But his thoughts did not so much as brush the treasures at which he stared, and neither the hurrying crowd—which had a restless, workaday look at the morning hour—nor the noisily clanging cars broke into the exquisitely reared castle of his dreams. Since the evening before his imagination had been thrilling to the tune of some spirited music, flowing presumably from these airy towers, and as he went on over the wet sunlight on the sidewalk, he was still keeping step to the exalted if unreal measures. Never in his life; not even in his wildest literary ecstasies, had he felt so assured of the beauty, of the bountifulness, of his coming years—so filled with a swelling thankfulness for the mere physical fact of birth. He was twenty-five, he believed passionately in his own powers, and he was, he told himself with emphasis, in love for the first and only time. In the confused tangle of his fancy he saw Laura like some great white flower, growing out of reach, yet not entirely beyond endeavour, and the ladder that went up to her was made by his own immediate successes. Then the footlights before his play swam in his picture and he heard already the applause of crowded houses and felt in his head the intoxication of his triumph. Act by act, scene by scene, he rehearsed in fancy his great drama, seeing the players throng before the footlights and seeing, too, Laura applauding softly from a stage box at the side. He had had moments of despondency over his idea, had grovelled in abject despair during trying periods of execution, but now all uncertainty—all misgivings evaporated like an obscuring fog before a burst of light. The light, indeed, had at the moment the full radiance of a great red glow such as he had seen used for effective purposes upon the stage—and just as every object of scenery had taken, for the time, a portion of the transfiguring suffusion—so now the external ugly details among which he moved were bathed in the high coloured light of his imagination.

But if the end is sometimes long in coming, it comes at last even to the visions of youth, and when his tired limbs finally dragged his soaring spirit to earth, he took a passing car and came home to luncheon. The glamour had faded suddenly from his dreams, as if a bat's wing had fluttered overhead, and in his new mood, he felt a resurgence of his old self-consciousness. He was provoked by the suspicion that he had shown less as a coming dramatist than as a present fool, and he contrasted his own awkwardness with Adams' whimsical ease of manner. Did a woman ever forget how a man appeared when she first met him? Would any amount of fame to-morrow obliterate from Laura's memory his embarrassment of yesterday? He had heard that the surface impression was what counted in the feminine mind, and this made him think enviously, for a minute, of Perry Bridewell—of his handsome florid face and his pleasant animal magnetism. Perry was stupid and an egoist, and yet he had heard that Mrs. Bridewell, for all her beauty and her wit, adored him, while he openly neglected her. Was the secret of success, after all, simply an indifference to everyone's needs except one's own? or was it rather the courage to impress the world that one's own were the only needs that counted?

He was late for luncheon but his mother had waited for him, and he found when he entered the drawing room that Christina Coles was with her. The girl still wore her hat, but she had removed her jacket, and it lay with a little brown package on the sofa. As she spoke to him he was struck afresh by the singular concentration of her expression.

"Your mother tells me that you've written a play," she began, a little shyly; "she says, too, that it is wonderful."

"'She says' is well put," he retorted gaily, "but I hear that you, also, are among the prophets."

"I am nothing else," she answered earnestly. "It is everything to me—it is my life."

Her frankness startled him unpleasantly, and but for her girlish prettiness, he might have felt himself almost repelled. As it was he merely glanced appealingly at his mother, who intervened with a gesture of her knitting needle. "She writes stories," explained the old lady, appearing to transfix her subject on the ivory point; "it is just as I imagined."

The girl herself met his eyes almost fiercely, reminding him vaguely of the look with which a lioness might defend her threatened young.

"I've done nothing yet," she declared, "but I mean to—I mean to if it takes every single hour I have to live." Then her manner changed suddenly, and she impressed him as melting from her hard reserve. "Oh, she tells me that you've met Laura Wilde!" she said.

The sacred name struck him, after his impassioned dreaming, like a sharp blow between the eyes, and he met the girl's animated gesture with a look of blank aversion.

"I've met her—yes," he answered coldly.

But her enthusiasm was at white heat, and he saw what he had thought mere prettiness in her warm to positive beauty. "And you adore her work as I do?" she exclaimed.

After a moment's hesitation his ardour flashed out to meet her own. "Oh, yes, I adore her work and her!" he said.



CHAPTER VI

SHOWS THAT MR. WORLDLY-WISE-MAN MAY BELONG TO EITHER SEX

Several afternoons later Trent was to have further light thrown on the character of Christina Coles by a chance remark of Roger Adams, into whose office he had dropped for a moment as he was on his way to make his first call upon Mrs. Bridewell.

After a few friendly enquiries about the young man's own work, and the report of a promising word from the great Benson, Adams took up a letter lying loose among the papers on his big littered desk.

"Half the tragedy in New York is contained in a letter like this," he observed. "Do you know, by the way, that the mass of outside literary workers drawn in at last by the whirlpool constitutes almost a population? Take this girl, now, she is so consumed by her ambition, for heaven knows what, that she comes here and starves in an attic rather than keep away in comfort. That reminds me," he added, with a sudden recollection, "she's from your part of the country."

"Indeed!" An intuition shot like a conviction into Trent's mind. "Could her name, I wonder, by any chance be Coles?"

"You know her then?"

"I've met her, but do you mean to say that ability is what she hasn't got?"

"For some things I've no doubt she has an amazing amount, only she's mistaken its probable natural bent. She strikes me as a woman who was born for the domestic hearth, or failing that she'd do admirably, I dare say, in a hospital."

"It's the literary instinct, then, that's missing in her?"

"Not the instinct so much as the literary stuff, and in that she's not different from a million others. She is evidently on fire with the impulse to create, but the power—the creative matter—isn't in her. Let her keep up, and she'll probably go on doing 'hack' work until her death."

"But she's so pretty," urged Trent with a chivalric qualm—and he remembered her smooth brown hair parted over her rosy ears, her blue eyes, fresh as flowers, and the peculiar steadfastness that possessed her face.

"The more's the pity," said Adams, while the muscles about his mouth twitched slightly, as they always did when he was deeply moved, "it's a bigger waste. I wrote to her as a father might have done and begged her to give it up," he went on, "and in return," he tapped the open sheet, "she sends me this fierce, pathetic little letter and informs me grandly that her life is dedicated. Dedicated, good Lord!" he exclaimed compassionately, "dedicated to syndicated stories in the Sunday press and an occasional verse in the cheaper magazines."

"And there's absolutely nothing to be done?" asked Trent.

Adams met the question with a frown.

"Oh, if it would make it all come right in the end, I'd go on publishing her empty, trite little articles until Gabriel blows his trumpet."

"It wouldn't help, though, after all."

"Well, hardly—the quick way is sure to be the most merciful," he laughed softly with the quality of kindly humour which never failed him, "we'll starve her out as soon as possible," he declared.

As if to dismiss the subject, he refolded the letter, slipped it in its envelope, and placed it in one of his crammed pigeon-holes. "Thank God, your own case isn't of the hopeless kind!" he exclaimed fervently.

"Somehow success looks like selfishness," returned Trent, showing by his tone the momentary depression which settled so easily upon his variable moods.

