He was still inclined to believe that. "There is a tremendous lot of talk and no result; yes—no one really does a thing. They want to, and that's all it comes to."

Fanny cast a glance of repressed attention at him across a lower center-piece. "If you could be whatever you wanted, what and where, what would you choose?" she asked.

"Here, with you and the children," his voice replied without hesitation. The youth of her expression was happily stained by a flush. He meant it, Lee told himself sharply. But about Peyton—

"Of course, he was drunk last night, and he said nothing conclusive; he was only wretchedly unhappy—wished he had been killed in the war and all the romantic rest."

"It is too much for me," Fanny decided generally; "but I am glad that I was young when I was; being alive was quite simple then. I am comparatively young, Lee, 'way under forty—well, two years—but you can't realize how things have changed in such a short while. The women we knew didn't even smoke then. Wasn't it only five or six years ago they were first allowed to in nice cafs? And, not simply that, men didn't, either, when they were with us. We used to go to Cape May; they called the dances hops; and do you, oh, do you, remember the bathing suits?"

"I am not so certain about any great change," he objected. "I seem to recall—"

"Horrid people will always be horrid!" she exclaimed. "I knew one or two very fast girls; but they were different about it from now, it was only whispered around and condemned, and it's shouted out today. I wish I had known you sooner; I would have done a lot better than your mother. I'd like to have had you, Lee, as a little boy; but I suppose you're enough that yet."

His opposition to Fanny's maternal manner, directed at him, was stronger than customary; she seemed to accept in herself every responsibility for him; as though, whenever his actions were unfortunate, it had been due to her imperfect control. With practically no experience of life, guarded from its threatening aspects, her attitude was that, not without patience, she brought him with relative safety through a maze in which otherwise he'd be lost. This was evident now in what he felt to be the complacency of her voice and expression; and a perverse impulse grew in him to combat and shatter her blind satisfaction. Lee subdued this, in the merest decency; but the effort left him thoroughly irritated. He found, finally, an outlet for his annoyance in the restlessness of Helena; and he ordered her from the table.

This show of paternal discipline Fanny met with lowered eyes and a silence that endured until Gregory had walked sedately from the room; then she reminded Lee that he must never, absolutely never, correct his children when he was in an ill temper.

"That's nonsense," he returned shortly; "you ought to see that because it's impossible. Even theoretically I don't agree with you—a child can understand a punishment in which there is some warmth. You are dealing with a little animal and not a reasonable being." To this Fanny replied that her children were not animals.

"Really, Fanny, you don't know what you are talking about," he asserted; "we are all, men and women and children and giraffes, animals. You might look that up in the dictionary."

"I haven't any need to," she observed, with a calmness that further tried him. "If the dictionary says that it isn't a very good one. And if you are trying to tell me that Helena and Gregory are no better than giraffes you're sillier than usual."

"That isn't in the least what I said," Lee retorted, with widely separated words. "I wasn't speaking of the comparative but of the absolute. It is a fact that we are animals, more responsible and with greater powers than the others, but animals, animals."

"Then what is an animal?" Fanny demanded.

"A mammal."

A marked expression of distaste invaded her. "It has a nasty sound," she admitted with her instinctive recoiling from life. "I don't see how we got on this subject anyhow, it's too much like sex. It seems you are able to discuss nothing else."

"It is only nasty in your mind," he declared.

"That's exactly like you, you all over, to blame things on me. It's convenient, I must say, but not fair nor true: it was you who got in a wicked temper and sent Helena, who was feeling miserable, away."

"You always say the children are sick when they misbehave."

"I wish I could be as sure of you as I was of that," she answered quickly; "for instance, when you go out in automobiles at the dances with women."

"Now, we are beginning," he told her with emphasis; "we never had an argument that didn't degenerate into this; and I'm sick of it."

"I thought I was the one who was sick of it," Fanny complained; "I wonder that I don't just let you go."

"I wish you would," he said, rising; "I give you my word, I'd rather be damned comfortably than have this endless trouble." In a position of unassailable quiet behind his papers he told himself that the scene with Fanny had been particularly vain because, underneath, he agreed with her opinion about the casual expression of small emotions; he no longer wanted it any more than she did. Yes, at last they were one there. And yet he felt further from her even than before—whatever his marriage hadn't satisfied, that he had stilled in minor ways, was now without check. The truth was that it had increased, become more serious, insistent.

The tangible facts, the letters and memoranda, before him, retreated and came back to his consciousness. Tobacco worms had been boring through his cigars, and destroyed a third of the box. Helena passed, affecting a grievance out of any proportion to its cause in him. Outside, the country was flooded with a deceptive golden radiance; and he remembered, suddenly, that Alice Lucian had told him to bring Fanny to the Club and a tea that afternoon, which she was giving for Mina Raff. He repeated this to his wife, in a conciliatory regret at his forgetfulness; and she replied that if he cared to go she would come over later for him in the car. Lee, standing at a window, thought he wouldn't; but, adding that Peyton would be there, he decided that, in view of the possible developments, his presence might be wise.

* * * * *

The early gloom gathered familiarly in the long main room of the clubhouse; the fire cast out fanwise and undependable flickering light upon the relaxed figures; it shone on tea cups, sparkled in rich translucent preserves, and glimmered through a glass sugar bowl. It was all, practically, Lee Randon reflected, as it had been before and would be again. How few things, out of a worldful, the ordinary individual saw, saw—that was—to comprehend, to experience: a limited number of interiors, certain roads and streets, fields and views. He made his way through life blinded to the customary and unaware of the strange; summer was hot and winter, usually, cold; the spring became green under rain; winds blew and the leaves fell in fall—of how much more was he conscious?

It was the same with regard to people; he, Lee Randon, knew a great many, or rather, he could repeat their names, recognize their superficial features at sight. But to say that he actually knew them— that was nonsense! Why, he was almost totally ignorant of himself. How much could he explain of Fanny's late state of mind? She had done all that was possible to make it clear to him; with little result. Fanny was an extraordinarily honest person; or, damn it, she seemed to be. He had a reputation for truthfulness; but how much of what was in his mind would he admit to his wife? The discrepancy between what he appeared and what he felt himself to be, what he thought and what published, was enormous, astounding.

There, as well, was Peyton Morris; Lee would have sworn that he understood him thoroughly—a character as simple, as obvious as Fanny's. But here was Morris seated with Mina Raff on the stairs to the upper floor, beyond the radius of the fire; and, though they were not ten feet away, he could not hear a word of what they were saying. At intervals there was an indistinct murmur, nothing more. Claire, at Lee Randon's side, was sitting with her chin high and a gaze concentrated on the twisting flames: talking generally had fallen into a pause.

The door from without opened, Fanny entered, and there was a momentary revival of animation. "Is Lee here?" she demanded; "but I know he is. The fire is just as attractive at home, yet, even with nothing to do, he'll hardly wait to give it a poke. Where's Peyton?"

"On the stairs," someone answered casually.

There was a movement, and Mina Raff approached. "It's so hot here," she asserted.

"It is warmer out," Fanny informed her; "I wonder what the weather is in New York?"

"I can't say, I'm sure; but I shall discover tomorrow morning. I have to be back as early as possible. Then—work, work, work."

"Mina has been made a star," Peyton Morris announced. But he stopped awkwardly, apparently conscious of the warmth, the largeness, in his voice. Fanny whispered to Lee that it was quite too outrageous. In return, he asked, "What?" and, indignant, she drew away from him.

The conversation died again. Lee Randon could see Mina Raff's profile, held darkly against the glow; her lips and chin were firm. "Where," Anette asked her, "shall you stay when you get back—at Savina Grove's?" No, Mina replied, her hours would be too long and uncertain to allow that; probably she would be at the Plaza. Lee had heard the Groves' name mentioned before in connection with Mina Raff; and he made an effort to recall the reason. The Groves—it was the William Loyd Groves—were rather important people, financially and socially; and one of them, yes, that was it, was related to Mina, but which he didn't know.

More came back to him: Mina Raff's parents had died when she was a young girl, and the Groves had rescued her from the undistinguished evils of improvidence; she had lived with them until, against their intensest objections, she had gone into moving pictures. Probably the Groves' opposition had lasted until Mina's success; or, in other words, their support had been withheld from her through the period when it had been most needed.

Yes, the girl had a determined mouth. If he, Lee Randon, had followed his first inclinations—were they in the way of literature?—how different his life would have been. Mina Raff had been stronger, more selfish, than her environment: selfishness and success were synonymous. Yet, as a human quality, it was more hated, more reviled, than any other. Its opposite was held as the perfect, the heavenly, ethics of conduct. To be sacrificed, that was the accepted essence of Christ; fineness came through relinquishment. He didn't believe it, he told himself fiercely; something deep, integral, in him revolted absolutely.

Mina Raff had been wholly justified; the very people who had thrown all their weight against her admitted it fully. It was only when such a self-belief was without compensating result, value, that it was wrong. But who could say what any outcome would be? Some people took the chance and others didn't; he had not. Then the question came up of whether he had not failed as it was? No one would agree with him that it might be failure; he hadn't called it that. Suddenly, vehemently, he wished that he could grow old at once, in a second; anything to quiet the restlessness at his heart.

Lee had a conviction that he ought to decide the case of the individual against the world, the feeling that it was of the greatest importance to him; but for centuries men had considered, without answer, just that. The thing to do was to live, not to think; for it was possible that those who thought, weighed causes and results, hardly lived at all in the sense he meant. All the people he knew were cautious before they were anything else; they existed primarily for their stomachs. The widely advertised beauty of self sacrifice was golden only when it adorned like a halo the heads of others. That was natural, inevitable to the struggle for survival; it didn't answer Lee's question, which, he felt, was of the spirit rather than the body.

