"It's the contrast; you see our duchesses were green-grocers' wives the day before yesterday, and our green-grocers' wives subscribe to the magazines. It's all mixed up, and there are no high lights anywhere. You move before us in a sort of panoramic pageant," Elfrida went on, determined to redeem her point, "with your Queen and Empress of India—she ought to be riding on an elephant, oughtn't she?—in front, and all your princes and nobles with their swords drawn to protect her. Then your Upper Classes and your Upper Middle Classes walking stiffly two and two; and then your Lower Middle Classes with large families, dropping their h's; and then your hideous people from the slums. And besides," she added, with prettily repressed enthusiasm, "there is the shadowy procession of all the people that have gone before, and we can see that you are a good deal like them, though they are more interesting still. It is very pictorial." She stopped suddenly and consciously, as if she had said too much, and Janet felt that she was suggestively apologized to.

"Doesn't the phenomenal squash make up for all that?" she asked. "It would to me. I'm dying to see the phenomenal squash, and the prodigious water-melon, and—"

"And the falls of Niagara?" Elfrida put in, with the faintest turning down of the corners of her mouth. "I'm afraid our wonders are chiefly natural, and largely vegetable, as you say."

"But they are wonders. Everything here has been measured so many times. Besides, haven't you got the elevated railway, and a statue of Liberty, and the 'Jeanne d'Arc,' and W. D. Howells! To say nothing of a whole string of poets—good gray poets that wear beards and laurels, and fanciful young ones that dance in garlands on the back pages of the Century. Oh, I know them all, the dear things! And I'm quite sure their ideas are indigenous to the soil."

Elfrida let her eyes tell her appreciation, and also the fact that she would take courage now, she was gaining confidence. "I'm glad you like them," she said. "Howells would do if he would stop writing about virtuous sewing-girls, and give us some real romans psychologiques. But he is too much afraid of soiling his hands, that monsieur; his betes humaines are always conventionalized, and generally come out at the end wearing the halo of the redeemed. He always reminds me of Cruikshank's picture of the ghost being put out by the extinguisher in the 'Christmas Carol.' His genius is the ghost, and conventionality is the extinguisher. But it is genius, so it's a pity."

"It seems to me that Howells deals honestly with his materials," Janet said, instinctively stilling the jar of Elfrida's regardless note. She was so pretty, this new creature, and she had such original ways. Janet must let her talk about romans psychologiques, or worse things, if she wanted to. "To me he has a tremendous appearance of sincerity, psychological and other. But do you know, I don't think the English or American people are exactly calculated to reward the sort of vivisection you mean. The bete is too conscious of his moral fibre when he's respectable, and when he isn't respectable he doesn't commit picturesque crimes, he steals and boozes. I dare say he's bestial enough, but pure unrelieved filth can't be transmuted into literature, and as a people we're perfectly devoid of that extraordinary artistic nature that it makes such a foil for in the Latins. That is really the only excuse the naturalists have."

"Excuse!" Elfrida repeated, with a bewildered look. "You had Wainwright," she added hastily.

"Nous nous en felicitons! We've got him still—in Madame Tussaud's," cried Janet "He poisoned for money in cold blood—not exactly an artistic vice! Oh, he won't do!"—she laughed triumphantly—"if he did write charming things about the Renaissance! Besides, he illustrates my case; among us he was a phenomenon, like the elephant-headed man. Phenomena are for the scientists. You don't mean to tell me that any literature that pretends to call itself artistic has a right to touch them."

By this time they had absolutely forgotten that up to twenty minutes ago they had never seen each other before. Already they had mutely and unconsciously begun to rejoice that they had come together; already each of them promised herself the exploration of the other's nature, with the preliminary idea that it would be a satisfying, at least an interesting process. The impulse made Elfrida almost natural, and Janet perceived this with quick self-congratulation. Already she had made up her mind that this manner was a pretty mask which it would be her business to remove.

"But—but you're not in it!" Elfrida returned. "Pardon me, but you're not there, you know. Art has no ideal but truth, and to conventionalize truth is to damn it In the most commonplace material there is always truth, but here they conventionalize it out of all—"

"Oh," cried Janet, "we're a conventional people, I assure you, Miss Bell, and so are you, for how could you change your spots in a hundred years? The material here is conventional. Daudet couldn't have written of us. Our wicked women are too inglorious. Now Sapho—"

Miss Cardiff stopped at the ringing of the door-bell. "Oh," she said, "here is my father. You will let me give you a cup of tea now, won't you?" The maid was bringing in the tray. "I should like you to meet my father."

Lawrence Cardiff's grasp was on the door-handle almost as she spoke. Seeing Elfrida, he involuntarily put up his hand to settle the back of his coat collar—these little middle-aged ways were growing upon him—and shook hands with her as Janet introduced them, with that courtly impenetrable agreeableness that always provoked curiosity about him in strangers, and often led to his being taken for somebody more important than he was, usually somebody in politics. Elfrida saw that he was quite different from her conception of a university professor with a reputation in Persian and a clever daughter of twenty-four. He was straight and slender for one thing; he had gay inquiring eyes, and fair hair just beginning to show gray where the ends were brushed back; and Elfrida immediately became aware that his features were as modern and as mobile as possible. She had a moment of indecision and surprise —indecision as to the most effective way of presenting herself, and surprise that it should be necessary to decide upon a way. It had never occurred to her that a gentleman who had won scientific celebrity by digging about Arabic roots, and who had contributed a daughter like Janet to the popular magazines, could claim anything of her beyond a highly respectful consideration. In moments when she hoped to know the Cardiffs well she had pictured herself doing little graceful acts of politeness toward this paternal person—acts connected with his spectacles, his Athenian, his foot-stool But apparently she had to meet a knight and not a pawn.

She was hardly aware of taking counsel with herself; and the way she abandoned her hesitations, and what Janet was inwardly calling her Burne-Jonesisms, had all the effect of an access of unconsciousness. Janet Cardiff watched it with delight. "But why," she asked herself in wonder, "should she have been so affected—if it was affectation—with me?" She would decide whether it was or was not afterward, she thought. Meanwhile she was glad her father had thought of saying something nice about the art criticism in the Decade; he was putting it so much better than she could, and it would do for both of them.

"You paint yourself, I fancy?" Mr. Cardiff was saying lightly. There was no answer for an instant, or perhaps three. Elfrida was looking down. Presently she raised her eyes, and they were larger than ever, and wet.

"No," she said, a little tensely. "I have tried" —"trr-hied," she pronounced it—"but—but I cannot."

Lawrence Cardiff looked at his teaspoon in a considering way, and Janet reflected, not without indignation, that this was the manner in which people who cared for them might be expected to speak of the dead. But Elfrida cut short the reflection by turning to her brightly. "When Mr. Cardiff came in," she said, "you were telling me why a Daudet could not write about the English. It was something about Sapho—"

Mr. Cardiff looked up curiously, and Janet, glancing in her father's direction, reddened. Did this strange young woman not realize that it was impossible to discuss beings like "Sapho" with one's father in the room? Apparently not, for she went on: "It seems to me it is the exception in that class, as in all classes, that rewards interest—"

That rewards interest? What might she not say next!

"Yes," interrupted Janet desperately, "but then my father came in and changed the subject of our conversation. Where are you living, Miss Bell?"

"Near Fleet Street," said Elfrida, rising. "I find the locality most interesting, when I can see it. I can patronize the Roman baths, and lunch at Dr. Johnson's pet tavern, and attend service in the church of the real Templars if I like. It is delightful. I did go to the Temple Church a fortnight ago," she added, "and I saw such a horrible thing that I am not sure that I will go again. There is a beautiful old Crusader lying there in stone, and on his feet a man who sat near had hung his silk hat. And nobody interfered. Why do you laugh?"

When she had fairly gone Lawrence and Janet Cardiff looked at each other and smiled. "Well!" cried Janet, "it's a find, isn't it, daddy?"

Her father shrugged his shoulders. His manner said that he was not pleased, but Janet found a tone in his voice that told her the impression of Elfrida had not been altogether distasteful.

"Fin de siecle," he said.

"Perhaps," Janet answered, looking out of the window, "a little fin de siecle."

"Did you notice," asked Lawrence Cardiff, "that she didn't tell you where she was living?"

"Didn't she? Neither she did. But we can easily find out from John Kendal."



CHAPTER XIV.

