful; he has already coaxed Lita out for a ride before

breakfast... Isn't that a triumph? When you get back you won't know

her... I shouldn't have a worry left if I didn't think Nona is looking

too pale and drawn. I shall persuade her to take a course of

Inspirational treatment as soon as we get back to town. By the way," her

pen ran on, "have you heard the news about Stan Heuston? People say he's

gone to Europe with that dreadful Merrick woman, and that now Aggie will

really have to divorce him... Nona, who has always been such a friend

of Stan's, has of course heard the report, but doesn't seem to know any

more than the rest of us..."

Nothing amused Arthur Wyant more than to be supplied with such tit-bits

of scandal before they became common property. Pauline couldn't help

feeling that father and son must find the evenings long in their island

bungalow; and in the overflow of her own satisfaction she wanted to do

what she could to cheer them.

In spite of her manifold occupations the day seemed long. She had

visited the baby, seen the cook, consulted with Powder about the working

of the new burglar-alarm, gone over the gardens, catalogues in hand,

with the head-gardener, walked down to the dairy and the poultry yard to

say that Mr. Manford would certainly inspect them both the next day, and

called up Maisie Bruss to ask news of her mother, and tell her to

prepare a careful list for the reception to the Cardinal; yet an

astonishing amount of time still remained. It was delightful to be in

the country, to study the working-out of her improvements, and do her

daily exercises with windows open on the fresh hill breezes; but already

her real self was projected forward into complicated plans for the

Cardinal's entertainment. She wondered if it would not be wise to run up

to town the next morning and consult Amalasuntha; and reluctantly

decided that a talk on the telephone would do.

The talk was long, and on the whole satisfactory; but if Maisie had been

within reach the arrangements for the party would have made more

progress. It was most unlucky that the doctors thought Maisie ought to

stay with her mother till the latter could get a private room at the

hospital. ("A room, of course, Maisie dear; I won't have her in a ward.

Not for the world! Just put it down on your account, please. So glad to

do it!") She really was glad to do all she could; but it was unfortunate

(and no one would feel it more than Maisie) that Mrs. Bruss should have

been taken ill just then. To fill the time, Pauline decided to go for a

walk with the dogs.

When she returned she found Nona, still in her riding-habit, settled in

a sofa-corner in the library, and deep in a book.

"Why, child, where did you drop from? I didn't know you were back."

"The others are not. Lita suddenly took it into her head that it would

be fun to motor over to Greenwich and dine at the Country Club, and so

father got a motor at Greystock and telephoned for one of the grooms to

fetch the horses. It sounded rather jolly, but I was tired, so I came

home. It's nearly full moon, and they'll have a glorious run back." Nona

smiled up at her mother, as if to say that the moon made all the

difference.

"Oh, but that means dancing, and getting home at all hours! And I

promised Jim to see that Lita kept quiet, and went to bed early. What's

the use of our having persuaded her to come here? Your father ought to

have refused to go."

"If he had, there were plenty of people lunching at Greystock who would

have taken her on. You know--the cocktail crowd. That's why father

sacrificed himself."

Pauline reflected. "I see. Your father always has to sacrifice himself.

I suppose there's no use trying to make Lita listen to reason."

"Not unless one humours her a little. Father sees that. We mustn't let

her get bored here--she won't stay if we do."

Pauline felt a sudden weariness in all her bones. It was as if the

laboriously built-up edifice of the simple life at Cedarledge had

already crumbled into dust at a kick of Lita's little foot. The

engine-house, the poultry yard, the new burglar-alarm and the heating of

the swimming pool--when would Dexter ever have time to inspect and

admire them, if he was to waste his precious holiday in scouring the

country after Lita?

"Then I suppose you and I dine alone," Pauline said, turning a pinched

little smile on her daughter.

XXII

WHAT a time of year it was--the freed earth suddenly breaking into life

from every frozen seam! Manford wondered if he had ever before had time

to feel the impetuous loveliness of the American spring.