"It's getting late," Fanny said briskly. There was a general movement, sighs and the settling of skirts. The lights were switched on, and the fire, that had been a source of magic, became nothing more than ugly grey charring logs with a few thin tongues of flame. Lee, with his wife, stopped to say good-bye to Mina Raff; Fanny's manner was bright, conventional; as palpably insincere to the other woman, Lee was certain, as it was to him. He said:

"I hope your new picture will go well."

"Thank you," she responded, her slight hand lingeringly holding his; "perhaps you will like me better on the screen than in reality."

"Could you tell me which was which?"

She hesitated. "Three months ago, yes, but not now; I'm not sure of myself."

"That was positively indecent," Fanny observed afterward; "she is as bold as brass. I hope I am not as big a fool as Claire."

"Claire and you are very different," he told her; "I have an idea that she is doing whatever is possible. But then we don't know what we are talking about: it's fairly evident that Peyton and Mina Raff are interested in each other, they may be in love; and, if they are, what does that mean? It isn't your feeling for the children or mine for you; they are both love; yet what is it?"

"It is God in us," Fanny said gravely; "and keeps us all, Helena and Gregory and you and me, safely together."

She seldom spoke to him of religion, but it dwelt closely, vitally, within her, and not as an inherited abstraction or correct social observation, but definitely personal in its intercommunication. Lee Randon had none at all; and in her rare references to it he could only preserve an awkward silence. That had always been a bar between his family and himself, particularly with the children: he was obliged to maintain an endless hypocrisy about the miracles, the dogmas and affairs, of Sunday school and the church. As a child he had been so filled with a literal Presbyterian imagery that, when a degree of reason discarded figures of speech seen as concrete actualities, nothing had been left. With the lapse of a purely pictorial heaven and hell, the loss of eternal white choirs and caldrons of the unrepentant, only earth remained.

* * * * *

He could recall in gloomy detail his early impression of Paradise: it was a sombre plain floating cloud-like in air, with, doubling through it, an unspeakable sluggish river of blood; God, bearded and frowning in the severity of chronic judgment, dominated from an architectural throne a throng of the saved in straight garments and sandalled feet; and, in the foreground, a lamb with a halo and an uplifted cross was intent on the baptism of individuals issuing unaccountably white from the thickly crimson flood.

Yet his children, in a modified Episcopalian form, were being taught the same thing: the Mosaic God; Christ Jesus who took unto Himself the sin of the world; the rugged disciple, St. Peter and the loving disciple, St. John. The sky, they learned, was the habitation of light- winged angels. The ark was still reported on its memorable voyage, with its providential pairs of animals gathered from every zone, but there was a growing reticence about Jonah. The persistence of such credulity, Lee thought, was depressing; just as the churches, leaning on the broken support of a charity they were held to dispense, were a commentary on the poverty of the minds and spirits of men.

Yes, the necessity of charging Helena and Gregory with such assurances, their rigid bending into mental forms, large and small, in which he had no confidence, put Lee outside the solidity of his family. In the instruction, the influences, widely held paramount in the welding of polite Christian characters, Fanny was indefatigable—the piece of silver firmly clasped in the hand for collection, the courtesy when addressed by elders, the convention that nature, birds, were sentimentally beneficent. When Gregory brought out these convictions, lessons, in his indescribably fresh eager tones, Lee listened with a helpless disapproval.

Everything, it seemed to Lee Randon, increased the position of self- delusion at the expense of what he felt to be reality. His doubts, for example, were real; with no will, no effort on his part, they invaded his mind ceaselessly. Cytherea's disturbing charm was real, as definite as Fanny's quiet actuality. However, he wasn't interested in an abstract arraignment of life, but intent only on the truth about himself. Lee wanted to discharge fully his duty to existence—in the more inglorious phrase, he didn't want to make a fool of himself—and yet it was growing more difficult all the while to distinguish folly from sense.

This affair, if it did exist, of Peyton's with Mina Raff wasn't so easily determined as Fanny insisted. Perhaps, like his own, Peyton Morris' life had been restricted by artificial barriers thrown about the rebellious integrity of his fundamental being. Few children could stand out against the combined forces of the older world; but it was conceivable that, later, like a chrysalis, they might burst the hard, superimposed skin and emerge triumphant.

That damned problem of self-sacrifice!

How much claim had men upon each other? What did children gain who sacrificed their lives for their parents? It was supposed to bring them nobility; but, at the same time, didn't it develop in the parents the utmost callous selfishness; didn't the latter, as their needs were exclusively consulted, grow more exacting, unreasonable? Was not love itself the most unreasonable and exacting thing imaginable?

Once surrendered to it, the tyranny of a beloved subject was absolute: Lee told himself that the emotion he was considering—the most sacred of earthly ties—ignominiously resembled the properties of fly paper. He turned abruptly from that graceless thought: it was a great deal warmer, and a mist, curiously tangible in the night, was rising through the bare branches of the maple trees.

"I am going to talk to Claire," Fanny said firmly.

"It would do both of you no good," he informed her; "besides, you'll have to take so much for granted."

"Claire will tell me."

"I wonder?" They were in their room, preparing for bed; Fanny, with her hair spread in a thin brown tide over the chaste shoulders of her nightgown, was incredibly like a girl. The mechanical sweep of her hand with a brush kept a brief sleeve falling back from the thinness of her arm. How delicately methodical she was—an indispensable quality in the repeated trying contacts, the lost privacy, of marriage. So much depended upon the very elusiveness which the security of possession, habit, destroyed.

"This love," he continued his speculations aloud, "isn't at all understood—we are ignorant about it in spite of endless experience and reports and poetry. Take us," he had one of his dangerous impulses of complete honesty, "before we were married, while we were engaged, we had an impracticable romantic attraction for each other. I know that I thought of you all the time, day and night; and, just because you existed, the whole world was full of prismatic colors; it was as though an orchestra were playing continually and I were floating on the finest music. You were like a figure in heaven that drew me up to you.

"Well, that lasted quite a while into our marriage; at first I had an even greater emotion. Then, as Helena and Gregory were born, it changed." Midway in the brushing of her hair Fanny was motionless and intent. "I don't say it decreased, Fanny, that it lost any of its importance; but it did change; and in you as well as me. It wasn't as prismatic, as musical, and there's no use contradicting me. I can explain it best for myself by saying that my feeling for you became largely tenderness."

"Oh!" Fanny exclaimed, in a little lifting gasp; "oh, and that tenderness," her cheeks were bright with sudden color, "why, it is no more than pity."

"That isn't just," he replied; "unless you want to speak of pity at its very best. No, that won't do: my affection for you is made of all our experiences, our lives and emotions, together. We are tied by a thousand strings—common disappointments and joy and sickness and hope and pain and heaven knows what else. We're held by habit, too, and convenience and the opinion of society. Certainly it is no smaller than the first," he argued, but more to himself than to Fanny; "that was nothing but a state of mind, of spirit; you can't live on music."

"Don't you think you have said enough for one night?" she asked, in a calm voice belied by the angry sparkle of her eyes, the faint irrepressible trembling of her lips. "Do you think I want to hear that it is only convention and our neighbors that keep you with me? You have no right to insist that your horridness is true of me, either. I—I could hear music, if you would let me." She sank on the little cushioned bench before her dressing table, where her youthfulness took on a piercing aspect of misery. Fanny's declaration, not far from tears, that she was just as she had always been was admirably upheld by her appealing presence.

The tenderness he had admitted, reduced by a perceptive impatience and the sense of having been wholly, wilfully, misunderstood, carried him over to her. He took Fanny, with her face strained away from him, into his arms. "Don't be an idiot," he begged softly; "you ought to be used to my talking by now. Let me go on, it can't come to anything—" She stiffened in his embrace:

"What do you mean by that?"

"Nothing, nothing," he answered shortly, releasing her; "where is all that certainty you assured me of? If you go on like this I shall never be able to tell you my thoughts, discuss problems with you; and it seems to me that's very necessary."

"It has been lately," she spoke in a metallic voice; "nothing satisfies you any more; and I suppose I should have been prepared to have you say things to me, too. But I'm not; you might even find that I am not the idiot you suspect."

"I was giving you a chance to prove that," he pointed out.

"Now you have discovered the fatal truth you can save yourself more trouble in the future." She emphatically switched off a light beside her, leaving him standing in a sole unsparing illumination. Yet in her extreme resentment she was, he recognized, rubbing Vaseline into her finger nails, her final nightly rite. Then there was silence where once he had kissed her with a reluctance to lose her in even the short oblivion of sleep.

* * * * *

Throughout Monday, at his office, Lee Randon thought at uncomfortable intervals of the late incipient scenes with Fanny. They had quarrels— who hadn't?—but they had usually ended in Fanny shedding some tears that warmly recemented their deep affections. This latter time, however, she had not wept—at the point of dissolving into the old surrender she had turned away from him, both in reality and metaphorically, and fallen asleep in an unexpected cold reserve. He was sorry, for it brought into their relationship a definite new quality of difference. He was aware of the thorough inconsistency of his attitude toward their marriage; again two opposed forces were present in him— one, Fanny, as, bound to her, he knew and cherished; and the other—the devil take the other!

