She sat up until daylight, to her maid's dismay, still in her remodelled wedding gown. She was thinking chaotic, rebellious, ridiculous nothings, punctuated with uneven ragged thoughts about matching gloves to gowns or getting potted goose livers at the East-Side store Trudy had just recommended. The general trend of her reverie was the dissatisfaction not over this first year of married life but at the twenty-seven years as a Gorgeous Girl, the disappointment at not having some vital impelling thing to do, which should of course supply a good time as well as a desirable achievement. The inherited energy was demanding an outlet. She recalled the evening's entertainment—a paper chase with every room left littered and disordered, her lace flounce badly torn, her head thumping with pain, the latest dances, the inane music, the scandal whispered between numbers, the elaborate supper and favours, the elaborate farewells—and the elaborate lies about the charm of the hostess and the good time.

She began to envy Steve as well as Trudy, Steve in his hotel busy with Labour delegates, wrangling, demanding, threatening, winning or losing as the case might be. She, too, must do something. She had finished with another series of adventures—that of being a mad butterfly. It was shelved with the months of a romantic, parasitical existence misnaming jealous monopoly as love, an existence which all at once seemed as long ago as another lifetime.

She would now be an advanced woman, intellectual, daring; she would allow her stunted abilities to have definite expression. Either she would find a new circle of friends or else swerve the course of the present circle into an atmosphere of Ibsen, Pater, advanced feminine thought, and so on—with Egyptology as a special side line. She would even become an advocate of parlour socialism, perhaps. She would encourage languid poets and sarcastic sex novelists with matted hair and puff satin ties. She would seek out short-haired mannish women with theories and oodles of unpublished short stories, and feed them well, opening her house for their drawing-room talks. She would be a lion tamer! She was done with sighing and tears, belonging to the first stage of Glorious Girlism; and with pouting and flirting, which belonged to the second—she would now make them roar, herself included!

At noon the next day she sought Mary Faithful in her office, to everyone's surprise. To her own astonishment she discovered her husband busily engaged in conversation with some members of the Board of Trade, his travelling bag on a side table.

"I didn't bother to telephone you or wire—I got in at eight this morning and came right up here. I knew you'd not be up," he added, curtly. "Would you mind waiting in Miss Faithful's office until I'm at liberty?"

Beatrice was forced to consent graciously and pass into the other room, where Mary was giving dictation.

When Mary finished she offered Beatrice a magazine but the Gorgeous Girl declined it and began in petulant fashion:

"I've been thinking about you, Miss Faithful, and I do envy you. Do you know why? You have more of my husband than I have; that was what I came to tell you. For business is his very life and you are his business partner. I only have the tired remnant that occasionally wanders homeward."

Mary wondered what Beatrice would say if she knew of the supper talks she had had with the tired remnant, who flung discretion to the winds and clamoured for invitations as keenly as he had once begged for the Gorgeous Girl's kisses.

"Oh, no, that's not true. You see——" she began, but she simply could not finish the lie.

"I've decided that if business is more important to my husband than his wedding anniversary I shall be of importance to him in his business," she continued. "Be careful—you've a rival looming ahead."

Steve opened the door and nodded for his wife to come in. Mary was left with rather unsteady nerves and a pessimistic attitude to round out her day. Beatrice's hint had had an unpleasant petty sound that she did not quite understand. She wished she had never allowed Steve to draw her out of her businesslike attitude. However, when she learned that he had very unexpectedly called off work for the rest of the day to do his wife's bidding she told herself she was needlessly alarmed, though it was always a rash thing to try exchanging her heartache for a temporary joyful mirage!

The next evening, when Mary was in the throes of explaining this thing in guarded fashion to Steve and Steve was arguing angrily and begging for his welcome, Trudy Vondeplosshe happened in unexpectedly and very much rejoiced inwardly at finding this delightful little tete-a-tete in full progress.

Of course the couple gave business and the recent strike as an alarming necessity for a private conference, and then Steve scuttled away, leaving Mary to try to look unconscious and change the subject to Trudy's new hat. But ever mindful of Mary's confession Trudy was not to be swerved from the topic.

"I'm glad Beatrice was not with me," she said, sweetly, "for like all heartless flirts she is jealous—ashamed of Steve half of the time and mad about him the other half. I'd try to have the business all transacted at the office. You used to. And Beatrice says business isn't half as brisk as it was then."

The upshot of the matter resulted in Mary's applying for a two-months' leave of absence. Spent in the Far North woods with Luke it would make common sense win over starved dreams.

"I think I've earned it," was all she said to Steve.

"A year ago I went away and you stayed. Of course you have earned it. But I am going to miss you."

The day before she left—it was well into July before she could conscientiously see her way clear to go—she received a plaid steamer rug. There was no card attached to the gift, and when she was summoned to Steve's apartment to inform him about some matters, Steve having a slight attack of grippe, she was so formal to both Steve and Beatrice, who stayed in the room, making them very conscious of her apricot satin and cream-lace presence, that Beatrice remarked later:

"It's a fortunate thing that she isn't going to visit the North Pole; she'd be so chilly when she returned you'd have to wrap the entire office in a warming pad. I was thinking this morning that with the way she lives and manages she must have saved some money. Do you know if she has—and how much? I hope you won't pay her her salary while she is gone. It's no wonder she can afford nervous prostration if you do!"

"I didn't know she had it," Steve said, dully.

"Whatever it is, then, that makes her take all this time. The way employees act, walking roughshod in their rights! And now, deary, hurry and get well, for I've a wonderful surprise for you." She knelt beside the couch and patted his cheek. "I'm going to be your private secretary during her absence—yes, I am. As soon as I finish making the mannikins for the knitting bags at the kermis. Then I'm going to try to take her place—well, a tiny part of her place to start with, and work into the position gradually. Yes, I am. I'm determined to try it. I've worried and worried to decide what to do with myself."

Worry was Beatrice's sole form of prayer. Steve wondered if what Mary had recently said to him could be true, at least in his own case. She had said that defeat at thirty should be an incentive—only after fifty could it be counted a definite disaster.



CHAPTER XIII

"You don't know how I've missed you," Steve told Mary upon her return. "Don't I look it?" he added, wistfully.

Mary had appeared at the office late one September afternoon rather than appear the following morning as a model of exact punctuality. She had had to force herself to remain away until her leave of absence expired. It was Luke who rejoiced in the freedom of the woods and the green growing things in which his sister had tried to take consolation, telling herself they would revive her common sense and banish absurd notions concerning Steve O'Valley. It was Luke who rejoiced at catching the largest trout of the season, who never wearied of hayrack rides and corn roasts and bonfires with circles of ghostlike figures enduring the smoke and the damp and the rapid-fire gossiping and giggling. Luke had returned with a healthy coat of tan and a large correspondence list, pledging himself to revisit the spot every season.

But Mary felt defeated in the very purpose of her holiday. The atmosphere of weary school-teachers trying to appear as golden-haired flappers foot-loose for a romance; the white shoes always drying outside tents or along window sills; the college professors eternally talking about their one three-months' tour of Europe; the mosquitoes; the professional invalid, the inevitable divorcee; the woman with literary ambitions and a typewriter set in action on the greenest, most secluded spot for miles about; the constant snapshotting of everything from an angleworm to a group of arm-entwined bathers about to play splash-me; the cheap talk and aping of such Gorgeous Girls as Beatrice Constantine—all this on one side, and a great and eternal loneliness for Steve on the other.

It was small wonder that defeat was the result. And yet in her heart of hearts Mary was glad that it was so. There is something splendid and breathless in trying to shut away a forbidden rapture, and being unable to do so; in telling oneself one will never try repression again but will shamelessly acknowledge the forbidden rapture and register a desire to thrill to it whenever possible.

Besides the irritations of the summer camp Mary had been forced to leave Hanover remembering Steve as ill, worried over business; of Beatrice's hinting that she would usurp her place. There had been so many womanly trifles she would have done for Steve had she been in Beatrice's position—a linen cover for the water glass; a soft shade on the window instead of the glaring white-and-gold-striped affair; exile for that ubiquitous spaniel; home cooking, with old-fashioned milk toast and real coffee of a forefather's day.

Strange how such homey trifles persist in the mind of a commercial nun through two months of supposed enjoyment and liberty. In the same way incongruous associations of ideas spring into the brain with no apparent reason at all causing fossilized professors to write essays-under-glass that elucidate matters not in the slightest.

So Mary returned to the office two days ahead of time, her heart thumping so loudly that she thought Miss Lunk would surely detect the sound. She deliberately dressed herself in a demure new suit and a becoming black-winged hat which made her seem as if delightfully arrayed for afternoon tea. And it was with a charming timidity that she tiptoed into the office.

Before Steve had asked her opinion she had given one swift look about the two offices, and she was glad that they looked as they did. It would have been disappointing to have found them spick and span and quite self-sufficient, without a hint that Mary Faithful was missed or irreplaceable.

Evidences of Beatrice's brief sojourn in the business world still remained—an elaborate easy-chair with rose pillows, a thermos bottle and cut-glass tumbler, a curlicue French mirror slightly awry and, on her desk, a gay-bordered silk handkerchief, a silver-mesh bag, and a great amount of cluttered notations; all of which proved that the understudy secretary had not yet mastered the law of efficiency.

It seemed amusing to Mary. She thought: "How stupid! How can she—when the wicker basket is the one logical place for——"

Then she spied Steve's desk, bearing a suggestion of the same disorder about it. When she spoke his name and he started up, holding out both hands, she saw a queer, bright look in his eyes, as if he, too, were trying to convince himself that everything was all right.

"So you really missed me?"

"Missed you! Heaven alone can record the unselfish struggle I endured to let you play. I give you my word."

