She was quite calm during this period, her mind full of trivial things. She had the firm conviction that she was living in a dream, that nothing of what was happening was irrevocable. And besides, as at Lydford, for much of the day, she was absorbed in the material details of her life, being rubbed and dressed and undressed, and adorned and fed and catered to. They were spending the few days before sailing in a very grand hotel, overlooking Central Park. Sylvia had almost every day the thought that she herself was now in the center of exactly the same picture in which, as a child, she had enviously watched Aunt Victoria. She adored every detail of it. It was an opening-out, even from the Lydford life. She felt herself expanding like a dried sponge placed in water, to fill every crack and crevice of the luxurious habits of life. The traveling along that road is always swift; and Sylvia's feet were never slow. During the first days in Vermont, it had seemed a magnificence to her that she need never think of dish-washing or bed-making. By this time it seemed quite natural to her that Helene drew and tempered the water for her bath, and put on her stockings. Occasionally she noticed with a little surprise that she seemed to have no more free time than in the laborious life of La Chance; but for the most part she threw out, in all haste, innumerable greedy root-tendrils into the surcharged richness of her new soil and sent up a rank growth of easeful acquiescence in redundance.

The wedding was quite as grand as the Sommervilles had tried to make it. The street was crowded with staring, curious, uninvited people on either side of the church, and when the carriage containing the bride drove up, the surge forward to see her was as fierce as though she had been a defaulting bank-president being taken to prison. The police had to intervene. The interior, fern and orchid swathed, very dimly lighted by rich purple stained glass and aristocratic dripping wax candles instead of the more convenient electric imitations, was murmurous with the wonderful throbbing notes of a great organ and with the discreet low tones of the invited guests as they speculated about the relative ages and fortunes of the bride and bridegroom. The chancel was filled with a vested choir which, singing and carrying a cross, advanced down the aisle to meet the bridal party. Molly, who had not been in a church since her childhood, had needed to be coached over and over again in the ins and outs of the complicated service.

Sylvia, seated several guests away from the aisle, saw little of the procession as it went up into the chancel. She caught a glimpse of a misty mass of white and, beside it, old Mr. Sommerville's profile, very white and nervous and determined. She did not at that time see the bridegroom at all. The ceremony, which took place far within the chancel, was long and interspersed with music from the choir. Sylvia, feeling very queer and callous, as though, under an anaesthetic, she were watching with entire unconcern the amputation of one of her limbs, fell to observing the people about her. The woman in front of her leaned against the pew and brought her broad, well-fed back close under Sylvia's eyes. It was covered with as many layers as a worm in a cocoon. There were beads on lace, the lace incrusted on other lace, chiffon, fish-net, a dimly seen filmy satin, cut in points, and, lower down, an invisible foundation of taffeta. Through the interstices there gleamed a revelation of the back itself, fat, white, again like a worm in a cocoon.

Sylvia began to plan out a comparison of dress with architecture, bringing out the insistent tendency in both to the rococo, to the burying of structural lines in ornamentation. The cuff, for instance, originally intended to protect the skin from contact with unwashable fabrics, degenerated into a mere bit of "trimming," which has lost all its meaning, which may be set anywhere on the sleeve. Like a strong hand about her throat came the knowledge that she was planning to say all this to please Felix Morrison, who was now within fifty feet of her, being married to another woman.

She flamed to fever and chilled again to her queer absence of spirit.... There was a chorister at the end of the line near her, a pale young man with a spiritual face who chanted his part with shining rapt eyes. While he sang he slipped his hand under his white surplice and took out his watch. Still singing "Glory be to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost," he cast a hasty eye on the watch and frowned impatiently. He was evidently afraid the business in hand would drag along and make him late to another appointment, "—is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen!" he sang fervently. Sylvia repressed an hysterical desire to laugh.

The ceremony was over; the air in the building beat wildly against the walls, the stained-glass windows, and the ears of the worshipers in the excited tumult of the wedding-march; the procession began to leave the chancel. This time Sylvia caught one clear glimpse of the principals, but it meant nothing to her. They looked like wax effigies of themselves, self-conscious, posed, emptied of their personalities by the noise, the crowds, the congestion of ceremony. The idea occurred to Sylvia that they looked as though they had taken in as little as she the significance of what had happened. The people about her were moving in relieved restlessness after the long immobility of the wedding. The woman next her went down on her knees for a devout period, her face in her white gloves. When she rose, she said earnestly to her companion, "Do you know if I had to choose one hat-trimming for all the rest of my life, I should make it small pink roses in clusters. It's perfectly miraculous how, with black chiffon, they never go out!" She settled in place the great cluster of costly violets at her breast which she seemed to have exuded like some natural secretion of her plump and expensive person. "Why don't they let us out!" she said complainingly.

A young man, one of those born to be a wedding usher, now came swiftly up the aisle on patent leather feet and untied with pearl-gray fingers the great white satin ribbon which restrained them in the pew. Sylvia caught her aunt's eye on her, its anxiety rather less well hidden than usual. With no effort at all the girl achieved a flashing smile. It was not hard. She felt quite numb. She had been present only during one or two painful, quickly passed moments.

But the reception at the house, the big, old-fashioned, very rich Sommerville house, was more of an ordeal. There was the sight of the bride and groom in the receiving-line, now no longer badly executed graven images, but quite themselves—Molly starry-eyed, triumphant, astonishingly beautiful, her husband distinguished, ugly, self-possessed, easily the most interesting personality in the room; there was the difficult moment of the presentation, the handclasp with Felix, the rapturous vague kiss from Molly, evidently too uplifted to have any idea as to the individualities of the people defiling before her; then the passing on into the throng, the eating and drinking and talking with acquaintances from the Lydford summer colony, of whom there were naturally a large assortment. Sylvia had a growing sense of pain, which was becoming acute when across the room she saw Molly, in a lull of arrivals, look up to her husband and receive from him a smiling, intimate look of possession. Why, they were married! It was done!

The delicate food in Sylvia's mouth turned to ashes.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith's voice, almost fluttered, almost (for her) excited, came to her ears: "Sylvia—here is Mr. Page! And he's just told me the most delightful news, that he's decided to run over to Paris for a time this fall."

"I hope Miss Marshall will think that Paris will be big enough for all of us?" asked Austin Page, fixing his remarkably clear eyes on the girl.

She made a great effort for self-possession. She turned her back on the receiving-line. She held out her hand cordially. "I hope Paris will be quite, quite small, so that we shall all see a great deal of each other," she said warmly.



CHAPTER XXXIV

SYLVIA TELLS THE TRUTH

They left Mrs. Marshall-Smith with a book, seated on a little yellow-painted iron chair, the fifteen-centime kind, at the top of the great flight of steps leading down to the wide green expanse of the Tapis Vert. She was alternately reading Huysmans' highly imaginative ideas on Gothic cathedrals, and letting her eyes stray up and down the long facade of the great Louis. Her powers of aesthetic assimilation seemed to be proof against this extraordinary mixture of impressions. She had insisted that she would be entirely happy there in the sun, for an hour at least, especially if she were left in solitude with her book. On which intimation Sylvia and Page had strolled off to do some exploring. It was a situation which a month of similar arrangements had made very familiar to them.

"No, I don't know Versailles very well," he said in answer to her question, "but I believe the gardens back of the Grand and Petit Trianon are more interesting than these near the Chateau itself. The conscientiousness with which they're kept up is not quite so formidable."

So they walked down the side of the Grand Canal, admiring the rather pensive beauty of the late November woods, and talking, as was the proper thing, about the great Louis and his court, and how they both detested his style of gilded, carved wall ornamentation, although his chairs weren't as bad as some others. They turned off at the cross-arm of the Canal towards the Great Trianon; they talked, again dutifully in the spirit of the place, about Madame de Maintenon. They differed on this subject just enough to enjoy discussing it. Page averred that the whole affair had always passed his comprehension, "—what that ease-loving, vain, indulgent, trivial-minded grandson of Henri Quatre could ever have seen for all those years in that stiff, prim, cold old school-ma'am—"

But Sylvia shook her head. "I know how he felt. He had to have her, once he'd found her. She was the only person in all his world he could depend on."

"Why not depend on himself?" Page asked.

"Oh, he couldn't! He couldn't! She had character and he hadn't."

"What do you mean by character?" he challenged her.

"It's what I haven't!" she said.

He attempted a chivalrous exculpation. "Oh, if you mean by character such hard, insensitive lack of imagination as Madame de Maintenon's—"

"No, not that," said Sylvia. "You know what I mean by character as well as I."

By the time they were back of the Little Trianon, this beginning had led them naturally enough away from the frivolities of historical conversation to serious considerations, namely themselves. The start had been a reminiscence of Sylvia's, induced by the slow fall of golden leaves from the last of the birches into the still water of the lake in the midst of Marie Antoinette's hamlet. They stopped on an outrageously rustic bridge, constructed quite in the artificially rural style of the place, and, leaning on the railing, watched in a fascinated silence the quiet, eddying descent of the leaves. There was not a breath of wind. The leaves detached themselves from the tree with no wrench. They loosened their hold gradually, gradually, and finally out of sheer fullness of maturity floated down to their graves with a dreamy content.