He was organizing a new company, and, figuring impatiently, he pressed the button for Mrs. Wald, his secretary. She appeared at once and quietly, her notebook and pencil ready, took a place at his side. "Run this out, please, Mrs. Wald," and an involved financial transaction followed. What he wanted to ascertain was, with a preferred stock bearing eight per cent at a stated capitalization, and the gift of a bonus of common, share for share, how much pie would remain to be cut up between a Mr. Hadly, Sanford, and himself? The woman worked rapidly, in long columns of minute neat figures. "About thirty-four thousand dollars, each, Mr. Randon," she announced almost directly. "Is that close enough; or do you want it to the fraction?"

"Good enough; send Miss Mathews in."

Almost anyone on his staff, Lee reflected, knew more about the processes of his business than he did; he supplied the energy, the responsibility of the decisions, more than the brains of his organization; and it perfected the details. The stenographer, Miss Mathews, was very elaborately blonde, very personable; and, dictating to her, Lee Randon remembered the advice given him by a large wielder of labor and finance. "Lee," he had said, touching him with the emphasis of a finger, "never play around with an employee or a client."

He, John Lenning Partins, had been a man of eccentric humors, and—like all individuals who supported heavy mental burdens, inordinately taxed their brains—he had his hours, unknown to the investing public, of erratic, but the word was erotic, conduct. On more than one occasion he had peremptorily telegraphed for Lee to join him at some unexpected place, for a party. Once, following a ball at the Grand Opera House, in Paris, they had motored in a taxi-cab, with charming company, to Calais. During that short stay in France John Partins had spent, flung variously away, four hundred thousand dollars.

The industrious, the clerks, efficient women like Mrs. Wald, the middle-aged lawyers in his office, were rewarded...by a pension. It was all very strange, upside down: what rot that was about the infinite capacity for taking pains! He supposed it wouldn't do to make this public, the tritest maxims were safer for the majority; but it was too bad; it spread the eternal hypocrisies of living. He asked Miss Mathews:

"You're not thinking of getting married, are you? Because if you do I'll have your young man deported; I simply won't let go of you."

"I don't see any signs of it, Mr. Randon," she replied, half serious and half smiling; "my mother thinks it's awful, but I'm not in any hurry. There are men I know, who might like me; they show me a very good time; but somehow I am not anxious. I guess in a way it's the other married girls I see: either they housework at home, and I couldn't be bothered with that; or they are in an office and, somehow, that seems wrong, too. I want so much," she admitted; "and with what clothes cost now it's terrible."

"Moralists and social investigators would call you a bad girl," he told her; "but I agree with you; get your pretty hats and suits, and smart shoes, as long as you are able. You're not a bit better in a kitchen than you are here, taking dictation from me; and I am not sure you would be more valuable at home with a child or two. You are a very unusual stenographer, rapid and accurate, and you have a good mind in addition to your figure. Why should you lose all that at once, give it up, for the accidents of cholera infantum and a man, as likely as not, with a consumptive lung?"

"But what about love, Mr. Randon? That's what throws me off. Some say it's the only thing in life."

"I'm damned if I know," he admitted, leaning back from his wide flat- topped desk. "I hear the same thing, and I am rather inclined to believe it. But I have an idea that it is very different from what most people insist; I don't think it is very useful around the house; it has more to do with the pretty hat than with a dishpan. If you fall in love go after the thing itself, then; don't hesitate about tomorrow or yesterday; and, above all else, don't ask yourself if it will last; that's immaterial."

"You make it sound wild enough," she commented, rising.

"The wilder the better," he insisted; "if it is not delirious it's nothing."

The road and countryside over which he returned in the motor sedan, partly frozen, were streaked by rills of muddy surface water; the sky, which appeared definitely to rest on the surrounding hills, was grey with a faint suffusion of yellow at the western horizon. It was all as dreary, as sodden, as possible. Eastlake, appearing beyond a shoulder of bare woods, showed a monotonous scattering of wet black roofs, raw brick chimneys, at the end of a long paved highway glistening with steel tracks.

Lee Randon was weary, depressed: nothing in his life, in any existence, offered the least recompense for the misfortune of having been born. He left his car at the entrance of his dwelling; Christopher, the gardener, came sloshing over the sod to take it into the garage; and, within, he found the dinner-table set for three. "It's Claire," his wife informed him; "she called up not half an hour ago to ask if she could come. Peyton was away over night, she said, and she wanted to see us." He went on up to his room, inattentive even to Claire's possible troubles.

He dressed slowly, automatically, and descended to the fire-lit space that held Cytherea in her mocking, her becoming, aloofness. In the brightly illuminated room beyond the hall Helena and Gregory were playing parchesi—Gregory firmly grasped the cup from which he intently rolled the dice; Helena shook the fair hair from her eyes and, it immediately developed, moved a pink marker farther than proper.

"You only got seven!" Gregory exclaimed; "and you took it nine right on that safety."

"What if I did?" she returned undisturbed. "I guess a girl can make a mistake without having somebody yell at her. Your manners aren't very good."

"Yes, they are, too," he asserted, aggrieved; "I have to tell you if you move to a safety where you don't belong." He shook the dice from the cup. "Now, see there—that just brings me to your man, and I can send him home."

"I don't care," Helena informed him; "it's a young sort of game, anyhow. Now I'm wearing waists and buttoned skirts I'd just as leaves write a letter to Margaret West with no boys in it at all."

She left the parchesi board, and crossed the room to the piano, where she stood turning over sheets of music with a successful appearance of critical interest. Gregory, silently struggling with the injustice of this, gazed up with a shadowed brow at Lee. "I was going to beat her," he said, "I was almost home, and she went away. She just got up like nothing was happening." Helena put in, "Neither there was." Lee Randon took her place. "You can beat me instead," he proposed. His interest in the game, he felt, was as false as Helena's pretended musical preoccupation; but he rolled the dice and shifted the counters, under Gregory's undeviating scrutiny, with the conviction that parchesi was not conspicuously different from the other more resounding movements of the world and its affairs. Gregory easily vanquished him, and Lee rose with a curt, unwarranted nod of dismissal.

* * * * *

Freezing cocktails in the pewter pitcher, in the repetition of minor duties which, Lee Randon thought, now constituted four-fifths of his life, he told himself that Claire Morris had never looked better: she was wearing a dress of a soft negative blue material, high about her throat, with glimpses of bright embroidery that brought out her darkly vivid personality. Claire had a slim low-breasted figure, gracefully broad shoulders; and her face, it might be because of its definite, almost sharp, outline, held the stamp of decided opinions. Claire's appearance, he recognized, her bearing, gave an impression of arrogance which, however, was only superficially true—she could be very disagreeable in situations, with people, that she found inferior, brutally casual and unsympathetic; but more privately, intimately, she was remarkably simple-hearted, free from reserve. She was related to Lee through her father, a good blood, he told himself; but her mother had brought her a concentration of what particular vigorous aristocracy—an unlimited habit of luxury without the responsibility of acknowledged place—the land afforded.

The drinks had been consumed, the soup disposed of, when Claire said abruptly, "Peyton is going to leave me."

Although, in a way, Lee had been prepared for such an announcement, the actuality upset him extremely. Fanny gasped, and then nodded warningly toward the waitress, leaving the dining-room; at any conceivable disaster, he reflected, Fanny would consider the proprieties.

"When did he tell you?" Fanny demanded.

"He didn't," Claire replied; "I told him. It was a great relief to both of us."

"Say what you like outside," Lee put in vigorously; "but at least with us be honest."

"I am, quite," she assured him; "naturally I don't want Peyton to go—I happen to love him. And there's Ira. But it was an impossible position; it couldn't go on, Peyton was absolutely wretched, we both were; and so I ended it. I laid out all his best silk pajamas so that he'd look smart—"

"How can you?" Fanny cried; "oh, how can you? It is too wicked, all too horrible, for words. I don't think you are advanced or superior, Claire, you failed him and yourself both. It's perfectly amazing to me, after the men you have met, that you don't know them. You must keep them going in the right direction; you can't let them stop, or look around, once; I only learned that lately, but it is so. They haven't an idea of what they want, and they try everything. Then if you let a man go he is the first to blame you; it's like winking at murder."

"How could I keep him when he didn't want to stay?" Claire asked wearily; "I am not too moral, but I couldn't quite manage that. Then what you say might do for some men, but not Peyton. You see, he has always been very pure; all his friends at Princeton were like that; they were proud of it and very severe on the other. And afterwards, when he went into the city, it was the same; Peyton would get drunk any number of times with any number of men, but, as he said, he was off women. The stage door, it seems, is very old-fashioned now.

"When we were engaged, and he told me that he was really pure, I was simply mad with happiness. I thought it was such a marvelous thing for a girl to find. I still think that; and yet, I don't know. If he were different, had had more experience, perhaps this wouldn't have hit him so hard. He would have kissed his Mina on the porch, outside the dance, and come home."

"As for that Raff woman—" Fanny stopped, at a loss for a term to express her disgust.

"Why not?" Claire asked. "She wanted Peyton and went after him: he isn't for her art, I believe, but for herself. I haven't talked to her; I can't make up my mind about that. Probably it would do no good. Peyton is splendidly healthy; it won't be necessary to tell her anything about draughts and stomach bands."

"Claire, you're utterly, tragically wrong," Fanny wailed. "I wish I could shake sense into you. Up to a point this is your fault; you are behaving in a criminally foolish way."

"What do you think Claire should do?" Lee asked his wife.

She turned to him, a flood of speech on her lips; but, suddenly, she suppressed it; the expression, the lines, of concern were banished from her face. "There is so much," she replied equably; "they haven't discussed it enough; why, it ought to take a year, two, before they reached such a decision. Peyton can't know his mind, nor Claire hers. And Ira, that darling innocent little child."

