By mid-January Louise had completed her inventory of the situation. She
faced her position without flinching and with no visible sign of the
distress the gradually unfolding picture caused her, save a certain
silent preoccupation from which Laura vainly sought to rouse her by
taking her on incessant rounds of the theatres, whisking her off on
short up-State and Long Island motor tours, and providing other means of
distraction and excitement. Laura's heart ached for Louise. Her own
girlhood had been clouded by trouble. Orphaned at sixteen, an heiress
with no disinterested advisors save those who were the legal guardians
of her person and estate, she had yielded shortly after leaving school
to a girlish infatuation and entered upon a surreptitious marriage with
a man who, with his child-wife's large wealth at his disposal, had
surrendered to one dissipation after another until, eventually becoming
a drug fiend, he had, in his treatment of her, developed into such an
utterly savage and irresponsible brute that she was compelled to divorce
him, after which he had been put under permanent restraint. It had taken
Laura long years to recover her natural equipoise after her bitter
disillusionment. Louise's trouble, Laura could not help apprehending,
was even more grievous than her own had been, intensified as she knew it
must be by the girl's carefully-screened feeling of humiliation.
Laura admired Louise beyond words for her uncomplaining acceptance of
her bitter bolus.
"I never saw such pluck," she told John Blythe time and again. "It is
the pluck of a thoroughbred. I believe she thoroughly understands
everything now, except that she is in Judd's debt for her education. Her
loyalty to her mother is wonderful, beautiful; far greater than
Antoinette really deserves. I don't remember ever meeting a girl or
woman whom I admired so much as I do Louise Treharne."
Laura could not fail to note how Blythe's clear grey eyes would glisten
when thus she praised the girl.
"Louise is like her father," he would say in reply to Laura's
enthusiasm. "You know what a fine, game man George Treharne was and is.
I'll never forget how generous he was in his treatment of me--and he
tried to prevent me from knowing it, too--when, as a cub lawyer, I was
first starting out on my own hook; and there wasn't the least reason in
life why he should have been so decent to me, either. You remember how
he never whimpered when Antoinette dragged his--Oh, well, no use in
referring to that. But, when I first met the grown-up Louise on the
train--after I accidentally discovered her identity, I mean--I couldn't
help but observe how her resemblance to her father--"
"To whom," Laura watched him with twinkling eyes, "your sense of
responsibility is so great that--er--that--"
Whereupon Blythe would flush hotly and proceed to shrivel Laura with
whatever in the way of polite invective occurred to him in his
confusion.
The thought of leaving her mother for the sake of extricating herself
from a difficult and taxing situation never entered Louise's mind. Her
mother, she felt, needed her. It was not, she considered, a problem for
her interposition; she shrank from the thought of even mentioning it.
She knew that it was an utterly impossible situation; she had a profound
belief that it was not, from its very nature, destined to last; but she
preferred that her mother should take the initiative in casting off the
evil. She clearly saw how, from day to day, her mother was becoming
increasingly conscious of the grave trouble she was heaping upon her
daughter's young shoulders; she perceived how her mother, not inherently
vicious, simply was in the bondage of an ingrained, luxury-loving
selfishness, and that, having been cast out of the social realm in which
she formerly had moved, she was now possessed by a sort of despair
which, more than anything else, prevented her from making the attempt to
extricate herself from the slough.
Louise, then, schooled herself to wait. It was a sort of waiting that
drew heavily upon her natural store of equanimity. But she could see no
other course, and hopefulness is the tandem mate of youth.
"I have lived long enough," Laura said to her one afternoon, when they
were driving, during this trying period when Louise was testing her
adaptability to the utmost, "to have discovered that nothing matters
very much except one's own peace of mind. If one have that, the rest is
all a mirage. I don't mean the peace of mind that proceeds from a
priggish sense of superiority to human weaknesses. That, I am pleased to
say, is a sort of mental peace that I haven't yet experienced, and I
hope I never shall. But when one's hands are just decently clean, and
one at least has tried to shake off the shackles forged by one's own
little meannesses, a sort of satisfying mental quiet ensues that is
worth, I think, more than anything else one finds in life."