At the speech Adams turned upon him the full sympathy of his smile, while he enclosed in a warm grasp the hand which the young man held out.

"It's what we're made for," he responded cheerily, "success in one way or another."

His words, and even more his look, remained with Trent long afterwards, blowing, like a fresh strong wind, through the hours of despondency which followed for him upon any temporary exaltation. The young man had a trick of remembering faces, not as wearing their accustomed daily look, but as he had seen them animated and transfigured by any vivid moment of experience, and he found later that when he thought of Adams it was to recall the instant's kindly lighting of the eyes, the flicker of courageous humour about the mouth and the dauntless ring in the usually quiet voice. He realised now, as he walked through the humming streets, that success or failure is not an abstract quantity but a relative value—that a man may be a shining success in the world's eyes and a comparative failure in his own. To Trent, Adams had for years represented the cultured and scholarly critic—the writer who, in his limited individual field, had incontestably "arrived." Now, for the first time, he saw that the editor looked upon himself as a man of small achievements, and that, inasmuch as his idea had been vastly more than his execution, he felt himself to belong to the unfulfilled ones of the earth.

When, a little later, he reached Mrs. Bridewell's house in Sixty-ninth Street the servant invited him, after a moment's wait below, into her sitting-room upstairs, and, following the man's lead, he was finally ushered into a charming apartment upon the second floor. A light cloud of cigarette smoke trailed toward him as he entered, and when he paused, confused by broken little peals of laughter, he made out a group of ladies gathered about a tiny Oriental table upon which stood a tray of Turkish coffee. Gerty rose from the circle as he advanced, and moved a single step forward, while the pale green flounces of her train rippled prettily about her feet. Her hair was loosely arranged, and she gave him an odd impression of wearing what in his provincial mind he called a "wrapper"—his homely name for the exquisite garment which flowed, straight and unconfined, from her slender shoulders. His mother, he remembered, not without a saving humour, had always insisted that a lady should appear before the opposite sex only in the entire armour of her "stays" and close-fitting bodice.

Gerty, as she mentioned the names of her callers, subsided with her ebbing green waves into the chair from which she had risen, and held her cigarette toward Trent with a pretty inviting gesture. Her delicate grace gave the pose a piquant attraction, and he found himself watching with delight the tiny rings of smoke which curled presently from her parted lips. As she smoked she held her chin slightly lifted, and regarded him from beneath lowered lids with an arch and careless humour.

"If you'd been the Pope himself," she remarked, as an indifferent apology, "I'd hardly have done more than fling the table-cover over my head. Even you, after you'd spent a morning trying on a velvet gown, would require a lounge and a good smoke."

He admitted that he thought it probable, and then turned to one of the callers who had spoken—a handsome woman with gray hair, which produced an odd effect of being artificial.

"I wish I'd done nothing worse than try on clothes," she observed, "but I've been to lunch with an old lover."

"Poor dear," murmured Gerty, compassionately, as she passed Trent a cup of coffee, "was he so cruel as to tell you you'd retained your youth?"

"He did worse," sighed the handsome woman, "he assured me I hadn't."

"Well, he couldn't have done more if he'd married you," declared Gerty, with her gleeful cynicism.

"He was too brutally frank for a husband," remarked a second caller as she sipped her coffee. "You showed more discretion, Susie, than I gave you credit for."

"Oh, you needn't compliment me," protested Susie; "in those days he hadn't a penny."

"Indeed! and now?"

"Now he has a great many, but he has attached to himself a wife, and I a husband. Well, I can't say honestly that I regret him," she laughed, "for if he has lived down his poverty he hasn't his passion for red—he wore a red necktie. Why is it," she lamented generally to the group, "that the male mind leans inevitably toward violent colours?"

"Perhaps they appeal to the barbaric part of us," suggested Trent, becoming suddenly at ease amid the battle of inanities.

"Have you a weakness for red, too, Mr. Trent?" enquired Gerty.

The sparkle in his eyes leaped out at her challenge.

"Only in the matter of hair," he retorted boldly.

She regarded him intently for a moment, while he felt again as he had felt at Laura Wilde's, not only her fascination—her personal radiance—but the conviction that she carried at heart a deep disgust, a heavy disenchantment, which her ostentatious gayety could not conceal. Even her beauty gave back to him a suggestion of insincerity, and he wondered if the brightness of her hair and of her mouth was as artificial as her brilliant manner. It was magnificent, but, after all, it was not nature.

"Because I warn you now," she pursued, after the brief pause, "that if you bind your first play in red I shall refuse to read it."

"You can't escape on that ground," rejoined Trent, "I'll make it green."

"Well, you're more civilised than Perry," declared Gerty, with one of her relapses into defiant ridicule, which caused Trent to wonder if she were not acting upon an intuition which taught her that a slight shock is pleasantly stimulating to the fancy, "and I suppose it's my association with him that convinces me if we'd leave your sex alone it would finally revert to the savage state and to skin girdles."

"Now don't you think Perry would look rather nice in skins?" enquired the handsome woman. "I can quite see him with his club like the man in—which one of Wagner's?"

"It isn't the club of the savage I object to," coolly protested Gerty, "it's the taste. Perry has been married to me five years," she continued, reflectively, "a long enough period you would think to teach even a Red Indian that my hair positively shrieks at anything remotely resembling pink. Yet when I went to the Hot Springs last autumn he actually had this room hung for me in terra-cotta."

Trent cast a blank stare about the tapestried walls.

"But where is it?" he demanded.

"It's gone," was Gerty's brief rejoinder, and she added, after a moment devoted to her cigarette, "now that's where it pays to have the wisdom of the serpent. I really flatter myself," she admitted complacently, "that I've a genius, I did it so beautifully. Your young innocent would have mangled matters to the point of butchery and have gloried like a martyr in her domestic squabbles, but I've learned a lesson or two from misfortune, and one of them is that a man invariably prides himself upon possessing the quality he hasn't got. That's a perfectly safe rule," she annotated along the margin of her story. "I used to compliment an artist upon his art and an Apollo upon his beauty—but it never worked. They always looked as if I had under-valued them, so now I industriously praise the folly of the wise and the wisdom of the fool."

"And the decorative talent of Perry," laughed one of the callers.

"You needn't smile," commented Gerty, while Trent watched the little greenish flame dance in her eyes, "it isn't funny—it's philosophy. I made it out of life."

"But what about the terra-cotta?" enquired Susie.

"Oh, as I've said, I did nothing reckless," resumed Gerty, relaxing among her cushions, "I neither slapped his face nor went into hysterics—these tactics, I've found, never work unless one happens to be a prima donna—so I complimented him upon his consideration and sat down and waited. That night he went to a club dinner—after the beautiful surprise he'd given me he felt that he deserved a little freedom—and the door had no sooner closed upon him than I paid the butler to come in and smoke the walls. He didn't want to do it at all, so I really had to pay him very high—I gave him a suit of Perry's evening clothes. It's the ambition of his life, you know, to look like Perry."

"How under heaven did he manage it?" persisted Susie. "The smoke, I mean, not the resemblance."

"There are a good many lamps about the house and we brought them all in, every one. The butler warned me it was dangerous, but I assured him I was desperate. That settled it—that and the evening clothes—and by the time Perry returned the room was like an extinct volcano."