"Damn Ira!" Claire Morris exclaimed.

"You mustn't," Fanny asserted; "you're not yourself. Mina Raff should be burned alive, something terrible done to her." Fanny's voice had the hard cold edge of fanatical conviction. "If she had come into my house making trouble.... But that couldn't have happened; I'd have known at once."

"You are more feminine than I am," Claire told her. "I see this in a very detached manner, as if it didn't concern me. I suppose I can't realize that it has happened to us. It has! But if you are right, Fanny, and it's necessary to treat a man like a green hunter, then this was bound to occur. I couldn't do anything so—so humiliating; he could bolt sooner or later. I did the best I knew how: I was amusing as possible and always looked well enough. I never bothered Peyton about himself and encouraged him to keep as much of his freedom as possible.

"I don't believe in the other," she said to Fanny Randon in a sharp accession of rebellion; "it is degrading, and I won't live that way, I won't put up with it. If he wants to go, to be with Mina Raff, how in God's name can I stop it? I won't have him in my bed with another woman in his heart; I made that clear to you. And I can't have him hot and cold—now all Mina and then the sanctity of his home. I've never had a house of that kind; it was christened, like a ship, with champagne.

"I have never cared for domestic things. I'd rather wear a dinner-gown than an apron; I'd a damn sight rather spin a roulette wheel than rock a cradle. And, perhaps, Peyton wanted a housewife; though heaven knows he hasn't turned to one. It's her blonde, no bland, charm and destructive air of innocence. I've admitted and understood too much; but I couldn't help it—my mother and grandmother, all that lot, were the same way, and went after things themselves. The men hated sham and sentimentality; they asked, and gave, nothing."

Fanny, it was evident, was growing impatient at what was not without its challenge of her character and expressed convictions. "I do agree with you, Claire, that we are not alike," she admitted. Her voice bore a perceptible note of complacency, of superior strength and position. "Just last week I was telling Lee that I belonged before the war— things were so different then, and, apparently, it's only in my house they haven't changed. We are frightfully behind the times, and you'd be surprised at how glad we are. It was your mother's father, wasn't it, who fell in love with the Spanish woman while he was in the Embassy at Seville? My family weren't people of public connections, although a great-aunt married Senator Carlinton; but they had the highest principles."

"They were lucky," Claire Morris replied indifferently; "I am beginning to think it isn't what you have so much as what happens to it. Anyhow, Peyton is going away with Mina Raff, and I am sorry for him; he's so young and so certain; but this has shaken him. Peyton's a snob, really, like the rest of his friends, and Mina's crowd won't have that for a moment: he can't go through her world judging men by their slang and by whom they knew at college. I envy him, it will be a tremendously interesting experience." If her eyes were particularly brilliant it was because they were surrounded by an extreme darkness. Her voice, commonly no more than a little rough in its deliberate forthrightness, was high and metallic. She gave Lee the heroic impression that no most mighty tempest would ever see her robbed of her erect defiance. It was at once her weakness and strength that she could be broken but not bent.

* * * * *

After dinner Claire, who was staying with the Randons until tomorrow, played picquet with Lee; and his wife, her shapely feet elevated above the possible airs of the floor, continued to draw threads from the handkerchiefs she was making for Christmas. Claire played very well and, at five cents a point, he had to watch the game. On a specially big hand she piqued and repiqued. "That," she declared, "will pay you for caputting me." The jargon of their preoccupation, "A point of six; yes, to the ace; paid; and a quatorze, kings," was the only sound until Fanny rose, decidedly. "I am going to bed." She hesitated at the door. "I hope you'll be comfortable, Claire: I had some club soda and rye put in your room, since you like it so well. Don't be too late, please, Lee; it makes you tired starting so early in the morning."

"You'll have to forgive me," Claire said, when Fanny had gone; "but I don't—I never did—like women."

"Do you think any more of men, now?"

"Heavens, yes. I wish I could find someone to blame for what has happened, Peyton specially, but I can't, not to save my life. It seems so hopelessly inevitable. I don't want you to suppose I'm not unhappy, Lee; or that I care only a little for Peyton. I love him very much; I needed him, and my love, more than I can explain. As Fanny as good as told me, I am a wild bird; anything, almost, with what is behind me, may happen. It was just the irony of chance that this affair caught Peyton, the immaculate, instead of me. I was awfully glad that I had an anchor that seemed so strong; in my own faulty way I adored everything I had; I wanted to be tranquil, and it had a look of security."

"It isn't over, Claire," Lee asserted. "I haven't seen that young fool yet."

"Please don't bother him; and it's too much to drag out the moralities on my account."

"Moralities!" he echoed indignantly, "who said a word about them? I'm not interested in morals. Lord, Claire, how little you know me. And as for bothering him, he'll have to put up with that. He has invited a certain amount of it."

They forgot the game and faced each other across the disordered cards. "If I won't argue with him," she insisted, "you can't. But we needn't discuss it—he won't listen to you, Peyton's all gone. I never saw such a complete wreck."

"He can't avoid it," Lee went on; "I'll have to do it if it is only for myself; I am most infernally curious about the whole works. I want to find out what it's about."

"If you mean love, he can't tell you; he hasn't had enough experience to express it. You might do better with me."

"No, I want it from the man; a woman's feeling, even yours, would do me no good. You see, this has always been explored, accounted for, condemned, written about, from the feminine side. Where the man is considered it is always in the most damnable light. If, in the novels, a man leaves his home he is a rascal of the darkest sort, and his end is a remorse no one would care to invite. That may be, but I am not prepared to say. No, dear Claire, I am not considering it in preparation for anything; I want to know; that's all."

"The books are stuff, of course," she agreed. "The grandfather of mine who was killed in Madrid—it wasn't Seville—must have had a gorgeous time: a love affair with one of the most beautiful women alive. It lasted five months before it was found out and ended; and his wife and he had been sick of living together. After it was over she was pleased at being connected with such a celebrated scandal; it made her better looking by reflected loveliness. She was rather second class, I believe, and particularly fancied the duchess part."

"It wouldn't be like that in the current novels, or even in the better: either your grandparent or the duchess would be a villainous person, and the other a victim. I'm inclined to think that most of the ideas about life and conduct are lifted from cheap fiction. They have the look of it. But that realization wouldn't help us, with the world entirely on the other side."

"No, it isn't," Claire objected; "and it's getting less so all around us. Perhaps men haven't changed much, yet; but you don't hear the women talk as I do. I don't like them, as I said; they are too damned skulking for me; but they are gathering a lot more sense in a short while."

"I don't agree with you there," he replied; "you are getting your own infinitesimal world confused with the real overwhelming majority; you haven't an idea how it feels and, in particular, of what it thinks of you, smoking and gambling and damning your fate. It may be largely envy—personally I am convinced it is—but they have you ticketed straight for hell just the same."

"It doesn't interest me." Claire increasingly showed the strain, the unhappiness, through which she was parsing. Nor did it him, he ended lamely, except in the abstract. This at once had the elements of a lie and the unelaborate truth; he couldn't see how his curiosity applied to him, and yet he was intent on its solving. The fixed mobile smile of Cytherea flashed into his thoughts. His perpetual restlessness struck through him.

His attitude toward the Morrises was largely dictated by his fondness for Claire. He had determined what, exactly, he would say to Peyton. Yet, as a fact, he returned to his former assertion to Fanny; the boy would make it difficult, if not impossible, to discuss such intimate relationships. And as Claire had pointed out, the very openness of Peyton's life would make him exceptionally far to reach; he was particularly youthful in his hardness, his confidence in his acts and friends and beliefs; yet all that couldn't help but be upset now.

"Fanny will think I have designs on you," Claire remarked; "go up when you like. I am not a bit sleepy."

Lee had no intention of going to bed then, and told her so. It seemed to him that, perhaps, with Claire, he might discover something that would set his questioning at rest. Vain delusion. He asked what her plans were:

"I'll stay in Eastlake for the winter, and, in March, go to Italy, to give Peyton his divorce—Florence; I lived a while at Arcetri; it's very lovely."

He had a momentary experimental vision of a small yellow villa among the olives of the Florentine hills, of crumbling pink walls with emerald green lizards along the stones, of myrtles and remarkable lilies-of-the-valley. Twenty years ago it would have drawn him irresistibly; but not now; he wanted—where his wants were articulate— a far different thing. It had nothing to do with Italy, or any other country; his intentness had been withdrawn from the surfaces of life, however charming; they had plunged into the profounder mysteries of being. Lee had gained nothing if not a certain freedom from exterior circumstance; his implied revolt against trivialities, if it did no other good, had at least liberated him from the furniture of existence. However, it had begun to appear that this was not an unmixed blessing; he had the uncomfortable sensation of having put out, on a limitless sea, in a very little boat too late to arrive at any far hidden desirable coast.

Claire shivered, and, discovering that she was cold, he insisted on her going upstairs. "To my pure sheets," she said, with a touch of her familiar daring. Left alone, Lee was depressed by the hour; the room, his house, seemed strange, meaningless, to him. There was a menace in the unnatural stillness; Fanny's unfinished handkerchief, her stool, were without the warmth of familiar association. It might have been a place into which he had wandered by accident, where he didn't belong, wouldn't stay. It was inconceivable that, above him, his wife and children were sleeping; the ceiling, the supine heavy bodies, seemed to sag until they rested on his shoulders; he was, like Atlas, holding the whole house up. It was with acute difficulty that he shook off the illusion, the weight. From outside came the thin howling of a dog, and it, too, seemed to hold a remote and desperate interrogation.

