The Unpretenders

		PAGE
	Anne—Just a Plain Woman	9
	Timothy—Only a Writer	33
	Gladys-Marie—Merely a Maid	59
	Sheila—Simply a Society Person	80
	Warner—What Else but a Wag	104
	Chalmers—Clearly a Clubman	126
	Pix—Purely a Philanthropist	147
	Richard—No More than King	178
	Lucia—A Mere Wife	205
	Roger—Plainly an Idler	227

“Perhaps Anne——” suggested Michael.

“Why, yes—certainly, Anne,” seconded Doromea, eagerly. “Of course Timothy’s our friend, but Anne knows that we have just this last chapter and—all we need do is to ask her.”

“Um-m. What is she doing?”

“She was trimming a hat on the west porch a few minutes ago.”

“Trimming a hat? Why, she never has one on her head!” Anne’s husband looked at his unfinished manuscript aggrieved.

“I think it was Gladys-Marie’s hat.” Doromea struggled back of plot to remember. “It had a look of Gladys-Marie—an incoherent sort of cloche, you know, that was meant to have been a sunbonnet.”

Michael laughed. “If you weren’t my sister I should be afraid of you,” he said, looking at her admiringly. “You see too deep—even in hats.”

“But I cannot trim them,” answered Doromea, seriously. “Anne can—she can make the most delicious hat out of an old square of lace or something. I can’t even tack a plume in place and have it look like anything but a curled poker.”

“You can only help write books,” smiled Michael, “and this one”—he smoothed the thick pile of closely written paper—“is the best you’ve ever helped to write. Er—suppose we just go and speak to Anne.”

The two figures, ludicrously alike in spite of the tall stoop of one and the trim roundness of the other, hurried around the house to the west porch.

“Is the book finished?” asked Anne, posing buttercups with an upward glance of amazement.

“No—that is, not quite—just that one more chapter, you know; but——”

“It must be finished to-day,” concluded Doromea, firmly, “and—the post came a few minutes ago and there was a letter from Timothy.”

“Yes?” Anne’s voice warmed. She had never seen Timothy, but Michael and Doromea had made him sound very nice.

“Timothy,” said Doromea, mildly indignant, “with all his excellences, has an abominable habit of not arriving psychologically at all.” (Michael beamed—there was not a phrase of Doromea’s turning whose cleverness he ever lost.) “He is coming this afternoon on the four-thirty,” plumped Doromea, with no cleverness at all.

“I had better meet him with the cart when I go to Aunt Hester’s,” Anne reflected, “unless—perhaps you had planned to meet him yourself, Dorry?”

“No”—Doromea magnanimously overlooked the abbreviation of her cherished name—“no, I hadn’t. Of course you’ve never seen him, but——”

“There’s no one else to get off,” Anne answered, simply.

“Oh, I didn’t mean that. I meant you have never met him, or anything.” Doromea always floundered in her explanations to Anne—perhaps because she found it necessary to make so many.

“Well, that needn’t worry her any,” put in Michael. “Timothy will make her feel at ease right away.” And he smiled at Anne with an affection back of which lurked an impatience to be off and at work, now that incidental disturbances were disposed of.

“Then you’ll meet the four-thirty,” reminded Doromea, impressively.

“But you’re coming in to lunch?” called Anne, seeing them about to start off. “It’s almost time.”

“I don’t know if we’ll bother with lunch to-day,” returned Michael, absently. “You can ring, but don’t wait for us if we don’t come.”

“Gladys-Marie wants to go to the city,” commenced Anne, but the sharp corner of the porch cut off her audience; “and I must read to Aunt Hester and shell the peas,” she finished. “Gladys-Marie!”

“Yes’m—yes, my lady.” There was but one woman in the world to whom Gladys-Marie would acknowledge such subservience, but one woman before whom she would appear instantly—and awesomely.

“Here’s the hat, Gladys-Marie. Run along with it and have a good time, only come back so that you can get dinner; and, Gladys-Marie, perhaps you had better leave a little lunch on the buffet. I don’t believe the others will be quite ready to eat with me.”

“Never are,” muttered Gladys-Marie, handling the hat as though it were Venetian glass. “Sit with their noses glued over an old pad o’ paper all day long, ’n’ the house ’n’ the meals ’n’ Lady Elinore ’n’ me c’n go to—c’n go hang, ’s what I mean,” she apologized to Anne. “Oh, I know you think I’m the pert one with me nerve carried round in me side pocket, but I c’n see, I can; ’n’ if ever I see perruls cast before swine—Gee! it’s plainer ’n any Sunday-school chromo ever tried to be.”

She looked back at the pearl in question with a kind of wrathful tenderness. But the Lady Elinore, apparently, had not heard a word; only the soft part in her warm gold hair was visible above the sewing in her hands.

“She’s awful sweet,” sighed the worldling, pityingly, “’n’ twice as smart with hands as I am. But—my word! she ain’t clever! The way she lets herself get done an’ don’t even squirm about it pickles me!”

 

The fussy little train steamed off with an important backward lunge, as though to say, “There! I did the very best I could for you!” And Anne, who alone with the station-master saw what it had deposited, could understand how it lingered on the siding and switched back and forth several times after it had given every pretence of departing. For the spare, shortish person it had set down at the small station made of the station a suddenly very wonderful place indeed.

“You are Timothy,” said Anne, gravely, going forward. “I came to meet you—I am Anne, you know.”

“I am very glad to know.” When the spare person smiled like that the station-master straightened his tie and began to whistle. “For you to come to meet me is the most cordial introduction we could possibly have had. Is that your cart?”

“Yes.” Since Timothy mentioned it, Anne thought it was not such a bad cart, after all. “If you will put your bag inside I will get the milk-can.”

“Oh, I’ll get the milk-can, miss,” offered the station-master, hastily, as though he were not in the habit of lounging over his pipe while he watched Anne carry it night and morning. “There you are!” He swung it up with a flourish.

“Thank you,” said Anne, and her eyes were bluer than before. “Did you hear him call me miss?” she asked Timothy almost before they rattled off. “He thinks I’m a girl.”

“I should say he was of a sound psychology,” pronounced Timothy. “I suppose he hasn’t seen Michael following you about, then?”

“No.” Anne drew the reins a shade tighter. “You see, Michael has been finishing his book—he and Doromea, I mean; and that keeps them very busy. I come down for the milk by myself—unless sometimes Gladys-Marie comes along.”

“And Gladys-Marie is——”

“My maid. She is very fond of dime novels and chews gum. I think you will like her.”

“I am sure of it.” Timothy’s gray eyes had bent a little closer upon Anne’s serene naturalness. “Do Michael and Doromea like her?”

“They have no time for her. They are too busy making up characters for the book.”

“I suppose you help at that, too——”

“I?” Anne’s blue gaze marvelled at him. “Oh, no—I am not clever enough to help Michael. Doromea is the only one who does that. Isn’t she pretty—Doromea?”

“Yes,” said Timothy, so fulsomely that any woman would have known at once. “But I wish she would stop being clever,” he added, after a minute.

“Men always want wives who are not clever, don’t they?” Anne meditated. “So many people said that when Michael married me. Are the women in your stories clever, Mr.—Timothy?”

“Never,” asserted Mr. Timothy, solemnly—and traitorously to Doromea.

“They—they are just plain women?”

“Just plain women. That is why women never buy the magazines they’re in.”

“But men do?”

“Oh, yes—men who have married the clever ones like to remember that there are the other kind. And men who have married the other kind—your kind” (this time it was Anne who straightened the little frill at her throat)—“like to be reminded how sensibly they have done for themselves.”

“Michael does not read your stories,” said Anne, turning a sharp corner carefully. “He says he does not understand them in you.”

Timothy’s quaint twisty mouth grew twistier for a moment. Then he said, “That is because he does not understand me in them—or you, or anybody else one sees day after day—and never sees at all.”

“One doesn’t see you day after day,” objected Anne. “If one never saw you at all, though, one would always be sure that one had—that one had wanted to.” She looked up at his glasses without coquetry. “Doromea and Michael have talked a great deal about you.”

Timothy groaned. “And said clever things about me, I suppose—epigrams?” He waited, as for the worst.

“I think so. Yes, Doromea said you were a literary Roycrofter—that is an epigram, isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid so—or a Mission-made metaphor. I wish”—Timothy’s voice grew wistful—“she had said she hated me.”

“Said she hated you? Oh! I see”—Anne remembered—“you want her to be in love with you.”

“She is in love with me,” admitted Timothy, modestly. “Only she thinks it’s beneath her—being in love at all, I mean. She thinks it isn’t subtle.”

“I suppose it isn’t,” Anne meditated, allowing the horse to walk in zigzag laziness across the road and back. “That must be why I don’t mind it,” she decided, as they came in sight of the house. “I’ve been in love ever since Michael asked me to try to be—and a long time before that.”

Timothy looked at her again more closely. “Michael should write better books,” he murmured, getting down to open the gate.

“So you really didn’t mind our not meeting you?” Doromea’s anxiety was most appealingly clothed in a rose-sprigged frock. “You see, Anne offered, so we thought——”

“You thought you couldn’t be more gracious to me,” finished Timothy, glad that Doromea’s hair curled over the ears as unsubtly as ever. “By the way, where is Anne?” He looked about the wide homely porch, where a work-bag and a tennis racquet spoke of some one, evidently just a plain woman.

“She is getting dinner.” Doromea shifted uncomfortably to another chair. “I wish I could help her, but I can’t even boil an egg—and not have it crack! Anne is so practical.”

“And so impractical,” appended Michael. “Fancy letting Gladys-Marie go to the city when Timothy was coming! And of course there was no one by whom to send the manuscript, once we had finished it. Anne had gone over to read to Aunt Hester, and Doromea hadn’t the least idea how to hitch up.”

“Neither had you,” added Doromea, a little warmly.

“Naturally not—having been brought up in the city with you.”

“Poor people!” Timothy’s gray eyes commiserated them. “But now that the book is done, you can begin to learn something?”

“I mean to find myself,” said Doromea, loftily. “And I shall have to go off alone for the whole day in order to do it.”

“That would be very rude—and no help at all to you. Why not take Gladys-Marie along?” Timothy meant it—though he had never seen Gladys-Marie.

“I would, if she were not so typical.” Doromea was quite serious. “Nowadays one must insist upon the unusual, or grow usual oneself. Even one’s maid is an influence.”

Michael looked triumphantly at Timothy—they were used to holding some argument together as to Doromea’s cleverness.

“I see—then how important we usual ones are, aren’t we?—for if it wasn’t for us, all of you’d be usual, too!” Timothy’s smile included Anne, who came out just at that moment, completely covered with a checked blue apron.

“Anne—Timothy!” Doromea’s voice showed what she thought of aprons.

“Yes, I know—I met him.” Anne sat down, innocently, and began to fan her flushed face. “Dinner’s ready,” she added, as an incident.

Both Doromea and Michael jumped up at once. “We didn’t have a bite of lunch,” cried Michael, plumping down into his chair and attacking the olives rather crudely. “By the time we had finished the book, you had gone to Aunt Hester’s——” he turned to Anne.

“Yes,” said Anne, setting down the water-pitcher. “There was lunch on the buffet, you know.”

“I told you!” Doromea triumphed at Michael. “I said Anne wouldn’t forget—but you wouldn’t even go and look.”

“Oh, well——” Michael’s voice was a shade less agreeable than usual. “I knew she was busy in the garden all morning, and trimming Gladys-Marie’s hat—I didn’t suppose she’d think. Anyway, what does it matter? The dinner’s tremendously good. Come, Timmie, tell us what you’ve been doing—more Plain Stories?”

“Not so many more.” Timothy wondered inadvertently if Michael had put Anne’s elbows in the book—they were exceedingly nice elbows. “You see, there aren’t so many Plain People left to write about. Every one’s going in for being extraordinary, these days—psychic or something.” He looked at Doromea inquiringly.

“I go to New Thought lectures,” defended Doromea, promptly.

“Do you?” Timothy asked Anne.

“I don’t have time—besides, I’m afraid I wouldn’t understand. I never went to college or anything.”

“Oh!” said Timothy, approvingly.

“You see, Anne”—Doromea interposed with a quick kindliness—“Anne always lived in the country before she came to New York to keep house for her grandfather—that winter we met her—so she isn’t as interested in the new mental trend. You must take it up when we go back, though, dear; after all, it’s the thing that counts—one’s psychic education.”

“I should say that depended on what one counts with.” But Timothy said it so low that nobody heard him.

“Psychic education——” Michael crumpled his roll thoughtfully. “In the book there’s a woman (Faero’s her name) who is absolutely the most perfect psychic completion you ever encountered. Simply a ripping creation, isn’t she, Doromea?”

“Wonderful!” Doromea sighed admiration; then she smiled, and all her dimples came out, which was to Timothy much more important. “You see, this woman, this Faero, has a way of seeing things—the most subtle, evanescent sort of things that nobody could possibly see——”

“Eh?” Timothy bolted, involuntarily.

“And it’s she who gathers up all the threads of the plot—there really isn’t so much plot, Michael—”

“No, not so much plot——” Michael paused vaguely over a stalk of asparagus. “People are sick of plot nowadays. They want something less apparent, less——”

“So this Faero is a sort of psychic gleaner,” went on Doromea, eagerly. “All the subtleties other people let fall unnoticed she picks up and treasures, until the mental of her, the infinitely fine sensitive perception that’s stretched to the vibration of a thin, thin silken string——”

“Gee whiz! Now ain’t I the late one! Me walkin’-papers ’n’ the cashless mitt’s all I deserve, I guess—but honest, Lady Elinore, if y’ could uv seen that Theatorium show! My word! it had Sothern ’n’ Marlowe lookin’ like two ice-cream freezers—yes’m! Why, when that girl, Phylo-Floretta, jumped out of a forty-six story buildin’, into her waitin’ lover’s arms, with Popper hangin’ out the winder threatenin’ air-ships—my eye! I says to Mamie, I says, this may be riskay, but it’s life, I says! ’N’ y’ c’n take it from me it was, too—oh!” From the window Gladys-Marie became suddenly aware of new audience, and hunted for her vanity-bag to see if her hat was on straight.

“A quaint person,” commented Doromea, when the buttercup hat had passed on, to the tune of The Rosary, “though a trifle hectic in her descriptive parts.”

Michael glanced again triumphantly at Timothy.

“I must go and see her about breakfast,” said Anne, rising.

“I thought you would play to us.” Michael’s voice was wistful as a child’s. “Anne always plays to us after dinner,” he explained to Timothy.

“I don’t play,” disclaimed Anne; “I only hum a little. There—tuck yourself up—I’ll play for a while.” She brought his pipe over to the hammock, and arranged two chairs undemonstratively tangent, before she went in to the piano.

Timothy, who had wandered into the yard, gazed at Michael; he was puffing peacefully as the simple little Irish ballad came to emphasize his comfort.

“Does the Lady Elinore always sing like that?” Timothy asked Gladys-Marie, who appeared (quite without reason) on the side porch.

Gladys-Marie listened. “I guess it’s you,” she said, finally, fumbling with her pompadour. “Sometimes she sounds kind a sad, but—I guess nobody could help pinchin’ their gladness a little when you’re around——” Her eyes under the pompadour went from Timothy to the two chairs Anne had left. One of them was occupied. “Her hair curls real pretty, don’t it?” she added, generously—for Doromea and Gladys-Marie had a vegetable understanding only. “An’ that rose-color is awful becomin’——”

Timothy threw away his light and turned toward the rose-sprigged chair. “It is a pretty dress, isn’t it?”

“Lady Elinore made it,” returned Gladys-Marie, proudly. “Sure it’s a pretty dress!”

Doromea and Michael and Timothy sat on the porch. “I can’t think it has been really two weeks since you’ve been here.” From the steps Doromea looked at Timothy a bit dolefully. “But it must be—since it was two weeks ago we—we sent the book off. Must you actually go to-morrow, Timothy?”

“It seems a breach of sense to admit it,” Timothy agreed, looking at her through the gloaming, “but my editors imagine that the summer has created some new Plain People—at least they want me to come and see.”

“I suppose so,” Doromea sighed. “I wish some one wanted me to come and do something,” she added, vehemently, under her breath. “Goodness knows there’s been nothing to do here, since the book’s been finished. Anne seems to be busy every minute,” she observed, aloud, “but I don’t sew or cook or row, or anything—I don’t even play the piano!” This with a gust of indignation, as some very good playing came through the window.

“It’s the book’s fault.” Michael’s voice sounded rather weary. “If I hadn’t held you to the book every minute, you might have learned these other things. But I never imagined for a moment that the publishers would reject it—it seemed so much better than the first one, so much subtler——”

“What did they say about it?” Timothy moved to where he could not see the quiver of Doromea’s lips.

“They said”—Michael repeated with the monotony of one who has gone over the lesson many times—“that they were much surprised and not a little disappointed over the decided inferiority of this book compared with the other; that I seemed to have striven for an effect rather than for a truthful portrayal of actual life. Oh, they tore it up sharply enough!” he concluded, breaking off as though the recital choked him.

“They did say,” Doromea comforted, wiping her eyes back of Michael’s cushions—“they did say there was some clever dialogue in it—you remember, Michael, where Faero talks with the rector? They mentioned that especially.”

“Yes—yes”—Michael caught at the consolation—“where she says, ‘One can be so many worse things than bad,’ and—Why, Anne said that, Doromea; funny, isn’t it? Don’t you know, when we were talking about that stable-boy who stole—the one who had been in the Reformatory? You said you thought he was the baddest boy in the world, and Anne—why, yes, of course!”

“What else did they say was especially good?” Timothy’s voice suggested, with suspicious impersonality.

“Why, farther on, the scene between the kitchenmaid and the policeman—that was a story of Gladys-Marie’s, Anne told us—awfully natural, you know, and—er—local-colorish. They like that.”

“Yes, and the bit about the ladies’ clubs.” Doromea would not allow Michael to omit anything.

“Surely, that—that was funny, you know——” Michael laughed heartily for the first time since yesterday, when the book had come back. “That was a conversation Anne had with—Doromea!” He sat all at once bolt upright in his hammock. “Every one of those things was Anne’s! Every single one of them—do you know that, Doromea?—and the publishers said they were the only clever things in the book!”

“Anne—clever?” Doromea stumbled, dazed with the dawning of it. “Why—why, Michael!”

“Yes”—Michael was standing up now, and almost excited—“yes, those were Anne’s things—the clever ones—and all the rest was rot. We sat in there racking our brains over subtle things to say, and all the time, if we’d just listened to Anne, we could have written a perfectly extraordinary book—the cleverest book in the world! It’s maddening—it’s——”

“Do you know why it would have been the cleverest book in the world?” asked Timothy, quietly—for Anne’s singing stopped just then. “Because it would have been the story of just a plain, ordinary woman—and that’s the rarest woman one can find to write about—women like Anne, and that little Patsy sister of mine, and a host of others. Why don’t you go in,” he said to Michael, gently, “and ask her to help you find her?”

As Michael slipped through the long window, Timothy moved to the step below Doromea. “Aren’t you convinced that she’s the subtlest woman, too—this plain, ordinary woman?” he asked. Doromea’s curly head was bent very low. “Don’t you think you might like to cook, and sew, and trim hats sometimes?”

His voice was so wistful that Doromea wiped her eyes quite frankly this time. “I—I am perfectly wild to trim hats,” she burst out, laughing between her sobs. “Oh, Timothy, I am so sick—sick—sick of trying to be clever and think up things! I am really the dullest, plainest woman in the world.”

“I hope so,” said Timothy, gravely, taking the unskilful little hands. “I need a heroine most awfully. You see”—turning her about to face the library windows—“Michael has found his.” For Michael was standing by, while Anne lit the lamp and undid a heavy pile of manuscript.

“Anne—just a plain woman——” Doromea’s voice caught—but with a yearning desire. “Even Gladys-Marie had the sense to tell me that she had the Duchess heroines beat by a lope! Do you suppose, Timothy”—her hands crept to his shoulders pleadingly—“do you suppose that I can ever learn to be as clever as Anne?”

Patsy thumped Timothy’s fattest yellow cushion viciously. “It’s all very well for you to sit there and smile,” she scolded her pretty stepmother. “Dad was always perfect to you, and Timmie—if he is my brother—is a joy to keep house for. You’ve never known what it is to live with a man from Boston!—oh, how I hate him, how I’d like to make him fairly eat slang! The idea—my own husband saying I was r-rowdy, and—and tomboy,” Patsy’s head went down into the yellow cushion, “and before my own mother-in-law, too, just because I slid down the banisters! Ugh!”

The stepmother looked at Patsy’s lovely rebellious little head. Then she looked at the ridiculous scrap of a frock she was making. “I suppose he thought of the Angel,” she murmured.

“And why?” Instantly Patsy sat bolt upright. “The Angel’s my child, of course—every bit as much as he is Warren’s—but why I shouldn’t slide down the banisters when I want to, just because I happen to have a baby—one might think it was my grandchild!” The disgust that tilted the small impudent nose made the stepmother bite her under lip hard. “Anyway, it’s all over now. I’ve left Warren for good, and when he gets back from Washington and finds nobody in the house he’ll realize that I’m sufficiently capable of action, though I can’t talk like a Macaulay essay. When he finds not only me but the Angel gone——” she listened suddenly—a faint cry came down from some place upstairs.

“I expect the house will seem still and—and strange.” The stepmother’s soft voice had a little ache in it as she listened too.

Patsy got up and walked to the window of the bright morning-room with a defiant shrug that was meant also to be quite indifferent. “He deserves it,” she defended. “Every bit of it. He behaved like a brute—a perfectly gentlemanly good-form Prince Albert brute; and when he has to go to Congress and give dinners and things without any wife, he’ll be sorry he was so abominable. He’ll remember that I could be grown-up and dignified when I want to. As for me, I can toddle on my own——”

“H’m?” The stepmother looked up inquiringly.

“Get along by myself, I mean, and take care of the Angel quite—quite as well as though I had a husband. I dare say Timothy won’t mind my staying here for a bit?” Patsy’s hauteur melted into an appealing wistfulness.

“Of course he won’t mind,” returned the stepmother, warmly. “He has some news——”

“And then,” went on Patsy, unheeding, “I can take—steps.” The vague importance of the decision seemed to reassure her; for she came back to her old place on the sofa and plumped down into the cushions almost cheerfully.

“I—before you take—er—steps,” suggested the stepmother, tentatively, “why not consult Timothy?”

“Consult Timothy?” Timothy’s sister faced about amazed. “W-what on earth could Timothy know about it—about leaving one’s husband? He’s the dearest boy in the world—a ripping good sport and all that—but, after all, Claire, he’s only a writer. He doesn’t know anything about things that happen.”

The stepmother sewed for a few minutes in silence. Then, “Nobody else knows that—that it’s happened yet, do they?” she asked, rather anxiously.

“No,” said Patsy, shortly. “I told the maids I was coming over to stay a few days with my brother, that’s all. Of course, Laura Hastings was spending the week-end with me when we had the scene—when Warren and his mother came in from Boston, I mean, and found me—Patricia—— Oh, yes,” with a wry face, “she calls me that, Warren’s mother! As I was saying, Laura was there, sliding down too, as it happened, and you know, Claire, Laura’s the worst gossip in New York. She has told it all over, I suppose, that Warren simply ordered me to get down—anybody might know such a good-looking man would be a tyrant!—but she can’t say a word about me, for I was the sweetest thing possible all the time she was there. I wouldn’t condescend to quarrel, you may be sure, even afterward, when only Warren and his mother were there.”

“They went on to Washington that same night, you said——” the stepmother creased a tuck thoughtfully.

“Yes—Warren had some business. His mother”—Patsy’s scorn pelted her words out—“went to a convention of the Women Militant, if you know what that is. Warren’s coming back to-day. Well”—she straightened her collar belligerently—“he’ll find a note on the pincushion that will explain a few things.”

“Ahem!” The stepmother coughed deprecatingly. “He’s been taking some rather tiresome trips lately, Warren, hasn’t he?”

“Oh, of course he has—but what difference does that make?” Patsy’s guilty compassion stirred itself to impatience. “Nobody wanted him to go to Congress except his mother—though of course I was glad he got the election,” she admitted, grudgingly. “But it’s meant running back and forth from New York to Boston and from Boston to Washington all the fall. This last Sunday simply capped the climax of everybody’s endurance. Why the goodness his mother had to come down with him, just that time when he was going to find me on the banisters——” She shook her pretty head despairingly.

“Hello!” whistled somebody. “So the Plain Little Sister has come to congratulate me—what? Didn’t I see a—er—perambulator-rocking-chair-crib, folded compactly as in the advertisement, out there in the hall?”

“Yes.” Patsy kissed her brother with characteristic vehemence. “It is the Angel’s. We’ve come to stay.”

“Oh,” said Timothy, curling his spare shortness into a huge chair, “how disappointing! I mean, that is, I thought you had come to congratulate me, you know.”

“Congratulate you?” Patsy flew at him. “On what?”

“Why, on Doromea, of course. I’ve got her to marry me.”

Patsy regarded the stepmother reproachfully. “And you never told me a word,” she said, with an air of deep injury. “I’ve been here two hours!”

“There was a good deal to talk about,” demurred the stepmother, soberly. “You were telling me, you know.”

“Yes—yes, of course.” Patsy’s injury transferred its object to the primary interest. “Timothy, I’ve left Warren.”

“That was nice of you,” commented Timothy. “Stay as long as you can.” He looked at his sister’s pretty hair contentedly; it curled over the ears like Doromea’s.

“But you don’t understand——” Patsy was seldom impatient with Timothy; she tried to remember that he was a writer. Then, too, they had been chums together always. “You don’t understand. I’ve left him forever. I’m not going to Washington with him. He—he insulted me; he called me a——”

Timothy uncurled himself in his interest. “Yes,” he encouraged. “What did he call you?”

“A—a t-tomboy!” Patsy’s lips quivered past control. “And his mother was there and Laura Hastings, a girl who was staying with me—and a perfectly horrid gossip, Timothy! Oh, he was a beast, that’s all. I’m sure,” tearfully, “I can’t think what you all ever let me marry him for!”

Timothy glanced over the auburn head at the stepmother. The stepmother glanced at Timothy. But neither of them smiled.

“I have never had anything against marriage,” said Timothy, mildly. “I have even persuaded one person to get over her prejudice against it. Perhaps I am wrong—if so, you can win the eternal credit of convincing me. And meanwhile, why not come with me to select an engagement present? We can argue as we go along, you know.”

It was not an unattractive proposition. Patsy brightened. “You must wait for me to change,” she warned, jumping up. “This frock’s a wreck. But I brought five trunks. I thought,” doubtfully, “that as long as I was leaving for good, I had better take everything with me.”

“A sound precaution,” commended Timothy, going over to the window.

“And you’ll look after the Angel?” Patsy stopped by the stepmother’s chair. “It may divert me to go out for a bit,” she added, plaintively. “Of course the poor boy—Timmie—can’t understand all I’m going through. He’s a regular brick, but in love, poor thing; and then how could he understand? He’s only a writer.”

“Only a writer,” repeated the stepmother, with an odd little smile. “A writer about Plain People and their Problems. Yes, dear, run along. As you say, it may divert you. If the Angel cries I’ll—I’ll give it smelling-salts. I dare say I sha’n’t kill it.”

“Oh, no,” Patsy called back, pleasantly. “You couldn’t. It has Warren’s obstinacy. But it’s a darling, just the same.” She flew up-stairs as a lusty squall blew down to them.

“She hasn’t congratulated you yet,” murmured the stepmother, gazing at Timothy with quite an unstepmotherly gaze.

“No—but she will to-morrow,” prophesied Timothy, with only a writer’s intuition.

 

The two short, blue-coated figures moved off briskly down the street toward the Avenue. From the window, the stepmother smiled at the identical cut of their shoulders, the boyish, easy swing of their same stride; it seemed such a very little while since she had watched them start off every day to school together—the blue coats had lengthened such a little bit—and now—— Timothy engaged, and Patsy married—married and half divorced; the stepmother’s nose wrinkled in a funny smile. Ah, well! There are poignant foolish heartaches for stepmothers as well as other people, but—just then the Angel cried. The stepmother caught up the frilly frock and hurried upstairs; where there is an angel——!

“For the Angel’s sake, I mean to have only a separation,” Patsy was explaining to Timothy. “Besides, it—it will serve Warren Adams only right not to be able to—t-to marry again. A Congressman without a wife! Imagine it!”

“There have been instances”—Timothy was knocking leaves with his stick—“isolated instances, I grant you,” he added, hastily, catching his sister’s eye. “I think myself such Congressmen are to be felt for. I suppose”—reflectively—“when Warren is sworn in, there will be nobody there except his mother.”

“I suppose not,” returned Patsy, shortly; and ramming her stout-gloved little hands into her mannish pockets, she began to whistle.

Timothy poked more leaves. They were scarcely at the corner of Madison Avenue. “When one can whistle like that,” he observed to a silent sparrow on the curb, “there is some point in letting the world know about it.”

Patsy stopped whistling at once. “I always want to whistle when Warren’s mother is about—even when it’s only in conversation. See here, Timmie,” the small hand clutched her brother’s arm confidentially, “don’t you—haven’t you always thought Warren’s mother was a bit of a muff?”

Timothy paused, over his glasses. “Muff?” he repeated—stupidly, Patsy thought. “Muff—that was a pretty one she sent the Angel, wasn’t it? All white and soft and fuzzy. She——”

“Oh, never mind, then,” Patsy cut him off impatiently. “If you’re not going to agree with me, where’s the use of arguing? I couldn’t help it if she did send the Angel a muff—anyway, he sha’n’t carry it!” she added, vindictively, under her breath. “Convention, tradition, what people will say—booh! How sick I am of it all—wish I could make every one of those words waltz themselves out of the big dic. forever!”

“Ah—about this present for Doromea——” When Timothy said that name, Patsy looked up quickly; there was no earthly reason why a lump should rise in her throat, but—“Doromea,” Timothy repeated, as though for very spite. “It must be a very nice present, you know.”

“Then we’ll go to ——,” said Patsy, swallowing emphatically. “Everybody goes there; my—my ring came from there, and Claire’s, and all our family have always bought things there. It’s a sort of——”

“Habit?” supplied Timothy, kindly.

“Yes, habit.” Patsy gave a sigh of relief. If Timothy should have guessed that she had almost said tradition! “Certainly, habit—and, well, we’re right there now, Timothy. It must be a ring, I suppose?”

Timothy’s gray eyes darkened to absorption. “I should say a ring might do,” he deliberated.

“Sure thing!” Patsy was standing near a person who looked like Warren’s mother, so she repeated, “Sure thing!” loudly and cheerfully. The person started. “Diamonds—eh, Timmie? But”—to the clerk—“not a solitaire. Solitaires”—feeling her own, under the heavy glove—“are so ordinary!”

“I rather fancy a solitaire,” protested Timothy, mildly. “Let’s see yours, Pats!”

With a sublime indifference Patsy took off her glove. “It is rather a good solitaire,” she admitted, negligently.

“Would you take it off a minute, madam? I should like to compare——”

“Oh, no—that is, I mean”—Patsy blushed furiously—“I have never taken that ring off—I—but I suppose I might just as well, now,” she concluded, defiantly.

“Why not?” agreed Timothy—who was only a writer.

“I prefer not to take that ring off here,” said Patsy, with a colossal dignity. “I—we will look at what you have in circlets.”

“Certainly, madam.” The clerk’s sandy head sank into a blue plush show-drawer.

“There’s Laura Hastings!” cried Patsy, suddenly, “with a man—looking at rings. And she never even hinted——! Do wait, Timothy. I must speak to her a minute. Just like a gossipy person—never to tell one thing about themselves!”

“Yes,” coming back breathlessly. “It’s true. They’re engaged. Laura said”—Patsy’s breezy voice grew somewhat dry—“it was seeing me so happy in my lovely home that really decided her—of course on top of that I could hardly tell her—umm!” as the clerk reappeared. “Perhaps, after all, a solitaire would be better—Laura’s getting one, and people might say——” the minute the words were out, Patsy glanced fearfully at Timothy; but Timothy was deep in settings. “Her friends might think,” amended Patsy, “that you ought to have given Doromea one. Is Doromea as pretty as she used to be?” she added, irrelevantly.

“She may sometime have been as pretty as she is now,” Timothy meditated, “but it seems hardly probable. As a Plain Person—she wants you to show her about things next winter,” he branched off. “The house and that, you know. Anne and Michael are going to stay on in the country, so——”

“But I shall be in Washington,” blurted Patsy. “Oh, no—of course, I forgot.” The blue shoulders sagged a bit forlornly as they turned again to solitaires. “I shall be very glad to help Dorry all I can,” finished Patsy, stiffly. “What do you think of this platinum one, Timothy?”

Timothy straightened his glasses to a critical focus. “Very nice—the claws are so thin and fine—like those in the pin Warren gave you when the Angel was born. I was always fond of that pin.” Timothy was talking mostly to himself as he squinted closer at the solitaire. “I remember Warren’s face when he went in to give it to you—‘’Tisn’t half good enough,’ he said. And it didn’t seem to me then that it was, either.”

Patsy was staring at a case of watches—staring hard and with her back to Timothy. Surreptitiously she got out her handkerchief.

“Then you’ll lay that one aside,” she suggested, lightly, though still with her back turned. “And the flat one—Doromea might like that, it’s so—so awfully subtle, you know. And Dorry always——”

“But not now,” corrected Timothy, gently. “She has advanced to the infinite subtlety of forgetting that there is such a thing. I think we won’t consider the flat one. What are you looking at over there, Pats?”

“Rattles,” replied Patsy, in a strangled voice. “Warren promised to come in and get one with me for the Angel’s seventh birthday—seventh-month birthday, you know. We bought his six-months one—that’s next Sunday—three weeks ago!” The handkerchief went up to Patsy’s impudent little nose, and blew it hard. “If it only wasn’t for Warren’s mother—” she scolded, sotto voce, so that the clerk should not hear—“you know, Timothy, I—but there, what’s the use in telling you? You wouldn’t understand.”

“I might—though I do write things,” encouraged Timothy. “Why not try me? We can pretend to be comparing rings over by the window.”

“All right.” Patsy gave a deep sigh. “You see, this is the way it is. When—when I married Warren I was in love with him—I really was, Timothy.”

“I remember you were,” said Timothy, gravely.

“Yes. And of course I was awfully young—awfully young; though, to be sure, I’m twenty-one now; I didn’t want to get married, you know——”

“No?” Timothy’s tone held only inquiry. He had the most tractable memory in the world.

“Certainly not. I was talked into it. Warren and Warren’s mother kept saying there was no sense in delaying the thing, and I supposed there wasn’t, as we’d have to get married some time, wouldn’t we, being in love and all?”

“Sometimes people don’t,” began Timothy. “In stories——”

“Oh, bother stories!” interrupted Patsy, rudely. “You promised to try to forget you were a writer. Quick, look at these silly rings—that woman’s listening. Well, so I married Warren, and for a while, you know, we didn’t get along so badly—the first year we were married we hadn’t but seven serious quarrels; of course there were little things, but you know yourself, Timmie, we managed very nicely.”

“It always seemed so to me,” Timothy came in promptly on his cue.

“That,” Patsy triumphed, “was because Warren was in love with me. He didn’t care then how much slang I used or if I wore boys’ boots; I could climb trees all day long when we were up at camp, and ride bareback all over the place. But now,” the piquant little face grew tragic, “it’s that same old thing—the glamour’s wearing off, and”—Patsy’s voice sounded unpleasantly older than twenty-one—“my husband’s tired of me, the real me. Now he wants me made to his order, to his mother’s order; now”—a big tear splashed on her engagement ring—“I’m just the mother of his child. I’m expected to be old and dull and mouse about in corners with a book or some sewing. Sewing! When I can sail a boat better than any one on Barnegat, and play hockey, and ride even the Blue Devil, that all the Club’s afraid of! Sewing!”

“Claire sews,” Timothy reflected.

“Of course she does,” snapped Patsy. “Claire was born amiable and womanly and all the sweet normal things a woman ought to be. I wasn’t. I’ve never been anything but a harum-scarum r-r-rowdy, just as Warren called me, I——”

“You’ve been the mother of the Angel.” Timothy spoke softly, almost reverently. “Claire has only been allowed to be a stepmother.”

“That makes it just so much worse,” choked Patsy, flashing diamonds as though for her life. “I—can’t you see, I don’t deserve to—to be the Angel’s mother! Tha—that’s what Warren thinks.”

Timothy looked down at the trembling softened mouth, at the brimming tawny eyes of his Plain Little Sister. “Warren is going to Congress,” he said, letting Doromea’s ring slip on to his smallest finger. “I have heard that at such times—just before they go—they hardly know what they think. Everybody expects them to think something different, you see. I should not be surprised if they did not even know what they said—sometimes. There are stories——”

Patsy looked at him reproachfully. “You promised to leave out stories,” she murmured. “You were just beginning to be comforting.”

“Um-m! So I did—so I was, I mean. The fact is, I almost believe they forget what they have said, what they have thought, almost the minute they have said or thought it. They—they get tired, you see. They have to go off and make speeches, and their constituents keep dinning their importance at them, the importance of maintaining the dignity of their position, and that, you know; then they come home, a bit low and worn out with it, and—they’re just plain ordinary people, Congressmen—they lose their grip once in a while. They need——”

“Claire told you!” accused Patsy, though into her eyes had crept that same look as when she was singing the Angel to sleep. “You knew it was the day he came home from Boston, and went right away again.”

Timothy peered suddenly through his glasses at some one who was coming into the store. “I did have an idea it was that day,” he confessed—“one of those days, that is.”

“And of course,” Patsy’s voice gathered injury, “of all days his mother had to choose that one to come along. And you know, Timmie, when Warren’s mother comes along, it isn’t any suit-case party. There are trunks to be checked and a maid to be hustled into the baggage-car, or wherever it is they put ’em; and there’s a dog to be fought about—Warren’s mother simply shrieks if they suggest putting Toto in the baggage-car—and half a dozen smaller parcels to be lost and found a few times. Oh, I know!”—grimly. “I’ve had to play leading understudy in the scream; and there was Warren, tired to a frazzle—you know he was tired, Timothy——”

“I dare say he was,” Timothy was now the party of admission, “probably very tired.”

“Coming into his own house—— Oh, well,” Patsy straightened her sturdy shoulders and dabbed at one eye after the other. “It’s all over now. I’ve left him, and where’s the good of talking about what might have been? It’s only in stories that what might have been ever is. In a story, now”—she arraigned the writer—“you’d have the hero and the hero’s mother appear out of nowhere and fall on the—er—pseudo-heroine’s neck, and offer a diamond necklace, while pseudo-heroine exchanged apologies; and the whole family would trip happily home on one another’s arms. Isn’t that so? Isn’t that just the sort of impossible thing you have happen in those Plain stories of yours?”

Timothy smiled, that same smile that had overcome Doromea’s prejudice against marriage. “If you were writing a Plain story, wouldn’t you have it end that way?” he asked, regarding diamonds unseeingly from behind his glasses.

“I—I never wrote a story,” began Patsy, fumbling with her veil.

Timothy looked at her. “You couldn’t help writing one,” he said, and his eyes were full of something that blinded Patsy’s. “At first, when there was just Claire and you and me, it was a story of adventure—of wild and thrilling dashes into the preserve-closet, and raids upon the neighbors’ cherry trees; then”—his voice softened—“it was a fairy-story, the story of a wonderful new world, all dazzling and radiant with tender possibilities. Wasn’t it?” he insisted, gently. “Wasn’t it for a while a fairy-story, Little Sister?”

“For—for a while, yes,” acknowledged Patsy, very low, “but——”

“But the castles had to fall,” went on Timothy, gazing wistfully at Doromea’s gleaming ring, “the castles had to fall, and the Fairy Prince had to become just a Plain Husband, or he would never have fitted this Plain, Plain World; and the story had to become a real story—ten times more wonderful than a fairy-story, if one reads it with an eye to life’s permanent values. Do you know”—Timothy took off his glasses and looked at them meditatively—“we people who write things—that is, you and I and all the world—are simply pestered to death by false climaxes? Silly midget episodes jump up and insist that they—one after one—are the great Turning Point of all our Plot. Pats, my dear”—he regarded her seriously—“I make it a point not to believe ’em. I do really; I say to myself: here, if you, the Big You, can’t recognize your own theme and its outworking as you’ve planned it, as you want it, then you aren’t much of a writer, that’s all. If you want your story to end a certain way, and can’t make it end that way, just on account of the interference of some puny bit of an incident, I say, well, after all, Tim, you ought never to have been allowed to write. And so”—the gray eyes smiled deeper—“just out of self-respect I have to make the end right, you see.”

Patsy glanced at him suspiciously. “That’s a story with a moral,” she asserted, though her voice was rather unsteady; “the most impossible kind of all.”

“It is,” confessed the writer, unabashed, “a story with a moral. But I refuse to admit it’s impossible. And if you will go back again to those rattles, I think you’ll refuse to admit it too. The——”

“Why”—Patsy had turned and walked a few steps back into the store—“why, it’s Warren! Warren, Timothy—and——”

“His mother is over looking at necklaces,” nodded Timothy, modestly. “Not diamond ones, but still——”

“She heard me say I wanted some pearls for my birthday,” Patsy murmured, guiltily. “She—she’s got her bag with her. They can’t have gone up to the house yet—— Timmie, Timmie dear—do you—do you suppose I might speak to Warren, just to tell him not to mind the pincushion note, you know—as long as he’s looking at rattles, Timmie——?”

“As long as he’s looking at rattles,” agreed Timothy, judiciously, “I should say you might speak to him—yes.”

And as Patsy flew across the aisle, he deliberately turned his back and bent his glasses once more on engagement rings. “So foolish to let oneself fear that a Plain Story won’t end well,” he mused to the ring with the fine platinum claws; after all, he was only a writer.

“So, ’s I was tellin’ you this mornin’, Marmaduke,” Gladys-Marie flipped her dish-towel at the yellow kitchen cat, “I ain’t so thrilled over the i-dea. As Adalbert said to Evelyn Hortense, in The Madness of a Handsome Hero, when the grewsomeness o’ this black scheme was sprung upon me, I—well, Marmaduke, though ’twas me own missus, Lady Elinore, put it up to me, I says, ‘Oh, pshaw!’ I did, fer a fact. Course I knew all along Lady Elinore and Mr. Michael was goin’ away, ’n’ leave me here to head off th’ burglars, but w’en she—bless her heart!—come in here yesterday mornin’ ’n’ broke it to me that that Mrs. Verplanck was goin’ to be here while they was away——! Marmaduke, me boy, y’ could ’a’ had me fer this dish-rag, I was that limp ’n’ speechless. ‘Mrs. Verplanck ’n’ her husband need a change,’ says Lady Elinore, in that kind o’ pitiful sweet way o’ hers. ’Y’ see, they live in a hotel, ’n’ they don’t know nothin’ about a home, or the country,’ she says. ‘I’m dependin’ on you, Gladys-Marie, to mak’ ’em see how nice it is. Yes,’ she says, drawin’ on her sixteen-button gloves thoughtful—like the heroine when she’s plannin’ the day-nooment—‘you c’n teach Ellen ’n’ Knollys a lot,’ she says.

“Oh, I know it’s funny, Marmaduke! Y’ needn’t squint yer old wall-eye at me! I know just ’s well ’s you that fer me, Lady Elinore’s gen’ral housemaid, to teach Mrs. Knollys Verplanck ’n’ husband anything is such a Hippodrome-size joke, y’ couldn’t get anybody t’ laugh at it. ’N’ my eye! W’en the station-master drove ’em over last night, I says t’ meself, it’s you that has the nerve, I says, t’ imagine Lady Elinore was drivin’ at anything but a joke, herself. Anyway,” Gladys-Marie patted her pompadour reassuringly, “she don’t even wear a transformation, ’n’ she’d be real plain, Mrs. Verplanck, if ’twasn’t fer her eyes. My, but she has the lamps, Marmaduke—all big ’n’ black ’n’ soft—’n’ the clothes! Gee! makes a Bon Ton colored plate look like a suffragette! Now git out o’ my way, yer Grace, ’n’ pertly too—I gotta get a hike on an’ lift in the dinner. Livin’ ’n hotels don’t give ye no correspondence course in th’ gentle art o’ waitin’.” And Gladys-Marie shoved Marmaduke affectionately under the table as she pinned on her scrap of a cap and took up her tray.

“Really quite a quaint place, don’t you think, Knollys?” Mrs. Verplanck was saying, as Gladys-Marie came in with the soup. She sat languidly back in her chair, so that the gracious candle-light touched her shimmery gown to even more wonderful glory than a Bon Ton colored plate. “It was most awfully sweet of Anne and Michael to turn it over to us for this week, though I dare say they grow bored enough with the quiet. I can’t think why they don’t come in to town for at least the winter.”

“Lady Elinore says th’ country in winter’s the most gorgeous place in the world,” plumped Gladys-Marie, twirling her tray resentfully. “’nN’ last winter we had taffy-pulls ’n’ sleigh-rides, ’n’ corn-roasts, ’n’ toboggans, ’n’ Miss Dorry ’n’ Mister Timothy says people was just fightin’ over bids t’ come out here. I used t’ think th’ city was th’ lobby o’ heaven meself, but my word! ’tain’t nothin’ to the country—Lady Elinore’s country!” She looked at Mrs. Verplanck earnestly.

Mrs. Verplanck looked at her—as though Gladys-Marie had never been heard to say a word.

“Er—rather an interesting person, my dear.” Knollys Verplanck put up his eye-glasses after the little maid’s retreating figure. “A bit—er—chatty, certainly, but—er——”

“Anne has spoiled her scandalously,” returned Mrs. Verplanck. “Fancy her putting in like that, in the midst of serving! No waiter at the hotel would dare think of such a thing. And then calling Anne ‘Lady Elinore,’ as though she were a personage—it’s absurd. Yet Anne seems entirely satisfied with her.”

“Um-m!” Mr. Verplanck looked about the charming, well-ordered dining-room. “She does seem a good servant, doesn’t she? This soup is excellent.” And, behind the big bowl of daffodils, he tipped his plate for the last spoonful—a thing he would never have dared to do in the hotel, before a waiter.

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Verplanck admitted, indifferently, “I suppose she can cook and sweep and things, this—er—Marie (I can’t really be expected to call her whole name), but she gives no tone, no prestige to the place, does she? And that’s so important nowadays, when one’s friends—really, Knollys, I think we should move to the St. Midas this spring. Where we are now, it hasn’t the name it used to have, you know.”

“No?” Knollys looked mildly undisturbed. “Then why not take a house some place? Really, Ellen, this—this strikes me as very pleasant, this house of Michael’s; all the room, you know, and no liveries forever underfoot. Even this—er—Marie person’s a relief. I’ve been Sir-ed now for over ten years. Do you know it is ten years since we went to live at Marble Court, Ellen?”

“We were married ten years ago next Sunday,” Ellen’s great black eyes were softer than usual, “and we went to live at the hotel directly we came back from our honeymoon. Yes, it is almost ten years, Knollys. But I’m quite contented; aren’t you? We should never be as comfortable in a house as we have been at Marble Court, I am sure. A house is such a care.”

“I suppose it is.” Knollys smothered his sigh—it was ten years since he had remembered to sigh for a house. “Too much trouble, and all that.”

“Yes,” said Ellen, firmly. “And with all I have to do—and next year I’m up for the Four-in-Hand Club—oh, it’s not to be thought of, of course. No doubt you were only joking, Nollsie——” yet she looked at him a little anxiously; for in spite of the ten years, she was more than very fond of him.

“Joking?” When he let his gaze fall, in that absent-minded way, it suddenly occurred to her that he was almost forty. That slight silvering of the hair about his temples (which secretly pleased her, as an aristocratic touch) took on a hint of new significance. “Joking? Yes, I suppose I was, my dear. I suppose I was. Yet”—his voice grew unwontedly wistful—“it would have been nice if I hadn’t been, wouldn’t it? If our house hadn’t been just a joke. Anne and Michael——”

“Anne and Michael are the two most erratic people one knows,” put in Ellen, somewhat shortly. “As a criterion, they aren’t to be taken seriously. They hide themselves here in the woods in order that Michael may write books—— Oh, they’re good books, I admit that (as Knollys started to interrupt)—but what Anne does with herself while he’s writing them I can’t imagine. A week here is very nice; but a lifetime!” Mrs. Verplanck’s slender hands went up in expressive wonderment.

“That—er—Marie girl said the winters were all right,” reminded Knollys, tentatively; “she said——”

“My dear——” Mrs. Verplanck regarded her husband with the nearest disapproval she could turn upon him. “And what if she did? Do you think she knows—what would be all right for you and me? After all, you are Knollys Verplanck, of Wall Street and Marble Court. This girl—this Marie may be perfectly conscientious, perfectly respectable; but she is nothing but a plain person, my dear Knollys, merely a maid, is she not?” And with reassured composure Mrs. Verplanck rang for her.

 

“What are you doing?”

Two days later, and Mr. Verplanck was squinting his glasses for a nearer view of Gladys-Marie’s trim stooping figure. The stoop was over a bed of strawberries, near which Marmaduke sniffed about for catnip, guileless and very, very yellow in the morning sun.

“I’m weedin’ this strawb’ry-patch,” puffed Gladys-Marie, looking up very flushed in the face. “What’re you doing?”

“I am—ah—I am doing just nothing,” admitted Mr. Verplanck, suddenly aware that it was a trivial occupation. “But I should like to weed very much if I——”

“You’d spoil yer clothes,” said Gladys-Marie, briefly; “’nn’ besides, what’d she say t’ you?”

Mr. Verplanck stopped regarding his spotless white flannels and regarded Gladys-Marie somewhat sharply; then—“She can’t say anything,” he returned. “She shut me out of the kitchen because she was making angel-food; and whatever I may do in revenge—— I say, Gladys-Marie, if I were to change my clothes, you know?”

“There’s a pair o’ Mister Michael’s overalls in the closet under the stairs,” Gladys-Marie relented. “But you’re s’ much taller—— Ain’t he the handsome figger of a man, though?” she murmured to Marmaduke as Knollys disappeared within the house. “An’ t’ think o’ him cramped up in a hotel! My eye! he’d ought a have the whole world t’ run around in!”

And Marmaduke blinked assent as he swept his yellow tail majestically among the tall grasses.

“Y’ see,” said Gladys-Marie, when she had turned over her trowel to Knollys, “this is Lady Elinore’s strawb’ry-patch, ’n’ while she’s away I gotta keep it goin’ fer her. D’ye ever notice, Mister Verplanck, how much more ye feel like doin’ fer other folks w’en y’re in the country? In the city it’s ev’ry kid fer ’imself, ’n’ a rush t’ get the main graft first. But in th’ country, seems like there’s time fer other people, s’ much time that yerself kind a fergits its kickin’.”

Again Mr. Verplanck glanced penetratingly at her, the plain conscientious person; but the curve of a pink ear was all that he could see. The rest of Gladys-Marie seemed to have been absorbed by the strawberry-bed.

“I guess I never told you about George—the swell middy I’m engaged to?” From the green leaves the friendly voice went on unself-consciously. “He’s gotta serve another year yet, an’ honest, Mister Verplanck, before I come to th’ country I took on worse ’n any Deserted at th’ Altar, over the dee-lay. I was thinkin’ all th’ time about me clothes, ’n’ how we c’d board for a year er two, George ’n’ me, so’s t’ put on a little more style, y’ know. But now—well, I tell y’ on the straight, since I got this country habit, style kinda strikes me like movin’ picters at a vaudyville. I’m s’ keen on the main show, I ain’t no time t’ waste on it. So George ’n’ I’re goin’ t’ be married next June, out here; ’n’ we’re goin’ to have a House!”

When she said that, Gladys-Marie looked up with a smile that did things to Knollys’s throat. A House!

“Nollsie! Nollsie!” Before he could answer the little maid, some one called from the kitchen porch. “I’m going to make the icing now—you can come and help, if you like.” Looking up from the strawberry-patch, one could see Ellen, pink-cheeked and swayingly girlish in her blue cotton frock. “Why, Nollsie Verplanck!” As she caught sight of the overalls her laugh rang out as Knollys had almost forgotten it used to ring. “Whatever are you doing?”

“There—run along, quick!” Gladys-Marie took the trowel from him with an impetuous hurry. “Don’t che see? She wants ye t’ help her!—-- ’N’ what I was ever s’ cross-eyed ’s to call her plain for, it ’ud take a couple o’ Con-an Doyles t’ tell me! Don’t it beat Paree how some people c’n get all their best points brought out by chambray at ’leven cents th’ yard?” And Gladys-Marie looked up wistfully at the two just disappearing into the kitchen. She would have liked to go in and make icing with them, as she often did with Lady Elinore; but something back of her pompadour reminded that she was merely a maid. So she sighed, and went on weeding Lady Elinore’s strawberry-patch.

In the kitchen, Mr. and Mrs. Knollys Verplanck (of Wall Street and Marble Court) sat opposite each other, with a big yellow bowl between them. The blue of Mr. Verplanck’s overalls exactly matched the blue of Mrs. Verplanck’s cotton frock.

“Great eye for color, Anne and Michael, ain’t they?” reflected Mr. Verplanck, mildly, as he sifted sugar into white of egg, with some absorption. “But a blessed good thing they left some of their clothes around. Ours are rather—er—too exotic for this atmosphere.”

“Well, one could hardly bake a cake in white broadcloth, could one?” defended Mrs. Verplanck, as though an excuse demanded itself.

“I never knew one could bake a cake at all,” returned her husband, watching the clever white hands admiringly.

“Mother taught me before I was married; but of course at the hotel——”

“Exactly.” There was something so suggestive in Knollys’s complete understanding that Mrs. Knollys glanced at him suspiciously from under her thick black lashes.

“Anyway, we go back on Monday,” she reassured herself, aloud. “I—it will seem natural to have some one to order about once more, won’t it? With this Gladys-Marie I find myself falling quite into Anne’s lax indulgence—why, do you know, Nollsie, this morning I even dusted the hall for her, and sewed a fresh frill on her cap. Fancy!”

“I suppose that’s what Anne does while Michael’s writing books,” fancied Knollys, dropping vanilla with fascinated attention. “Rather fun, isn’t it?”

“Oh, for a while, perhaps,” acknowledged Ellen, carelessly. “Of course we’re having great larks playing at it, this week, and the house is sweet, but—after all, I’d rather have a little bit more tone, wouldn’t you, Knollys?”

“Gladys-Marie wouldn’t,” said Knollys, gazing out toward the strawberry-patch. “She says she’s so keen on the main show that she has no time to think about style and things.”

“The main show?” Ellen looked up, puzzled.

“Getting married, you know, and—a House. A House in the country.”

“Oh!” For some minutes Ellen stirred in silence. Then suddenly she set the bowl down on the table and untied her apron. “I think”—she took Knollys firmly by the hand—“we will go up and put on our own clothes. Gladys-Marie can finish the icing.”

“Certainly she can,” agreed Knollys, bewildered, “but why? Weren’t we doing it perfectly well?”

“Too well,” returned his wife, succinctly, pushing him before her out of the kitchen.

But as she saw him safely started up the stairs, she slipped back guiltily for just one look at her cake.

 

Mrs. Verplanck stood regarding a ragged wreath of daisies. Across the centre ran “10 Yeres” in straggling brown-eyed-susan capitals. It was Sunday morning.

“10 Yeres”! Something brighter than the dew upon the daisies brimmed Mrs. Verplanck’s eyes and fell upon the awkward little wreath.

“Why, you silly goose, Ellen!” Her friend, Mrs. Deverence (out from town for the anniversary), took her by the shoulders with an amused little laugh. “Getting sentimental over a bunch of wild flowers!—it was merely a maid who fixed them, wasn’t it?”

Mrs. Verplanck turned sharply to answer. Then she remembered the words had a quoted ring. “Merely a maid,” she assented, mechanically, but in spite of her, two more big drops of sentiment fell upon the daisies.

“It’s a good thing for you you’re going back to town to-morrow,” declared Mrs. Deverence, briskly. “Another week of this morbid country atmosphere——”

“It isn’t a morbid atmosphere,” contradicted Ellen, impolitely.

“With nobody in the house except a servant and your husband,” went on the friend calmly. “Tell me, Ellen, hasn’t it seemed awfully odd, having Knollys about, all the time?”

“About, all the time?” Ellen’s amazement was too frank to be mistrusted. “Why, my dear Sheila, I’ve scarcely seen him. You see, he weeds the strawberry-patch every morning, while I’m dusting and doing the flowers, and then after lunch I have my sewing and practising—yes, actually I’ve managed two hours a day!—and Knollys always gets through his mail and goes to the village to wire for stock quotations—why, we’ve never been as busy in our lives.”

“Um-m! And to-morrow it all ends——” Mrs. Deverence sat down very practically to breakfast.

“To-morrow—yes, I suppose so.” Ellen sat down too—as though one chair had been pushed from under her. “We go back—to the hotel to-morrow.”

“And I see you’re up for the Four-in-Hand.” Mrs. Deverence’s manner added to itself blitheness as the men came in. The change in attitude had never before struck Ellen as artificial.

“Yes—a regular club-gourmand she’s getting to be, eh, Knollys?” Hawley Deverence’s weighty laugh took heavy possession of the charming sunny dining-room as he slumped into his chair. “The women are usurping us, Nolly, my boy—they’re usurping us!”

“And Ellen’s such a complex person,” amended Mrs. Deverence. “A whirl of committees and things just suits her. Of course”—she looked brightly at Knollys—“this is all very well for a week, but for a lifetime——!”

“I think it might do quite well for a lifetime,” said Ellen, sitting very straight as she poured the coffee. “Two lumps, Hawley?”

“Er—thanks, three.” Hawley was staring at the graceful uplifted hands. “Ah—you really do that very well, you know, Ellen,” he allowed, graciously. “Don’t think I ever saw you pourin’ things before. You’ve always been at the hotel, haven’t you?”

“Yes”—Ellen looked at Knollys with a smile that had a twist to it—“always at the hotel.”

When Knollys looked back at her there was something in his eyes that seemed to sweep away ten years.

“Well,” Mrs. Deverence announced, cheerfully, “a house is very nice—we’ve had ours ever since we were married; but it’s a great care—oh, a shocking care, really!—and for you, Ellen——” she shrugged her pretty shoulders with a soft laugh. “I simply can’t imagine it. A house for you would be a joke!”

“Why?” Knollys turned to her very quietly. “Why do you think so?”

“Oh, dear me, now I do hope I haven’t said something ultra,” fluttered Sheila. “All I meant was the clubs and things, you know—dear Ellen has so many, and so much to do.”

“I dare say you are right,” said Ellen, slowly. “A house for me would be a joke. Yet—did I tell you, Knollys, what Gladys-Marie said yesterday? ‘Always seems t’ me,’ she said, ‘like a woman’s house is a sort of frame for her, only some poor things don’t care enough about it t’ more’n passepartout ’emselves.’”

“Ha! ha! Smart little baggage, isn’t she?” roared Hawley.

“But, my dear Ellen”—Mrs. Deverence raised her eyebrows a trifle—“surely you don’t encourage a person like that to talk so freely with you? Why, no servant at the hotel would dare——”

“No,” said Ellen, this time avoiding Knollys’s eyes. “No servant at the hotel; but Anne’s and Michael’s servant——”

“Still, one can’t take them as an example, can one, dear? Delightful people, of course, but a bit—er—eccentric. Her frocks—you know——”

“This is one of them.” Ellen smoothed it with a sudden tenderness. “I—it has been a very nice frock.”

“Ahem! A very decent chap he is—the husband, I mean,” put in Hawley, evidently feeling things a bit strained. “Writes A-1 books, doesn’t he?”

“It was really too dear of them to lend you this place, wasn’t it?” Sheila came in conscientiously on her husband’s initiative. “Simply a wonderful house!”

“Yes,” agreed Ellen and Knollys simultaneously, “a wonderful house!”

 

The Deverences were gone. Knollys and Ellen sat on the porch alone. Beside them lay Gladys-Marie’s wreath.

“Ten years,” said Knollys, meditatively. “Ten years—in the hotel. And to-morrow we go back. To clubs and Wall Street!” There was no cynicism in his brief laugh—just an ache, a sort of emptiness.

“Knollys Verplanck”—his wife laid her hands impressively upon his shoulders, and even through the darkness he could feel the warmth in her great dark eyes—“we’re not going back! That’s the only joke—I—oh, those silly city people! Knollys!—Knollys dear, we’re going to have a House. Say we are! I—I don’t want to be just passepartouted. Knollys—couldn’t we—don’t you think we might pretend it’s ten years ago? Don’t you think we might start over and be just plain married people?”

And Gladys-Marie, coming round the corner of the porch just in time to see Knollys’s answer, stole noiselessly back into the house with Marmaduke. A conscientious person, Gladys-Marie, though, after all, merely a maid.

“She’s the sweetest thing in the world”—Doromea looked up extenuatingly from a large hole in Timothy’s best socks that she was darning—“and ever so lovable, Sheila, but——”

“Just a born butterfly, that’s all,” continued Ellen, for the moment abstracted from dish-towels piled up before her to be hemmed, “a captivating will-o’-the-wisp creature, made to have things done for her—even thought for her; a——”

“Simply a society person!” Patsy sat triumphantly upright, with the air of having nutshelled the whole argument. “Can you imagine Sheila, sitting here on Ellen’s porch, with anything but a bridge score or a cup of tea in her hand? Fancy her making baby-clothes!” There was a pitying smile for the defrauded Sheila as Patsy bent again over the filmy microscopic thing that she was stitching.

“She did do that clever little sketch for us to act at Anne’s last Christmas,” suggested Ellen, doubtfully. It was partly through Sheila that Ellen had come into possession of her own; through Sheila’s very superficiality that Ellen’s desire for a house had crystallized. She looked about the cool shaded porch and into the wide, charming rooms of which she was chatelaine, and sighed contentedly. “If only one could make her a bit more self-realizing——”

“Make her see that she is just a Plain Person.” Doromea was biting thread. “Timothy says that’s where society people disparage themselves—they’re always imagining themselves something extraordinary. But the bewildering part about Sheila is that she doesn’t imagine herself at all; she simply pays no attention to herself.”

“Hasn’t time,” Patsy explained, succinctly. “She’s always at the Suffrage Club or at the theatre—you know, Dorry, she told Anne she fairly lived in the theatre—or off with Hawley somewhere. Of course I’m terribly fond of Hawley—he’s an excellent person, really, and makes one the most delicious things to drink; but as a husband—well, of course he isn’t like Warren.”

“Or Knollys.”

“Or Timothy!”

The three wives nodded at one another emphatically.

“He puffs so,” complained Patsy, returning to her mutton. “And all he ever says when Sheila asks him something is, ‘Yes, m’ dear,’ or, ‘Do jus’ ’s you like, darlin’.’ He does seem fond of her—but then, so many men have been fond of one. It would have been so easy for Sheila to have taken somebody a little less—er—husky. She’s such a midget, they make each other ridiculous.”

“Didn’t she say they were going somewhere together this afternoon, Ellen? Wasn’t that the reason she couldn’t come out from town to lunch with us?” The socks were finished and folded, and Doromea turned her attention entirely to the matter of conversation.

“Yes—that is, they were going to motor out to the Claremont, to try Hawley’s new machine—how is it that society people always have a new machine?—and then to look at some ponies for the twins. Sheila said she’d get Hawley to drop her here before he went back to town, if there was time; she must be at the Elbert Lewises’ for tea, she said, and get home to dine early. It seems there’s a first night of something. Did you ever hear such a programme! How she keeps that pink and white look is what I can’t fathom—bridge until all hours, and then day after day of mad rushing about—all for what? I’m sure I never knew, when I was doing it! Why, when I contrast that ten years of slavery with this last one——” Ellen’s great dark eyes softened happily. “And Knollys was just as miserable as I; he confesses it, now that we’ve emancipated ourselves from hotels and clubs and things. Poor Sheila! If she’d only realize—for I suppose even butterflies must get tired of flying.”

“They’re always wanting to fly just a little higher.” Patsy wagged her auburn head sagaciously. “And then they’re determined that the children shall simply soar—Sheila says quite naïvely that her ambition for the twins is too enormous to be taken seriously by any one else than herself. I dare say she wants Margretta to marry a duke, and Maurice to distinguish himself in polo, or something of the sort. Now all I ask for the Angel is that he sha’n’t be President; I just won’t have him bully me.”

Doromea and Ellen looked at each other; and—quickly—looked away again. They had no children.

But Doromea smoothed Timothy’s socks upon her lap with very much the same tenderness that Patsy smoothed the tiny frock. “The Angel’s a dear,” said Doromea. “So are Maurice and Margretta, even though they are society children. I shouldn’t wonder if they do other things besides dukes and polo later on. Sheila herself may get to want them to.”

Ellen shook her head. “Not as long as she remains simply a society person. It’s like running round and round in a chariot-race, always pushing desperately to get ahead, but never able to make a wide-enough swing outside the circle that’s been laid out. Poor Sheila!”

“Absolutely conventional!” In her conviction Patsy broke her needle. “Must be deadly for her. Just suppose she’d slid down the banisters——!”

“It would have been a fad with the younger married set for a whole week,” supplemented Ellen. “Sheila leads them all about by the nose, her society. Well,” with a sigh, “I wish she’d come. Even her affectations are charming; it’s only to herself that she doesn’t do justice. To other people she’s delightful.”

“I wish she’d come, too,” joined in Doromea. “Somehow I never have time to go to see her—it’s such an undertaking to go in to town.”

“And it used to be such an undertaking to come out,” Ellen laughed. “I think it’s rather sweet of Sheila to bother. Ah”—as a cloud of dust came round the corner of the road—“there she is now—at least I suppose she will emerge shortly.”

And in another minute she had emerged; a tiny, wild-rose sort of creature, all fluffy chiffons and flying yellow curls—a baby, you would have said, until you saw her reach up and kiss her husband.

“Wasn’t he a darling to bring me?” she asked the other women, when he and the machine had vanished down the drive. “He had two men to see by three o’clock, and a simply terrifically important race to follow; but he brought me out just the same. And he’s coming back for me—those wretched Elbert Lewises!—but I promised Peter Butler I’d go to something of theirs; they took care of Peter when he broke his knee that time, and as long as he’s my cousin—well, what I meant to say in the very first place was, how are you all? Patsy, where’s the Angel?”

“Up-stairs on Ellen’s bed, asleep,” returned Patsy, promptly. “Want to go look at him?”

“Rather!” Sheila was tugging at the strings of her frilly blue motor-bonnet. “There!—and I’ll just shed this coat, too; then I can’t get him the least bit dusty.” She was out of the coat in a second, and more childish than ever in her simple rose-colored frock.

“Fancy Sheila thinking about getting dust on the baby!” Doromea turned to Ellen, as the two ridiculously young mothers disappeared inside the house.

“A society person with ideas on hygiene!” echoed Ellen.

 

“He does look so well and rosy.” Sheila peered wistfully at Patsy’s Angel from under her long curling eyelashes. “And in Washington, too, you can keep him always out-of-doors—there are so many squares and flowery places.”

“Oh, yes,” said Patsy, cheerfully. “There are dozens of parks for him in Washington; though I always look forward to this real country when we come to visit Timothy and Dorry.”

“The twins have only our back yard,” reflected Sheila, her wide blue eyes very serious. “Hawley got them swings and a sand-pile, but—it’s always city for them; and they’re four years old now.”

“Why don’t you send them to the Park—Central Park, I mean?” Patsy’s impulsive sympathy darted at once to the most obvious idea.

“I couldn’t go with them,” said Sheila, simply. “They would have to play with their governess, and they wouldn’t like that. You see, when we come home, either Hawley or I, we can always run down to the yard with them right away. But it’s rather grim and stiff for them, poor dears, with only trees in tubs and a fence all round. Some day perhaps we can afford to live in the country.”

“Oh!” Patsy’s glance was rather blank. If she had not known Sheila to be simply a society person, she would have suspected her of trying to make an epigram. But, as Ellen said, Sheila paid no attention to herself—it would never have occurred to her to attempt being clever.

“How was the new machine?” asked Patsy, steering away from what she did not understand.

Sheila’s lovely little face beamed. “Hawley was so pleased over it! He says it’s a rip-snorter—the bulliest engine he’s had yet!” Hawley’s large enthusiasm came quaintly from the small, almost infantile mouth. “I’m so delighted; though it—it does go rather fast. I had to hold on to the rail all the way out.”

“I’m crazy over them when they go fast,” protested Patsy, relapsing into her old sportsman vernacular. “At the Vanderbilt Cup race——”

“Ah! You saw the play, then? You remember——” and the babyish features lit up with a something that made downright Patsy blink with surprise, as Sheila went on to enumerate certain scenes in the play, certain thrilling passages—quoting, explaining, mimicking—so eagerly that one had not the heart or any longer the interest to explain that one had meant the actual race itself.

Patsy listened absorbedly. “And I never had thought she could talk,” she told Doromea afterward. “But then she really didn’t talk; something just talked through her.”

The something kept on talking, until Ellen came and “shooed” them downstairs to the porch and Doromea. “Here I’ve been waiting for days to see Sheila, and now you two go off and look at a year-old baby the whole while! Tell me, Sheila, when are you going to free yourself of clubs and bridge and suffrage leagues and theatres and things?”

“When Hawley makes me,” answered Sheila, serenely. She was fumbling for something in her exquisite little gold bag—a half-finished lace collar it rolled out to be. “I’m just crocheting this bit of fluff for Margretta,” she explained, laughing a delicious, gurgling sort of laugh. “Isn’t it a joke? I carry it about with me, and work on it between acts—I did two rows in bed this morning—Fanchon was late with my breakfast—and then lots more during the lectures at the Mechanics’ Association.”

“The Mechanics’ Association?” bolted Doromea.

“Yes—every Thursday at noon, you know.” Sheila was counting stitches busily. “Air-ships it was to-day—the most thrilling subject.”

“Oh!” Doromea sat back again. Air-ships; one could understand. Society was engrossed with air-ships just at present.

“I do hope Maurice will take to air-ships,” murmured Sheila, dreamily. “He’s so given over to fireworks now—some part of him’s always exploded. If he keeps it up, he’ll look a guy by the time he’s old enough to lead cotillons.” Behind Sheila’s back, Ellen and Patsy and Doromea exchanged a triumvirate “I told you so”; if it was not polo, it was less than polo; cotillons!

“And Margretta,” suggested Ellen, wondering if Sheila would have looked as absolutely charming had she been hemming dish-towels instead of crocheting Irish lace, “what is Margretta’s raison de vivre?”

“Margretta is going to be an actress,” said Margretta’s mother, slowly. “She is absorbed with playing Little Red Riding-hood to Peter Butler’s wolf at the moment. But later she will be playing—other things in Peter Butler’s theatres. It saves so much management, having a cousin who owns things one wants to enter.”

“And when your two offspring are at their separate vocations,” Doromea smiled above the childish curly head, “while the one is whirring furiously through the air, and the other acknowledging a triumphant series of curtain-calls, what will you be doing? Where will you and Hawley be?”

“Oh, I——!” Sheila shook her hair all into her eyes, as she laughed, gayly insouciant. “I shall be still in society, of course—simply a society butterfly! Hawley and I shall be still giving dinners and going to Elbert Lewises’ and living within call of Wall Street and our clubs. And perhaps—when we feel specially bored—we shall sneak down and play in the sand-pile. But we shall always be doing the conventional, Hawley and I—just Plain People, like the ones in Timothy’s stories” (she turned to Doromea with a little nod of homage); “it is the children who must accomplish the extraordinary. As Hawley says, we shall just be going round the same old track, taking the same old hurdles—and happy as larks at it!”

The careless, rippling voice stopped; for some reason Ellen and Doromea had caught up their sewing again, and were stitching away at a hectic pace. Patsy decided with great suddenness that she must go up and wake the baby. Dumbness seemed to have seized everybody—except Sheila. But then a society person is expected to keep on talking.

“That reminds me—I meant to speak of it when I first came—can’t you come with me one night to see this play, The Rut, that Peter’s putting on? He’s given me a box for all next week, knowing how I’ve always remained the matinée girl!”—Sheila’s face looked up for a moment from Margretta’s collar with an appealing ingenuousness—“and it would be jolly if we could all go; you two and Knollys and Timothy. Patsy, too, if she could be persuaded while Warren is away, and if she’ll leave the Angel. I don’t know much about the play’s merits,” added Sheila, indifferently. “But—they say it’s being talked about a good deal.”

“Timothy says it’s the most subtle satire of our generation,” put in Doromea, eagerly. “He’s been trying to get seats for us all week, but it was quite impossible. You see, a critic took him the first night, but they had to stand the whole time—it is good of you to ask us, Sheila!”

“That play is absolutely the only thing that could get me to town on a June night,” chimed in Ellen. “But that—why, it’s been running only ten days, and already it is a classic; what a pity the author can’t be here to receive his ovation! Mr. Butler gave it out that the man who wrote it is abroad, and won’t even allow his identity to be divulged. So extraordinary, in this day of the fame-greedy!”

“Perhaps he didn’t write the play for fame,” suggested Sheila, always continuing to count stitches. “Perhaps he wrote it just because he couldn’t help it; and now he wants to stay a Plain Person, with his home and children and all.”

“He has children, then? But, yes—of course; it said in the papers that that had been the most phenomenal part of his creation—introducing two perfectly natural children in a satire of society! And then they say he has the most remarkable range—that he handles theories of electricity and deepest economical problems with the same piercing ease that he does feminine psychology. The Rut!—you can’t know what a treat you’ll be giving us, Sheila.”

“Then we’ll say Monday night, shall we?” Sheila had a trick of reflecting other people’s eagerness—a quick little turn of the head, that was compelling of still more enthusiasm. “Hawley will be able to go Monday night, and we will motor you out in the new machine afterward.”

“Heavenly!” Doromea forgot that she had ever felt—vaguely—uncomfortable, and dropped her work again.

“You are such satisfactory society people,” sighed Ellen. “Except when you have to go away,” she added, as a siren blew its warning up the drive.

Sheila jumped up. “It’s the bondage of our rut,” she said, lightly, once more tying on the frilly bonnet; “you see, it is us this new playwright has satirized—and idealized a bit as well, perhaps? Doesn’t he show that we never go or stay, just as we please—that we’re forever doing the things we don’t want to do; just because we fit our groove so exactly? I think that’s it—awfully serious, isn’t it?” Her laugh rang softly amused as she went out to meet her husband. “Till Monday, then—you’ll meet us at the theatre at half past eight, and, oh—do bring Patsy—where is she?”

“Coming!” Patsy’s pretty auburn head appeared at the door—over the Angel whom she was holding. “Where am I to be brought, Sheila?”

“To see two perfectly natural children!” The blue eyes under the motor-hood sought her husband’s. “But society children, I suppose, Hawley—in The Rut, you know?”

“Yes, m’ dear, certainly; jus’ ’s you say.” He looked down at her with the benignity of a large Newfoundland.

“To the Elbert Lewises’, then—good-by, good-by!” And Sheila’s fluffy curls swirled round, hiding her face, as she was carried smoothly away.

“In the groove,” Ellen reminded Patsy and Doromea. “The man who wrote The Rut was right when he called it bondage, because the people fit it so exactly. Poor little Sheila!—there’s something very pathetic about her at times.”

“It’s because of her blind satisfaction with surface things,” said Doromea.

“Because she’s simply a society person,” said Patsy.

 

Monday night, and, at Peter Butler’s Theatre, The Rut was nearing its big scene. Doromea and Timothy, Ellen and Knollys, sat well toward the front of the box—breathless with anticipations realized; Sheila and her big, immovable husband were farther back—out of sight almost, against the box door.

Timothy looked back at them anxiously. “I don’t suppose they’re thinking much about it,” he sighed; “they look a good deal more taken up with each other. And it’s the greatest play of our age—such a shame Patsy didn’t come—nobody will ever do anything that can touch it; unless, of course, the same author——”

“Sheila says the author doesn’t care to write any more,” said Doromea, as the curtain went down on the first act. “Mr. Butler told Sheila that if only the man would keep on, he could make a fortune and anything else he liked out of plays. But he seems a strange creature, the author; he prefers to remain just a Plain Person. No one even knows his name, except Peter Butler.”

“Then how do they know he’s a man?” asked Timothy, suddenly. “Very probably, you know, he isn’t—— I say, Dorry, Mr. Butler’s coming into the box. After this next act I’m going to ask him.”

“Are you enjoying it?” Sheila called, her smile including Ellen and Knollys. She was a veritable bit of froth to-night, Sheila, a Dresden shepherdess in a cloud of chiffons.

“It’s splendid!” Ellen answered for them all. “But we want to know about the author, Sheila—Timothy thinks it may be a woman, and——”

“I want to ask Mr. Butler,” said Timothy, looking at the manager, who was absorbed in conversation with Hawley. “You see,” he smiled at Sheila, “I’ve gone quite foolish over this play; it has stirred me so enormously that——”

“Wait until after this second act.” Sheila’s small, frivolous head was bent over an unruly glove-button. “Peter has an announcement to make then, something or other about this author creature, and it might throw some light on what you want to know. I think I’ll go outside for a bit,” she added, as the curtain went up. “One gets so warm—and I’ve seen the play before.”

