"You're intense," she said, soberly. "Jill says you'd make a wonderful actor."

Steve looked annoyed. "Those scatterbrained time wasters—don't listen to them. Let's find our real selves—you and I; be worth while. Now that I've made my fortune I want to spend it in a right fashion—I want to be interested in things, not just dollars and cents. Help me, dearest. You know about such things; you've never had the ugliness of poverty bruise the very soul of you."

"You mean having a good time—and parties——" she began.

"No; books, music; studying human conditions. I want to study the slow healing of industrial wounds and determine the best treatment for them. I have made the real me go 'way, 'way off somewheres for a long time until I won my pile of gold that helped me capture the girl I loved. Now it is done the real me wants to come back and stay."

"Oh, I see," she said, vaguely. "Of course there are tiny things to brush up on—greeting people, and you mustn't be so in earnest at dinner parties and contradict and thump your fist. It isn't good form."

"When whippersnappers like Gaylord Vondeplosshe——"

"Sh-h-h! Gay's a dear. He is accepted every place."

"We're nearly there, tough luck! One kiss, please; no one can see. Say you care, then everything else must true up."

The wedding took place at high noon in church, with the bishop and two curates to officiate. There was a vested choir singing "The Voice That Breathed O'er Eden"; a thousand dollars' worth of flowers; six bridesmaids in pastel frocks and picture hats, shepherdess' staffs, and baskets of lilies of the valley; a matron of honour, flower girls, ushers; a best man, a papa, an aunty in black satin with a large section of an ostrich farm for her hat—and a bridegroom.

After the wedding came the breakfast at the Constantine house. Though certain guests murmured that it was a trifle too ultra like the house itself, which was half a medieval castle and half the makings of a village fire department, it was generally considered a success. Nothing was left undone. The bride left the church amid the ringing of chimes; her health was drunk, and she slipped up to the rose-taffeta-adorned boudoir to exchange her ivory satin for a trim suit of emerald green. Everyone wished on the platinum circlet of diamonds and there was the conventional throwing of the bouquet, the rush through the back of the grounds to the hired taxi, the screams of disappointment at the escape—and Mr. and Mrs. O'Valley were en route on their honeymoon.

It remained for the detectives to guard the presents, the society reporters to discover new adjectives of superlative praise, and the guests to drink up the champagne and say: "Wonderful." "Must have cost thousands." "Handsome couple. Couldn't have happened in any other country but America." "War fortune." "Oh, yes, no doubt of it—hides and razors turned the trick." "Well, how long do you think it is going to last?"

The office forces of the O'Valley and Constantine companies had been excused so as to be present at the ceremony. But Mary Faithful and Trudy Burrows had not availed themselves of the opportunity. Womanly rebellion and heartache suddenly blotted out Mary's emotionless scheme of action. Besides, there was a valid excuse of waiting to catch an important long-distance call. With Trudy it was mere envy causing her to say over and over: "See Gay, the ragged little beggar, walk up the aisle with one of those rich girls and never glance at me—just because he's a Vondeplosshe? And me have to sit beside Nellie Lunk, who'll cry when the organ plays and wear that ridiculous bathtub of a hat? Never! I won't go unless I can walk up the aisle with Gay. Wait until I see him to-night; I'll make it very pleasant."

Life seemed rather empty for Trudy as she sat in the deserted offices pretending to add figures and trying to hum gayly. Even the box of wedding cake laid on her desk—it was laid on everyone's desk—brought forth no smile or intention of dreaming over it. Was she to spend her days earning fifteen dollars a week in this feudal baron's employ? Tears marred the intensive cultivation on her rouged cheeks as she looked out the window to see the office force being brought back from the church in trucks.

"Like cattle—peasants—all because of money. A war profiteer, that's what he was. And she isn't anything at all except that she has her father's money." She glanced toward Mary's closed door. "Poor Mary," she thought; "she cares! I don't—that makes it easier. Well, he could have done worse than to take Mary," tossing her head as she tried to create the impression of indifference now that the employees were coming back to their desks.

For there was a forked road for Trudy as well as for Mary Faithful. Women are no longer compelled to accept the one unending pathway of domesticity. Trudy's forked road resolved itself into either marriage with Gay as a stepping stone to marriage with someone else, or a smart shop with society women and actresses as patrons, being able to live at a hotel and do as she wished, inventing a neat little past of escaping from a Turkish harem or being the widow of an English officer who died serving his country. Trudy was not without resources, in her own estimation, and whether she married Gay or achieved the shop was a toss-up. Like the rest of the world she considered herself capable of doing both!

Hearing the scuffle of feet Mary opened the door and forced herself to ask about the wedding. Presently the excitement died down and the round of mechanical drudgery took its place. An hour later someone knocked at an inner door which led to steep side stairs connecting with a side street entrance. Wondering who it was Mary opened it, to find Steve, very flushed and handsome, a flower in his buttonhole yet no hint of rice about him.

"Sh-h-h! Not a word out loud! I want to escape. Mrs. O'Valley is waiting round the corner in a cab. I forgot the long-distance call—the one we expected yesterday."

"It came while everyone was at the church. I stayed here in case it did. They will pay your price, so I closed the deal."

"Hurrah for Mary Faithful! But I wish you could have been there. It was like a picture. I never saw her look so lovely. Well, that's settled. Wire me at Chicago. I think that's everything. Oh, you're to have fifty a week from now on. What man isn't generous on his wedding day? Good-bye, Miss Head of Affairs." A moment later he was climbing down the rickety flight of stairs.

For a long time Mary sat watching the hands of her desk clock slowly proceed round the dial. Someone knocked at the door and she said to come in, but her voice sounded faint and far away.

Fifty dollars a week—generous on his wedding day! She ought to be very glad; it meant she could save more and have an occasional treat for Luke. It was good to think that women had forked roads these days. How terrible if she were left in the shelter of a home to mourn unchecked. Besides, she was guarding his business; that was a great comfort. The Gorgeous Girl was sharing him with Mary Faithful—would always share him. That was a comfort, too.

After the errand boy left, Mary tried to write a letter but she found herself going into the washroom off Steve's office and without warning weakly burying her face in an old working coat he had left behind. She had just made a great many dollars for him which he would spend on the Gorgeous Girl; she would make many more during the long summer while she stayed at the post and was Miss Head of Affairs. She had laid her woman's hopes on the altar of commerce because of Steve O'Valley, and he rewarded her with a ten-dollar-a-week raise since a man was always generous on his wedding day.

Yet there was a distinct satisfaction in the heartache and the responsibility, even in the irony of the ten-dollar-a-week advance. Life might be hard—but it was not empty! She was glad to be in the deserted office replete with his belongings and breathing of his personality. She was glad to be an acknowledged Miss Head of Affairs.

"You'd miss even a heartache if it was all you had," she whispered to herself from within the folds of Steve's office coat.



CHAPTER IV

During the summer the O'Valley Leather Company discovered that Mary Faithful made quite as efficient a manager as Steve O'Valley himself. Nor did she neglect any of a multitude of petty details—such as the amount of ice needed for the water cooler, the judicious issue of office supplies; the innovation of a rest-room for girls metamorphosed out of a hitherto dingy storeroom; the eradication of friction between two ancient bookkeepers who had come to regard the universe as against them. Even the janitor's feelings were appeased by a few kind words and a crossing of his palm with silver when Mary decided to houseclean before Steve's return.

It is impossible for a business woman not to have feminine notions. They stray into her routine existence like blades of pale grass persistently shooting up between the cracks of paving blocks. Quite frilly curtains adorned Mary's office windows, fresh flowers were kept in a fragile vase, a marble bust of Dante guarded the filing cabinet, and despite the general cleaning she used a special little silk duster for her own knicknacks. On a table was a very simple tea service with a brass samovar for days when the luncheon hour proved too stormy for an outside excursion.

Sharing Steve with the Gorgeous Girl, Mary had decided to clean his business home just as the Gorgeous Girl would have the apartment set in spick-and-span order. It was during the general upsetting with brooms, mops, paint pots, and what not, while Mary good-naturedly tried to work at a standing desk, that Mark Constantine dropped in unexpectedly.

"Gad!" he began, characteristically. "Thought I'd find you in your cool and hospitable office inviting me to have a siesta." He mopped his face with a huge silk handkerchief.

"Try it in a few days and we will be quite shipshape." Mary wheeled up a chair for him. "Anything I can do for you?"

He sank down with relief; his fast-accumulating flesh made him awkward and fond of lopping down at unexpected intervals. He glanced up at this amazing young woman, crisp and cool in her blue muslin dress, the tiny gold watch in a black silk guard being her only ornament. His brows drew into what appeared to be a forbidding frown; he really liked Mary, with her steady eyes somehow suggesting eternity and her funny freckled nose destroying any such notion.

"How are you getting on?" was all he said.

"Splendidly. We expect Mr. O'Valley a week from Monday—but of course you know that yourself."

"Gad," Constantine repeated.

"And how is Mr. Constantine?" Mary asked, almost graciously.

"In the hands of my enemy," he protested. "Bea left a hundred and one things to be seen to. My sister has sprained her ankle and is out of the running. It's the apartment that causes the trouble—Bea has sent letter after letter telling what she wants us to do. I thought everything was all set before she went away but—here!" He drew out violet notepaper and handed it over. "Sorry to bother you, but when that girl gets home and settled I hope she'll be able to tend to her own affairs and leave us in peace. I guess you understand how women are about settling a new house."