* * * * *

He slept badly, in short broken stretches, with the Morrises constantly in his mind; and what, in the slightest dislocation of reality, was dream and what waking he couldn't determine; at times his vision seemed to hold both—a door, the irrevocable door, swung open, the end impended, but he was unable to see the faces of the man and woman; when he looked anxiously a blind spot intervened. The morning found him unrefreshed, impatient; and he was glad that his early breakfast was solitary; Lee didn't want then to see either Claire or Fanny, he was in no mood to discuss Peyton's seizure. That, it seemed to Lee Randon, was exactly what had happened to the younger man—Peyton had gone within the region of a contagious fever that had run through all his blood.

Yet, at dinner, to his surprise, Fanny said very little about what had entirely occupied their thoughts; she was quiet, reserved; her attitude was marked by a careful dignity. Her gaze, even more than commonly, rested on her husband. "I had a wretched night, too," she told him; "my head is like a kite. I've thought and thought until my brain aches, it is so full. But there are some things I decided; and if you don't agree with them I'm sorry; because, Lee, I am right, I am indeed."

"Of course you are," he replied; "but, possibly, only for yourself. I mean, for instance, that you can't be sure you're right for Claire."

"No, no, that's just the same as saying there isn't any right or wrong at all, and you know better. Yes, what I am certain about is duty; you must do that before everything else. Peyton's duty is to Claire and their child. It is as clear as this soup. Nothing else matters so much, or at all. Why, Lee, the world is made up of people doing their duty; what, I'd like to know, would become of it if they didn't? You don't seem to realize it, but there are loads of obligations I get dreadfully tired of, like the Social Service when it is my month to follow the accounts, and visits to Annie Hazard who has a cancer of the stomach and is dying, and thinking every day what to get you and the children and the servants to eat. Suppose, some morning, I didn't stir, but just rested in bed—what would happen? What did happen last winter when I had pleurisy? Why, the whole house went to pieces, and, when you weren't worrying about me, while I was getting well, you were the most uncomfortable man imaginable. I don't want you to think I am complaining, or that I don't love every minute and stick and stone of my home and life; I do. But you seem to forget about me ... that's because the house goes along so smoothly. It would be a good lesson if you had to live with some other woman for a while."

"I'm sure every word is so," he returned; "no one could have a better wife; you've spoiled me outrageously; I feel like that pig Christopher has in a pen out by the stable."

"You might think of something nicer to say," she protested. "You're not easy to live with, either," Fanny continued; "you hardly ever agree with what other people think; and you curse fearfully. I wish you wouldn't swear like that, Lee. I object to it very much in Claire; I can't help believing that she thinks it is smart or funny. And you encourage her. If Claire had been different—no, don't interrupt me— this would never have happened. You may say what you like about her good breeding: she's been too flippant. I felt that last night. Claire doesn't accept her obligations seriously enough. She's kept herself lovely looking, but that isn't the whole thing."

"What is the whole thing?" he demanded.

"I've told you, but you won't listen—duty."

"You put that above all the rest?"

Fanny hesitated. "I said my head hurt because I've thought so much. Love and duty, yes; I see them as the same. Duty without love would be hard, and there isn't any love without duty." Fanny evidently grew aware of her threatening incoherence. "It isn't necessary to tell you in so many words," she said defensively; "you are only being contrary."

"You have explained yourself beautifully," he hastened to assure her; "I am the person who is at sea."

"Why, Lee!" she exclaimed, surprised; "I don't know anyone who is so decided. That's what makes me raging, you're so dogmatic. There, that is a splendid word. Don't eat that apple, it isn't baked; I can see from here." She rang. "Varney," Fanny addressed the maid, "take Mr. Randon's apple out and see if there isn't another better done, please. I warned you about that; he can't eat them uncooked."

"Let me keep it," he protested; "it might have an excellent effect on my disposition."

"Don't interfere, Lee," she responded coldly: "yes, Varney. It's really idiotic of you," she turned to him; "you are not a boy any more, you're not even a young man, and you can't take liberties with your digestion. You are quite like Helena with her prayers—if she feels very well she's apt to forget them, but if she's sick she says them as hard as possible. I wish she were like Gregory."

"Gregory and you are cut out of the same gold cloth," Lee Randon pronounced.

"That was lovely of you, Lee." Fanny radiated happiness. "No one could say anything prettier to his old wife." Dinner was over, and, rising, she walked around the table and laid a confident arm on his shoulders. The knife-like tenderness which, principally, he had for her overwhelmed him; and he held Fanny against him in a silent and straining embrace. For that reason he was annoyed at himself when, sitting through an uneventful evening, his simile of the pig, enormously fat, sleepily contented, in its pen, returned to him. It wasn't that he found an actual analogy between the pig and life, individuals, on a higher plane, so much as that he was vaguely disturbed by the impression that there was an ultimate similitude between him, Lee Randon, and a fattened somnolence of existence.

After all, were his individual opinions and doubts expressed in a manner forceful enough to diversify him from a porcine apathy? The pig, secure against the inequalities of fate and weather, wallowed through life with a dull fullness of food as regular as the solar course. Christopher was his wife. Now that, Lee told himself, with a vision of the gardener's moustache, sadly drooping and stained with tobacco, his pale doubtful gaze, was inexcusable. He abruptly directed his thoughts to Peyton and Claire Morris; how exact Claire had been in the expression of her personality! What, he grasped, was different in her from other women was precisely that; together with an astonishing lack of sentimental bias, it operated with the cutting realism of a surgeon's blade. She had, as well, courage.

That was the result of her heritage; and he wondered if all strong traits were the action of superior blood strayed into expected and unexpected places? It was probable, but not susceptible of proof. The pig's blood was that of the best registered Berkshire. God damn the pig!

He asked Fanny if she had heard any further particulars of the proposed rearrangement of the Morrises' lives; when they were to separate; but she knew no more than he. "I hope he doesn't come here," she said vigorously: "I should refuse to speak to him or have him at my table. Outrageous! I can't make out why you take it so coolly. Mina Raff's a rotten immoral woman; it doesn't matter how it's arranged. Why," she gasped, "she can be no more than Peyton's mistress, no better than the women on the street."

"That is so," he agreed. But his following question of the accepted badness of mistresses and streetwalkers he wisely kept to himself. Were they darker than the shadow cast by the inelastic institution of matrimony? At one time prostitutes were greatly honored; but that had passed, he was convinced, forever; and this, on the whole, he concluded, was fortunate; for, perhaps, if prostitution were thoroughly discredited, marriage might, in some Elysian future, be swept of most of its rubbish. Houses of prostitution, mistresses, like charity, absorbed and dissipated a great deal of the dissatisfaction inseparable from the present misconceptions of love and society. The first move, obviously, in stopping war was the suppression of such ameliorating forces as the Red Cross; and, conversely, with complete unions, infidelity would languish and disappear.

* * * * *

He thought of this further in the darkened theatre to which, driven by his growing curiosity, he had gone to see Mina Raff in the leading part of a moving picture. It was a new version, in a new medium, of an old and perennial melodrama; but, too late for the opening scenes, the story for the moment was incomprehensible to him. However, it had to do with the misadventures of a simple country girl in what, obviously, was the conventional idea of a most sophisticated and urbane society. Lee waited, and not vainly, to see the feminine grub transformed, by brilliant clothes, into a butterfly easily surpassing all the select glittering creatures of the city; and he told himself that, personally, he vastly preferred Mina Raff in her plainest dress.

It was strange—seeing her there; while, in fact, she was in New York with far different things occupying her thoughts. Here she was no more than an illusion, a pattern, without substance, of projected light and shade; she had neither voice nor warmth nor color; only the most primitive minds could be carried away, lost, in the convention of her flat mobile effigy! Yet, after a little, he found that he as well was absorbed in the atmosphere of emotional verity she created. It was clear to him now that not the Mina Raff in New York, but this, was the important reality. In herself she was little compared to what she so miraculously did. Then—the final step in a surrender, however much he hated the word, to art—he forgot Mina Raff completely. He lost her partly in his own mental processes and partly in the unhappy girl she was portraying:

It was an uncomplicated story of betrayal, of a marriage that was no marriage, and the birth, in circumstances of wretched loneliness, of an illegitimate baby. The father annoyed Lee excessively; he was the anciently familiar inaccurate shape of conventionalized lust without an identifying human trait. Not for a second did Lee believe in his grease-pencilled incontinence and perfidy; but the child he seduced, incidents of the seduction charged with the beauty of pity, thronged Lee's mind with sensations and ideas. However, it was the world surrounding the central motive, the action, that most engaged him; hardly a trait of generosity dignified it; and, exaggeratedly as a universal meanness and self-righteous cruelty was shown, it scarcely departed, he felt, from the truth.

Why was it that virtue, continence, corroded the heart? Why did people who, through predilection, went to churches, regard those who didn't with such an insistent animosity? Why did the church itself seek to obliterate—as though they were a breathing menace—all who stood outside its doors? There was something terribly wrong in the reaction of life to religion, or in the religion that was applied to life. It began, in the symbolical person of Christ, with, at least, a measure of generosity; but that had been long lost. Now the bitterness of the religious rather resembled envy.

In the picture flickering on the screen the girl who had suffered the agonies of birth sat, with her baby on her young lap, in the forlorn room of a village boarding house. The baby was sick, a doctor had left shortly before, and one minute clenched hand rested on the mother's bare breast. Lee found himself gazing fixedly at the girl's face: trouble slowly clouded it, the trouble was invaded by fear, a terrible question. He realized that the hand was growing cold—the baby was dead.