"I never happened to see that effect before," said Page. "I supposed leaves were detached only by wind. It's astonishingly peaceful, isn't it?"

"I saw it once before," said Sylvia, her eyes fixed on the noiseless arabesques traced by the leaves in their fall—"at home in La Chance. I'll never forget it." She spoke in a low tone as though not to break the charmed silence about them, and, upon his asking her for the incident, she went on, almost in a murmur: "It isn't a story you could possibly understand. You've never been poor. But I'll tell you if you like. I've talked to you such a lot about home and the queer people we know—did I ever mention Cousin Parnelia? She's a distant cousin of my mother's, a queer woman who lost her husband and three children in a train-wreck years ago, and has been a little bit crazy ever since. She has always worn, for instance, exactly the same kind of clothes, hat and everything, that she had on, the day the news was brought to her. The Spiritualists got hold of her then, and she's been one herself for ever so long—table-rapping—planchette-writing—all the horrid rest of it, and she makes a little money by being a "medium" for ignorant people. But she hardly earns enough that way to keep her from starving, and Mother has for ever so long helped her out.

"Well, there was a chance to buy a tiny house and lot for her—two hundred and twenty dollars. It was just a two-roomed cottage, but it would be a roof over her head at least. She is getting old and ought to have something to fall back on. Mother called us all together and said this would be a way to help provide for Cousin Parnelia's old age. Father never could bear her (he's so hard on ignorant, superstitious people), but he always does what Mother thinks best, so he said he'd give up the new typewriter he'd been hoping to buy. Mother gave up her chicken money she'd been putting by for some new rose-bushes, and she loves her roses too! Judith gave what she'd earned picking raspberries, and I—oh, how I hated to do it! but I was ashamed not to—I gave what I'd saved up for my autumn suit. Lawrence just stuck it out that he hated Cousin Parnelia and he wouldn't give a bit. But he was so little that he only had thirty cents or something like that in a tin bank, so it didn't matter. When we put it all together it wasn't nearly enough of course, and we took the rest out of our own little family savings-bank rainy-day savings and bought the tiny house and lot. Father wanted to 'surprise' Cousin Parnelia with the deed. He wanted to lay it under some flowers in a basket, or slip it into her pocket, or send it to her with some eggs or something. But Mother—it was so like her!—the first time Cousin Parnelia happened to come to the house, Mother picked up the deed from her desk and said offhand, 'Oh, Parnelia, we bought the little Garens house for you,' and handed her the paper, and went to talking about cutworms or Bordeaux mixture."

Page smiled, appreciative of the picture. "I see her. I see your mother—Vermont to the core."

"Well, it was only about two weeks after that, I was practising and Mother was rubbing down a table she was fixing over. Nobody else happened to be at home. Cousin Parnelia came in, her old battered black straw hat on one ear as usual. She was all stirred up and pleased about a new 'method' of using planchette. You know what planchette is, don't you? The little heart-shaped piece of wood spiritualists use, with a pencil fast to it, to take down their silly 'messages,' Some spiritualistic fake was visiting town conducting seances and he claimed he'd discovered some sort of method for inducing greater receptivity—or something like that. I don't know anything about spiritualism but little tags I've picked up from hearing Cousin Parnelia talk. Anyway, he was 'teaching' other mediums for a big price. And it came out that Cousin Parnelia had mortgaged the house for more than it was worth, and had used the money to take those 'lessons.' I couldn't believe it for a minute. When I really understood what she'd done, I was so angry I felt like smashing both fists down on the piano keys and howling! I thought of my blue corduroy I'd given up—I was only fourteen and just crazy about clothes. Mother was sitting on the floor, scraping away at the table-leg. She got up, laid down her sandpaper, and asked Cousin Parnelia if she'd excuse us for a few minutes. Then she took me by the hand, as though I was a little girl. I felt like one too, I felt almost frightened by Mother's face, and we both marched out of the house. She didn't say a word. She took me down to our swimming-hole in the river. There is a big maple-tree leaning over that. It was a perfectly breathless autumn day like this, and the tree was shedding its leaves like that birch, just gently, slowly, steadily letting them go down into the still water. We sat down on the bank and watched them. The air was full of them, yet all so quiet, without any hurry. The water was red with them, they floated down on our shoulders, on our heads, in our laps—not a sound—so peaceful—so calm—so perfect. It was like the andante of the Kreutzer.

"I knew what Mother wanted, to get over being angry with Cousin Parnelia. And she was. I could see it in her face, like somebody in church. I felt it myself—all over, like an E string that's been pulled too high, slipping down into tune when you turn the peg. But I didn't want to feel it. I wanted to hate Cousin Parnelia. I thought it was awfully hard in Mother not to want us to have even the satisfaction of hating Cousin Parnelia! I tried to go on doing it. I remember I cried a little. But Mother never said a word—just sat there in that quiet autumn sunshine, watching the leaves falling—falling—and I had to do as she did. And by and by I felt, just as she did, that Cousin Parnelia was only a very small part of something very big.

"When we went in, Mother's face was just as it always was, and we got Cousin Parnelia a cup of tea and gave her part of a boiled ham to take home and a dozen eggs and a loaf of graham bread, just as though nothing had happened."

She stopped speaking. There was no sound at all but the delicate, forlorn whisper of the leaves.

"That is a very fine story!" said Page finally. He spoke with a measured, emphatic, almost solemn accent.

"Yes, it's a very fine story," murmured Sylvia a little wistfully. "It's finer as a story than it was as real life. It was years before I could look at blue corduroy without feeling stirred up. I really cared more about my clothes than I did about that stupid, ignorant old woman. If it's only a cheerful giver the Lord loves, He didn't feel much affection for me."

They began to retrace their steps. "You gave up the blue corduroy," he commented as they walked on, "and you didn't scold your silly old kinswoman."

"That's only because Mother hypnotized me. She has character. I did it as Louis signed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, because Madame de Maintenon thought he ought to."

"But she couldn't hypnotize your brother Lawrence, althought he was so much younger. He didn't give up his thirty-seven cents. I think you're bragging without cause if you claim any engaging and picturesque absence of character."

"Oh, Lawrence—he's different! He's extraordinary! Sometimes I think he is a genius. And it's Judith who hypnotizes him. She supplies his character."

They emerged into an opening and walked in silence for some moments towards the Grand Trianon.

"You're lucky, very lucky," commented Page, "to have such an ample supply of character in the family. I'm an only child. There's nobody to give me the necessary hypodermic supply of it at the crucial moments." He went on, turning his head to look at the Great Trianon, very mellow in the sunshine. "It's my belief, however, that at the crucial moments you have plenty of it of your own."

"That's a safe guess!" said Sylvia ironically, "since there never have been any crucial moments in a life so uninterestingly eventless as mine. I wonder what I would do," she mused. "My own conviction is that—suppose I'd lived in the days of the Reformation—in the days of Christ—in the early Abolition days—" She had an instant certainty: "Oh, I have been entirely on the side of whatever was smooth, and elegant, and had amenity—I'd have hated the righteous side!"

Page did not look very deeply moved by this revelation of depravity. Indeed, he smiled rather amusedly at her, and changed the subject. "You said a moment ago that I couldn't understand, because I'd always had money. Isn't it a bit paradoxical to say that the people who haven't a thing are the only ones who know anything about it?"

"But you couldn't realize what losing the money meant to us. You can't know what the absence of money can do to a life."

"I can know," said Page, "what the presence of it cannot do for a life." His accent implied rather sadly that the omissions were considerable.

"Oh, of course, of course," Sylvia agreed. "There's any amount it can't do. After you have it, you must get the other things too."

He brought his eyes down to her from a roving quest among the tops of the trees. "It seems to me you want a great deal," he said quizzically.

"Yes, I do," she admitted. "But I don't see that you have any call to object to my wanting it. You don't have to wish for everything at once. You have it already."

He received this into one of his thoughtful silences, but presently it brought him to a standstill. They were within sight of the Grand Canal again, looking down from the terrace of the Trianon. He leaned against the marble balustrade and thrust his hands deep into his pockets. His clear eyes were clouded. He looked profoundly grave. "I am thirty-two years old," he said, "and never for a moment of that time have I made any sense out of my position in life. If you call that 'having everything'—"

It occurred to Sylvia fleetingly that she had never made any sense out of her position in life either, and had been obliged to do a great many disagreeable things into the bargain, but she kept this thought to herself, and looked conspicuously what she genuinely felt, a sympathetic interest. The note of plain direct sincerity which was Page's hallmark never failed to arrest her attention, a little to arouse her wonder, and occasionally, for a reason that she did not like to dwell upon, somewhat to abash her. The reason was that he never spoke for effect, and she often did. He was not speaking for effect now: he seemed scarcely even to be speaking to her, rather to be musingly formulating something for his own enlightenment. He went on. "The fact is that there is no sense to be made out of my situation in life. I am like a man with a fine voice, who has no ear."