Kendal hardly admitted to himself that his acquaintance with Elfrida had gone beyond the point of impartial observation. The proof of its impartiality, if he had thought of seeking it, would have appeared to him to lie in the fact that he found her, in her personality, her ideas, and her effects, to be damaged by London. The conventionality—Kendal's careless generalization preferred a broad term—of the place made her extreme in every way, and it had recently come to be a conclusion with him that English conventionality, in moderation, was not wholly to be smiled at. Returning to it, its protectiveness had impressed him strongly, and he had a comforting sense of the responsibility it imposed upon society. Paris and the Quartier stood out against it in his mind like something full of light and color and transient passion on the stage—something to be remembered with recurrent thrills of keen satisfaction and to be seen again. It had been more than this, he acknowledged, for he had brought out of it an element that lightened his life and vitalized his work, and gave an element of joyousness to his imagination—it was certain that he would go back there. And Miss Bell had been in it and of it—so much in it and of it that he felt impatient with her for permitting herself to be herself in any other environment. He asked himself why she could not see that she was crudely at variance with all color and atmosphere and law in her present one, and he speculated as to the propriety of telling her so, of advising her outright as to the expediency in her own interest, of being other than herself in London. That was what it came to, he reflected in deciding that he could not—if the girl's convictions and motives and aims were real; and he was beginning to think they were real. And although he had found himself at liberty to say to her things that were harder to hear, he felt a curious repugnance to giving her any inkling of what he thought about this. It would be a hideous thing to do, he concluded, an unforgivable thing, and an actual hurt. Kendal had for women the readiest consideration, and though one of the odd things he found in Elfrida was the slight degree to which she evoked it in him, he recoiled instinctively from any reasoned action which would distress her. But his sense of her inconsistency with British institutions —at least he fancied it was that—led him to discourage somewhat, in the lightest way, Miss Halifax's interested inquiries about her. The inquiries suggested dimly that eccentricity and obscurity might be overlooked in any one whose personality really had a value for Mr. Kendal, and made an attempt, which was heroic considering the delicacy of Miss Halifax's scruples, to measure his appreciation of Miss Bell as a writer—to Miss Halifax the word wore a halo—and as an individual. If she did not succeed it was partly because he had not himself quite decided whether Elfrida, in London, was delightful or intolerable, and partly because he had no desire to be complicated in social relations which, he told himself, must be either ludicrous or insincere. The Halifaxes were not in any sense literary; their proper pretensions to that sort of society were buried with Sir William, who had been editor of the Brown Quarterly in his day, and many other things. They had inherited his friends as they had inherited his manuscripts; and in spite of a grievous inability to edit either of them, they held to one legacy as fast as to the other. Kendal thought with a somewhat repelled amusement of any attempt of theirs to assimilate Elfrida. It was different with the Cardiffs; but even under their enthusiastic encouragement he was disinclined to be anything but discreet and cautions about Elfrida. In one way and another she was, at all events, a young lady of potentialities, he reflected, and with a view to their effect among one's friends it might be as well to understand them. He went so far as to say to himself that Janet was such a thoroughly nice girl as she was; and then he smiled inwardly at the thought of how angry she would be at the idea of his putting any prudish considerations on her account into the balance against an interesting acquaintance. He had, nevertheless, a distinct satisfaction in the fact that it was really circumstances, in the shape of the Decade article, that had brought them together, and that he could hardly charge himself with being more than an irresponsible agent in the matter.

Under the influence of such considerations Kendal did not write to Elfrida at the Age office asking her address, as he had immediately resolved to do when he discovered that she had gone away without telling him where he might find her. It seemed to him that he could not very well see her at her lodgings. And the pleasure of coming upon her suddenly as she closed the door of the Age behind her and stepped out into Fleet Street a fortnight later overcame him too quickly to permit him to reflect that he was yielding to an opposite impulse in asking her to dine with him at Baliero's, as they might have done in Paris. It was an unlooked-for opportunity, and it roused a desire which he had not lately been calculating upon—a desire to talk with her about all sorts of things, to feel the exhilaration of her artistic single-mindedness, to find out more about her, to guess at the meanings behind her eyes. If any privileged cynic had taken the chance to ask him whether he found her eyes expressive of purely abstract significance, Kendal would have answered affirmatively in all honesty. And he would have added a confession of his curiosity to discover what she was capable of, if she was capable of anything—which he considered legitimate enough. At the moment, however, he had no time to think of anything but an inducement, and he dashed through whole pickets of scruples to find one. "They give one such capital strawberry ices at Baliero's," he begged her to believe. His resolutions did not even reassert themselves when she refused. He was conscious only that it was a bore that she should refuse, and very inconsistent; hadn't she often dined with him at the Cafe Florian? His gratification was considerable when she added, "They smoke there, you know," and, it became obvious, by whatever curious process of reasoning she arrived at it, that it was Baliero's restaurant she objected to, and not his society.

"Well," he urged, "there are plenty of places where they don't smoke, though it didn't occur to me that—"

"Oh," she laughed; "but you must allow it to occur to you," and she put her finger on her lip. Considering their solitariness in the crowd, he thought, there was no reason why he should not say that he was under the impression she liked the smell of tobacco.

"There are other places," she went on. "There is a sweet little green-and-white place like a dairy in Oxford Street, that calls itself the 'Hyacinth,' which is sacred to ladies and to gentlemen properly chaperoned. If you would invite me to dine with you there I should like it very much."

"Anywhere," he said. He accepted her proposal to dine at the "Hyacinth" with the same unquestioning pleasure which he would have had in accepting her proposal to dine at the top of the Monument that evening; but he felt an under perplexity at its terms, which was vaguely disturbing. How could it possibly matter? Did she suppose that she advanced palpably nearer to the proprieties in dining with him in one place rather than the other? There was an unreasonableness about that which irritated him.

He felt it more distinctly when she proposed taking an omnibus instead of the cab he had signalled. "Oh, of course, if you prefer it," he said; and there was almost a trace of injured feeling in his voice. It was so much easier to talk in a cab.

He lost his apprehensions presently, for it became obvious to him that this was only a mood, coming, as he said to himself devoutly, from the Lord knew what combination of circumstances—he would think that out afterward—but making Elfrida none the less agreeable while it lasted. Under its influence she kept away from all the matters she was fondest of discussing with that extraordinary candor and startling equity of hers, and talked to him with a pretty cleverness, about commonplaces of sorts arising out of the day's news, the shops, the weather. She treated them all with a gaiety that made her face a fascinating study while she talked, and pointed them, as it were, with all the little poises and expressions and reserves which are commonly a feminine result of considerable social training. Kendal, entering into her whim, inwardly compared her with an acknowledged successful girl of the season with whom he had sat out two dances the night before in Eaton Square, to the successful girl's disadvantage. Finding something lacking in that, he came upon a better analogy in a young married lady of the diplomatic circle, who had lately been dipping the third finger of her left hand into politics with the effect of considerably increasing her note. This struck him as satisfactory, and he enjoyed finding completion for his parallel wherever her words and gestures offered it. He took her at the wish she implied, and eddied with her around the pool which some counter-current of her nature had made for the hour in its stream, pleasantly enough. He made one attempt, as Elfrida unbuttoned her gloves at their little table at the "Hyacinth," to get her to talk about her work for the Age.

"Please, please don't mention that," she said. "It is too revolting. You don't know how it makes me suffer."

A moment later she returned to it of her own accord, however. "It is absurd to try to exact pledges from people," she said, "but I should really be happier —much happier—if you would promise me something."

"'By Heaven, I will promise any thing!'" Kendal quoted, laughing, from a poet much in vogue.

"Only this—I hope I am not selfish—" she hesitated; "but I think—yes, I think I must be selfish here. It is that you will never read the Age."

"I never do," leapt to his lips, but he stopped it in time. "And why!" he asked instead.

"Ah, you know why! It is because you might recognize my work in it—by accident you might—and that would be so painful to me. It is not my best—please believe it is not my best!"

"On one condition I promise," he said: "that when you do your best you will tell me where to find it"

She looked at him gravely and considered. As she did so it seemed to Kendal that she was regarding his whole moral, mental, and material nature. He could almost see it reflected in the glass of her great dark eyes. "Certainly, yes. That is fair—if you really and truly care to see it. And I don't know," she added, looking up at him from her soup, "that it matters whether you do or not, so long as you carefully and accurately pretend that you do. When my best, my real best, sees the light of common—"

"Type," he suggested.

"Type," she repeated unsmilingly, "I shall be so insatiate for criticism—I ought to say praise—that I shall even go so far as to send you a marked copy, very plainly marked, with blue pencil. Already," she smiled with a charming effect of assertiveness, "I have bought the blue pencil."

"Will it come soon?" Kendal asked seriously.

"Cher ami," Elfrida said, drawing her handsome brows together a little, "it will come sooner than you expect That is what I want," she went on deliberately, "more than anything else in the whole world, to do things —good things, you understand—and to have them appreciated and paid for in the admiration of people who feel and see and know. For me life has nothing else, except the things that other people do, better and worse than mine."

"Better and worse than yours," Kendal repeated. "Can't you think of them apart?"

"No, I can't," Elfrida interrupted; "I've tried, and I can not. I know it's a weakness—at least I'm half persuaded that it is—but I must have the personal standard in everything."