"And he never found out?" asked Susie, as the callers rose to go.

"Found out! My dear, do you really give him credit for feminine penetration? Well, if you will go—good-bye—and—oh—don't look at my gown to-morrow night or you'll turn blue with envy," then, as Trent started to follow the retreating visitors, she detained him by a gesture. "Stay awhile, unless you're bored," she urged, "but if you're really bored I shan't say a word. I assure you I sometimes bore myself."

As he fell back into his chair Trent was conscious of a feeling of intimacy, and strange as it was, it dispelled instantly his engrossing shyness.

"I'm not bored," he said, "I'm merely puzzled."

"Oh, I know," Gerty nodded, "but you'll get over it. I puzzle everybody at first, but it doesn't last because I'm really as clear as running water. My gayety and my good spirits are but the joys of flippancy, you see."

"I don't see," protested Trent, his eyes warming.

She laughed softly, as if rather pleased than otherwise by the frankness of his admiration. "You haven't lost as yet the divine faith of youth," she said, carelessly flicking the ashes of her cigarette upon the little table at her elbow. Then, tossing the burned end into a silver tray, she pushed it from her with a decisive movement. "I've had six," she observed, "and that's my limit."

"What I'm trying to understand," confessed Trent, leaning forward in his earnestness, "is why you should care so greatly for Miss Wilde?"

Gerty flashed up suddenly from her cushions. "And pray why shouldn't I?" she demanded.

"Because," he hesitated an instant and then advanced with the audacity born of ignorance, "you're as much alike as a thrush and a paroquet."

She laughed again.

"So you consider me a paroquet?"

"In comparison with Laura Wilde."

"Well, I'd have said a canary," she remarked indulgently, "but we'll let it pass. I don't see though," she serenely continued, "why a paroquet shouldn't have a feeling for a thrush?"

He shook his head, smiling. "It seems a bit odd, that's all."

"Then, if it's any interest to you to know it," pursued Gerty, with a burst of confidence, "I'd walk across Brooklyn Bridge, every step of the way, on my knees for Laura. That's because I believe in her," she wound up emphatically, "and because, too, I don't happen to believe much in anybody else."

"So you know her well?"

"I went to school with her and I adored her then, but I adore her even more to-day. Somehow she always seems to be knocking for the good in one, and it has to come out at last because she stands so patiently and waits. She makes me over every time she meets me, shapes me after some ideal image of me she has in her brain, and then I'm filled with desperate shame if I don't seem at least a little bit to correspond with it."

"I understand," said Trent slowly; "one feels her as one feels a strong wind on a high mountain. There's a wonderful bigness about her."

"It's because she's different," explained Gerty, "she's kept so apart from life that she knows it only in its elemental freshness—she has a kind of instinct for truth just as she has for poetry or for beauty, and our little quibbles, our incessant inanities have never troubled her at all."

The servant entered with a card as she finished, and after reading the name she made a quick movement of interest.

"Ask him to come up," she said to the man, adding immediately as Trent rose to go, "it's Arnold Kemper. Will you stay and see him?"

Trent shook his head, while he held out his hand with a laugh. "I won't stay," he answered; "I don't like him."

She looked up puzzled, her brows bent in an enquiring frown. "Not like him! Why, you've never met."

"What has that to do with it?" he persisted lightly. "One doesn't have to meet a man to hate him."

"One does unless one's a person of stupid prejudices."

"Well, maybe I am," he admitted, "but I have my side."

As the portieres were drawn back, he turned hastily away, to come face to face with Gerty's caller the next instant upon the threshold. Keen as his curiosity was he took in, at his brief glance, only that Kemper presented a bright and brave appearance and walked with a peculiarly energetic step.



CHAPTER VII

THE IRRESISTIBLE FORCE

Gerty was leaning forward among her cushions and as her visitor approached she held out her hand, still faintly scented with cigarettes. "Will you have coffee," she asked, "or shall I ring for tea?"

He sat down in the chair from which Trent had risen and replied with a gesture of happy physical exhaustion. "Let me have some coffee," he answered, "I've been out golfing all the morning, and if you don't prove mentally stimulating I shall fall asleep before you. How many holes do you think I played to-day?"

Gerty shrugged her shoulders over the little coffee pot. "I don't know and it doesn't interest me," she retorted. "After six months of Europe do you still make a god of physical exertion?"

The genial irony of his smile flashed back at her, and his eyes, half quizzical, half searching, but wholly kind, wandered leisurely down her slender figure. Even as he lazily sipped his coffee, with his closely clipped, rather large brown head lying against the chair-back, she was made to feel, not unpleasantly, the compelling animal magnetism—the "personal quantity," as she had called it—that lay behind the masculine bluntness of manner he affected. "Aren't you rather tumbled?" he enquired, with an animated glance, and, though he was fond of boasting that he was the only man he knew who never flattered women, Gerty was conscious of a sudden flush and the pleased conviction that she must be looking her very best. It was a trick of his, she knew, to flatter, as it were, by paradox, to deal with delicate inuendos and to compliment by pleasant contradiction. She had not been a woman of the world without reaping the reward of knowledge, and now, as she leaned back and smiled brilliantly into his face, she knew that, despite the apparent abruptness of his beginning, they would descend inevitably to the play of personal suggestion. His measure had been taken long ago, she told herself, and lay tucked away in the receptacle which contained the varied neatly labelled patterns of her masculine world; but at the same time she was perfectly aware that within five minutes he would pique afresh both her interest and her liking. "You can't warm yourself by fireworks," she had once said to him, and a moment later had paused to wonder at the intrinsic meaning of a daring phrase which he had spoken.

Still sipping his coffee, he regarded her with the blithe humour which lent so great a charm to his expression.

"I don't see why you object to exercise when it saves my life," he observed as he took up a cigarette and then bent forward to hold it to the flame of the alcohol lamp.

"I don't object except when it bores me out of mine," responded Gerty lightly.

He was still smiling when he raised his head.

"You used to like it yourself," he persisted.

"I used to like a great many things which bore me now."

"Yes, you used to like me," he retorted gaily.

She had so confidently expected the remark, had left so frank an opening for it, that while she watched him from beneath languid eyelids a little cynical quiver disturbed her lips. The game was as old as the Garden of Eden, she had played it well or ill from her cradle, and at last she had begun to grow a trifle weary. She had found the wisdom which is hidden at the core of all Dead Sea fruit, and the bitter taste of it was still in her mouth. The world for her was a world of make-believe—of lies so futile that their pretty embroidered shams barely covered the ugly truths beneath, and, though she had pinned her faith upon falsehood and had made her sacrifice to the little gods, there were moments still when the undelivered soul within her awoke and stirred as a child stirs in the womb. Even as she went back to the game anew, she was conscious that it would be a battle of meaningless words, of shallow insincerities—yet she went back, nevertheless, before the disgust the thought awoke had passed entirely from among her sensations.

"I believe I did," she confessed with a charming shrug.