He showed surprise that Sylvia failed to follow this, and explained. "I mean the voice is no good to that kind of a man, it's no good to anybody. It's the craziest, accidental affair anyhow, haven't you ever noticed it?—who draws the fine voices. Half the time—more than half the time, most of the time it seems to me when I've been recently to a lot of concerts, the people who have the voices haven't any other qualifications for being singers. And it's so with coal-mines, with everything else that's inherited. For five years now I've given up what I'd like to do, and I've tried, under the best maestri I could find, to make something out of my voice, so to speak. And it's no go. It's in the nature of things that I can't make a go of it. Over everything I do lies the taint that I'm the 'owner'! They are suspicious of me, always will be—and rightly so. Anybody else not connected with the mediaeval idea of 'possession' could do better than I. The whole relation's artificial. I'm in it for the preposterous reason that my father, operating on Wall Street, made a lucky guess,—as though I should be called upon to run a locomotive because my middle initial is L!"

Sylvia still felt the same slight sense of flatness when this recurring topic thrust itself into a personal talk; but during the last month she had adjusted herself to Page so that this no longer showed on the surface. She was indeed quite capable of taking an interest in the subject, as soon as she could modulate herself into the new key. "Yes, of course," she agreed, "it's like so many other things that are perfectly necessary to go on with, perfectly absurd when you look closely at them. My father nearly lost his position once for saying that all inheritance was wrong. But even he never had the slightest suggestion as to what to do about it, how to get an inheritance into the hands of the people who might make the best use of it." She was used from her childhood to this sort of academic doubt of everything, conducted side by side with a practical acceptance of everything. Professor and Madame La Rue, in actual life devotedly faithful married lovers, staid, stout, habit-ridden elderly people, professed a theoretical belief in the flexibility of relationships sanctioned by the practice of free love. It was perhaps with this recollection in her mind that she suggested, "Don't you suppose it will be like the institution of marriage, very, very gradually altered till it fits conditions better?"

"In the meantime, how about the cases of those who are unhappily married?"

"I don't see anything for them but just to get along the best they can," she told him.

"You think I'd better give up trying to do anything with my Colorado—?" he asked her, as though genuinely seeking advice.

"I should certainly think that five years was plenty long enough for a fair trial! You'd make a better ambassador than an active captain of industry, anyhow," she said with conviction. Whereupon he bestowed on her a long, thoughtful stare, as though he were profoundly pondering her suggestion.

They moved forward towards the Grand Canal in silence. Privately she was considering his case hardly one of extreme hardship. Privately also, as they advanced nearer and nearer the spot where they had left Mrs. Marshall-Smith, she was a little dreading the return to the perfect breeding with which Aunt Victoria did not ask, or intimate, or look, the question which was in her mind after each of these strolling tete-a-tetes which consistently led nowhere. There were instants when Sylvia would positively have preferred the vulgar openness of a direct question to which she might have answered, with the refreshing effect to her of a little honest blood-letting: "Dear Aunt Victoria, I haven't the least idea myself what's happening! I'm simply letting myself go because I don't see anything else to do. I have even no very clear idea as to what is going on inside my own head. I only know that I like Austin Page so much (in spite of a certain quite unforgotten episode) there would be nothing at all unpleasant about marrying him; but I also know that I didn't feel the least interest in him until Helene told me about his barrels of money: I also know that I feel the strongest aversion to returning to the Spartan life of La Chance; and it occurs to me that these two things may throw considerable light on my 'liking' for Austin. As for what's in his mind, there is no subject on which I'm in blacker ignorance. And after being so tremendously fooled, in the case of Felix, about the degree of interest a man was feeling, I do not propose to take anything for granted which is not on the surface. It is quite possible that this singularly sincere and simple-mannered man may not have the slightest intention of doing anything more than enjoy a pleasant vacation from certain rather hair-splitting cares which seem to trouble him from time to time." As they walked side by side along the stagnant waters, she was sending inaudible messages of this sort towards her aunt; she had even selected the particular mauve speck at the top of the steps which might be Mrs. Marshall-Smith.

In the glowing yellow gold of the sky, a faintly whirring dark-gray spot appeared: an airman made his way above the Grand Canal, passed above the Chateau, and disappeared. They had sat down on a bench, the better to crane their heads to watch him out of sight. Sylvia was penetrated with the strangeness of that apparition in that spot and thrilled out: "Isn't it wonderful! Isn't it wonderful! Here!"

"There's something more wonderful!" he said, indicating with his cane the canal before them, where a group of neat, poorly dressed, lower middle-class people looked proudly out from their triumphal progress in the ugly, gasping little motor-boat which operates at twenty-five centimes a trip.

She had not walked and talked a month with him for nothing. She knew that he did not refer to motor-boats as against aeroplanes. "You mean," she said appreciatively, "you mean those common people going freely around the royal canal where two hundred years ago—"

He nodded, pleased by her quickness. "Two hundred years from now," he conjectured, "the stubs of my checkbook will be exhibited in an historical museum along with the regalia of the last hereditary monarch."

Here she did not follow, and she was too intelligent to pretend she did.

He lifted his eyebrows. "Relic of a quaint old social structure inexplicably tolerated so late as the beginning of the twentieth century,"

"Oh, coal-mines forever!" she said, smiling, her eyes brilliant with friendly mockery.

"Aye! Toujours perdrix!" he admitted. He continued to look steadily and seriously into her smiling, sparkling face, until, with a sudden pulse of premonition, she was stricken into a frightened gravity. And then, with no prelude, no approach, quite simply and directly, he spoke. "I wonder how much you care for me?" he said musingly, as he had said everything else that afternoon: and as she positively paled at the eeriness of this echo from her own thought, he went on, his voice vibrating in the deep organ note of a great moment, "You must know, of course, by this time that I care everything possible for you."

Compressed into an instant of acute feeling Sylvia felt the pangs which had racked her as a little girl when she had stood in the schoolyard with Camilla Fingal before her, and the terrifying hostile eyes about her. Her two selves rose up against each other fiercely, murderously, as they had then. The little girl sprang forward to help the woman who for an instant hesitated. The fever and the struggle vanished as instantly as they had come. Sylvia felt very still, very hushed. Page had told her that she always rose to crucial moments. She rose to this one. "I don't know," she said as quietly as he, with as utter a bravery of bare sincerity, "I don't know how much I care for you—but I think it is a great deal." She rose upon a solemn wing of courage to a greater height of honesty. Her eyes were on his, as clear as his. The mere beauty of her face had gone like a lifted veil. For a instant he saw her as Sylvia herself did not dream she could be. "It is very hard," said Sylvia Marshall, with clear eyes and trembling lips of honest humility, "for a girl with no money to know how much she cares for a very rich man."

She had never been able to imagine what she would say if the moment should come. She had certainly not intended to say this. But an unsuspected vein of granite in her rang an instant echo to his truth. She was bewildered to see his ardent gaze upon her deepen to reverence. He took her hand in his and kissed it. He tried to speak, but his voice broke.

She was immensely moved to see him so moved. She was also entirely at a loss. How strangely different things always were from forecasts of them! They had suddenly taken the long-expected stride away from their former relation, but she did not know where they had arrived. What was the new status between them? What did Austin think she meant? It came to her with a shock that the new status between them was, on the surface, exactly what it was in reality; that the avowed relation between them was, as far as it went, precisely in accord with the facts of the case. The utter strangeness of this in any human relationship filled her with astonishment, with awe, almost with uneasiness. It seemed unnatural not to have to pretend anything!

Apparently it did not seem unnatural to the man beside her. "You are a very wonderful woman," he now said, his voice still but partly under his control. "I had not thought that you could exist." He took her hand again and continued more steadily: "Will you let me, for a little while longer, go on living near you? Perhaps things may seem clearer to us both, later—"

Sylvia was swept by a wave of gratitude as for some act of magnanimity. "You are the wonderful one!" she cried. Not since the day Helene had told her who he was, had she felt so whole, so sound, so clean, as now. The word came rushing on the heels of the thought: "You make one feel so clean!" she said, unaware that he could scarcely understand her, and then she smiled, passing with her free, natural grace from the memorable pause, and the concentration of a great moment forward into the even-stepping advance of life. "That first day—even then you made me feel clean—that soap! that cold, clean water—it is your aroma!"

Their walk along the silent water, over the great lawn, and up the steps was golden with the level rays of the sun setting back of them, at the end of the canal, between the distant, sentinel poplars. Their mood was as golden as the light. Sometimes they spoke, sometimes they were silent. Truth walked between them.

Sylvia's mind, released from the tension of that great moment, began making its usual, sweeping, circling explorations of its own depths. Not all that it found was of an equal good report. Once she thought fleetingly: "This is only a very, very pretty way of saying that it is all really settled. With his great wealth, he is like a reigning monarch—let him be as delicate-minded as he pleases, when he indicates a wish—" More than once—many, many times—Felix Morrison's compelling dark eyes looked at her penetratingly, but she resolutely turned away her head from them, and from the impulse to answer their reproach even with an indignant, well-founded reproach of her own. Again and again she felt a sweet strangeness in her new position. The aroma of utter sincerity was like the scent of a wildflower growing in the sun, spicy, free. She wondered at a heart like his that could be at once ardent and subtle, that could desire so profoundly (the deep vibrations of that voice of yearning were in her ears still) and yet pause, and stand back, and wait, rather than force a hair's breadth of pretense. How he had liberated her! And once she found herself thinking, "I shall have sables myself, and diamonds, and a house as great as Molly's, and I shall learn how to entertain ambassadors, as she will never know." She was ashamed of this, she knew it to be shockingly out of key with the grand passage behind them. But she had thought it.