Reluctantly Mary deciphered the slanting, curlicue handwriting, which said in part:

Now, papa dear, I'm terribly worried about the painted Chinese wall panels for the little salon. They are likely to be the wrong design. Jill has written that hers were. So please get the man to give you a guarantee that he will correct any mistakes. I want you to go to Brayton's and get white-and-gold jars that will look well in the dining room—Brayton knows my tastes. Besides this, he is to have two rose pots of old Wheldon ware for me—they will contain electrically lighted flowers—like old-fashioned bouquets. I wish you and aunty would drive out to the arts-and-crafts shop and bid on the red lacquer cabinet and the French clock that is in stock; I am sure no one has bought them. I could not decide whether I wanted them or not until now, and I must have them. They will tone in beautifully with the rugs.

Mary turned the page:

Also, Aunt Belle has not answered my letter asking her to order the monogrammed stationery—four sizes, please, ashes of roses shade and lined with gold tissue. I also told Aunt Belle to see about relining my mink cape and muff. I shall wish to wear it very early in the season, and I want something in a smart striped effect with a pleated frill for the muff. And the little house for Monster completely slipped my mind—Aunt Belle knows about it—with a wind-harp sort of thing at one side and funny pictures painted on the outside. I have changed my mind about the colour scheme for the breakfast nook—I am going to have light gray, almost a silver, and I would like some good pewter things.

It seems to me I shall never be rested. Steve wants to see every sunrise and explore every trail. We have met quite nice people and the dancing at the hotels is lovely. Oh, yes, if you need any help I know Miss Faithful will be glad to help, and Gaylord has ripping ideas.

Loads of love to you, dear papa. Your own

BEA.

Mary returned the letter without comment.

"Will you help me?" Constantine demanded almost piteously. "Belle's out of the running, you know."

"I'm cleaning my own house," Mary began, looking at the surrounding disorder, "but I can run up to the apartment with you and see what must be done; though it seems to me——"

"Seems to you what, young woman?"

"—that your daughter would prefer to do these at her leisure—they are so personal."

Constantine moved uneasily in his chair. "I guess women don't like to do things these days"—rather disgruntled in general—"but she might as well have asked an African medicine man as to ask me. What do I know about red lacquered cabinets and relining fur capes? I just pay for them."

Mary smiled. Something about his gruff, merciless personality had always attracted her. She had sometimes suspected that the day would come when she would be sorry for him—just why she did not know. She had watched him from afar during the period of being his assistant bookkeeper, and now, having risen with the fortunes of Steve O'Valley, she faced him on an almost equal footing—another queer quirk of American commerce.

She realized that his tense race after wealth had been in a sense his strange manner of grieving for his wife. But his absolute concentration along one line resulted in a lack of wisdom concerning all other lines. Though he could figure to the fraction of a dollar how to beat the game, play big-fish-swallow-little-fish and get away with it, he had no more judgment as to his daughter's absurd self than Monster, who had gone on the honeymoon wrapped in a new silken blanket. You cannot have your cake and eat it, too, as Mary had decided during her early days of running errands for nervous modistes who boxed her ears one moment and gave her a silk remnant the next. Neither can a man put all his powers of action into one channel, blinding himself to all else in the world, and expect to emerge well balanced and normal in his judgments.

As Mary agreed to help Constantine out of his debris of French clocks and pewter for the breakfast room she began to feel sorry for him even if he was a business pirate—for he had paid an extremely high price for the privilege of being made a fool of by his own child.

He escorted her to the limousine and they whirled up to the apartment house, where in all the gray stone, iron grille work, hall-boy elegance there now resided three couples of the Gorgeous Girl type, and where Bea's apartment awaited her coming, the former tenants having been forced to vacate in time to have the place completely redone.

"I wouldn't ask Gaylord if I had to do it myself," Constantine said, brushing by the maid who opened the door. "There is a young man we could easily spare. If he ever gets as good a job as painting spots on rocking-horses I'll eat my hat."

Mary was surveying the room. "Where—where do we go to from here?" she faltered.

Constantine sank into a large chair, shaking his head. "Damned if I know," he panted. "Look at that truck!"—pointing to piles of wedding gifts.

Mary walked the length of the drawing room. It had black velvet panels and a tan carpet with angora rugs spread at perilous intervals; there was a flowered-silk chaise-longue, bright yellow damask furniture, and an Italian-Renaissance screen before the marble fireplace.

Opening out of this was a salon—this was where the Chinese panels were to find a haven—and already cream-and-gold furniture had been placed at artistic angles with blue velvet hangings for an abrupt contrast. There was a multitude of books bound in dove-coloured ooze; cut glass, crystal, silver candelabra sprinkled throughout. Men were working on fluted white satin window drapes, and Mary glanced toward the dining room to view the antique mahogany and sparkle of plate. Someone was fitting more hangings in the den, and a woman was disputing with her co-worker as to the best place for the goldfish globe and the co-worker was telling her that Monster's house was to occupy the room—yes, Monster, the O'Valley dog—a pound and a half, he weighed, and was subject to pneumonia. Here they began to laugh, and someone else, knowing of Constantine's presence, discreetly closed the door.

Flushing, Mary returned to the drawing room and standing before Constantine's chair she said swiftly: "I'm afraid I cannot help you, sir. I'm not this sort. I shouldn't be able to please. Besides, it is robbing your daughter of a great joy—and a wonderful duty, if you don't mind my saying it—this arranging of her own home. We have no right to do it for her."

"She's asked us to do it," spluttered the big man.

"Then you will have to ask her to excuse me."

Mary was almost stern. It seemed quite enough to have to stay at her post all summer, run the business and houseclean the office for his return, without being expected to come into the Gorgeous Girl's realm and do likewise. In this new atmosphere she began to feel old and plain, quite impossible! The yellow damask furniture, the rugs, the silver and gold and lovely extravagances seemed laughing at her and suggesting: "Go back to your filing cabinet and your old-maid silk dusting cloths, to your rest-rooms for girls, and to your arguments with city salesmen. You have no more right here than she will ever have in your office."

When Constantine would have argued further she threw back her head defiantly, saying: "Someone explains the difference between men and women by the fact that men swear and women scream, which is true as far as it goes. But in these days you often find a screaming gentleman and a profane lady—and there's a howdy-do! You can't ask the profane lady—no matter if she is a right-hand business man—to come fix pretties. You better write your daughter what I've said, and if you don't mind I'd like to get back to the office."

Constantine rose, frowning down at her with an expression that would have frightened a good many women stauncher than Mary Faithful. For she had mentioned to him what no one, not even his sluggish conscience, had ever hinted at—his daughter's duty.

But all he said was: "Profane ladies and screaming gentlemen. Well, I've put a screaming-gentleman tag on Gaylord Vondeplosshe—but what about yourself? Where are you attempting to classify?"

"Me? I'll be damned if I help you out," she laughed up at him as she moved toward the door.

Chuckling, yet defeated, Constantine admitted her triumph and sent her back to the office in the limousine.

At that identical moment Gaylord, alias the screaming gentleman, had been summoned to Aunt Belle's bedside. For Beatrice believed in having two strings to her bow and she had written her aunt a second deluge of complaints and requests. Bemoaning the sprained ankle—and the probable regaining of three pounds which had been laboriously massaged away—Aunt Belle had called for Gaylord's sympathy and support.

While Mary, rather perturbed yet unshaken in her convictions, returned to the office and Constantine had decided his blood pressure could not stand any traipsing round after folderols, Gaylord was eagerly taking notes and saying pretty nothings to the doleful Mrs. Todd, who relied utterly on his artistic judgment and promptness of action.

Whereupon Gaylord proudly rolled out of the Constantine gates in a motor car bearing Constantine's monogram, and by late afternoon he had come to a most satisfactory understanding with decorators and antique dealers—an understanding which led to an increase in the prices Beatrice was to pay and the splitting of the profits between one Gaylord Vondeplosshe and the tradesmen.

"A supper!" Mark Constantine demanded crisply that same evening, merely groaning when his sister told him that Gaylord had undertaken all the errands and was such a dear boy. "And send it up to my room—ham, biscuits, pie, and iced coffee, and I'm not at home if the lord mayor calls."

He departed to the plainest room in the mansion and turned on an electric fan to keep him company. He sat watching the lawn men at their work, wondering what he was to do with this barn of a place. Beatrice had told him forcibly that she was not going to live in it. Wherein was the object of keeping it open for Belle Todd and himself when more and more he wished for semi-solitude? Noise and crowds and luxuries irritated him. He liked meals such as the one he had ordered, the plebeian joy of taking off tight shoes and putting on disreputable slippers, sitting in an easy-chair with his feet on another, while he read detective stories or adventurous romances with neither sense nor moral. He liked to relive in dream fashion the years of early endeavour—of his married life with Hannah. After he finished the reverie he would tell himself with a flash of honesty, "Gad, it might as well have happened to some other fellow—for all the good it does you." Nothing seemed real to Constantine except his check book and his wife's monument.