"But you turned against me in the end—women always do," he lamented merrily, as he flicked away the ashes of his cigarette. Then, with a perceptible start of recollection, he paused a moment and leaned forward to look at her more closely. "By the way, I had a shot at your friend to-day," he said, "the lady who looks like an old picture and does verse. Why on earth did she take to poetry?" he demanded impatiently. "I hate it—it's all sheer insanity."

"Well, some few madmen have thought otherwise," remarked Gerty, adding immediately, "and so you met Laura. Oh, you two! It was the irresistible force meeting the immovable body. What happened?"

He regarded her quite gravely while his cigarette burned like a little red eye between his fingers.

"Nothing," he responded at last. "I didn't meet her—I merely glimpsed her. She has a pair of eyes—you didn't tell me."

Gerty nodded.

"And I forgot to mention as well that she has a nose and a mouth and a chin. What an oversight."

"Oh, I didn't bother about the rest," he said, and she wondered if he could be half in earnest or if he were wholly jesting, "but, by Jove, I went overboard in her eyes and never touched bottom."

For a moment Gerty stared at him in blank amazement, in the midst of which she promptly told herself that henceforth she would be prepared for any eccentricities of which the male mind might be capable. A hot flush mantled her cheek, and she spoke in a voice which had a new and womanly ring of decision.

"You would not like her," she said, "and she would hate you."

With an amused exclamation he replaced his coffee cup upon the table. "Then she'd be a very foolish woman," he observed.

"She believes in all the things that you scoff at—she believes in the soul, in people, and in love—"

He made a protest of mock dismay. "My dear girl, I've been too hard hit by love not to believe in it. On the contrary, I believe in it so firmly that I think the only sure cure for it is marriage."

At her swift movement of aversion his laughing glance made a jest of the words, and she smiled back at him with the fantastic humour which had become almost her natural manner. It was a habit of his to treat sportively even the subjects which he reverenced, and in reality she had sometimes felt him to be less of a sober cynic than herself. He took his pleasures where he found them, and there was a touch of pathos in the generous eagerness with which he was ready to provide as well for the pleasures of others. If he lacked imagination she had learned by now that he did not fail in its sister virtue, sympathy, and his keen gray eyes, which expressed so perfectly a gay derision, were not slow, she knew, to warm into a smiling tenderness.

"Laura is the most earnest creature alive," she said after a moment.

"Is that so? Then I presume she lacks a sense of humour."

"She has a sense of honour at any rate."

With a laugh he settled his figure more comfortably in his chair, and while she watched the movement, a little fascinated by its easy freedom, she felt a sudden impulse to reach out and touch his broad, strong shoulders as she might have touched the shoulders of a statue. Were they really as hard as bronze, she wondered, or was that suggestion of latent power, of slumbering energy, as deceptive as the caressing glance he bent upon her? The glance meant nothing she was aware—he would have regarded her in much the same way had Perry been at her side, would have shone quite as affectionately, perhaps, upon her mother. Yet, in spite of her worldly knowledge, she felt herself yielding to it as to a delicate flattery. Her eyes were still on him, and presently he caught her gaze and held it by a look which, for all its fervour, had an edge of biting irony. There was a meaning, a mystery in his regard, but his words when at last they came sounded almost empty.

"Oh, that's well enough in its way," he said, "but as a safeguard there's no virtue alive that can stand against a sense of humour. An instinct for the ridiculous will keep any man from going to the devil."

She shot her defiant merriment into his face. "Has it kept you?"

"I?—Oh, I wasn't bound that way, you know—but why do you ask?"

For a breath she hesitated, then, remembering her mystification of an instant ago, she felt a swift desire to punish him for something which even to herself she could not express—for too sharp a prick of unsatisfied curiosity, or was it for too intense a moment of uncertainty?

"Oh, one hears, you know," she replied indifferently.

"One hears! And what is it that one hears?"

His voice was hard, almost angry, and she despised herself because the fierce sound of it made her suddenly afraid.

"Do you know what a man said to me the other day," she went on with a cool insolence before which he became suddenly quiet. "Whom the gods destroy they first infatuate—with an opera singer."

She delivered the words straight from the shoulder, and as she finished he rose from his chair and stood looking angrily down upon her.

"Did you let me come here for this?" he demanded.

"O Arnold, Arnold!" the gayety rang back to her voice, and she made a charming little face of affected terror. "If you're going to be a bear I'll run away."

She stretched out her hand, and he held it for an instant in his own, while he fell back impatiently into his chair.

"The truth is that I was clean mad about her," he said, "about Madame Alta—but it's over now, and I abominate everything that has ever set foot on the stage."

"Was she really beautiful?" she enquired curiously.

He laughed sharply. "Beautiful! She was flesh—if you mean that."

An angry sigh escaped him, and Gerty lighted a fresh cigarette and gave it to him with a soothing gesture. The nervous movements which were characteristic of him became more frequent, and she found herself wondering that they should increase rather than diminish the impression of virile force. For a while he smoked in silence; then, with his eyes still turned away from her, he asked in a changed voice.

"Tell me about your friend—she interests me."

"She interests you! Laura?"

"There's something in her that I like," he pursued, smiling at her exclamation. "She looks human, natural, real. By Jove, she looks as if she were capable of big emotions—as if, too, you could like her without making love. She's something new."

Gerty's amazement was so sincere that she only stared at him, while her red lips parted slightly in a breathless and perfectly unaffected surprise. Something new! Her wonder faded slowly, and she told herself that now at last she understood. So he was still what he had always been—an impatient seeker after fresh sensations.

"I thought you were too much like Perry to care about her," she said.

His amused glance made the remark appear suddenly ridiculous. "I'm different from Perry in one thing at least," he retorted. "You didn't marry me."

"Well, I dare say it's a good thing you never gave me the chance," she tossed back lightly. "I don't let Perry rave, you know, even over Laura. Not that I'm unduly jealous, but that I'm easily bored."

"I can't imagine you jealous," he commented, keeping as usual close to the intimate intention.

"And of Perry! I should hope not!" Her gesture was one of amused indifference. "Jealousy is the darling virtue of the savage, and I may not be a saint, but at least I'm civilized. Give me food and a warm fire and clothes to my back, and I'm quite content to let the passions go."

"Even love?" he asked, still smiling.

She shrugged her shoulders—gracefully as few women can. "Love among the rest—I don't care—why should I? Make me comfortable."

An impulse which was hardly more than a consuming interest in humanity—in the varied phenomena of life—caused him to draw quickly nearer.

"You say that because you've 'arrived,'" he declared. "You've 'arrived' in love as your friend has in literature. The probationary stage after all is the only one worth while, and you've gone too far beyond it."

"I've gone too far beyond everything," she protested, laughing. "I'm a graduate of the world. Now Laura—"

The name recalled his thoughts and he repeated it while she paused. "Laura—it has a jolly sound—and upon my word I haven't seen a woman in years who has had so much to say to me before I've met her. Do you know, I already like her—I like her smooth black hair, without any of your fussy undulations; I like her strong earnest look and the strength in her brow and chin; I even like the way she dresses—"

Gerty's laugh pealed out, and he broke off with a movement of irritation. "Is it possible that Laura is an enchantress," she demanded, "and have I followed the wrong principle all my life? Has my honest intention to please men led me astray?"