"But you are a hero-worshipper; often I have seen you at it."

"Yes," she said cynically, while the white-capped maid who handed Kendal asparagus stared at her with a curiosity few of the Hyacinth's lady diners inspired, "and when I look into that I find it is because of a secret consciousness that tells me that I, in the hero's place, should have done just the same thing. Or else it is because of the gratification my vanity finds in my sympathy with his work, whatever it is. Oh, it is no special virtue, my kind of hero-worship." The girl looked across at Kendal and laughed a bright, frank laugh, in which was no discontent with what she had been telling him.

"You are candid," Kendal said.

"Oh yes, I'm candid. I don't mind lying for a noble end, but it isn't a noble end to deceive one's self."

"'Oh, purblind race of miserable men—'" Kendal began lightly, but she stopped him.

"Don't!" she cried. "Nothing spoils conversation like quotations. Besides, that's such a trite one; I learned it at school."

But Kendal's offence was clearly in his manner. It seemed to Elfrida that he would never sincerely consider what she had to say about herself. She went on softly, holding him with her eyes: "You may find me a simple creature—"

"A propos," laughed Kendal easily, "what is this particular noble end?"

"Bah!" she said, "you are right It was a lie, and it had no end at all. I am complex enough, I dare say. But this is true, that my egotism is like a little flame within me. All the best things feed it, and it is so clear that I see everything in its light. To me it is most dear and valuable, it simplifies things so. I assure you I wouldn't be one of the sloppy, unselfish people the world is full of for anything."

"As a source of gratification isn't it rather limited?" Kendal asked. He was thinking of the extra drop of nervous fluid in Americans that he had been reading about in the afternoon, and wondering if it often had this development.

"I don't quite know what you mean," Elfrida returned. "It isn't a source of gratification, it's a channel. And it intensifies everything so that I don't care how little comes that way. If there's anything of me left when I die it will be that little fierce flame. And when I do the tiniest thing, write the shortest sentence that rings true, see a beauty or a joy which the common herd pass by, I have my whole life in the flame, and it becomes my soul—I'm sure I have no other!

"When you say that there is no real pleasure in the world that does not come through art," Elfrida went on again, widening her eyes seriously, "don't you feel as if you were uttering something religious—part of a creed—as the Mussulman feels when he says there is no God but one God, and Mohammed is his prophet? I do."

"I never say it," Kendal returned, with a smile. "Does that make me out a Philistine, or a Hindu, or what?"

"You a Philistine!" Elfrida cried, as they rose from the little table. "You are saying a thing that is absolutely wicked."

Her quasi-conventional mood had vanished completely, and as they drove together in a hansom through the mysterious movement of the lamp-lit London streets, toward her lodgings, she plunged enjoyingly into certain theories of her religion, which embraced Arnold and Aristotle and did not exclude Mr. Whistler, and made wide, ineffectual, and presumptuous grasps to include all beauty and all faith. She threw handfuls of the foam of these things at Kendal, who watched them vanish into the air with pleasure, and asked if he might smoke. At which she reflected, deciding that for the present he might not, but when they reached her lodgings she would permit him to renew his acquaintance with Buddha, and give him a cigarette.

During the hour they smoked and talked together Elfrida was wholly delightful, and only one thing occurred to mar the enjoyment of the evening as Kendal remembered it. That was Mr. Golightly Ticke, who came up and smoked too, and seemed to have an extraordinary familiarity, for such an utterly impossible person, with Miss Bell's literary engagements. On his way home Kendal reflected that it was doubtless a question of time; she would take to the customs of civilization by degrees, and the sooner the better.



CHAPTER XV.

Shortly afterward Elfrida read Mr. Pater's "Marius," with what she herself called, somewhat extravagantly, a "hungry and hopeless" delight. I cannot say that this Oxonian's tender classical recreation had any critical effect upon her; she probably found it much too limpid and untroubled to move her in the least. I mention it by way of saying that Lawrence Cardiff lent it to her, with a smile of half-indulgent, half-contemptuous assent to some of her ideas, which was altered, when she returned the volumes, by the active necessity of defending his own. Elfrida had been accepted at the Cardiffs, with the ready tolerance which they had for types that were remarkable to them, and not entirely disagreeable; though Janet was always telling her father that it was impossible that Elfrida should be a type—she was an exception of the most exceptionable sort. "I'll admit her to be abnormal, if you like," Cardiff would return, "but only from an insular point of view. I dare say they grow that way in Illinois." But that was in the early stages of their acquaintance with Miss Bell, which ripened with unprecedented rapidity for an acquaintance in Kensington Square. It was before Janet had taken to walking across the gardens with Elfrida in the half-hour between tea-time and dressing for dinner, when the two young women, sometimes under dripping umbrellas, would let the right omnibus follow the wrong one toward Fleet Street twice and thrice in their disinclination to postpone what they had to say to each other. It was also before Elfrida's invasion of the library and fee-simple of the books, and before she had said there many things that were original, some that were impertinent, and a few that were true. The Cardiffs discussed her less freely as the weeks went on—a sure sign that she was becoming better liked, accepted less as a phenomenon, and more as a friend. There grew up in Janet the beginnings of the strong affection which she felt for a very few people, an affection which invariably mingled itself with a lively desire to bestir herself on their account, to be fully informed as to their circumstances, and above all to possess relations of absolute directness with them. She had an imperious successful strain which insisted upon all this. She was a capable creature of much perception for twenty-four, and she had a sense of injury when for any reason she was not allowed to use her faculties for the benefit of any one she liked in a way which excited the desire to do it. Janet had to reproach herself, when she thought of it, that this sort of liking seldom came by entirely approved channels, and hardly ever found an object in her visiting-list. Its first and almost its only essential, to speak boldly, was an artistic susceptibility with some sort of relation to her own, which her visiting-list did not often supply, though it might have been said to overflow with more widely recognized virtues. For that Miss Cardiff was known to be willing to sacrifice the Thirty-nine Articles, respectable antecedents, the possession of a dress-coat. Her willingness was the more widely known because in the circle which fate had drawn around her—ironically, she sometimes thought—it was not usual to sacrifice these things. As for Janet's own artistic susceptibility, it was a very private atmosphere of her soul. She breathed it, one might say, only occasionally, and with a kind of delicious shame. She was incapable of sharing her caught-up felicity there with any one, but it was indispensable that she should see it sometimes in the eyes of others less contained, less conscious, whose sense of humor might be more slender perhaps. Her own nature was practical and managing in its ordinary aspect, and she had a degree of tact that was always interfering with her love of honesty. Having established a friendship by the arbitrary law of sympathy, it must be admitted that she had an instinctive way of trying to strengthen it by voluntary benefits, for affection was a great need with her.

It was only about this time and very gradually that she began to realize how much more she cared for John Kendal than for other people. Since it seemed to be obvious that Kendal gave her only a share of the affectionate interest he had for humanity at large, the realization was not wholly agreeable, and Janet doubtless found Elfrida, on this account, even a more valuable distraction than she otherwise would. One of the matters Miss Bell was in the habit of discussing with some vivacity was the sexlessness of artistic sympathy. Upon this subject Janet found her quite inspired. She made a valiant effort to illumine her thoughts of Kendal by the light Elfrida threw upon such matters, and although she had to confess that the future was still hid in embarrassed darkness, she did manage to construct a theory by which it was possible to grope along for the present. She also cherished a hope that this trouble would leave her, as a fever abates in the night, that she would awake some morning, if she only had patience, strong and well. In other things Miss Cardiff, was sometimes jarred rather than shocked by the American girl's mental attitudes, which, she began to find, were not so posed as her physical ones. Elfrida often left her repelled and dissenting. The dissent she showed vigorously; the repulsion she concealed, sore with herself because of the concealment. But she could not lose Elfrida, she told herself; and besides, it was only a matter of a little tolerance—time and life would change her, tone her inner self down into the something altogether exquisite and perfect that she was, to look at, now.

Elfrida called the Cardiffs' house the oasis of Kensington, and valued her privileges there more than she valued anything else in the circumstances about her, except, perhaps, the privilege she had enjoyed in making the single contribution, to the Decade of which we know. That was an event lustrous in her memory, the more lustrous because it remained solitary and when the editor's check made its tardy appearance she longed to keep it as a glorious archive—glorious that is to say, in suggestion, if not particularly impressive intrinsically. In the end she fought the temptation of giving herself a dinner a day for a fortnight out of it, and bought a slender gold bangle with the money, which she slipped upon her wrist with a resolution to keep it there always. It must be believed that her personal decoration did not enter materially into this design; the bangle was an emblem of one success and an earnest of others. She wore it as she might have worn a medal, except that a medal was a public voice, and the little gold hoop spoke only to her.