"But one's worry for others?" quietly suggested Louise, putting it in
the form of a question.
Laura pressed the girl's hands between her own.
"All of us, dear, must know the meaning of solicitude--often painful
solicitude--for others at some period of our lives," she said, tenderly.
"I know what you mean. You are carrying yourself nobly through a
difficult ordeal. Let that consciousness suffice. You will have the
right to feel proud, in the coming time, to remember that you stood the
test--as we are proud of you now."
"'We?'" said Louise, puzzling.
"We," repeated Laura, steadfastly. "I think you scarcely understand,
dear, how profoundly interested--yes, and chivalrously interested,
too--John Blythe is in your--your problem."
Louise felt the blood rushing to her face.
"Does Mr. Blythe know?" she asked, her cheeks tingling.
"How could he avoid knowing, dear?" rejoined Laura, gently. "He is your
father's lawyer. He is an occasional visitor at your--" she hesitated;
"--visitor on Riverside Drive," she resumed. "And so of course he
knows--everything. You may be glad of that, dear. There is no man in the
world whose friendship I value more highly than that of John Blythe. I
think he would like to have you feel--I know, in fact, that he
would--that he is interested in your--your concerns; that, indeed, in a
way, he is standing guard for you."
Louise studied for a little while.
"I should have understood, of course, that he knew," she said,
hesitatingly. "But it did not occur to me. I am afraid that I should
have been a little reluctant to meet him on those two or three occasions
at your home if I had known that he--" She paused.
"Why, dear child, should you have such a feeling when a man of innate
nobility, who knew you when you were a little girl----"
"It is wrong, I know," put in Louise, hastily. "But I find it so hard to
regard him as--as just a lawyer, you know, Laura. He is not like a
lawyer at all--at least I have not found him so. He is----"
Laura pointed a teasing finger at her, which caused the color to
reappear on Louise's face.
"Don't try to tell me what he is, Louise," said Laura, smiling. "Don't
you suppose I know? But you don't know how intensely glad I am to hear
that you can't regard Mr. Blythe as--as 'just a lawyer.' I shall tell
him that you are going about criticizing his professional ability."
"Don't do that--please!" said Louise in such an obvious panic that Laura
pinched her cheek reassuringly.
The meetings with Blythe to which Louise referred were casual ones in
Laura's apartment. Blythe was in the habit of dropping in occasionally
for coffee--he abominated tea--and a chat at Laura's tea hour in the
late afternoon; and Laura duly noted, not without slyly chaffing him
over it, that he had made this an almost daily habit since his discovery
that he stood a pretty fair gambling chance of finding Louise there
almost any afternoon. Once, when Laura and Louise came in from a drive
which had been prolonged rather later than usual, they entered the
library quietly, to find Blythe, looking decidedly glum, browsing among
the books without the least seeming of being interested in any of them,
for his hands were thrust deep into his pockets and they caught him
yawning most deplorably. But at sight of the two women--one woman, Laura
said, accusingly, to him after Louise had gone home in Laura's car--he
had brightened so suddenly and visibly that Laura had to profess that
her rippling laugh was occasioned by something she had seen during her
drive.
On these occasions Laura had found it imperatively necessary to leave
them together in order to confer with her servants. Louise and Blythe
had talked easily on detached, somewhat light matters, finding an
agreeable mutual plane without effort. Louise, remembering his somewhat
sober preoccupation on the train, had been surprised and pleased--though
she could not have told why--to note his possession of a rather unusual
social charm. She was pleased, too, that, except in the matter of a
remarkable physique, he was not to be rated as a handsome man. His
features were too rugged for that. Strength, keenness and kindliness
shone from his masterful countenance; but he was anything but handsome
judged from the magazine-cover standard. Louise had amused Laura one day
by saying that she found Blythe's face "restful." She had not the least
partiality for men of the generally-accepted straightout handsome type
of features; she was, in truth, a little inclined to be contemptuous of
an excessive facial pulchritude in men. But--again for a reason which
she could scarcely have explained--she was glad that Blythe was perhaps
two inches more than six feet in height, that he was as straight as a
lance, and that he found it necessary to walk sidewise in order to get
his shoulders through some of Laura's lesser doors.