And, as these thoughts, and many more, passed through her mind, as she spoke with a quiet peace, or was silent, she was transfigured into a beauty almost startling, by the accident of the level golden beams of light back of her. Her aureole of bright hair glowed like a saint's halo. The curiously placed lights and unexpected shadows brought out new subtleties in the modeling of her face. Her lightened heart gleamed through her eyes, like a lighted lamp. After a time, the man fell into a complete silence, glancing at her frequently as though storing away a priceless memory....



CHAPTER XXXV

"A MILESTONE PASSED, THE ROAD SEEMS CLEAR"

As the "season" heightened, the beautiful paneled walls of Mrs. Marshall-Smith's salon were frequently the background for chance gatherings of extremely appropriate callers. They seemed a visible emanation of the room, so entirely did they represent what that sort of a room was meant to contain. They were not only beautifully but severely dressed, with few ornaments, and those few a result of the same concentrated search for the rare which had brought together the few bibelots in the room, which had laid the single great dull Persian rug on the unobtrusively polished oaken floor, which had set in the high, south windows the boxes of feathery green plants with delicate star-like flowers.

And it was not only in externals that these carefully brushed and combed people harmonized with the mellow beauty of their background. They sat, or stood, moved about, took their tea, and talked with an extraordinary perfection of manner. There was not a voice there, save perhaps Austin Page's unstudied tones, which was not carefully modulated in a variety of rhythm and pitch which made each sentence a work of art. They used, for the most part, low tones and few gestures, but those well chosen. There was an earnest effort apparent to achieve true conversational give-and-take, and if one of the older men found himself yielding to the national passion for lengthy monologues on a favorite theme, or to the mediocre habit of anecdote, there was an instant closing in on him of carefully casual team-work on the part of the others which soon reduced him to the tasteful short comment and answer which formed the framework of the afternoon's social activities.

The topics of the conversation were as explicitly in harmony with the group-ideal as the perfectly fitting gloves of the men, or the smooth, burnished waves of the women's hair. They talked of the last play at the Francais, of the exhibitions then on view at the Petit Palais, of a new tenor in the choir of the Madeleine, of the condition of the automobile roads in the Loire country, of the restoration of the stained glass at Bourges.

On such occasions, a good deal of Sylvia's attention being given to modulating her voice and holding her hands and managing her skirts as did the guests of the hour, she usually had an impression that the conversation was clever. Once or twice, looking back, she had been somewhat surprised to find that she could remember nothing of what had been said. It occurred to her, fleetingly, that of so much talk, some word ought to stick in her usually retentive memory; but she gave the matter no more thought. She had also been aware, somewhat dimly, that Austin Page was more or less out of drawing in the carefully composed picture presented on those social afternoons. He had the inveterate habit of being at his ease under all circumstances, but she had felt that he took these great people with a really exaggerated lack of seriousness, answering their chat at random, and showing no chagrin when he was detected in the grossest ignorance about the latest move of the French Royalist party, or the probabilities as to the winner of the Grand Prix. She had seen in the corners of his mouth an inexplicable hidden imp of laughter as he gravely listened, cup in hand, to the remarks of the beautiful Mrs. William Winterton Perth about the inevitable promiscuity of democracy, and he continually displayed a tendency to gravitate into the background, away from the center of the stage where their deference for his name, fortune, and personality would have placed him. Sylvia's impression of him was far from being one of social brilliance, but rather of an almost wilful negligence. She quite grew used to seeing him, a tall, distinguished figure, sitting at ease in a far corner, and giving to the scene a pleasant though not remarkably respectful attention.

On such an afternoon in January, the usual routine had been preserved. The last of the callers, carrying off Mrs. Marshall-Smith with her, had taken an urbane, fair-spoken departure. Sylvia turned back from the door of the salon, feeling a fine glow of conscious amenity, and found that Austin Page's mood differed notably from her own. He had lingered for a tete-a-tete, as was so frequently his habit, and now stood before the fire, his face all one sparkle of fun. "Don't they do it with true American fervor!" he remarked. "It would take a microscope to tell the difference between them and a well-rehearsed society scene on the stage of the Francais! That's their model, of course. It is positively touching to see old Colonel Patterson subduing his twang and shutting the lid down on his box of comic stories. I should think Mrs. Patterson might allow him at least that one about the cowboy and the tenderfoot who wanted to take a bath!"

The impression made on Sylvia had not in the least corresponded to this one; but with a cat-like twist of her flexible mind, she fell on her feet, took up his lead, and deftly produced the only suitable material she had at command. "They seem to talk well, about such interesting things, and yet I can never remember anything they say. It's odd," she sat down near the fireplace with a great air of pondering the strange phenomenon.

"No, it isn't odd," he explained, dropping into the chair opposite her and stretching out his long legs to the blaze. "It's only people who do something, who have anything to say. These folks don't do anything except get up and sit down the right way, and run their voices up and down the scale so that their great-aunts would faint away to hear them! They haven't any energy left over. If some one would only write out suitable parts for them to memorize, the performance would be perfect!" He threw back his head and laughed aloud, the sound ringing through the room. Sylvia had seldom seen him so light-heartedly amused. He explained: "I haven't seen this sort of solemn, genteel posturing for several years now, and I find it too delicious! To see the sweet, invincible American naivete welling up in their intense satisfaction in being so sophisticated,—oh, the harmless dears!" He cried out upon them gaily, with the indulgence of an adult who looks on at children's play.

Sylvia was a trifle breathless, seeing him disappear so rapidly down this unexpected path, but she was for the moment spared the effort to overtake him by the arrival of Tojiko with a tray of fresh mail. "Oh, letters from home!" Sylvia rejoiced, taking a bulky one and a thin one from the pile. "The fat one is from Father," she said, holding it up. "He is like me, terribly given to loquaciousness. We always write each other reams when we're apart. The little flat one is from Judith. She never can think of anything to say except that she is still alive and hopes I am, and that her esteem for me is undiminished. Dear Spartan Judy!"

"Do you know," said the man opposite her, "if I hadn't met you, I should have been tempted to believe that the institution of the family had disappeared. I never saw anything like you Marshalls! You positively seem to have a real regard for each other in spite of what Bernard Shaw says about the relations of blood-kin. You even, incredible as it seems, appear to feel a mutual respect!"

"That's a very pretty compliment indeed," said Sylvia, smiling at him flashingly, "and I'm going to reward you by reading some of Judith's letter aloud. Letters do paint personalities so, don't they?"

He settled himself to listen.

"Oh, it won't take long!" she reassured him laughingly. She read:

"'DEAR SYLVIE: Your last letter about the palaces at Versailles was very interesting. Mother looked you up on the plan of the grounds in Father's old Baedeker. I'm glad to know you like Paris so much. Our chief operating surgeon says he thinks the opportunities at the School of Medicine in Paris are fully as good as in Vienna, and chances for individual diagnoses greater. Have you visited that yet?'" Over the letter Sylvia raised a humorous eyebrow at Page, who smiled, appreciative of the point.

She went on: "'Lawrence is making me a visit of a few days. Isn't he a queer boy! I got Dr. Wilkinson to agree, as a great favor, to let Lawrence see a very interesting operation. Right in the middle of it, Lawrence fainted dead away and had to be carried out. But when he came to, he said he wouldn't have missed it for anything, and before he could really sit up he was beginning a poem about the "cruel mercy of the shining knives."'" Sylvia shook her head. "Isn't that Lawrence! Isn't that Judith!"

Page agreed thoughtfully, their eyes meeting in a trustful intimacy. They themselves might have been bound together by a family tie, so wholly natural seemed their sociable sitting together over the fire. Sylvia thought with an instant's surprise, "Isn't it odd how close he has come to seem—as though I'd always, always known him; as though I could speak to him of anything—nobody else ever seemed that way to me, nobody!"

She read on from the letter: "'All of us at St. Mary's are feeling very sore about lawyers. Old Mr. Winthrop had left the hospital fifteen thousand dollars in his will, and we'd been counting on that to make some changes in the operating-room and the men's accident ward that are awfully needed. And now comes along a miserable lawyer who finds something the matter with the will, and everything goes to that worthless Charlie Winthrop, who'll probably blow it all in on one grand poker-playing spree. It makes me tired! We can't begin to keep up with the latest X-ray developments without the new apparatus, and only the other day we lost a case, a man hurt in a railroad wreck, that I know we could have pulled through if we'd been better equipped! Well, hard luck! But I try to remember Mother's old uncle's motto, "Whatever else you do, don't make a fuss!" Father has been off for a few days, speaking before Alumni reunions. He looks very well. Mother has got her new fruit cellar fixed up, and it certainly is great. She's going to keep the carrots and parsnips there too. I've just heard that I'm going to graduate first in my class—thought you might like to know. Have a good time, Sylvia. And don't let your imagination get away with you.

"'Your loving sister,

"'JUDITH,'"

"Of all the perfect characterizations!" murmured Page, as Sylvia finished. "I can actually see her and hear her!"