He wheeled up a chair for her, just as he used to wheel up a chair for Beatrice, and sitting opposite him Mary heard an almost womanish enumeration of petty troubles and disturbances, a pathetic threat as to the avalanche of work which would await her in the morning.

"And now I will be polite enough to ask if you had a good time?"

"Very! And Mrs. O'Valley?"

It was so horrid to have to pretend when each knew the other was pretending; and as they pretended to the world in general, what a relief and blessed lightening of tension it would have been to have said merely an honest: "We don't care about Mrs. Gorgeous Girl or any one else. We are quite content with each other. True, this is still platonic friendship—with one of us—but all tropical twilight is of short duration. It won't be platonic much longer. So let's talk about ourselves all we like!"

But being thoroughbred young persons they felt it was not the thing even to think frankly.

"She is well," Steve said, briefly.

"She came down here, she wrote me, when she wanted to find out about something or other. I've forgotten just what."

Steve smiled. "Yes, for nearly a week Mrs. O'Valley managed to create a furore among her own set. Before she came here she ordered an entire new outfit of clothes—business togs. There were queer hats and shirt waists and things." He laughed at the remembrance. "Then she had to practise getting up early; that took a lot of time. Meanwhile, Miss Sartwell did your work just as we planned. It was found necessary to postpone her business career still further because of an out-of-door pageant that required her services as a nymph. She caught cold at rehearsal and enjoyed a week of indoors.

"Then Gay turned up with a whole flock of new decorators for the d——for the villa thing, and I was left without aid from the ennuied for another ten days. Jill Briggs had a wedding anniversary and relied on Beatrice's aid. Of course she could not refuse, and Trudy, who, by the way, has come on very rapidly, persuaded Beatrice to take a booth at a charity kettledrum.

"So after several weeks my wife appeared on my business horizon and hung that mirror up and had those other things moved in and then she discovered that the impudent girls were all copying her coats and hats and stuff and even used her sort of perfume, and she decided that her duty lay not in making me a competent secretary but in reforming these extravagant young persons so that she could wear a model gown in comfort and not see it copied within a month. It was quite an experience for her; she was here about five days. Miss Sartwell just moved her desk out there and we managed nicely. Beatrice also had a private teacher for typewriting and so on, but she gave it all up because she felt the confinement and long hours made her head ache and she gained weight. She fled in haste. Sorry she had to do so, but under the circumstances it was better to jeopardize my business career than her own figure!"

"Aren't you a little unfair?" Mary said, seriously.

"Am I? I never thought so. Wait—I must finish the tale. For a whole week after being my business partner she tried what she called holiness as a cosmetic, and became high-church and quite trying. At the end of that time she felt a veritable dynamo of nerves and scandal and proceeded to become a liberated and advanced woman. You'll soon enough see what I mean. She doesn't run to short-haired ladies with theories so much as to hollow-eyed gentlemen embroidering cantos in the drawing room and trying to make the world safe for poetry. De-luxe adventuresses strike her as harmonious just now. You'll hear about one Sezanne del Monte who is staying in town and living off of Bea and her set."

"The woman who is divorced every season—and stars in musical comedy?"

"The same. Sezanne is now writing the intimate story of her life; sort of heart throbs instead of punctuation marks—lots of asterisks, you know, separating the paragraphs. Beatrice is going to finance the publication of it and Gay is going to be the sales manager. Yes, it's funny, but a blamed nuisance when you come home and you find yourself wandering through a crowd of Sezanne del Montes and Gays and Trudys, all bent on playing parlour steeplechase, and you can't find a plain chair to sit down or eat a plain meal or read a newspaper. It's more than a blamed nuisance—it's cause for a trial by jury," he added, whimsically. "Now what's wrong?"—watching Mary's face.

"It isn't cricket to tell all this."

Somehow the old struggle began with renewed energy in Mary's heart, the puritanical part saying: "Forget you ever thought twice of this man"; and the dreamer part urging: "You have earned the right to love him. She has not. Just be fair—merely fair. You have the right; don't let your opportunity slip by."



"Why can't I tell you? I have no one else to whom I can tell things—and I'm so everlastingly tired. Goat tending and living off dried buffalo meat never fagged me like trying to dance with Trudy and living on truffles and champagne. First you are mentally bewildered and physically fagged, then you become defiant; then you realize that that is no use, you've brought this on your own self—it is quite the common fate of men like myself—and so you keep on with the steady grind; and by and by you find yourself longing to play in your own way with your own sort. The other sort have no use for you so long as you pay their bills; you are hardly missed, if the truth were told.

"Well, you must keep on with the grind. And you want your sort of playmates and fun, and it's such decent, upright fun in comparison—oh, pshaw!" He stood up, kicking the edge of the rug with his foot in almost boyish, shamed fashion.

"Business isn't quite so good," he began anew in an impersonal, even voice. "Mr. Constantine thinks that the abnormal prosperity is on the wane for keeps—we must prepare for it—but Mr. Constantine has practically retired since you have been away. He's not well. To-morrow morning, if you don't mind, I'll take you over there and we can straighten out some things for him. He is selling the greater share of stock to men from the West. And he's saved out some pretty nice sugar plums to hand over to me. I haven't been asked whether or not I want them."

"I'm sorry."

"I knew you would be, Miss Iconoclast."

"Why do you accept them?"

"How can I refuse?"

"By saying you are not prepared to be a mental wreck at forty—which you will be if you try such a gigantic scheme with so little preparation. I've an idea that when Mr. Constantine is known to have withdrawn from the business world there will be a change in many things. And when you are known to be alone in the fort—" She paused.

"Go on," he demanded, irritably. "Can I never make you understand how much I want your advice, your opinions, your scoldings?"

"I think you will have new enemies with whom to deal—enemies you never thought existed. I don't believe you can deal with them because you have always been so cotton-woolled, so to speak, by being Constantine's special project——"

"I've done what I've done myself," he interrupted, "and I'm afraid of no one."

"You think you have," she corrected. "You have done what you have because Constantine was back of you—and now he is an old, tired man, and very soon he will think more of his days with Hannah than of the present. Which is perfectly safe for him to do. Because Mr. Constantine reckoned on his enemies he knew to a man who hated him and who was afraid of him, who admired him and who would be indifferent; and that is just as essential to success as to reckon on your friends. You never did that—you hadn't the time—it was all so dazzling and sudden with the war helping things along at breakneck speed. You will find that if you have an Achilles' heel it will be because you did not reckon on your enemies and are somewhat like a blindfolded man with money in your purse set down in a strange locality.... There. How does that sound for a welcome?"

Steve was pacing up and down the floor. "I'd like enemies," he said. "I'd like to see them try jumping at my throat. I'd make them cry quits. You don't frighten me; you stimulate me."

"That was my intention"—picking up her purse.

"Don't go—or let me come to supper," he begged.

She shook her head. Someone came in just then to whom she spoke of the pleasure it was to be back at the office; the word spread that Miss Faithful was back and girls came in groups to smile and say some pretty thing, and the men nodded with a pleased expression. Watching the procedure Steve realized that Mary was as dominant a personality in his office as he was himself, and instead of feeling a vague disapproval of the fact he was genuinely elated that it was so.

After the last of the visitors had gone and the clock pointed to five he said: "Of course I'm going to be dragged some place this evening, so I wouldn't have much time—but may I come to supper? I'm going out of town next week. There, isn't that a good reason to come to-night?"

"Suppose the world knew this—our little business world?"

"Hang the world!"

"You never did. You flattered it, and were delighted when the world patted you on the head and said, 'Nice Stevens, come in and bring your bags of gold—the living's fine.'"

"Are you starting in to tell me that people would misunderstand my motives? Sezanne del Monte has chapters along those lines. And Beatrice has quite a fad of slumming and taking a notebook along to write down new slang phrases or oaths or bits of heart-broken philosophy spilled in a drunken moment.... I've grown careless to everything presumably orderly and conventional. I'm ready to walk the plank for my indifference if need be—but I do want to come home with you for supper!"

Mary did not answer for a moment. Then she said, in a quick breathless tone, as if she did not want to hear her own words: "I wonder if it would do any good to try explaining—really explaining and not fibbing or pretending——"

"It has always done me good when you have explained—and I can't imagine you telling cheap untruths."

"Then I will try it." The gray eyes grew stormy. "For if we are to continue as employer and secretary—and you must have such a person and I must earn my living—it would be much easier if you really understood and it was all settled. You've talked about early hardships, misunderstood childhood, goat tending, and what not; and the world gives you credit for your achievements. Then surely you must understand the woman's end of the game—the American woman's part in business, for it's not easy to be errand girl or to fill endless underpaid clerical positions. It's not easy to pile out every morning at such and such an hour and stand at a desk and work as if you had neither heart nor eye for the other things in life until gradually the woman part of yourself is changed and it is often too late to enjoy anything but desk drudgery—and a bonus!

"Now the man in the business game forgoes nothing; he has the world's applause if he succeeds and the kisses of the woman he loves for his recreation, and all is complete and as it should be. But we commercial women of to-day do a man's work and earn a man's wage. We do stay starved women, even if that fact doesn't appear on the surface. We cannot have the things of romance as well as our livelihood. And by the very nature of the average business woman's life she is often in love with someone in her office—from propinquity if for no other reason. She must. Don't you see? They're practically the only men she really comes to know or who come to know her, and she just can't stab her heart into sudden death.

"So she wears her prettiest frock for this man—a wooden-faced bookkeeper perhaps; or a preoccupied president—and she dreams of him and is jealous of him and very likely gossips about him. And the years pass and she stays just as shut away and misunderstood and starved. And sometimes a woman, originally the most honest in the world, under these circumstances will deliberately steal another woman's husband if she has the chance. Yes, she will—she does."