"Oh, you may be funny at my expense if you choose," he retorted, "but I've had enough of fluff and feathers, and I like the natural way she wears her clothes—" Again he smoked in an abstracted silence, and then asked abruptly: "Will you take me some day to see her?"

She shook her head.

"Take you? No, you've missed your opportunity."

"But I'll make another. Why not?"

"Because I tell you frankly she would hate you."

"My dear girl, she wouldn't have a shadow of an excuse. No woman has ever hated me in my life."

"Then there's no use seeking the experience. You'd just as well accept the fact at once that Laura couldn't bear you—"

A laugh followed from the door while the words were still in the air, and turning quickly they saw Laura pausing upon the threshold.

"And pray what is it about Laura?" she asked in her cordial contralto voice. "A person who has borne living in the house with a flute may be said to have unlimited powers of endurance."

She moved forward and Kemper, while he sprang to his feet and stood waiting for the introduction, became swiftly aware that with her entrance the whole atmosphere had taken a fresher and a finer quality. The sophistication of the world, the flippant irony of Gerty's voice gave place immediately before her earnest dignity and before the look of large humanity which distinguished her so vitally from the women whom he knew. He felt her sincerity of purpose at the same instant that he felt Gerty's shallowness and the artificial glamour of the hot-house air in which he had hardly drawn breath. There was an appeal in Laura's face which he had never seen before—an expression which seemed to him to draw directly from the elemental pulse; and he felt suddenly that there were depths of consciousness which he had never sounded, vivid experiences which he had never even glimpsed. "She is different—but how is she different?" he asked himself, perplexed. "Is she simply a bigger personality, or is she really more of a woman than any woman I have ever known? What is it in her that speaks to me and what is it in myself that responds?" And it seemed to him both strange and wonderful that he should be drawn by an impulse which was not the impulse of love—that a woman should attract him through qualities which were independent of the allurement of sex. A clean and perfectly sane satisfaction was the immediate result; he felt that he had grown larger in his own eyes—that the old Adam who had ruled over him so long had become suddenly dwarfed and insignificant. "To like a woman and yet not to make love to her," he repeated in his thoughts. "By Jove, it will be something decent, something really worth while." Then he remembered that he had never known intimately a woman of commanding intellect, and the novelty inspired him with the spirit of fresh adventure.

She had bowed to him over the large muff she carried, and he spoke lightly though his awakened interest showed in his face and voice. "I was the unfortunate subject of Gerty's decision," he said. "Is there no appeal from it?"

Her answering smile was one of indifferent kindliness; and he liked, even while he resented her sincerity of manner. "Appeal! and to whom?" she enquired.

"To you—to your mercy," he laughed.

She glanced at Gerty with a look which hardly simulated a curiosity she apparently did not feel.

"But why should you need my mercy?" she demanded, as she sat down on a little sofa heaped with cushions.

His gaze, after resting a moment on the smooth black hair beneath her velvet hat, turned to the exquisite shining waves which encircled Gerty's head.

"Ask my cousin," he advised with merriment.

Whatever Gerty's reason for not caring to bring them together may have been, she concealed it now beneath a ready acceptance of the situation.

"Oh, he tried to make me promise to take him to see you," she explained, "but I've told him you'd show him no quarter because he hasn't read your poems."

Laura raised her eyes to his face, and he had again the sensation of looking into an unutterable personality.

"I'm glad you haven't read them," she rejoined, "for now you won't be able to talk to me about them."

"So you don't like to have one talk about them?"

She met his question with direct simplicity. "About my verse? I shouldn't like to have you do it."

"And why not I?" he demanded, laughing.

"Oh, I don't know," she returned, her eyes lighting with the humour of her frankness, "can one explain? But I'm perfectly sure that it's not the kind of thing you'd like. There's no action in it."

"So Gerty has told you that I'm a strenuous creature?"

"Perhaps. I don't remember." She turned to Gerty, looking down upon her with a tenderness that suffused her face with colour. "What was it that you told me, dearest?"

"What did I tell you?" repeated Gerty, still clasping Laura's hand. "Oh, it must have been that he agrees with some dreadful person who said that poetry was the insanity of prose."

Laura laughed as she glanced back at him, and he contrasted her deep contralto notes with Gerty's flute-like soprano.

"Well, he may not be right, but he is with the majority," she said.

Her indifference piqued him into the spirit of opposition, and he felt an immediate impulse to compel her reluctant interest—to arouse her admiration of the very qualities she now disdained.

"Well, I take my poetry where I find it," he rejoined, "and that's mostly in life and not in books."

From the quick turn of her head, the instant's lifting of her emotional reserve, he saw that the words had arrested her imagination—that for the first time since her entrance she had really taken in the fact of his existence as an individual.

"Then you are not with the majority, but you are right!" she exclaimed.

"Is it not possible to be both?" he asked, pleased almost more than he would admit by the quickening of her attention.

"I think not," she answered seriously, "don't you?"

"I never think," he laughed with his eyes upon hers, "I live."

The animation, which was like the glow from an inner illumination, shone in her face, and he thought, as Trent had thought before him, that her soul must burn like a golden flame within her—a flame that reached toward life, knowledge and the veiled wonders of experience.

"And so would I if I were a man," she said.

She rose, clasping the furs at her throat, then folding Gerty in her arms she kissed her cheek.

"I stopped for a moment to look at you, nothing more," she confessed. "It was a choice between looking at you and at the Rembrandt in the Metropolitan, and I chose you." As she held Gerty from her for an instant and then drew her into her embrace again, Kemper saw that her delight in her friend's beauty was almost a rapture, that her friendship possessed something of a religious fervour.

"Do stay with me," pleaded Gerty; "I want you—I need you."

"But you dine out."

"Oh, I forgot. Wait, I'll break it. I'll be ill."

Laura smiled her refusal and, stooping, picked up her large, fluffy muff.

"I'll come to-morrow," she returned, "and it won't cost us a lie. Good bye, my bonnie, what do you wear?"

Gerty waved her hands in a gesture of unconcern.

"It rests with the fates and with Annette," she replied. "Green, blue, white; I don't care."

"But I do," persisted Laura; "let it be white." She looked at Kemper and bowed silently as she turned toward the door; then, hesitating an instant, she came back and held out her hand with a cordial smile. "It has been very pleasant to meet you," she said.

"Mayn't I at least see you down?" he asked. "How do you go?"

"There's really no need to trouble you," she answered, "I shall go a part of the way in the stage."

She went out, and as he followed her down the staircase he asked himself again the puzzling question: "She is different from other women—but how is she different?" And still he assured himself with confidence that what he liked in her was her serene separateness from the appeal of passion. "This is the thing that lasts—that really lasts for a lifetime," he said in his thoughts.



CHAPTER VIII

PROVES THAT A POOR LOVER MAY MAKE AN EXCELLENT FRIEND

That night in her sitting-room, while she corrected the proof-sheets of her new book of verse, Laura remembered Kemper's face as he sat across from her on the long seat of the almost empty stage. Beyond him was the humming city, where the lights bloomed like white flowers out of the enveloping dusk, and when he turned his profile, as he did once, against a jeweller's window, she saw every line of his large, strongly marked features silhouetted with distinctness on a brilliant background. Twice during the ride down she had been conscious, as when they left Gerty's house together, that he was more masculine than any man she had known closely in her life, and at first she had told herself that his nervous activity—the ardent vitality in his appearance—was too aggressive to be wholly pleasing. She had been used to a considerate gentleness from men, and his manner, though frankly sympathetic, had seemed to her almost brusque.