"Oh, there's nobody like Judith!" agreed Sylvia, falling into a reverie, her eyes on the fire.

The peaceful silence which ensued spoke vividly of the intimacy between them.

After a time Sylvia glanced up, and finding her companion's eyes abstractedly fixed on the floor, she continued to look into his face, noting its fine, somewhat gaunt modeling, the level line of his brown eyebrows, the humor and kindness of his mouth. The winter twilight cast its first faint web of blue shadow into the room. The fire burned with a steady blaze.

As minute after minute of this hushed, wordless calm continued, Sylvia was aware that something new was happening to her, that something in her stirred which had never before made its presence known. She felt very queer, a little startled, very much bewildered. What was that half-thought fluttering a dusky wing in the back of her mind? It came out into the twilight and she saw it for what it was. She had been wondering what she would feel if that silent figure opposite her should rise and take her in his arms. As she looked at that tender, humorous mouth, she had been wondering what she would feel to press her lips upon it?

She was twenty-three years old, but so occupied with mental effort and physical activity had been her life, that not till now had she known one of those half-daring, half-frightened excursions of the fancy which fill the hours of any full-blooded idle girl of eighteen. It was a woman grown with a girl's freshness of impression, who knew that ravished, scared, exquisite moment of the first dim awakening of the senses. But because it was a woman grown with a woman's capacity for emotion, the moment had a solemnity, a significance, which no girl could have felt. This was no wandering, flitting, winged excursion. It was a grave step upon a path from which there was no turning back. Sylvia had passed a milestone. But she did not know this. She sat very still in her chair as the twilight deepened, only knowing that she could not take her eyes from those tender, humorous lips. That was the moment when if the man had spoken, if he had but looked at her ...

But he was following out some thought of his own, and now rose, went to Mrs. Marshall-Smith's fine, small desk, snapped on an electric light, and began to write.

When he finished, he handed a bit of paper to Sylvia. "Do you suppose your sister would be willing to let me make up for the objectionable Charlie Winthrop's deficiences?" he asked with a deprecatory air as though he feared a refusal.

Sylvia looked at the piece of paper. It was a check for fifteen thousand dollars. She held there in her hand seven years of her father's life, as much money as they all had lived on from the years she was sixteen until now. And this man had but to dip pen into ink to produce it. There was something stupefying about the thought to her. She no longer saw the humor and tenderness of his mouth. She looked up at him and thought, "What an immensely rich man he is!" She said to him wonderingly, "You can't imagine how strange it is—like magic—not to be believed—to have money like that!"

His face clouded. He looked down uncertainly at his feet and away at the lighted electric bulb. "I thought it might please your sister," he said and turned away.

Sylvia was aghast to think that she had perhaps wounded him. He seemed to fear that he had flaunted his fortune in her face. He looked acutely uncomfortable. She found that, as she had thought, she could say anything, anything to him, and say it easily. She went to him quickly and laid her hand on his arm. "It's splendid," she said, looking deeply and frankly into his eyes. "Judith will be too rejoiced! It is like magic. And nobody but you could have done it so that the money seems the least part of the deed!"

He looked down at her, touched, moved, his eyes very tender, but sad as though with a divination of the barrier his fortune eternally raised between them.

The door opened suddenly and Mrs. Marshall-Smith came in quickly, not looking at them at all. From the pale agitation of her face they recoiled, startled and alarmed. She sat down abruptly as though her knees had given way under her. Her gloved hands were perceptibly trembling in her lap. She looked straight at Sylvia, and for an instant did not speak. If she had rushed in screaming wildly, her aspect to Sylvia's eyes would scarcely have been more eloquent of portentous news to come. It was a fitting introduction to what she now said to them in an unsteady voice: "I've just heard—a despatch from Jamiaca—something terrible has happened. The news came to the American Express office when I was there. It is awful. Molly Sommerville driving her car alone—an appalling accident to the steering-gear, they think. Molly found dead under the car."



CHAPTER XXXVI

THE ROAD IS NOT SO CLEAR

It shocked Sylvia that Molly's death should make so little difference. After one sober evening with the stunning words fresh before their eyes, the three friends quickly returned to their ordinary routine of life. It was not that they did not care, she reflected—she did care. She had cried and cried at the thought of that quivering, vital spirit broken by the inert crushing mass of steel—she could not bring herself to think of the soft body, mangled, bloody. Austin cared too: she was sure of it; but when they had expressed their pity, what more could they do? The cabled statement was so bald, they hardly could believe it—they failed altogether to realize what it meant—they had no details on which to base any commentary. She who had lived so intensely, was dead. They were sorry for her. That was all.

As an apology for their seeming callousness they reiterated Aunt Victoria's dictum: "We can know nothing about it until Felix comes. Let us hold our minds in suspense until we know what to think." That Morrison would be in Paris soon, none of them doubted. Indeed, they united in insisting on the number of natural—oh, perfectly natural—reasons for his coming. He had always spent a part of every winter there, had in fact a tiny apartment on the Rue St. Honore which dated from his bachelor life; and now he had a double reason for coming, since much of Molly's fortune chanced to be in French bonds. Her father had been (among other things) American agent for the Comptoir National des Escomptes, and he had taken advantage of his unusual opportunities for acquiring solid French and remunerative Algerian securities. Page had said at once that Morrison would need to go through a good many formalities, under the French laws. So pending fuller information, they did not discuss the tragedy. Their lives ran on, and Molly, dead, was in their minds almost as little as Molly, living but absent, had been.

It was only two months before Felix Morrison arrived in Paris. They had expected him. They had spoken of the chance of his arrival on this or that day. Sylvia had rehearsed all the possible forms of self-possession for their first meeting; but on the rainy February afternoon when she came in from representing Aunt Victoria at a reception and saw him sitting by the fire, her heart sank down and stopped for an instant, and when it went on beating she could hear no sound but the drumming of her pulse. The back of his chair was towards her. All she could see as she stood for a moment in the doorway was his head, the thick, graying dark hair, and one long-fingered, sensitive, beautiful hand lying on the arm of the chair. At the sight, she felt in her own palm the soft firmness of those fingers as palpably as ever she had in reality.

The instant's pause before Aunt Victoria saw her standing there, gave her back her self-control. When Mrs. Marshall-Smith turned and gravely held out her hand, Sylvia came forward with a sober self-possession. The man turned too, sprang up with an exclamation apparently of surprise, "Miss Marshall, you here!" and extended his hand. Sylvia, searching his face earnestly, found it so worn, saw in it such dark traces of suffering and sorrow, that the quick tears of sympathy stood in her eyes.

Her dread of the meeting, a morbid dread that had in it an acknowledged element of horror, vanished. Before that moment she had seen only Molly's face as it had looked the day of their desperate talk, white and despairing, and resolutely bent over the steering-wheel. She had not been able to imagine Felix' face at all, had instinctively put it out of her mind; but as she looked into it now, her fear of it disappeared. It was the fine, sensitive face of a fine, sensitive man who has known a great shock. What had she feared she would see there? He was still holding her hand, very much affected at seeing her, evidently still in a super-sensitive condition when everything affected him strongly. "She loved you—she admired you so!" he said, his wonderful voice wavering and uncertain. Sylvia's tears fell openly at this. She sat down on a low stool near her aunt's knees. "I can't believe it—I haven't been able to believe it!" she told him; "Molly was—she was more alive than anybody I ever saw!"

"If you had seen her that morning," he told them both,—"like a flame of vitality—almost frightening—so vivid. She waved good-bye, and then that was not enough; she got out of the car and ran back up the hotel-step to say good-bye for just those few moments—and was off—such youth! such youth in all her—"

Sylvia cried out, "Oh, no! no! it's too dreadful!" She felt the horror sweep down on her again; but now it did not bear Felix' face among its baneful images. He stood there, shocked, stricken, but utterly bewildered, utterly ignorant—for the moment in her relief she had called his ignorance utter innocence ...

They did not see him again for many days, and when he came, very briefly, speaking of business technicalities which absorbed him, he was noticeably absent and careworn. He looked much older. The gray in his thick hair had increased. He looked very beautiful and austere to Sylvia. They exchanged no more than the salutations of arrival and farewell.

Then one day, as she and Aunt Victoria and Austin Page strolled down the long gallery of the Louvre, they came upon him, looking at the Ribera Entombment. He joined them, walking with them through the Salon Carre and out to the Winged Victory, calling Sylvia's attention to the Botticelli frescoes beyond on the landing. "It's the first time I've been here," he told them, his only allusion to what lay back of him. "It is like coming back to true friends. Blessed be all true friends." He shook hands with them, and went away down the great stairway, a splendid figure of dignity and grace.

After this he came once and again to the apartment of the Rue de Presbourg, generally it would appear to use the piano. He had none in his own tiny pied-a-terre and he missed it. Sylvia immensely liked his continuing to cling for a time to the simple arrangements of his frugal bachelor days. He could now of course have bought a thousand pianos. They understood how he would miss his music, and stole in quietly when, upon opening the door, Tojiko told them that Mr. Morrison had come in, and they heard from the salon his delicately firm touch on the keys. Sometimes they listened from their rooms, sometimes the two women took possession of the little octagonal room off the salon, all white paneling and gilt chairs, and listened there; sometimes, as the weeks went on and an especially early spring began to envelop Paris in a haze of sunshine and budding leaves, they stepped out to listen on the wrought-iron balcony which looked down the long, shining vista of the tree-framed avenue. For the most part he played Bach, grave, courageous, formal, great-hearted music.