After the triumph that the bangle signified Elfrida felt most satisfaction in what was constantly present to her mind as her conquest of the Cardiffs. She measured its importance by their value. Her admiration for Janet's work in the beginning had been as sincere as her emulation of its degree of excellence had been passionate, and neither feeling had diminished with their intimacy. In Lawrence Cardiff she felt vaguely the qualities that made him a marked man among his fellows, his intellectual breadth and keenness, his poise of brain, if one might call it so, and the habilete with which, without permitting it to be part of his character, he sometimes allowed himself to charm even people of whom he disapproved. These things were indeterminately present to her, and led her often to speculate as to how it was that Mr. Cardiff's work expressed him so little. It seemed to her that the one purpose of a personality like his was its expression—otherwise one might as well be of the ruck. "You write with your intellectual faculties," she said to him once; "your soul is curiously dumb." But that was later.

The plane of Elfrida's relations with Janet altered gradually, one might say, from the inclined, with Elfrida on her knees at the lower end, to the horizontal. It changed insensibly enough, through the freemasonry of confessed and unconfessed ideals, through growing attraction, through the feeling they shared, though only Janet voiced it, that there was nothing but the opportunities and the experience of four years between them, that in the end Elfrida would do better, stronger, more original work than she. Elfrida was so much more original a person, Janet declared to herself, so—and when she hesitated for this word she usually said "enigmatical." The answer to the enigma, Janet was sure, would be written large in publishers' advertisements one day. In the meantime, it was a vast satisfaction to Janet to be, as it were, behind the enigma, to consider it with the privileges of intimacy. These young women felt their friendship deeply, in their several ways. It held for them all sacredness and honor and obligation. For Elfrida it had an intrinsic beauty and interest, like a curio —she had half a dozen such curios in the museum of her friends—and for Janet it added something to existence that was not there before, more delightful and important than a mere opportunity of expansion. The time came speedily when it would have been a positive pain to either of them to hear the other discussed, however favorably.



CHAPTER XVI.

Lady Halifax and her daughter had met Miss Bell several times at the Cardiffs', in a casual way, before it occurred to either of them to take any sort of advantage of the acquaintance. The younger lady had a shivering and frightened delight in occasionally wading ankle-deep in unconventionality, but she had-lively recollections, in connection with the Cardiffs, of having been very nearly taken off her feet. They had since decided that it was more discreet to ignore Janet's enthusiasms, which were sometimes quite impossible in their verdict, and always improbable. The literary ladies and gentlemen whom the ghost of the departed Sir William brought more or less unwillingly to Lady Halifax's drawing-rooms were all of unexceptionable cachet; the Halifaxes were constantly seeing paragraphs about them in the "Literary Gossip" department of the Athenian, mentioning their state of health, their retirement from scientific appointments, or the fact that their most recent work of fiction had reached its fourth edition. Lady Halifax always read the Athenian, even the publishers' announcements; she liked to keep "in touch," she said, with the literary activities of the day, and it gave her a special gratification to notice the prosperity of her writing friends indicated in tall figures. Miss Halifax read it too, but she liked the "Art Notes" best; it was a matter of complaint with her that the house was not more open to artists—new, original artists like John Kendal. In answer to this Lady Halifax had a habit of stating that she did not see what more they could possibly want than the president of the Royal Academy and the one or two others that came already. As for John Kendal, he was certainly new and original, but he was respectable notwithstanding; they could be certain that he was not putting his originality on—with a hearth-brush, for the sake of advertisement. Lady Halifax was not so sure of Elfrida's originality, of which she had been given a glimpse or two at first, and which the girl's intimacy with the Cardiffs would have presupposed in any case. But presently, and somewhat to Lady Halifax's perplexity, Miss Bell's originality disappeared. It seemed to melt into the azure of perfect good-breeding, flecked by little clouds of gay sayings and politenesses, whenever chance brought her under Lady Halifax's observation. A not unreasonable solution of the problem might have been found in Elfrida's instinctive objection to casting her pearls where they are proverbially unappreciated, and the necessity in her nature of pleasing herself by one form of agreeable behavior if not by another. Lady Halifax, however, ascribed it to the improving influence of insular institutions, and finally concluded that it ought to be followed up.

Elfrida wore amber and white the evening on which Lady Halifax followed it up—a Parisian modification of a design carried, out originally by the Sparta dressmaker, with a degree of hysteria, under Miss Bell's direction. She wore it with a touch of unusual color in her cheeks and, an added light in her dark eyes that gave a winsomeness to her beauty which it had not always. A cunningly bound spray of yellow-stamened lilies followed the curving line of her low-necked dress, ending in a cluster in her bosom; the glossy little leaves of the smilax the florist had wreathed in with them stood sharply against the whiteness of her neck. Her hair was massed at the back of her head simply and girlishly enough, and its fluffiness about her forehead made a sweet shadow above her eyes. She had a little fever of expectation, Janet had talked so much about this reception. Janet had told her that the real thing, the real English literary thing in numberless volumes, would be on view at Lady Halifax's. Miss Cardiff had mentioned this in their discussion of the Arcadia Club, at which institution she had scoffed so unbearably that Elfrida, while she cherished the memory of Georgiadi, had not mentioned it since. Perhaps, after all, she reflected, Janet was just a trifle blind where people were not hall-marked. It did not occur to her to consider how far she herself illustrated this theory.

But as she went down Mrs. Jordan's narrow flights of stairs covered with worn oil-cloth, she kissed her own soft arm for pure pleasure.

"You are ravishing to-night," she told herself.

Golightly Ticke's door was open, and he was standing in it, picturesquely smoking a cigarette with the candle burning behind him—"Just to see you pass," he said.

Elfrida paused and threw back her cloak. "How is it?" she asked, posing for him with its folds gathered in either hand.

Ticke scanned her with leisurely appreciation. "It is exquisite," he articulated.

Elfrida gave him a look that might have intoxicated nerves less accustomed to dramatic effects.

"Then whistle me a cab," she said.

Mr. Ticke whistled her a cab and put her into it. There was the least pressure of his long fingers as he took her hand, and Elfrida forbade herself to resent it. She felt her own beauty so much that night that she could not complain of an enthusiasm for it in such a belle ame as Golightly.

They went up to tie drawing-room together, if Elfrida and the Cardiffs, and Lady Halifax immediately introduced to Miss Bell a hollow-cheeked gentleman with a long gray beard and bushy eyebrows as a fellow-countryman. "You can compare your impressions of Hyde Park and St. Paul's," said Lady Halifax, "but don't call us 'Britishers.' It really isn't pretty of you."

Elfrida discovered that the bearded gentleman was principal of a college in Florida, and corresponded regularly at one time with the late Sir William. "It is to that," said he ornately, "that I owe the honor of joining this brilliant company to-night." He went on to state that he was over there principally on account of his health—acute dyspepsia he had, it seemed he'd got out of running order generally, regularly off the track. "But I've just about concluded," he continued, with a pathetic twinkle under his bushy brows, "that I might have a worse reason for going back. What do you think of the meals in Victoria's country, Miss Bell? It seems to me sometimes that I'd give the whole British Museum for a piece of Johnny-cake."

Elfrida reflected that this was not precisely what she expected to experience, and presently the hollow-cheeked Floridian was again at Lady Halifax's elbow for disposal, while the young lady whose appearance and nationality had given him so much room for hope smilingly drifted away from him. The Cardiffs were talking to a rosy and smooth-faced round-waistcoated gentleman just returned from Siberia about the unfortunate combination of accidents by which he lost the mail-train twice in three days, and Janet had just shaken hands with a short and cheerful-looking lady astrologist.

"Behind that large person in the heliotrope brocade—she's the wife of the Daily Mercury—there's a small sofa," Janet said in an undertone. "I don't think she'll, occupy it, the-brocade looks so much, better standing—no, there she goes! Let us sit down." As they crossed the room Janet added: "In another minute we should have been shut up in a Russian prison. Daddy's incarcerated already. And the man told all he knew about them in the public prints a month ago." They sat down luxuriously together, and made ready, in their palm-shaded corner, to wreak the whole of their irresponsible youth upon Lady Halifax's often venerable and always considerable guests. The warm atmosphere of the room had the perceptible charge of personalities. People in almost every part of it were trying to look unconscious as they pointed out other people.

"Tell me about everybody—everybody," said Elfrida.

"H'm! I don't see anybody, that is anybody, at this moment. Oh, there's Sir Bradford Barker. Regard him well, for a brave soul is Sir Bradford, Frida mine."

"A soldier? At this end of the century one can't feel an enthusiasm for killing."