Even now, while she laid her work aside to think of him, she was hardly sure that his genial egoism had not repelled her. Her instinct told her that he could be both kind and generous, that he was capable of unselfish impulses, and full, too, of a broad and tolerant humanity, yet there was something within her—some finer spiritual discernment—which rose to battle against the attraction he appeared to possess. He was not mental, he was not even superficially bookish, and yet because of a certain magnetic quality—a mere dominant virility—she found herself occupied, to the exclusion of her work, with the words he had uttered, with the tantalising humour in his eyes.

"I am glad that I did not ask him to call," she thought as she took up her pencil. "He does not interest me and very likely I shall never see him again. He was pleasant certainly, but one can't make acquaintances of every stranger one happens to meet." Then it seemed to her that she had been distant, almost rude, when he had bidden her good-night, and as she remembered the engaging frankness of his smile, the eager yet humble look with which he had waited at her door for the invitation she did not give, she regretted in spite of herself that she had been so openly inhospitable. After all there was no reason that one should turn a man from one's door simply because his personality didn't please one's fancy. For a moment she dragged her mind for some word, some look in which she might have found a shadow of excuse for the dislike she felt. "No, he said nothing foolish," she confessed at last, "he was only kind and friendly and it is I who have offended—I who have allowed myself to feel an unreasonable aversion." All at once an irritation against herself pervaded her thoughts, and she determined that if she met him again she would be more cordial—that she would force herself to show a particular friendliness. The recollection of his love for Madame Alta came to her, and she felt at the same time a sharp curiosity and a deep disgust—"A man like that must love with madness," she thought, and next, "but how do I know if it were love between them and why should I judge?" Her clasped hands went to her eyes and she prayed silently: "Keep me apart, O Lord, keep me pure and apart!"

For a while she sat with bowed head, then, as her hands fell into her lap, she broke into a little tender laugh at herself. "What a fool I am, after all," she lamented; "here I have seen a man whom I do not like—once, for an hour—and he has so troubled my quiet that I cannot put my mind upon my work. What does it matter, and why should a stranger who displeases me have power to compel my thoughts? It was but a trifle—the distraction of an hour, nothing more—and, whether I like him or not, by to-morrow I shall have forgotten his existence."

But she remembered his face as he sat across from her in the dimly lighted stage, and she felt again, with a start, that he was the first man she had ever known. "Yet he does not attract me, and I shall never see him again," she thought after a moment. She took up a little religious book from her desk and tried in vain to fix her wandering attention. Life appeared all at once very full and very beautiful, and as she thought of the thronging city around her it seemed to her that she herself and the people in the street and the revolving stars were held securely in the hand of God. The belief awoke in her that she was shielded and set apart for a predestined good, an exalted purpose, and she wondered if the purpose were already moving toward her out of the city and if its end would be only the fulfilling of the law of her own nature. Then she thought of Angela in her closed chamber. Had she been shielded? Was she also set apart? But the thought did not disturb her, for she herself seemed of a larger growth, of a braver spirit, than Angela or than her aunts or than Uncle Percival, who had missed life also. They had been defeated, but was it not because they had lacked in themselves the courage to attain?

The next morning, after she had had her tea and toast in her room, she went, as was her custom, into Angela's chamber. Early as it was, Mrs. Payne had already apparelled herself in her paint and powder and driven down. Seen by the morning sunlight, her smeared face with its brilliant artificial smile revealed a pathos which was rendered more acute by its effect of playful grotesqueness. She was like a faded and decrepit actress who, fired by the unconquerable spirit of her art, forces her wrinkled visage to ape the romantic ecstasies of passion. Age which is beautiful only when it has become expressive of repose—of serene renouncement—showed to Laura's eyes only as a ghastly and comic travesty of youth.

Angela was having her breakfast at a little table by the window, and at Laura's entrance she turned to her with a sigh of evident relief.

"Rosa has come down to speak to you particularly," she explained. "There is something she has very heavily on her mind."

Mrs. Payne had wheeled herself about at the same instant; and Laura, after regarding her uncertainly for a moment, impressed a light caress upon her outstretched jewelled fingers.

"I didn't sleep a wink, my dear," began the old lady in her most conciliatory tones, "not a blessed wink after Horace told me."

The questioning stare in Laura's face had the effect of jerking her up so hurriedly that the words seemed to trip and stumble upon her lips.

"I might have had it from yourself, of course," she added with an aggrieved contortion of her features, "but as I was just telling Angela, I would not for worlds intrude upon your confidence."

"But what has he told you?" asked Laura, curiously, "and what, after all, did I tell Uncle Horace?"

Mrs. Payne settled herself comfortably back in her chair, and, picking up a bit of Angela's toast from the tray, nibbled abstractedly at the crust.

"What under heaven would he have told me but the one thing?" she demanded. "Mr. Wilberforce has at last proposed."

"At last!" echoed Laura, breaking into a laugh of unaffected merriment. "Well, he was long about it!"

At the words Angela leaned toward her, stretching out her frail hands in a pleading gesture.

"Don't marry, Laura," she entreated; "don't—don't marry. There is only misery from men—misery and regret."

"I believe he has millions," remarked Mrs. Payne, in the tone in which she might have recited her creed in church, "and as far as a husband goes I have never observed that there was any disadvantage to be found in age. My experience of the world has taught me that decrepitude is the only thing which permanently domesticates a man."

Laura sat down across from her, and then clasping her hands together made her final determined stand.

"You needn't try to persuade me, Aunt Rosa," she answered, "for I wouldn't marry him—no, not if he had billions."

For a brief interlude Mrs. Payne returned her gaze with silent yet expressive dignity.

"There's really no occasion to become violent," she observed at last, "particularly in the presence of poor Angela."

"But I like it! I like it," declared Angela, "it is her marriage that I couldn't bear."

Mrs. Payne turned her reproachful look for a moment upon the weaker sister.

"I am very sure, my dear, that we can bear anything the Lord chooses to send," she remarked, "especially when we feel that our cross is for another's good. Is there any reason," she wound up to Laura again, "for the obstinate position you appear to take?"

Laura shook her head.

"I don't take any position," she replied, "I simply decline to be made to marry him, that's all."

"But you like him—I've heard you say so much with my own ears."

"You never heard me say I liked him for a husband."

"It would have been highly indelicate if I had," observed Mrs Payne, "but since he has proposed I may as well impress upon you that any kind of liking is quite sufficient argument for a marriage which would be so suitable in every way. And as to the romantic nonsense—well it all comes very much to the same thing in the long run, and whether you begin by loving a man or by hating him, after six months of marriage you can ask nothing better than to be able to regard him with Christian forbearance."

Laura turned away impatiently as Uncle Percival put his bland, child-like face in at the open door.