Sometimes he went away with no more than a nod and a smile to them, but more and more, when he had finished, he came out where they were, and stood or sat to exchange brief impressions on the enchanting season, or on some social or aesthetic treat which "ces dames" had been enjoying. Austin Page was frequently with them, as in the earlier part of the winter, and it was finally he himself who one day took the step of asking Morrison if he would not go with them to the Louvre. "No one could appreciate more than Miss Marshall what has always been such a delight to us all."

They went, and not only once. That was the beginning of another phase; a period when, as he began to take up life again, he turned to his old friends to help him do it. He saw almost no one else, certainly no one else there, for he was sure to disappear upon the arrival of a caller, or the announcement of an expedition in which other people were included. But he returned again and again to the Louvre with them, his theory of galleries necessitating frequent visits. Nothing could be more idiotic, he held, than to try to see on one occasion all, or even half, or even a tenth part, of a great collection of works of art. "It is exactly as reasonable," he contended, "as to read through on the same day every poem in a great anthology. Who could have anything but nausea for poetry after such a gorge? And they must hate pictures or else be literally blind to them, the people who look at five hundred in a morning! If I had looked at every picture in the Long Gallery in one walk through it, I should thrust my cane through the Titian Francis-First itself when I came to the Salon Carre."

So he took them to see only a few, five or six, carefully selected things—there was one wonderful day when he showed them nothing but the Da Vinci Saint Anne, and the Venus of Melos, comparing the dissimilar beauty of those two divine faces so vitally, that Sylvia for days afterwards, when she closed her eyes and saw them, felt that she looked on two living women. She told them this and, "Which one do you see most?" he asked her. "Oh, the Saint Anne," she told him.

He seemed dissatisfied. But she did not venture to ask him why. They lived in an atmosphere where omissions were vital.

Sylvia often wondered in those days if there ever had been a situation so precariously balanced which continued to hang poised and stable, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day. There were moments when her head was swimming with moral dizziness. She wondered if such moments ever came to the two quiet, self-controlled men who came and went, with cordial, easy friendliness, in and out of the appartement on the Rue de Presbourg. They gave no sign of it, they gave no sign of anything beyond the most achieved appearance of a natural desire to be obliging and indulgent to the niece of an old friend. This appearance was kept up with such unflagging perseverance that it almost seemed consciously concerted between them. They so elaborately avoided the slightest appearance of rivalry that their good taste, like a cloth thrown over an unknown object, inevitably excited curiosity as to what was concealed beneath it.

And Sylvia was not to be outdone. She turned her own eyes away from it as sedulously as they. She never let a conscious thought dwell on it—and like all other repressed and strangled currents of thought, it grew swollen and restive, filling her subconsciousness with monstrous, unformulated speculations. She was extremely absorbed in the luxury, the amenity, the smooth-working perfection of the life about her. She consciously concentrated all her faculties on her prodigious opportunity for aesthetic growth, for appreciation of the fine and marvelous things about her. She let go the last scruple which had held her back from accepting from Aunt Victoria the shower of beautiful things to wear which that connoisseur in wearing apparel delighted to bestow upon an object so deserving. She gave a brilliant outward effect of enjoying life as it came which was as impersonal as that of the two men who looked at her so frequently, and this effect went as deep as her will-power had command. But beneath—unacknowledged waves beating on the shore of her life and roughly, irresistibly, rudely fashioning it—rolled a ground-swell of imperious questionings....

Was Felix' perfect manner of impersonal interest solely due to the delicacy of his situation? Did he feel now that he was as rich as Austin ...? But, on the other hand, why did he come now and put himself in a situation which required the utmost efforts for unconsciousness on everybody's part if not because Austin's being there had meant he dared not wait? And Austin's change of manner since the arrival of the other man, the film of ceremony which had slid imperceptibly over the tender friendliness of his manner, did that mean that he would not take advantage of Morrison's temporarily tied hands, but, with a scrupulousness all his own, would wait until the race was even and they stood foot to foot on the same level? Or had he noticed at once, with those formidably clear eyes of his, some shade of her manner to Felix which she had not been able to command, and was he waiting for some move from her? And how could she move until she had some sign from Felix and how could he give a sign? There was nothing to do but to wait, to hope that the thin ice which now bent perilously under the pleasant ceremonies of their life in common, would hold them until.... Even the wildest up-leaping wave of that tossing tide never went beyond the blank wall which came after the "until...."

There were other moments when all that surge swung back and forth to the rhythm of the poisoned recollection of her unacknowledged humiliation in Lydford; when, inflamed with determination to avoid another such blow in the face, Sylvia almost consciously asked herself, self-contemptuously, "Who am I, an obscure, poverty-stricken music-teacher out of the West, to fancy that I have but to choose between two such men, two such fortunes?" but against this counted strongly the constantly recurring revelations of the obscure pasts of many of the women whom she met during those days, women who were now shining, acknowledged firsts in the procession of success. The serene, stately, much-admired Princesse de Chevrille had been a Miss Sommers from Cleveland, Ohio, and she had come to Paris first as a governess. The beautiful Mrs. William Winterton Perth, now Aunt Victoria's favorite friend, who entertained lesser royalty and greater men of letters with equal quiet dignity, had in her youth, so she chanced casually one day to mention, known what it was to be thrifty about car-fares. There was nothing intrinsically impossible in any of the glittering vistas down which Sylvia's quick eye cast involuntary glances.

But inevitably, when the heaving dark tide rose as high as this, there came a swift and deadly ebbing away of it all, and into Sylvia's consciousness (always it seemed to her with the most entire irrelevance) there flared up the picture of Molly as she had seen her last, shimmering like a jewel in her white veil—then the other picture, the over-turned car, the golden head bruised and bloody and forever stilled—and always, always beyond that, the gaunt, monstrous possibility, too awful ever to be put into words, too impossible for credence ...

From that shapeless, looming, black mass, Sylvia fled away actually and physically, springing to her feet wherever she was, entering another room, taking up some other occupation.

Just once she had the faintest sign from beyond the wall that she was not alone in her fear of this horror. She was sitting near Austin Page at a tea, one of the frequent, small, richly chosen assemblages which Mrs. Marshall-Smith gathered about her. Part of the ensuing chatter on one of these occasions turned, as modern chatter frequently does, on automobiles. The husband of Mrs. William Winterton Perth was an expert on such matters, having for some years diverted by an interest in mechanics the immense enforced leisure of a transplanted male American. He was talking incessantly that day of the wonderful improvement in steering mechanism the last few years had brought about. "I tell you what, Miss Marshall!" he insisted, as though she had disputed the point with him, "I tell you what, there used to be some excuse for piling your car up by the side of the road, but nowadays any one who doesn't keep in the road and right side up must be just plain looking for a chance to use his car like a dose of cold poison." For a moment Sylvia could not conceive why she felt so sickening a thrust at her heart. She turned her eyes from the speaker. They fell on a man's hand, on the arm of the chair next hers. It was Austin's hand and it was shaking uncontrollably. As she gazed at it, fascinated, he thrust it deep into his pocket. She did not look at him. In a moment he rose and crossed the room. The husband of Mrs. William Winterton Perth asked for another petit four, confessing his fondness for chocolate eclairs,—and embarked upon demountable rims.



CHAPTER XXXVII

"... His wife and children perceiving it, began to cry after him to return; but the man put his fingers in his ears and ran on, crying, 'Life! Life Eternal!'"

They had been in the Louvre, had spent an hour with Felix in that glowing embodiment of the pomp and majesty of human flesh known as the Rubens Medici-Room, and now, for the sheer pleasure of it, had decided to walk home. Mrs. Marshall-Smith, endowed with a figure which showed as yet no need for exercise, and having passed youth's restless liking for it, had vetoed the plan as far as she went, and entering her waiting ear, had been borne smoothly off, an opulent Juno without her peacocks.

The three who were left, lingered for a moment in the quiet sunny square of the Louvre, looking up at the statue of Lafayette, around at the blossoming early shrubs. Sylvia was still under the spell of the riotous, full-blown splendor of the paintings she had seen. Wherever she looked, she saw again the rainbow brilliance of those glossy satins, that rippling flooding golden hair, those ample, heaving bosoms, those liquid gleaming eyes, the soft abundance of that white and ruddy flesh, with the patina of time like a golden haze over it. The spectacle had been magnificent and the scene they now entered was a worthy successor to it. They walked down through the garden of the Tuileries and emerged upon the Place de la Concorde at five o'clock of a perfect April afternoon, when the great square hummed and sang with the gleaming traffic of luxury. Countless automobiles, like glistening beetles, darted about, each one with its load of carefully dressed and coiffed women, looking out on the weaving glitter of the street with the proprietary, complacent stare of those who feel themselves in the midst of a civilization with which they are in perfect accord. Up the avenue, beyond, streamed an incessant parade of more costly ears, more carriages, shining, caparisoned horses, every outfit sumptuous to its last detail, every one different from all the others, and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them, till in the distance they dwindled to a black stream dominated by the upward sweep of the Arc de Triomphe, magnified to fabulous proportions by the filmy haze of the spring day. To their left flowed the Seine, blue and flashing. A little breeze stirred the new leaves on the innumerable trees.