"Not in the least. A member of Parliament who writes verses and won't be intimidated by Punch into not publishing them. And the man he is talking to has just done a history of the Semitic nations. He took me down to dinner last night, and we talked in the most intelligent manner about the various ways of preparing crabs. He liked them in five styles; I wouldn't subscribe to more than three. That little man with the orchid that daddy has just seized is the author of the last of the 'Rulers of India' series—Sir Somebody Something, K.C.S.I. My unconscionable humbug of a parent probably wants to get something approaching a fact out of him. Daddy's writing a thing for one of the reviews on the elective principle for India this week. He says he's the only writer on Indian subjects who isn't disqualified by ever having been there, and is consequently quite free of prejudice."

"Ah!" said Elfrida, "how banal! I thought you said there would be something real here—somebody in whose garment's hem there would be virtue."

"And I suggest the dress-coat of the historian of the Semitic nations!" Janet laughed. "Well, if nearly all our poets are dead and our novelists in the colonies, I can't help it, can I! Here is Mr. Kendal, at all events."

Kendal came up, with his perfect manners, and immediately it seemed to Elfrida that their little group became distinct from the rest, more important, more worthy of observation. Kendal never added anything to the unities of their conversation when he joined these two; he seemed rather to break up what they had to say to each other and attract it to himself. He always gave an accent to the life and energy of their talk; but he made them both self-conscious and watchful—seemed to put them, as it were, upon their guard against one another, in a way which Janet found vaguely distressing. It was invariably as if Kendal turned their intercourse into a joust by his mere presence as spectator; as if—Janet put it plainly to herself, reddening—they mutely asked him to bestow the wreath on one of them. She almost made up her mind to ask Elfrida where their understanding went to when John Kendal came up, but she had not found it possible yet. There was an embarrassing chance that Elfrida did not feel their change of attitude, which would entail nameless surmises.

"You ought to be at work," Janet said severely to Kendal, "back at Barbizon or in the fields somewhere. It won't be always June."

"Ah, would you banish him!" Elfrida exclaimed daintily. "Surely Hyde Park is rustic enough—in June."

Kendal smiled into her face. "It combines all the charm of the country," he began.

"And the chic of the town," Elfrida finished for him gaily. "I know—I've seen the Boot Show."

"Extremely frivolous," Janet commented.

"Ah, now we are condemned!" Elfrida answered, and for an instant it almost seemed as if it were so.

"Daddy wants you to go and paint straggling gray stone villages in Scotland now—straggling, climbing gray stone villages with only a bit of blue at the end of the 'Dead Wynd' where it turns into the churchyard gate."

"How charming!" Elfrida exclaimed.

"I suppose he has been saturating himself with Barrie," Kendal said. "If I could reproduce Barrie on canvas, I'd go, like a shot. By the way, Miss Bell, there's somebody you are, interested in—do you see a middle-aged man, rather bald, thick-set, coming this way?—George Jasper."

"Really!" Elfrida exclaimed, jumping to her feet "Oh, thank you! The most consummate artist in human nature that the time has given!" she added, with intensity. "There can be no question. Oh, I am so happy to have seen him!"

"I'm not altogether sure," Kendal began, and then he stopped, looking at Janet in astonished question. Elfrida had taken half a dozen steps into the middle of the room, steps so instinct with effect that already as many heads were turned to look at her. Her eyes were large with excitement, her cheeks flushed, and she bent her head a little, almost as if to see nothing that might dissuade her from her purpose. The author of "The Alien," "A Moral Catastrophe," "Her Disciple," and a number of other volumes which cause envy and heart-burnings among publishers, in the course of his somewhat short-sighted progress across the room, paused with a confused effort to remember who this pretty girl might be who wanted to speak to him.

Elfrida said, "Pardon me!" and Mr. Jasper instantly perceived that there could be no question of that, with her face. She was holding out her hand, and he took it with absolute mystification. Elfrida had turned very pale, and a dozen people were listening. "Give me the right to say I have done this!" she said, looking at him with shy bravery in her beautiful eyes. She half sank on one knee and lifted the hand that wrote "A Moral Catastrophe" to her lips.

Mr. Jasper repossessed himself of it rather too hastily for dignity, and inwardly he expressed his, feelings by a puzzled oath. Outwardly he looked somewhat ashamed of having inspired this unknown young lady's enthusiasm, but he did his confused best, on the spur of the moment, to carry off the situation as one of the contingencies 'to which the semi-public life of a popular novelist is always subject.

"Really, you are—much too good. I can't imagine—if the case had been reversed—"

Mr. Jasper found himself, accustomed as he was to the exigencies of London drawing-rooms, horribly in want of words. And in the bow with which he further defined his discomfort he added to it by dropping the bit of stephanotis which he wore in his buttonhole.

Elfrida sprang to pick it up. "Oh," she cried, "broken at the stem; see, you cannot wear it anymore. May I keep it?"

A deadly silence had been widening around them, and now the daughter of the historian of the Semitic races broke it by twittering into a laugh behind her fan. Janet met Kendal's eyes instinctively; he was burning red, and his manner was eloquent of his helplessness. Angry with herself for having waited, so long, Janet joined Elfrida just as the twitter made itself heard, and Mr. Jasper's face began to stiffen with indignation.

"Ah, Miss Cardiff," he said with relief, "how do you do! The rooms are rather warm, don't you think?"

"I want to introduce you to my Am—my very great friend, Miss Bell, Mr. Jasper," Janet said quickly, as the buzz of conversation began again about them.

Elfrida turned to her reproachfully. "If I had known it was at all possible that you would do that," she said, "I might have—waited. But I did not know."

People were still looking at them with curious attentiveness; they were awkwardly solitary. Kendal in his corner was asking himself how she could have struck such a false note—and of all people Jasper, whose polished work held no trace of his personality, whose pleasure it was to have no public entity whatever. As Jasper moved off almost immediately, Kendal saw his tacit discomfort in the set of his shoulders, and so sure was he of Elfrida's embarrassment that he himself slipped away to avoid adding to it.

"It was all wrong and ridiculous, and she was mad to do it," thought Janet as she drove home with her father; "but why need John Kendal have blushed for her?"



CHAPTER XVII.

"I am sure you are enjoying it," said Elfrida.

"Yes," Miss Kimpsey returned. "It's a great treat—it's a very great treat. Everything surpasses my expectations, everything is older and blacker and more interesting than I looked for. And I must say we're getting over a great deal in the time. Yesterday afternoon we did the entire Tower. It did give one an idea. But of course you know every stone in it by now!"

"I'm afraid I've not seen it," Elfrida confessed gravely. "I know it's shocking of me."

"You haven't visited the Tower! Doesn't that show how benumbing opportunity is to the energies! Now I dare say that I," Miss Kimpsey went on with gratification, "coming over with a party of tourists from our State, all bound to get London and the cathedral towns and the lakes and Scotland and Paris and Switzerland into the summer vacation—I presume I may have seen more of the London sights than you have, Miss Bell." As Miss Kimpsey spoke she realized that she had had no intention of calling Elfrida "Miss Bell" when she saw her again, and wondered why she did it. "But you ought to be fond of sight-seeing, too," she added, "with your artistic nature."

Elfrida seemed to restrain a smile. "I don't know that I am," she said. "I'm sorry that you didn't leave my mother so well as she ought to be. She hasn't mentioned it in her letters." In the course of time Miss Bell's correspondence with her parents had duly re-established itself.

"She wouldn't, Elf—Miss Bell. She was afraid of suggesting the obligation to come home to you. She said with your artistic conscience you couldn't come, and it would only be inflicting unnecessary pain upon you. But her bronchitis was no light matter last February. She was real sick."

"My mother is always so considerate," Elfrida answered, reddening, with composed lips. "She is better now, I think you said."

"Oh yes, she's some better. I heard from her last week, and she says she doesn't know how to wait to see me back. That's on your account, of course. Well, I can tell her you appear comfortable," Miss Kimpsey looked around, "if I can't tell her exactly when you'll be home."

"That is so doubtful, just now—"

"They're introducing drawing from casts in the High School," Miss Kimpsey went on, with a note of urgency in her little twanging voice, "and Mrs. Bell told me I might just mention it to you. She thinks you could easily get taken on to teach it. I just dropped round to one or two of the principal trustees the day before I left, and they said you had only to apply. It's seven hundred dollars a year."

Elfrida's eyebrows contracted. "Thanks very much! It was extremely kind—to go to so much trouble. But I have decided that I am not meant to be an artist, Miss Kimpsey," she said with a self-contained smile. "I think my mother knows that. I—I don't much like talking about it. Do you find London confusing? I was dreadfully puzzled at first."

"I would if I were alone. I'd engage a special policeman—the policemen are polite, aren't they? But we keep the party together, you see, to economize time, so none of us get lost. We all went down Cheapside this morning and bought umbrellas—two and three apiece. This is the most reasonable place for umbrellas. But isn't it ridiculous to pay for apples by the pound? And then they're not worth eating. This room does smell of tobacco. I suppose the gentleman in the apartment below smokes a great deal."