"I hope you had a quiet night, Angela," he said in his high, piping voice; "the morning is a fine one and I've already had my turn." Then, holding his coat closely over a small bundle which he carried, he greeted Mrs. Payne with a deprecating smile. "You're down early, Rosa; it's a good habit."

Mrs. Payne surveyed him with an intolerant humour.

"I'm not undertaking to cultivate a habit at my time of life," she responded, raising her voice until it sounded harsh and cracked; then she became a prey to a devouring suspicion. "What is that under your coat?" she demanded sternly.

Uncle Percival's flaccid mouth fell open with a frightened droop, and he took instantly the demeanour of a small offending schoolboy.

"It—it's only a little present for Angela," he replied. "I thought it might interest her, but I hardly think you would care for it, Rosa."

"What is it?" persisted Mrs. Payne in her unyielding calmness.

The object moved beneath his coat, and, pulling it out with a timid yet triumphant gesture, he displayed before their astonished eyes a squirming white rabbit.

"I hoped it might interest Angela," he repeated, seeking in vain for sympathy in the three amazed faces.

The rabbit struggled in his grasp, and after holding it suspended a moment by the nape of its neck, he cuddled it again beneath his coat. "A woman was selling them in the street," he explained in a suppressed voice. "She had a box filled with them. I bought only one."

"That was fortunate," returned Mrs. Payne, severely, "for you will have to carry the creature back at once—or drown it if you prefer."

"But I thought Angela would like it," he said with a disappointed look.

Angela closed her eyes as if shutting out an irritating sight.

"What in the world would I do with a white rabbit?" she enquired.

"But I could take care of it," insisted Untie Percival. "I should like to take care of it very much."

Laura drew the rabbit from his coat and held it a moment against her bosom.

"It's a pretty little thing," she remarked carelessly, and added, "why not keep it for yourself, Uncle Percival?"

As he glanced up at her the light of animation broke in his face.

"Why shouldn't I, indeed, why shouldn't I?" he demanded eagerly, and hurried out before Mrs. Payne, with her Solomonic power of judgment, could bring herself to the point of interference.

"I hope that will be a lesson to you with regard to men," she observed as a parting shot while she tied her bonnet strings.

An uncontrollable distaste for her family swept over Laura, and she felt that she could suffer no longer the authority of Mrs. Payne, the senility of Uncle Percival or the sorrows of Angela. As she looked at Mrs. Payne she was struck as if for the first time by her ridiculous grotesqueness, and she experienced a sensation of disgust for the old lady's stony eyes and carefully painted out wrinkles.

Without replying to the moral pointed by Uncle Percival and the white rabbit, she left the room and hastily dressed herself for her morning walk. The house had grown close and oppressive to her and she wanted the January cold in her face and limbs. At the moment she was impatient of anything that recalled a restraint of mind or body.

When she came in two hours later, after a brisk walk in the park, she found Mr. Wilberforce awaiting her in the drawing-room downstairs. He looked older she thought at the first glance in the last few days, but there was a cheerfulness, a serenity, in his face which seemed to lend itself like a softening light to his beautiful pallid features. He was a man who having fought bitterly against resignation for many years comes to it peacefully at last only to find that he has reaped from it a portion of the "enchantment of the disenchanted." Her intuition told her instantly that he had given up hope of love, but she recognized also, through some strange communion of sympathy, that he had attained the peace of soul which follows inevitably upon any sincere renouncement of self.

"I am so glad, dear friend," she said, holding his hand for a moment as she sat beside him.

He looked at her silently with his brilliant eyes which burned in the midst of his blanched and withered face like two watch-fires that are kept alive in a scorched desert.

"For a while I thought it might be," he replied after a long pause. "I asked you to give me what I have never had—my youth. You could not do it," he added with a smile, "and at first it seemed to me that there remained only emptiness and disappointment for the future, but presently I learned wisdom in the night." He hesitated an instant and then added gravely, "I saw that if you couldn't give me youth, you could at least make my old age very pleasant."

"I can—I will," she answered in a broken voice, and it seemed to her that all the bitterness had turned to sweetness in his look. Was the divine wisdom, after all, she wondered, not so much the courage which turned the events that came to happiness as the greater power which created light where there was nothing. Only age had learned to do this, she knew, and she was conscious of a quick resentment against fate that only age could put into passion the immortal spirit which youth craved in vain.

"I asked a great deal," he said, "but I shall be content with a very little."

"With my whole faith—with all my friendship," she replied; and as she spoke the words, her heart contracted with a spasm which was almost that of terror of the unknown purpose to which she felt, with a kind of superstitious blindness, that she was pledged. Fate had offered her this one good thing, and she must put it from her because she waited in absolute ignorance—for what? For love it might be, and yet her woman's instinct taught her that the only love which endures is the love of age that has never been young for youth so elastic that it can never grow old. Then swift as the flash of self-revelation she saw in imagination the eager yet humble look with which Arnold Kemper had waited before her door, and, though she insisted still that the picture displeased her fancy, she knew that passion to meet response in her must come to her clothed in a virile strength like his.

"I wish from my soul that it might have been," she murmured, but even with the words she knew that she had all her life wished for a different thing—for a love that was wholly unlike the love he offered.

"It has been," he answered, while his grave gentleness fell like dew on the smouldering fire in his eyes. "It has been, my dear, and it will be always until I die."



CHAPTER IX

OF MASQUES AND MUMMERIES

In the afternoon of the next day Laura received by a special messenger an urgent appeal from Gerty Bridewell.

"Come to me at once," said the note, which appeared to have been written in frantic haste. "I am in desperate trouble and I need you."

The distress of the writer was quite as apparent as the exaggeration, and while Laura rolled rapidly toward her in a cab, she prepared herself with a kind of nervous courage to bear the brunt of the inevitable scene. Perry was at the bottom of it she knew—she had answered such summonses often enough before to pre-figure with unerring insight the nature of the event. He had shown his periodical inclination to a fresh affair, his errant fancy had wandered in a particular direction, and Gerty's epicurean philosophy had failed as usual to account for the concrete fact. To Laura the amazing part was not so much Perry's fickleness, which she had brought herself to accept with tolerant aversion, as the extraordinary value Gerty placed upon an emotion which was kept alive by an artifice at once so evident and so ineffectual. There was but one thing shorter lived than his repentance she knew, and that was the sentiment of which he was charitably supposed to have repented. By nature he was designed a lover, and it seemed, broadly viewed, the merest accident of circumstances that he should tend toward variety rather than toward specialisation.

A man passing in the street bowed to her as the cab turned a corner, and, as she recognised Arnold Kemper, she wondered vaguely if he had aught in common with his cousin. A slight resemblance to Perry Bridewell offended her as she recalled it, and, while her resentful sympathy flew to Gerty, she felt almost vindictive against the masculine type he appeared physically to represent.

"O Lord, keep me apart!" she prayed fervently, as she had prayed in the night, for it appeared to her that the shield of faith was the one shield for the spirit against the besieging vanities of life. Gerty's faith had fallen from her long ago, and, as she remembered this, Laura felt a jealous impulse to snatch her friend away from the restless worldliness and the inordinate desires. The pitiable soul of Gerty showed to her suddenly as a stunted and famished city child struggling for life in an atmosphere which carried the taint of death, and in her imagination the picture was so vivid that she saw the face of the child turned toward her with a wistful, imploring look.