Ellen and Doromea looked after her. Then they looked at each other. “If only she could be brought to realize herself,” was in their eyes. “Overlooking the big scene in the biggest play of her time because one gets warm—and she has seen it before! Poor Sheila!”

Then the scene was on, and they forgot all about Sheila. Doromea sat close to the box rail, and when once in a while she came to, stole a second to look at Timothy, whose eyes were round and sending out little sparks behind his glasses. Knollys and Ellen sat on the edge of their chairs, oblivious even of each other. But in the back of the box was a man who paid the deepest attention of them all; who watched the stage with only less interest than he ordinarily watched Sheila. His big thumbs held a book, which he followed closely as he followed the play; a conscientious creature, Hawley, though perhaps not like Warren, or Knollys, or Timothy.

When the curtain went down, he sat back and wiped his forehead exhaustedly; though he had come every night, it was always the same. The others were sitting back too, limp with the wonder of the playwright’s conception.

“And now for the announcement.” Timothy drew a long breath.

Peter Butler had come out before the footlights: his clever, shrewd face was very keen. “Playgoers,” he began, slowly, “have certain rights that are all their own; one right is to adore the star, another to hear the author make a speech. This play has been running two weeks now, and still the author has not satisfied the theatregoer’s curiosity about—herself.” He paused a moment to let the revelation sink in—“herself.” “To-night, however, she has decided to break her silence. I will let her tell you why.”

He stepped back into the wings; there was an excited buzz—which grew into an uproar, and cries of “Author!” “Author!” followed each other with an enthusiasm headed by the group in Sheila’s box. They were on the qui vive, impatient, insistent; all except Hawley, who simply sat quietly stolid, like an excellent husband-person.

“I could shake him!” declared Ellen to Doromea, her eyes always on the stage. “This dazzling play—and now the author, and—oh!” She stopped with a quick gasp, as once more the curtains parted and out in front stepped—Sheila! “Why, what—what——” Sheila’s two friends fell back speechless. It was the small butterfly creature who spoke now—deliberately, and with a faintly smiling friendliness. She stood scarcely five feet in her tiny, frivolous French slippers, a wide-eyed rose-leaf doll, in a halo of golden curls and gossamer rose fluff, before the dark dignity of the velvet curtain.

“Yes, I wrote it,” she confessed, looking out over the crowd without an atom of self-consciousness. “I didn’t want to tell, because I’ve always wanted the twins to do the extraordinary. I wanted to stay just their mother. But Mr. Butler says it will help the play if people know who wrote it; and I want to help the play. It’s a good play?” Like Peter Pan, she searched their faces eagerly. “You think it’s a good play, don’t you?”

“Yes!”

“Well, rather!”

“You betcherlife!”

Sheila dimpled. “Then it’s all right. I don’t mind your knowing; and I can stay on in ‘The Rut’—it’s not such a bad rut,” she pleaded. “I’ve dug it to pieces for you, but for myself I have had to put it together again, since the groove of it is my life. After all, you see, the author is just a plain, ordinary person!” With a gay little nod she slipped back behind the scenes, and so to Hawley.

“That is all I am, isn’t it, Hawley?” she asked, hiding herself behind his bigness, as the applause rose more and more enthusiastic. “Simply a society person and your wife—the mother of the twins.”

“Yes, darlin’—certainly; jus’ ’s you say.” But this time Hawley’s expression was quite satisfactory to Ellen and Doromea.

“And we said she didn’t realize herself”—Doromea turned to Ellen—“we said she could never swing wide enough to get outside the circle! Ellen!”

“Just shows we have a rut all our own, doesn’t it?” Ellen was wiping her eyes joyously. “We hadn’t the sense to see that she was staying in hers voluntarily—that she was creating an ideal society person!”

“And they’re the most rarely plain people of all,” added Timothy—not without reverence.

“ ... Just as I was telling Timmie the other night, when a man’s serious—and only then—his trouble begins! Well, I must be tripping along; promised to help Sheila give Lady Trotworthy tea—the dear old soul’s mind isn’t so light on its feet any more, you know. Bye-bye, Hawley. Bye, Plunkett.” Warner threw his coat over his shoulder and departed.

Hawley moved his feet still an inch higher on one of the Club’s red leather chairs. “Awful’ good fellow, Warner,” he vouchsafed, as intelligibly as his cigar would let him.

“Fine,” agreed Plunkett (respectfully speaking, Mr. Knollys Verplanck) from the depths of another red leather chair.

“Er—awfully funny, and all that, you know. Keeps things goin’. I don’t know what Sheila’d do if it wasn’t for Warner, since she has that old English Someone to stop. Nice old lady, y’know, but—well, her mind is a bit heavy on its feet, just as Warner said. Don’t know what he’d say if he knew there was another coming to-morrow—another Englishwoman I mean, but nothing like Lady Trot; Sheila says this one’s young and tremendously good-looking. Well, I’m glad—for Warner. He deserves some kind of reward after a week of Lady Trot. Deuced good of him to help Sheila; he’s so—so funny, don’ che know.”

“Very funny,” agreed Verplanck again.

“But—but I say, Plunkett”—uneasily the substantial tan boots drew themselves down from comfort, and Hawley’s big, solid body bent confidentially toward his friend—“I wouldn’t have any of these other chaps hear me, you know, not for worlds; but I’ve often wondered—d’ye think Warner’s anything besides funny, Plunkett? D’ye think—well, what else but a wag is he, eh? I dunno.”

“Well, I don’t,” said Verplanck, frankly; and he stared out across the crowded Avenue, with an expression that paid Warner no little compliment—by its regret. “I tell you candidly, Deverence, I’ve known Jim Warner now for nearly twelve years, and I’ve never yet heard him say anything but a joke. By George, the other night at Treadham’s, when that girl’s dress was on fire, I could have killed Warner! There the girl was, in flames, and Warner, with his eyes right on her, sitting still on the other side of the room, telling a funny story! Why half the people in the room didn’t know she was on fire, even. I tell you, it made me mad—so mad, I’ve scarcely been civil to Jim since.”

“D’you say anything to him about it?” Hawley’s cigar had gone out. His big, good-humored face looked almost earnest.

“I told him—I couldn’t help telling him—I thought he might have made some pretence at least, at aiding the girl, as long as he saw——”

“And what d’ he say?”

“He said ‘my dear boy, there were five of you aiding her already. I never deliberately make myself inconspicuous!’ Yes, sir, that was just exactly what he said!”

Hawley swore; plentifully. “And d’ye know,” he added, plaintive through his disgust, “Sheila told me that was the funniest story she ever heard in her life; told me about it after we got home, and by Gad, it was funny! Began with——”

“Oh, of course!” Knollys shook his shoulders impatiently. “His stories always are funny. He’s always funny. He can’t help being funny. But great Heavens, Hawley, he can help being nothing else! It does seem to me that a fellow ought to have something come to him besides a laugh. He’s got an almighty fine face.”

“Right!” Genuine affection beamed from Hawley’s dog-eyes. “I—don’t you suppose it’s rather because he—there’s never been any woman, I mean?” The big “society man” lapsed into sudden shyness. “I think all that—that sort of thing, y’know, makes a tremendous difference, old chap.”

The other man met his eyes squarely. “So do I,” he said; and it was as though their hands had gripped for the moment. “Yes, I daresay you’re right: Warner’s never had much to do with women—now I think of it, I’ve never seen him with one, except Ellen and Sheila, and then only at parties, or when there’s some guest to help entertain, like now at your house. Odd, too, for Warner’s just the sort that ought to succeed with a woman——”

“Yes”—Hawley nodded—“devilish good-lookin’, plenty of money, and er—what d’ye call it? Debonair, y’know; um-m, that’s it, debonair. Asked Sheila what it meant, and she said the sort of person who could tell you his own tragedy as though it were some one’s else. Poor little Sheila! I’ll bet she’s having her own troubles this afternoon—a tea-party and Lady Trot all together—whew! S’pose I’d better run along and help ’em out, what?” He drained his glass regretfully. “Come up for a bit, Plunkett?”

“Thanks”—Knollys too was reaching for his hat—“I’ve to do ‘notions’ for Ellen: beeswax and binding-tape, and er—ah, yes! Elastic, you know! Pale blue, a yard and—and how much, Hawley?” Mr. Verplanck’s aristocratic nose wrinkled thoughtfully. “Blessed if I know.”

Hawley roared. “Come on up, when you’ve found out,” he called, as they left each other at the foot of the Club steps. “Warner’s sure to have some ripping story for us; so—er—so deuced funny, y’know, Warner!”

 

In Sheila’s charming octagon room, an impatient little group of people crowded about some one seated cross-legged on a quaint Chinese stool. “Come, Sheila, do make him! He’s such a lazy beggar——”

“And he’s had his eternal three cups of tea; there’s not a particle of excuse——”

“Warner, you Sphinx, unravel! We’re waiting, these fifteen minutes; why are you invited, d’ye suppose, if not to tell stories? You’re no good at all en tête-à-tête, you know.”

“My dear Mr. Warner (it was a delightfully ugly old lady in a marvelous tea-gown, who spoke to him), I’m afraid you really must gratify them. Such noise—and my poor neuralgia—really!”

The person on the tabouret raised his careless attractive face to her, smiling. “You win, Lady Trot! What shall it be, Sheila? Broad farce, or screaming tragedy? Nothing so appallingly funny, you know, as a really tremendous tragedy.”

“Then tell us one,” commanded Sheila—a veritable bit of her own Dresden china, as she glanced at him over the tea-cups. She was genuinely fond of Warner, the little society lady; his sense of the dramatic, something told her, made them subtly kin. “Tell us the most awful—and the funniest—tragedy you can think of, Jim, an original one, you know.” And Sheila pushed her chair back from the teatable, and curled down into it, in a luxury of anticipation.

“All right”—Warner’s drawl came a bit slower than usual; he was sitting forward, gazing steadily at the fire—“I’ll tell you one. It—I’m quite sure it’s original, that it’s never been told before. Because,” he laughed contagiously, looking around at all of them, “it was my tragedy, you see!”

“Yours—ha! ha!” Every one was laughing with him, as they drew their chairs into a closer circle. “A tragedy that happened to Jim! That’s a good one. Go on, Jim; it starts rippingly!”

Warner balanced a plate of frivolous pink cakes on one of his crossed knees; his eyes, as he regarded them, were full of negligent amusement. “She—that’s the way all tragedies begin, of course—was a bachelor girl, and lived in a flat. Nothing very original about that, but then she was the sort of girl who made the commonplace very nice. She even made me very nice—for a time: at least so people told me. And out of sheer gratitude, I suppose, I—silly ass!—fell in love with her.”

“Haw! Haw!” It was Hawley’s large roar that interrupted. He had just come in, and was standing near the door. “Warner in love!—that’s the best yet! Nothing that chap won’t tell, for the sake of a story. Funny old Warner!”

“Fact.” Warner grinned back at him. “Well, naturally, when I realized the shocking state I was in, I set about to pry into the lady’s emotions. But malheureusement, I found she hadn’t any. That is, not for me. There were other men—oh, a disgusting lot of other men!—with whom she was shy, coquette, difficult—all the encouraging things, you know; but with me she remained always that frightful neutrality, one’s Platonic friend. So, things went; I mean, stood still. I went to the flat, and she came out to dine; and, ah, yes; a pretty touch I had almost forgotten—she always wore a tiny carved jade elephant hung on a fine gold chain about her neck. Lends a neat flavor of the artistic, that elephant, what?” He smiled at the little group whimsically. “Um-m; one night at the Savoy——”

“Ah! It was in London then?” The ugly old lady’s beautiful bright eyes betrayed what she thought of London. “You didn’t tell us that.”

“Of course—in London, five years ago last November. As I said, we were having supper at the Savoy, and she told me she called the elephant Jim. I thought it a crude joke, myself; but I let it pass.... I let it pass. He did me no end of good turns after all, that elephant: every time I was on the verge of insanity—blurting the thing, I mean, of course, and so losing her for a pal or anything—I seemed to catch that old beast’s green eye fixed on me—with the leeriest grin you ever saw. And I swore I’d never be as clumsy as he, no matter if our names were the same.

“Well, to get on to the tragedy”—Warner’s laugh rang out so delightfully clear that every one had to join in it; even Sheila, whose adorable butterfly face had been rather serious in its attention. “One dull afternoon I had dropped in to tea, as I did a shocking lot of rainy evenings, and found her in a blue frock—um-m—a delicious frock really—but blue and in a mood to match. After she’d made us each three very bad cups of tea—and she generally made very creditable tea, too, for a girl—I said: ‘Come, let’s have it! which of them is it—who’s bothering you?’

“For a minute she looked as though she’d like to box my ears—you know the kind of look, when you’ve just displayed a little perspicacity in some one’s else affairs; then ‘it’s the one who isn’t bothering me,’ she said, toying with the little elephant and looking at it in a peculiar sort of fashion. ‘The one who hasn’t the perception to bother me—or doesn’t want to,’ she added, in a rather lower voice.

“‘But who——?’ I began.

“‘Never mind’—— you know how girls are, the minute one begins to be useful; nothing women hate so much as usefulness. A practical man has absolutely no chance with ’em. ‘I’m absurd even to mention it to you. I hate rainy days—they always make one so absurd. Come, let’s try those new songs——’

“‘Not until you’ve told me——’

“‘What? I don’t intend to tell you anything,’ she declared—so firmly that I knew she would end by telling me everything.

“‘Oh, yes, you do,’ I said—with that disgusting urbanity which has made all my friends abhor me, more or less—‘yes, you do. First of all, what’s his name?’

“‘J—Jack,’ she stammered. The reason people hate that urbanity is because it’s a sort of subtle hypnotic.

“‘And he—ah, doesn’t bother you enough? Isn’t sufficiently courageous in his attitude of approach, I mean?’

“‘Oh!’ she threw up her hands with a little gesture of abandon. ‘He’s sufficiently courageous, I suppose; but he doesn’t see. Oh, I don’t know why I tell you all this, but it’s gone on so long now—our being just such good pals and all that—it—it’s getting on my nerves frightfully. And then this beastly wet afternoon’—— she laughed a bit hysterically. ‘Yes, yes; I’ll tell you. You see (she was twisting the jade elephant almost off its chain) this man I’ve known for ages—a year at least—and we’ve done everything together; I’ve always kept my best jokes for him, and my craziest hopes and plans, and—yes, I’m afraid my worst moods, too. He’s never seemed to mind somehow, no matter how disagreeable I’ve been, and—well, just lately I’ve found that—that I can’t go on being pals, that’s all. I daren’t even hint to him—I might lose everything, you see; and yet—oh, don’t you see, if he did care—and was perhaps in exactly my position—I’ve worn the mask so faithfully. If he did care——! Oh, Jim (but she was looking at the clumsy little elephant), isn’t it funny? Isn’t it funny, funny, funny!’

“And ’twas funny, now, wasn’t it? Nothing so frightfully funny as a real tragedy. Now I—I was just clown enough to snatch at one little ravelled end of her story, and try to match it up with a ragged corner of mine—that, you see, was where the delicious joke of it came in. Of course, I couldn’t be sure, but—something said slyly, ‘Why it’s you she means, can’t you see? It’s you, you blessed idiot, and everything’s coming out all shipshape.’

“Just the same, one can’t believe oneself just offhand like that—it seems so reckless; so I suggested, carelessly, you know, that she bring this tongue-tied impossibility to tea with me next day. In that way, I told her, I could see exactly how things stood (and I meant it more literally than she knew, by a good deal!); we’d tea at some Galleries—good place, I pointed out, for me to watch this Jack person, without his knowing it, and then (by this time my ridiculous tongue was fairly tripping itself up with expectation) she and I would have another talk, and decide her next move.

“‘Capital!’ she pronounced—a bit nervously, I thought at the time. ‘If only I can get hold of Jack for to-morrow——’

“‘Oh, well, if to-morrow turns out impossible, any day next week will be all right,’ I said cheerfully—the burning question being, of course, whether she would find it possible, any day, to produce this ‘Jack’—whom by the way I was beginning to care for quite foolishly—as one cares for oneself, don’t you know! ‘Say you meet him at the New, at four; have an hour for the pictures—which means anything you want to say to him, while I stroll quietly about after you—unobserved. Then we go to tea à trois, and—the game’s complete. At tea——’ I endeavored to look at her quite impersonally—‘I shall try to make you understand just what I think. It’s understood?’

“‘Yes.’ She drew a long breath. ‘Yes, I suppose it might as well be to-morrow as any other day. We can’t go on as we’ve been doing, that’s certain.’

“‘No,’ I said—my voice as leading man was quite good in this part, really! ‘No,’ I said, ‘we can’t. We must er—come to some new arrangement to-morrow.’

“But will you believe me, when I said good-bye to her, that detestable elephant actually leered at me; and for some unaccountable reason I was suddenly furious at his being named Jim. A senseless liberty, I thought it. However, when I was outdoors again, and walking home through Regent’s Park, I began to think less and less about the elephant; more and more about her peculiar nervousness and agitation. The way she’d answered me at first—‘it’s the one who isn’t bothering me—who hasn’t the perception to bother me, or doesn’t want to’—and all the time looking at that little jade elephant, whose name was Jim! Not such a bad elephant after all, I decided.

“Then the way she hesitated when I asked his name: ‘J-Jack’ why of course! She was always the frankest, most absurdly truthful creature; and she had started to say—ah! It was almost too exquisite, even the hint of it. And—‘it’s gone on so long now—our being just good pals’ came back to me on leaping little bounds of recollection; and then ‘oh, don’t you see, if he did care—and was perhaps in exactly my position’—Hm! There was certainly no one else of whom she could possibly have thought that; no one else who had been shown her ‘worst moods’ as well as her ‘craziest hopes and plans!’ My children (Warner passed his plate of pink cakes to each one of them, with an elaborate bow, while his wonderful smiling eyes mocked their gravity), I assure you, that was one of the most remarkable twenty-four hours I have ever spent—from the time I left her, till the time I saw her again next afternoon. Those of you who have known the emotion will remember its alternative phases—of leaving one entirely strangled, and again curiously hollow. I underwent them both, with breathless rapidity, all night and the next day; and they left me rather weak-kneed and stuttery, when I arrived at the Galleries at precisely half past four.

“I strolled about, and watched the Americans, at the same time keeping a weather eye out for her—and Jack! Awfully amusing, you know, waiting round for one’s fate to make up its mind! I never spent such a funny half hour in my life!

“Then I saw her. And she was alone. And, you know, to this day, for the life of me, I can’t remember what I thought—much less what I said or did, when I saw her—alone—at five o’clock! I do remember she had on another blue gown, some sort of tailored thing, with little lines in it; and those lines danced themselves up and down and round that room, till somehow they caught up those tiresome weighted feet of mine, and drew me over to her.

“‘Jack not here?’ I asked—oh, with an enormous carelessness. My voice, once out, sounded so odd, I just asked again to make sure.

“‘Jack not here?’ ‘No—no; that is, not yet. I can’t understand,’ she went on hurriedly, ‘I wrote him a line—rather an absurd line, I’m afraid—and told him if for any reason he couldn’t be here, to send me a wire. And he didn’t send the wire, and I haven’t seen anything of him—up till now.’

“Up till now! I was grinning like a fool, trying to remember all I had planned to say, and failing utterly to say anything—until she took the reins and suggested rather faintly that we might as well have tea.

“So we had it; and I gulped mine, and said quite the most brilliant things I’ve ever said in my life—naturally, since I hadn’t an idea what I was talking about; and watched her eat her muffin (which she did with the most frantic deliberation), wishing to goodness she’d finish, so that—well, one certainly could not propose, with the person eating a muffin!

“At last she did finish, and—I was cold from my head to my feet—I knew it was The Time! She had given me undivided attention all during tea, gave it me still. Her eyes had never once wandered after some one who might be expected.

“‘Dear old girl’—I had leaned forward to where I could watch her eyes a bit better; when suddenly I saw in them something—something I had never seen before, something I have never seen since, in a woman’s eyes. It knocked the breath all out of me—you see (Warner’s laugh was the lightest thing in the world) I thought it was for me, that look. Great joke!—for in another second she’d jumped up, run round the other side of the table behind me, and held out both hands to—Jack! Some wretched duffer I’d never heard of, he turned out to be; knew her in Paris or somewhere, where she’d spent a lot of time. Seems that since he’d come to England people had rather scared him off, by tales of me! Perf’ly ridiculous, I told him; she told him, too. Absolutely extraordinary! Why I—I was just old Jim, you know—like the elephant; good old friend—er pal’s the word rather; good old pal, and all that, but—well, so that’s the end (Warner stood up and faced them all, more debonair than ever), for they lived happily ever after.”

“Yes, but—but how did this er—eccentric young person who preferred some one else to you, effect the er—the explanation, I mean to say?” came from Lady Trot’s dim corner of the room. “Such extremely quick adjustment, you make it, dear Mr. Warner!”

“’nTwas,” said Warner blithely. “When I saw him, and he saw her, and she waited to see what he’d say when he saw her, why I just said it for him, d’ye see? ‘You’ve come to get congratulated, now haven’t you?’ I accused him. And he half murdered my hand, and said that that was about it.”

“And then——?” It was Sheila, the little society lady, who questioned very softly. But she did not look at Warner.

“Oh, then, having said my piece, I went away and left him to say his. And do you know”—Warner’s drawl was one of exceeding gentleness—“I’ve always cared for—Jack; like one cares for oneself, you know, the person who should have been oneself. And I’m sure she likes him; better than the elephant. Such a clumsy, conceited beast, an elephant.”

He turned to have a laugh with Hawley, who—with singular interest—was still standing by the door; when just then, in came Knollys Verplanck, laden with parcels, and a little air of excitement as well. “I’ve brought you your guest, Sheila,” he announced, over the heads of some superfluous people. “Her husband deserted her at the door, to attend to some luggage, so I offered myself as escort. Their boat got in a bit ahead of time, you see.”

With a little rush, Sheila had come forward. “Joan, you angel, you wretch, for not sending me a wireless—oh, where are these lights! Turn them on, do, Jim—and then I want you to meet Mrs. Herrington. She’s—oh!” And every one else in the room drew in their breath involuntarily also; for the lady with whom Warner was shaking hands, was dressed in a blue tailored gown. And on a fine gold chain about her neck she wore a tiny carved jade elephant.

“And is its name still Jim?” asked Warner, gently.

“Awfully funny, Warner,” said Knollys to Hawley, mechanically.

“Awfully funny,” agreed Hawley—a bit uncertainly.

“But I can tell you one thing, Claire”—Patsy looked at her stepmother across a sea of chiffon, surging round seven fat red-lettered trunks—“never do I go abroad for six months again! And if the Angel’s education perishes (grimly) it’ll have to perish, that’s all; as long as his father—as long as Warren remains what he is. Of course, I’ve always known Warren was weak, but——”

“I’ve always thought you were rather glad he was weak,” ventured the stepmother, her dainty silvered head half lost in the vastness of the biggest trunk. “You have always said——”

“I’ve said I was glad he wasn’t infallible, certainly,” Patsy cut in a bit shortly. “So I am. I wouldn’t have Warren goody-good—like so many handsome men!—for anything. At the same time, you must admit there’s a difference between—well, ordinary flirtation, and the sort of thing Warren’s just confessed to; it must be a very deep interest in a woman, that would allow one to accept her influence in obtaining a Cabinet appointment! I daresay (carelessly) you’ve seen the woman?”

“Yes.” The stepmother’s head was altogether lost to view, this time. “Yes; I’ve seen her.”

“Warren didn’t tell me her name,” Patsy gazed hard at the lace she was folding. “He started to, but I wouldn’t let him. I told him”—she laughed lightly—“I really took no interest. He knew of course I could find out from you, as you’d been staying here in Washington ever since I went away.”

The stepmother opened her lips, but shut them again—rather tightly. Then, “He lost no time in making a clean breast of it,” she said—as though something forced her to say it. “And really, Patsy, the whole affair—well, Warren certainly did not take the initiative; you know a popular young Congressman——”

“Cannot afford to get himself talked about,” finished Patsy, rising to the full dignity of her five feet five. “There is not the slightest use in your pleading for Warren, Claire,” she said coldly. “Of course he knew I should hear all about this Mrs.—Whatever-her-name-is, the first tea-party I’d go to: his telling me, the first morning I got home, is only a part of his other cowardice—he couldn’t bear to have me hear from some one else. One can always tell one’s story more agreeably than the onlooker, you know. However”—and Patsy’s smile made the little stepmother wince—“we’re not twenty-one this time, are we, dear? And it’s not such a serious case as when Warren caught me sliding down the bannisters!”

“I suppose we all like to slide down the bannisters, once in a while?” The stepmother regarded Patsy rather wistfully. No, she was no longer twenty-one, this beautiful, tawny-eyed little person. The ten years since then—well, was not Patsy unpacking her trunks?—and quite calmly? The stepmother wished—as with unreasonable ardor—that they were back again at that day when she had packed them up and left Warren. One can do so much more with the age that takes things tragically, she reflected.

But, as Patsy said, it was not so serious now. Though the bannisters—in the present case—were more slippery. “I suppose we all like to slide down them?” persisted the stepmother. “When our playfellows are gone—and there’s nothing else to do?”

Patsy kissed her. “You’re a dear, Claire,” she said softly. “It’s very evident you’ve never lived in Washington ten years, and been—Warren’s wife,” she ended suddenly. “Oh, I know well enough they never let him alone,” she added, half under her breath; “women can’t, somehow, if a man’s good-looking—and has influence. But there’s Kent Chalmers—one never hears of Kent like that; and he’s quite as attractive as Warren—well, almost—and if he liked he could have twice Warren’s influence. But somehow Kent just saunters along—nothing in particular happens to him, nothing in particular’s said about him. He’s just an agreeable person—clearly, a clubman pure and simple.” Patsy laughed. “That’s funny, isn’t it, dear? A clubman pure and simple! But” (the lovely tawny eyes grew serious again) “Kent is; and he’s miles too good for his wife—you know that, Claire”—Patsy’s voice came from the depths of a huge cupboard, where she was storing away very small boots—“Farleigh Chalmers is nowhere near good enough for Kent.”