On her last meeting with Blythe Louise had asked him, with a certain
hesitancy which he noticed, if he had written to her father.
"Yes," Blythe had replied, simply, "and I sent him your love." He had
not offered to become more communicative; and Louise, concluding that
his reticence on the subject might be based on a considerateness for her
which it might be unfair for her to seek to fathom, did not mention the
matter to him again. She had an oddly resolute confidence in him,
considering how short the time had been since he had come into her life;
and she felt that, if he now exhibited a taciturnity which puzzled her,
it would be explained in due time.
Louise Treharne belonged to that rare (and therefore radiant) type of
women who know how to wait.
* * * * *
Louise's life at the house on the Drive quickly resolved itself into a
daily programme tinctured with a monotony that could not but wear upon
the spirits of a young woman of a naturally cheerful and gregarious
temperament.
Her mother, generally in a state of feverish unrest that marked her
strained incertitude over a situation which, in a way, was more
intolerable to her than to her daughter because she was guiltily
conscious that she was the maker of it, usually dropped into Louise's
room for an hour's chat during the forenoon. She was alternately
affectionate, stilted, indifferent and petulant in her attitude toward
her daughter. She did not seek, in her brooding self-communings, to
thrust aside the keen consciousness that she was utterly and hopelessly
in the wrong; but this consciousness did not serve to allay her
irritation, even if it was directed against herself. Like most women,
she hated to be in the wrong; and she particularly loathed the thought
of confessing herself in the wrong. She was less immoral than unmoral;
her descent had been due to a sort of warped view as to forbidden
relationships, nourished by an inborn and intense dislike for the
sovereignty of convention--"the tyranny of the smug," she habitually
called it--and based essentially upon her love of luxurious and
extravagant living. But a consciousness of these facts only made her
self-contempt the more keen. She measured and despised her sordidness.
She was not, she fell into the habit of reflecting after her daughter's
return, the victim of anybody but herself; her days of ardor had slipped
away; she well knew that she had not even the excuse of a fondness for
the man who had made her a social pariah. If she had ever experienced
any such a fondness that fact might have mitigated, at least in her own
self-view, the rawness of her course. But she cared nothing for Judd,
which made her case abominable, and she knew it.
Yet her weakened will, her character rendered flaccid by years of
careless self-indulgence, made it acutely difficult for her to
contemplate the thought of abandoning her way of living, even for the
sake of her daughter. Her prettiness was now purely a matter of
meretricious building up; she would soon be forty; she fumed inwardly at
the thought of middle age, which now, for her, was only around the
corner, so to speak; she had been cast off by her own kind; and the
terminal idea of her self-communings always was that, since there was no
hope for her in any event, no matter what she might do, she might as
well finish the scroll. She pushed aside Louise's involvement in the
difficulty as something that would--that would have to--adjust itself. A
way out for Louise must present itself sooner or later; but the way out
for her daughter must be one that would not demand too great a
sacrifice--if any sacrifice at all--on her own part. Perhaps a good
marriage could be contrived for Louise; that would be the easiest and
most natural solution; and she would cast about in her mind for
eligibles on whose sensitive social concepts perhaps her own method of
life would not grate. Her dreary meditations usually terminated with
futilities of this sort.
Louise, fighting back the oppressiveness that had clutched her ever
since her return from school, was cheerful and sunny when her mother was
with her. She made no allusion of any sort to the conditions of her
environment. Her mother, noticing this, was grateful for it, and she was
conscious of a genuine and growing admiration for the mingled dignity
and delicacy of her daughter's behavior. On one of her forenoon visits
to Louise's dressing room the mother herself, swept by a feeling of
remorse in the contemplation of the girl's fragrant, pure-eyed beauty,
could not refrain from touching impulsively upon the nub of her own
unrest.