In spite of his drive home in the small hours he had started out early

the next morning for a long tramp. Sleep--how could a man sleep with

that April moonlight in his veins? The moon that was everywhere--caught

in pearly puffs on the shadbush branches, scattered in ivory drifts of

wild plum bloom, tipping the grasses of the wayside with pale

pencillings, sheeting the recesses of the woodland with pools of icy

silver. A freezing burning magic, into which a man plunged, and came out

cold and aglow, to find everything about him as unreal and incredible as

himself...

After the blatant club restaurant, noise, jazz, revolving couples,

Japanese lanterns, screaming laughter, tumultuous good-byes, this white

silence, the long road unwinding and twisting itself up again, blind

faces of shuttered farmhouses, black forests, misty lakes--a cut through

a world in sleep, all dumb and moon-bemused...

The contrast was beautiful, intolerable...

Sleep? He hadn't even gone to bed. Just plunged into a bath, and

stretched out on his lounge to see the dawn come. A mysterious sight

that, too; the cold fingers of the light remaking a new world, while men

slept, unheeding, and imagined they would wake to some familiar

yesterday. Fools!

He breakfasted--ravenously--before his wife was down, and swung off with

a couple of dogs on a long tramp, he didn't care where.

Even the daylight world seemed unimaginably strange: as if he had never

really looked at it before. He walked on slowly for three or four miles,

vaguely directing himself toward Greystock. His long tramps as a boy, in

his farming days, had given him the habit of deliberate steady walking,

and the unwonted movement refreshed rather than tired him--or at least,

while it tired his muscles, it seemed to invigorate his brain. Excited?

No--just pleasantly stimulated...

He stretched himself out under a walnut tree on a sunny slope, lit his

pipe and gazed abroad over fields and woods. All the land was hazy with

incipient life. The dogs hunted and burrowed, and then came back to doze

at his feet with pleasant dreamings. The sun on his face felt warm and

human, and gradually life began to settle back into its old ruts--a

comfortable routine, diversified by pleasant episodes. Could it ever be

more, to a man past fifty?

But after a while a chill sank on his spirit. He began to feel cold and

hungry, and set out to walk again.

Presently he found it was half-past eleven--time to be heading for home.

Home; and the lunch-table; Pauline; and Nona; and Lita. Oh, God, no--not

yet... He trudged on, slowly and sullenly, deciding to pick up a

mouthful of lunch somewhere by the way.

At a turn of the road he caught sight of a woman's figure strolling

across a green slope above him. Strong and erect in her trim golfing

skirt, she came down in his direction swinging a club in her hand. Why,

sure enough, he was actually on the edge of the Greystock course! The

woman was alone, without companions or caddies--going around for a trial

spin, or perhaps simply taking a stroll, as he was, drinking in the

intoxicating air...

"Hul_lo_!" she called, and he found himself advancing toward Gladys Toy.

Was this active erect woman in her nut-brown sweater and plaited skirt

the same as the bejewelled and redundant beauty of so many wearisome

dinners? Something of his old interest--the short-lived fancy of a week

or two--revived in him as she swung along, treading firmly but lightly

on her broad easy shoes.

"Hul_lo_!" he responded. "Didn't know you were here."

"I wasn't. I only came last night. Isn't it glorious?" Even her

slow-dripping voice moved faster and had a livelier ring. Decidedly, he

admired a well-made woman, a woman with curves and volume--all the more

after the stripped skeletons he had dined among the night before. Mrs.

Toy had height enough to carry off her pounds, and didn't look ashamed

of them, either.

"Glorious? Yes, you _are_!" he said.

"Oh, _me_?"

"What else did you mean, then?"

"Don't be silly! How did you get here?"

"On my feet."

"Gracious! From Cedarledge? You must be dead."

"Don't you believe it. I walked over to lunch with you."

"You've just said you didn't know I was here."

"You mustn't believe everything I say."

"All right. Then I won't believe you walked over to lunch with me."

"Will you believe me when I tell you you're awfully beautiful?"

"Yes!" she challenged him.