"What do you mean, Mary?" He was almost unconscious of using the name.

"That I am no different from the others. I came here with the same starved heart and woman's hopes, and I put into your career the devotion and service and very prayers that I should have put into a home and a family—your joys were my joys, your problems mine. It has not been my clever brain that has made me worth so much to you. That is what the superficial public says, but I know better. It's been the love—yes, the love for you that has made me indispensable! The unreturned and unsuspected and I presume wicked love I felt for you. And now I've told you—broken precedent and told the truth. And as you don't love me you'll feel very uncomfortable with me about. And you won't want to play off pal; you'll fight shy of me except for everyday work. So it has been the only square thing to do—humiliate myself into telling.

"I love you, I always have, and I always will—but I'm no home-wrecking, emotional being and I expect that you will resume our old relationships and I shall go on serving you and knowing my recompense will be a handsome farewell gift and a pension.

"Oh, the business woman's life isn't all beer and skittles. We're expected to lie about our hearts, yet be as reliable as an adding machine about our columns of figures; to be shut away from the social world, thrown with men more hours a day than their wives see them and yet remain immovable, aloof, disinterested! Just good fellows, you know. Isn't it hideous to think I've really told the truth?"

At this identical moment their platonic friendship, alias tropical twilight, ended, and Mary's evening star of romance rose to stay. But such being the case Steve was the last person in the world to try to convince her that it was so.

All he said was: "I never appreciated you before. Please don't feel that telling me this will make any difference save that I'll stay aloof—as you suggest. I can forget it, somewhat, if that will make you feel any better about it. It is all quite true and equally hopeless—true things usually are—and if you like I'll send you home in the car, because you must be a trifle tired."

"Thank you," she remembered answering as she told Steve's chauffeur where to drive.

"You look as tired as before we went away," Luke complained that same night when Mary sat at her desk adding up expenses and making out checks.

"Oh, no. This shade makes everyone look ghastly," she said.

"I'll have to get a hump on and make my pile," he consoled. "I don't want my sister being all tired out before she's too old to have a good time."

"A good time?" Mary repeated. "Are you inoculated, too?"

"What's wrong with a good time? I guess Steve O'Valley plays all he likes!"

"Yes, dear, I guess he does," Mary forced herself to answer.

When Steve returned home that evening he found one of those impromptu dinner parties on hand instead of a formal engagement. They had become quite the fad in Bea's set. The idea was this—young matrons convened in the afternoon at one of their homes for cocktails and confidences; very likely Sezanne del Monte would drop in to read her last chapter or Gay Vondeplosshe would arrive brandishing his cane and telling everyone how beautiful the Italian villa was to be; and by and by they would gather round the piano to sing the latest songs; then when the clock struck six there would be a wild flutter and a suggestion:

"Let's phone cook to bring over our dinner. Then our husbands can come along or not just as they like. We'll have a parlour picnic; and no one will bother about being dressed. And we'll go to the nickel dance hall later."

This was followed by a procession of cooks arriving in state in various motor cars and carrying covered trays and vacuum bottles and departing in high spirits at the early close of their day's work. Then the procession of subdued husbands would follow, and conglomerate menus would be spread on a series of tea tables throughout the rooms, with Sezanne smoking her small amber-stemmed pipe and describing her sojourn in a Turkish harem while Gay picked minor chords on his ukulele. After a later diversion of nickel dance halls and slumming the young matrons would say good-bye, preparing to sleep until noon, quite convinced that any one would have called it a day.

Such a party greeted Steve, with Gay showing plans for Beatrice's secret room with a sliding panel—clever idea, splendid when they would be playing hide and seek—and the cooks en route with the kettles and bottles of wine and the husbands meekly arriving in sulky silence.

A little before two in the morning Steve escorted Aunt Belle back to the Constantine house.

Beatrice had started to go to bed, but thinking of something she wished to ask Steve she stationed herself in his room, some candy near at hand and Sezanne's manuscript as solace until he should arrive.

"I wanted to ask you if Mary Faithful has returned," she said, throwing down the manuscript as he came in. "Heavens, don't look like a thundercloud! You used to complain about getting into evening dress for dinner; and now when they are as informal as a church supper you row even more. How was papa? Did you go in to see him? Does the house look terrible?"

"Of course I didn't see your father at two in the morning; he was asleep. Your aunt fell into a bucket of plaster."

"Plaster! Why did the men leave it where she could fall into it? Did it hurt her dress?"

"No, just her bones." Steve laughed in spite of himself. "The dress hadn't started to begin where the bones hit the bucket."

Beatrice giggled. "Aunt Belle will try to look like a Kate Greenaway creation. And isn't Jill stout? I'd eat stones before I'd get like her. Well, what about the Faithful woman?"

"Why such a title? It was always Mary Faithful, and even Mary."

"I don't know—but ever since I worked with you this summer I've realized what an easy time she has. She isn't burdened with friends and social duties. It's all so clearcut and straight-ahead sailing for her. I suppose she laughs at her day's work."

"She has returned."

"Then we can go to the Berkshires. Sezanne knows an artist and some people from Chicago who are ripping company and they are going to visit her cousin at Great Barrington and we are all invited there——"

"Once and for all," Steve said, shortly, to his own surprise, "I am not in on this! Just count yourself a fair young widow for the time being. I cannot run my business, help close up your father's affairs, be a social puppet, and go chasing off with bob-haired freaks to the Berkshires, and expect to survive. I'm going to work and keep on the job—it will be bad enough when I have to live in an Italian villa. Who knows what new tortures that will bring? But for a few months I am certain of my whereabouts, so plan on going alone."

"So you won't come with me! Oh, Steve, sometimes I can just see the whole mistake—you should never have made a fortune. Rather you should have been a nice foreman with a meek little wife in four-dollar hats and a large portion of offspring. You should have lived in a model bungalow with even a broom closet in the kitchen and leaded windows at one side. You would have been a socialist and headed labour-union picnics. But as my husband and my father's assistant and all that—you are as impossible as that Faithful woman would be if she tried to be a lady!"

For a moment Steve hesitated. But the average day does not include losing ten thousand on the stock exchange from sheer folly, finding out that your blood pressure is too high, that your faithful secretary loves you and is truer blue than ever, and discovering at the same moment that you love her yet may not tell her so. Nor is a day so hectic usually concluded by finding an impromptu parlour picnic in full swing at home where rest was sought—finding, too, the full realization that you not only do not love your wife but you do not even approve of her.

So he said, quietly: "If you wish to make some radical change regarding your husband would you mind waiting until he has had a chance at a shower bath and some breakfast?"

For the first time in her life the Gorgeous Girl found herself gathering up Monster, the candy, and the novel manuscript in her lace-draped arms and standing outside her husband's firmly closed door.

The shock was so great that she could not squeeze out a single tear.



CHAPTER XIV

Mary Faithful felt no regrets at having told the truth about her love for Steve O'Valley. The regrets were all on Steve's side of the ledger. Contrary to customary procedure it was he who practised nonchalance and indifference, and the office force saw no whit of difference in the attitude of the president toward his private secretary or vice versa.

Long ago the force had accepted the attitude of these two persons as strictly businesslike and their conception of Mary Faithful was tinged with awe and a bit of envy at her success. To imagine her desperately in love with her employer, working for and with him each day, and finally in extreme desperation telling the truth as brutally as women sometimes tell it to women over clandestine cups of tea—was farthest from their comprehension.

Nor would they have thought it credible that Steve, married to his coveted fairy princess, should first become attached to Mary Faithful by friendship and then find that friendship replaced by a deep and never-to-be-changed love. It was an impossible situation, they would have said.

The morning following Beatrice's parlour picnic and Mary's hard-wrung confession Steve made it a point to be at his desk when Mary came in, despite the few hours' sleep and the fact that Beatrice had willfully chosen to take breakfast with him in sulky, tearful reproach. When Mary was taking off her hat and coat he came to the door of her office and made a formal little bow.

He found himself more in love with her than the night previous. There was something so pathetic and lonely about her, successful business woman that she was; the very fact of people's not suspecting it, labelling her as self-sufficient and carefree, only emphasized this loneliness now that he looked at her with a lover's eyes. He realized that whereas he had had to win a fortune to marry the Gorgeous Girl it would be as necessary to lose a fortune to marry Mary—if such a thing were possible; that she was a woman not easy to win, one who would find her happiness not in taking hastily accumulated wealth but in making a man by slow processes and honourable methods until he was fitted to obtain a fortune and then enjoy it with her.

"Good morning"—wondering if he looked confused—"I wanted to say that I am on the country-club committee to welcome English golfers, and I'll be away this week off and on. And—and whenever you want me to I'll try to keep under cover for a bit.... I think I do appreciate your telling me the truth last night more than anything else that has ever happened to me; there was something so stoically splendid about it—and I don't want to abuse the confidence. Please don't mind my just mentioning it, I'll promise not to do so again; and we'll go on as before. I was a cad to play about your fireplace—quite wrong—and you had to make me realize it. Do you know, I was half afraid you'd send in your resignation this morning? Women always do those things in books. Please say something and help a chap out."

Mary was at her desk opening mail with slow, steady fingers.

"I have my living and Luke's living to make, and I could not resign unless you asked me to do so," she told him. "I wondered whether or not you would feel it the thing for me to do. It is a unique situation," she said in a slightly more animated tone—"not the situation, but my calm betrayal of it. Usually my sort go along in silence and take our bursts of truthful rebellion on our mothers' shoulders or in sanitariums. I really feel a great deal better now that I have told you." Her gray eyes were quite fearless in their honesty as she glanced up. "I feel that I can settle down in an even routine and be of more service to everyone."