"I think he does. I'm so sorry. Let me open another window."

"Oh, don't mind me! I don't object to tobacco, except on board, ship. But it must be bad to sleep in."

"Perhaps," said Elfrida sweetly. "And have you no more news from home for me, Miss Kimpsey?"

"I don't know as I have. You've heard of the Rev. Mr. Snider's second marriage to Mrs. Abraham Peeley, of course. There's a great deal of feeling about it in Sparta—the first Mrs. Snider was so popular, you know —and it isn't a full year. People say it isn't the marriage they object to under such circumstances, it's—all that goes before," said Miss Kimpsey, with decorous repression, and Elfrida burst into a peal of laughter. "Really," she sobbed, "it's too delicious. Poor Mr. and Mrs. Snider! Do you think people woo with improper warmth—at that age, Miss Kimpsey?"

"I don't know anything about it," Miss Kimpsey declared, with literal truth. "I suppose such things justify themselves somehow, especially when it's a clergyman. And of course you know about your mother's idea of coming over here to settle?"

"No!" said Elfrida, arrested. "She hasn't mentioned it. Do they talk of it seriously?"

"I don't know about seriously. Mr. Bell doesn't seem as if he could make up his mind. He's so fond of Sparta you know. But Mrs. Bell is just wild to come. She thinks, of course, of having you to live with them again; and then she says that on their present income—you will excuse my referring to your parents' reduced circumstances, Miss Bell?"

"Please go on."

"Your mother considers that Mr. Bell's means would go further in England than in America. She asked me to make inquiries; and I must say, judging from the price of umbrellas and woollen goods, I think they would."

Elfrida was silent for a moment, looking steadfastly at the possibility Miss Kimpsey had developed. "What a complication!" she said, half to herself; and then, observing Miss Kimpsey's look of astonishment: "I had no idea of that," she repeated; "I wonder that they have not mentioned it."

"Well then!" said Miss Kimpsey, with sudden compunction, "I presume they wanted to surprise you. And I've gone and spoiled it!"

"To surprise me!" Elfrida repeated in her absorption. "Oh yes; very likely!" Inwardly she saw her garret, the garret that so exhaled her, where she had tasted success and knew a happiness that never altogether failed, vanish into a snug cottage in Hampstead or Surbiton. She saw the rain of her independence, of her delicious solitariness, of the life that began and ended in her sense of the strange, and the beautiful and the grotesque in a world of curious slaveries, of which it suited her to be an alien spectator, amused and free. She foresaw long conflicts and discussions, pryings which she could, not resent, justifications which would be forced upon her, obligations which she must not refuse. More intolerable still, she saw herself in the role of a family idol, the household happiness hinging on her moods, the question of her health, her work, her pleasure being eternally the chief one. Miss Kimpsey talked on about other things —Windsor Castle, the Abbey, the Queen's stables; and Elfrida made occasional replies, politely vague. She was mechanically twisting the little gold hoop on her wrist, and thinking of the artistic sufferings of a family idol. Obviously the only thing was to destroy the prospective shrine.

"We don't find board as cheap as we expected," Miss Kimpsey was saying.

"Living, that is food, is very expensive," Elfrida replied quickly; "a good beefsteak, for instance, costs three Francs—I mean two and fivepence, a pound."

"I can't think in shillings!" Miss Kimpsey interposed plaintively.

"And about this idea my people have of coming over here—I've been living in London four months now, and I can't quite see your grounds for thinking it cheaper than Sparta, Miss Kimpsey."

"Of course you have had time to judge of it."

"Yes. On the whole I think they would find it more expensive and much less satisfactory. They would miss their friends, and their place in the little world over there. My mother, I know, attaches a good deal of importance to that. They would have to live very modestly in a suburb, and all the nice suburbs have their social relations in town. They wouldn't take the slightest interest in English institutions; my father is too good a citizen to make a good subject, and they would find a great many English ideas very—trying. The only Americans who are happy in England are the millionaires," Elfrida answered. "I mean the millionaires who are not too sensitive."

"Well now, you've got as sensitive a nature as I know, Miss Bell, and you don't appear to be miserable over here."

"I!" Elfrida frowned just perceptibly. This little creature who once corrected the punctuation of her essays, and gave her bad marks for spelling, was too intolerably personal. "We won't consider my case, if you please. Perhaps I'm not a good American."

"Mrs. Bell seems to think she would enjoy the atmosphere of the past so much in London."

"It's a fatal atmosphere for asthma. Please impress that upon my people, Miss Kimpsey. There would be no justification in letting my mother believe she could be comfortable here. She must come and experience the, atmosphere of the past, as you are doing, on a visit. As soon as it can be afforded I hope they will do that."

Since the day of her engagement with the Illustrated Age Elfrida had been writing long, affectionate, and prettily worded letters to her mother by every American mail. They were models of sweet elegance, those letters; they abounded in dainty bits of description and gay comment, and they reflected as little of the real life of the girl who wrote them as it is possible to conceive. In this way they were quite remarkable, and in their charming discrimination of topics. It was as if Elfrida dictated that a certain relation should exist between herself and her parents. It should acknowledge all the traditions, but it should not be too intimate. They had no such claim upon her, no such closeness to her, as Nadie Palicsky, for instance, had.

When Miss Kimpsey went away that afternoon, trying to realize the intrinsic reward of virtue—she had been obliged to give up the National Gallery to make this visit—Elfrida remembered that the American mail went out next day, and spent a longer time than usual over her weekly letter. In its course she mentioned with some amusement the absurd idea Miss Kimpsey had managed to absorb of their coming to London to live, and touched in the lightest possible way upon the considerations that made such a project impossible. But the greater part of the letter was taken up with a pleased forecast of the time—could it possibly be next summer?—when Mr. and Mrs. Bell would cross the Atlantic on a holiday trip. "I will be quite an affluent person by then," Elfrida wrote, "and I will be able to devote the whole of my magnificent leisure to entertaining you."

She turned from the sealing of this to answer a, note from Lawrence Cardiff. He wrote to her, on odds and ends of matters, almost as often as Janet did now. He wrote as often, indeed, as he could, and always with an amused, uncertain expectancy of what the consciously directed little square envelopes which brought back the reply would contain. It was becoming obvious to him that they brought something a little different, in expression or feeling or suggestion, from the notes that came for Janet, which Janet often read out for their common benefit. He was unable to define the difference, but he was aware that it gave him pleasure, especially as he could not find that it was in any way connected with the respectful consideration that Elfrida might have thought due to his forty-seven years. If Mr. Cardiff had gone so far as to soliloquize upon the subject he would have said to himself, "In my trade a man gets too much of that." I do not know that he did, but the subtle gratification this difference gave him was quite strong enough, at all events, to lead to the reflection. The perception of it was growing so vivid that he instinctively read his notes in silence, paraphrasing them for Janet if she happened to be there. They had, as it were, a bloom and a freshness, a mere perfume of personality that would infallibly vanish in the communicating, but that left him, as often as not, when he slipped the note back into the envelope with a half smile on his lips.

Janet was conscious of the smile and of the paraphrasing. In reprisal—though she would not have admitted it was that—she kept her own missives from Elfrida to herself whenever it occurred to her to check the generous impulse of sharing the pleasure they gave her, which was not often, after all. It was the seldomer because she could not help feeling that her father was thoroughly aware of her action, and fancying that he speculated upon the reason of it. It was unendurable that daddy should speculate about the reason of anything she did in connection with Frida, or with any other young lady. Her conduct was perfectly simple; there was no reason whatever why it should not be perfectly simple.

When Miss Kimpsey arrived at Euston Station next day, with all her company, to take the train For Scotland; she found Elfrida waiting for her, a picturesque figure in the hurrying crowd with her hair blown about her face with the gusts of wind and rain, and her wide dark eyes looking quietly about her. She had a bunch of azaleas in her hand, and as Miss Kimpsey was saying with gratification that Elfrida's coming down to see her off was a thing she did not expect, Miss Bell offered her these.

"They will be pleasant in the train perhaps," said she. "And do you think you could find room for this in one of your boxes? It isn't very bulky—a trifle I should like so much to send to my mother, Miss Kimpsey. It might go by post, I know, but the pleasure will be much greater to her if you could take it."

In due course Mrs. Bell received the packet. It contained a delicate lace head-dress, which cost Elfrida the full pay and emoluments of a fortnight. Mrs. Bell wore it at all social gatherings of any importance in Sparta the following winter, and often reflected with considerable pleasure upon the taste and unselfishness that so obviously accompanied the gift.



CHAPTER XVIII.