"And that I want to kiss you?"

She smiled with the eyes of a tired swimmer, and he saw that her slender

stock of repartee was exhausted. "Herman'll be here tonight," she said.

"Then let's make the most of today."

"But I've asked some people to lunch at the club."

"Then you'll chuck them, and come off and lunch with me somewhere else."

"Oh, will I--shall I?" She laughed, and he saw her breast rise on her

shortened breath. He caught her to him and planted a kiss in the middle

of her laughter.

"Now will you?"

She was a rich armful, and he remembered how splendid he had thought

plump rosy women in his youth, before money and fashion imposed their

artificial standards.

When he reëntered the doors of Cedarledge the cold spring sunset was

slanting in through the library windows on the tea-table at which his

wife and Nona sat. Of Lita there was no sign; Manford heard with

indolent amusement that she was reported to be just getting up. His

sentiment about Lita had settled into fatherly indulgence; he no longer

thought the epithet inappropriate. But underneath the superficial

kindliness he felt for her, as for all the world, he was aware of a

fundamental indifference to most things but his own comfort and

convenience. Such was the salutary result of fresh air and recovered

leisure. How absurd to work one's self into a state of fluster about

this or that--money or business or women! Especially women. As he looked

back on the last weeks he saw what a fever of fatigue he must have been

in to take such an exaggerated view of his own emotions. After three

days at Cedarledge serenity had descended on him like a benediction.

Gladys Toy's cheeks were as smooth as nectarines; and the keen morning

light had shown him that she wasn't in the least made up. He recalled

the fact with a certain pleasure, and then dismissed her from his

mind--or rather she dropped out of herself. He wasn't in the humour to

think long about anybody or anything ... he revelled in his own

laziness and indifference.

"Tea? Yes; and a buttered muffin by all means. Several of them. I'm as

hungry as the devil. Went for a long tramp this morning before any of

you were up. Mrs. Toy ran across me, and brought me back in her new

two-seater. A regular beauty--the car, I mean--you'll have to have one

like it, Nona... Jove, how good the fire feels ... and what is it

that smells so sweet? Carnations--why, they're giants! We must go over

the green-houses tomorrow, Pauline; and all the rest of it. I want to

take stock of all your innovations."

At that moment he felt able to face even the tour of inspection, and all

the facts and calculations it would evoke. Everything seemed easy now

that he had found he could shake off his moonlight obsession by spending

a few hours with a pretty woman who didn't mind being kissed. He was to

meet Mrs. Toy again the day after tomorrow; and in the interval she

would suffice to occupy his mind when he had nothing more interesting to

think of.

As he was putting a match to his pipe Lita came into the room with her

long glide. Her boy was perched on her shoulder, and she looked like one

of Crivelli's enigmatic Madonnas carrying a little red-haired Jesus.

"Gracious! Is this breakfast or tea? I seem to have overslept myself

after our joy-ride," she said, addressing a lazy smile to Manford.

She dropped to her knees before the fire and held up the boy to Pauline.

"Kiss his granny," she commanded in her faintly derisive voice.

It was very pretty, very cleverly staged; but Manford said to himself

that she was too self-conscious, and that her lips were too much

painted. Besides, he had always hated women with prominent cheekbones

and hollows under them. He settled back comfortably into the afternoon's

reminiscences.

XXIII

DECIDEDLY, there was a different time-measure for life in town and in

the country.

The dinner for Amalasuntha organized (and the Toys secured for it),

there were still two days left in that endless inside of a week which

was to have passed so rapidly. Yet everything had gone according to

Pauline's wishes. Dexter had really made the promised round of house and

grounds, and had extended his inspection to dairy, poultry yard and

engine-house. And he had approved of everything--approved almost too

promptly and uncritically. Was it because he had not been sufficiently

interested to note defects, or at any rate to point them out? The

suspicion, which stirred in his wife when she observed that he walked

through the cow-stables without making any comment on the defective

working of the new ventilating system, became a certainty when, on their

return to the house, she suggested their going over the accounts

together. "Oh, as long as the architect has o.k'd them! Besides, it's

too late now to do anything, isn't it? And your results are so splendid

that I don't see how they could be overpaid. Everything seems to be

perfect--"

"Not the ventilating system in the Alderneys' stable, Dexter."