"We'll be friends," he urged, impulsively. It seemed hard not to say foolish, loverish little things, try to make her believe in miracles, make wild and impossible rainbow plans, precluding any Gorgeous Girls and newly remodelled Italian villas.

"I wanted to add a postscript," she interrupted. "That's only running true to form, isn't it? Here it is: If you ever at any time, because you are emotional and in many ways untried, find yourself unhappy and at cross purposes, and try to lean on a sentimental crutch which inclines in my direction—I shall leave this office just as they do in novels. And I shall not come back, which they always do in novels. This would deprive you of a good employee and myself of a good position and be foolish all round. You men are no different from us women; once a woman knows a man loves her she cannot quite hate him even if her heart is another's. Instinctively she labels him as a rainy-day proposition and during some wild thunderstorm—well, idiotic things happen! Whereas if she never knew he cared she might go about finding a mild mission in life. A man is the same; and since I have trusted you with my secret, and that secret happens to concern yourself, the logical consequence is that you will never quite hate me because I care. In some moods you might even try telling yourself that you cared, too. Then I should not only leave your employ but I should stop caring."

She went on with the morning's mail. Outside, the office force was stirring. Raps at the door and phone calls would soon begin.

"Would you really?" he asked, so soberly that Mary's hands trembled and she blotted ink on her clean desk pad as she tried to make a memorandum.

"Really. I never can bring myself to believe in warmed-over magic."

"Then I shall never have any such moods."

He answered a phone call and there fell upon the office an atmosphere of strange peace which had been missing for many months.

During the winter the rift between Steve and Beatrice became noticeable even to the Gorgeous Girl's friends, to Trudy's infinite delight; and by the time spring came it was an accepted thing that Steve's share in the scheme of things was to write checks and occupy as little space as possible in the apartment, whereas Beatrice's part in the scheme of things was to badger and nag at her husband eternally or be frigidly polite and civil, which was far harder to endure than her temper.

The Gorgeous Girl's endeavours to become an advanced woman, an intellectual patroness and so on, were amusing and ineffectual. She soon found neither pleasure nor satisfaction in any of her near-lions. Nor did she succeed in making them roar. Whether it was a parlour lecture on Did a Chinese Monk Visit America a Thousand Years before Columbus? or a Baby Party at which Beatrice and Gay dressed as twins and were wheeled about in a white pram by Trudy, dressed as a French bonne—the reaction was one of depression and defeat. Though Beatrice still had her name printed on the reports of charity committees she no longer took what was termed an active part. She shrugged her shoulders carelessly and gave the reason that it was all so hopeless—and no fun at all.

Inanimate things afforded the most satisfaction; at least she could buy an individual breakfast service costing a thousand dollars and have the item recorded in all the fashion journals, with her photograph, and she could have the most unique dinner favours and the smartest frocks, and they never disappointed her.

Besides, the Italian villa was to be finished shortly and that would necessitate a new round of entertainments and minor adjustments and no end of enviable publicity and comment. This diversion would take her through the late spring and summer, and in the fall she fully intended to take up dress reform and become a feminist. She had an idea of wearing nothing but draped Grecian robes—which could be made to look quite fetching if one had enough jewellery to punctuate the drapes—and of going in for barefoot dancing on the lawn. It would be more convenient if she could persuade her father and aunt not to stay on at the Villa Rosa, as it was to be called. And certainly it would have been more aesthetic to look across the street and see something besides another expensive and hopelessly mediocre brick house which another rich man somewhat after Constantine's own heart had built with pride and joy. She wished she had bought a site back from the town and created a real estate. The fact that she had not done so made her miserable for over a week, during which Gay consoled her in most flattering fashion, neglecting his own wife to do so.

Well, after the Villa Rosa—what then? Life seemed very empty. With a certain natural squareness of nature Beatrice was not the sort of woman to indulge in unwise affairs beyond a certain discreet point. She had never learned how to study, so she could not become a devotee of some fascinating and exacting subject. Her really keen mind had merely skimmed through her studies.

Nor was she over fond of children. As she told Trudy, children were absorbing things and goodness knew if she ever had any of her own she would have a wonderful enough nursery and sun parlour with panels designed by a child psychologist; there was everything in first impressions. But take care of one of them? The actual responsibility? Heavens, what a fate! She would engage a trained baby nurse—and then drop in at the nursery for a few moments each day to see that everything was going well.

Later, after the trying first years, she would be very proud of her children. Besides, planning children's clothes was a great deal of fun; and if she had a daughter she would see that the daughter married properly. Whether or not she was thinking of Steve, Trudy did not dare to ask; but she evidently was, as she added that one might better marry an impoverished nobleman and live in an atmosphere of culture and smart society than marry someone who never attempted to be anything.

A child demanded of one intelligence up to a certain point, and faithful service, but it did not require keen intellect. A primitive knowledge of what their hurt or hunger or plain-temper cry meant—and a primitive tender fashion of coping with whichever it might be—were all that young babies demanded; and hence the Gorgeous Girl, like all finely bred and thoroughly selfish women of to-day who are bent on psychological nursery panels, refused to be tied down to the narrow routine of a nursemaid, as she called it. Love-gardening is the title old-fashioned gentlewomen originated.

Then Beatrice cited how carefree Jill Briggs was with her four children. Goodness knew that Jill was always within hailing distance of the big time; and except for a few little illnesses and the fact that the oldest boy had died of croup the children were a complete success and perfect darlings, and Jill dressed them like old-style portraits. Besides, Jill had tried out a new system of education on the oldest boy; he had been taught to develop his individuality to the highest possible degree. At eight, just before the croup attack—though he did not know his alphabet or how to tell time and had never been cuddled or rocked to sleep with nursery jingles as soothing mental food—he could play quite a shrewd game of poker and drive a bug roadster. Beatrice, in talking over the child problem with Trudy, decided that if she ever had a son she, too, would develop the poker shark in him rather than the admirer of Santa Claus and the student of Mother Goose.

"Of course Steve thinks a woman should drudge and slave over those crying mites as if the nation depended upon it," she concluded, "but I should never pay any attention to him. He said, in front of Jill, that he always felt well acquainted with rich children, for he had passed a similar childhood—meaning that living in an orphan asylum and being brought up by a nursemaid were much the same thing. Quite lovely of him, wasn't it?"

Trudy could not suppress her giggle.

"I'm sure the children get on well enough. Just think, if you had to plan all the meals and dress and undress them and all the baths—ugh, I never could! And when Steve begins his eloquent stories about these nursemaids who neglect children or dope them or do something dreadful I simply leave the room. He actually told Mrs. Ostrander that he saw her nurse slap her child across the face, and proceeded to add: 'It is never fair to strike a child that way. It breeds bad things in him. And he wasn't doing anything; it was just nurse's day for nerves.' Of course the Ostranders will never forget it. Now, Mrs. Ostrander is a member of the Mothers' Council, and a dear. She just slaved over her children's nursery and she reads all their books before she allows the nurse to read them aloud. I'm sure no children were ever brought up as scientifically; they have a wonderful schedule. She told me she had never held them except when they were having their pictures made—never!—and that crying strengthens the lungs. Of course Steve says we feed our lap dogs when they whine but close the door on the baby when he tries it. So what can you do with such a person?"

To which Trudy agreed. Trudy agreed to anything Beatrice might say until the bills for the villa were settled and the O'Valleys established in the gondola-endowed home. Trudy sometimes pinched herself to realize that in such a short space of time she was living in the Touraine apartment house and that her husband, whom she loathed more each day, had actually scrambled into the position of being the best decorator in Hanover and was busy splitting commissions and wheedling orders from New York art dealers and Hanover's social set.

Sometimes Nature takes her own methods of revenge, and to Mark Constantine's child she saw fit to send no son or daughter. Constantine never mentioned his hunger for grandchildren. He had a strange shyness about admitting the desire and the plans he had made for them. But when he saw the completion of this villa and realized the thousands of dollars squandered upon it and the impossible existence his daughter would lead living therein he went to his untouched plain room, looking out on sunken gardens, to try to figure out how this had all come about.

He fumbled in mental chaos as to the meaning of all this nonsense and longed more than ever for a grandchild, someone who should be quite unspoiled and who would not approach him with light, begrudged kisses and a request for money.

The formal Venetian ball which Beatrice gave to open her new home merely amused Steve, who had really dreaded it with the hysteria of a schoolgirl. He hated the whole scheme of the house and the man who was reaping a rich harvest by engaging the army of persons who had done the work therein. He rejoiced openly at each delay on the part of the plumber, the tinsmith, the decorator; and openly gave a thanksgiving when the illustrated wall paper for the halls, which told the legend of Psyche and Cupid, had been sent to Davy Jones's locker en route from Florence. Steve's name for the Villa Rosa was the Fuller Gloom.

But when they did move into the new-old home and Steve was led through each room of gammon and spinach, as he had faintly whispered to Mary Faithful, he found himself only amused. Now that he considered it, it was a relief to know Beatrice had such a new and absorbing plaything to take up her time and keep her aloof from his personal affairs. He sought out his father-in-law in his plain room with its walnut set and stand of detective stories, and sat down in relief, though the two men honourably refrained from criticizing a certain person openly.

At the ball Beatrice appeared in a wonderful black gown, so wonderful and expensive that its creator had given it a distinct title—The Plume. Steve did his duty as a handsome figurehead, as someone called him; after which he was free to stroll in the gardens and smoke and wonder what manner of folks inhabited the stars.

An inspection of the house had taken place with Beatrice and Gay leading the procession, and Aunt Belle bringing up the rear. The oh's and ah's and exclamations of approval, resultant of fairy cocktails, rewarded Beatrice for her expenditure. When she brought them into her own apartment she stood back, while Gay lisped out the story of the greatest achievement and novelty of the entire house, watching the faces of her guests so as to catch the first expression of envy which should reveal itself.