Waves of suffering passed darkly over the mother, incredulity swiftly followed by a frozen knowledge; she tried with her lips, her mouth, to breath life into the flesh already meaningless, lost to her. Then the tragedy of existence drew her face into a mask universal and timeless, a staring tearless shocked regard as white and inhuman as plaster of Paris. Emotion choked at Lee's throat; and, in a sense of shame at having been so shaken, he admitted that Mina Raff had an extraordinary ability: he evaded the impressive reality by a return to the trivial fact. In the gloom there was only a scattering of applause, a failure of approbation caused either by an excess of emotion in the audience, or—this he thought more probable—a general uneasiness before a great moment of life. The crowded theatre was wholly relieved, itself again, in a succeeding passage of trivial clowning.

Hatred pursued the youthful informally maternal figure: that, eventually, she was saved by the love of an individual was small before the opposed mass—women surrounded her with vitriolic whispers, women turned her maliciously from house to house, a woman had betrayed her. Finally the tide of Christianity rose, burst, in a biblical father who drove her into a night of snow that was a triumph of the actual substituted for the cut paper of stage convention. That she would be rescued, no doubt was permitted; and Lee took no part in the storm of applause which greeted this act of satisfactory heroics.

The other spirit had appalled him: in his state of mental doubt—it might equally have been a condition of obscure hope—he had been rudely shoved toward pessimism; the converse of the announced purpose of the picture. The audience, for one thing, was so depressingly wrong in the placing of its merriment: it laughed delightedly at a gaunt feminine vindictiveness hurrying through the snow on an errand of destruction. The fact that the girl's maternity was transcendent in a generous and confident heart, made lovely by spiritual passion, escaped everyone. The phrase, spiritual passion, had occurred to him without forethought and he wondered if it were permissible, if it meant anything? It did decidedly to him; he told himself further that it was the fusion of the body and all the aspirations called spirit in one supreme act of feeling.

It had been his and Fanny's ... at first. Then the spirit, though it had lingered in other relationships, had deserted the consummation of passion. That hadn't grown perfunctory, but it became a thing more and more strictly of the flesh; with this it was less thrilling. There, he believed, they were not singular; or, anyhow, he wasn't; he saw what he was convinced was the same failure in the men past youth about him. But in Fanny there was, he recognized, that fierce if narrow singleness of impulse, of purity. His thoughts of other women were not innocent of provocative conjecture—Anette's sinuous body, now as dead to him as Alohabad, recurred to his mind—but in this Fanny was utterly loyal. Yes, she had, a thing impossible for any man he had known, a mental singleness of desire.

Was it that which had in her an affinity with the oppressors of the picture, which made her, mechanically, the vigorously enlisted enemy of the actual Mina Raff? It startled him a little to realize that Fanny— for all her marked superiority—was definitely arrayed with the righteous mob. She was sorry for those who failed in the discharge of duty to God and man, and she worked untiringly to reinstate them—in her good opinion. That was it, and it was no more! All such attempted salvation resolved itself into the mere effort to drag men up to the complacent plane of the incidental savior.

This recognition took a great deal of the vigor from his intended conversation with Peyton Morris: anything in the way of patronage, he reflected, would be as useless as it would be false. But he had no impulse to forego his purpose; he was engaged to help Claire who was too proud to help herself; yes, by heaven, and too right for the least humiliation. If Claire suffered, it must be because the world was too inferior for hope of any kind.

Lee was not unaware of the incongruity of his position, for he was equally ignoring the needs of two others, Peyton and Mina Raff. It was evident to him now, since he had seen her in a picture, that she was well worth the greatest consideration. She lay outside the stream of ordinary responsibilities. What held him steady was the belief that she and Peyton were not so important to each other as they thought; Claire needed him more badly than Mina. There was a possibility—no, it was probable—that Claire deserted would develop into an individual as empty and as vacantly sounding as a drum. She had said as much. Her heritage, together with its splendors of courage and charm, signally carried that menace.

* * * * *

So much, joined to what already was thronging his thoughts, brought Lee's mind to resemble the sheet of an enormous ledger covered with a jumble of figures apparently beyond any reduction to an answer. He was considering Claire and Mina Raff, Mina and Claire, at a hunt breakfast at Willing Spencer's in Nantbrook Valley, north of Eastlake, when, with a plate of food in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, he collided with Peyton Morris, his face pinched and his eyes dull from a lack of rest. The Spencer house was sparely furnished, a square unimpressive dwelling principally adapted to the early summers of its energetic children; and Peyton and Lee Randon allowed themselves to be crowded into the bare angle formed by a high inner door.

"Claire told you," the younger said.

"Yes," Lee replied briefly. It wouldn't, after all, be difficult to talk to Peyton; he was obviously miserable from the necessity of suppressing what absorbed his entire consciousness.

"Well, I suppose you think there's nothing to be said for me," his voice was defiant; "and that I ought to be shot."

"Very much to the contrary," Lee asserted; "there is so much to say that it's difficult to know where to begin. With another situation practically the same, I might have agreed with you thoroughly; but, with Claire and what I have gathered of you, in this special one I can't."

"It isn't absolutely necessary," the other pointed out; "Mina and I will have a lot to ignore."

"The first thing you'll have to manage," Lee observed sharply, "is to grow up. You are not in a place to be helped by leather-headed satire and visions of solitary grandeur. My interest comes only from Claire and some personal curiosity; Mina Raff doesn't require anyone's assistance. Of you all, her position is clearest. I don't know if you can be brought to see it, but this is only incidental, a momentary indulgence, with her."

"What you don't seem to get," Peyton told him, with a brutally cold face, "is that I may smash you; now, where you are."

"That was possible," Lee agreed; "and you are right—I had overlooked it. I think that's passed, though; I'm going to keep on as if it were. Why, you young fool, you seem to have no conception, none in the world, of what you propose to do. In a week, in your frame of mind, you'd have a hundred fights; there would be time for nothing else but knocking out the men who insulted you. You'll collapse over Sunday if you are not absolutely and totally impervious to everything and everybody. The only way you can throw the world over is to ignore it; while you appear to have the idea that it should put a rose in your buttonhole."

"You don't have to tell me it's going to be stiff," Peyton Morris asserted gloomily. "I can take care of that. Claire and Ira are the hard part. Lee, if anyone a year ago had said that I was like this, that I was even capable of it, I'd have ruined him. God, what a thing to happen! I want you to understand that we, Mina and I, didn't have a particle to do with it—it just flatly occurred. I had seen her only three times when it was too late; and if you think I didn't try to break it, and myself, too—"

Lee nodded. "Certainly. Why not, since it's bound to knock you on the head? You've been very unfortunate: I can't imagine a man to whom this would come worse."

"If I can make Mina happy I don't care about myself."

"Of course, that is understood," Lee Randon returned impatiently; "it is nothing but sentimental rot, all the same. If you are not contented, easy in mind, how can she be happy? You have got to believe entirely in what you are doing, it must be right to you on every possible side; and you can't make that grade, Peyton; you are too conventional underneath."

"Sink your spurs in me," he said doggedly; "it's funny when you really think about it. Why, only a little while ago, if I had heard of a man doing this, I would have beaten him up just on general principles: running away from his wife and child, with another woman, an actress, that's what it is! I tell myself that, but the words haven't a trace of meaning or importance. Somehow, they don't seem to apply to me, to us; they can say what they like, but Mina isn't wicked. She—she loves me, Lee; and, suddenly, that swept everything else out of sight.

"But go back to me—you realize that I was rather in favor of what I was, what I had. Brandenhouse is a good school and my crowd ran it. We were pretty abrupt with boys who whored about; and, at Princeton, well, we thought we were it. We were, still, there; and I got a heavy idea of what I liked and was like. We were very damned honorable and the icing on the cake generally. That was good after I left college, too; but what's the use of going into it; I was in the same old Brandenhouse surrounding. The war split us wide open. Or I thought it did; but, Lee, by God, I don't believe it changed a thing. I got my touch of concussion early, Ira was born, and, and—"

"Disaster," Lee Randon pronounced shortly.

"Call it that if you choose; there isn't much use in calling it at all: it simply is."

"With someone else, yes; but with you, no, not finally; you haven't the character and disposition to get away with it. You don't, secretly, approve of yourself, Peyton; and that will be fatal. The truth is that, while you want this now, in a year, or two years, or five, you'll demand the other. You think it is going to be different from everything else in heaven and earth, you're convinced it's going to stay all in the sky; but it will be on the solid familiar ground. Understand again —it isn't your plan I'm attacking; but your ability; that and your real ignorance of Mina Raff.

"If you imagine for an instant that this love will be bigger than her work, if you suppose that, against her acting, it will last, you are an idiot for your pains. If I don't know the side of her you do, I have become fairly familiar with one you haven't dreamed of. She is a greater actress than people yet recognize, principally because of the general doubt about moving pictures; but that recognition will come, and, when it does, you will be swept out of sight.

"No, you haven't the slightest suspicion of what it is about; that side of her, and it's very nearly the whole woman, is a blank. She admitted to me that she couldn't understand it herself. But what she is doing is dragging into her genius what it needs. She loves you now, and tomorrow she'll love a Belgian violinist, a great engineer, a Spanish prince at San Sebastian. How will you take sitting in the salon and hearing them padding around over your head? It's no good your getting mad at me; I am not blaming Mina Raff; you are. I admire her tremendously.