"My dear," she said to Louise, passing a white and still prettily
rounded arm around her daughter, "do you hate your little mother?"
Louise fought back the tears that suffused her eyes.
"Why do you ask such a thing, dear?" she asked in a voice the hoarseness
of which she strove to disguise.
Her mother did not reply to the question, but went on, turning her head
away:
"Because there are circumstances, conditions that you can't have failed
to notice here that maybe--" She struggled for words. "It has never been
in my heart to do anything except what was right and fair by you, child,
but one drifts, drifts, always drifts----"
She could not proceed.
Louise wrapped her arms about her mother. Neither spoke for a space.
"Nothing can ever change me, dear," said Louise then in her quiet tone.
"It is not for me to judge or condemn. I can--wait. We shall not speak
of it again, shall we, mother?"
Her mother, haggard and with pain-drawn features, smoothed Louise's face
with her hand for a little while and went away without another word. The
girl's eyes were swollen when Laura came for her in her car an hour
later. But Laura did not ask her why.
Louise went nowhere with her mother. Mrs. Treharne made it plain from
the beginning that this was her intention. Louise, for her part,
required no reason. She understood. Nor did Louise seek to re-establish
the friendships she had formed with girls at Miss Mayhew's school, many
of whom now were living in New York or visiting their homes there during
the holiday vacation.
One afternoon, at an opera matinée, Louise, strolling out the entr'acte
in the foyer with Laura, came face to face with Bella Peyton, a girl who
had been graduated from the finishing school with the class ahead of
Louise's. Miss Peyton was with her mother, a stony-eyed,
granite-featured dowager who had often met Louise on her frequent visits
at the school; for her daughter and Louise had been school inseparables.
Bella rushed up cordially to Louise and kissed her enthusiastically.
"You darling!" she exclaimed in the abandonment of her delight at coming
upon the chum of her school days so unexpectedly. "When did you reach
town? And why didn't you come to see me the very instant you returned?"
Mrs. Peyton, who, at sight of Louise, had purposely lagged in the rear,
and whose adamantine countenance reflected intensifying degrees of
frozenness with each word that her daughter was saying to Louise, drew
her adipose person into a posture of icy rigidity, and croaked:
"Bella!"
Mrs. Peyton had not so much as nodded to Louise.
"Why, mamma," Bella broke out, "don't you remember Louise Treharne, my
sworn and subscribed and vowed and vummed chum at Miss Mayhew's?"
"Bella!"
This time it was not merely an adjuration, it was a command.
Bella, perceiving then that something was wrong, flushed. But she was
loyal to her friend.
"You are coming to see me immediately, dear?" she said, hurriedly
shaking hands with Louise in order to obey her mother's command.
"Bella! Come to me at once!" Mrs. Peyton croaked with cutting,
unconscionable rudeness, seizing her daughter by the arm and
incontinently marching her off.
Louise, crimsoning, took the stab without a word.
"The tabby!" broke out Laura, her eyes flashing with indignation.
"Gracious heaven, is it any wonder that men privately sneer at the way
women treat each other? Don't you mind the shocking old cat, Louise;
she'll tear herself to pieces with her own claws some day;" and Laura
was unusually tender and kind in her treatment of Louise for the
remainder of the afternoon. But, after that encounter, Louise learned to
avoid meeting her school friends when, as occasionally happened, she saw
them before they caught sight of her. She felt that they all "knew" or
"would know," and she did not elect to take chances on additional snubs.