The novelty consisted in the set of bedroom furniture, which, though the rest of the house was Italian, as Gay hastily explained, was of Chinese workmanship, carved and inlaid in intricate design—two dragons fighting over pearls, with the various stages of the struggle represented on the bed legs, the bureau drawers, the easy-chair, the dressing table, and so on. The set had been made for the Emperor of China, but when his private council inspected it, it was found that one of the carved dragons on top of the four-poster bed had captured the pearl for which they had been fighting in sixty-seven or so other carvings. This signified bad luck for the emperor; misfortune and rebellion would be his lot if he slept in the bed. Though regretting the loss of the furniture the emperor felt the loss of his kingdom would be even greater, and the furniture was placed on the market. To Mrs. Stephen O'Valley was awarded the ownership as well as the privilege of writing the check that made the purchase possible. On the bed was a pillow of the material woven for emperors only, thrown in on account of the ill luck that would attend him who slept in the bed beneath the conquering dragon; and on a carved bone platter was an antique Maltese shawl which gave a rare note to the entire room.

Steve, who had regarded the emperor's rejected furniture as a cross between a joke and an outrage, gave way to his feelings by pacing up and down the hall and capturing a tray of sandwiches being carried to the supper room. But Beatrice, after Gay's speech, felt a rare joy—for every guest in the room hated her for having won the prize. What more could she ask by way of reward?

When they were alone in the new-old home Steve felt it only decent to congratulate her. Somehow he had come to feel that keeping up sham courtesies made everything easier.

"You have worked very hard, haven't you?" he asked. "But you have wonderful results."

"Do you think so? Everyone hates me now, for there will never be another royal bedroom set like mine on the market—when you think that Gay skirmished about and won it for me, it is quite remarkable. And it shows what Gay can do when he has a little encouragement. Alice Twill was almost cross-eyed and crying; her husband nipped the chateau idea in the bud. New York men are coming here to take photographs next week. I wish the garden were in better shape. They are going to run feature stories about it.... Oh, Steve, do you think of any new place to go this summer?"

"I thought we had just moved to Venice," he said, still dazed at the amount of carved fire screens, tapestries, dim, impractical candlelights, and soft-eyed Madonnas which smiled at him on all sides.

"I must have all the office force come and see this—it would be such a treat. And we can serve tea on the lawn."

"Do. They don't often take time to go to museums."

Steve's bad nature was getting the better of polite resolves. He was thinking of Mary's clear, witty eyes as she would view the remains of a plain American house.

The next thing of interest to keep Beatrice at home was the advent of a real lion cub, following Monster's departure to canine heaven. Being too impossible of shape and disposition for any one's pride or comfort, Monster was disposed of and buried in a satin-lined coffin with a neat white headstone telling salient facts of her short existence.

While Steve was giving devout thanks for the event Beatrice was realizing that the gardens needed a dominating note, as Gay said. During her reading of old fables and romantic legends about superwomen or extremely wicked matrons she had discovered that they nearly all possessed a lion or a bear or a brace of elephants to gambol on the green. Such a pet symbolized its owner's power and fearlessness, and any young woman who could have the Emperor of China's bedroom suite brought post haste into Hanover, U. S. A., was surely entitled to something in the jungle line for her front yard!

For the first time in his daughter's life Mark Constantine made a faint protest, suggesting that she have a taxidermist mount several lion cubs and group them about the hall—while Steve sat back in cynical amusement and asked if she were going to request the goldfish to step aside in favour of a few Alaska seals?

"If she gets a live lion—and she will, because I'm writing to a circus man now," Gay told Trudy—"I'm going to sprain my ankle and be laid up from the day the beast arrives until he goes—he won't tarry long, the police won't have it. But I'm not going to take any chances. Still, it would never do to make a fat commission on the deal and then act as if I were afraid to come over and play cannibal with him. I guess you can go," he added, insolently.

Trudy looked at him in scorn. "You are cheap," she said. "Well, I will go! I'd just as soon be eaten by a lion as to have to live with a shrimp."

The lion arrived in due time and was named Tawny Adonis. Beatrice considered him a perfect love. He was a gay young cub and quite effective in the new background, well intentioned but lonesome for his old atmosphere of circus life and his mother and brothers. He was given a large run in the Constantine grounds, and while Aunt Belle stayed locked in her room the greater share of the time and Gay immediately sprained his ankle and was forced to send Trudy as his messenger, Mark Constantine and Steve found their time well occupied in convincing the authorities that the town infantry would not be devoured piecemeal. Hanover had never really approved of having an Italian villa crammed down its throat, and it was certainly not agreeable, to say the least, to have a lion cub at large as a dominating garden note.

"You cannot keep him, even if you pulled all his teeth and taught him to be a dope fiend," Steve said in desperation after the roars of Tawny Adonis had been reported to the police as annoying. "He is growing bigger every day and all he has done is demolish flowers and shrubs and chew up fence posts. I'm sorry for him, and I'm not particularly afraid of him, but if there was an accident with a child even the owner of a dominating garden note could not expect to go scot-free."

Her father and her friends championed Steve's stand in the matter and after a little rebelling and pouting and having the pleasure of seeing her name in all the papers as the owner of the lion cub and so on, Beatrice consented to part with him on the condition that she be allowed to give him a farewell birthday party, he being nearly a year old. She was going to ask the children of all her friends. But getting a hint of the event her friends hastily arranged a Tom Thumb wedding for charity, and then assured Beatrice it was merely a coincidence that the two things interfered with each other, wasn't it a shame? Realizing that this dominating note was not a social asset Beatrice hastily sided in with her father and the authorities.

Besides, she was tired of Tawny Adonis; he was destructive, and a secret source of worry if she could have been made to admit it. So she prepared for a birthday fete and determined to have the public-school children as the guests. But these refused her invitation as well; so she went into the slums and collected thirty harmless waifs who felt that a lion's birthday party was not to be despised, and brought them triumphantly into the Italian gardens.

The waifs gathered round an outdoor table, too busy swallowing food to bother about their possible and likely fate. In the centre of the table was a huge birthday cake for Tawny Adonis. It was made of raw hamburger steak, generously iced with bone marrow, and the single anniversary candle took the form of a balanced soup bone. After the children had eaten their fill Tawny Adonis was let loose upon the scene and at the birthday cake, and during the wild smashing of glass and china and the excited shrieks of the waifs Tawny went to the birthday cake and devoured it, soup bone and all.

Gay was out of town the day of the party but Trudy bravely assisted, as did one or two others, Mark Constantine and his sister sitting in the windows to watch the procedure while Beatrice in a gown of turquoise velvet with a coronet of frosted leaves played Lady Bountiful and dismissed the slum brigade as soon as possible, sending them home with the confused knowledge that a beautiful lady in angel clothes and a wild animal sometimes meant plenty of ham sandwiches and ice cream, as well as the opportunity to slip a fork into one's pocket.

Steve declined to take any part in the celebration, but at the conclusion of the event he appeared with policemen and a patrol wagon containing a cage, and amid gay farewells and grim coaxings Tawny Adonis was escorted to the railway station and shipped back to the circus man, at a loss of five hundred dollars—not counting the damage done—to the Gorgeous Girl!



CHAPTER XV

Trudy was keen as a brier whenever her own realm was threatened. With the shrewdness which caused her to refrain from ever speaking ill of a woman when talking to a man and never speaking aught but ill of women when talking to their own kind, she foresaw in Gay's constant attendance on the Gorgeous Girl the possibility of an unpleasant situation.

For the Gorgeous Girl had said not only to her husband but to her friends that she must find some other kind of a good time now the novelty of the Villa Rosa was exhausted. Even inky people bored her, she added; poets were no longer permitted in her drawing room, and the circle of pet robins and angel ducks had somehow wandered out of her safe keeping. An unusually pretty flock of sweetsome debutantes had thinned the bachelor ranks, and Jill Briggs's youngest boy died of some childish ailment, disturbing Beatrice more than she admitted, for some reason, and making her own thoughts poor company.

It was while she was talking of this child's death with Trudy that the latter glimpsed the handwriting on the wall, and with scantily concealed enmity determined to beat Beatrice at her own game.

"Jill is going away for the winter, poor thing," Beatrice said. "I don't blame her; it would be too horrible to have to stay and see all his things about. And it's the second child she's lost. Goodness me, she has spent hundreds on baby specialists and nurses! Well, you know yourself, Trudy—you've seen how wonderful she has been. This boy's death has so distressed her that she has decided to have two nurses stay with the children instead of one. Mighty sweet of her, as it all comes out of Jill's pocketbook and not her husband's. She says she cannot think of leaving them with one person, and she must go away because her nerves are frazzled.

"She is going to the West Indies with an artist friend, and they are going to make a marvellous collection of water-colour paintings of birds and flowers, a sort of memorial to the boy. Jill says she will sell them and give the proceeds for the creche charity. Well, that is all very well for Jill to do; she has a real heartache to live down. But when you have no earthly reason to go and paint wild birds and flowers and you are bored to distraction with everything—" She shrugged her shoulders.

"Meaning yourself?" asked Trudy. "Really?"—delighted that this was so.

"Are you ever bored?"

"Only enough to be fashionable. You see I have to live Gay's life and career and my own at the same time." Instinctively Trudy knew this caused envy in her hostess's heart for a multitude of reasons. "Gay never amounted to anything until we were married"—she paused for this to take full effect—"and I enjoy playing the game. I have grown fond of makeshifts and make-believes and hedging, bluffing, stalling, jumping mental hurdles—it's fun—it keeps you alive and never weighing more than a hundred and ten pounds."