"In the beginning I said she could watch out for herself, and I intimated that I was reasonably indifferent to what happened to you: it is Claire I am concerned about. Unfortunately for her, and without much reason, she loves you too. When Mina is done with you and you stray back, from, perhaps, South America, Claire won't be here. I don't mean that she will have gone away, or be dead in the familiar sense. I haven't any doubt but that she would live with you again—she is not small-minded and she's far more unconventional than you—what there was of her."

"If you or anyone else thinks that I don't admire Claire—" he stopped desperately. "We won't get far talking," Peyton added; "even if all you have said is a fact. You can't hit on much that I've missed. You might just as well curse me and let me go."

"Nothing of the sort," Lee Randon returned equably; "that's exactly what I have no intention of doing. In the interest of Claire I must try to open your eyes." The younger man said indignantly:

"You talk as though I were a day-old kitten. It's cursed impertinent: I don't seem to remember asking for so much advice."

* * * * *

Throughout their conversation they were both holding the plates of sausage and scrambled eggs, from which rose a pungent odor, inevitable to the occasion. And, in a silence which fell upon them, Lee realized the absurdity of their position behind the door. "We can't keep this up," he declared, and moved into the eddying throng, the intermingling ceaseless conversations. Almost at once Peyton Morris disappeared, and Lee found Fanny at his shoulder. Neither of them fox-hunted, although they hacked a great deal over the country roads and fields, and they had ridden to the Spencers' that morning. Fanny wore dark brown and a flattened hunting derby which, with her hair in a short braid tied by a stiff black ribbon, was particularly becoming. She was, he told himself, with her face positively animated, sparkling, from talk, unusually attractive. Fanny was like that—at times she was singularly engaging.

"What did he say?" she demanded, nodding in the direction in which Peyton had disappeared. "I have avoided him all morning."

"An uncommon lot for Peyton," Lee acknowledged. "I almost think he has been jarred out of his self-complacency. But, on the whole, that is not possible. It's temporary with him. At one time I thought—in the language of youth—he was going to crown me."

"The little beast!" she exclaimed viciously. "If he had I'd have made him sorry. I saw Claire a few minutes ago, and she asked me to tell you, if she missed you, that she had something for you to see. Wasn't it strange that she said nothing to me about it? I should think, in her scrape, she'd rather turn to a woman than to a man. But Claire isn't very feminine: I've always felt her hardness."

"Then that's why she didn't speak to you," Lee assented superficially. "I'll go over tonight, after dinner. They must be pretty nearly ready to drop the fox, and it's beginning to drizzle."

There was, soon after that, an exodus from the back of the house to the fields beyond. It was a very fair hunting country, rolling and clear of brush, with grouped woods on the surrounding hills and streams in the swales below. The clouds were broken and aqueous, and the grass held a silver veil of fine raindrops. Only an inconsiderable part of those present were following the hounds; the others, in a restricted variety of sporting garb—the men in knickerbockers and gaiters or riding breeches, the women breeched and severely coated or swathed in wide reddish tweed capes—stood, with a scattering of umbrellas and upturned collars, in a semi-circle on the soggy turf.

There was a baying of hounds from the direction of the stables, and the Master swung up on a bright chestnut horse with a braided tail. A huntsman appeared with a shuttered box, holding the fox, and an old brown and white hound bitch, wise with many years of hunting, to follow and establish and announce the scent. "If you are ready, Brace," the Master said to his huntsman, "you may drop." A stable boy held the hound, and, raising the shutter, Brace shook the fox out on the ground.

The animal—in view of the commotion about to pursue it—was surprisingly small, slim flanked; proportionately the tail seemed extravagant. "I hope the brush won't get wet," a man behind Lee spoke; "when it does they can't run." As it was, the fox, obviously, was reluctant to start; it crouched in the rough grass and glanced fleetly around with incredibly sharp black eyes. The men shouted and flung up their arms; but the animal was indifferent to their laudable efforts. The hunt, Lee Randon thought, had assumed an aspect of the ridiculous; the men and women on expensive excited horses, the pack yelping from beyond a road, the expectant on-lookers, were mocked by the immobility of the puzzled subject of the chase. Finally the fox obligingly moved a few steps; it hesitated again, and then trotted forward, slipping under a fence. Lee could follow it clearly across the next field and into the next; its progress was unhurried, deliberate, insolent.

"Give him six minutes," the Master decided.

When the time had gone the leash of the single hound was slipped. She ran around in a circle, whining eagerly, her nose to the sod, and then with a high yelp, set smartly off in a direction absolutely opposite to that taken by the fox. She was brought back and her nose held to the hot scent; again, with a fresh assurance, the bitch gave tongue, followed the trail to where it went under the fence, and turned, instead of bearing to the right, to the left. There were various exclamations. A kennel man declared, "She knows what she's about, and the fox will swing into Sibley's Cover." Someone else more sceptically asserted that the hound was a fool. Her sustained cry floated back from under the hill; and, in another minute, the pack, the hunt, was off. The horses rose gracefully in a sleek brown tide over the first fence; and then there was a division—the hounds scattered and bunched and scattered, some of the riders went to the left after the palpable course of the fox, others pounded direct for Sibley's Cover, and the remainder reined up over the hounds.

Although long association and familiarity had made such scenes a piece with Lee Randon's subconsciousness, today the hunt seemed nothing more than nonsense. He laughed, and made a remark of disparaging humor; but he found no support. Willing Spencer, kept out of the field by a broken collar bone, gazed at him with lifted eyebrows. Fanny and Lee turned to their horses, held for them by a groom at a mounting block, and went home. The rain had increased, but, not cold, Lee found it pleasant on his face. They jogged quietly over the roads bordered with gaunt sombre hedges, through the open countryside, into Eastlake.

Nothing, he realized, had been accomplished with Peyton Morris; the other was too numbed, shocked, by the incredible accident that had overtaken him to listen to reason. Lee felt that he could hardly have said more. He wondered what Claire had to show him. Still, he wasn't through with her husband; he had no intention of resting until every hope was exhausted. What particularly impressed him—he must speak of it to Peyton—was that no matter where Morris might get he would find life monotonously the same. It was very much like mountain climbing— every peak looked different, more iridescent and desirable, from the one occupied; but, gazing back, that just left appeared as engaging, as rare, as any in the distance. Every experience in the life surrounding him was the same as all the others; no real change was offered, because the same dull response permeated all living; no escape such as Peyton planned was possible.

Escape, Lee Randon continued, happened within; it was not, he repeated, a place on earth, or any possession, but a freedom, a state, of mind. Peyton Morris, while it was quite possible for him to be destroyed, was incapable of mental liberty, readjustments; he might drive himself on the rocks, on the first reef where he disregarded the clamor of warning bells and carefully charted directions, but he was no Columbus for the discovery of a magical island, a Cuba, of spices and delectable palms. Peyton had looked with a stolid indifference at the dangerously fascinating, the incomprehensible, smile of Cytherea. Yes, if the young donkey could be forced past this tempting patch of grazing, if he could only be driven a short distance farther down the highway of custom, Claire would be safe.

But she must be made to think that such a conclusion had been purely the result of Peyton's reserved strength, and not of a mere negative surrender following doubt. And, above all, there must be no appearance of Mina Raff having, after a short trial, herself discarded him. On such trivialities Claire's ultimate happiness might hang. Truth was once more wholly restrained, hidden, dissimulated; the skillful shifting of painted masks, false-faces, continued uninterrupted its progress. A new lethargy enveloped Lee: his interest, his confidence, in what he was trying to prevent waned. What did it matter who went and who stayed? In the end it was the same, unprofitable and stale. All, probably, that his thought had accomplished was to rob his ride of its glow, make flat the taste of the whiskey and charged water he prepared. However, shortly a pervading warmth—but it was of the spirits—brought back his lately unfamiliar sense of well-being.

* * * * *

The Morrises lived in a large remodelled brick house, pleasantly pseudo-classic, beyond the opposite boundary of Eastlake; and, leaving his car in the turn of the drive past the main door, Lee walked into the wide hall which swept from front to back, and found a small dinner party at the stage of coffee and cigarettes. It was composed, he saw at once, of Peyton's friends; as he entered three young men rose punctiliously—Christian Wager, with hair growing close like a mat on a narrow skull and a long irregular nose; Gilbert Bromhead, a round figure and a face with the contours and expression, the fresh color, of a pleasant and apple-like boy; and Peyton. They had been at their university together; and, Lee Randon saw, they were making, with a characteristic masculine innocence, an effort to secure their wives in the same bond of affectionate understanding that held them.

Claire, who had smiled acknowledgingly with her eyes when Lee approached, returned to a withdrawn concentration upon the section of table-cloth immediately before her; she answered the remarks directed to her with a temporary measure of animation vanishing at once with the effort. Christian Wager, who was in London with a branch of an American banking firm, had married an English girl strikingly named Evadore. She was large, with black hair cut in a scanty bang; but beyond these unastonishing facts there was nothing in her appearance to mark or remember. However, a relative of hers, he had been told, distant but authentic, had been a lady-in-waiting to the Queen. Gilbert Bromhead's wife was southern, a small appealing compound of the essence of the superlatively feminine.

Lee Randon, in a chair drawn up for him at the table, studied the women, arbitrarily thrown together, with a secret entertainment. Evadore Wager was frankly—to a degree almost Chinese—curious about the others. At short regular intervals, in a tone of unvaried timbre and inexhaustible surprise, she half exclaimed, "Fancy." Claire was metallic, turned in, with an indifference to her position that was actually rude, upon herself. But Mrs. Gilbert Bromhead made up for any silence around her in a seductive, low-pitched continuous talking. A part of this was superficially addressed to Claire and the solidly amazed Evadore; but all its underlying intention, its musical cadences and breathless suspensions for approval, were flung at the men. The impression she skillfully conveyed to Lee Randon, by an art which never for an instant lost its aspect of the artless, was that he, at least, older in experience than the rest there, alone entirely understood and engaged her.