The stepmother gazed at the back of Patsy’s head—a little strangely. “No—I don’t believe she is,” she said. “Patsy, I see the Angel—I see Junior coming up the drive—and—no, my dear! He has not got his rubbers on! That child——!”

Patsy threw an arm around her. “Never mind, grannie dear. What’s it matter, rubbers or not, when one’s ten, and owns a velocipede! Nothing happens then, somehow, does it?” She was peering through the twilight at a sturdy figure trudging up the drive. A very tall figure followed it—rather slowly. “It’s Warren with him,” said Patsy, stiffening; “no it isn’t—why it’s Kent! He’s come to say hello—but how odd of him, when all the men are at the Club—and Kent’s such a very clubman, isn’t he? I think that’s rather sweet of Kent, Claire—I’ll run down right away; he must have wanted to see me especially!”

“Yes,” said the stepmother, smoothing Patsy’s lovely hair, “he must. I—I’ll just wait up here for Junior, dear. His feet, you know——”

Patsy laughed. “Of course. I’ll send him straight to you. I shan’t be long down myself, probably; Kent will want to get on to the Club, you know. It’s his business, Farleigh says—the Club!”

 

“Well, Patsy?”

“Well, Kent?”

“You’re home?”

“Yes, I’m home. Oh, yes!”—Patsy’s eyes were following two absurd autumn leaves, chasing each other across the wind-swept lawn. “I’m home,” she said again—very quietly; as her eyes came back to the comfort of the fire-lit sitting-room.

“Aren’t you glad, then?” asked Chalmers gently. He had sat down opposite her, by the fire. Patsy admitted again that he was almost as handsome as Warren. Too bad he never did anything, she reflected; he was too good for just the Club. In fact, Patsy decided suddenly, he was good enough to help her.

“Am I glad?” she repeated slowly, while her eyes still measured him. “Well, Kent—you know all about it, of course—would you be? Oh, I suppose I’m a little cad to answer you like that,” she went on swiftly, “even though you are Timothy’s friend—my brother’s friend, and—my husband’s. Because you are, perhaps I should say. But Kent”—she faced him squarely, with that little boyish movement of the shoulders that Patsy would never lose, no matter how many tens of years went by—“you’re my friend too—have been ever since I came to Washington; and that’s a very long time. You know how I’ve worked for Warren, how I’ve hated the work I had to do for him—because of the wires to be pulled and the finesse to be made use of, all the sort of thing a Congressman’s wife has to do, you know, and that was like driving nails into the frankness Timothy and I had always been used to. But you know I did do that work, Kent—for Warren’s sake; nothing else in the world! And (Patsy turned her head away abruptly) my reward was always, that I was everything to Warren.”

“Yes——?” Chalmers’ voice came to her like the strong grip of an understanding hand.

“Well,—that’s all. You know—Warren says every one in Washington knows—I’ve not been everything to him. It was only necessary for me to go away for a very little time and—Warren found some one who was really everything to him.” Patsy looked across at Warren’s friend, but he was shading his eyes, so that she could not see them. “Just put yourself in my place, Kent; suppose Farleigh——”

“That is what I’m trying to do, put myself in your place,” Chalmers interrupted very quietly; “and I admit it’s not a pleasant place, Patsy. Still—Warren told you all this? He came straight to you, and told you everything?”

“Yes. But——”

“He might very easily not have told you,” meditated Chalmers. “People—in such cases, people don’t often tell, you know.”

“He knew, of course, I’d find out,” returned Patsy a bit scornfully. “In this place every one knows everything.”

“Or invents it,” retorted Chalmers. “Tell me truthfully, Patsy, if you had heard that Warren was er—interested in some other woman, that she was using her influence” (Chalmers hesitated), “her husband’s influence to get him a Cabinet appointment—Warren told you that?” he added quickly.

“Yes,” said Patsy, very low.

“Then—truthfully—if any one in Washington had told you this thing about Warren, tell me—would you have believed it? Would you, Patsy?”

There was a moment of rather tense silence; then “Warren sent you here to plead for him,” Patsy broke out, tying her handkerchief in hard little knots; “and you’re doing it—oh, cleverly! But it’s no good, Kent. Of course, I wouldn’t have believed it; you know that. But it’s no good, Kent, Warren——”

“And you don’t credit Warren with the wit to know it too?” Chalmers interrupted, impatiently. “I daresay there have been stories, plenty of them, about Warren, as there are about every politician, that have made your blood boil, Patsy; and yet, with all the experience he’s had with you, and knowing how much importance you’d attach to this story if it were to come to you in the usual way, you think that Warren told you the truth himself because he was afraid? My dear Patsy, you don’t know strength when it’s shown you!”

“My dear Kent,” Patsy’s voice was as cold as the fall wind that whistled to them through the chimney, “I know weakness when I’ve lived with it for ten years. Oh, you don’t need to remind me”—she went on restlessly—“I know I’ve liked Warren’s weakness, I’ve encouraged it, I suppose, by begging him not to be a saint and all that, like his mother and all those Boston aunts had tried to make him. And, secretly, I suppose too, I’ve rather gloried in being the stronger nature: I was willing Warren should have the cleverness, the brains, if I could direct them. I liked feeling myself always the power behind the throne, and all that sort of thing, and—well, you can’t blame me if I resent having the throne usurped in my absence!”

“Is that what you said to Warren, when he told you?” Chalmers had risen and walked over to the window. It was very cold and bleak outside.

“I said to Warren”—Patsy’s friend had never heard quite that note in her voice—oddly hollow it was, and colorless—“that as he had made the decision, he must abide by it. That we were both of us too sensitive to make a scandal, and besides there was the Angel—Junior, I mean; I told Warren we should have to go on living here, of course; but that—as he had already chosen to go his way, I certainly should not interfere. I had no idea of subjecting myself to more confessions like this morning’s.”

“Yes!” Chalmers wheeled round suddenly and came over to her. “And I suppose that while you were saying it, you felt very eloquent and injured and pleased with yourself—that you were able to put it to him so clearly, and convincingly. And you congratulated yourself for not flying into a rage and making a scene, as so many women would have done. The very fact that you were talking down to him gave you a pleasant thrill of self-approbation!—oh, I know you strong people,” he added bitterly. “You’re the weakest people in the world!”

“Kent!” She was too astonished to be furious, even.

“Yes; I mean it. Lord knows I’ve been strong long enough to know, haven’t I? But by Heavens, I’m beginning to fairly long to be weak! Here you have a man (he still stood over her, sternly) whom you have, confessedly, encouraged in his weakness, nay, taught his weakness. You teach him, too, to depend on you utterly, you give him all the complement of sense and practical judgment that his own brains and imagination need; then suddenly, and for the first time, you withdraw all this—not heartlessly, for you had Junior’s welfare to consider; but unrealizingly. You withdraw all this that Warren has depended on for years, and he finds himself all at once alone. A hand is stretched out—and you know as well as I do, Patsy, in Washington it is not a hand, but many hands. He takes one of them—a little doubtfully, yet somehow trustingly, too; and—it’s a very experienced hand, this that he’s caught hold of—he lets it drag him deeper and deeper, till he very nearly drowns. Then, all of a sudden, he comes to the top—with a little gasp of realization. He shakes himself loose—oh, yes, he did, weeks ago!—he puts in a month of the most ghastly shipwreck a man can know. And at the end of that time he has the sublime courage to tell you! And you—what do you do for him?”

“How do you know all this about Warren?” demanded Patsy, irrelevantly. This time it was she who had risen and gone over to the window. “He told me, when I asked about you, that he had scarcely seen you, since I’d been away. How do you know what he’s been through?”

“I know, Patsy—because—I’ve been through shipwreck myself, though of a different sort. Thank God!—a different sort! For I never had to screw my shrinking soul up to the point of baring it to a strong person’s knife!” Chalmers came over to her, and laid both hands on her shoulders. “Patsy, dear little girl, just remember, will you, that I am Timothy’s friend, and your friend, and—Warren’s friend; remember it, will you? For I’ve said some rather harsh things to you. But—don’t you see? Maybe it’s because I envy you—yes” (as Patsy’s eyes opened wide at him), “that may be it. You see, little pal”—Chalmers’ voice was not quite steady—“in spite of everything, Warren hasn’t failed you! Or if he has, it’s been to show himself to you, nearer perfect than he’s ever been before. He was weak, yes; even cheap, perhaps—which is much worse than weak—but through that very weakness somehow he gained strength to climb up and stand beside you—on your level, for the first time in his life. And you—oh, Patsy! you pushed him over the precipice! It’s a way strong natures have—the way of the fittest, I suppose; you didn’t see that for the first time in his life he was strong, worthy of you, worthy of all you had given him before. You saw—isn’t it so, Patsy?—only the woman?”

“Yes,” said Patsy, faintly, “it is so.” She was staring amazedly at the handsome, passionately earnest face of the clubman. “But, Kent—I don’t understand—why do you feel so keenly about all this? You”—she laughed a little nervously—“it’s almost as though you were pleading your own case. But I’m sure such a thing has never happened to you, Kent—it couldn’t somehow: you’re er—too remote, too much of a—what shall I say?—not dreamer, exactly——”

“Yes,”—the lines about the clubman’s mouth hardened—“I think you have hit it exactly, Patsy: I’ve been too much of a dreamer! But”—he slumped down into his chair again—“let all that go; it’s of no consequence anyway, my part. Just say you’ll let Warren see that it’s not going to make any difference, will you?—the—the woman, I mean? You will say that much, Patsy?”

Patsy looked away from him, for a long moment. Then her hand met his with the old impulsive frankness. “Yes, I will, Kent. If you care enough for Warren to come here and plead for him, I surely care enough to forgive him! Though, of course”—she weakened a little—“you’re an outsider in the affair: you can’t really see what it means to——”

“To forgive? Perhaps not,—then again, perhaps I do. You see——”

“Somebody had to forgive the woman, I suppose,” it occurred to Patsy who was intent on her own train of thought; “or not to forgive her. Oh, do you know if I were that woman’s husband, Kent, I just couldn’t forgive her—that’s all! I couldn’t. Why, think——” she broke off suddenly, looking up at him with a little laugh. “Do you know what just came into my mind, Kent?—something perfectly absurd!—that what I ought to do now, is to go beg the woman’s husband to forgive her! Then I’d have conquered my weakness as well as Warren did his, eh?” Patsy stopped abruptly; for there in the door stood Warren.

He still wore his overcoat, and his splendidly built body seemed to have hunched down into it—apathetically. “Well——?” he said, coming over and dropping into a third chair by the fire, “I suppose you’ve talked it all over?”

The big clubman, his friend, got up and began slowly to draw on one glove. “Ye-es,” he said,—and it was with the characteristic Club drawl—“we’ve talked it all over, Warren, and—it’s all right!” His ungloved hand went out to the other man; who stared at it—then up into the face above it—and finally, with a long breath, wrung it nearly off.

“Well, I must be toddling along to the Club,” added Chalmers lightly; “the boys will be missing me, you know; yes, the boys will be missing me. Good-night, Patsy, my dear” (she had gone over to the door with him, and he spoke in an undertone) “and—and don’t worry too much about that—that other person, you know. I daresay her hus—I daresay it’s all right with her, too. Good-night, Warren.”

 

“It is all right?” Warren asked his wife. In his tired face a little glimmer of vitality showed.

“All right!” echoed Patsy, her eyes meeting his with a something he had never seen in them before. Then, “Take this wet coat off at once, Warren Adams,” she scolded, “and those boots—you’re to go straight upstairs and change them. I declare, it’s certainly a good thing I’ve come home!—you’re worse than Junior, about your rubbers!” She was tugging at his heavy coat, but he caught her hands and drew her about, to face him.

“Yes,” he said—reverently—“it’s a very good thing you’ve come home!”

And for some reason, Patsy had to snatch her hands away and go flying up the stairs ahead of him.

“But do you know, Claire,” she told the little stepmother, after she had finished the story of Chalmers’ visit and his strange zeal on Warren’s behalf, “it’s just as I told Kent: I can’t see how that woman’s husband can forgive her! Why, she——”

“You told Kent that?” asked the stepmother, oddly.

“Why, yes—why not?”

“Nothing. Except that—that woman’s husband is Kent. The woman, you see, was Farleigh.”

“Farleigh!” Patsy covered her face with her hands. “Oh, no—no! Not Farleigh, Claire!—why it couldn’t have touched Kent, a thing like that; it couldn’t, you know—and then you see he came here to plead for Warren. Oh, no, no, Claire—it couldn’t have been Farleigh!”

“The woman was Farleigh,” insisted the little stepmother, with gentle obstinacy.

“And I told him he couldn’t judge—that he was too much of an outsider, too remote——!” Patsy drew her hands down from her face, with a little sob. “I said ‘you’re too much of a dreamer’; and—oh, Claire!—Kent said ‘yes, you’ve hit it exactly! I’ve been too much of a dreamer!’” Patsy had dropped down on one of the big trunks, and was crying bitterly. There is no personal grief in the world as poignant as the pain one feels for a creature who bears his silently.

“But, Patsy—don’t cry so, dear”—into the older woman’s face had come a wonderful understanding sweetness—“don’t you see why Kent came here and talked to you that way? Don’t you see that it’s futile to be sorry for a man who loves as Kent can love?”

“You mean——?” Patsy sat up and dried her eyes.

“I mean—why do you suppose that Kent came here to-day to plead for Warren, Patsy?—to plead for his friend? Never in the world! He came to plead for the injury wrought his friend!—for the person who wrought the injury. Ah, my dear!—to be loved as Kent loves Farleigh——!” The silver-haired woman’s voice had sunk almost to a whisper. “It—it’s worth being wicked, just to find it out. It’s sublime!”

“And he went off to the Club!”—Patsy was talking more to herself than audibly—“he said the boys would be missing him—the boys, that’s all!”

Somewhere a bell rang musically. A child’s voice called “Mumsie!” And a man came and stood in the door, waiting—his eyes fixed yearningly on the tear-stained face within.

Patsy looked at him—looked at the little stepmother; but as she slipped a hand through the arm of each of them, it was not of them she was thinking, but of Chalmers—clearly a clubman, pure and simple.

“Don’t be so lazy,” said Kent, “get something to do.”

“I have something to do,” said Pix; “I’m a philanthropist.”

“That’s what I mean;—get an occupation.”

“My dear boy,” reproachfully Pix looked at him, “don’t say unnecessary things. You know I was educated for the position of an English gentleman; though my brains in the first place weren’t half bad. Besides, I make a very good philanthropist.”

“So does anybody.”

“Who’s rich enough,” added Pix, lighting another pipe. “One can make quite exhaustive use of being rich, d’ye know, Chalmers? You and I, for instance, shouldn’t have to be sitting here on a Park bench unless we were rich; I shouldn’t dare to be smoking a pipe, you wouldn’t dare to be puffing Pall Malls at a shilling the box—you’d be opening and re-opening a case of monogrammed Egyptians you couldn’t afford, for the sake of showing any one who happened to pass that you could afford them.”

“I thought you said I wouldn’t dare to be sitting on this bench—who’d pass, then? where?”

“I’m never logical,” Pix returned, without pride; “what philanthropist is? D’ye know, Chalmers, I believe some day I’m going to do something extraordinary at philanthropy.”

“It isn’t likely,” Chalmers discouraged. His eyes were fixed absently on the White House across the Park.

“I know it isn’t. That’s why I may do it. In fact I’m almost sure——”

“I wish I could lend hope to the idea, but an unlikely philanthropist—really, Pix! Credulity must have its limits.”

“—— Almost sure I shall do something spectacular at it,” finished Pix, meditative, between puffs. “Perhaps I’ll even do a philanthropic turn for you, Kentie, old boy,” benevolently.

“Wish I thought it,” muttered Kent, over a fresh Pall Mall, “but that would be almost too much to expect, eh? That a philanthropist should help some one who needed it?” He stared still more fixedly at the gleam of white beyond the trees.

And Pix suddenly remembered something he had heard—something about Chalmers’ wife—he forgot just what it was, but—— He screwed uncomfortably on the end of the bench. “Shall we be toddling?” he said finally. “Think we’ve aired our riches quite flagrantly enough, don’t you? Then there’s to dine——”

“Where do you do it?” Chalmers rose, with as much alacrity as could be expected—of a clubman. “Boys’ Boxing Club, Home for Blond Babies, Ladies’ select Slumming Society—or——”

“With you,” interposed Pix, sauntering the more aimlessly for his injury; “being the first time—at your house, that is—I had hoped you might remember it.”

“My dear fellow, I’m delighted!” Chalmers didn’t look it (he had forgotten how, perhaps) but he looked less absent. For a moment he gazed at Pix as though he saw him. “I remember now. Farleigh did say she’d asked you for to-night.”

“Yes—said in the note she’d make it a parti à trois, too. Thought it was no end good of her. A fellow gets so rotten sick of these drove dinners, what? Slum society or high society, it’s all the same. But I say, old boy, I—you’ll think it’s beastly cheek, I suppose, but do you mind telling me why she invited me? I’ve seen her only once, you know, at the de Tregers’ and I’ve known you only at the Club—I—I just wondered what my cue was, y’know,” he dropped his monocle, rather uneasily.

“I’m sure I can’t tell you.” Kent Chalmers gazed straight ahead of him, though he spoke lightly. “Farleigh—my wife—has no set code of move—that I know of,” he added. “Just come and be yourself—that’ll do.”

“Thanks,” replied Pix soberly. Yes, it ought to do; even for Farleigh Chalmers. Pix was, unabbreviated, Charles Clarence Hope de Crecy Pixenthorpe, younger son of Somebody or Other in Middleshire. That he was a younger son is not extraordinary; that he was a rich younger son is almost an epigram. But on the contrary, it’s the truth. He had gone to Africa, and come back that way; and after a girl (who had enough of her own) had added further to his good fortune by saying no to him, he had turned to philanthropy and America. “They go together,” he had said placidly. “One can’t be a philanthropist on a big scale—one can’t be anything abnormal on a big scale, except in America.”

So he had gone. And terminated in Washington. Only four months now since his first donation to the Needy Boys’ guild; yet Farleigh Chalmers was inviting him to dinner. Farleigh Chalmers’ husband wondered what there was important about Pix, besides his being rich. He knew there was something; Farleigh knew any number of rich men in the Capital. Yes, there was something—and he liked Pix; almost, comparatively, as he loved Farleigh. He knew, moreover, that Pix in spite of his trip to Africa, knew nothing about the world—of Washington, Washington, as he wished Farleigh did not know it.

His heel crunched round in the gravel, as they left the Mall. “By the way, Pix, I’ll be late to-night—I’ve to see a man at the Club about something at seven, so—don’t hurry, old boy. Eight o’clock’s plenty of time. Farleigh never minds one’s being late.”

“Right!” Pix clapped his shoulder. “Going to the Club now, eh? Well, au revoir. I’m for the Men’s Friendly—they have sandwich and beer at six. Gad, but a philanthropist does have to feed!—er beg pardon, Kent, really! Sure I’ll enjoy my dinner, you know, but—yes, ’bye, old chap.”

 

Having agreed to come at eight o’clock, Pix presented himself at Chalmers’ residence, twenty to eight sharp. Strain enough keeping one’s word, as a philanthropist, he reflected inaudibly to the butler who was removing his coat; besides, he wanted to see——“Is Mrs. Chalmers down?” he asked the man.

“Yes, sir, Mrs. Chalmers is down, sir. Marster’s just come in ’arf a minute ago, sir, but Mrs. Chalmers is hin the library. I’ll just hannounce you, sir.”

“Awfully good of you,” as a (now) Brother of Humanity, Pix felt called upon to show fraternity with the butler classes. In fact he followed Binks so affectionately, he almost trod on his own name.

“Yes, that’s what I met with as a first disaster, Mrs. Chalmers,” he came into the soft-lit library with a gentle melancholy in his appeal; “you’ll let my—er—fellow man be the only one to call it, though, won’t you? To Chalmers and the chaps at the Club, I’m just Pix.”

“I shall be delighted, Mr.—Pix,” Farleigh gave him her hand with that smile of hers that meant—well, there were those who could have told him. “Won’t you sit down? Kent is dressing yet, I’m afraid—he came in late, an appointment, I believe, with some man.” Farleigh herself sat down with one of her quick, lithe movements—Pix remembered now, he had noticed that night at the de Tregers’. She was slim, svelte, and with slender tapering hands and feet. Her hair and eyebrows were dense black; blue black. And she wore red. Pix liked her; she reminded him of a cat. And he reflected there were excellent points about a cat; people didn’t appreciate ’em.

“I suppose of course you know the British minister?” she began, watching him out of her restless eyes, as he sat down beside her. It was spring and the open windows let in a little breeze to ruffle her dark hair. “Sir Maxon-Goring? he must be quite an intimate of yours, no?”

“No,” said Pix, watching her in return. “He goes in for politics—very bad form on the part of an ambassador. I’ve nothing to do with him.”

Farleigh laughed, and looked at Pix with more interest. “You don’t go in for politics, then? Why not?”

“I’m too rich; can’t afford ’em.” The philanthropist smiled at her—that smile of his that meant—well, no one needed to tell her. It meant that Pix was there, behind the monocle. It meant—a discouraging outlook for Farleigh. “Only poor men should risk their lives for the nation—er—their idea of the nation: rich men must be left in safety—to give away their money. I suspect that’s Kent’s idea, too?”

“Oh, Kent!” exclaimed Farleigh, and then, catching herself hastily, “Kent isn’t interested in politics, no,” she added quietly—but her long pointed fingers tapped her armchair at Pix’s side. “He says—there’s too much intrigue in them; and he hates intrigue.”

“And you don’t?” from behind the monocle, the mild eyes gazed at her yet more kindly. Yes, he remembered now what he had heard; he knew what it was, about Chalmers’ wife. And that odd note in Kent’s voice, the absent stare, the long silences in the clubman’s jolly talk—“you like politics?” he turned his question to Farleigh over, like one showing the reverse side of the same piece of goods.

“I like anything that is complex,” replied Farleigh slowly. “And I want Kent—Mr. Pix,” she leaned toward him with a feline swiftness, “will you——”

“If that is so,”—as a philanthropist, Pix had learned, he modestly confessed it, to avoid a request of something he knew he wasn’t going to do—“if you like anything that is complex, I wish to goodness you’d come down to my—hum—which is it? ah, yes! the Young Men’s gymnasium—and untangle a case I’ve got down there. Janitor’s wife, nice lazy little woman,” he watched Farleigh’s slender foot swinging impatiently while her face turned, all interest, toward him. A philanthropist, though Kent had forgotten it, necessarily sees a great deal of women—“nice lazy little woman, married to a husband who’s so keen for committees and being third vice presidents of things, he forgets to come home on Sundays. Fact. Shuts up the—what did I say? gymnasium—I always forget if it’s the gymnasium or the Babies’ Home—and goes off to lobby the boys; ’stead of taking the tram to Alexandria and his waiting wife. She belongs to a Browning Society, but it doesn’t keep her busy, because she can’t read—farther than Poor Richard’s almanac. There are no children, and she complains there’s no husband either. Now what’s to be done? She comes to me—I’m the root of all evil, gymnasium and otherwise—she upbraids me. She’s upbraided me twice this last week, once before my valet. It can’t go on. But the man, her husband, ’s a good janitor; and good janitors are scarce as honest philanthropists. I ask you what’s to be done? I must cure this maniac of his politics. But how?”

“Make him a clubman,” suggested Farleigh with a slow illuminating smile.

“He is one. That’s what’s the matter with him. He belongs to the Men’s Literary and the Byron Brigade and the Reformed Republicans—downtown branch—and the Kindling Wood Karpet Knights (that’s in winter), and the Sons of Adam and—well, she’ll tell you. Anyway he’s a regular attendant and officer in all of ’em. Now—Mrs. Chalmers, how am I to unite this alienated couple? Don’t you see, as a philanthropist, I’ve got to unite them? Come, now, you said you liked complexity, unravel for me. How am I to make them see that each of them is part wrong?”

“Always the first step in reconciliation?” queried Farleigh, slipping deeper into her chair. “I should make her a suffragette and him an indigent tailor—they live at home, don’t they?”

“On the principle that a swapping of wrongs makes right? It would be good humor, but not good philanthropy. Because—you see, Mrs. Chalmers”—Pix dropped the monocle and looked quite steadily into Chalmers’ wife’s eyes—“underneath their—ah—differences, they care for each other.”

“How original!” Farleigh’s laugh was light like the little breeze. “But you said, didn’t you, they were in the middle class? Of course. But Mr. Pix—this is all tremendously interesting—but I wanted to ask you, I started to ask you before, you know” (her eyes under their blue black screen kept shifting toward the door); “there’s a post open in London now—first Secretary of the Embassy—and I understand Sir Maxon-Goring is being asked by the Administration to suggest some one. Some one from here, who has had training in Washington. Of course your being such an intimate of Sir Maxon-Goring’s—for I know you are, spite of your epigram—and such a friend of Kent’s as well—well, Mr. Pix, I know the man whose lot you want for your new Children’s Library. He’s told you he won’t sell, but——”

“Ah, so here you are, old man—at last!” Pix got up leisurely and held his host three fingers as Kent entered. “Three fingers is correct, not? for a philanthropist? Four for a hard drinker? Well, you have done yourself well!” He looked at his watch—not at Mrs. Chalmers. “Ten after eight—a primp worthy of a guardsman, what?”

Kent, standing by his wife’s chair, smiled. More absently than ever, “It was that miserable man who wanted to see me at such length”—the big clubman’s eyes wandered; from Pix to Farleigh, from Farleigh to Pix, and back again—“Shall we go out, Farleigh?” he asked, after a little pause.

“Yes, Binks announced some time ago.” In Farleigh’s voice was a hint of rumble; like the purr of a cat that has been disturbed. “You will lead me?” She laughed at Pix, slipping her hand through his arm.

“With pleasure,” he said gravely, “I will lead you both.” And slipping his other arm through Kent’s, he took them in to dinner.

 

“Mrs. Chalmers has promised to come down and help me with the tangle at the ah—gymnasium, Kentie,” Pix remarked with some satisfaction, as they sat in the library again later, over their coffee. “I say,” he leaned forward almost eagerly—for a philanthropist—“there’s going to be an exhibition—er—Field Day or something or other on Thursday, and Mrs. Budd is sure to come in—um-m, that’s their name, Budd,” he turned to Farleigh, “why not drop down for a moment, late, and you can see her and Budd too. There’s sure to be some row on—anyway you’d have a splendid chance to diagnose and suggest a medicine. You will?”

“Why—yes,” Farleigh had no further chance to speak with Pix alone. “Yes, I’ll come. Thursday, you say, at——?”

“Five.” Pix beamed.

“At five. Yes; it will be amusing, I’m sure.”

“Think so too. Suppose I may come also, Pix?” Kent was looking at Farleigh’s profile with a look that made Pix swallow the rest of his coffee with a gulp.

“Why, of course, old man—delighted. Only it’s hardly in your line, you know—a political, I mean to say, a lobby-maniac; a maniac for office, whose wife——”

“A maniac for office?” Kent laughed shortly. “Well, no. That’s rather at the other end of my line. However, I’ll come. What, going?” as Pix rose.

“Sorry—but you can’t expect manners in a doer of good. I’m to deliver an address at the Rough Rider Lustitude at nine-thirty—‘Is marriage a failure?’ oh, my dears!” Pix cast a wild eye at them, an eye that was something else too, could they have seen. “An address from me—and it’s their ladies’ evening. Good-night—good-night,” he shook Farleigh’s hand with a despairing gratitude, “you don’t know what this dinner has done for me though, as preparation—ah—I mean to say—ahem! you understand.” He dropped the slender hand and fled. Dash it! he always did make some silly ass of himself, just when things were at their most delicate—oh, hang! (this to Binks, under his breath) he supposed all philanthropists were bunglers.

“Farleigh”—left alone, Kent came over and put his hands on the slim shoulders—“Farleigh”—his whole attitude asked a question.

Farleigh screened her eyes with the blue black lashes, and laughed. “I’m going to a dance—the McCleans are stopping for me—where are you off to, Kent, the Club?”

“Yes,” Kent’s hands fell to his sides. “The Club.” He strode away from her, out of the room.

At the gymnasium on Thursday, Pix walked up and down between trapezes, with a little woman whose short steps—from under a remarkable plaid silk gown—doubled on themselves valiantly to keep pace.

“And indeed, Mister Pix,” she said plaintively—to all his philanthropées Pix was just Pix—“indeed, I don’t know what I’m to do if Theophilus don’t stop being so active. Forty-six he is, forty-seven come July, and no holdin’ him; off again all last Sunday with the Sons of Adam—gettin’ himself put in as chancellor ’f the order—and I made up my mind then, I was goin’ to do somethin’ desprit. But what t’ do”—she flung out ten cotton-gloved fingers, in an abandon of despondency.

“Perhaps this lady can tell you,” Pix said in a low voice, nodding toward some one slim and swift, who was coming up the stairs opposite, into the great hall. “I have an idea she can, for—she’s a very clever lady indeed. You put the case to her frankly, tell her the whole trouble, and see if she doesn’t suggest something. Ah, Mrs. Chalmers! this is most awfully good of you”—he met the slim lady in black half way across the gymnasium. “The er—exhibition’s over, but—Kent isn’t with you?” he broke off.

“No. Kent’s coming later. That is, he said he’d meet me here at five. I was early, because—Mr. Pix, I want to talk to you——”

“Yes, yes—excuse me just a moment—I see Budd beckoning me with a dumb-bell. You won’t mind waiting just a second while I see just what he wants? Er—Mrs. Chalmers, Mrs. Budd—you’ll find that vaulting-horse very comfortable, Mrs. Chalmers—ah, back in just one minute, you know!” And Pix hurried away.

The little woman in the plaid dress and tan cotton gloves regarded the slender woman in black cloth and a Virot turban. “Shan’t we sit down?” she suggested. “Myself, I don’t think much o’ that vaultin’ horse, but this movin’ swing’s right cosy.”

So Mrs. Kent Chalmers and Mrs. Theophilus Budd sat down together in the moving swing.

“Your husband’s the Mister Chalmers who was at one of them foreign courts, isn’t he?” Mrs. Budd began, a little curiously. “My friend, Mrs. Silas Holt—we belong to the same Browning Society in Alexandria—she’s read me pieces out o’ the paper about him. And once there was his picture—he is the handsome figger of a man now! What’s his job now—he’s left that foreign place, hasn’t he?”

“Yes,” Farleigh could not be annoyed with the little person—she was too simple, somehow—but she kept watching the stairs where Pix had disappeared. Why didn’t he come back? Surely he didn’t imagine she had taken him seriously about untangling this funny little Mrs. Budd’s affairs—“yes, he left Budapest a year ago,” telling it even to funny little Mrs. Budd made Farleigh’s red lips come close together, “he—he has no place now. He’s just a clubman.”

“Just a clubman?” almost shrieked Mrs. Budd. “Oh, my dear, how I feel for you! I do indeed—oh. Mr. Pix was right when he said we might help each other. Ain’t he the knowin’ one, Mr. Pix? And to think, your husband belongs to Clubs, too! Oh, isn’t it awful?”

“Yes,” said Farleigh fervently—she was biting her lips—“it is.”

“An’ stayin’ out eight days out o’ seven, an’ runnin’ for office in ten different things at once, an’ wire-pullin’ an’ toadyin’ an’—yes, though I could sink in my grave with shame for sayin’ it—bribin’ men as he can make useful—oh, Mrs. Chalmers, what a life! That’s what I say to Theophilus, on the ice-olated occasions when I happen to see him. What a life!”

Farleigh was silent.

“An’ how do you spend your time?” went on the little woman with tan cotton gloves, more cheerfully. “Makin’ the home more attractive, I s’pose, an’ doin’ everything you can, same as I do, to keep him with you and in some kind o’ sane, contented life? D’ye keep a girl, Mrs. Chalmers?”

“Oh, yes,” though her voice was rather sharp, Farleigh smiled, “I have—yes, I have a maid.”

“You must excuse me if I was impertinent,” apologised Mrs. Budd softly; she had a very nice soft voice, Farleigh couldn’t help noticing, “but I thought maybe since your husband lost his job, you couldn’t afford——”

“Oh, yes!” was it bitterly that Farleigh said it? Bitterly to little Mrs. Budd? “He has money, you see, my husband. He—he doesn’t have to have a job.”

“Now that’s too bad!” commiserated the other woman, gently rocking the “movin’ swing” with her foot. “I mean it’s too bad when anybody doesn’t have a job, man or woman. I always say my job’s makin’ a home for Theophilus—though he doesn’t stay in it,” she sighed. “What’s your job, Mrs. Chalmers?”

Farleigh stirred restlessly in her corner of the swing. “Why—trying to make my husband a success, I suppose,” she said unwillingly—after all, what danger in telling the truth to this simple little thing? Why didn’t Mr. Pix come back, anyway (impatiently); there would be no time before Kent came for her to ask him——

“Men are queer creatures,” reflected Mrs. Budd, looking at her with a certain thoughtfulness; “Mr. Pix, he thought you might help me out with Theophilus, but I guess you can’t. I guess you’ve got just as hard a job as me, and no better off t’ cope with it. Men’re queer creatures, Mrs. Chalmers—they’ve got to go their own way, ’n’ all we can do, I guess, is to sit by an’ keep lovin’ ’em. Isn’t that what you say?”

“Er—yes,” Farleigh rose out of the swing altogether this time. “Yes, I suppose it is. Shall we walk a little, Mrs. Budd? I feel rather—rather cramped.”

“You don’t look as though you’d ever felt a pain in your life,” said Mrs. Budd admiringly, as they started down the big hall hung with apparatus, “but then I s’pose you keep outdoors a lot, and don’t let yourself be ruined by this s’ciety life. Mis’ Holt was readin’ me out of last Sunday’s fashion supplement how a preacher had said the word for Washington s’ciety was ‘hectic,’ and we looked it up, at the Tuesday readin’ of the Browning class, an’ I guess he’s right, Mrs. Chalmers. Washington s’ciety’s hectic.”

“They call it so many things,” murmured Farleigh; busy in avoiding a punching-ball, she spoke again truthfully, to the little woman—almost friendly, in her nonchalance, to the janitor’s wife.

“But I don’t take no stock in it, do you?” pursued Mrs. Budd. “Seems as though it’s just like this room full o’ climbin’ machines—an’ somebody liable to fall off the trapeze an’ bust his head open, any time—half way up or at the top; y’ can’t tell nothin’ about it. I’m glad you let it alone, Mrs. Chalmers. This paper said one woman—it didn’t give her name—one woman had gone so far’s to—look out for that movin’ staircase, Mis’ Chalmers—they’re awful treacherous: they pretend to be takin’ you up all the time an’ then before you know it, they throw you—had gone so far as to make a name for herself, in the line o’ intrigue,” continued Mrs. Budd, her soft voice hushed with excitement; “she didn’t need nothin’ as far as climb goes, it said, she just liked pullin’ the ropes because she done it so well. It said they call her——”

“Mrs. Budd, do you see anything of Mr. Pix?” asked Farleigh, two red spots glowing in her cheeks.

“No—but he’ll be along presently. Don’t fret, he ’n’ your husband’s probably met and ’re having a shindy with Budd down below. Men ’re gossipy creatures. I was goin’ to tell you, they call that woman the Spanish Cat—’cause she slides in an’ out o’ things so easy, and looks that Spanish kind. You’re real dark too, aren’t you, Mrs. Chalmers? My, but your husband must be proud of you!” the little woman in the plaid dress looked up wistfully.—“Why, Mis’ Chalmers, what’s the matter?”

For Mrs. Chalmers looked as though she was going to cry. She also looked furiously angry, and—Mrs. Budd gasped—very beautiful. “Mrs. Chalmers, I—I do hope I haven’t said nothin’ to hurt your feelings,” faltered the little janitor’s wife.

“No”—with a ringing laugh Farleigh dashed her hand to her eyes—“oh, no, Mrs. Budd. I—shan’t we sit down on this unmoving staircase and wait?—So you don’t think much of the Spanish Cat?” she questioned, as Mrs. Budd sat down. “You think she’s—er—rather a fool?”

“I think they’ll come a day when she’ll get caught, in one o’ these slides,” said Mrs. Budd, delighted to settle to a cosy chat, “an’ then that’ll be the end of her. Just the same, she must be a real clever woman, Mrs. Chalmers, and then, my dear—as I told Mis’ Holt—there must be somethin’ the matter with her husband. No woman would take to pullin’ wires for a job, if her husband was the man he should be. Prob’ly he’s some lazy, no account s’ciety man, this——”

“No, Mrs. Budd,” Farleigh sat very erect, “I—I’m sure you’re mistaken,” she added less hastily, “he—her husband isn’t no account, or—you see, such a clever woman wouldn’t have married him!” Yes, watching that smile of hers, Mrs. Budd declared she was beautiful.

“My dear, you can’t tell,” said Theophilus’ wife sombrely, “women, the cleverest of ’em, do marry the strangest men!—yes I just bet you anything, this intreegant’s husband is some s’ciety loafer, who’s made his wife so tired with his foolishness, she just had——”

“No, not a loafer,” Mrs. Chalmers shook her head decidedly, “certainly he is not a loafer, though——”

“Ah, you do know him then?” Mrs. Budd fairly trembled with anxiety. No wonder Mrs. Chalmers had looked angry. “He ’n’ she’s friends of yours?”

“She’s not a friend of mine, no,” said Farleigh slowly. She seemed to have forgotten Mrs. Budd as a “funny little person,” Farleigh. “I should rather say she’s my worst enemy. He—well, I don’t know,” she ended rather abruptly.

“Do you know, my dear,” the other woman—the woman with the tan cotton gloves leaned forward earnestly, “I sh’d think there would be a chance for some real mission’ry work for you—and if I called ’em names, I’m sorry indeed——”

“It’s all right,” said Farleigh hastily, “one’s quite apt to tell the truth about people, before one knows who they are.”

“But being such friends of yours, or at least knowin’ ’em as you do, if you could bring them together, my dear,” went on the simple little woman looking earnestly into the beautiful face, “if you could make that woman see how she’s wastin’ herself on the trapeze business, when she might be walkin’ along safe an’ happy on the ground with him; an’ if you could make him see that—but men’s queer creatures!—if you could make him see that if he’ll only stir his stumps a bit ’n’ make himself more interestin’ for her, she—don’t you see, my dear? Why, if you did that, if you could make ’em see that each is part wrong, why—it’d be the biggest job you ever did in your life!”

“Yes,” Farleigh drew a deep breath, “it would. The biggest job I ever did in my life! And—isn’t it funny, Mrs. Budd? that’s just what Mr. Pix said too: that to make each see that each is part wrong, is the first step toward reconciliation.”

“Ah, but he’s a smart man, Mr. Pix,” said Mrs. Budd ingenuously. “But you’ll try, my dear? You’ll do what you can to bring these two together again?—don’t know why I take s’ much interest in ’em,” she laughed a little abashed, “but readin’ that woman’s story in the paper seemed so kind o’ pitiful—you see, I thought o’ Theophilus always playin’ around with these climbin’ machines—and then I knew, ’s I say, there must be something wrong about the husband.—You’ll try, my dear?”

“Yes,” promised Farleigh simply, “I’ll try. And—I’m glad you happened to read the story in the paper, Mrs. Budd.”

“Funny now, wasn’t it?” The little woman smiled happily. “And that I should just happen to tell it to you, and you knew those people? Well,” she sighed, “even if we ain’t come to no conclusion about Theophilus, maybe we’ve helped somebody. And here’s Mr. Pix”—then, as another man appeared beside Pix on the stairs—“my dear! is that your husband?” she asked wonderingly.

“Yes,” Farleigh rose to meet them, “why?”

“Because he—my dear, I wouldn’t worry one mite,” the little woman with the tan gloves patted the black sleeve cut by Paquin, reassuringly, “don’t you fret, my dear, one minute. That man could be a member of the Sons of Adam an’ the Kindlin’ Wood Knights an’ any other forty-seven ’leven Clubs he was a mind to. He’s a man, my dear. And (as she saw him smile at Farleigh, coming toward her) he loves you. You’re a very lucky woman.”

“Mrs. Budd, this is my husband, Mr. Chalmers,” Farleigh made the introduction rather unsteadily. “I want you to know each other.”

“Indeed, and I’m proud to, Mr. Chalmers,” the little woman beamed; while Farleigh turned to Pix, but not exclusively. “Mrs. Chalmers an’ I have just been having the most interestin’ time, talkin’ about the Spanish Cat—oh I—I beg your pardon”—she grew frantically pink—“I forgot again, they was friends of yours, and besides I don’t know her real name. I——”

“Mrs. Budd has been telling me how to manage the Spanish Cat, Kent,” said Farleigh very quietly. Pix stared at the window as though he meant to jump out of it. “She says that to—to manage her would be the biggest job of my life, and——”

“Oh, not exactly to manage her, Mrs. Chalmers,” put in the little woman uneasily, “to bring her ’n’ her husband together’s what I mean. You see,” she turned to Chalmers, “I think her husband must be part wrong, too.”

“I think he must,” said Kent, looking into Farleigh’s eyes; “I’m sure he is.”

“But what about the case of Budd?” broke in Pix, renouncing the window.

“Oh, we didn’t get ’s far ’s him,” said Mrs. Budd resignedly; “we’ll take up Theophilus at the next meetin’, won’t we, Mrs. Chalmers?”

“We will, indeed,” said the very clever lady. And I must tell you that as she said good-bye to her, she kissed Mrs. Budd!

Kent turned to Pix—Farleigh had gone on ahead of them, rather swiftly, down the stairs. “Pix, I—you—it’s all your affair,” he stammered unevenly, “I——”

“Tut, my dear boy!” Pix waved aside the words, though he gripped the proffered hand and wrung it. “I’m twice as pleased as you are. I never do things unselfishly, you know—I’m purely a philanthropist.

“By the way,” added Pix carelessly, watching Chalmers from behind his monocle as they came out into the street, “who’s this man who’s been detaining you all the time at the Club?”

“That,” said Kent, stepping into the car beside Farleigh, “is a gentleman who has been trying to get my opinion on a Secretaryship in London. I just told him, this afternoon: yes.”

Into the mysterious shadows of the grey-cloistered chapel, the Court in all its ceremony was disappearing—all except the newest Maid of Honor, who, after one glance back at the sunset, shook her curls rebelliously, and deliberately stayed behind in the rose-garden!

“I just won’t go to vespers,” declared the Maid of Honor wilfully; “and what’s more”—darting after two other stragglers in the procession—“you sha’n’t go either.” She laid a compelling hand on a little old person in rose and silver, and a very magnificent person in black velvet and pumps. “It’s a perfect sacrilege to pray any more to-day. Besides, don’t you know we’ve got to talk? To talk about him?” And she shook her small fist threateningly after the departing monarch.

“It is a fine evening,” conceded the little old person weakly; already she had arranged her brocade and laces against the quaint primness of an ancient stone settle.

“And—er—no sense, really, in making Sunday too shocking a misfortune,” abetted the magnificent person, enjoying the effect of himself under the glowing luxuriance of a canopy of Maréchal Niels. “Fact is, the King——”

“That’s just it!” The Maid of Honor pounced upon the words, as she pounced upon her favorite garden seat. “The King! Oh”—she clicked her fan vehemently—“I am so glad to get you two alone for once, so that we can talk and talk and talk about him!”

“My dear!” The little old person’s hands went up. “I’m sure no one ever found that much to say about a king. There’s really nothing much to say, is there?” She glanced half fearfully toward the beautiful old chapel door.

“Exactly what I mean!” announced the Maid of Honor triumphantly. “Mind you, I don’t agree to it for all kings—perhaps the less important ones aren’t so bad—but this one! Why, he’s a mere bundle of robes, a mannequin to hang things on: satins, epigrams, anything. A sort of peg for the traditions of our ancestors. Oh!” In the small restless face showed the exasperation of all youth. “What difference does it make how many millions of subjects he has? He’s always the same. He always will be the same, I suppose: just a monarch, a handsome effigy, no more than a king!”

“Nor less,” appended his Fool impartially. (Nowadays, they call them the “king’s best friend”: it amounts to the same thing.) “He does the best he can with the predicament, you know. Rather beastly situation to find oneself in, too, now isn’t it? Fancy, just fancy for yourself”—he looked toward the Maid of Honor’s profile propitiatingly—“being suddenly obliged to become king—or, queen, that is, of Dumdedum; Emperor of Ladada, Lord High Protector of Thingumbob, and all the rest of it. You wouldn’t like it, you know. Nobody would.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” For some reason the Maid of Honor was blushing.

“Nobody would, unless it were one’s butler. It’s being such a temptation to anarchists; and no well-brought-up person likes to be a temptation—or admits that he likes it.”

“And you confess he is marvelously handsome,” urged the little old Lady-in-Waiting slyly, “you acknowledge yourself, Ermyntrude, that he fills his position with distinction; never looks scared, I mean, and that’s so hard for a king. You said just now, you know—you called him——”

“I called him a handsome effigy!” The Maid of Honor rose to her feet sharply. “And that’s quite all he is. Oh, I don’t ask that he shall do anything so wonderful,” she defended, catching up his pet spaniel, and pulling its ears with a mixture of affection and intense impatience, “I don’t ask that he shall ride to wars, or build huge palaces, or squander fortunes over pageantry. I ask simply that he show some signs of humanness, that he be a man, any sort of a man, anything rather than a dummy! Why, if Ja—if the Prince were to grow like him ...!”

“But”—the Fool began to look worried. He rubbed his pumps together till they creaked.

“Other kings manage it,” went on the Maid of Honor accusingly; “they have their personalities, their special diets, their favorite spa; they invent a cravat or a new kind of soup, and it’s all very well. But he—he doesn’t do one thing that’s different. It’s the Queen who reigns, you know. It’s she” (was it a note of bitterness in the little Maid’s voice?) “who has been straining every nerve to promote this marriage of the Crown Prince with that Franconia girl. But he—he’s such a piece of passivity, he won’t even say yes or no to the idea. All he has energy to do, this whole month since I came to court, is to avoid quarrelling. Any lazy person can do that.”

“But, my dear——”

“Oh”—the Maid of Honor heeded nothing but her own rising indignation—“if he’d only get some spite in him, and quarrel like the—like everything—why, it would be splendid! He’d be sublime! And if he’d be wicked—you know what I mean, real, antique, Francis the First, Henry the Eighth wicked—oh, then he’d immortalize himself. When one’s genuinely wicked, one’s never forgotten, eh?” She turned confidently to the Fool.

“Um-m. Not if one has a clever press-agent: biographer, that is to say. However,” and, for a Fool, his voice grew quite gentle, “I am afraid that Richard will never be so very wicked. You know he—he has loved a woman.”

The Maid of Honor laughed.

“He has loved a woman,” emphasized the Fool, “and for a man, especially for a king, that is a very rare experience.”

“It was before Ermyntrude was born,” reminded the little old Lady-in-Waiting, softly; and her pretty, faded eyes lost themselves in the sunset. “Before even your mother came to be Mistress of the Robes to his mother, my dear,” she drew the girl down beside her on the ancient settle, “when I myself was a slip of a girl in the Palace at Camelot, and the young Prince Richard barely through with his examinations. He used to talk to me—ah, yes” (she sighed a little sadly) “then he was not so quiet; he used to talk. And one day—it was in the summer, and yes, in this very rose-garden—we had come up from Camelot for some tournament—one day he told me he was in love. ‘Her name’s Rosemary, Guarda,’ he said, ‘and her father is just a professor at the University’ (the little Maid winced). ‘Oh, Guarda, I am glad I don’t have to succeed—think, Guarda! I couldn’t marry Rosemary!’ And” (the sun or something had got into the little old lady’s eyes, so that she had to put up her hand to shield them) “just six months after that—one month before he was going to marry Rosemary—the Crown Prince died, and then his father, the old King; and now”—the fragile old hand fell back into the Lady Guarda’s lap, with a limp little gesture of finality—“Richard is married to a Princess. Perhaps that is why he is no more than a King!”

“Yes”—the Maid of Honor’s voice sounded strangely subdued—“perhaps that is why. See, they are coming out from vespers—shall we walk as far as the gates, Lady Guarda?”

And as the two swept their soft trains down the fragrant allée, out of the dim grey cloisters came a monarch and his court—a splendid panoply of vivid color, mellowed by the dying sun, which cast its tenderness over all the vast old garden, but lingered on the handsome impassive features of the Man Who Came First—a handsome effigy.

“A mere bundle of robes——?” wondered his Fool—who knew him best.

 

“I know all that you say.” The King rose a trifle wearily, regarding his councillors with that mixture of gentleness and pity which seemed to shut him from them, from every one, like a beautiful stiff hedge. “Our relation with Franconia is, truly, very delicate: the two most prominent world powers ... and then the peculiar situation in the Colonies ... yes, for the best interests of the State, I grant you, even, His Royal Highness should make this alliance. But, milords,” his smile upon them was grave though very sweet, “there are things greater than the State.”

“That is a terrible thing for your Majesty to say,” pronounced his minister severely.

“All true things are terrible—especially beautiful true things. Milords, I will announce my decision at the State banquet to-morrow night. It is, as you know, His Royal Highness’ birthday to-morrow—his eighteenth birthday. Yes, yes, you all are right, he is getting to be a man. A man!—or rather a king. Between the two words, milords, a tremendous gulf is fixed. But I will detain you no longer, gentlemen; I desire an hour or two alone before retiring. Sir Estes, pray send my Fool into the garden—er, not now, you understand, but in half an hour. Yes, thank you, that will be quite soon enough.” And the royal mannequin watched his courtiers disappear into the Palace, always with that gentle, commiserating smile upon his lips.

Then, with a brief sigh that might have meant almost anything, or nothing, he sank down on to the old garden seat, and lit his strange long pipe. The garden was very still, in the pale mystery of the moonlight, very still, and very empty. The King from his shadowy corner gazed past its loveliness at the great palace unbelievingly: it was not a real Palace, there was no real Court inside. Only the exquisite soft arches of the cloister were real, and the long sweep of the old steps, down which he had stolen to meet—he drew in his breath sharply. Yes, the steps, and the grand towering oaks, and the beckoning green vistas, luring one into their ever-vanishing embrace, promising one at the end surely some sweet, half-forgotten memory of childhood. Why, one’s first kite had flirted away down that leafy winding lane; and, yes! at the end of this, that wretched pony had tumbled one’s enraged manhood off its seat—at the resentful age of four. Then that other: it was there as far as the bend in the trees that one’s mother had walked with one, that day of departure for the University. A Queen she was, to be sure, but—marvelously!—one’s wonderful mother as well. And “I’m so glad you don’t have to succeed, Dick,” she had whispered against his cheek, starting guiltily at her own words: “I—I want you to be just a man, you know. A man, with all a man’s pleasures, and burdens, and hobbies, and—and loves, dear. You don’t have to be superb, thank God! you can be just a commonplace man. Ah, Dick, that’s the greatest privilege in the world!”