If John Kendal had been an on-looker at the little episode of Lady Halifax's drawing-room in Paris six months earlier it would have filled him with the purest, amusement. He would have added the circumstance to his conception of the type of young woman who enacted it, and turned away without stopping to consider whether it flattered her or not. His comprehension of human nature was too catholic very readily to permit him impressions either of wonder or contempt—it would have been a matter of registration and a smile. Realizing this, Kendal was the more at a loss to explain to himself the feeling of irritation which the recollection of the scene persistently aroused in him, in spite of a pronounced disposition, of which he could not help being aware, not to register it but to ignore it. His memory refused to be a party to his intention, and the tableau recurred to him with a persistence which he found distinctly disagreeable. Upon every social occasion which brought young ladies of beauty and middle-aged gentlemen of impressive eminence into conversational contact he saw the thing in imagination done again. In the end it suggested itself to him as paintable—the astonished drawing-room, the graceful half-kneeling girl with the bent head, the other dismayed and uncomprehending figure yielding a doubtful hand, his discomfort indicated in the very lines of his waistcoat. "A Fin de Siecle Tribute," Kendal named it. He dismissed the idea as absurd, and then reconsidered it as a means of disposing of the incident finally. He knew it could be very effectually put away in canvas. He assured himself again that he could not entertain the idea of painting it seriously, and that this was because of the inevitable tendency which the subject would have toward caricature. Kendal had an indignant contempt for such a tendency, and the liberty which men who used it took with their art. He had never descended to the flouting of his own aims which it implied. He threw himself into his pictures without reserve; it was the best of him that he painted, the strongest he could do, and all he could do; he was sincere enough to take it always seriously. The possibility of caricature seemed to him to account admirably for his reluctance to paint "A Fin de Siecle Tribute,"—it was a matter of conscience. He found that the desire to paint it would not go, however; it took daily more complete possession of him, and fought his scruples with a strong hand. It was a fortnight after, and he had not seen Elfrida in the meantime, when they were finally defeated by the argument that a sketch would show whether caricature were necessarily inherent or not. He would make a sketch purely for his own satisfaction. Under the circumstances Kendal realized perfectly that it could never be for exhibition, and indeed he felt a singular shrinking from the idea that any one should see it. Finally, he gave a whole day to the thing, and made an admirable sketch.

After that Kendal felt free to make the most of his opportunities of seeing Elfrida—his irritation with her subsided, her blunder had been settled to his satisfaction. He had an obscure idea of having inflicted discipline upon her in giving the incident form and color upon canvas, in arresting its grotesqueness and sounding its true motif with a pictorial tongue. It was his conception of the girl that he punished, and he let his fascinated speculation go out to her afterward at a redoubled rate. She brought him sometimes to the verge of approval, to the edge of liking; arid when he found that he could not take the further step he told himself impatiently that it was not a case for anything so ordinary as approval, or anything so personal as liking; it was a matter of observation, enjoyment, stimulus. He availed himself of these abstractions with a candor that was the more open for not being complicated with any less hardy motive. He had long ago decided that relations of sentiment with Elfrida would require a temperament quite different from that of any man he knew. It was entirely otherwise with Janet Cardiff, and Kendal smiled as he thought of the feminine variation the two girls illustrated. He had a distinct recollection of one crisp October afternoon before he went to Paris, as they walked home together under the brown curling leaves and passed the Serpentine, when he had found that the old charm of Janet's gray eyes was changing to a new one. He remembered the pleasure he had felt in dallying with the thought of making them lustrous, one day, with tenderness for himself. It had paled since then, there had been so many other things; but still they were dear, honest eyes—and Kendal never brought his reverie to a conclusion under any circumstances whatever.



CHAPTER XIX.

I have mentioned that Miss Bell had looked considerations of sentiment very full in the face at an age when she might have been expected to be blushing and quivering before them, with downcast countenance. She had arrived at conclusions about them—conclusions of philosophic contumely, indifference, and some contempt. She had since frequently talked about them to Janet Cardiff with curious disregard of time, and circumstance, mentioning her opinion in a Strand omnibus, for instance, that the only dignity attaching to love as between a man and a woman was that of an artistic idea. Janet had found Elfrida possessed of so savage a literalism in this regard that it was only in the most hardily adventurous of the moods of investigation her friend inspired that she cared to combat her here. It was not, Janet told herself, that she was afraid to face the truth in any degree of nakedness; but she rose in hot inward rebellion against Elfrida's borrowed psychological cynicisms—they were not the truth, Tolstoi had not all the facts, perhaps from pure Muscovite inability to comprehend them all The spirituality of love might be a western product—she was half inclined to think it was; but at all events it existed, and it was wanton to leave out of consideration a thing that made all the difference. Moreover, if these things ought to be probed—and Janet was not of serious opinion that they ought to be—for her part she preferred to obtain advices thereon from between admissible and respectable book-covers. It hurt her to hear them drop from Elfrida's lips—lips so plainly meant for all tenderness. Janet had an instinct of helpless anger when she heard them; the woman in her rose in protest, less on behalf of her sex than on behalf of Elfrida herself, who seemed so blind, so willing to revile, so anxious to reject. "Do you really hope you will marry?" Elfrida had asked her once; and Janet had answered candidly, "Of course I do, and I want to die a grandmother too." "Vraiment!" exclaimed Miss Bell ironically, with a little shudder of disgust, "I hope you may!"

That was in the very beginning of their friendship, however, and so vital a subject could not remain, outside the relations which established themselves more and more intimately between them as the days went on. Janet began to find herself constantly in the presence of a temptation to bring the matter home to Elfrida personally in one way or another, as young women commonly do with other young women who are obstinately unorthodox in these things—to say to her in effect, "Your turn will come when he comes! These pseudo-philosophies will vanish when he looks at them, like snow in spring. You will succumb—you will succumb!" But she never did. Something in Elfrida's attitude forbade it. Her opinions were not vagaries, and she held them, so far as they had a personal application, haughtily. Janet felt and disliked the tacit limitation, and preferred to avoid the clash of their opinions when she could. Besides, her own ideas upon the subject had latterly retired irretrievably from the light of discussion. She had one day found it necessary to lock the door of her soul upon them; in the new knowledge that had taken sweet possession of her she recognized that they were no longer theoretical, that they must be put away. She challenged herself to sit in a jury upon Love, and found herself disqualified.

The discovery had no remarkable effect upon Janet. She sometimes wasted an hour, pen in hand, in inconsequent reverie, and worked till midnight to make up; and she took a great liking for impersonal conversations with Miss Halifax about Kendal's pictures, methods and meanings. She found dining in Royal Geographical circles less of a bore than usual, and deliberately laid herself out to talk well. She looked in the glass sometimes at a little vertical line that seemed to be coming at the corners of her mouth, and wondered whether at twenty-four one might expect the first indication of approaching old-maidenhood. When she was paler than usual she reflected that the season was taking a good deal out of her. She was bravely and rigidly commonplace with Kendal, who told her that she ought to drop it and go out of town—she was not looking well. She drew closer to her father, and at the same time armed her secret against him at all points. Janet would have had any one know rather than he. She felt that it implied almost a breach of faith, of comradeship, to say nothing of the complication of her dignity, which she wanted upheld in his eyes before all others. In reality she made him more the sovereign of her affections and the censor of her relations than nature designed Lawrence Cardiff to be in the parental connection. It gave him great pleasure that he could make his daughter a friend, and accord her the independence of a friend; it was a satisfaction to him that she was not obtrusively filial. Her feeling for Kendal, under the circumstances, would have hurt him if he bad known of it, but only through his sympathy and his affection—he was unacquainted with the jealousy of a father. But in Janet's eyes they made their little world together, indispensable to each other as its imaginary hemispheres. She had a quiet pain, in the infrequent moments when she allowed herself the full realization of her love for Kendal, in the knowledge that she, of her own motion, had disturbed its unities and its ascendancies.

Since that evening at Lady Halifax's, when Janet saw John Kendal reddening so unaccountably, she had felt singularly more tolerant of Elfrida's theories. She combated them as vigorously as ever, but she lost her dislike to discussing them. As it became more and more obvious that Kendal found in Elfrida a reward for the considerable amount of time he spent in her society, so Janet arrived at the point of encouraging her heresies, especially with their personal application. She took secret comfort in them; she hoped they would not change, and she was too honest to disguise to herself the reason. If Elfrida cared for him, Janet assured herself, the case would be entirely different—she would stamp out her own feeling without mercy, to the tiniest spark. She would be glad, in time, to have crushed it for Elfrida, though it did seem that it would be more easily done for a stranger, somebody she wouldn't have to know afterward. But if Elfrida didn't care, as a matter of principle Janet was unable to see the least harm in making her say so as often as possible. They were talking together in Mr. Cardiff's library late one June afternoon, when it seemed to Janet that the crisis came, that she could never again speak of such matters to Elfrida without betraying herself. Things were growing dim about the room, the trees stood in dusky groups in the square outside. There was the white glimmer of the tea-things between them, and just light enough to define the shadows round the other girl's face, and write upon it the difference it bore, in Janet's eyes, to every other face.