It was still to dawn upon him that his daughter partly despised him. He had always said that no one loved him but his child, and that no one but his child mattered so far as he was concerned. Since Beatrice's marriage he had become restless, wretched, desperately lonesome; he found himself missing Steve quite as much as he missed Beatrice. Their letters were unsatisfactory since they were chiefly concerned with things—endless things that they coveted or had bought or wanted in readiness for their return. As he sat watching the lawn men gossip he knitted his black brows and wondered if he ought to sell the mansion and be done with it. Then it occurred to him that grandchildren playing on the velvety lawn would make it quite worth while. With a thrill of anticipation he began to plan for his grandchildren and to wonder if they, too, would be eternally concerned with things.

As he recalled Mary's defiance he chuckled. "A ten-dollar-a-week raise was cheap for such a woman," he thought.

Meantime, Trudy informed the Faithful family at supper: "Gay has telephoned that he is coming to-night. Were you going to use the parlour, Mary?" A mere formality always observed for no reason at all.

"No, I'm going to water the garden. It's as dry as Sahara."

Luke groaned.

"Don't make Luke help you. He's stoop-shouldered enough from study without making him carry sprinkling cans," Mrs. Faithful objected.

"Nonsense! It's good for him, and he will be through in an hour."

"Too late for the first movie show," expostulated Luke.

"A world tragedy," his sister answered.

"I wanted to go to-night," her mother insisted. "It's a lovely story. Mrs. Bowen was in to tell me about it—all about a Russian war bride. They built a whole town and burnt it up at the end of the story. I guess it cost half a million—and there's fighting in it, too."

"All right, go and take Luke. But I don't think the movies are as good for him as working in a garden."

"You never want me to have pleasure. Home all day with only memories of the dead for company, and then you come in as cross as a witch, ready to stick your nose in a book or go dig in the mud! Excuse me, Trudy, but a body has to speak out sometimes. Your father to the life—reading and grubbing with plants. Oh, mother's proud of you, Mary, but if you would only get yourself up a little smarter and go out with young people you'd soon enough want Luke to go out, too! I don't pretend to know what your judgment toward your poor old mother would be!"

Mary's day had included a dispute with a firm's London representative, the Constantine incident, a session at the dentist's as a noon-recess attraction, housecleaning the office, and two mutually contradictory wires from Steve. She laid her knife and fork down with a defiant little clatter.

"I can't burn the candle at both ends. I work all day and I have to relax when I leave the office. If my form of a good time is to read or set out primroses it is nothing to cry thief for, is it? I want you to go out, mother, as you very well know. And you are welcome to fill the house with company. Only if I'm to do a man's work and earn his wage I must claim my spare time for myself."

"Now listen here, dear," interposed Trudy, who took Mary's part when it came to a real argument, "don't get peeved. Let me buy your next dress and show you how to dance. You'll be surprised what a difference it will make. You'll get so you just hate ever to think of work."

"Splendid! Who will pay the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker?" Mary thought of the wedding presents carelessly stacked about Beatrice's apartment. One pile of them, as she measured expenses, would have paid the aforementioned gentlemen for a year or more.

"Now you've got her going," Luke objected. "Say, Trudy, you don't kill yourself tearing off any work at the shop!"

"Luke," began his mother, "be a gentleman. Dear me, I wish I hadn't said a word. To think of my children in business! Why, Luke ought to be attending a private school and going to little cotillion parties like my brothers did; and Mary in her own home." She pressed her napkin to her eyes.

"I admit Mary carries me along on the pay roll—I'm Mary's foolishness," Trudy said, easily. "Mary's a good scout even if she does keep us stepping. She has to fall down once in a while, and she fell hard when she hired me and took me in as a boarder."

Mary flushed. "I try to make you do your share," she began, "and——"

"I ought to pay more board," Trudy giggled at her own audacity. "But I won't. You're too decent to make me. You know I'm such a funny fool I'd go jump in the river if I got blue or things went wrong, and you like me well enough to not want that. Don't worry about our Mary, Mrs. Faithful. Just let her manage Luke and he won't wander from her apron strings like he will if you and I keep him in tow."

Luke made a low bow, scraping his chair back from the table. "I'll go ahead and get reserved seats and mother can come when she's ready," he proposed.

Mrs. Faithful beamed with triumph. "That's my son! Get them far enough back, the pictures blur if I'm too close."

"I'll do the dishes," Mary said, briefly. "Go and get ready."

"I'd wipe them only Gay is coming so early," Trudy explained, glibly.

"I'd rather be alone." Mary was piling up the pots and pans.

"Now, deary, if you don't feel right about mother's going," her mother resumed a little later as she poked her head into the kitchen, "just say so. But I certainly want to see that town burnt up; and besides, it's teaching Luke history. Dear me, your hair is dull. Why don't you try that stuff Trudy uses?"

"Because I'm not Trudy. Good-bye."

"You're all nerves again. I'd certainly let someone else do the work."

"I need a vacation."

"That means you want to get away from us. Well, I try to keep the home together. Leave that coffeepot just as it is, I'll want a drop when I get back." Waddling out the door Mrs. Faithful left Mary to assault the dishes and long for Steve's return.

"I wonder why the great plan did not make it possible for all folks to like their relatives?" she asked herself as she finally hung the tea towels on the line; "or their star boarder?"

Then she became engrossed in the way the newly set out plants had taken root. Bending over the flower beds she was hardly conscious that darkness had fallen over the earth—a heavenly, summer-cool darkness with veiled stars prophetic of a blessed shower. She repaired to the porch swing to dream her dreams of fluffs and frills, arrange a dream house and live therein. It should be quite unlike the Gorgeous Girl's apartment—but a roomy, sprawling affair with old furniture that was used and loved and shabby, well-read books, carefully chosen pictures, dull rugs, and oddly shaped lamps, a shaggy old dog to lie before the open fireplace and be patted occasionally, fat blue jugs of Ragged Robin roses at frequent intervals. Perhaps there would be a baby's toy left somewhere along the stairway leading to the nursery. When one has the cool of a summer's night, a porch screened with roses and a comfortable swing, what does it matter if there are unlikable persons and china-shop apartment houses?

Had Mary known what was taking place in the front parlour it would not have jarred her from her dreams. For Gaylord, resplendent in ice-cream flannels, and Trudy, wearing an unpaid-for black-satin dress with red collar and cuffs, were both busier than the proverbial beaver planning their wedding. It was to be an informal and unexpected little affair, being the direct result of the Gorgeous Girl's demands as to settling her household.

"You've no idea how jolly easy it was, Babseley. There was a dressing case I know Bea will keep—it brought me a cool hundred commission—it had just come in. I plunged and bought two altar scarfs she can use for her reading stand—she likes such things, besides all the bona-fide orders. I've been working for fair—and I've made over a thousand dollars."

Trudy kissed Bubseley between his pale little eyes. "You Lamb! Sure you won't have to give it back or that they will tell?"

"Of course not! They'd give their own selves away. That's the way such things are always done, y'know. I've an idea that I'll go in seriously for the business by and by. I don't feel any compunction; I'm entitled to every cent of it; in fact, I call it cheap for Bea at a thousand."

"But will they really pay you?" Trudy was skeptical. It seemed such a prodigious amount for buying a few trifles.

"The Constantine credit is like the Bank of England. I'll have my money and we'll make our getaway before Bea arrives in town."

"Why?" Trudy did not approve of this. The contrast between her marriage and the Gorgeous Girl's wedding rankled.

Gay hesitated. "I want to go to New York and see concert managers and father's friends," he evaded. "Then we'll visit my sister in Connecticut as long as she'll have us. And when we come back—well, you'll—you'll know the smart ways better."

He was a trifle afraid of Trudy and he did not know how best to advise her that her slips in speech and manners would be more easily remedied by setting her an example of the correct thing than by staying in Hanover and leading a cat-and-dog life, getting nowhere at all.

Trudy kissed him again. "Hurrah for the eternal frolic!" she said, adding: "But we'll know Beatrice and Steve socially, won't we?"

"Of course!" he said, in helpless concession.

His one-cylinder little brain had not yet reckoned with Trudy's determination to conquer the social arena. He knew he must have her to help him; his efforts with creditors were failing sadly of late. Besides, he admired her tremendously; he felt like a rake and a deuce of a chap when they went out together, and he relied on her vivacity—Pep had been his pet name for her before he originated Babseley—to carry him through. It really would be quite an easy matter to live on nothing a year until something turned up. The graft from Beatrice was the open sesame, however, and the Gorgeous Girl would never suspect the truth.

"Keep right on working hard," Trudy said, fondly, as they kissed each other good-night. "I'll tell Mary to-morrow. I want to leave my big trunk here because we might want to stay here for a few days when we come back."

"Never!"—masterfully pointing his cane at the moon. "My wife is going to have her own apartment. One of father's friends has built several apartment houses and he'll be sure to let me in."

"Are we dreaming?" Trudy asked, thinking of how indebted she was to Beatrice O'Valley, yet how she envied and hated her.

"No, Babseley, I'll phone you to-morrow and come down. If you see me flying about in a machine don't be surprised; I'm to use their big car as much as I like. But it would be a little thick to have us seen together—just yet."

"I'll see that the whole social set gets a draft from me that will open their eyes," Trudy promised, loath to have him go.

"If old man Constantine knew I drew that money down!" Gay chuckled with delight. "When his favourite after-dinner story is to tell how Steve O'Valley lay on his stomach and watched goats for an education."

"I'd hate to have my finger between his teeth when he learns the truth," Trudy prompted.