Trudy rose to go. She was a chic little vixen in a fantastic costume of black velvet with a jacket of blush pink. No one but Trudy could have worn such a thing—a semi-Dick-Whittington effect—and have gotten away with it. Though she was physically very tired from sewing late the night before, and mal-nourished because she was too indolent to bother to cook, Trudy looked quite fit for a long stretch of hard running.

"Why don't you diet seriously?" she purred. "It's only right for your true friends to tell you. The double chin is permanent, I'm afraid." She shook her shapely little head, to Beatrice's inward rage.

As Beatrice sat looking up at this impertinent little person she suddenly became angered to think she had ever bothered with an ex-office girl or permitted Gaylord to coax her into being nice to his wife. And if this impossible person could bring Gaylord into the ranks of prosperity in a short time, making everyone accept her, what couldn't she, Beatrice O'Valley, do with Gay if she tried—seriously tried? He would not linger beside Trudy if Beatrice gave him to understand there was a place for him at her own hearth. She knew Gaylord too well; he suddenly assumed the figurative form of a goal, as she had once assumed to Steve—a play pastime—in the true sense. A real man would not play off property doll in the hands of any woman, not excepting his own wife; which Beatrice realized. Living with a cave man had taught her many things. Yet it would be rare fun to have a property doll all one's own, different from the impersonal, harmless herd of boys and poets, a really innocent pastime if you considered it in the eyes of man-written law. What a lark—to switch Gay from this cheap, red-haired little woman, dominate his life, suddenly assert her starved abilities, and make him become far greater than anything Trudy had ever been able to do! It would cause such a jolly row and excitement and pep everyone up. Pet and flatter him and show Trudy that after all she had only been an incompetent clerk in Steve's office!

"Perhaps I will diet," was all she said, smiling sweetly. "And tell Gay he must come see me to-morrow. I have a plan that I want to tell him—and no one else. Besides, there is a flaw in the last pair of candlesticks he bought for me."

Trudy realized perfectly well that sweetness from the lips of an obese lady, after one has assured her of the arrival of a double chin, always augurs ill for everyone.

Originally Trudy had determined to use Gaylord as a stepping-stone, a rather satisfactory first husband. But since Beatrice's commission to do the villa and the stream of like orders from the new-rich who were trying to unload their war fortunes before they were caught at it, Trudy had grown content and even keen about Gaylord in an impersonal sense. She felt that she could not better herself if he continued to do as well as he had the last few months, and that she would continue to do her share of hill-climbing indefinitely. In other words, having won Gaylord in the remnant department, Trudy decided to keep him and make him answer the purpose of paying her board bill.

Besides, though she admitted it only to Mary, she felt anything but well. The more money Gaylord made the more he spent on himself, and he seemed to expect Trudy to manage out of the ozone, yet to appear as the indulged wife of her enterprising young husband. It never ended—the eternal searching for bargains; dyeing clothes and mending, cleaning, and pressing; living on delicatessen food; sitting up nights to help out with the work, often doing odds and ends of sewing, and appearing the next afternoon in the customer's house to admire the effect of the new drapery and tell of the bright-eyed Italian woman who had done the work.

Trudy saw little of Mary. Her better self made her stay aloof lest she win from her friend other details to add to her already safeguarded secret. And she never attempted to amuse Steve. She fought shy of him when he was about, wisely limiting herself to shy nods and smiles and occasionally a very meek compliment, which he usually pretended not to hear.

As she walked home from the villa—Gay had the roadster—she told herself that she must watch out or Beatrice would attempt to spoil Gay to the extent of making him wish to be rid of his wife. She realized that Gay was extremely scornful and careless of her. Having married her and satisfied his one-cylinder brain that he was a deuce of a chap and a democratic rake in marrying this dashing nobody Gaylord turned bully and permitted Trudy to take the cares of the family on her shoulders. He was now enjoying the fruits of her industry with a fair credit rating, very different from formerly, a bank account of which Trudy knew nothing, and the congenial work of pussyfooting about boudoirs and guzzling tea while perched on Beatrice's blue-satin gondolas.

He no longer needed Trudy. He could see now that to be single-handed once more, but with his new standing and profession, would be a most satisfactory state of affairs. In fact, if Trudy would only fall in love with a travelling man and decamp—what a chap he would soon rise to be! For a broken heart is often a man's strongest asset and a woman's gravest suspicion. Trudy, however, gave him no hope in this direction. She hung about her fireplace contrary to her former plans concerning it. She really put in an eighteen-hour day as both slavey and sylph, and seemed filled with everlasting patience and jazz.

Coming into the Touraine apartment Trudy found Gaylord showing old prints to some woman customers and advising as to the smartness of having them framed and used in sun parlours or any intriguing little nook. Trudy was de trop—she was prettier than the prospective customers, but in their eyes she had only a Winter-Garden personality—and Gay frowned his welcome.

Had Trudy not come in Gay would have served cocktails of his own making, which would cause them to order the prints at fabulous prices; and then sat in the dusk talking about the occult and the popularity of Persian pussy cats and how to make pear-and-cottage-cheese salad and serve it on cabbage leaves, which was quite the mode. It never does for an interior decorator, particularly if specializing in boudoirs, to have a wife, Gaylord decided as his customers patronized Trudy and departed, Gaylord seeing them to their car and standing bareheaded to wave his bejewelled hand as they whirled round the corner.

He then returned to give Trudy his unbiassed opinion. "I thought you were going to stay away until evening," he said. "You spoiled the sale."

"Did I? What were you about to do—play soul mate if they'd take the old things? I'm the one who found those prints in a second-hand store and had sense enough to buy the lot. I'm the one who found the remnants of cretonne you paste them on—and told you to charge ten dollars each—and I'm the one who sits out in the little back room and pastes them on, too!"

She threw her purse down with an angry gesture.

"You are the crudest thing," he said.

"I slapped you once for calling me a crude little fool—and the next time you try it I'll do better than that!" She was unable to control her temper. "If you think being a bachelor and languishing in this place would keep you afloat you're mistaken. It's me—I'm the one that buys the bargains and runs the sewing machine half the night, sends out the bills and wheedles the salesmen into looking at you—to say nothing of doing the housekeeping, and keeping every good-looking woman afraid of me, yet polite. Why, if you were alone any real business man could come in here and start a shop and put you behind the bench overnight. You're nothing! You never were. You lived on a dead man's reputation until you married me, and now you're living on a redheaded girl's nerve. I'll scold as shrilly as I like. If the neighbours hear, all the better!"

Trudy had lost control of herself. Besides, she was very tired. "Who told you to wear gray-velvet smocks in your drawing-room shop and to have soft ties poured down softer collars? You look a hundred per cent, better than when you hopped round in a check suit that gave you a gameboard appearance. I did that. If I'd ever worked for O'Valley as I have for you, thinking I'd get a good time out of it somehow, I'd have had Mary Faithful on the run."

She did not add the rest of her ideas—that Beatrice O'Valley, not contented with her store of possessions and avenues of interests, contemplated playing property doll with this half-portion little snob who stood before her in his ridiculous smock costume, half afraid and half sneering.

The interview concluded with Trudy's going to the kitchen for some kind of a supper and Gay's driving off post haste to see Beatrice.

* * * * *

When Steve returned from his hurried two-day trip he asked Beatrice if she realized the amount of money she was spending.

"Why should I?" she answered, aggrievedly. Steve looked unusually handsome this afternoon, and seemed to fit into the antique chair; and, in contrast to her contemplated property doll, Beatrice felt amiable and willing to play for favour. "I haven't asked you for one quarter of it."

"That's the trouble—your father has gone on paying your bills, and you don't seem to realize I am not an enormously rich man—and never will be, abnormal business conditions having ceased. We are back where we started, so to speak, and I don't look for a time of unheralded prosperity for some days to come. I was figuring up while I was away, in detail; and here are the results." He handed her a memorandum. "You see? I earn a splendid living and I have a neat nest egg not to be despised. But I have no Italian-villa income. Your father has, so you came back to your father to take his money and I am merely a necessary accessory to the entire ensemble." His voice was bitter.

"Oh, no, Stevuns!" She was quite the romantic parasite as she came and knelt beside him in coaxing attitude. "Why, papa wishes me to have everything I want. He would be terribly worried if he thought I had to do without a single shoe button!"

"But must all the shoe buttons be of gold?" Steve interpolated.

She paid no attention to him. "I'm papa's only heir—the money is all mine, anyway, and it always has been. You know how simple papa's tastes are."

"Like my own—like those of all busy people who are doing things. We haven't time to pamper ourselves."

"Someone has to buy up the trash! And you ought to thank us rich darlings of the gods for existing at all—we make you look so respectable by contrast." She waited for his answer.

He rose and went over to the carved mantel, standing so he could look down the long room crowded with luxuries.

"But this place isn't the home of an American man and his wife. It's a show place—bought with your father's money! And I've failed. I'm not supporting my wife. Good heavens, if I were I'd have to be cracking safes every week-end to do it. I can't make any more money than I am making—and stay at large—and you cannot go on living off your father and being my wife. I won't have it! I won't be that kind of a failure!"

"What shall I do with the money, throw it to the birds?" Her head began to ache, as it always did when a serious conversation was at hand.

"Wait until it is yours and then spend it on something for the good—not the delight—of someone else, or of a great many other people. Be my wife—let me take care of you," he begged, earnestly.

Beatrice hesitated. "I couldn't," was her final answer. "I couldn't manage with the allowance you give me—don't worry, dearest, there's no reason at all that we shouldn't have as good a time as there is. Papa wants us to."