"Oh!" Elfrida was saying, "it does make life more interesting, I admit—up to a certain point. And I suppose it's to be condoned from the point of view of the species. Whoever started us, and wants us to go on, excuses marriage, I suppose. And of course the men are not affected by it. But for women, it is degrading —horrible. Especially for women like you and me, to whom life may mean something else. Fancy being the author of babies when one could be the author of books! Don't tell me you'd rather!"

"I!" said Janet "Oh, I'm out of it. But I approve the principle."

"Besides, the commonplaceness, the eternal routine, the being tied together, the—the domestic virtues! It must be death, absolute death, to any fineness of nature. No," Elfrida went on decisively, "people with anything in them that is worth saving may love as much as they feel disposed, but they ought to keep their freedom. And some of them do nowadays."

"Do you mean," said Janet slowly, "that they dispense with the ceremony?"

"They dispense with the condition. They—they don't go so far."

"I thought you didn't believe in Platonics," Janet answered, with wilful misunderstanding.

"You know I don't believe in them. Any more," Elfrida added lightly, "than I believe in this exaltation you impute to the race of a passion it shares with—with the mollusks. It's pure self-flattery."

There was a moment's silence. Elfrida clasped her hands behind her head and turned her face toward the window so that all the light that came through softly gathered in it. Janet felt the girl's beauty as if it were a burden, pressing with literal physical weight upon her heart She made a futile effort to lift it with words. "Frida," she said, "you are beautiful to—to hurt to-night Why has nobody ever painted a creature like you?"

It was as if she touched an inner spring of the girl's nature, touched it electrically. Elfrida leaned forward consciously with shining eyes. "Truly am I, Janetta? Ah—to-night! Well, yes, perhaps to-night, I am. It is an effect of chiaroscuro. But what about always—what about generally, Janetta? I have such horrid doubts. If it weren't for my nose I should be satisfied—yes, I think I should be satisfied. But I can't deceive myself about my nose, Janetta; it's thick!"

"It isn't a particularly spiritually-minded nose," Janet laughed. "But console yourself, it's thoughtful."

Elfrida put her elbows on her knees and framed her face with the palms of her hands. "If I am beautiful to-night you ought to love me. Do you love me, Janetta? Really love me? Could you imagine," she went on, with a whimsical spoiled shake of her head, "any one else doing it?"

Janet's fingers closed tightly on the arm of her chair. Was it coming already, then?

"Yes," she said slowly, "I could imagine it well."

"More than one?" Elfrida insisted prettily. "More than two or three? A dozen, perhaps?"

"Quite a dozen," Janet smiled. "Is that to be the limit of your heartless proceedings?"

"I don't know how soon one would grow tired of it. Maybe in three or four years. But for now—it is very amusing."

"Playing with fire?"

"Bah!" Elfrida returned, going back to her other mood. "I'm not inflammable. But-to that extent, if you like, I value what you and the poets are pleased to call love. It's part of the game; one might as well play it all. It's splendid to win—anything. It's a kind of success."

"Oh, I know," she went on after an instant. "I have done it before—I shall do it again, often! It is worth doing—to sit within three feet of a human being who would give all he possesses just to touch your hand—and to tacitly dare him to do it."

"Stop, Elfrida!"

"Shan't stop, my dear. Not only to be able to check any such demonstration yourself, with a movement, a glance, a turn of your head, but without even a sign, to make your would-be adorer check it himself! And to feel as still and calm and superior to it all! Is that nothing to you?"

"It's less than nothing. It's hideous!"

"I consider it a compensation vested in the few for the wrongs of the many," Elfrida replied gaily. "And I mean to store up all the compensation in my proper person that I can."

"I believe you have had more than your share already," Janet cried.

"Oh no! a little, only a little. Hardly anything here—people fall in love in England in such a mathematical way. But there is a callow artist on the Age, and Golightly Ticke has become quite mad lately, and Solomon —I mean Mr. Rattray—will propose next week—he thinks I won't dare to refuse the sub-editor. How I shall laugh at him! Afterward, if he gives me any trouble, I shall threaten to write up the interview for the Pictorial News. On the whole though, I dare say I'd better not suggest such a thing; he would want it for the Age. He is equal to any personal sacrifice for the Age."

"Is, that all?" asked Janet, turning away her head.

"You are thinking of John Kendal! Ah, there it becomes exciting. From what you see, Janetta mia, what should you think? Myself, I don't quite know. Don't you find him rather—a good deal—interested?"

Janet had an impulse of thankfulness for the growing darkness. "I—I see him so seldom!" she said. Oh, it was the last time, the very last time that she would ever let Elfrida talk like this.

"Well, I think so," Elfrida went on coolly. "He fancies he finds me curious, original, a type—just now. I dare say he thinks he takes an anthropological pleasure in my society! But in the beginning it is all the same thing, my dear, and in the end it will be all the same thing. This delicious Loti," and she picked up "Aziade"—"what an anthropologist he is—with a feminine bias!"

Janet was tongue-tied. She struggled with herself for an instant, and then, "I wish you'd stay and dine," she said desperately.

"How thoughtless of me!" Elfrida replied, jumping up. "You ought to be dressing, dear. No, I can't; I've got to sup with some ladies of the Alhambra to-night—it will make such lovely copy. But I'll go now, this very instant."

Half-way downstairs Janet, in a passion of helpless tears, heard Elfrida's footsteps pause and turn. She stepped swiftly into her own room and locked the door. The footsteps came tripping back into, the library, and then a tap sounded on Janet's door. Outside Elfrida's voice said plaintively, "I had to come back. Do you love me—are you quite sure you love me?"

"You humbug!" Janet called from within, steadying heir voice with an effort, "I'm not at all sure. I'll tell you to-morrow!"

"But you do!" cried Elfrida, departing. "I know you do."



CHAPTER XX.

July thickened down upon London. The society papers announced that with the exception of the few unfortunate gentlemen who were compelled to stay and look after their constituents' interests, at Westminster, "everybody" had gone out of town, and filled up yawning columns with detailed information as to everybody's destination. To an inexperienced eye, with the point of view of the top of an Uxbridge Road omnibus for instance, it might not appear that London had diminished more than the extent of a few powdered footmen on carriage boxes; but the census of the London world is after all not to be taken from the top of an Uxbridge Road omnibus. London teemed emptily, the tall houses in the narrow lanes of Mayfair slept standing, the sunlight filtered through a depressing haze and stood still in the streets for hours together. In the Park the policemen wooed the nursery-maids free from the embarrassing smiling scrutiny of people to whom this serious preoccupation is a diversion. The main thoroughfares were full of "summer sales," St. Paul's echoed to admiring Transatlantic criticism, and the Bloomsbury boarding-houses to voluble Transatlantic complaint.

The Halifaxes were at Brighton, Lady Halifax giving musical teas, Miss Halifax painting marine views in a little book. Miss Halifax called them "impressions," and always distributed them at the musical teas. The Cardiffs had gone to Scotland for golf, and later on for grouse. Janet was almost as expert on the links as her father, and was on very familiar terms with a certain Highland moor and one Donald Macleod. They had laid every compulsion upon Elfrida to go with them, in vain; the girl's sensitiveness on the point of money obligations was intense, and Janet failed to measure it accurately when she allowed herself to feel hurt that their relations did not preclude the necessity for taking any thought as to who paid. Elfrida staid, however, in her by-way of Fleet Street, and did a little bit of excellent work for the Illustrated Age every day. If it had not been for the editor-in-chief, Rattray would have extended her scope on the paper; but the editor-in-chief said no, Miss Bell was dangerous, there was no telling what she might be up to if they gave her the reins. She went very well, but she was all the better for the severest kind of a bit. So Miss Bell wrote about colonial exhibitions and popular spectacles, and country outings for babies of the slums, and longed for a fairer field. As midsummer came on there arrived a dearth in these objects of orthodox interest, and Rattray told her she might submit "anything on the nail" that occurred to her, in addition to such work as the office could give her to do. Then, in spite of the vigilance of the editor-in-chief, an odd unconventional bit of writing crept now and then into the Age—an interview with some eccentric notability with the piquancy of a page from Gyp, a bit of pathos picked out of the common, streets, a fragment of character-drawing which smiled visibly and talked audibly. Elfrida in her garret drew a joy from these things. She cut them out and read them over and over again, and put them sacredly away, with Nadie's letters and a manuscript poem of a certain Bruynotin's, and a scrawl from one Hakkoff, with a vigorous sketch of herself, from memory, in pen and ink in the corner of the page, in the little eastern-smelling wooden box which seemed to her to represent the core of her existence. They quickened her pulse, they gave her a curious uplifted happiness that took absolutely no account of any other circumstance.