The King flung his pipe away abruptly. She was dead now. And he——“She was right,” he muttered harshly, beginning to stride up and down, “that’s the greatest privilege in the world. But I——”

“You are alone out here, my dear?” The voice that came to him from a balcony above was as coldly sweet as the moon’s own rays.

“I am alone,” he answered mechanically.

A stately figure trailed down the winding stair and joined him, directing his steps to that corner of the garden that was farthest from the Palace. “Some one has told me that our son—that John will soon come to you with a most unreasonable request. I beg of you, Richard, do not grant it. It has to do with the announcement to be made to-morrow night.”

“The announcement? Why I——”

“You understand me, I am sure.” The cold voice lowered cautiously. “It is imperative that nothing shall be done to mar my plan for adjusting our relations with Franconia; I am only more and more regretful that you have kept the matter of John’s alliance with the Princess Royal pending for so long a time.”

“I have not yet consented——”

“You have not consented to discuss the question formally with the Franconian ambassador”—in the smooth voice an element of irritation was rising—“nor to have him present at the banquet to-morrow night; when, very firmly, you will announce your desire, your earnest desire that the alliance should take place. And listen to me, Richard—you remember that this is the last resort: you have admitted everything else has been tried, and to no purpose, in this situation with Franconia. Now it lies with you. Hitherto, you have refused to discuss the subject of John’s betrothal, even with the family, or your ministers. In this I do not say you have been wrong. It has doubtless been as well to keep the matter quiet until we could learn that the suggestion would be welcomed by Franconia. Now that we are assured of that, however—well, you will make the informal announcement to-morrow night. You know, Richard, where John is concerned, you are apt to be over-lenient. And some one told me——”

“I understand you, Alix.” He understood, too, that when she said over-lenient, she meant weak; no one appreciated the fact that the Queen reigned, more intelligently than did the King. “I could wish, however, that ‘some one’ was not always telling you things about John. It looks—you will pardon me—unpleasantly like spying.”

“One cannot sacrifice the State to looks,” returned the Queen coolly. “If you will insist on forgetting your duty to your people, Richard, somebody must remember it for you. You are not just a plain, ordinary person, you know.” And she swept back up the stair again, and into the Palace.

“Oh, God, if I only were!” groaned the King, turning on his heel with a sudden fierceness very foreign to a mere mannequin. Then he saw his Fool standing there.

“A fine night,” observed the King formally.

“It would be if it were raining, your Majesty,” replied the Fool.

“If it were raining?”

“Yes, your Majesty. When it rains, so many things can happen. One slips, one slides, one tumbles into a puddle: there are all sorts of possibilities. While a fine night—is just a fine night, that’s all. Most distressingly ordinary. Before I was a fool——”

“What were you?” interrupted the King.

“A very wise man, my liege. You see, I have changed but little; except that when I was a wise man, I did not enjoy knowing myself to be a fool; whereas now it gives me the subtlest sort of pleasure, knowing how very wise I really am. All a matter of placing oneself, Sire; a matter of light and shade; and if one has the true artistic eye——”

“Do you think that one is then competent to place others?” asked the King abruptly.

The Fool stopped twirling his bauble (his boutonnière, I mean, of course). “One is never competent,” he said slowly, “one is only less stupid than before. One’s sense of values is in better equilibrium. With your Majesty, for instance——”

“Yes?” The King bent toward him eagerly.

“The King can do no wrong,” began his Fool pompously. “Which is only another way of saying that the King is left no chance to do anything but right. He is not an ordinary person.”

“He is,” contradicted the King calmly. “At least he is going to be. Your next King, my dear Fool, is to be just an ordinary person!”

Limply the Fool leaned against a balustrade. “Your Majesty is too exotic in his fancies—quite too exotic,” he protested feebly. “I beg your Majesty to allow me to retire: I am so truly a fool that a joke quite unnerves me. Besides, His Royal Highness is coming—see, yonder he is—an idea, smiling at a makeshift! I beg leave to take the makeshift within the Palace, Sire.”

“So then, Father!”—one felt with a thrill the onslaught of Youth—“you have been railing at the world, with the help of that soberest man at Court. Fie upon you! And you, sir, off with you! I will not have my father’s Fool turn him into an old sobersides!” The young Prince ran lightly down the steps from the terrace and came laughing to the King’s side.

“I suppose I should have said ‘your Majesty’ before him,” he apologized, locking arms with his father, as the Fool vanished within; “Mother told me only this morning that I did not sufficiently realize the respect due you as a monarch. But how can I? Why, we’ve always been such pals, eh, Father? And if ever I’m a king and have children—well, I’ll try to make them forget I’m a king, that’s all.”

“Have I made you forget it?” asked the King wistfully. “Do I seem to you just—just your father, Jack—you know what I mean, just an ordinary man?”

“You seem”—his son regarded him half puzzled—“an ordinary man? Well, no, Father. Of course, you’re keen for sport, as keen as I am; and then in your heart you’ve that passion for the flute—ah, yes, you have! You needn’t shake your head: you know you’d pawn the Palace if only you could play the flute. But something’s always hindering you. I suppose something always hinders a king, Father?” The King’s own wistfulness had crept into the young voice.

The King cleared his throat. “I’m afraid it does,” he acknowledged, looking away from the boy, and up at the balcony—so cold and white in the moon’s radiance. “I—but come, let’s walk. You were saying——”

“There’s something I’ve got to ask you.” The Prince walked a little faster. “You must know what it is, Father—they’ve all talked so much about it. And last night at the Masque Ermyntrude whispered to me that it was no use at all, asking you—that Mother had arranged everything, and you would never go against Mother. But, somehow, because you aren’t just an ordinary man, because you’ve always been different to me from the rest of the world, I made up my mind to ask you. You see, it’s—it’s about this marriage.” For the moment the young Prince looked a good deal more than eighteen. “I haven’t said anything up till now—I’ve always known, of course, that being a king made a difference, that it meant one could never do as one liked, you know; so when Mother and all of them first talked about the Princess—all along, in fact—I didn’t say anything. Oh, I understood”—and for the first time in his life the King saw bitterness in his son’s face—“an alliance with Franconia is essential; my tutor’s told me of it many times: he’s prepared me very cleverly. But, Father, I don’t want to make an alliance. I want to marry a woman.”

The King stopped walking. They were just at the foot of the steps where he had used to meet—“I see,” he said gently.

“I’ve tried to go through with it”—the boy’s voice grew more and more unsteady—“since Mother told me how much it would mean to all the millions of our people I’ve nerved myself up to it; and I told myself again and again that, as Ermyntrude says, a man who’s got to be a king has no right to any feelings. That he must be just a dummy, to support the prestige and ambitions of his subjects. His subjects!” The Prince’s laugh was not a pleasant thing to hear. “Oh, I wonder that you don’t see the screaming satire of it, Father—even though you are a king.”

The King looked at him strangely. “I was not always a king,” he said; and again his glance strayed down the dim green vistas with their whimsical shadows. At the end of each vista it was black now. “When I was your age, Jack, I had no idea that I ever would be King. But—but I want to ask you something: if the country were to go to war, and a good man was needed to lead the troops, would you go? Understand me: even though there was every probability of your being killed, though you had one chance in a thousand, or say no chance at all—and—you were also just about to marry—a woman. Would you go?”

“I”—the boy drew a long breath. “But of course I’d go. You know that, Father.”

“Then—the country is at war; for a great nation, the subtlest, deadliest kind of war, John: with international opinion. It does need a leader. The King, you see”—the even voice never wavered—“is just a dummy—no more than the King. And I’m very much afraid that the leader will have to be killed, at least all but the mere blood and bones and breath of him: and those amount to so little, don’t they? Yes, yes; they amount to so little. Well! so this some one must sacrifice himself. We’ve tried everything, we’ve come dangerously near showing ourselves abject, in this adjustment with Franconia: at least, so the queen tells me. There is left just this way out, the alliance, I mean, and ... some one must sacrifice himself. Who do you think will do it, John?” Under the cold stone balcony, the King stretched his hand toward the Crown Prince. Did he congratulate himself that for once he was not being over-lenient?

“Very well, your Majesty.” There was no doubt as to its being the Crown Prince who spoke. At the same time his hand as it met the King’s was the hand of a subject. “I will do it. You will, I suppose, make the formal announcement to the Court to-morrow night? I will be prepared, sir. Good-night.”

“Good-night.” An infinite sadness was in the King’s eyes as once more he turned about to pace up and down, alone.

The alliance, then, was assured. The Queen and all her ministers—far more than his—would be satisfied. He supposed it was a very satisfactory piece of business. But—he wondered suddenly—would the next King be just an ordinary person?

“Jack.” Some one was calling softly. “Jack, are you there?” The moon had gone down; it was very dark in the vast old garden. But through the blackness one could see a dainty figure, like an adorable phantom image, poised uncertainly, just at the top of the steps. “It’s so dark, I can’t see you, Jack”—the little laugh held a note of the piteous. “And I daresay it’s the last time I shall see you, isn’t it? For of course he wouldn’t listen to you. He—he’s such a real king, isn’t he?” For a moment longer she stood there, the beseeching, fairy thing; then with a quick sob of disappointment, she fled.

But the half-concealed impatience of her last speech had told the King that it was the little Maid of Honor, Ermyntrude. Ah—he remembered: she had come to Court not so long ago, just a month—after her father died. Her father was—why should it seem suddenly so significant?—a professor at the University; a very learned man. Her mother, a Princess, had broken rank to marry him. Women did those things.

A professor at the University! And “It’s the last time I shall see you, isn’t it?” Who was it standing there at the top of the steps? Standing there for the last time, piteously brave, with that heartbreaking little laugh in her voice. The King dashed his hand across his eyes. “Rosemary!” he called yearningly; and fled after her up the steps.

 

The great banquet hall was hushed. The minstrels had put away their songs, and the Court sat quiet. Only the Fool played with his gardenia: he whispered to some one that nothing gave him confidence like appearing trivial.

“Milords, Ladies of the Court, and our distinguished guests”—as the King raised his handsome face to the colonial Princes, one saw that it was very pale—as pale as that of the Crown Prince, who sat at his right.

“The King is but just beginning to be alive to the privileges of his position. You know how in olden times, and in these modern reckless days as well, monarchs have sacrificed thousands—lives, ducats, principalities even, for the sake of some passing fancy—some hobby, perhaps, that wanted gratifying. And no one has dared to say them nay. Milords, I have been up to this time a very lenient sovereign” (the Queen was tapping her slipper nervously); “I have been content to be just an ordinary King!” He looked from one to the other of the company whimsically. “Emperors have given away continents; great lords have sold their every slave—all for the sake of a whim. And so now, milords, I intend to gratify a little notion of my own. It has long been the custom to betroth the Crown Prince on His Highness’ birthday. His Highness grows to manhood, he attains his majority, and voila! One picks him a bride! Quite suitable; quite suitable.” (The Queen was breathing more freely. The Crown Prince sat with his young face half shaded. The whole Court held its breath with attention; particularly the Fool, who was watching his master with a new concentration.)

“Very good. The King has taken the fancy—oh, a very flighty fancy no doubt, milords—to present the Crown Prince and his affections to er—some one quite unexpected—some one whom the King shall choose on the ah—spur of the moment, you understand. It lends more excitement to a game, to cast the die quite on the spur of the moment, eh?” (By this time the Queen was beside herself; while the Prince had half risen, in his indignation.)

“So—let me see—I assure you, milords”—and the King’s voice had never been so lightly gay, his face so gravely sweet—“I assure you this moment is worth all the monotony of Kingship, yes, though that monotony had lasted a thousand dreary years!—this moment on which one stakes his all: his destiny, his country, his lands beyond the seas—for the sake of one glorious, mad whim! I bestow the hand of Prince John upon which one? Let us say the littlest—she who sits yonder in the corner—what, not crying? There’ll be plenty of time for that when you’re Queen, my dear. Come bring her forward, your Highness, and let all men see whom the King has chosen to carry out his one wild madness. Your name is——? Ermyntrude! Milords, I pledge you Ermyntrude, your future Queen, the daughter of a Princess, and” (for the first time the King’s voice faltered) “of a professor at the University. Ermyntrude!”

“And so he’s no more than a King?” The Fool was asking the Maid of Honor a moment later—and for a Fool, his voice was beautiful.

The Maid of Honor’s lovely, vivid little face was like a drenched spring flower—all the more radiant for its tears. “No—no more than a King? Oh!” she caught the velvet sleeve impetuously. “Oh, Fool, you’re his best friend—you’re his Fool, so you know him best—could any one, I ask you could any one be more than the King!”

 

But why, asks the Child (the Child we all are, when it comes to a story), why was the King so wonderful? Was it because he was one of our Plain People?

And the story-teller turns back over the pages wistfully—on each of them, for her, is written a little of the great tragedy and great sublimity of Life. “It was because he couldn’t be one” (she says finally), “because he couldn’t be a Plain Person; but had nevertheless the supreme courage to demand for his son what he could never have for himself. And I think, in the power to make this subtlest of sacrifices, every man is King; and every King that divinely privileged creature: a Plain Man.”

“I’ve come,” said Lucia, “for a very long visit.”

Something in the weary little sigh with which she threw herself down on the sofa, made her mother look up, arrested.

“You—you don’t mean that you aren’t happy, my dear?” she asked uncertainly.

Lucia gave a faint smile. “At least I’m not unhappy. I wish” (with sudden vehemence) “I were. I wish——”

Mrs. Loring took an apprehensive step towards her.

“There, mother, it’s all right. I’m a little tired, and—and unstrung with seeing you again, that’s all. It’s all right.”

“But my dear, I’m afraid that is just what it isn’t. I——”

“Yes, really! It’s only that I—I’ve always been a little over-balanced, you know, if such a state were possible. And it is,” tensely, “outside of mathematics.”

Mrs. Loring—whose intimacy with mathematics was fleeting—looked at her daughter anxiously. “Just what do you mean, Lucy? There, my dear—throw your coat off. And your hat—so! Jacqueline will unpack you while we have our tea. Tell me what you mean—over-balanced?” She inclined her well-dressed head vaguely.

“I mean,” said Lucia, pressing back against a nest of cushions, “just that. All my life I’ve seen things evenly, mother: in parallel rows, that always tallied. When you sent me to finishing-school, I hated it; but I put up with the two years’ boredom without complaint, because I realized it was making valuable friends for me. When I took up drawing, later, I did it because I knew that on the other side of the hard work and cruel discouragement in getting started, would lie a hobby—and a profitable one—in which I might bury myself at any time, and with absorbing interest. And when I married——”

“Yes?” Mrs. Loring sat forward a little.

“You thought I never would marry, didn’t you, mother darling?” with a brief laugh. “I was afraid of marriage, rather. But when John came, and I thought I cared enough and—well, it seemed to me that if I went into the thing with no illusions, I couldn’t lose any. That if I got married, just because I wanted to,—if I expected nothing, at least I couldn’t get less.”

“Lucy,” put in her mother uncomfortably, “you think too much. You always did. Cream, my dear?”

“Please. I said, when I came in, I’d come for a very long visit.”

“Isn’t John Gwynne a good husband?” demanded Mrs. Loring. “Is there anything——?”

“Oh, nothing—nothing. Our life is as even as the lines in my account-book. That,” said Lucia in a low voice, “is what I simply can’t stand; what I had to get away from.”

“But—but, my dear, it doesn’t sound very serious. Really, you know, it doesn’t!”

“I know it doesn’t—perhaps it isn’t. Only to me”—Lucia’s fingers closed dangerously over the fragile cup-handle—“it was growing unbearable! I had to get away.”

“Yes, yes, dear. And you were right to come to me. I was delighted when your wire arrived—quite delighted,” said Mrs. Loring quickly. “But what about Tommy?”

“Tommy’s away at school,” said his mother, sipping her tea with a pretense of tranquillity. “We decided to send him to military school this year, you know, as he’s nine. He left yesterday. That gave me my opportunity to come to you. Oh, mother, I snatched at it!”

“Yes, dear—yes,” Mrs. Loring leaned over to pat her hand. She had certainly not known Lucy was so nervous! “And I’ll let the Granvilles and Ada Barker and the Temple girls know you’re here, and we’ll have a gay little visit,” she added cheerfully. “The longer the better, Lucy!”

“Dear mother!” murmured Lucia. “Though I would rather not do a lot of social things—I really would, mother. I’m—I believe I’m rather tired. And John said”—she checked herself swiftly.

“Yes? What did John say?”

“A stupid married woman’s habit I’ve fallen into! What he said was ‘do get rested.’ What he should have said——”

“Lucia,” interrupted her mother, “I was married to your father only four years, but ‘what he should have said’ never happened. I wouldn’t let it happen.”

“He should have said ‘I shall miss you,’” murmured Lucia stubbornly. “That’s one of the things, mother: I’m taken—and let go—so for granted!”

Mrs. Loring looked at her judiciously. “You’re a very pretty woman,” said she. “Even excepting your hair, you’d be striking. And” (running her left hand through its ripples) “it seems to me your hair’s blacker than ever. Doesn’t John think so?”

“John—is occupied more with Consolidated Iron than he is with my hair. Nonsense, mother! Why be tragic about it? John is kind, I’m contented. Why” (lightly) “should I go into heroics because our romance is not so gossamer but that I can pull it to pieces and put it together again? I’m thirty-two. Yet”—she added, laying down her cup—“I seem as greedy for romance as a débutante in the first season. I,” reminiscently, “was rather a nice débutante, eh, mummy?”

“You were delicious!” said Mrs. Loring with enthusiasm. “Ambrose Fayerweather was saying only yesterday”——

“Does Mr. Fayerweather still call here?”

Mrs. Loring’s smooth cheeks flushed. “He is a very old friend,” said she, busy with the cream jug. “And he says the girls these last few years can’t”——

“Hold a candle to those a dozen years ago,” finished Lucia.

“Why, yes! How did you know?”

“He’s said it to me—and other old galants—every time I’ve seen him in the last decade. Well, mummy! I’m going up to lie down for a little. I hope,” wistfully, “I haven’t blued you up, dear? I’m afraid I’m rather”——

“You’re in need of rest!” replied Mrs. Loring briskly. “Run along and get it, my dear. John said the right thing, after all!”

She smiled brightly at her daughter; but when Lucia had reached the landing, stood gazing after her. “She thinks too much,” said her mother with a sigh; “it’s a bad habit for a woman.”

Lucia, upstairs, on a couch luxurious with pillows, was still thinking; that is, always the same thing. Why would the figures always balance each other, she wondered wearily? Life was one long sum in algebra—or subtraction: the signs changed, the quantities cancelled, and—X was zero. Everything seemed to be known; so distinct and matter-of-fact. When she married John Gwynne, she had loved him—passionately; but also reasoningly. She had taken into consideration that the passion would dim, but that a certain comfortable comradeship would take its place. The passion had dimmed; the comradeship had taken its place. And the illusions which Lucia had not possessed had remained unattacked. What was there then to quarrel with? Her house, from which she had anticipated as much satisfaction as care, had given her the two in equal proportion. Her child, who she had known would thrill and agonize her alike, had done both, with impartial intensity. Her art, which she had been willing to abandon in exchange for certain other delights, had been indeed compensated for by those delights; it had been a fair exchange and no more. No more, for that would have been to spoil the law; to dig unevennesses in the groove—which, for Lucia, seemed eternally straight.

“Oh!” She sat up and flung off the soft blanket that covered her. Was there any way, was there any trick or painful art, with which to break the relentlessness of pleasure paid for? Of happiness counter-checked? Perhaps her mother was right—if she didn’t think so much——. But she had to think. It was all the expression she had of a nature that had never been able to escape from itself, for an unconscious minute. Heavens! Lucia beat the pillows and sank down again. “If this keeps on, I’ll go quite mad.” She had the wit to know she was half mad, anyhow—and always had been. It was perhaps the one thing that kept her sane. Analysts are harassed creatures. John Gwynne, who ate meat and potatoes three times a day, and loved a good vaudeville show, did not know of their existence.

John Gwynne was at that moment in a shop, leaving an order for new decorations for Lucia’s rooms.

“You’ll have to push it through in a hurry,” he said anxiously. “Mrs. Gwynne said she didn’t know when she’d be back, and that means any time. I want something in lilac. Lilac’s her color.”

The attentive clerk showed two samples in pale mauve. “We have the chintz to match these, Mr. Gwynne. If I might suggest, I should think the unconventional design——”

“Sure, the unconventional’s the thing for Mrs. Gwynne! You’ve served her for ten years, Eh, Gregg?”

“Yes, sir—” the suave clerk’s face broke into an almost natural smile—“I was here when you brought her in to select her bridal furnishings, ten years ago.”

“Sure!” said John Gwynne again, more slowly. “Ten years ago! George, but time goes by, don’t it, Gregg?” He was staring out the window at the motors tearing up and down outside.

“Well!” with a start, “the unconventional it is,—paper, hangings, and the whole business—and look here, Gregg, rush this for me, will you? Push it right along.”

“We certainly will, Mr. Gwynne,” the clerkly manner was not quite restored again. Heartiness struggled with it; and—“excuse me, sir,” said Gregg hurriedly, “but do you know I think this is the very design Mrs. Gwynne chose when you were married—wistaria, with the pale pink rosebuds in the border—I’m almost positive it is. It’s a piece we didn’t carry for a number of years, and then”——

“Why, sure—sure!” said Gwynne, gazing at it. “The very thing! And then my sister, two years later, went and put on blue—to surprise Mrs. Gwynne—while we were in Europe. And I think it did surprise her some!” he remembered grimly.

The clerk gave a feeble smile. “Yes, sir—blue with a silver stripe—I remember, sir!”

“I should think you would! I told her to come down and have it changed, but Tommy—our little boy—had the measles just then, and afterward I got hurt in that hunting accident, and then we went to the country—and blessed if there’s ever been a time since when she’s had so much as a chance to think about it! That’s why now—well, see you push it through, Gregg.”

“Indeed yes, Mr. Gwynne! Good-day, Mr. Gwynne.”

“Good-day.”

“Beats me,” added Gwynne to himself outside, “why these clerk-fellows can’t say things as they come: ‘indeed yes’—why the Dickens should a thing be turned hind-side to, when you can say it straight out?”

It was a point he and Lucia had not infrequently discussed—in other denominations. Gwynne, going home to an empty house, felt he would willingly have dropped his side, if Lucia had been there to carry hers.

“She looked tired,” he thought, sitting alone by the library fire after dinner. “I hope her mother makes her rest. She looked regularly fagged.”

He spent the rest of the evening writing her a letter; and Tommy. In the morning he sent Mrs. Loring a telegram. “How’s Lucia?” it said. Lucia had been gone twenty-four hours.

“And you say you’re taken for granted!” triumphed her mother. “You think he’s more interested in Consolidated Iron? Stuff, my dear! John Gwynne’s forty. For a man of forty to follow his wife up with telegrams, the very day after——”

“He might have sent it to me,” said Lucia, ungraciously.

“Oh, well!” Mrs. Loring tossed her handsome head. “If you’re determined to be difficile——!”

Lucia, who was pretending to eat a strip of bacon, asked, “Did my drawing-ink come? I ordered some sent down from town, before I left—and a lot of Bristol-board.”

“It came,” said Mrs. Loring, looking at her uneasily. “Lucia, whatever are you——”

“I am going to draw,” said Lucia, with a deep breath. “Ever since I was married, I’ve never had time: first there was Tommy, and then the trip abroad, and then Tommy’s measles, and then John’s accident, and then the new house in the country, and—I’m going to draw, mother! For days and days, and blissful weeks—I’m going to draw!”

Her cheeks were vivid, her eyes afire.

“Oh!” gasped Mrs. Loring, looking at her. “You—you’re going to draw. For—weeks!”

“Yes, mother! And you can tell Ada Barker, and the Temple girls, and whoever else comes, that their fascinations are nothing compared with black-and-white. And if John sends telegrams asking ‘How’s Lucia?’ tell him ‘She’s drawing!’ Do you hear? Tell him ‘She’s drawing!’”

And snatching up her precious parcel that a servant had brought, with an excited little laugh, Lucia fairly flew upstairs. Her mother, left with John Gwynne’s telegram, shook her head, perplexedly.

At luncheon, Lucia appeared, less gay, though still flushed and ardent with intention. “It’s wonderful,” she said, “to have one uninterrupted morning—to know there’s no ordering to be done, and that John won’t come tearing home for early lunch. I really believe I shall accomplish something—if I work,” she added, a little pucker coming between her eyes.

After lunch, she went back to it. Mrs. Loring wished she would lie down and rest her eyes; but she knew Lucia fairly well: she did not suggest it. That night when Ambrose Fayerweather came to dinner, he said warmly, “Well, well! And so the mother tells me you’re at work again, drawing! What energy you youngsters have, to be sure!”

Lucia, who was genuinely fond of him, did not answer that she was as old as her own grandmother, but said with a kind of enthusiasm, “Yes, isn’t it nice! I feel as though I should really get something done. Though—it’s rather hard, of course, starting in again, after so many years.”

“Of mere wife-hood, eh?” Mr. Fayerweather looked at her a bit wistfully from under his iron-grey brows. “By the way, I saw that husband of yours the other day. They tell me he’s a man to reckon with, now. I tell them—but you always get cross with me when I tell the truth about yourself.”

Lucia smiled at him. And he remembered she had always been a confoundedly pretty girl. “Dear Mr. Fayerweather, I’m never cross with you. I’m only unconvinced.”

“Oh! very well then” (they were waiting for her mother and dinner), “I’ll tell you: when people say to me what a splendid fellow Gwynne is, and how successful, I say yes, but who’s backing him? Mrs. Gwynne!”

“Backing him?” repeated Lucia slowly.

“Why, yes. Haven’t you always furnished the brains of the combination—the spark? My dear Lucia, we all know that delightful head of yours works in twenty directions a minute!”

Lucia looked at him curiously. “No. It works in only two.” And they kill each other, she started to add; but changed it to “I’m afraid neither has ever helped John.”