She spent half the night taking inventory of her wardrobe, her debts, and her personal charms, practising airs and graces before her mirror and calculating how long the thousand would last them. All the world was before her, to Trudy's way of thinking. She would be Mrs. Gaylord Vondeplosshe, and with Gay's name and her brain—well, to give Trudy's own sentiments, they would soon be able to carry the whole show in their grip and use the baggage cars to bring back the profits!



CHAPTER V

Gaylord's sudden marriage and departure for New York caused no small comment. In the Faithful family Mary and Luke stood against Mrs. Faithful, who declared with meaning emphasis that some girls had more sense than others and it was better to marry and make a mistake the first time than to remain an old maid. With Trudy's style and high spirits she was going to carry Gaylord into the front ranks without any effort. Luke described the event by saying that a bad pair of disturbers had teamed for life, and relied upon Mary to take up the burden of the proof.

"Don't mourn so, mother. I'm a happy old maid," she insisted when the comments grew too numerous for her peace of mind. "Trudy was not the sort to blush unseen, and it's a relief not to have to cover up her mistakes at the office. Everything will be serene once more. As for Gay's future—I suppose he is likely to bring home anything from a mousetrap to a diamond tiara. I don't pretend to understand his ways."

"Of course it isn't like Mrs. O'Valley's wedding," her mother resumed, with a resonant sniffle. "You have been so used to hearing about her ways that poor little Trudy seems cheap. Perhaps your mother and brother and the little home seem so, too. But we can't all be Gorgeous Girls, and I think Trudy was right to take Gaylord when he had the money for a ring and a license."

"He had more than that," Mary ruminated. "People don't walk to New York."

"Did he win it on a horse race?" Luke had an eye to the future.

"Maybe his father's friends helped him," Mrs. Faithful added.

"Can't prove anything by me." Mary shook her head.

Neither Trudy nor Gaylord knew that all Beatrice's bills were sent to Mary to discount, and Mary, not without a certain shrewdness, had her own ideas on the matter. But it amused more than it annoyed her. Gay might as well have a few hundred to spend in getting a wife and caretaker as tradesmen whose weakness it was to swell their profits beyond all respectability.

"I wonder where they will live." Mrs. Faithful found the subject entirely too fascinating to let alone.

"Not here," her daughter assured her. "And if you'd only say yes I could get such a sunny, pretty flat where the work would be worlds easier."

"Leave my home? Never! It would be like uprooting an oak forest. Time for that when I am dead and gone." The double chin quivered with indignation. "I don't see why Trudy and Gay won't come here and take the two front rooms. They'd be company for me."

She approved of Trudy's views of life as much as she disapproved and was rather afraid of this young woman who wanted to bustle her into trim house dresses instead of the eternal wrappers.

"I kept Trudy only because she needed work—and a home," Mary said, frankly; "and because you wanted her. But my salary does nicely for us. Besides, it would be a bad influence for Luke to have such a person as Gay about. We must make a man out of Luke."

"Don't go upsetting him. He eats his three good meals a day and always acts like a little gentleman. You'll nag at him until he runs away like my brother Amos did."

"Better run away from us than run over us," Mary argued; "but there is no need of planning for Trudy's return. Their home will be in a good part of the city, if it consists in merely hanging onto a lamp-post. You don't realize that Gay is a bankrupt snob and married Trudy only because he could play off cad behind his pretty wife's skirts. Men will like Trudy and the women ridicule and snub her until she finds she has a real use for her claws. Up to now she has only halfway kept them sharpened. In a few years you will find Mr. and Mrs. Gaylord Vondeplosshe in Hanover society with capital letters, hobnobbing with Beatrice O'Valley and her set and somehow managing to exist in elegance. Don't ask how they will do it—but they will. However, they would never consider starting from our house. That would be getting off on a sprained ankle."

Mrs. Faithful gulped the rest of her coffee. "No one has any use for me because I haven't money. Our parlour was good enough for them to do their courting in, and if they don't come and see me real often I'll write Trudy a letter and tell her some good plain facts!"

"Be sure to say we all think Gay's mother must have been awful fond of children to have raised him," Luke suggested from the offing.

Mary tossed a sofa pillow at him and disappeared. She could have electrified her mother by telling her that Steve was to return that morning, that the office was prepared to welcome him back, and that Mrs. O'Valley would be anchored at the telephone to get into communication with her dearest and best of friends.

As she walked to the street car she reproached herself for not having told the news. It was a tiny thing to tell a woman whose horizon was bounded by coffee pots, spotted wrappers, and inane movies.

"You're mean in spots," Mary told herself. "You know how it would have pleased her."

She sometimes felt a maternal compassion for this helpless dear with her double chins and self-sacrificing past, and she wondered whether her father had not had the same attitude during the years of nagging reproach at his lack of material prosperity. She resolved to come home that night with a budget of news items concerning Steve's return, even bringing a rose from the floral offering that was to be placed on his desk.

"After all, she's mother," Mary thought, rounding the corner leading to the office building, "and like most of us she does the best she can!"

She tried to maintain a calm demeanour in the office as she answered inquiries and opened the mail. But all the time she kept glancing at her desk clock. Half-past nine—of course he would be late—surely he must come by ten. She wished she had flung maidenly discretion to the winds and worn the white silk sport blouse she had just bought. But she had made herself dress in a crumpled waist of nondescript type. The floral piece on Steve's long-deserted desk made her keep glancing up to smile at its almost funeral magnificence.

She answered a telephone call. Yes, Mr. O'Valley was expected—undoubtedly he would wish to reserve a plate for the Chamber of Commerce luncheon—unless they heard to the contrary they could do so. ... Oh, it was to include the wives and so on. Then reserve places for Mr. and Mrs. O'Valley. She hung up the receiver abruptly and went to making memoranda.

Even if she demanded and would receive a share of Steve's time and attention it would be the thankless, almost bitter portion—such as reserving plates for Mr. and Mrs. O'Valley or O.K.ing Mrs. O'Valley's bills. Still it was hers, awarded to her because of keenness of brain and faithfulness of action. Steve needed her as much as he needed to come home to his miniature palace to watch the Gorgeous Girl display her latest creation, to be able to take the Gorgeous Girl fast in his arms and say: "You are mine—mine—mine!" very likely punctuating the words with kisses. Yet he must return each day to Mary Faithful and say: "You are my right-hand man; I need you."

"A penny for your thoughts." Steve O'Valley was standing beside her. "You look as if work agreed with you. Say something nice now—that a long holiday has improved me!"

She managed to put a shaking hand into his, wondering if she betrayed her thoughts. Being as tall as Steve she was able to look at him, not up at him; and there they stood—the handsome, reckless man with just a suggestion of nervous tension in his Irish blue eyes, and the plain young woman in a rumpled linen blouse.

"Ah—so I don't please," he bantered. "Well, tell us all about it. I've a thousand questions—my father-in-law says you are the only thing I have that he covets. How about that?" He led the way into his office, Mary following.

Then he fell upon his mountain of mail and memoranda, demands for this charity and that patriotic subscription, and Mary began a careful explanation of affairs and they sat talking and arguing until the general superintendent looked in to suggest that the shop might like to have Mr. O'Valley say hello.

"It's nearly eleven," Steve exclaimed, "and we haven't begun to say a tenth of all there is to discuss. See the funeral piece, Hodges? Why didn't you label it 'Rest in pieces' and be done with it, eh? I shall now appear to make a formal speech." Here he cut a rosebud from the big wreath and handed it gravely to Mary; he cut a second one and fastened it in his own buttonhole. "Lead me out, Hodges. I'm a bit unsteady—been playing too long."

Mary stood in the doorway, one hand caressing the little rose. That Beatrice should have had the flower was her first thought. Then it occurred to her that Beatrice would have all the flowers at the formal affairs to be given the bridal couple, besides sitting opposite Steve at his own table. She no longer felt that she had stolen the rose or usurped attention. There was a clapping of hands and the usual laughter which accompanies listening to any generous proprietor's speech, a trifle forced perhaps but very jolly sounding. Then Steve returned to his office to become engrossed in conversation with Mary until Mark Constantine dropped in to bowl him off to the club for luncheon.

"She's kept things humming, hasn't she?" Constantine asked, sinking into the nearest chair.

"A prize," Steve said, proudly. "I don't find a slip-up any place. I'll be back at two, Miss Faithful, in case any one calls.... How is Bea?" His voice softened noticeably.

Mary slipped away.

"Bea doesn't like one half of her things and the other half are so much better than the apartment that she says they don't show up," her father admitted, drolly. "She is tired to death—so you'll find her at home, my boy, with a box of candy and the latest novel. Belle was talking her head off when I left the house and the girls keep calling her on the telephone for those little three-quarters-of-an-hour hello talks. It seems to me that for rich girls, my daughter and her friends are the busiest, most tired women I ever knew—and yet do the least." He put on his hat and waited for Steve to open the door.

"I don't pretend to understand them," Steve answered. "Maybe that's why I'm so happy. Bea fusses if the shade of draperies doesn't match her gown, and if Monster has a snarl in her precious hair it is cause for a tragedy. But I just grin and go along and presently she has forgotten all about it."

"I tried to get that young woman helper of yours to help me fix up Bea's things," Constantine complained. "Let's walk to the club—my knees are going stiff on me."