"Don't you see what I'm trying to get at?" he insisted. "Won't you try to see? Just try—put yourself in my place, make yourself think with my viewpoint as a starting place. Suppose you had been a dreamer of a boy with a pirate's daring and a poet's unreal delusions, and you combined the two to produce a fortune, a fortune everyone marvelled at, the lucky turn of the wheel. Suppose you used that fortune with the same daring and fancy, loving someone with all your heart, to make money in a regular business and under the guidance of a well-trained merchant like your father—and then you married the person you loved and saw her deliberately belittle your manhood by going to her father's house to live, spending her father's money, and leaving you quite alone and without the joyous and needed responsibility of supporting your wife. Now what would you do?"

"I'd start right in spending my own money for things I wanted," she decided, glibly.

"But suppose you did not want things—cluttery, everlasting things, glaring, upholstered, painted, carved, what not—lugged from the four corners of the earth, not harmonizing with your own aims or interests? Suppose you wanted to create an individual and representative home and take care of it and the guardian angel who presided therein—then what would you do?"

"Oh—you mean you want another style of house? Then let's buy a country tract—and I promise to let you build and furnish just as you wish. That's a bully idea, dear, to have an abrupt contrast to this house—old-English manor type would be wonderful!"

The dinner gong brought a merciful release. Beatrice danced through the archway throwing him a kiss as the rest of her decision.

It was at this identical moment that Steve concluded it was too late for his wife ever to develop anything more than a double chin or so.



CHAPTER XVI

During Beatrice's house party, at which twenty or so equally Gorgeous Girls and their husbands were quartered in the Villa Rosa, while a string orchestra danced them further along the road toward nervous prostration each night, a fire ignited in the offices of the O'Valley Leather Company.

Steve's office and Mary's adjoining room were damaged by water rather than by the slight blaze itself and during an enforced recess from work both Mary and Steve found that a fire in an office building may cause a loss of time from routine yet be a great personal boon.

The day following the accident, Steve having been summoned at midnight to view the flames, Mary came to the office to try to rescue the files and sweep aside the debris.

"Nothing is really hurt, but they always mess things up," Steve said, coming to the doorway to hold up a precious record book. "See this? I wonder why they always leave such a lot of stuff to clear away. Now the whole extent of damage is the destroying of that rickety side stairway that is never used and could have been done away with long ago. Some boys, playing craps and smoking, left the makings of the fire and before it touched these rooms there was water poured into the whole plant. As a consequence, we have a three-day vacation and instead of having the side stairs torn down I'm in line for a chunk of insurance."

"Even the tea isn't spilled from my caddy," Mary answered; "Look."

"Wonder what they used this side stairway for? It was rickety when I bought the place." He looked at the blackened remains of steps.

"I don't know," Mary answered, absent-mindedly. She could have added that whenever she looked at those stairs or their closed door she saw but one thing—Steve on his wedding day as he came stealing up to ask about the long-distance telephone call, aglow with happiness and dreams. For her own reasons, therefore, Mary did not regret the destruction of the side stairs.

"They've shoved this cabinet over as if they had a special antagonism to it," he was saying, righting a small piece of furniture containing mostly Mary's papers. "There—not hurt, is it? Do the drawers open?" He began pulling them out, one after another. The last refused to open.

"What's in this one—it blocks the spring?"

Mary tried her hand at it. "Something wedged right at the edge. I'm sure I don't see what it can be. I never used that drawer for anything but——"

At their combined jerk the drawer came flying into space, and with it the remains of a white cardboard box with the monograms of B. C. and S. O. entwined by means of a cupid and a tiny wreath of flowers. Dried cake crumbs lay in the bottom of the drawer. It was the Gorgeous Girl's box of wedding cake which Mary Faithful had found on her desk.

Neither spoke immediately. Finally Mary said: "I suppose that's as bad an omen as to break a mirror under a ladder on Friday the thirteenth. Now shall I have the men sweep the office out? There is no reason we cannot get to work to-morrow."

"Wait a moment about sweeping out offices and going to work," Steve insisted. "If you want to break the hoodoo you have just brought on yourself by smashing up wedding cake—let me talk and act as high priest."

She shook her head. "You promised, and you've been true-blue—don't spoil it. Besides, it can do no good."

"I want to ask a question," he insisted. "I'm not going to break faith with you or take advantage of knowing what you told me. I shall always try to appreciate the honour done me, no matter if I am unworthy. I want to ask a question in as impersonal a way as if I wrote in to a woman's column." He tried to laugh.

"Ask away." Mary sat down in the nearest chair, the broken cardboard box at her feet.

"Why is it that a man can honestly be in love with the woman he marries and yet in an amazingly short time find himself playing the cad in feeling disappointed, discontented, utterly lacking affection? It's a ghastly happening. Why is it he saw no handwriting on the wall? I am not stupid, Mary, neither am I given to inconstancy—I've had to struggle too much not to have my mind made up once and for all time. Why didn't I see through this veneer of a good time that these Gorgeous Girls manage to have painted over their real selves? Why did I never suspect? And what is a man to do when he discovers the disillusionment? You see it all, there's no sense in not admitting it—why do I find myself ill at ease, now tense, now irritable over trifles, now sulky, despondent—as plainly sulky and despondent as a wild animal successfully caged and labelled, which must perforce stay put yet which will not afford its spectators the satisfaction of walking wistfully from cage corner to cage corner and yowling in unanswered anguish!"

"Is it as bad as that?" she asked, softly.

He nodded as he continued: "I sometimes feel the way the monkish fraternity did at Oxford when they claimed 'they banished God and admitted women.' I want a man-made world, womanless, without a single trace of romance or a good time. Not right, is it? Sometimes I think I'll crack under the pretense, go raving mad and scream out the whole miserable sham under which I live—and every time I indulge myself in such a reverie I find myself writing Beatrice an extra check and going with her to this thing or that, steel-hammer pulses beating at my forehead and a languor about even the attempt at breathing."

Mary would have spoken but he rushed ahead: "I like this fire, this debris. Most people would curse at it—it's real and rather common, sort of plain boiled-dinner variety. It gives me an excuse to take time off from the eternal frolic. I'm glad when there's a strike or a row and I dig out of town to stay in a commercial hotel. I have to get away from the whole tinsel show. And yet it was what I wanted, was willing to play modern Faust to any Wall Street Mephistopheles——"

"And you are sure it wasn't a Mephistopheles?"

"Of course not—for that much I can draw a deep breath and give thanks—it was my own luck."

"Other times, other titles," she murmured.

"One time you told me what you thought of the future of American women, the all-round good fellows of the world—do you remember? I wish you had not told me. It's just another thing to irritate. I'm driven mad by trifles—I'm starved for a big tragedy; that's the way this craving for a fortune and a good time is playing boomerang. I'm so infernally weary of hearing about the cut-glass slipper heels of some chorus girl and so hungry to hear about a shipwreck, a new creed, a daring crime that——"

"You foolish, funny boy," she said, taking pity on his involved analysis, "don't you see what you have done? It's quite the common fate of get-rich-quick dreamers; you merely symbolized your goal by Beatrice Constantine, she stood for the combined relationships of wife, comrade, lady luxury—and you captured your goal, and the greater effort ceased. You have had time to examine your prize in microscopic fashion. It isn't at all what you intended—but it is quite what you deserve. No one can make a lie serve for the truth—at all times and for an indefinite period. There is bound to come a cropper somewhere—usually where you least expect it. And you lied to yourself in the beginning, a passive sort of falsehood, in merely refusing to see the truth and groping for the unreal. You had to justify your race for wealth, so you said, 'Oho, I'll love a story-book princess and let that be my incentive. Story-book princesses are expensive lovelies and you have to have money bags to jingle before their fair selves!' So you became more and more infatuated with the fairy-book princess who happened to be in your pathway—and it was Beatrice. She made you feel that anything your slightly mad and quite unrealizing young self might do was proper. Just as the boy with a new air rifle deliberately sets up a target to shoot away at because the savage in him must justify hitting something besides the ozone, so you have merely wooed and won your own falsehood and disillusionment."

"You say it rather neatly; but that isn't all. The thing is that I'm not game enough to go on and take the punishment. Are you surprised?"

"No. But are you prepared to give up the thing which won her?"

"My money? I've thought of it." He folded his arms and began walking up and down the littered, water-soaked office. "Would you like me any better?" he asked, tenderly.

Mary's eyes grew stormy. "If the men go to work at once we can have the rugs sent to the cleaner's and put down old matting for a temporary covering—and I can go ahead taking inventory," was her answer.

"I see," Steve made himself respond. "Well—I didn't trespass very much," he whispered as he passed her to leave the building.

* * * * *

Beatrice regarded the fire as an amusing happening and before Steve realized what was being done she had proposed that Gaylord refurnish the office in an arts-and-crafts fashion. It had long seemed to her a most inartistic and clumsy place and when Steve refused her offer and told her that a splint-bottomed chair and a kitchen chair were his office equipment some years ago she sent for Gaylord on her own initiative and told him to beard the lion in the den to see if he could win Steve to the cause of painted wall panels typifying commerce, industry, and such, and crippled beer steins and so on as artistic wastebaskets.

There had never been an active feud between Gaylord and Steve; it was always that hidden enmity of a weak culprit toward a strong man. Neither had Trudy been able to win Steve by her Titian curls, baby-blue eyes, and obese compliments. In fact, Gaylord had avoided Steve the last year. He was the one Beatrice called upon to play with her, he accompanied her shopping, even unto the milliner's, and had been in New York one time when Beatrice had gone down to see about buying a moleskin wrap. Not even Trudy knew that he had actually adopted a monocle and squired Beatrice round in state.

So he approached Steve with the attitude of "I hate you and am only waiting to prove it but meanwhile I'll play off the friend lizard no matter how painful."

But after a few "my dear fellows" and "old dears" and gibes about the disordered office with its prosaic chairs and Mary Faithful, quite flushed and plain looking as she dashed round giving orders, Gaylord found himself being neatly set outside on the curbstone and told to remain in that exact position.

"I hate this decorating business," Steve said in final condemnation. "I agree with my father-in-law that when a man approaches me with a book of sample braids and cretonnes under his arm I feel it only righteous that he be shot at sunrise—and now you know how strong you stand with me. I don't mind Beatrice having her whirl at the thing. A new colour scheme as often as she has a manicure; that's different. But my office stays as I wish it and you can't rush in any globes of goldfish and inkstands composed of reclining young females with their little hands forming the ink cup, while a single spray of cherry blossoms flourishes over the hook I hang my hat and coat upon. Oh, no, trot back to your boudoirs and purr your prettiest, but stop trying to tackle real men."

Gaylord's one-cylinder brain had become more efficient by dint of daily sparring with his wife. So he retorted: "She is going to make you a present of it—your birthday gift, I understand. Does that alter the case?"

Steve looked at him with an even wilder frown. "Tell her to build a bomb-proof pergola for herself and mark it for me just the same. When we redecorate round here it takes Miss Faithful about a half hour to plan the show. Good-bye, Gay, I'm awfully rushed. Thanks just as much."

Gaylord sauntered outside, smiling, apparently as if he accepted the entire universe. But his one-cylinder brain harboured an unpleasant secret which concerned Steve. Gaylord knew that Steve had not reckoned with his enemies and that he was in no condition to begin doing so now. Constantine was no longer at the helm, fearless, respected, and dominating. Steve was quite the reckless egotist, out of love with his wife, mentally jaded, and weary of the game—and his enemies surmised all this in rough fashion and were making their plans accordingly. How wonderful it would be if certain catastrophes did happen. How lucky Beatrice had her own income! She would never cease ordering bomb-proof pergolas or bird cages carved from rare woods.

The next day—before Beatrice and Steve had a chance to argue the matter out to a fine point—Mark Constantine had a stroke. It was like the sudden crashing down of a great oak tree which within had been hollow and decayed for some time but to all exterior appearances quite the sturdy monarch. Without warning he became first a mighty thing lying day after day on a bed, fussed over and exclaimed over and prayed over by a multitude of people. Then he assumed the new and final proportions of a childish invalid—his fierce, true grasp of things, his wide-sweeping and ambitious viewpoint narrowed hastily to the four walls of the sick room. Instead of the stock-market fluctuation bringing forth his "Gad, that's good!" or oaths of disapproval, the taste of an especially good custard or the way the masseuse neglected his left forearm were cause for joy or grief.

Life had suddenly changed into the monotonous and wearing routine of a broken, lonesome old man who had plenty of time to think of the past with his wife Hannah, recalling incidents he had not recalled until this dull, long day arrived. And after reaching many conclusions about many things Constantine was forced to realize that no one particularly cared for or sought out his opinions. He was placed in the category of all fallen oaks—someone who would have one of the largest funerals ever held in the city. And friends murmured that for Bea's sake they hoped it would not be long.

But it was to be long—for with the tenacity of purpose he had always exhibited Constantine readjusted himself to the narrow realm of four walls. His former tyranny toward the business world was now exercised toward his daughter and son-in-law, his sister and his attendants. He resolved to live—or exist—just as long as life was possible, to vampire-borrow from those about him all the vitality that he could, to have every care and comfort and every new doctor ever heard of called in to attend him; he now said he wished to live as many years as God willed. There was a God, now that he was partially paralyzed, a very real God, to whom he prayed in orthodox fashion. He wanted to keep remembering the past with Hannah, to shed the tears for her death which he had never taken the time to shed, to decide what it was that had been so wrong in his life in order that his death and hereafter might be very properly right.

Aunt Belle had taken this new affliction after the fashion of a Mrs. Gummidge. It affected her worse than any one else, first because the ridicule and fault-finding to which her brother had always treated her were tripled in their amount and quality, and yet as she was dependent upon this childishly weak brother she must endure the treatment. Secondly, she was reminded that her age was somewhat near Mark Constantine's age and perhaps a similar fate lay in store for her. Lastly, it tied her down—propriety demanded that someone be in the sick room a share of the time and certainly Beatrice had no intention of undertaking the responsibility.

Steve had acted as Aunt Belle fancied he would act, genuinely concerned over the catastrophe and seeking refuge with this tired old child a greater share of the time. By degrees Aunt Belle left Steve to play the role of comforter and companion, since no nurse ever stayed at the Constantine bedside for longer than a fortnight. So she was allowed to gambol about in her pinafore frocks and high-heeled shoes, wondering if her brother had made a fair will, taking into account the fact that a woman is only as old as she looks—and with a tidy fortune who knows what might happen after the proper mourning period?

Beatrice had been prostrated at the news. For two days she stayed in bed and sobbed hysterically. Then she was prevailed upon to see her father and to take the sensible attitude of preparing for a long siege, as Steve suggested.

"How cold-hearted it sounds—a long siege!" she reproached.

"But it is true. He will not die—he will live until that splendid vitality of his has been snuffed out by a careless law of rhythm, so you may as well buck up and run in to see him every day and then go about as usual."

"A sick room drives me wild. I wish I had taken a course in practical nursing instead of the domestic-science things."

Steve did not answer.

"I can't bear to think of it. It's like having life-in-death in the very house. Oh, Steve, can't you talk him into going to a sanitarium? They'd have so many interesting kinds of baths to try!"

"He won't mind your parties, if that is what is bothering you. The only thing he asks is to be left in peace in his room with plenty of detective stories and plenty of medical attention, and he won't know if you dance the roof off. But if you really want to hasten the end send Gay up there with plans for remodelling his room—it will either kill or cure," he laughed.

"I must do something to help me forget and make it easier for him," she said, soberly. "I'm going to try a faith healer—not because I believe in them but because I don't want to leave any stone unturned. I think a new interest would help papa. Would you try adopting a child or my taking up classical dancing in deadly earnest?" She was quite sincere and emotionally wrought up as she came up to him and laid her head on his shoulder.

"Oh, I'd take up classical dancing," he advised.

She gave a sigh of relief. "Yes, it's what I really think would be the best. I will dance on the lawn so papa can watch me."

He gave vent to his father-in-law's favourite expletive, "Gad!" under his breath.

He did not add what was an unpleasant probability: that, having to assume full responsibility of affairs, there were likely to be astonishing complications. Crashed-down oak trees are quite helpless concerning their enemies, reckoned upon or otherwise, and Steve, who had never taken count of his foes, would be called upon to meet them all single-handed.



CHAPTER XVII

In a jewellery store Trudy Vondeplosshe, wrapped in wine-coloured velours, was coquetting with diamond rings under glass and trying to affect an air of indifference concerning them. With all her husband's rise in the world he did not see fit to bestow upon his wife any substantial token of his regard. The vague and transitory idea he once entertained of playing off fairy godfather to her and placing a fortune at her feet had become past history. Now that Gay did run a motor and wear monogrammed silk shirts he saw to it that Trudy had as little as the law allowed. She still continued remaking her dresses and haunting remnant counters, sewing on Gay's work, playing off the same overstrained, underfed Trudy as in the first days at the Graystone apartment. But as it was for a good time she never thought of faltering.

She had decided, however, that it was time now to adopt other and more forceful methods of obtaining the things she craved and felt she had earned. Foremost, as with many women, was a diamond ring. After obtaining this she would turn in her wedding ring for old gold, the price to apply on a platinum circlet studded with brilliants. For months Trudy's eyes had glittered greedily as she observed Gay's clientele with their jewelled bags, rings, brooches, watches, and what not—yet she possessed not a single gem.

She had often enough asked Gay for one, to which he would sneer: "What do you want with a diamond? You know I'm always on the ragged edge of failing!"

"Because you gamble and drink and are a born fool," she protested. "You could make real money if you would listen to me and keep quiet."

"I can't see what that has to do with your wanting a diamond ring! If I ever make real money you can have one but not when auto tires are as high as they are——"

"And when husbands grow tipsy and drive into ditches and have to be brought home by horses and wagons. Oh, no. But you'll go shopping with Beatrice and pick out her jewellery and tell her jewels have souls and a lot more bunk, and then get a commission as soon as her back is turned! Why don't you get me a diamond instead, and omit the bunk? I'll take one with a flaw—I'm used to seconds. You must believe me when I say that, because I married you."

Gay no longer feared Trudy; in fact, he felt he had little use for her. She was an obstacle to his making an excellent marriage. Through Trudy and all the rest of the complicated ladder climbing he was now recognized, and real men were extremely busy these days getting the tag ends of war-debris business in shape. It was quite a different situation—he could have had his choice of several widows. Take it all in all, he preferred a matron, his days at playing with debutantes were in the discard. The business of buying and selling antiques and interior decorating had so inflated his one-cylinder brain that he really fancied he needed a mature companionship and understanding.

"I'll buy you a diamond ring, old dear," he said, lightly, "when you have me in a corner, hands up—so set your wits to work and see what you can do about it."

It was over their hurried breakfast that the discussion took place, with Trudy, quite a fright in a tousled boudoir cap and neglige, scuttling about the dining room with the breakfast tray and planning to send out bills, reorder some draperies, and call up her friends until one of them should offer to take her to a fashionable morning musical in the near future. After which she would go down town and make good at her star act—window wishing.

"You make me so tired I wonder why I don't clear out," she retorted. "You think I'm afraid to buy a diamond ring and charge it to you? Watch me!"