“Nonsense—non—sense! Why, Gwynne was nowhere until he got married; and since then—he’s simply soared! There’s no holding him down. Believe me, Lucia, I hear it from men who——”

“Oh, of course he’s done well. I—I’m tremendously proud of John’s success. But it’s his own success, Mr. Fayerweather,” Lucia said passionately. “I haven’t contributed to the length of an idea!” The suddenness with which it struck her, almost overwhelmed Lucia Gwynne.

“My dear,” said Ambrose, looking at her, “you—none of you—can tell what you contribute. You’re women, aren’t you?” He glanced through the door, at the stairs where her mother was coming down. “That’s one thing you can’t help or evade. And—you don’t know what you contribute.”

Lucia, during dinner, thought about it. It was a new kind of thinking for her: what she didn’t know; what she could not possibly determine; what didn’t balance with anything else. In it, she forgot the somewhat disheartening disclosures of the day’s work—that her technique was laborious rather than a joy—that it was hard, impossible almost, to get back at the end of the years; and remembered to write to Tommy. She wondered if he had put his boots away, and if he was homesick. Funny little freckle-faced Tommy! Two stubborn tears, like those that had worked their way out of his brave brown eyes when he parted from her, rose suddenly to Lucia’s. How weak she was! she told herself, the next minute, impatiently.

But she wrote to Tommy that night, before she went to bed. And at the end she said—instead of the caution about colds he hated so—“Mother wishes she could kiss you good-night—really, truly good-night, little son!” When she had sent the letter, she was inclined to be scornful of that last bit. The foolish third person—it was only an advanced baby-talk, that in her training of Tommy she had rigorously excluded.

Next day she worked harder than ever, and when John’s telegram came, she did not even know it. She was upstairs, putting her eyes out drawing a bit of lace on the gown of a gorgeous Wenzell lady. Come right, it would not. All afternoon she toiled; got a smudge on her nose that stayed there when Ada Barker came to tea, and a general irritability that caused that young woman to say later, “Well, I didn’t know Lucia Gwynne had gone off so! She’s positively untidy, and so sharp!”

That, Lucia’s mother had reason to echo during those twenty-four hours. But mothers don’t echo, somehow. They exonerate. Mrs. Loring was kept busy exonerating, while that bit of lace tied itself up in knots, and haughtily refused unravelling. When in the evening John Gwynne wired “why doesn’t Lucia write to me?” Lucia’s mother replied, “She’s drawing a piece of lace.” When, an hour later, he demanded, “What in thunder ails her?” Mrs. Loring wired back, “Why don’t you come and see for yourself?”

He came.

Three days after Lucia had arrived, throwing herself down on the little sofa, her husband followed suit. He looked extraordinarily big there.

“Where’s Lucia?” he asked instantly.

“Drawing lace,” said Mrs. Loring—about whose pretty mouth were little lines.

“Is she mad?” demanded her husband.

“She has been—very near it.” Mrs. Loring looked intently into Gwynne’s face. “Lucia thinks too much. You don’t give her enough to do.”

“Thinks too much—not enough to do? Why, isn’t she my wife? What should she do, except give orders to the servants and enjoy herself? I don’t want her to do anything!”

“Then you mustn’t be surprised,” said her mother, “if she comes off to me and draws lace.”

“What? If she—what?”

“If she finds something to do for herself.”

“But she’s always busy—rushing about, with a thousand things to—! That’s one reason why I was glad to have her get away: the only reason. She looked fagged to death. And you say she hasn’t anything to do!”

“Nothing with her head. Only her arms and legs—and nerves. For Lucia that’s not enough. If her head isn’t busied, it gets away from her, and——”

“You tell her to come down here,” broke in John Gwynne suddenly. “Please! Tell her to come down here, and——”

Lucia appeared in the door. There were two smudges on her nose. “I simply can’t get that wretched”—she began: then, with a gasp, “Oh! John! Why—why——”

“Hello, little girl!” John caught her, smudges and all, half way across the room. Mrs. Loring vanished. “Are you—glad to see me?”

Lucia’s lips were buried somewhere about his ear. “But—I—I—yes,” she murmured with difficulty. “I—was trying to draw lace.”

“Well,” said John Gwynne, “you’re going to draw a good deal bigger things than that.” John Gwynne could act quickly in matters of importance. “I’ve a million-dollar combine up for dicker this week—Fayerweather and Lodge and some of the fellows are in it with me—and it’s to do with an art collection of a regent prince who’s gone bankrupt and who’s got to sell to pay his debts. We’re thinking of buying; and I want your—why, Lucia, honey, what’s the matter? Sit down. Why——”

For Lucia was crying. First, softly, then tempestuously; as though her heart would break. John drew her down by him on the sofa, and patted her hand. “It’s all right, honey,” he said steadily, “it’s all right. I know—I took you by surprise, and you were tired to death, and—well, maybe you’d better come home, Lucy.”

“Oh, John—John,” she tried to control herself, “you don’t understand. It’s not that—it’s—John, don’t you see, I’ve tried all along to keep tab on things! I’ve put down so much on your side, and so much on mine; and then added them up. What you gave out I gave—and they always tallied. And at last—oh, don’t you see how dreary it got? How worthless? But I couldn’t stop doing it. I was like a wound-up clock. And so——”

“And so now you are going to begin a new column called our side,” put in John Gwynne, covering her hands. “And, Lucia! It’ll be so mixed up, and in such big figures, you can never count ’em—my dear! And, anyhow, we’ll be too busy. I’m going to send for Tommy—after you and I——” with swift tenderness, he kissed her.

While Gwynne, next day, was standing with Lucia in the room hung with the wistaria and pale rosebuds of ten years ago, Ambrose Fayerweather was saying to Mrs. Loring, “but I thought she came to make a long visit?”

“Well,” said Mrs. Loring defensively, “she stayed three days!”

“Eh bien, Marcel! and how does it go?” I asked.

“Oh, it goes, m’sieu—it goes, always. But——”

“Yes? ‘But’——?”

“Well, m’sieu” (pulling my chair out, uneasily), “it is the season of the Americans, and—but pardon, m’sieu!”

“Don’t mind me,” I said, pouncing on the carte du jour of the Café aux Oranges. “In Paris I am equally content as you to forget it—that I am American. Alors, Marcel!—it will be hors d’œuvres variés, and then an omelette fines herbes, and then, I think, an assiette anglaise with a bit of salad, eh? and a Camembert, to finish.”

Marcel regarded me solemnly—consideringly—from over the wide block rims of his glasses. “But yes, m’sieu,” he said at last, grudgingly, “I suppose that it can go, as a breakfast. And monsieur drinks——?”

“Beer,” I was suddenly occupied with an extraordinarily pretty girl in the orangier opposite, “demibrune, Marcel.”

“Pardon, m’sieu, demiblonde—er—I—a thousand pardons, m’sieu!” Confused, the old fellow brought his eyes back from the same direction; made a violent effort to blush, and hurried off, murmuring, “demibrune, m’sieu, it is understood!”

I looked again at the girl. Even for the Café aux Oranges, where in spring, like this, there are as many pretty girls as blossoms on the chestnut trees above the little tables,—she was extraordinarily pretty. And she was American. One knew that by the upholstered shoulders of the young man and the shopping-bag of the lady, who were with her. The lady was frowning over the menu.

“I will not come here again!” she was heard to say, in a voice with as many corners as her shopping bag. “The second time this week—no roast beef! I’ll not come again. It’s a cheap place.”

“But, mamma” (by straining one’s ears, one could just get the low response of the pretty girl) “it’s a very nice place, really! And don’t you know it is one of the very few old cafés of the Quarter—the old French cafés—Roger told us?”

“Roger!” exploded the lady (there was no difficulty in hearing her). “If Roger knew less about cafés, it would be a great deal better for——”

Marcel returned with the hors d’œuvres. But not before I had seen a thin smile overtake the features of the heavy-shouldered young man.

“Who are they?” I asked Marcel, carelessly enough.

With a thump he set down the radishes. “They, m’sieu?” Scornfully, “they are Americans who are come since m’sieu went away. While m’sieu was in Italy they came to live in the Rue Vavin, near by. They are friends of Monsieur Roger Elmont—ce beau garçon! But mademoiselle is an angel—but of a goodness! Only last Sunday she gave me two francs ten, and always when she takes coffee here in the evening—but she is very good for me.”

“And the others? The mother and brother?”

“Pah! what would you? Canaille!—tourists—but it is not her brother, m’sieu. It is the futur of mademoiselle, saints dieux!”

“Not possible! But are you sure, Marcel? How do you know?”

“Listen, m’sieu”—he lowered his voice—“m’sieu eats his crevettes, and I shall recount to him: listen. A month ago, before one began to take the repasts outside at Café aux Oranges, there came one evening these three and Monsieur Roger. They are gay—but of a gaiety! They order dinner and—mais si! champagne and champagne—first Monsieur Roger, then this young man, Stuart, he calls himself, I think. This Monsieur Stuart, of champagne he himself orders two bottles. But they are friendly, he and Monsieur Roger; they are like brothers.

“Then—I am serving them, I and Little-John—all of a sudden something happens. Something is said—I am out, searching their dessert, I do not hear. But Little-John hears, and he murmurs to me, stupidly in high voice as he always does, ‘it is the futur of Mademoiselle, that one with the made shoulders. Madame has come from telling Monsieur Roger.’ This, then, is the cause of the quick silence, and of Monsieur Roger’s pale face, and mademoiselle’s blushes—ah, but she is beautiful, mademoiselle; m’sieu finds her brunette! For myself, to me she seems blonde. Such blue eyes and the skin so white, like camelia, though certainly her hair——”

“Never mind,” I said, buttering a heel of bread, “I can see her hair.”

“But perfectly, m’sieu. I was saying, Monsieur Roger is all of a surprise with the news. He has not known mademoiselle is engaged. But yes, says madame with victory, since two months—since the ship in which they came from America. This—how you say?—Chames? Chames Stuart was on that ship. Madame is an intimate of M. Stuart’s mother. To Monsieur Roger, madame tells with what singular air of double entendre, this Chames Stuart is a man to be trusted. A good man. Monsieur Roger throws back his head and laughs—very long.

“But, m’sieu, I do not like to hear that laugh. Myself, I am foolish for Monsieur Roger, like all the rest at Café aux Oranges, more than all the other garçons I am foolish for him. Do I not know him since he came, poor obscure student, five years ago? But of a certainty! And that laugh, it is not the laugh of Monsieur Roger—rich, successful, grand artiste. No! it is a laugh that hides tears, suffering maybe. I do not know. Surely it makes me regard Monsieur Roger more closely, while he says, with what legereté, ‘but certainly madame! one knows that you would give Julie to none but a good man—that you would assure yourself as to his goodness.’

“Then, while mademoiselle and Chames Stuart sip their coffee, madame speaks to him severely. I understand but meagerly English, m’sieu knows, I attrap a word here and there—of girls and student balls and the gay life of the Quartier that has embroiled Monsieur Roger. Truly, m’sieu, he has always seemed to me a brave young man, ce beau garçon, not at all a mean young man or of mauvais sang, like some who come here; but he has been young, parbleu! The saints be thanked, he has been young. Yet with that does Madame reproach him, in low tones. Monsieur Roger’s mother, madame says, has heard of his follies but too often; her heart is broken. ‘Nor can your success repair it,’ adds madame with harshness. ‘All Baltimore knows of your wild affairs and your mother’s shame.’ M’sieu, I do not know who is this Baltimore, but I think he must be droll, if he is shocked at Monsieur Roger’s folies de jeunesse. N’est ce pas? But certainly, m’sieu—the omelette!”

When he had brought it, “M’sieu does not ennui himself? M’sieu permits that I go on?”

“Go on,” I said—looking at the wide blue eyes of the girl in the orangier opposite.

“That evening passes itself. I do not know why, mademoiselle—the blush once gone—looks pale and distraite. She speaks quite gay and very fast, yet—why she is sad one can but imagine. This Chames Stuart, he is scarcely of a beauty, hein? A beauty like Monsieur Roger with his black hair and his gay smile and his figure like—Dame! But I am foolish for Monsieur Roger, all the Café knows. And he, what does he do? He says good-night with empressement, formally, and hopes he may have the pleasure of seeing these ladies again very soon. With Chames Stuart he shakes hands—yet more formally. They separate.

“Second chapter, it is—what do you think, m’sieu? Mademoiselle and Monsieur Roger alone! But of a surety! They come in one warm afternoon and order tea—but they come inside and far over in one corner, and mademoiselle glances about, nervously and says, ‘Oh, Roger, it is rash! It is wrong—I ought not to have come.’ But he soothes her—Mon Dieu: what a voice: what strength—what tenderness divine! The emotion a young girl must feel for him—one can but imagine—he soothes her and tells her it was of a necessity for him, this little hour alone with her.

“‘For I was to have married you, Julie, you know,’ he says sadly. ‘Our mothers planned it when you were a little girl in—how you say, m’sieu? pinafore? and I a clumsy boy in knickers. Have you forgotten?’

“‘No,’ says mademoiselle with a little sigh; ‘but—they say you did. They say—mamma and your mother too—that you forgot everything but what you should have forgotten; that you flung your name and the reputation of your family to the four winds, and cared for nothing but pleasure!—and dissipation and mad gaieties. They say!' mademoiselle tells him with a break in her lovely voice, ‘that you aren’t fit to marry a young girl—that you would break her heart.’

“Monsieur Roger cursed—softly, under his breath. But I, m’sieu, heard him.

“‘Idiots!’ he mutters between his teeth. ‘Fools—prurient-minded canaille!—to fill a child’s head with such drivel. But it’s dangerous drivel.’ He turns to mademoiselle.—‘Listen, Julie,’ he says with what gentleness, ‘Americans have different ideas from ours over here. They lead the same lives,’ says Monsieur Roger bitterly, ‘but they have different ideas about those lives. They take trouble to conceal. Here in Paris, one lives as one lives,—openly. One is ashamed of nothing,—except meanness. I,’ says Monsieur Roger proudly, ‘am ashamed of nothing. I have been foolish, yes! wild. Did I not come here, a boy of twenty-one, from my mother and Baltimore (I wonder what is this Baltimore, m’sieu?), from all the stupid conventions of a society that is nothing but afraid? Of course I was wild; and the people we know, who came to Paris, would go back with great tales of my escapades.’

“Monsieur Roger folds his arms suddenly. ‘Julie,’ he says with earnestness, ‘I am ready to tell you anything—answer any question you may care to put, about my life here in Paris.’

“Mademoiselle looks frightened—confused. Also she reddens,—she is of a youth, enchanting!

“‘But, Roger,’ she says timidly, ‘I would not know how to ask you questions. I——’

“‘Then listen,’ he says, leaning forward until his black eyes stare into her blue ones; ‘I could tell you almost anything, and you would believe me, Julie?’

“‘Yes,’ says mademoiselle faintly.

“‘I could tell you no, I have not been all these things—I have not drunk much nor gambled nor lost at cards, as they all say, nor—had flirtations with women. I could tell you that, couldn’t I, and you would believe me?’

“‘Ye-es,’ mademoiselle says—yet more faintly.

“‘Well, I tell you nothing of the sort! I tell you, yes, Julie—I have done all these things; I have been wild and extravagant, and what you call dissipated, perhaps. I have been all these; but since how long? and to whose harm—except my own? Can you find me a man in the Quarter who will tell you that, since a year, I have been anything but what you see me now—sane and keen for my work? Can you find me a woman who will tell you that since a year she has seen me anywhere but drinking coffee in some place like this—or that ever, in all the five years, I was anything but gentle and courteous to her? You cannot, Julie!’ cries Monsieur Roger passionately, ‘you cannot!’

“Mademoiselle Julie is trembling—and there are tears in her blue eyes.

“‘With you,’ declares Monsieur Roger, ’as with all the world—Paris, Baltimore, all!—I am what I am. I seek to be nothing else. But I think you have never quite understood what I am—is it not so?’

“Mademoiselle shakes her head. She is overcome—pauv’ petite!—But m’sieu is famishing! M’sieu’s assiette anglaise—an instant!”

He hurried back with it, and stood anxiously mixing my salad dressing—though his sharp old eyes strayed sometimes to the trio in the orangier opposite. “After that,” he went on triumphantly, “Monsieur Roger is bold—but of a boldness! He takes mademoiselle’s hand—they have no shame whatever over the tea which is still in the pot!—and says to her with a simplicity that alarms, ‘tell me—do you love this Chames Stuart?’

“‘Love him?’ almost screams mademoiselle. ‘Are you out of your mind?’

“‘Then,’ says Monsieur Roger, with the air of a King of France, ‘I’m going to marry you. It is decided. You have nothing more to say about it.’

“Mademoiselle blushes divinely—leans a suspicion towards him. They sigh—ah, youth enchanting! What they feel one can but imagine. He kisses her hand—of me they are oblivious; until—I cough like one in the throes of sudden death. They start apart. Madame has entered! And Chames Stuart!

“I wring my hands and babble Holy Mary’s. In such a case what can one do that is practical? Nothing. I wait—in terror for Monsieur Roger and mademoiselle. But Monsieur Roger speaks, with a calm supernal, ‘Will you not have tea, madame?’ he demands, offering her his place all politely. But she—madame—sweeps by him. Catches mademoiselle by the arm. ‘I thought this,’ she cries—‘when I missed you! I suspected it, you ungrateful girl! Perhaps when you hear that you are to be married next week at the Consulate, and to Chames Stuart’—then she does look at Monsieur Roger, and with scorn. Chames Stuart looks at Monsieur Roger too—and gives a little smile. It is like his shoulders, that smile, m’sieu—made up and put on. When I see this Chames Stuart, I feel like Bibi, our café dog, who shows her teeth at him. Madame says he is a good man—tant pis! For myself, if it is true, I prefer a devil.

“The three go out, mademoiselle looks at Monsieur Roger not at all. She looks very far away from him. And Monsieur Roger is left with the pot of tea—that has grown cold. When I ask him shall I renew it, he says ‘to be married next week! And to Chames Stuart!’ And then he laughs one laugh—very short—‘Indeed!’ he says—throwing back his head like he does—‘indeed!’ And he marches out of the café, with two steps—but he has legs, Monsieur Roger!—forgetting to pay—everything. But I do not worry, m’sieu. I know, when he comes to-morrow, he will give me the two francs fifty—and something more. He is very good for me, Monsieur Roger.

“Enfin, that was two weeks ago. And still mademoiselle is not married. But hèlas, it approaches. Yesterday when madame came with her alone, I heard madame say, ‘Monday—not a day later.’ And I know that it is because of money difficulties that she is anxious. Chames Stuart has much money. So has Monsieur Roger, but not so much as Chames Stuart, and, as madame insists to mademoiselle, Monsieur Roger is not good. One day—yesterday—mademoiselle cried out, ‘Oh, how do you know what is good and what is not good? What matters is what is true!’ Madame is shocked—horrified at this temper. And after an instant mademoiselle apologizes—with meekness—Pauv’ petite! What she feels, one can but imagine.”

He gave me my cheese, and stared gloomily at the back of Chames Stuart’s sandy head. “Monday!” I heard him mutter, belligerently. Then to me—“But where then is Monsieur Roger? Only now does mademoiselle whisper to me if he has been here—Monsieur Roger. Since that day when he comes to pay for the tea, he is not here. I think he tries somewhere to console himself, but I do not tell mademoiselle. A young girl cannot understand such things.”

“Then she should,” I declared with a warmth that surprised myself—forty, and inclined to take young girls and the rest of life negligently. “It is because young girls don’t understand such things better, that they let themselves be overruled by James Stuarts and mammas with empty shopping-bags,” I snapped, to the wonder of old Marcel.

My eyes just then had met the troubled blue of the girl’s—the three were leaving. James Stuart took her arm, always with that thin, satisfied smile. I glared at him. I do not like good young men with padded shoulders, and a smile for features. I grumbled as much to Marcel, who shook his head astonished (delighted, too) at my vehemence. “Madame tells mademoiselle there is nothing in his life which this Chames Stuart might not tell to her,” he said scornfully. “That no one has seen him or heard of him doing anything to be condemned. Eh! la! la!” The Frenchman rolled his eyes. “C’est un drôle d’idéale, hein m’sieu? These Americans!—pardon, m’sieu! M’sieu’s hat? À ce soir, alors, m’sieu.”

That evening at dinner he came up to my table, with an air of tremendous excitement. Indeed the whole Café aux Oranges seemed curiously alert, almost explosive. Mademoiselle Julie and her mother were there in their corner, sipping petits verres—mademoiselle’s cheeks the color of jacqueminots, to be sure, and madame’s with more corners than ever—if possible. But what caught my attention was—heaven of heavens!—Roger Elmont sitting directly opposite them, between Margot and Suzette! the two madcaps of the Quarter! James Stuart was not in the café.

“But, m’sieu, listen—listen while I tell you,” old Marcel’s words tumbled over themselves in his eagerness—“M’sieu has dined, hein? M’sieu takes only coffee and his liqueur? Listen, then, m’sieu: these ladies, they come in alone. They order dinner—which mademoiselle will scarcely touch. She is miserable, she is without herself. At last she says with a bitterness that is to break the heart, ‘If it’s only the money, Roger has plenty; and I am going to tell him to-night that if it’s true, what he says about his life this last year, and if he can prove to you that it’s true, I will marry him. Chames Stuart,’ says mademoiselle—but with a calm—‘can go back to America.’

“Madame is furious. ‘But,’ she repeats, ‘he cannot prove it—Roger can never prove it, that he has been good this last year.’

“‘I can,’ flashes mademoiselle with a defiance, mon Dieu, divine! ‘We can prove it. Only wait and——’

“M’sieu, at this heart-rending moment, I ask you does not Monsieur Roger come in! Monsieur Roger and” (Marcel groaned in anguish) “that mad Suzette!—arm in arm, singing, laughing—m’sieu, I, the old garçon de café, Marcel, want to perish! And, can you believe me, they do not see those ladies, no! But—nom de Dieu!—another sees them! Margot—the vixen—who was mad for Monsieur Roger all last year; Margot sees them. She makes a rush—she leaves her escort—she insults Suzette—tears her hat off. They scream! they pull each other’s hair—the café is of a furore! And Monsieur Roger, he only laughs—he just laughs, and teases those girls to wilder and wilder rage.

“Still he does not see mademoiselle—pauv’ petite, so white, suddenly!—who begs to go; but madame will not permit her. Hard as iron she holds mademoiselle’s arm and makes her see. ‘Now will you prove?’ she demands, with triumph. ‘Now can you prove?—this scandal!’ Mademoiselle answers nothing. She looks very little and very white. Now the patron has come in, peace is ruled, and Monsieur Roger with good nature promises to give both those girls dinner. But ciel! m’sieu, at the instant, he has seen mademoiselle! It is tragedy. What will happen? It is just at the moment of m’sieu’s entrance that he perceived this—oh, poor young man! Is he desolated!—what he feels one can but imagine. I am bringing m’sieu’s liqueur.”

I glanced about. Mademoiselle Julie was indeed abject; nor did madame and her shopping-bag look too happy in their triumph. As for Roger Elmont—dark, gloomy-eyed, between the two now chattering girls—he looked, if anything, the most wretched of the three. All at once he rose, walked swiftly over to mademoiselle. They were sitting quite near me, to-night, and I heard him say in a firm voice, “Julie, I want to explain.”

“Sir!” said madame, indignantly. (One could have sworn she would say, ‘Sir!’)

Roger beautifully disregarded her. “What I told you was true, Julie,” he concentrated all the conviction of his black eyes on mademoiselle. “I have been this afternoon to the studio of a friend for whom Suzette poses. I was sad—God knows I had reason—she suggested we should come here. Margot—the other girl—came across us. And—you saw the rest. If you do not believe me, others will tell you—what I told you was true! And there is nothing else to tell—nothing.”

The girl looked at him—straight in the eyes. Then suddenly she stood up. “I believe you,” she said—with a smile for which I would give all the philosophy of forty and a bald head.

“Julie!” cried madame sharply. “You foolish girl, what do you mean?”

“I mean,” said Julie slowly, “that I am going to marry Roger.”

“You shan’t do it!” declared madame. By this time again the café was on the verge of uproar. “You are to marry James Stuart, who is a man of moral sense, a good man who——”

Just here, James Stuart came in—in evening dress, very debonair and with the smile. “Er—how de do?” he said feebly—seeing Roger.

Then some one saw him—and darted forward. “C’est lui, c’est lui,” screamed Suzette, seizing him with an impish laugh—“that one who was with me at the Olympia last night—with whom I did the tour of Montmartre. La! la! ces anglais!” And the minx kissed Chames Stuart loudly on both cheeks—before the outraged eyes of madame.

As for Roger Elmont—he looked steadily at madame.

Madame had shrunk back—for an instant crushed. Then she regained confidence, caught the girl’s hand. “Come,” she said in a voice choking with emotion, “come, Julie! Let us go, quickly—let us get out of this mire—this mud of Paris, where nothing seems to be clean or good. Come!”

But the girl—with a new gleam in her blue eyes—turned and gave her hand to Roger. “I think,” she said to her mother in a clear voice, “it is not the mud that counts, but the way one comes out of it.”

“And did you perceive, m’sieu,” chuckled Marcel—when later I was drinking their health in a fine champagne—“did you see that Chames Stuart had, fault of the wet evening, mud on his boots? Chames Stuart—that ‘good man,’ eh nom d’un pipe! These Americans—pardon, m’sieu!”

THE END

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The Chalk Line

By Anne Warwick

Author of “The Unknown Woman,” “Victory Law,” etc.

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Novels by Anne Warwick

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THE UNKNOWN WOMAN

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BEHIND THE BEYOND
AND OTHER CONTRIBUTIONS TO HUMAN KNOWLEDGE

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Arcadian Adventures
With the Idle Rich

BY
STEPHEN LEACOCK Author of “Nonsense Novels,” “Sunshine Sketches,” etc.

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