"Well?"

"She looked round the apartment and plain refused to put away another woman's pots and pans. It was just spunk. I don't know that I blame her. So Belle got that low order of animal life——"

"Meaning Gaylord?"

"Yes; and now the husband, I understand, of one of your thinnest clad and thinnest brained former clerks. Gay was in his element; he kept the machine working overtime and flattered Belle until he had everything his own way. Yet Beatrice seems quite satisfied with his achievements."

"You must have been hanging round the house this morning."

"I couldn't get down to brass tacks," he admitted. "You've had her all summer—but you can bet your clothes you wouldn't have had her if I hadn't been willing." He slapped Steve on the shoulder good-naturedly.

Steve nodded briskly. Then he suggested: "Bea has the New York idea rather strong. Has she ever hinted it to you?"

"Don't let that flourish, Steve. Kill it at the start. She knew better than to try to wheedle me into going. I'm smarter than most of the men round these parts but I'd be fleeced properly by the New York band of highbinders if I tried to go among them. And you're not as good at the game as I am. Not——" He paused as if undecided how much would be best to tell Steve. He evidently decided that generalities would be the wisest arguments, so he continued: "Don't wince—it's the truth, and there must be no secrets between us from now on. Besides, you're in love and you can't concentrate absolutely. My best advice to you is to stay home and tend to your knitting.

"You and Bea can go play round New York all you like. Let the New York crowd come to see you and be entertained, they'll be glad to eat your dinners and drink your wine if they don't have to pay for it. We can get away with Hanover but we'd be handcuffed if we tried New York. When I made a hundred thousand dollars I was tempted to try New York instead of staying here—to make Bea the most gorgeous girl in the metropolis. But horse sense made me pass it by and stay on my own home diamond. So I've made a good many more hundreds of thousands and, what's to the point, I've kept 'em!"

Here the conversation drifted into more technical business detail with Steve expostulating and contradicting and Constantine frowning at his son-in-law through his bushy eyebrows, admiring him prodigiously all the while.

* * * * *

Beatrice had telephoned Steve's office, to be told that her husband was at lunch and would not be in until two o'clock.

"Have him come to our apartment," she left word, "just as soon as he can. I am just leaving Mr. Constantine's house to go there."

After which she began telling Aunt Belle good-bye.

"Dear me, Bea, what a wonderful hat!" her aunt sighed. "I never saw anything more becoming."

It took ten minutes to admire Bea's costume of rosewood crape and the jewelled-cap effect, somewhat like Juliet's, caught over each ear by a pink satin rose.

"Steve doesn't appreciate anything in the way of costumes," she complained. "He just says: 'Yes, deary, I love you, and anything you wear suits me.' Quite discouraging and so different from the other boys."

"I'd call it very comfortable," suggested her aunt.

"I suppose so—but comfortable things are often tiresome. It is tiresome, too, to see too much of the same person. I was really bored to death in the Yosemite—Steve is so primitive—he wanted to stay there for days and days."

"Steve comes from primitive people," her aunt said, soberly, not realizing her own humour.

"Don't mention it. Didn't he force me to go to Virginia City, the most terrible little ghost world of tumbledown shacks and funny one-eyed, one-suspendered men, and old women smoking pipes and wearing blue sunbonnets! He was actually sentimental and enthusiastic about it all, trying to hunt up old cronies of his grandfather's—I was cross as could be until we came back to Reno. Now Reno is interesting."

She spent the better part of an hour describing the divorcees and their adventures.

"Well, I'm off for home. I think I shall entertain the Red Cross committee first of all. It's only right, I believe"—the dove eyes very serious—"they've been under such terrible strains. I'm going to send a large bundle of clothes for the Armenian Relief, too. Oh, aunty, the whole world seems under a cloud, doesn't it? But I met the funniest woman in Pasadena; she actually teed her golf ball on a valuable Swiss watch her husband had given her! She said her only thrills in life came from making her husband cross."

"Was he—when he found it out?"

"No; she was dreadfully disappointed. He called her a naughty child and bought her another!"

When Beatrice reached the apartment she found Steve standing on the steps looking anxiously up and down the street.

"What's happened?" he asked, half lifting her out of the car.

"Don't! People will see us. I was telling aunty about Reno. Oh, it's so good to be here!" as she came inside her own door. "I hope people will let me alone the rest of the day. I'm just a wreck." She found a box of chocolates and began to eat them.

"A charming-looking wreck, I'll say." He stooped to kiss her.

The rose-coloured glasses were still attached to Steve's naturally keen eyes. Like many persons he knew a multitude of facts but was quite ignorant concerning vital issues. He had spent his honeymoon in rapt and unreal fashion. He had realized his boyhood dream of returning to Nevada a rich and respected man with a fairy-princess sort of wife. The deadly anaesthesia of unreality which these get-rich-quick candidates of to-day indulge in at the outset of their struggle still had Steve in its clutch. He had not even stirred from out its influence. He had accomplished what he had set out to accomplish—and he was now about to realize that there is a distinct melancholy in the fact that everyone needs an Aladdin's window to finish. But under the influence of the anaesthesia he had proposed to have an everlasting good time the rest of his life, like the closing words of a fairy tale: "And then the beautiful young princess and the brave young prince, having slain the seven-headed monster, lived happily ever, ever after!"

With this viewpoint, emphasized by the natural conceit of youth, Steve had passed his holiday with the Gorgeous Girl.

"What did you want, darling?" he urged.

"To talk to you—I want you to listen to my plan. You are to come with me to New York for the fall opera and all the theatres—oh, along in November. It's terribly dull here. Jill Briggs and her husband and some of the others are going, and we can take rooms at the Astor and all be together and have a wonderful time!"

"I'd rather stay in our own home," he pleaded. "It's such fun to have a real home. We can entertain, you know. Besides, I'm the worker and you are the player, and I don't understand your sort of life any more than you can understand mine. So you must play and let me look on—and love me, that's all I'll ever ask."

"You're a dear," was his reward; "but we'll go to New York?"

"I'll have to take you down and leave you—I'm needed at the office."

"But I'd be the odd one—I'd have to have a partner. Steve, dear, you don't have to grub. When we were engaged you always had time for me."

"Because you had so little for me! And so I always shall have time for you," the anaesthesia causing his decision. "Besides, those were courtship days—and I wasn't quite so sure of you, which is the way of all men." He kissed her hair gently.

She drew away and rearranged a lock. "I don't want a husband who won't play with me."

"We'll fix it all right, don't worry. Now was that all you wanted?"

"I want you to stay home and go driving with me. I want you to call on some people—and look at a new cellaret I'd like to buy. It is expensive, but no one else would have one anywhere near as charming. I need you this afternoon—you're so calm and strong, and my head aches. I'm always tired."

"Yet you never work," he said, almost unconsciously.

"My dear boy, society is the hardest work in the world. I'm simply dragged to a frazzle by the end of the season. Besides, there is all my war work and my clubs and my charities. And I've just promised to take an advanced course in domestic science."

"I see," Steve said, meekly.

"I think it is the duty of rich women to know all about frying things as well as eating them," she said, as she took a third caramel.

"Quite true. Having money isn't always keeping it"

"Oh, papa has loads of money—enough for all of us," she remarked, easily. "It isn't that. I'd never cook if I were poor, anyway; that would be the last thing I'd ever dream of doing. It's fun to go to the domestic-science class as long as all my set go. Well—will you be a nice angel-man and stay home to amuse your fractious wife?"

"I'll call Miss Faithful on the phone and say I'm going to play hooky," he consented. "By the way, you must come down to the office and say hello to her when you get the time."

Beatrice kissed him. "Must I? I hate offices. Besides, Gaylord has married your prettiest clerk, and there will be no one to play with me except my husband."

"Funny thing—that marriage," Steve commented. "If it was any one but Gay I'd send condolences for loading the office nuisance onto him."

"Wasn't she any use at all?" she asked, curiously.

"None—always having a headache and being excused for the day. That was the only thing I ever questioned in Mary Faithful—why she engaged Trudy and took her into her own home as a boarder."

"Oh, so Mary isn't perfection? Don't be too hard on the other girl. I'd be quite as useless if I ever had to work. I'd do just the same—have as many headaches as the firm would stand for, and marry the first man who asked me."

"But think of marrying Gay!"

"Poor old Gay—his father was a dear, and he is terribly well behaved. Besides, see how obliging he is. Your Miss Faithful refused to help me out, and Gay ran his legs off to get everything I wanted. I'll never be rude to Gay as long as he amuses me."

"That's the thing that leads them all, isn't it, princess?"



CHAPTER VI

After the first round of excessively formal entertainments for Mr. and Mrs. O'Valley, Steve found a mental hunger suddenly asserting itself. It was as if a farm hand were asked to subsist upon a diet of weak tea and wafers.

In the first place, no masculine mind can quite admit the superiority of a feminine mind when it concerns handling said masculine mind's business affairs. Though Steve insisted that Mary had done quite as well as he would have done, he told himself secretly that he must get down to hard work and go over the letters and memoranda which had developed during his absence.

With quiet amusement Mary had agreed to the investigation, watching him prowl among the files with the same tolerant attitude she would have entertained toward Luke had he insisted that he could run the household more efficiently than a mere sister.

"Poor tired boy," she used to think when Steve would come into the office with a fagged look on his handsome face and new lines steadily growing across his forehead. "You don't realize yet—you haven't begun to realize."

And Steve, trying to catch up with work and plan for the future, to respond graciously to every civic call made upon him, would find himself enmeshed in a desperate combination of Beatrice's dismay over the cut of her new coat, her delight at the latest scandal, her headaches, the special order for glace chestnuts he must not forget, the demand that he come home for luncheon just because she wanted him to talk to, the New York trip looming ahead with Bea coaxing him to stay the entire time and let business slide along as it would. All the while the anaesthesia of unreality was lessening in its effect now that he had attained his goal.

The rapt adoration he felt for his wife was in a sense a rather subtle form of egotism he felt for himself. The Gorgeous Girl or rather any Gorgeous Girl personified his starved dreams and frantic ambitions. He had turned his face toward such a goal for so many tense years, goading himself on and breathing in the anaesthesia of indifference and unreality to all else about him that having obtained it he now paused exhausted and about to make many disconcerting discoveries. Had the Gorgeous Girl had hair as black as his own or a nose such as Mary Faithful's she would have still been his goal, symbol of his aims.

Having finished the long battle Steve now felt an urge to begin to battle for something else besides wealth and social position. He felt ill at ease in Beatrice's salon and among her friends, who all seemed particularly inane and ridiculous, who were all just as busy and tired and nervous as Beatrice was for some strange reason, and who considered it middle class not to smoke and common to show any natural sentiment or emotion. He soon found it was quite the thing to display the temperament of an oyster when any vital issue was discussed or any play, for example, had a scene of deep and inspiring words. A queer little smirk or titter was the proper applause, but one must wax enthusiastic and superlative over a clever burglary, a new-style dance, a chafing-dish concoction, or, a risque story retold in drawing-room language.

Before his marriage Beatrice had always been terribly rushed and he had had more time in which to work and glow with pride at the nearing of his goal. She kept him at arm's length very cleverly anchored with the two-carat engagement ring and Steve had to fight for time and plead for an audience. It fired his imagination, making him twice as keen for the final capture.

But when two persons live in the same apartment, notwithstanding the eleven rooms and so on, a monotony of existence pervades even the grandeur of velvet-panelled walls. There are the inevitable three meals a day to be gone through with—five meals if tea and a supper party are counted. There are the same ever-rising questions as to the cook's honesty and the chauffeur's graft in the matter of buying, new tires. There are just so many persons who have to be wined and dined and who revenge themselves by doing likewise to their former host; the everlasting exchanging of courtesies and pleasantries—all the dull, decent habits of ultra living.

Steve found his small store of possessions huddled into a corner, his pet slippers and gown graciously bestowed upon a passing panhandler, and he was obliged to don a very correct gray "shroud," as he named it in thankless terms, and to put his cigar and cigar ashes into something having the earmarks of an Etruscan coal scuttle, though Beatrice said it was a priceless antique Gay had bought for a song! There were many times when Steve would have liked to roam about his house in plebeian shirt sleeves, eat a plain steak and French-fried potatoes with a hunk of homemade pie as a finish, and spend the evening in that harmless, disorderly fashion known to men of doing nothing but stroll about smoking, playing semi-popular records, reading the papers, and very likely having another hunk of pie at bedtime.

Besides all this there were the topics of the day to discuss. During his courtship love was an all-absorbing topic. There were many questions that Beatrice asked that required intricate and tiring answers. During the first six weeks of living at the apartment Steve realized a telling difference between men and women is that a woman demands a specific case—you must rush special incidents to back up any theory you may advance—whereas men, for the most part, are content with abstract reasoning and supply their own incidents if they feel inclined. Also that a finely bred fragile type of woman such as Beatrice inspires both fear and a maudlin sort of sympathy, and that man is prevented from crossing such a one to any great extent since men are as easily conquered by maudlin sympathy as by fear.

When a yellow-haired child with dove-coloured eyes manages to squeeze out a tear and at the same moment depart in wrath to her room and lock the doors, refusing to answer—the trouble being why in heaven's name must a pound-and-a-half spaniel called Monster, nothing but a flea-bearing dust mop, do nothing but sit and yap for chocolates?—what man is going to dare do otherwise than suppress a little profanity and then go and whisper apologies at the keyhole?

After several uncomfortable weeks of this sort of mental chaos Steve determined to do what many business men do—particularly the sort starting life in an orphan asylum and ending by having residence pipe organs and Russian wolfhounds frolicking at their heels—to bury himself in his work and defend his seclusion by never refusing to write a check for his wife. When he finally reached this decision he was conscious of a strange joy.

Everything was a trifle too perfect to suit Steve. The entire effect was that of the well-set stage of a society drama. Beatrice was too correctly gowned and coiffured, always upstage if any one was about, her high-pitched, thin voice saying superlative nothings upon the slightest provocation; or else she was dissolving into tears and tantrums if no one was about.

Steve could not grasp the wherefore of having such stress laid upon the exact position of a floor cushion or the colour scheme for a bridge luncheon—he would have so rejoiced in really mediocre table service, in less precision as to the various angles of the shades or the unrumpled condition of the rugs. He had not the oasis Mark Constantine had provided for himself when he kept his room of old-fashioned trappings apart from the rest of the mansion.

Steve needed such a room. He planned almost guiltily upon building a shack in the woods whither he could run when things became too impossible for his peace of mind. If he could convince his wife that a thing was smart or different from everything else its success and welcome in their house were assured. But an apple pie, a smelly pipe, a maidless dinner table, or a disorderly den had never been considered smart in Beatrice's estimation, and Steve never attempted trying to change her point of view.

Beatrice wondered, during moments of seriousness, how it was that this handsome cave man of hers rebelled so constantly against the beauty and correctness of the apartment and yet never really disgraced her as her own father would have done. It gave her added admiration for Steve though she felt it would be a mistake to tell him so. She did not believe in letting her husband see that she was too much in love with him.

Despite his growls and protests about this and that, and his ignorance as to the things in life Beatrice counted paramount, Steve adapted himself to the new environment with a certain poise that astonished everyone. The old saying "Every Basque a noble" rang true in this descendant of a dark-haired, romantic young woman whom his grandfather had married. There was blood in Steve which Beatrice might have envied had she been aware of it. But Steve was in ignorance, and very willingly so, regarding his ancestors. There had merely been "my folks"—which began and ended the matter.

Still it was the thoroughbred strain which the Basque woman had given her grandson that enabled Steve to be master of his house even if he knew very little of what it was all about. It was fortunate for his peace of mind—and pocketbook—that Beatrice had accepted the general rumour of a goat-tending ancestry and pried no further. Had she ever glimpsed the genealogy tables of the Benefacio family, from which Steve descended, she would have had the best time of all; coats of arms and family crests and mottoes would have been the vogue; a trip to the Pyrenees would have followed; mantillas and rebozos would have crowded her wardrobe, and Steve would have been forced to learn Spanish and cultivate a troubadourish air.

Moreover, the Gorgeous Girl was not willing that her husband be buried in business. She could not have so good a time without him—besides, it was meet that he acquired polish. Her father was a different matter; everyone knew his ways and would be as likely to try to change the gruff, harsh-featured man as to try surveying Gibraltar with a penny ruler. Now Beatrice had married Steve because cave men were rather the mode, cave men who were wonderfully successful and had no hampering relatives. Besides, her father favoured Steve and he would not have been amiable had he been forced to accept a son-in-law of whom he did not approve. Mark Constantine had never learned graciousness of the heart, nor had his child.

So Beatrice proceeded to badger Steve whenever he pleaded business, with the result that she kept dropping in at his office, sometimes bringing friends, coaxing him to close his desk and come and play for the rest of the day. Sometimes she would peek in at Mary Faithful's office and baby talk—for Steve's edification—something like this:

"Ise a naughty dirl—I is—want somebody to play wif me—want to be amoosed. Do oo care? Nice, busy lady—big brain."

Often she would bring a gift for Mary in her surface generous fashion—a box of candy or a little silk handkerchief. She pitied Mary as all butterflies pity all ants, and she little knew that as soon as she had departed Mary would open the window to let fresh air drive out distracting perfume, and would look at the useless trifle on her desk with scornful amusement.

Before the New York trip Steve took refuge in his first deliberate lie to his wife. He had lied to himself throughout his courtship but was most innocent of the offence.

"If Mrs. O'Valley telephones or calls please say I have gone out to the stockyards," he told Mary. "And will you lend me your office for the afternoon? I'm so rushed I must be alone where I can work without interruption."

Mary gathered up her papers. "I'll keep you under cover." She was smiling.

"What's the joke?"

"I was thinking of how very busy idle people always are and of how much time busy people always manage to make for the idle people's demands."

He did not answer until he had collected his work materials. Then he said: "I should like to know just what these idle people do with themselves but I shall never have the time to find out." He vanished into Mary's office, banging the door.

Beatrice telephoned that afternoon, only to be given her husband's message.

"I'll drive out to the stockyards and get him," she proposed.

"He went with some men and I don't believe I'd try it if I were you," Mary floundered.

"I see. Well, have him call me up as soon as he comes in. It is very important."

When Steve reached home that night he found Beatrice in a well-developed pout.

"Didn't you get my message?" she demanded, sharply.

"Just as I was leaving the office. I looked in there on—on my way back. I saw no use in telephoning then. What is it, dear?"

"It's too late now. You have ruined my day."

"Sorry. What is too late?"

"I wanted you to go to Amityville with me; there is a wonderful astrologer there who casts life horoscopes. He predicted this whole war and the Bolsheviki and bombs and everything, and I wanted him to do ours. Alice Twill says he is positively uncanny."

Steve shook his head. "No long-haired cocoanut throwers for mine," he said, briefly, unfolding his paper.

"But I wanted you to go."

"Well, I do not approve of such things; they are a waste of time and money."

"I have my own money," she informed him, curtly.

Steve laid aside the paper. "I have known that for some time."

"Besides, it is rude to refuse to call me when I have asked you to do so. It makes me ridiculous in the eyes of your employees."

Recalling the shift of offices Steve suppressed a smile. "It was nothing important, Bea, and I am mighty busy. Your father never had time to play; he worked a great deal harder than I have worked."

"I can't help that. You must not expect me to be a little stay-at-home. You knew that before we were even engaged. Besides, I'm no child——"

"No, but you act like one." He spoke almost before he thought. "You are a woman nearly twenty-six years old, yet you haven't the poise of girls eighteen that I have known. Still, they were farm or working girls. I've sometimes wondered what it is that makes you and your friends always seem so childish and naive—at times. Aren't you ever going to grow up—any of you?"

"Do you want a pack of old women?" she demanded. "How can you find fault with my friends? You seem to forget how splendidly they have treated you."

A cave man must be muzzled, handcuffed, and Under the anaesthetic of unreality and indifference to be a satisfactory husband for a modern Gorgeous Girl.

"Why shouldn't they treat me splendidly? I have never robbed or maltreated any of them. Tell me something. It is time we talked seriously. We can't exist on the cream-puff kind of conversation. What in the world has your way of going through these finishing schools done for you?"

The dove-coloured eyes flickered angrily. "I had a terribly good time," she began. "Besides, it's the proper thing—girls don't come out at twenty and marry off and let that be the end of it. You really have a much better time now if you wait until you are twenty-five, and then you somehow have learned how to be a girl for an indefinite period. As for the finishing school in America—well, we had a wonderful sorority."

"I've met college women who were clear-headed persons deserving the best and usually attaining it—but I've never taken a microscope to the sort of women playing the game from the froth end. I'm wondering what your ideas were."

"You visited me—you met my friends—my chaperons—you wrote me each day."

"I was in love and busy making my fortune. I was as shy as a backwoods product—you know that—and afraid you would be carried off by someone else before I could come up to the sum your father demanded of me. I have nothing but a hazy idea as to a great many girls of all sorts and sizes—and mostly you."

"Well, we had wonderful lectures and things; and I had a wonderful crush on some of the younger teachers—that is a great deal of fun."

"Crushes?"

"You must have crushes unless you're a nobody—and there's nothing so much a lark. You select your crush and then you rush her. I had a darling teacher, she is doing war work in Paris now. She was a doll. I adored her the moment I saw her and I sent her presents and left flowers in her room, orchids on Sundays, until she made me stop. One day a whole lot of us who had been rushing her clipped off locks of our hair and fastened them in little gauze bags and we strung a doll clothes line across her room and pinned the little bags on it and left a note for her saying: 'Your scalp line!'"

"What did that amount to?"

"Oh, it was fun. And I had another crush right after that one. Then some of the classes were interesting. I liked psychology best of all because you could fake the answers and cram for exams more easily. Math. and history require facts. There was one perfectly thrilling experience with fish. You know fish distinguish colours, one from the other, and are guided by colour sense rather than a sense of smell. We had red sticks and green sticks and blue sticks in a tank of fish, and for days we put the fish food on the green sticks and the fish would swim right over to get it, and then we put it on the red sticks and they still swam over to the green sticks and waited round—so it was recognizing colour and not the food. And a lot of things like that."

Steve laughed. "I hope the fish wised up in time."

Beatrice looked at him disapprovingly. "If you had gone to college it might have made a great difference," she said.

"Possibly," he admitted; "but I'll let the rest of the boys wait on the fishes. Did you go to domestic science this morning?"

"Yes, it was omelet. Mine was like leather. The gas stove makes my head ache. But we are going to have a Roman pageant to close the season—all about a Roman matron, and that will be lots of fun."

"You eat too much candy; that is what makes your head ache," he corrected.

She pretended not to hear him. "It is time to dress."

"Don't say there's a party to-night," he begged.

"Of course there is, and you know it. The Homers are giving a dinner for their daughter. Everyone is to wear their costumes wrong side out. Isn't that clever? I laid out a white linen suit for you; it will look so well turned inside out; and I am going to wear an organdie that has a wonderful satin lining. There is no reason why we must be frumps."

"I'd rather stay home and play cribbage," Steve said, almost wistfully. "There's a rain creeping up. Let's not go!"

"I hate staying home when it is raining." Beatrice went into her room to try the effect of a sash wrong side out. "It is so dull in a big drawing room when there are just two people," she added, as Steve appeared in the doorway.

"Two people make a home," he found himself answering.

The Gorgeous Girl glanced at him briefly, during which instant she seemed quite twenty-six years old and the spoiled daughter of a rich man, the childish, senseless part of her had vanished. "Would you please take Monster into the kitchen for her supper?" she asked, almost insolently.

So the owner of the O'Valley Leather Works found his solace in tucking the pound-and-a-half spaniel under his arm and trying to convince himself that he was all wrong and a self-made man must keep a watch on himself lest he become a boor!

* * * * *

The day the O'Valleys left for New York in company with three other couples Mr. and Mrs. Gaylord Vondeplosshe arrived in Hanover, having visited until their welcome was not alone worn out but impossible ever to be replaced. A social item in the evening paper stated that they had taken an apartment at the Graystone and would be at home to their friends—whoever they might be.

If Gay's club and his friends had determined merely to be polite and not welcome his wife, Trudy had determined that they would not only welcome her but insist upon being helpful to them; as for her former associates—they would be treated to a curt bow. This, however, did not include the Faithfuls. Mary was not to be ignored, nor did Trudy wish to ignore her. All the good that was in Trudy responded to Mary's goodness. She never tried to be to Mary—no one did more than once. Nor did she try to flatter her. She was truly sorry for Mary's colourless life, truly grieved that Mary would not consent to shape her eyebrows. But she respected her, and it was to Mary's house that Mrs. Vondeplosshe repaired shortly after her arrival.

It was quite true that Beatrice Constantine would have developed much as Trudy had were the pampered person compelled to earn her living, and, like Trudy, too, would have married a half portion, bankrupt snob. As Trudy dashed into the Faithful living room, kissing Mary and her mother and shaking a finger at Luke, Mary thought what a splendid imitation she was of Beatrice returning from her honeymoon.

"As pretty as a picture," Mrs. Faithful declared, quite chirked up by the bridal atmosphere. "How do you do it, Trudy? And why didn't you write us something besides postals? They always seem like printed handbills to me."

"Especially mine," Luke protested. "One of Sing Sing with the line: 'I am thinking of you.'"

Trudy giggled. "I didn't have a minute and I bought postals in flocks. Oh, I adore New York! I'm wild to live there. I nearly passed away in New England, but of course we had to stay as long as they would have us."

She looked at herself in a mirror, conscious of Mary's amused expression. She wore a painfully bright blue tailored suit—she had made the skirt herself and hunted up a Harlem tailor to do the jacket—round-toed, white leather shoes stitched with bright blue, white silk stockings, an aviatrix cap of blue suede, and a white fox fur purchased at half price at a fire sale.

"I haven't any new jewellery except my wedding ring," she mourned. "I expected Gay's sister to give me one of her mother's diamond earrings—I think she might have. They are lovely stones—but she never made a move that way—she's horrid. As soon as I can afford to be independent I shall cut her, for she did her best to politely ask us to leave."

"You were there several weeks, weren't you?" Mary ventured.

"Yes—I grew tame. I learned a lot from her—I was pretty crude in some ways." Which was true. Trudy was quite as well-bred looking, at first glance, as the Gorgeous Girl. "It is always better to get your experience where the neighbours aren't watching. I didn't lose a minute. If I never did an honest day's work for Steve O'Valley I worked like a steam engine learning how to be a real lady, the sort Gay tried to marry but couldn't!"

"As if you weren't a little lady at all times," Mrs. Faithful added.

"Of course we are stony broke but Gay's brother-in-law just had to loan us some money in order to have us go. They gave us fifty dollars for a wedding present. Well, it was better than nothing. Gay has talked to a lot of concert managers and he's going to have some wonderful attractions next season. People have never taken Gaylord seriously; he really has had to discover himself, and he is——"

"Are you practising small talk on me?" Mary asked.

"You've said it," Trudy admitted. "That last is the way I'm going to talk about Gaylord to his friends. I'll make him a success if he will only mind me. Just think—I'll be calling on Beatrice O'Valley before long! She will have to know me because Gay helped furnish her apartment and was one of her ushers. It will mean everything for us to know her—and I'm never going to appear at all down and out, either. People never take you seriously if you seem to need money. Debt can't frighten me. I was raised on it. All I need is Gay's family reputation and my own hair and teeth and I'll breeze in before any of the other entries. I came to ask if you won't come to see where I live?" She smiled her prettiest. "Gay is at his club and we can talk. It was quite a bomb in the enemies' camp when he married—people just can't dun a married man like they do a bachelor."

"I'll come next week." Mary tried putting off the evil day.

"No—now. I want your advice—and to show you my clothes."

"You will have clothes, Trudy, when you don't have food."

"You have to these days—no good time unless you do."

She kissed Mrs. Faithful and promised to have them all up for dinner. Then she tucked her arm in Mary's and pranced down the street with her, talking at top speed of how horrid it was that they had to walk and not drive in a cab like Beatrice, and concluding with a dissertation on Gaylord's mean disposition.

"I'm not mean, Mary, unless I want to accomplish something—but Gaylord is mean on general principle. He sulks and tells silly lies when you come to really know him. Oh, I'm not madly in love—but we can get along without throwing things. It's better than marrying a clod-hopper who couldn't show me anything better than his mother's green-plush parlour."

"Doesn't it seem hard to have to pretend to love him?"

"No, he's so stupid," said the debonair Mrs. Vondeplosshe as she brought Mary up before the entrance of the Graystone, a cheap apartment house with a marble entrance that extended only a quarter of the way up; from there on ordinary wood and marbleized paper finished the deed. The Vondeplosshes had a rear apartment. Their windows looked upon ash cans and delivery entrances, the front apartments with their bulging bay windows being twenty-five dollars a month more rent. As it was, they were paying forty-five, and very lucky to have the chance to pay it.

Trudy unlocked the door with a flourish. All that Trudy had considered as really essential to the making of a home was a phonograph and a pier glass; the rest was simple—rent a furnished place and wear out someone else's things. The bandbox of a place with four cell-like rooms was by turns pitiful and amusing to Mary Faithful.

"We are just starting from here," Trudy reminded her as she watched the gray eyes flicker with humour or narrow with displeasure. "Wait and see—we'll soon be living neighbour to the O'Valleys. Besides, there is such an advantage in being married. You don't have to worry for fear you'll be an——"

"Old maid," finished Mary. "Out with it! You can't frighten me. I hope you and Gay never try changing your minds at the same time, for it would be a squeeze."

She selected a fragile gilt chair in the tiny living room with its imitation fireplace and row of painted imitation books in the little bookcase. This was in case the tenants had no books of their own—which the Vondeplosshes had not. If they possessed a library they could easily remove the painted board and give it to the janitor for safekeeping. There were imitation Oriental rugs and imitation-leather chairs and imitation-mahogany furniture, plated silver, and imitations of china and of linen were to be found in the small three-cornered dining room, which resembled a penurious wedge of cake, Mary thought as she tried saying something polite. The imitation extended to the bedroom with its wall bed and built-in chiffonier and dresser of gaudy walnut. Trudy had promptly cluttered up the last-mentioned article with smart-looking cretonne and near-ivory toilet articles. There was even a pathetic little wardrobe trunk they had bought for $28.75 in New York, and Trudy had painstakingly soaked off old European hotel labels she had found on one of Gay's father's satchels and repasted them on the trunk to give the impression of travel and money.

The kitchen was nothing but a dark hole with a rusty range and nondescript pots and pans. "Being in the kitchen gets me nothing, so why bother about it?" Trudy explained, hardly opening the door. "We have no halls or furnace to care for, and an apartment house sounds so well when you give an address. I wish we could have afforded a front one; it will be hard to have people climbing through the back halls. I have put in a good supply of canned soups and vegetables and powdered puddings, and we can save a lot on our food. We'll be invited out, too, and when we eat at home I can get a meal in a few minutes and I'll make Gay wash the dishes. Besides, I have a wonderful recipe for vanishing cream that his sister bought in Paris, and I'm going to have a little business myself, making it to supply to a few select customers as a favour. I'll sell small jars for a dollar and large ones for three, and I can make liquid face powder, too. Oh, we won't starve. And if you could wait for the money I know I owe you——"

"Call it a wedding present," Mary said, briefly.

"You lamb!"

Trudy fell on her neck and was in the throes of explaining how grateful she was and how she had an evening dress modelled after one of Gay's sister's, which cost seven hundred dollars before the war, when Gay appeared—very debonair and optimistic in his checked suit, velours hat, and toothpick-toed tan shoes, and his pale little eyes were quite animated as he kissed Trudy and dutifully shook hands with Mary, explaining that the Hunters of Arcadia had just offered him a clerical position at the club, ordering supplies and making out bills and so on—because he was married, very likely. It would pay forty a month and his lunches.

"And only take up your mornings! You can slip extra sandwiches in your pockets for me, deary. I'll give you a rubber-pocketed vest for a Christmas present," Trudy exclaimed. "Oh, say everything in front of Mary—she knows what we really are!"

At which Mary fled, with the general after impression of pale, wicked eyes and a checked suit and a dashing, red-haired young matron with a can opener always on hand, and the fact that the Vondeplosshes were going to lay siege to the O'Valleys as soon as possible.

Mary decided that it was a great privilege to be a profane lady concealing a heartache compared to other alternatives. At least heartaches were quite real.



CHAPTER VII

It was almost Christmas week before the realization of Trudy's ambition to have Beatrice call upon her as the wife of Gaylord Vondeplosshe instead of an unimportant employee of her own husband. Trudy counted upon Beatrice to help her far more than Gaylord dared to hope.

"Bea is like all her sort," he warned Trudy when the point of Beatrice's having to invite the Vondeplosshes for dinner was close at hand; "she is crazy about herself and her money. She would cheat for ten cents and then turn right round and buy a thousand-dollar dress without questioning the price."

Which was true. Beatrice had never had to acquire any sense of values regarding either money or character. By turns she was penurious and lavish, suspecting a maid of stealing a sheet of notepaper and then writing a handsome check for a charity in which she had only a passing interest. She would send her soiled finery to relief committees, and when someone told her that satin slippers and torn chiffon frocks were not practical she would say in injured astonishment: "Sell them and use the money. I never have practical clothes."

If a maid pleased her Beatrice pampered her until she became overbearing, and there would be a scene in which the maid would be told to pack her things and depart without any prospect of a reference; and someone else would be rushed into her place, only to have the same experience. Beatrice was like most indulged and superfluously rich women, both unreasonable and foolishly lenient in her demands. She had no schedule, no routine, no rules either for herself or others. She had been denied the chance of developing and discovering her own limitations and abilities. She expected her maids and her friends to be at her beck and call twenty-four hours out of the twenty-four, she would not accept an excuse of being unfitted by illness for some task or of not knowing how to do any intricate, unheard-of thing which suddenly it occurred to her must be done.

When a servant would plead her case Beatrice always told her that for days at a time she left her alone in her beautiful home with nothing to do but keep it clean and eat up all her food and very likely give parties and use her talking machine and piano—which was quite true—and that she must consider this when she was asked to stay on duty until three or four o'clock in the morning or be up at five o'clock with an elaborate breakfast for Beatrice and her friends just returning from a fancy-dress ball.

On a sunny day she often sent the maids driving in her car, and if a blizzard came up she was certain to ask them to walk downtown to match yarn for her, not even offering car fare. She would borrow small sums and stamps from them and deliberately forget to pay them back, at the same time giving her cook a forty-dollar hat because it made her own self look too old. She had never had any one but herself to rely upon for discipline, and whenever she wanted anything she had merely to ask for it. When anything displeased her it was removed without question.

American business men do not always toil until they are middle-aged for the reward of being made a fool by a chorus girl or an adventuress. That belongs to yellow-backed penny-dreadfuls and Sunday supplement tales of breach-of-promise suits. More often the daughter of the business man is both the victim and the vampire of his own shortsighted neglectfulness. The business man expresses it as "working like a slave to give her the best in the land." And sometimes, as in the case of Steve O'Valley, it is his own wife instead of a blonde soul mate who lures him to destruction in six installments.

When Beatrice first knew of Gaylord's return she was inclined to pay no attention to his wife, despite her remarks to Steve. Then Gaylord telephoned, and she had him up for afternoon tea, during which he told her all about it. He was very diplomatic in his undertaking. He pictured Trudy as a diamond in the rough, and in subtle, careful fashion gave Beatrice to understand that just as she had married a diamond in the rough—with a Virginia City grandfather and a Basque grandmother and the champion record of goat tending—so he, too, had been democratic enough to put aside precedent and marry a charming, unspoiled little person with both beauty and ability, and certainly he was to be congratulated since he had been married for love alone, Truletta knowing full well his unfortunate and straitened circumstances.... Yes, her people lived in Michigan but were uncongenial. Still, there was good blood in the family only it was a long ways back, probably as far back as the age of spear fighting, and he relied upon Beatrice, his old playmate, to sympathize with and uphold his course.

Secretly annoyed that the tables had been so skillfully turned, yet not willing to admit it to this bullying morsel, Beatrice was obliged to say she would call upon his wife and ask them for dinner the following week.

Gaylord fairly floated home, to find Trudy remodelling a dress, scraps of fur and shreds of satin on the floor.

"Babseley, she's coming to call to-morrow!" he said, joyfully, hanging up his velours hat and straddling a little gilt chair.

"Really? I wish we had a better place. I feel at a disadvantage. If it were a man I wouldn't mind, I could act humble and brave—that sort of dope. But it never goes with a woman; you have to bully a rich woman, and I'm wondering if I can."