"Oh, well; can't that be arranged? If it can't, put it down to profit

and loss. I never enjoyed anything more than my swim this morning in the

pool. You've managed to get the water warmed to exactly the right

temperature."

He slipped out to join Nona on the putting green below the terrace.

Yes; everything was all right; he was evidently determined that

everything should be. It had been the same about Michelangelo's debts.

At first he had resisted his wife's suggestion that they should help to

pay them off, in order to escape the young man's presence in New York;

then he had suddenly promised the Marchesa to settle the whole amount,

without so much as a word to Pauline. It was as if he were engrossed in

some deep and secret purpose, and resolved to clear away whatever

threatened to block his obstinate advance. She had seen him thus

absorbed when a "big case" possessed him. But there were no signs now of

professional preoccupation; no telephoning, wiring, hurried arrivals of

junior members or confidential clerks. He seemed to have shaken off "the

office" with all his other cares. There was something about his serene

good humour that obscurely frightened her.

Once she might have ascribed it to an interest--an exaggerated

interest--in his step-son's wife. That idea had already crossed

Pauline's mind: she remembered its cold brush on the evening when her

husband had come home unexpectedly to see her, and had talked so

earnestly and sensibly about bringing Lita and her boy to Cedarledge.

The mere flit of a doubt--no more; and even then Pauline had felt its

preposterousness, and banished it in disgust and fear.

Now she smiled at the fear. Her husband's manner to Lita was

perfect--easy, good humoured but slightly ironic. At the time of Jim's

marriage Dexter had had that same smile. He had thought the bride silly

and pretentious, he had even questioned her good looks. And now the

first week at Cedarledge showed that, if his attitude had grown

kindlier, it was for Jim's sake, not Lita's. Nona and Lita were together

all day long; when Manford joined them he treated both in the same way,

as a man treats two indulged and amusing daughters.

What was he thinking of, then? Gladys Toy again, perhaps? Pauline had

imagined that was over. Even if it were not, it no longer worried her.

Dexter had had similar "flare-ups" before, and they hadn't lasted.

Besides, Pauline had gradually acquired a certain wifely philosophy, and

was prepared to be more lenient to her second husband than to the first.

As wives grew older they had to realize that husbands didn't always keep

pace with them...

Not that she felt herself too old for Manford's love; all her early

illusions had rushed back to her the night he had made her give up the

Rivington dinner. But her dream had not survived that evening. She had

understood then that he meant they should be "only friends"; that was

all the future was to hold for her. Well; for a grandmother it ought to

be enough. She had no patience with the silly old women who expected

"that sort of nonsense" to last. Still, she meant, on her return to

town, to consult a new Russian who had invented a radium treatment which

absolutely wiped out wrinkles. He called himself a Scientific Initiate ...

the name fascinated her.

From these perplexities she was luckily distracted by the urgent

business of the Cardinal's reception. Even without Maisie she could do a

good deal of preparatory writing and telephoning; but she was mortified

to find how much her handwriting had suffered from the long habit of

dictation. She never wrote a note in her own hand nowadays--except to

distinguished foreigners, since Amalasuntha had explained that they

thought typed communications ill-bred. And her unpractised script was so

stiff and yet slovenly that she decided she must have her hands

"treated" as she did her other unemployed muscles. But how find time for

this new and indispensable cure? Her spirits rose with the invigorating

sense of being once more in a hurry...

Nona sat on the south terrace in the sun. The Cedarledge experiment had

lasted eight days now, and she had to own that it had turned out better

than she would have thought possible.