The men—even Peyton, temporarily—resting confident on a successful bringing of their wives into the masculine simplicity of their common memories and affection, said little. With eyes puckered wisely against the cigarette smoke they made casual remarks about their present occupations and terse references to companions and deeds of the past. Only Peyton had been of any athletic importance; he had played university foot-ball; and, in view of this, there was still a tinge of respect in Bromhead's manner. A long run of Peyton's, crowned with a glorious and winning score, was recalled. But suddenly it failed to stir him. "How young we were then," he observed gloomily.

Christian Wager protested. "That isn't the right tone. We were young then, true, but Princeton was teaching us what it meant to be men. In that game, Morris, you got something invaluable to you now, hard endurance and fairness—"

"In my day," Lee interposed, "the team was told to sink a heel in any back that looked a little too good for us."

"There were instructors like that," Gilbert Bromhead assented; "and some graduate coaches are pretty cunning; but they are being discredited."

Wager largely, obliviously, passed over this interruption. "We learned decency," he proceeded, "in business and ideals and living; and to give and take evenly. In the war and in civil life we were and are behind the big issues. This new license and socialistic rant, the mental and moral bounders, must be held down, and we are the men to do it. Yes, and I believe in the church, the right church, we're all for that: I tell you the country depends on the men the best colleges turn out."

"My God, Christian, you must have made a lot of money lately," Bromhead observed. "You talk exactly like the president of a locomotive works. You have been dining with the best, too; I can tell that with certainty. Answer us this, honestly—do you mention the Royal Family in your prayers?"

Evadore laughed. "Do you know, that's really awfully good. He does put it on a bit, doesn't he?"

"If you let Christian go on," Peyton added, "he'll talk about the sacred ties of Anglo-Saxon blood and tradition, with the English and American exchange ruling the world. Gilbert, how did your artillery company get along with the Londoners?"

"All right, if we were near a brick yard."

Claire rose abruptly, and they drifted out to a reception room opening, with a wide arch, beyond the hall. Gilbert Bromhead's wife hesitated; then, confidentially, she told Lee that she adored to sit on stairs. "Very well," he assented; "these of the Morrises' are splendid." He was a step below her, and her knees and his shoulder settled together.

"I like older men so much," she admitted what she had already so adroitly conveyed; "patches of grey above the ears are so distinguished."

"Older than what?"

Apparently forgetful that her gesture included Gilbert Bromhead she indicated the rooms that now held the others. "Young men are so head over heels," she particularized; "they are always disarranging things." She laughed, a delectable sound. "I oughtn't to have said that, and I wouldn't—to them. I might almost tell you the story about the man in the department store and the drawers." Their contact was more pronounced. "Isn't that English girl extraordinary? I didn't believe for a minute that was her own color till I was close to it. Her hair isn't dyed; but why does she wear that skimpy bang?" Again she laughed, a pure golden melody. "But you admired it, I know you did; men are so unaccountable. Could you trust her, do you think? It wasn't very nice to make fun of her husband." Adroitly, without the flutter of a ruffle, she moved to a higher step, and Claire—before Lee had any premonition of her appearance—stood below them with chocolates.

"She is rather attractive," his companion admitted, when Claire had gone. "She doesn't like me, or Mrs. Wager, though; and I must say she made it plain in her own house. I've been studying her, and there is something wrong. Is she happy with Peyton Morris? I thought he was right nice until you came." She turned for a better view, through the balustrade, of the doors beyond, and then drew her skirt close so that he could move up beside her. "It's just like a smoke-house in there," she reported. "I don't truthfully think cigarettes are nice for a woman; and I wouldn't dream of taking whiskey; in the South we never. You'd call that out of date." She bent forward, arranging the ribbon of a slipper, and her mouth met his in a long kiss.

"What made you suppose you could do that?" she demanded; "how did you know I wouldn't be cross with you? But ... somehow I didn't mind. Although you mustn't again, so publicly. I wonder why, with you, it seemed so perfectly nice, and not at all as if I had only met you?"

There was a response to that as recognized, as exact, as the bishop's move in chess; indeed, it was expected of him; she was hesitating, waiting for it; but he was unable to reassure her with the conventional sentiment. A month ago he would have commanded and developed an enticing situation; but now, for Lee Randon, it was without possibilities, hardly more than perfunctory. A shade of vexation invaded her bearing, and she moved a significant infinitesimal fraction away from him. Then she discovered a wind blowing down the stairs. "I have to take such good care of myself," she told Lee, preparing to descend. "It is because I am so delicate—I can get upset at nothing. Here you are all so strong; you have an advantage over me. Gilbert, dear," she called from the hall, her voice musical with tender reproach, "I can't see how you love me, you stay away so far."

* * * * *

"What did the little ass say to you?" Claire asked. Lee was standing with her by the piano, and the others were around the fireplace in the farther spaciousness. "Nothing much," he replied. "You mean that she never stopped. I'll admit she's skillful; but she needn't think I'm a fool. But you will never guess what I want to tell you. My dear Lee, that Mrs. Grove wrote me a letter. I have it here in my dress, for you to read. It's a scream." He took the sheet of note paper: it was grey with an address on East Sixty-sixth Street embossed in pale vermilion, and had an indefinable scent. The writing was decisive:

"MY DEAR MRS. MORRIS,

"It is so difficult for me to express my disturbance at what Mina Raff has just told me, that I am asking to see you here, at my house in New York. Engagements make it difficult for me to leave at present. I hope you will not find this impertinent from an older woman, threatened very much as you in her affections by an impossible calamity—"

The signature, Savina Grove, had the crispness of a name often attached to opinions and papers of authority.

"That's rather cool," he agreed.

"Cool! The woman's demented. No, I suppose she thinks I am an honest wronged woman or something objectionable of the sort. I was going to throw it away when I kept it to amuse you."

"It does, Claire; and I'm glad to see it; impertinent as she admits it may be, you must consider. As Mrs. Grove writes, you are both caught."

"If you think I'll go see her you are madder still."

"I realize you won't; but worse things could happen. It's the only possible approach to Mina Raff; I had a chance to try Peyton, but it did no good. It seems to me this Mina ought to have some understanding."

Claire Morris said: "You can do it."

He reflected. "Well, perhaps; I'm your uncle; there are no brothers, and what other family you have is away. It might be useful. Anyhow, she would hear a thing or two about you from me."

"Seriously, Lee, you'd only get angry: I can see Mrs. Grove as though she were in the room—the utmost New York self-satisfaction. And I won't have you discussing my affairs."

"Absurd. A thousand people will be talking about them soon if this isn't managed. I have an idea I had better go to New York and try what can be done there. I got along well enough with the girl herself; and perhaps, though it's not likely, Mrs. Grove has some influence."

"Of course, I can't stop you," Claire said; her hand strayed over his, on the piano. "I'm simply enraged at myself, Lee. Why, I should let him go with cheers—except where I was sorry for him—but I can't. He is such a sweet child; and, you see, he was all mine."

"I can't leave before Thursday." He considered. "I'll have a wire sent to the Groves, say something regretful and polite about you—measles."

"Don't bother," she returned.

Peyton came stiffly up to them. "I happened to mention, Claire, that we had some champagne left, and it created the intensest excitement. I told them it would do no good, that you were keeping hold of it; but they insisted on a look at the bottles."

"Get them, Peyton," she replied unhesitatingly. "I was keeping it, but perhaps for now. This is a very appropriate time for you and me, and the last of the cases left over from our wedding."

An expression of pain tightened his mouth; he turned away without further speech. "We'll have it in the dining-room," Claire announced; "big glasses filled with ice." They gathered about the bare table, and Peyton Morris ranged the dark green bottles, capped in white foil, on the sideboard. He worked with a napkin at a cork: there was a restrained sibilant escaping pressure, and the liquid rose in frothing bubbles through the ice.

It was, Lee thought, a golden drink, flooded, up to a variable point, with an inimitable gaiety. In comparison whiskey was brutalizing; sherry was involved with a number of material accompanying pleasures; port was purely masculine and clarets upset him; beer was a beverage and not a delight; ale a soporific; and Rhine wines he ignored. Champagne held in solution the rhythm of old Vienna waltzes, of ball rooms with formal greenery, floating with passions as light as the tarleton skirts floating about dancing feet. But it wasn't, he insisted, a wine for indiscriminate youth—youth that couldn't distinguish between the sweet and the dry. It was for men like himself, with memories, unrealized dreams. Ugly women, and women who were old, and certainly prudes, should never be given a sip.

Peyton Morris again filled all the glasses; there was a clatter of talk, the accent of the South, about Lee; but he grew oblivious of it. Champagne always gave Fanny a headache; neither was it a drink for contented mothers, housewives. Contrarily, it was the ideal, the only, wine for seductions. It belonged most especially to masked balls, divine features vanishing under a provocative edge of black satin. He thought of little hidden tables and fantastic dresses, fragile emotion; lips and knees and garters. It all melted away before the intentness of Claire's expression. Peyton was doggedly holding to the rim of the table; Gilbert Bromhead was very close to Evadore; the black sheath of her hair had slipped and her eyes were blank; the blanched delicate hand of the South nearest Christian Wager had disappeared, Christian's hand on that side could not be seen. Peyton once more filled the glasses: