In the morning Steve was accosted by Aunt Belle, who felt she must say her conventional, marcelled, gray-satin, and violet-perfumed reproaches. All Beatrice had told her was that Steve was now an impossible pauper, that he loved Mary Faithful and had loved her for years, that it was quite awful, and she was going to divorce him. Her aunt, with the proper emotions of a Gorgeous Girl's aunt, and uncomfortable memories of love in a cottage with the late Mr. Todd, began to upbraid Steve. She began in a cold, stereotyped fashion, calling his attention to the broken-hearted wife, the sick man who lay upstairs and who had befriended him, and of the social ostracism that was to result should he take such a drastic step.

She felt it indelicate to mention Mary but she did say there were "other vicious deceits of which we are well aware, my young man," warning him that in years to come old age would bring nothing but remorse and terror, asking him what he would be forced to think when his marriage was recalled?

"My marriage?" Steve answered, too pleasantly to be safe. "I dare say in time I'll come to realize it is always the open season for salamanders." Which left Aunt Belle with the wild thought that she must accompany Beatrice to Reno to sit out in the sagebrush for the best part of a year.

Steve found his wife in her dressing room; she had waited as eagerly for his coming as she had done during the first days of their engagement. She, too, during a sleepless night had resolved that the only solution was a divorce, but she was going to have just as gay a time out of the event as was possible, which included making Steve as wretched as could be. Even with the rumours concerning Mary she believed, in the conceited fashion of all persons so cowardly that they merely consent to be loved, that Steve still adored her and that she was dealing with the deluded man of a few years ago.

She wore a sapphire-coloured neglige with slippers to match, and lay in her chaise-longue gondola, her prayer books with their silver covers and a new Pom as touching details to the farewell tableau. Then Steve was permitted to come into the room.

She gazed at him in a sorrowful, forgiving fashion, quite enjoying the situation. Then she held out her hand, wondering if he would kiss it; but he took it as meaning that he might sit down or try to sit down on a perilous little hassock which he had always named the Rocky Road to Dublin despite its Florentine appearance.

"I hope you agree with me," he began, in businesslike fashion as he noted the prayer books, the untouched breakfast tray, the snapping Pom, which never tolerated his presence without protest. "I am going to see your father, out of courtesy, and explain more in detail how things stand. It won't interest you so I sha'n't bore you. I have enough money and securities to cover the loss of any of his money. I shall apply for a position in another city. I am reasonably sure of obtaining it. It seems to me it would be better that I go away."

"I forgive you, Steve," she said, sadly, shaking her golden head.

"I presume you will want to do something about a legal separation—and if you do not I shall."

The prayer books fell to the floor in collision with the slipping Pom but Beatrice did not notice.

"So you do love her!" There was a hint of a snarl in her high-pitched voice. "So you want to marry her after all!"

"I think," Steve continued, in the same even voice, "that as you are going to tire of being a divorcee playing about, and will want a second husband to help with the ennui that is bound to occur, you had best select your form of a divorce and let me do what I can to aid in the matter. You are very lovely this morning, as you usually are. There is no doubt but what many men far better suited to you than I will try to have you marry them—they will wisely never expect to marry you. That was our great mistake, Beatrice. I thought I was marrying you—but you were really marrying me."

"So you do love her," she repeated, paying no heed to what else he said.

"Yes, I do," Steve said, with sudden honesty. It was a relief to be as brutal and uncomplimentary as possible; it offset the silver-covered prayer books, the breakfast tray, the bejewelled Pom, the whole studied, inane effect of a discontented woman trying to play coquette up to the last moment.

"I have loved her a long time. I could no more have refrained from it than you can refrain from feeling a pique at the fact, though you have nothing but contempt for us both and only a passing interest if the truth were known. I am glad you have persisted in asking me until I told you. I think one of the most promising signs that women will survive is the fact that they are never afraid to ask questions, no matter how delicate the situation. Men keep silence and often bring disaster on their sulky heads as a result."

"So—and you dare tell me this?"

"Of course I do. I dare to tell you the truth, which no one else has ever taken the pains to tell you. If you do not get a divorce I intend to. Not that I champion the custom as a particularly healthy institution, but it is sometimes a necessary one. If it is any satisfaction to you I do not think Miss Faithful has the slightest idea of marrying me. She has put that part of her aside for business and taking care of Luke. The time has passed when she would have married me. Still, I shall try to make her change her mind," he added with the same spirit he had once displayed toward winning the Gorgeous Girl. "Only this time I shall not bargain for her."

Beatrice gave an affected laugh. "Quite a satisfactory arrangement all round. I hope you do not bother me again. Tell my father what you like, and then take yourself off to the new position and do as you please. When I decide what course I shall pursue you will be informed. Would you please pick up my prayer book?" she added, languidly.

Steve bent over to grasp the intricate nothing in his hand and lay it gently in the sapphire-velvet lap.

"Good-bye, Beatrice," he said, a trifle sadly—for the day the child discovers there are no fairies is one of sadness.

It was something of this Steve felt as he looked at his wife for the last time. How thrilled and adoring he would have one time been. Just such visions, a trifle cruder no doubt, had stirred his young soul in the bleak orphanage days—the boo'ful princess and the valiant young hero chaining the seven-headed dragon. And in America it was just bound to have come true!

"Good-bye, Stevuns," she answered, in the same gay voice—but a trifle forced if one knew her well. "I hope you have a wonderful time leading a mob somewhere and your wife selling your photographs on the next corner curbstone!"

She pretended to become interested in the prayer book; and, with the Pom shooing him out by sharp, ear-piercing barks, Steve left the room.



CHAPTER XXIII

Not an hour later Mrs. Stephen O'Valley's card was taken in to Mary Faithful as she sat trying to work in the new office—it never ceased to be new to her. She had heard the swift rumours of Steve's failure. Understanding that the visitor's card had a deeper significance than the messenger who delivered it realized, Mary closed the outer doors of her office and waited for her guest.

It was a very Gorgeous Girl who swept serenely into the room and lost no time in introducing the nature of her errand.

"I don't know how well informed you are in business reports," she began in her high-pitched voice, "but perhaps you have heard——"

"The report of the new leather trust—without including your husband's factory? Yes—but it was bound to come. I always told him so."

Beatrice lost sight of the business introduction she had so carefully planned while dressing and then driving downtown.

"You have told my husband a great many things, haven't you?" she insisted. "Don't seem to be surprised. I am quite well informed."

She was scrutinizing Mary as she talked. Within her mind was the undeniable thought that there was something about this thin, tall woman with gray eyes which was real and comforting. She even wished that Steve had fallen in love with someone else, and that she, Beatrice, might have come to Mary for comfort and advice. If any one could have set her right with herself it would be just such a good-looking thing, as Trudy used to say, a commercial nun who had kept her ideals and was not bereft of ideas. Faith and intellect had been properly introduced in Mary's mind.

Mary blushed. "I have always wished to speak to you about something Mrs. Vondeplosshe told you shortly before her death. Won't you sit down? I am sure we have much to say to each other."

Beatrice found herself obeying like a docile child. As she took a chair facing Mary's desk she realized that in just such a kind, practical fashion would Mary proceed to manage Steve, that the years of experience in the business world as an independent woman would give Mary quite a new-fashioned charm in his eyes. Whether she was dealing with gigantic business interests in deft fashion or showing tenderness for the little girl who puts away her dolls for the last time, Mary possessed a flexibility of comprehension and power. One could not be cheap in dealings with her. And as the eternal sex barrier was not present in Beatrice's behalf she realized that her jargon so impulsively planned would never be said. Nor could she dismiss Mary patronizingly and say the halfway melodramatic things she had said to Steve. It occurred to her as Mary began to talk that Mary had been brave enough to love, not merely be loved, the truth of this causing her to wince within.

"In a malicious moment Trudy told you of my—my affection for your husband. It is true, if that is what you have come to ask me about. I told myself months ago that if you did come to ask me this thing I should answer you truthfully, and we must remain at least polite acquaintances over a hard situation. I think I have played fairly." Mary's face had a tired look that bore proof to the statement. "I even left his employ. As I once told you from an impersonal statement, I have a theory that many business women of to-day are in love with someone in their office. Propinquity perhaps and the shut-in existence that they lead account for much of it. Yet no woman is a true woman who forgets her employer is a married or engaged man.

"You and I know, however, that love does not stop to ask if this is the case, and I sometimes feel—impersonally, remember—that the business women earn the love of their employers and associates more than said employers' and associates' wives. Does it sound strange? Of course you need not agree—I hardly expect it. Yet the fact remains that we watch and save that you Gorgeous Girls may spend and play. In time the man, tense and non-understanding of it all, discovers that his trust and confidence may be placed in the business woman while romantic love is not enduring in his home. Not always, of course; but many times in these days of overnight prosperity and endless good times. So I have neither shame nor remorse—I have as much right to love your husband as you have—and because of that I shall be as fair to you as I would ask any woman to be toward me in similar circumstances."

"I think I understand," the Gorgeous Girl said, swiftly. "I see something of the light." She laughed nervously. It was easier to laugh than to cry, and one or the other was necessary at this moment. "I wanted to tell you that my husband is going away to take a rather mediocre position. I shall divorce him."

"He's won out," Mary said, in spite of herself.

"Has he? So you have been the urge behind him and his poverty talk?"

"I'd like to claim the credit," Mary retorted.

"Really?"

Beatrice found herself in another mental box, undecided how to cope with the situation. She had fancied she could make Mary cry and beg for silence, be afraid and unpoised. Instead she felt as ornate as a circus rider in her costume, and as stupid regarding the truth as the snapping Pom under her arm. Her head began to ache. She wondered why all these people delighted in accepting sacrifice and seeking self-denial—and she thought of Gay again and of what a consolation he was. And through it all ran a curious mental pain which informed her that she had not the power to hurt or to please either of these persons, and she was being politely labelled and put in her own groove by Mary Faithful. This stung her on to action, just as any poorly prepared enemy loses his head when he sees the tide is turning.

In desperation she said, coldly: "After all, I shall play square with you because you have played square with him. I'll give you the best advice a retiring wife can give her advancing rival. Don't copy me—no matter how Steve may prosper in years to come, do you understand? Oh, I'm not so terrible or abnormal as you people think. I'd have done quite well if my father had never earned more than three thousand a year and I had had to put my shoulder to the wheel. But don't ever start to be a Gorgeous Girl—stay thrifty and be not too discerning of handmade lace or lap dogs. You know, there's no need to enumerate. Stay the woman who won my husband away from me—and you'll keep him. What is more, I think you will make him a success—in time for your golden-wedding anniversary! There, that's as fair as I can be."

"Quite," Mary said, softly.

"Once you admit to him there is a craving in your sensible heart to be as useless as I am—then someone else will come along to play Mary Faithful to your Gorgeous Girl." There was a catch in the light, gay voice. "I don't want him," she added, vigorously. "Heavens, no, we never could patch it up! I shall always think of this last twelve months as l'annee terrible! My Tawny Adonis was a far more soothing companion than Steve. Nor do I envy you and your future. I don't really want Steve—and you deserve him. Besides, we women never feel so secure as novelists like to paint us as being in their last chapters! So I'm giving you the best hint concerning our mutual cave man that a defeated Gorgeous Girl ever gave a Mary Faithful. As far as I am concerned the thing is painless. I shall have a ripping time out West, and some day perhaps marry someone nice and mild, someone who will stand for my moods and not spend too much of my money in ways I don't know about—a society coward out of a job! The thing that does hurt," she finished, suddenly, "is the fact that I'd honestly like to feel broken-hearted—but I don't know how. I've been brought up in such a gorgeous fashion that it would take a jewel robbery or an unbecoming hat to wring my soul."

"Thanks," Mary said, lightly. "I may as well tell you I've determined never to marry Steve, for all your good advice."

"Why?" All the tenseness of her nature rushed to the occasion. This was decidedly interesting, since it resembled her own whims. She felt almost friendly toward the other woman.

"Because," Mary answered, handing the psychologists another problem for a rainy afternoon.

Beatrice nodded, satisfied at the answer and the eternal damnable woman's notion inspiring it, for it was just what she would have replied in like circumstances. She felt there was nothing more to be said about the matter and that Gorgeous Girls and commercial nuns had much in common. As usual, Steve was appointed the official blackguard of the inevitable triangle!

Going home that night Mary felt that truly the "day was a bitter almond." It even began to be dramatically muggy and threatening, in keeping with her state of mind—the sort of forced weather that issues offstage in roars of thunder the moment the villain begins his plotting. She took a street car, having meant to walk and give herself time to pull together and adopt the fat smile of a professional optimist.

A tired-faced woman, heavily rouged, was talking to another tired-faced woman, also rouged. Mary listened because it was a relief to listen to someone else besides herself, to realize there were other persons in this world occupied with other problems besides a commercial nun with a heartache, a tired cave man about to start again, and a Gorgeous Girl defeated in no uncertain terms. The whole thing was beyond Mary's comprehension just now; as much as the graybeards' lack of understanding when they try to Freud the schoolboy's mind.

"That's me, too, Mame, all over—and when she tried telling me she was a natural blonde, never using lemon juice in even the last rinse water—well, when you've been handing out doll dope and baby bluster over the counter of a beauty department as long as I have you know there ain't no such animal! Good-bye, Mame. I hope you get home safe."

"There ain't no such animal," Mary found herself repeating. "No, there sure ain't!"

There were no real commercial nuns; it was a premeditated affair entirely, merely a comfortable phrase borrowed by the lonesome ones unwilling to be called old maids; a big, brave bluff that women have adopted during these times of commercial necessity and economic stress. Commercial nuns! As foolish as the tales told children of the wunks living in the coalbins—as if there ever could be such creatures! The reason Mary would not marry Steve was because she, Mary, did not want to disappoint him even as the Gorgeous Girl had done. She did not want to be all helpmate, practical comrade; she had fed herself with this delusion during the years of loneliness. She had adopted the veneer, convinced herself that it was true, but she knew now that it was false. It had taken a Gorgeous Girl to scratch beneath the veneer in true feminine fashion. Mary did wish to be dependent, helpless—to have Gorgeous Girl propensities. The cheap phrases of the shopwomen kept interrupting her attempts to think of practical detail. "There ain't no such animal."

She found Luke wild-eyed and excited, brandishing an evening paper.

"Look what's happened—the O'Valley Leather Company has gone under! Won't Constantine help him out? I always said you were the mascot——"

"I'd rather not talk about it."

"Why? I always tell you everything."

Mary smiled. Luke was so boyish and square. She felt that particularly toward Luke must she keep up the delusion of being a commercial nun, content with her part in things.

"It's such a horrid day. I rode on a car that was as crowded as a cattle shipment. My head aches. The stenographer has left to be married."

"You mean you are not interested about Steve O'Valley?" Luke was not to be trifled with regarding the affair.

Mary sank down into the nearest chair. "Of course I am. But what right have I to be?" she asked, almost bitterly. "It never pays to be too keenly interested."

Luke laid the paper aside. "Mary," he began, his voice very basso profondo, "do you like this man?"

Mary gave a little cry. "Stop—all of you—all of you!" Then she began sobbing quite as helplessly as the Gorgeous Girl could have done.

Luke stood before her in helpless posture. He might have coped with her temper but his reliable tailor-made sister in tears?—Never. As she cried he experienced a new sympathy, a delightful sense of protectorship. He decided that his wife should cry occasionally—it became women.

"See here," he began, shyly, "you mustn't cry about him; it won't do any good. If he has failed it isn't your fault. And if you do like him—well, you like him. He likes you," he finished with emphasis. "I know it. I've known it all along."

"Oh, Luke!" Mary said, helplessly. "Luke!"

He put his arm round her, clumsily. "There—now I wouldn't—please don't, it makes me feel awful bad—there's no sense worrying about it—you have a lot of good things ahead of you. There, that's the girl."

At that moment Luke grew up and became far more manly and self-sufficient than all Mary's practical naggings and deeply laid plans could have achieved. He felt he must protect his sister; hitherto it had been his sister who had protected him. And he watched with pride the way she smiled up through her tears in rainbow fashion and patted his cheek, calling him a dear. She was a new kind of Mary. Both of them felt the better for the happening.

But when Steve came unceremoniously to Mary's apartment that same evening, and Luke, very amusing and pathetic in his dignity, met him, innocent of the tornado of emotion sweeping about his nice boyish self—Mary almost wished the happening had not taken place. For a moment she feared that Luke would try to take command of the situation. There was something maternal in Mary's wishing Luke to be ignorant of the hard things until the ripe time should come. And Luke, quite willing to be released, since it was a trifle beyond his powers of comprehension, retired to read a magazine and resolve to be ready for action at the first sound of a sister's sob!

"I had to come," Steve said, simply. "I've been like the man who never took time to walk because he had always been so busy running. I want to walk but I don't know how."

Mary shook her head, really shaking it at herself. "Go away, Steve."

"I shall, after a little. But I had to come now. Her aunt said she saw you and made quite a time of it. I'm sorry."

"I'm not. We are good friends, in a sense; far better than we have ever been before. We found we were in accord—after all."

He looked at her in the same helpless fashion Luke had adopted.

"She will divorce you and marry someone else and continue to be a Gorgeous Girl," Mary finished, quietly. "No terrible fate will overtake her, nothing occur to rouse or develop her abilities. She will remain young and apparently childish until she suddenly reaches the stately dowager age overnight. Gorgeous Girls are like gypsies—they should either be very young and lissom or old, crinkled, and vested with powers of fortune-telling—the middle stage is impossible. I realized this morning that I've been fooling myself, all the heart in me trying to be 100 per cent efficient, when I really want to be a Gorgeous Girl—fluffy, helpless—a blooming little idiot. And I'm glad you have come so I can tell you."

"You don't mean that," he corrected.

"Being incurably honest I am bound to tell tales on myself. Yes, I do mean it. I'd probably be rushing round for freckle lotion and patent nose pins, to give me a Greek-boy effect. I'd take to swathing myself in chiffons and have my hair a different tint each season. I think every business woman would do the same, too—if she had the chance. We have to fool ourselves to keep on going down the broad highway; or else we would be sanitarium devotees, neurasthenic muddles. So we strike our brave pose and call ourselves superwomen, advanced feminists, and all the rest of the feeble rubbish until the right man comes along. Sometimes he never comes—so we keep right ahead, growing dry as dust at heart and even fooling ourselves. I did. But it took your wife to show me my smug conceit, my fancy that I was a bulwark of commerce, so proper, so perfect! She showed me that I was just plain woman making the best of having been born into the twentieth century! There is a Gorgeous Girl in all of us, Steve. So I can't advise or comfort or do any of the things I used to—a bag of tricks we women in business have adopted to make the heart loneliness the less. Go away and make good! That is just what she told you—isn't it? You will never believe in any of us again. And I don't know that you should, after all. For cave men need Gorgeous Girls."

Steve was laughing down at her. "True—but they need the right Gorgeous Girl. I'm glad you have finally told the truth; I always suspected it. You have over-emphasized it somewhat—and the woman I married was unfairly over-emphasized as well. But in the main, what you have said is the truth. I assure you I am twice as glad to have an incentive instead of a lady directress. And I want you to be helpless—if you can; and fluffy—if you will! Don't you see that you are the right Gorgeous Girl—and she was the wrong one—and I'm the culprit? Why, Mary, the worst thing you could do would be to descend upon me in curl papers under a pink net cap. Even that prospect does not frighten me!"

"Are you going away?" she asked, shyly.

"Not far—nothing spectacular or romantic. I'm done with that. Beatrice goes West, I believe. She is quite happy. She is going to New York first to get her divorce wardrobe. It is her father I pity—he has to face another son-in-law," Steve laughed. "I am merely going to work for an old and reliable firm—use my nest egg for a house. A brown-shingled house, I think, with plain yard and a few ambitious shrubs blooming along the walks. I don't know what they will be; I leave that to you!"

Luke wondered why he was not called upon for action, but he wondered still more as Mary came presently to ask that he tell Steve good-night. Her gray eyes were like captured sunrise.

"Luke, dear," she said in as feminine a manner as Beatrice might have done, "don't worry about me any more. I'm a queer old sister—but it's all coming out all right," kissing him before Steve, to his utter confusion.



CHAPTER XXIV

Beatrice sent for Gay before she decided to run down to New York to gather up some good-looking things to wear while West. More and more the novelty of the situation was appealing to her. She would ship her car out and take with her a maid, the Pom, and her aunt, besides three trunks of clothes. She also had learned of hot springs that were extremely reducing; and of a wonderful lawyer whom several of her friends recommended. It had grown very distressing to have a cave man prowl about the villa, the eternal disapproval of whatsoever she did, then her father's presence got on her nerves. Considering everything she was glad to escape, and she welcomed the sympathy and peculiar publicity that would be hers. The role of an injured woman is almost as attractive as that of a romantic parasite. All in all, she was just bound to have a good time.

To be sure she thought of Steve working for someone else, making one twentieth of his former income, marrying Mary and starting housekeeping in eight rooms and a pocket handkerchief of a lawn—and she envied them. This was only natural; it would be fun to be in Mary's place for a fortnight or so, so she could tell about it afterward. And she thought of Mary and of all she had admitted in the tenseness of their conversation.

When she returned from New York Gay met her at the train. He carried a single long-stemmed white rose, which, he lisped, stood for friendship. And Beatrice—three pounds heavier if the truth were told—quite languid and easily pleased, looked affectionately upon Gay, who was trying to smile his sweetest.

"Of course this is very hard"—feeling it the thing to say—"but inevitable."

"I always knew it," he supplemented, feeling that the gates of paradise were slowly opening for him. Within a year or so he would not even have the pretense at a business. "I understand only too well. May I say to my old friend, one whose opinions have swayed me far more than she has imagined, that I, too, have experienced a similar disillusionment which terminated more tragically?"

"Really?" Beatrice roused from her cushions. "Tell me, Gay, just when did you begin to regret having married Trudy?"

The barriers down, Gay began a rapid fire of incidents concerning Trudy's gross nature and lack of comprehension, and the patience it had required to bear with her. He twirled her diamond ring on his finger. Beatrice spied it.

"Why, that setting is just a little different from any I have," she said, almost crossly. "I never saw it before."

She held out her hand, and the minor question of a dead wife and a discarded husband was put aside until further ennui should overtake them.

Aunt Belle opposed the divorce trip more vigorously than any one else concerned. It seemed to her naught but a wild panorama of rattlesnakes and Indians, with no opportunity for her daily massage. Besides, she knew Beatrice's moods, and as time went on, between Constantine's ridicule and his daughter's tempers, Aunt Belle was forced to work hard to maintain a look of joyous contentment.

But there was nothing else for her to do unless she wished to be taken to an old ladies' home. Her brother had said he would be delighted to have her away, her pretenses and simpering nothings drove him to distraction; and he had at last secured a man attendant who knew how to dodge small articles skilfully for the compensation of a hundred dollars a month and all he could pilfer. Like Beatrice, Aunt Belle regretted that the actual divorce must lack a gorgeous setting; it was quite commonplace. But one cannot have everything, and Beatrice had as much as hinted that for her second wedding she would use the sunken gardens at the Villa Rosa and wear a cloth-of-gold gown without a veil but a smart aigrette of gilded feathers.

Beatrice shrank from saying good-bye to her father. It was more than her usual dislike of entering the sick room. She had come to realize that though her father caused her to be the sort of person she was, he himself had remained both real and simple, succeeding by force of this fact, and her contact with both Steve and Mary convinced her that she did not wish to know real, everyday persons—they had nothing in common with her and caused her to be restless and distressed. Gay was as wild a mental tonic as she desired.

However, she bent solicitously over him and murmured the usual things: "Take best care of yourself—miss you worlds—do be careful—will write every day."

Constantine looked up at her, tears in the harsh eyes, which had lost their black sparkle. "I'm sorry," he said, in childish fashion, as she waited for an equally conventional reply. "Your mother would have liked Steve."

"Papa!"—shocked at his lack of fairness—"how horrid!"

"Maybe I was wrong—maybe if your mother had lived it would have been different. She would have liked Steve."

Beatrice played her final weapon against Steve's reputation in her father's eyes.

"He is going to marry Miss Faithful. He has loved her for a long time. Now you see what I have endured."

"Are you sure?"

"Oh, quite. He admitted it. So did she." Beatrice knew that Mary's declaration against ever marrying Steve would have as much effect as to attempt to keep the sun from shining if it so inclined. "I've no doubt they will be the model couple of a model village, for if ever there was a reformer it is Steve. He never should have been a rich man."

"Not at thirty," his father-in-law championed. "So—it's the woman who worked for him that won.... I guess it's the way of things, Bea."

"You uphold him?" Her temper was rising.

Constantine shook his head, closing the dull eyes. "I'm out of it all," he excused himself. "There's a check for you on the table."

Either pretended or real, he seemed to go to sleep without delay.

* * * * *

Some months later Gaylord, very suave in white flannels, came in to tell Constantino that he was to meet Beatrice in Chicago, en route from the West, and that they were planning to announce their engagement shortly after their arrival in Hanover. At which Constantine managed to curse Gay in as horrid fashion as he knew how. But Gay was quite too happy and secure to mind the reception. Besides, there was nothing Constantine could do about it. It was a rather neat form of revenge since his daughter would bring into his family the son of one of the men he had ruthlessly ruined in his own ascent of the ladder.

Gay had done nothing but write letters to Beatrice, in which he copied all the smart sayings and quips of everyone else, purporting them as original, impoverishing himself for florists' orders and gifts, and even taking a desperate run out to see Beatrice ensconced in state in a Western town with her tortured aunt and lady's maid and a stout squaw to do the housekeeping. Gay knew that all this work would not count in vain. So when he proposed to Beatrice, having taken three days in which to write the love missive, he knew that he would be accepted, and therefore counted Constantine's wrath as a passing annoyance.

Everything considered, Beatrice could do no better. She had inclined toward a minister as a second husband, she one time said, but her chances there were small since she was not a bona-fide widow. Gay would endure anything at her hands; he knew no pride, he had no purpose in existing save to have a good time, neither did he possess annoying theories about life. He was an adept at flattery, and he understood Beatrice's sensitiveness about being called stout. With a suitor at hand well trained for the part, why waste time looking further, she argued.

So the wedding in the sunken gardens with the cloth-of-gold-garbed bride was planned for the next season's calendar and there would be all the pleasure of talking it over, the entertainments, the new clothes, and so on. His father-in-law was paralyzed and his aunt-in-law was senile. Gay was bound to be master of all he surveyed before long.

Perhaps during the breaking up of his establishment he might be unpleasantly reminded of a red-haired girl who had died unmourned and whose very ring Beatrice now wore—in exchange for one of hers which Gay wore. But he could take an extra cordial if that was the case and soon forget. After all, Trudy, like Steve, had been impossible; and Gay felt positive that impossible people would not count at judgment day.

Likewise Beatrice, who regarded the whole thing as a lark, thought sometimes of Steve, who, she understood, was superintendent of a large plant some two hundred miles removed from Hanover, and of the time when the slightest flicker of her eyes made him glad for all the day, or the suggestion of a pout brought him to the level of despair. Perhaps she thought, too, of the very few moments as his wife during which she had wished things might have been as he wanted. No, not really wished—but wondered how it would have been. And of Mary she thought a great deal—that was to be expected. No one wrote her about Mary, no one seemed to think it would be interesting. The dozen dear friends who deluged her with weekly items of local scandal never once told her of her wife-in-law, as Gay dubbed her. Therefore she thought of her more than she did of any one else—even Gay.

She wondered if Mary was making simple hemstitched things for her trousseau; if she would shamelessly marry this divorced man, superintendent of a cement works; if she would go live in a brown-shingled house and belong to the town social centre and all the rest of the woman's-column, bargain-day, sewing-society things. And Beatrice knew that Mary would. Moreover, that she would make a complete success of so doing. Whereas even now Beatrice merely regarded Gay as essential to complete her defeat.

When she reached home, in company with Gay, her aunt, the maid, and an armful of flowers, the attendant told them her father was dead. He had had a bad turn in the early morning—no pain—just drifted off. Well, the only intelligible things he had said were—should he repeat them now? Well, the two words he had said over and over again were "Steve—Hannah—Hannah—Steve."

So the cloth-of-gold wedding with the sunken-garden setting was changed for a wedding at twilight in the conservatory, Beatrice dressed in shimmery mauve out of memory to dear papa!

* * * * *

"You have renounced your economic independence and you are now approaching the legal-vassal stage," Steve warned Mary as they viewed the rooms of the new brown house. "Do you know what it all means?"

"No; probably that is why we women do so," she retorted. "Luke says you are bully and everything is fino—and I set quite a store by Luke's opinions."

"You'll have green-plush and golden-oak people call on you, I'm afraid, and a few who run to Sheraton and crystal goblets. There will be funny entertainments and dinner parties where the hostess fries the steak and then removes her apron to display her best silk gown."

"I am prepared. And the maid will leave us before the month is over and I shall be her understudy. Well, I can. That is something."

"I'm not going to ask permission to smoke—I'm going to sprawl in all the chairs and puff away at my leisure."

"Do. I'll try to remember it is good for moths."

"Mary, are you satisfied?" he asked, wistfully.

"Of course. It never does to have it all perfect—to the last detail of the wallpaper designs. That never lasts."

She went to lay her head on his shoulder for a brief second, almost boyishly darting away and running upstairs to see to some detail in which Steve was not concerned.

He went to the side doorway of the house to look out at the other houses and yards—pleasant, livable dwellings without romantic construction or extravagant details—the homes of the people who keep the world moving and mostly turning to the right.

He felt he had earned this brown house—and the woman who was upstairs examining the linen-closet capacity. He had neither stolen nor bargained for either. It was true there was a tinge of regret, like a calm stretch of road without the suggestion of a stirring breeze. One cannot chain youth, romance, and Irish-Basque ancestry together and let them go breakneck speed without glorious and eternal memories of the feat.

Mary realized this—even though she might pretend ignorance of the fact. She had reckoned with it before she gave Steve her word. Perhaps it, too, had been a factor in stripping off the mask of commercial nun and showing him the Gorgeous-Girl propensities. Nothing would content him so much as to think of someone dependent upon him, make him shoulder responsibility, surround him in a halo of hero worship. Even if they both knew this to be a lovely rosy joke—aide-de-camp of romance, which even the most practical American woman will not forgo—Mary had been wise in telling him the truth. The only time women do at all well in fibbing is to each other. Besides, there is a vast difference between fibs and rosy jokes!

Steve had earned this, therefore it would be his for all time. And though he felt youth had gone from him—the optimistic swashbuckling youth which conquered all in his pathway—approaching middle age was good to have, and he rejoiced that this mad noonday was over. As he looked out at the simple grounds and thought of how sensible Mary was, and how sensible was the colour of their modest car, and a hundred similar facts—there crossed his mind a vision of the Gorgeous Girl like a frail, exotic jungle flower, clad in copper-coloured tulle with tiny rusty satin slippers and surrounded by a bodyguard of the season's best dancers.

"Why, Stevuns," he almost fancied her light, gay voice saying, "aren't you funny!" Then the tiny rusty satin slippers tripped away to the latest of waltz tunes.

Well, that was at an end. Perhaps even to Mary, who had come downstairs, delighted at finding extra shelf room, Steve would never confide these fleeting visions that would cross his mind from time to time; also his banished boy heart. Mary would grow a trifle matronly of figure, become addicted to severe striped silks, perhaps insist on meatless days—and smokeless rooms, for all she said not just now. She would dominate a trifle and be on committees, raise a great hue and cry as to the right schools for the children. But she would always be his Mary Faithful, gray-eyed and incurably honest and loving him without pause and without thought of her own splendid self. Truly he was a fortunate man, for though there is an abundance of Gorgeous Girls these days there are seldom enough Mary Faithfuls to go round.

But he would never tell even his nearest and dearest of the visions. This would be Steve's one secret.

And as Steve thought sometimes of the Gorgeous Girl in copper-coloured tulle and with a dancing bodyguard, or in white fur coats being halfway carried into her motor car, so would the Gorgeous Girl sometimes find Gay and his simpering servility quite beside her own thoughts. Once more she would see Steve, young and flushed with a lover's dream!

The same germ of greatness in these Gorgeous Girls as in their fathers frequently causes them to produce good results in the lives of those they apparently harm. As in Steve's case—he found his ultimate salvation not so much by Mary Faithful's love and service as by realizing the Gorgeous Girl's shallow tragedy. With iron wills concealed behind childish faces and misdirected energy searching for novelty, so the Gorgeous Girls stand to-day a deluxe monument to the failure of their adoring, check-bestowing, shortsighted parents. They are neither salamanders nor vampires. Steve had not spoken truly. They are more chaste and generous of heart than the former, more aloof from sordid things than the latter. Wonderful, curious little creatures with frail, tempting physiques and virile endurance, playing whatever game is handy without remorse and without vicious intent just as long as it interests them—in the same careless fashion their fathers stoked an engine or became a baker's assistant as long as it proved advantageous.

Moreover, they are so apart from the workaday world that it is impossible to refrain from thinking of them in unwise fashion—even after life has fallen into pleasant channels and the dearly beloved of all the world is by one's side. So strong yet so weak, so tantalizing yet generous, they have the power to haunt at strange intervals and in strange fashion. So it was with Steve. He could not experience a storm of definite reproach at the thought of Beatrice—nor bitter hatred. Only a vague, lonesome urge, which soon dulled beside the sharp commands of common sense.

It was only Mary who was done with visions and could give herself unreservedly to the making of her home, the rearing of her family. But Mary had realized her vision—not relinquished it.

THE END



THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS

GARDEN CITY, N. Y.