Her first formal meeting with Judd had been a trial. It had been an
accidental encounter, happening about a week after Louise's return from
school, and at a time when Mrs. Treharne was in more than one mind as to
whether she would permit Louise to meet Judd at all. Mrs. Treharne and
Judd were stepping out of the huge yellow car at the close of their late
afternoon ride just at the moment when Louise, alone, was returning in
Laura's car. Their meeting on the pavement was inevitable. For a moment
Louise hoped that her mother would permit her to lag behind on pretense
of returning to Laura's car to find some imaginary forgotten article;
but Mrs. Treharne, suddenly deciding that the meeting had best be over
with, since no way of avoiding it, sooner or later, had suggested
itself, called to her; and Louise, very beautiful with her cold-ruddied
cheeks nimbussed by her breeze-blown hair of bronze, walked erect to
where her mother stood with the bulky, red-eyed Judd, who regarded
Louise with a stare of disconcerting admiration.
"My dear Louise," said Mrs. Treharne, obviously quelling a certain
tremulousness in her tone, "permit me to present Mr. Judd; Mr. Judd, my
daughter Louise."
Judd, his mouth still unpleasantly agape, started the preliminary
gesture toward extending his hand. But he made no further progress with
the hand, for he was quick to notice that Louise, at that very instant,
was inserting her loose right hand in her muff. Louise bowed and then
returned to Laura's car in quest of the imaginary article; she desired
to give Judd time to resume his place in his car before she joined her
mother on the steps.
"Demmed handsome, that daughter of yours," Judd commented on Louise to
Mrs. Treharne when he saw her the next afternoon, "but--er--uppish,
what?"
"I can dispense with your generalities on that subject," Mrs. Treharne
had replied.
After that Louise had met Judd casually in the wide, fire-lit
down-stairs hall on two or three occasions, and once at the only one of
her mother's extraordinary Sunday night receptions--the "salon" which at
once provoked and amused Laura--which she attended; but she had
exchanged no word with him. She was not lacking in diplomacy, but there
were some stultifications that she found to be wholly beyond her; and
she was conscious of a certain previously unexperienced difficulty with
her neck when she even inclined her head to Judd.
* * * * *
"Would you care to meet some of my Sunday night people, Louise?" her
mother had asked her. "I dare say Laura has told you they are freaks.
Perhaps some of them are. But there are clever ones among them, and one
must take the gifted with the mediocre. It would not harm you to meet a
few of them. They are not wicked. They only think they are; some of
them, that is. Their wickedness is an amiable abstraction. Shall you be
down?"
It was on a Sunday morning, in Louise's apartments, that Mrs. Treharne
made the suggestion. Louise was conscious of the need of a laugh, even
if it were a politely smothered one; and Laura had comically depicted
her mother's "salon" to her. She told her mother that she had been
waiting for that invitation, which caused Mrs. Treharne to glance
sharply at her to ascertain if Louise already had adopted Laura's point
of view as to the Sunday evening gatherings.
"Do you entertain your people yourself, mother, or is there a--" Louise
stumbled on the word "host."
But her mother was quick to catch her meaning.
"I should not ask you down, else, my dear--you should credit me that
far," she had replied, a tinge of reproach in her tone. And so, an hour
or so after dinner on Sunday night, Louise, willowy yet full-blossomed
and splendid in a simple princesse dress of white broadcloth, a gardenia
nestling in an embrasure of her velvety auburn hair, and a tiny-linked
chain of gold, with aquamarine pendants--a gift from Laura--around her
firm white neck, went, for the first time since she had been in the
house, to the already crowded main floor.
Louise, in her inexperience, could not know that the gathering really
was little less than an apotheosis of the _declasée_; she merely found
some of the people agreeable, others of them unconsciously naïve in
their ebullient enthusiasm over their imaginary achievements or
accomplishments, still others frankly laughable for their indurated
habit of self laudation.
It was in the main, so far as its social side went, an assemblage of
persons, men and women, who, thrust outside the genuine social
breastworks for various and more or less highly-tinctured lapses, thus
foregathered in response to an instinct of gregariousness--an instinct
around which the "birds of a feather" aphorism no doubt was framed.