Sylvia stopped for an instant to take in the marvel of this pageant, enacted every day of every season against that magnificent background. She made a gesture to call her companions' attention to it—"Isn't it in the key of Rubens—bloom, radiance, life expansive!"

"And Chabrier should set it to music," said Morrison.

"What does it make you think of?" she asked. "It makes me think of a beautiful young Greek, in a purple chiton, with a wreath of roses in his hair."

"It makes me think of a beautiful young woman, all fire and spirit, and fineness, who drinks life like a perfumed wine," said Morrison, his eyes on hers. She felt a little shiver of frightened pleasure, and turned to Page to carry it off, "What does it make you think of?" she asked.

"It makes me think," he answered her at once, his eyes on the haze caught like a dream in the tender green of the budding trees,—"it makes me think of a half-naked, sweating man, far underground in black night, striking at a rock with a pick."

If he had burst into loud profanity, the effect could not have been more shocking. "Oh!" said Sylvia, vexed and put out. She began to walk forward. Morrison in his turn gave an exclamation which seemed the vent of long-stored exasperation, and said with heat: "Look here, Page, you're getting to be a perfect monomaniac on the subject! What earthly good does it do your man with a pick to ruin a fine moment by lugging him in!"

They were all advancing up the avenue now, Sylvia between the two men. They talked at each other across her. She listened intently, with the feeling that Morrison was voicing for her the question she had been all her life wishing once for all to let fly at her parents' standards: "What good did it do anybody to go without things you might have? Conditions were too vast for one person to influence."

"No earthly good," said Page peaceably; "I didn't say it did him any good. Miss Marshall asked me what all this made me think of, and I told her."

"It is simply becoming an obsession with you!" urged Morrison. Sylvia remembered what Page had said about his irritation years ago when Austin had withdrawn from the collector's field.

"Yes, it's becoming an obsession with me," agreed Page thoughtfully. He spoke as he always did, with the simplest manner of direct sincerity.

"You ought to make an effort against it, really, my dear fellow. It's simply spoiling your life for you!"

"Worse than that, it's making me bad company!" said Page whimsically. "I either ought to reform or get out."

Morrison set his enemy squarely before him and proceeded to do battle. "I believe I know just what's in your mind, Page: I've been watching it grow in you, ever since you gave up majolica."

"I never claimed that was anything but the blindest of impulses!" protested Page mildly.

"But it wasn't. I knew! It was a sign you had been infected by the spirit of the times and had 'caught it' so hard that it would be likely to make an end of you. It's all right for the collective mind. That's dense, obtuse; it resists enough to keep its balance. But it's not all right for you. Now you just let me talk for a few minutes, will you? I've an accumulated lot to say! We are all of us living through the end of an epoch, just as much as the people of the old regime lived through the last of an epoch in the years before the French Revolution. I don't believe it's going to come with guillotines or any of those picturesque trimmings. We don't do things that way any more. In my opinion it will come gradually, and finally arrive about two or three generations from now. And it oughtn't to come any sooner! Sudden changes never save time. There's always the reaction to be gotten over with, if they're sudden. Gradual growths are what last. Now anybody who knows about the changes of society knows that there's little enough any one person can do to hasten them or to put them off. They're actuated by a law of their own, like the law which makes typhoid fever come to a crisis in seven days. Now then, if you admit that the process ought not to be hastened, and in the second place that you couldn't hasten it if you tried, what earthly use is there in bothering your head about it! There are lots of people, countless people, made expressly to do whatever is necessary, blunt chisels fit for nothing but shaping grindstones. Let them do it! You'll only get in their way if you try to interfere. It's not your job. For the few people capable of it, there is nothing more necessary to do for the world than to show how splendid and orderly and harmonious a thing life can be. While the blunt chisels hack out the redemption of the overworked (and Heaven knows I don't deny their existence), let those who can, preserve the almost-lost art of living, so that when the millennium comes (you see I don't deny that this time it's on the way!) it won't find humanity solely made up of newly freed serfs who don't know what use to make of their liberty. How is beauty to be preserved by those who know and love and serve her, and how can they guard beauty if they insist on going down to help clean out the sewers? Miss Marshall, don't you see how I am right? Don't you see how no one can do more for the common weal than just to live, as finely, as beautifully, as intelligently as possible? And people who are capable of this noblest service to the world only waste themselves and serve nobody if they try to do the work of dray-horses."

Sylvia had found this wonderfully eloquent and convincing. She now broke in. "When I was a young girl in college, I used to have a pretentious, jejune sort of idea that what I wanted out of life was to find Athens and live in it—and your idea sounds like that. The best Athens, you know, not sensuous and selfish, but full of lovely and leisurely sensations and fine thoughts and great emotions."

"It wasn't pretentious and jejune at all!" said Morrison warmly, "but simply the most perfect metaphor of what must have been—of course, I can see it from here—the instinctive sane effort of a nature like yours. Let's all try to live in Athens so that there will be some one there to welcome in humanity."

Page volunteered his first contribution to the talk. "Oh, I wouldn't mind a bit if I thought we were really doing what Morrison thinks is our excuse for living, creating fine and beautiful lives and keeping alive the tradition of beauty and fineness. But our lives aren't beautiful, they're only easeful. They're not fine, they're only well-upholstered. You've got to have fitly squared and substantial foundations before you can build enduring beauty. And all this," he waved his hand around him at the resplendent, modern city, "this isn't Athens; it's—it's Corinth, if you want to go on being classic. As near as I can make out from what Sylvia lets fall, the nearest approach to Athenian life that I ever heard of, was the life she left behind her, her parents' life. That has all the elements of the best Athenian color, except physical ease. And ease is no Athenian quality! It's Persian! Socrates was a stone-cutter, you know. And even in the real Athens, even that best Athens, the one in Plato's mind—there was a whole class given over to doing the dirty work for the others. That never seemed to bother Plato—happy Plato! but—I'm sure I don't pretend to say if it ultimately means more or less greatness for the human race—but somehow since Christianity, people find it harder and harder to get back to Plato's serenity on that point. I'm not arguing the case against men like you, Morrison—except that there's only one of you. You've always seemed to me more like Plato than anybody alive, and I've regarded you as the most enviable personality going. I'd emulate you in a minute—if I could; but if mine is a case of mania, it's a genuine case. I'm sane on everything else, but when it comes to that—it's being money that I don't earn, but they, those men off there underground, do earn and are forced to give to me—when it comes to that, I'm as fixed in my opinion as the man who thought he was a hard-boiled egg. I don't blame you for being out of patience with me. As you say I only spoil fine minutes by thinking of it, and as you charitably refrained from saying, I spoil other people's fine moments by speaking of it."

"What would you have us do!" Morrison challenged him—"all turn in and clean sewers for a living? And wouldn't it be a lovely world, if we did!"

Page did not answer for a moment. "I wonder," he finally suggested mildly, "if it were all divided up, the dirty work, and each of us did our share—"

"Oh, impractical! impractical! Wholly a back-eddy in the forward-moving current. You can't go back of a world-wide movement. Things are too complicated now for everybody to do his share of anything. It's as reasonable, as to suggest that everybody do his share of watchmaking, or fancy juggling. Every man to his trade! And if the man who makes watches, or cleans sewers, or even mines coal—your especial sore spot—does his work well, and is suited to it in temperament, who knows that he does not find it a satisfaction as complete as mine in telling a bit of genuine Palissy ware from an imitation. You, for instance, you'd make a pretty coal-miner, wouldn't you? You're about as suited to it as Miss Marshall here for being a college settlement worker!"

Sylvia broke out into an exclamation of wonder. "Oh, how you do put your finger on the spot! If you knew how I've struggled to justify myself for not going into 'social work' of some kind! Every girl nowadays who doesn't marry at twenty, is slated for 'social betterment' whether she has the least capacity for it or not. Public opinion pushes us into it as mediaeval girls were shoved into convents, because it doesn't know what else to do with us. It's all right for Judith,—it's fine for her. She's made for it. I envy her. I always have. But me—I never could bear the idea of interfering in people's lives to tell them what to do about their children and their husbands just because they were poor. It always seemed to me it was bad enough to be poor without having other people with a little more money messing around in your life. I'm different from that kind of people. If I'm sincere I can't pretend I'm not different. And I'm not a bit sure I know what's any better for them to do than what they're doing!" She had spoken impetuously, hotly, addressing not the men beside her but a specter of her past life.

"How true that is—how unerring the instinct which feels it!" said Morrison appreciatively.

Page looked at Sylvia quickly, his clear eyes very tender. "Yes, yes; it's her very own life that Sylvia needs to live," he said in unexpected concurrence of opinion. Sylvia felt that the honors of the discussion so far were certainly with Felix. And Austin seemed oddly little concerned by this. He made no further effort to retrieve his cause, but fell into a silence which seemed rather preoccupied than defeated.