Lita was giving them wonderfully little trouble. After the first flight

to Greenwich she had shown no desire for cabarets and night-clubs, but

had plunged into the alternative excitement of violent outdoor sports;

relapsing, after hours of hard exercise, into a dreamy lassitude

unruffled by outward events. She never spoke of her husband, and Nona

did not know if Jim's frequent--too frequent--letters, were answered, or

even read. Lita smiled vaguely when he was mentioned, and merely

remarked, when her mother-in-law once risked an allusion to the future:

"I thought we were here to be cured of plans." And Pauline effaced her

blunder with a smile.

Nona herself felt more and more like one of the trench-watchers pictured

in the war-time papers. There she sat in the darkness on her narrow

perch, her eyes glued to the observation-slit which looked out over

seeming emptiness. She had often wondered what those men thought about

during the endless hours of watching, the days and weeks when nothing

happened, when no faintest shadow of a skulking enemy crossed their span

of no-man's land. What kept them from falling asleep, or from losing

themselves in waking dreams, and failing to give warning when the attack

impended? She could imagine a man led out to be shot in the Flanders mud

because, at such a moment, he had believed himself to be dozing on a

daisy bank at home...

Since her talk with Aggie Heuston a sort of _curare_ had entered into her

veins. She was sharply aware of everything that was going on about her,

but she felt unable to rouse herself. Even if anything that mattered

ever did happen again, she questioned if she would be able to shake off

the weight of her indifference. Was it really ten days now since that

talk with Aggie? And had everything of which she had then been warned

fulfilled itself without her lifting a finger? She dimly remembered

having acted in what seemed a mood of heroic self-denial; now she felt

only as if she had been numb. What was the use of fine motives if, once

the ardour fallen, even they left one in the lurch?

She thought: "I feel like the oldest person in the world, and yet with

the longest life ahead of me ..." and a shiver of loneliness ran over

her.

Should she go and hunt up the others? What difference would that make?

She might offer to write notes for her mother, who was upstairs plunged

in her visiting-list; or look in on Lita, who was probably asleep after

her hard gallop of the morning; or find her father, and suggest going

for a walk. She had not seen her father since lunch; but she seemed to

remember that he had ordered his new Buick brought round. Off again--he

was as restless as the others. All of them were restless nowadays. Had

he taken Lita with him, perhaps? Well--why not? Wasn't he here to look

after Lita? A sudden twitch of curiosity drew Nona to her feet, and sent

her slowly upstairs to her sister-in-law's room. Why did she have to

drag one foot after the other, as if some hidden influence held her

back, signalled a mute warning not to go? What nonsense! Better make a

clean breast of it to herself once for all, and admit--

"I beg pardon, Miss." It was the ubiquitous Powder at her heels. "If

you're going up to Mrs. Manford's sitting-room would you kindly tell her

that Mr. Manford has telephoned he won't be back from Greystock till

late, and she's please not to wait dinner?" Powder looked a little as if

he would rather not give that particular message himself.

"Greystock? Oh, all right. I'll tell her."

Golf again--golf and Gladys Toy. Nona gave her clinging preoccupations a

last shake. This was really a lesson to her! To be imagining horrible

morbid things about her father while he was engaged in a perfectly

normal elderly man's flirtation with a stupid woman he would forget as

soon as he got back to town! A real Easter holiday diversion. "After

all, he gave up his tarpon-fishing to come here, and Gladys isn't a bad

substitute--as far as weight goes. But a good deal less exciting as

sport." A dreary gleam of amusement crossed her mind.

Softly she pushed open the door of one of the perfectly appointed

spare-rooms: a room so studiously equipped with every practical

convenience--from the smoothly-hung window-ventilators to the jointed

dressing-table lights, from the little portable telephone, and the

bed-table with folding legs, to the tall threefold mirror which lost no

curve of the beauty it reflected--that even Lita's careless ways seemed

subdued to the prevailing order.

Lita was on the lounge, one long arm drooping, the other folded behind

her in the immemorial attitude of sleeping beauty. Sleep lay on her

lightly, as it does on those who summon it at will. It was her habitual

escape from the boredom between thrills, and in such intervals of

existence as she was now traversing she plunged back into it after every

bout of outdoor activity.