Having no choice in the matter, these persons were willing to accept the
shadow for the reality. It might almost be said that on every uptown
square of New York there is at least one common meeting point for
similar assemblages of social exiles. Nearly all of the figurantes in
Mrs. Treharne's Sunday evening affairs were _divorcées_ of more or less
note; the "cases" of some of whom had been blazoned in huge red block
type in the yellow newspapers, and "illustrated," in default of genuine
portraits, with blurred "cuts" of no less benevolent or redoubtable
females than the late Mrs. Pinkham or Carrie Nation. The men in the
company who had not already rocketed through the divorce court were
willing, it appeared from their frank method of expressing themselves,
to make that by no means perilous passage; though there was a sprinkling
of younger men, still factors in a social world from which there are no
voluntary expatriates, who attended Mrs. Treharne's Sunday evening
affairs in a spirit of larkishness and glad of the chance to forsake,
for a little while, regions more austere and still under the domination
of at least a tacit repression.
For the rest, there were poetasters who fidgetted until they were called
upon, out of pure sympathy, to read their own verse--some of the latter
obviously "lifted;" temperamental musicians, male and female, who
preferred to sway at or with their instruments with the rooms darkened
while they performed; manufacturers and proselytizers of
personally-conducted and generally quite unintelligible cults, physical,
moral or ethical, all of the cults extending a maximum of "freedom of
action" to the individual; devisers of impromptu or extemporaneous
religions or near-religions, none of which boasted so inconvenient a
restriction as a Decalogue; fashionable or striving-to-be-fashionable
palmists and chiromancers, "swamis," "yogis;" burnoosed, sullen,
white-robed exploiters, from the Near or Far East, of women who mistook
their advanced symptoms of neuresthenia for a hankering for the occult;
and the other unclassified, sycophantic factors of a "Bohemianism" whose
seams were perfectly visible to the naked eye and whose sawdust was only
held in place with the all-together co-operation of the whole artificial
assemblage.
Louise's entrance upon the scene created a stir which caused her to feel
distinctly uncomfortable. She longed for Laura; but Laura had "sworn
off" attending Mrs. Treharne's Sunday evening parties; not from any
selfish motives of caution--for Laura was in keen demand in the social
circle in which she had been born and reared; but simply because she had
at length ceased to extract amusement from the self-idolizing vagaries
of Mrs. Treharne's crew; more briefly still, because they bored her to
extinction.
When the word was buzzed around among the slowly-moving, chattering
assemblage to whom the entire lower floor of the house, including the
conservatory, had been thrown open--that "the tall girl with the air and
the hair" was Mrs. Treharne's daughter--the more privileged ones
adverted to their hostess as Tony--there was a sudden cluttering of the
passageways leading to the room in which Louise was standing with her
mother. In their keenness to catch a glimpse of the "just-bloomed
daughter of Tony" many of them even forsook the long and
generously-provided buffet, than which no greater sign of a consuming
interest or curiosity could be given; for not a few of the raffish
guests appeared to be so patently in need of nourishment--and
stimulant--that they spent the major portion of the evening at the
buffet.
A woman whose vision seemed to be slightly filmed from her inordinate
devotion to the punch lifted her glass, after studying Louise in a sort
of open-mouthed daze for a moment or so, and sang out, in a tone that
she apparently had some difficulty in controlling:
"To Tony's daughter--the Empress Louise!"
The men and women in her neighborhood grabbed for glasses to fill from
the punchbowls and took up the refrain:
"The Empress Louise!"
Louise felt the blood swirling to her head, but she braced herself to
stand the volleying of eyes. Her mother was intensely annoyed and made
not the least effort to conceal her annoyance. When the incident had
been merged in a diversion afforded by a recitation of a Portuguese
madrigal in another room by a man with unkempt hair and untidy
fingernails, Mrs. Treharne glided away from Louise's side for a moment
and found the woman who had proposed the toast. She was still absorbedly
busy at the buffet.
"You are to leave at once, Ethel," she said in a low but determined tone
to the toast-proposer, a woman whose divorce story in the newspapers had
been remarkable for the detailed account of liquid refreshments she had
consumed up and down the world, at foreign hotels and on board yachts,
for a number of years at a stretch. "I shall never forgive you if you
make another scene here."
"All right, Tony," the woman replied, with a vacuous smile. "Not angry
at me, are you, for wishing luck to your little girl--your big girl, I
mean; she _is_ an empress, you know, and--"
Mrs. Treharne guided her to the cloak room and stayed by her side until
she bade her goodnight at the door.
Louise, in the meantime, had been approached by a man whose eyes, she
had noticed with a certain vague disquietude, had been following her
about since her entrance upon the scene.
He was a handsome man of the florid type, with a sweeping blonde
mustache and oddly-restless light brown eyes in which Louise, catching
him devouring her with his gaze at frequent intervals, nervously thought
that she detected certain felinely-topaz glints. He was tall and a
trifle over-heavy; but there was a certain slow-moving, easy air of
adventitious distinction about him which might have been in part lent by
the immaculateness of his evening clothes and his facile way of
disposing of his hands without requiring any article to give them
employment; an art in which even practiced courtiers and carpet knights
occasionally are deficient. Louise did not like his face; she observed,
when she saw, not without a certain vague trepidation, that he was
approaching her, that his over-red and over-full lips, from which the
sweeping mustache was brushed away, were curved in a sort of habitual
sneer which by no stretch of charity could be called a smile; though
that, no doubt, was the desired intent of it.
He bowed low, keeping his eyes upraised on Louise's face, when he
reached her side, and said:
"Miss Treharne?"
Louise, used to more formal methods of meeting new men, inclined her
head.
"You will condone, I hope, Miss Treharne, my seeming breach of formality
in presuming to address you without a presentation," he said, even his
intensified smile failing to efface the sneering curve from his too
visible lips. "But your mother is generous enough to permit her guests
at times--on such occasions as these, for example--to forego formality.
I have been ineffectually trying to reach her for an hour in order to--"
"In order to ask me to do that which you have already done," said Mrs.
Treharne, with quite unusual affability, coming up at that moment and
catching his final words. "Louise, dear, permit me--Mr. Langdon Jesse.
Don't expect her to know, Mr. Jesse, that you are a cotton king. I doubt
if her routine at school permitted her to read the newspapers, even if
they interested her; which I sincerely hope they did not and will not."
Louise had not often seen her mother in so gracious a humor toward any
man; but this fact did not in any sense serve to quell the instinctive
dislike which she immediately felt for Jesse, the "cotton king" of her
mother's somewhat too purposely-significant introduction. She noticed
that his hands were small and obtrusively white; that there was a wave
in his burnished blonde hair; that his large clear-cut features were of
a chiselled regularity; and her natural aversion to the merely handsome
man promptly asserted itself. The sneer of his mouth, and his fixed way
of gazing squarely into her eyes as if his own eyes were forming a
question, disquieted her. She replied in purposed monosyllables to his
rather trivial yet studied questions about her school life. She knew
perfectly well that he was in no wise interested in her school life, but
that he merely was seeking what he considered might be the most engaging
method of capturing her attention. Five minutes after his meeting with
her she devised an excuse and went to her apartments. She threw her
windows wide and let the wintry air bulge the curtains when she reached
her sleeping room; perhaps it was her subconsciousness that told her
that she needed some such a bath of purifying air to obliterate what
intangible traces there might remain of her brief contact with Langdon
Jesse. That night she dreamt persistently of a leopard with large,
blazing eyes of topaz; and an hour after she awoke a large basket of
superb orchids, with Langdon Jesse's card attached, was brought to her.
Laura was with her at the time.
"From Langdon Jesse?" said Laura, knitting her brow. "Did you meet him
last night, Louise?"
"Yes. I disliked him intensely."
"If I were you, dear," suggested Laura, "I should send these orchids to
a hospital. They can of course have no sinister effect upon those who
have not met their donor. But I should be afraid to have you keep any
flowers sent you by Langdon Jesse. They might poison the air. The bald
impudence of him in sending you flowers at all!"
A footman was carrying the orchids to a nearby hospital five minutes
later.