They were close to the Arc de Triomphe now. A brilliant sunset was firing a salvo of scarlet and gold behind it, and they stood for a moment to admire. "Oh, Paris! Paris!" murmured Morrison. "Paris in April! There's only one thing better, and that we have before us—Paris in May!"

They turned in past the loge of the concierge, and mounted in the languidly moving elevator to the appartement. Felix went at once to the piano and began playing something Sylvia did not recognize, something brilliantly colored, vivid, resonant, sonorous, perhaps Chabrier, she thought, remembering his remark on the avenue. Without taking off her hat she stepped to her favorite post of observation, the balcony, and sat down in the twilight with a sigh of exquisitely complete satisfaction, facing the sunset, the great arch lifting his huge, harmonious bulk up out of the dim, encircling trees, the resplendent long stretch of the lighted boulevard. The music seemed to rise up from the scene like its natural aroma.

Austin Page came out after her and leaned silently on the railing, looking over the city. Morrison finished the Chabrier and began on something else before the two on the balcony spoke. Sylvia was asking no questions of fate or the future, accepting the present with wilful blindness to its impermanence.

Austin said: "I have been trying to say good-bye all afternoon. I am going back to America tomorrow."

Sylvia was so startled and shocked that she could not believe her ears. Her heart beat hard. To an incoherent, stammered inquiry of hers, he answered, "It's my Colorado property—always that. It spoils everything. I must go back, and make a decision that's needed there. I've been trying to tell you. But I can't. Every time I have tried, I have not dared. If I told you, and you should beckon me back, I should not be strong enough to go on. I could not leave you, Sylvia, if you lifted your hand. And that would be the end of the best of us both." He had turned and faced her, his hands back of him, gripping the railing. The deep vibrations of his voice transported her to that never-forgotten moment at Versailles. He went on: "When it is—when the decision is made, I'll write you. I'll write you, and then—I shall wait to hear your answer!" From inside the room Felix poured a dashing spray of diamond-like trills upon them.

She murmured something, she did not know what; her breathing oppressed by her emotion. "Won't you—shan't we see you—here—?" She put her hand to her side, feeling an almost intolerable pain.

He moved near her, and, to bring himself to her level, knelt down on one knee, putting his elbows on the arm of her chair. The dusk had fallen so thickly that she had not seen his face before. She now saw that his lips were quivering, that he was shaking from head to foot. "It will be for you to say, Sylvia," his voice was rough and harsh with feeling, "whether you see me again." He took her hands in his and covered them with kisses—no grave tokens of reverence these, as on the day at Versailles, but human, hungry, yearning kisses that burned, that burned—

And then he was gone. Sylvia was there alone in the enchanted twilight, the Triumphal Arch before her, the swept and garnished and spangled city beneath her. She lifted her hand and saw that he had left on it not only kisses but tears. If he had been there then, she would have thrown herself into his arms.



CHAPTER XXXVIII

SYLVIA COMES TO THE WICKET-GATE

Three weeks passed before his letter came. The slow, thrilling crescendo of May had lifted the heart up to a devout certainty of June. The leaves were fully out, casting a light, new shadow on the sprinkled streets. Every woman was in a bright-colored, thin summer dress, and every young woman looked alluring. The young men wore their hats tilted to one side, swung jaunty canes as they walked, and peered hopefully under the brim of every flowered feminine headdress. The days were like golden horns of plenty, spilling out sunshine, wandering perfumed airs, and the heart-quickening aroma of the new season. The nights were cool and starry. Every one in Paris spent as much as possible of every hour out of doors. The pale-blue sky flecked with creamy clouds seemed the dome, and the city the many-colored pavement of some vast building, so grandly spacious that the sauntering, leisurely crowds thronging the thoroughfares seemed no crowds at all, but only denoted a delightful sociability.

All the spring vegetables were at their crispest, most melting perfection, and the cherries from Anjou were like miniature apples of Hesperus. Up and down the smaller streets went white-capped little old women, with baskets on their arms, covered with snowy linen, and they chanted musically on the first three notes of the scale, so that the sunny vault above them resounded to the cry, "De la creme, fromage a la creme!" The three Americans had enchanted expeditions to Chantilly, to Versailles again, called back from the past and the dead by the miracle of spring; to more distant formidable Coucy, grimly looking out over the smiling country at its foot, to Fontainebleau, even a two days' dash into Touraine, to Blois, Amboise, Loches, jewels set in the green enamels of May ... and all the time Sylvia's attempt to take the present and to let the future bring what it would, was pitched perforce in a higher and higher key,—took a more violent effort to achieve.

She fell deeper than ever under Morrison's spell, and yet the lack of Austin was like an ache to her. She had said to herself, "I will not let myself think of him until his letter comes," and she woke up in the night suddenly, seeing the fire and tenderness and yearning of his eyes, and stretching out her arms to him before she was awake. And yet she had never tried so hard to divine every shade of Morrison's fastidiousness and had never felt so supreme a satisfaction in knowing that she did. There were strange, brief moments in her life now, when out of the warring complexity in her heart there rose the simple longing of a little girl to go to her mother, to feel those strong, unfailing arms about her. She began to guess dimly, without thinking about it at all, that her mother knew some secret of life, of balance, that she did not. And yet if her mother were at hand, she knew she could never explain to her—how could she, when she did not know herself?—what she was living through. How long she had waited the moment when she would know!

One day towards the end of May, Morrison had come in for lunch, a delicately chosen, deceptively simple meal for which Yoshida had outdone himself. There had been a savory mixture of sweetbreads and mushrooms in a smooth, rich, creamy sauce; green peas that had been on the vines at three o'clock that morning, and which still had the aroma of life in their delectable little balls; sparkling Saumur; butter with the fragrance of dew and clover in it; crisp, crusty rolls; artichokes in oil—such a meal as no money can buy anywhere but in Paris in the spring, such a simple, simple meal as takes a great deal of money to buy even in Paris.

"It is an art to eat like this," said Morrison, more than half seriously, after he had taken the first mouthful of the golden souffle which ended the meal. "What a May we have had! I have been thinking so often of Talleyrand's saying that no one who had not lived before the French Revolution, under the old regime, could know how sweet life could be; and I've been thinking that we may live to say that about the end of this regime. Such perfect, golden hours as it has for those who are able to seize them. It is a debt we own the Spirit of Things to be grateful and to appreciate our opportunity."

"As far as the luncheon goes, it's rather a joke, isn't it," said his hostess, "that it should be an Oriental cook who has so caught the true Gallic accent? I'll tell Tojiko to tell Yoshido that his efforts weren't lost on you. He adores cooking for you. No, you speak about it yourself. Here comes Tojiko with the mail."

She reached for the Herald with one hand, and with the other gave Sylvia a letter with the American postmark. "Oh, Tojiko," said Morrison with the familiarity of an habitue of the house, "will you tell your brother for me that I never tasted anything like his ..."

Mrs. Marshall-Smith broke in with an exclamation of extreme astonishment. "Oh—what do you think—! Sylvia, did you know anything about this? Of all the crazy—why, what under the sun—? I always knew there was a vein of the fanatic—any man who won't smoke—you may be sure there's something unbalanced—!" She now turned the paper as she spoke and held it so that the headlines leaped out across the table:

MILLIONAIRE COAL OPERATOR TURNS VAST HOLDINGS OVER TO THE STATE

Son of Old Peter Page Converted to Socialism

"What!" cried Morrison. Even in the blankness of her stupefaction, Sylvia was aware of a rising note in his voice that was by no means dismay.

"Yes," continued Mrs. Marshall-Smith, reading rapidly and disconnectedly from the paper, beginning an item and dropping it, as she saw it was not the one she was searching for, "'Mr. Page is said to have contemplated some such step for a long ...'—m-m-m, not that ... 'well-known collector of ceramics—Metropolitan Museum—member of the Racquet, the Yacht, the Century, the Yale—thirty-two—Mother Miss Allida Sommerville of Baltimore, formerly a great beauty'—here it is," she stopped skimming and read consecutively: "'Mr. Page's plan has been worked out in all detail with experts. A highly paid, self-perpetuating commission of labor experts, sociologists, and men of practical experience in coal-operating has been appointed to administer Mr. Page's extremely extensive holdings. The profits form a fund which, under the stipulations of Mr. Page's agreement with the State, is to be used to finance a program of advanced social activities; to furnish money for mothers' pensions, even perhaps for fathers' pensions in the case of families too numerous to be adequately cared for on workingmen's wages; to change the public school system of the locality into open-air schools with spacious grounds for manual activities of all kinds; greatly to raise wages; to lengthen the period of schooling before children go into remunerative occupations ...'" Mrs. Marshall-Smith looked up, said, "Oh, you know, the kind of thing such people are always talking about," and began to skip again, "'—extensive plans for garden cities—public libraries—books of the business to be open to employes—educational future—no philanthropy—and so forth and so forth.'" She glanced hurriedly down the page, caught the beginning of another sentence, and read: "'The news has created an immense sensation all over the country. It is prophesied that Mr. Page's unexpected action will throw the coal business into great confusion. Other operators will find it extremely difficult to go on with the old conditions. Already it is rumored that the Chilton Coal and Coke Company ...'"