The cab stopped with a jerk, and in a little while she was knocking softly at the closed door of Gerty's chamber. Almost immediately it opened and the French maid came out.

"Madame is ill with a headache," she explained, pointing to the closed shutters, "she refuses to eat."

Putting her impatiently aside, Laura closed the door upon her, and then crossing to the windows threw back the shutters to let in the late sunshine.

"A little light won't hurt you, dearest," she said, with a smile.

Gerty, still in her nightgown with a Japanese kimono flung carelessly about her and her hair falling in a brilliant shower upon her shoulders, was sitting before her bureau making a pretence of sorting a pile of bills. In spite of this pathetic subterfuge, her beautiful green eyes held a startled and angry look, and her face was flushed with an excitement like that of fever.

"I was sorry I sent for you the moment afterward," she said, hardly yielding to Laura's embrace, while she nervously tore open a bill she held and then tossed it aside without glancing over it. "It's the same thing over again—there's no use talking about it. I shall die."

"You cannot—you cannot," protested Laura, still holding her in her arms. "You are too beautiful. You were never in your life lovelier than you are to-day."

"And yet it does not hold him," broke out Gerty, in sudden passion, "and it will never be any better, I see that. If it's not one it's another, but it's always somebody. A year ago he promised me that I should never have cause for jealousy again—he swore that and I believed him—and now this—this—"

Her anger choked her like a sob, and she tore with trembling fingers at the papers in her lap. Then suddenly her brow contracted with resolution, and she went through a long list of items as if the most important fact in life were the amount of money she must pay to her dressmaker.

"Of course you know what I think," murmured Laura with her lips at Gerty's ear.

"That he isn't worth it," Gerty nodded, while her indignant and humiliated expression grew almost violent. "Well, I think so, too. Of course he isn't, but that doesn't make it any better—any easier."

"You mean you couldn't give him up?"

"When I'm dead I may, not before." She closed her eyes and a long shudder ran through her body. "It has been nothing but a fight since I married—a fight to keep him. I used to think that marriage meant rest, contentment, but I know now that it means a battle—all the time—every instant. I've never had one natural moment, I've never since the beginning been without a horrible suspicion—and I see now that I never shall be. He likes me best I know—in his heart he really puts me first—but there are others and I won't have it. I'll be alone, I'll be the only one or nothing. I said I wouldn't be beaten the first time, and I won't—I won't be beaten." She paused an instant to draw breath. "And I haven't been," she wound up in bitter triumph.

"You'll never be, darling," declared Laura; "who is there on earth to shine against you?"

The violence faded from Gerty's face, yielding to an expression of disgust, of spiritual loathing—the loathing of a creature that hates the thing it loves.

"But it isn't worth it, it isn't worth it," she moaned, pushing the papers away from her with an indignant gesture, and rising from her chair to walk hurriedly up and down the floor. "It isn't worth it, but I'm bound to it—I can't get away. I'm bound to the wheel. Do you think if I could help myself—if I could be different—that I would turn into a mere bond-slave to my body? Why, a day labourer has rest, but I haven't. There's not a moment when I'm not doing something for my beauty, or planning effects, or undergoing a treatment. I never sleep as I want to, nor bathe as I want to, nor even eat what I like. It's all somebody's system for preserving something about me. I've lived on celery and apples to keep from growing fat and taken daily massage to keep from getting thin—and yet I never wake up in the morning that I don't turn sick for fear I'll discover my first wrinkle in the glass. Now imagine," she finished with a cynical laugh, "Perry going upon a diet for any sentimental reasons, or sacrificing terrapin in order to retain my affection!"

"I can't," confessed Laura bluntly, "it's beyond me, but I wish you wouldn't. I wish you'd try to hold him by something different—something higher."

"You can't hold a person by what he hasn't got," returned Gerty with the flippant ridicule she so desperately clung to—a ridicule which she used as unsparingly upon herself as upon her husband. Then, after a pause, she resumed her bitter musing in the same high-strung, reckless manner. "A wrinkle would kill me," she pursued; "I'd rather endure any agony—I'd be skinned alive first like some woman Perry laughed about. Yet they must come—they're obliged to come in fifteen—ten—perhaps in five years. Perhaps even to-morrow. Do you suppose," she questioned abruptly, with a tragic intensity worthy of a less ignoble cause, "that when one gets old one really ceases to mind—that one dies out all inside—the sensations I mean, and the emotions—before the husk begins to wither?" She paused a moment, but as Laura continued to regard her with a soft, compassionate look she turned away again and, touching an electric button in the wall, flooded the room with light. The change was so startling that every object seemed to leap at once from twilight vagueness into a conspicuous prominence. On a chair in the corner was carelessly flung a white chiffon dinner gown, and a pair of little satin slippers had been thrown upon the floor beside it, where they lay slightly sideways, with turned-out toes, as they had fallen from the wearer's feet. The pathos which seems so often to dwell in trifling inanimate objects spoke to Laura from the little discarded shoes, and again society appeared to her as a hideous battle in which the passions preyed upon the ideals, the body upon the soul. She thought of Perry Bridewell, of his healthy animalism, his complacent self-esteem, while her heart hardened within her. Was love, when all was said, merely a subjection to the flesh instead of an enlargement of the spirit? Did it depend for its very existence upon the dress-maker's art and the primitive instinct of the chase? Had it no soul within it to keep it clean? Could it see or hear only through the eye or the ear of sense?

"O Gerty, Gerty," she said, "if I could only make you see!"

But Gerty, with one of those swift changes of humour which made her moods at once so unexpected and so irresistible, had burst into a peal of mocking laughter.

"I'm prepared to conquer or to die," she said merrily; and going to a large white box on the bed, she opened it and dangled in the air a gorgeous evening gown of silver gauze shot with green. "This cost me a thousand dollars," she commented in the hard, business-like tones Laura had begun to dread. "I was keeping it for the ball next week, but there's no call like the call of an emergency. The horrid creature he fancies will be there," she added, surveying her exquisite armful with an admiring, unhappy glance, "and it will be war to the death between us, if it costs him every cent he has." She fell thoughtfully silent, to break out at the end of a minute or two with a remark which had the value of an imparted confidence: "She—I mean the creature—wore one something like it, only not nearly so handsome—last night—and it made her look frightfully gone off—even Perry noticed it."

Spreading the gown carefully upon the bed, she went to the mirror and regarded herself with passionate scrutiny.

"Will you wait and see me dress?" she asked; "Annette has my cold bath ready. I must have a colour, but I shan't be a minute in the tub."

"Do you mean that you are really going out to-night?" asked Laura, remembering the despairing note of a few hours ago.

Gerty nodded. "To a dinner and a dance. Do you think that I will play the neglected wife?"

A glow had sprung to her eyes that was like the animation with which an intrepid hunter might depart upon a desperate chase—and through all her elaborate toilette—the massaging of her face, the arranging of her hair, the perfuming of her beautiful neck and arms—she chatted gayly in the same flippant yet nervous voice. When at last the maid had withdrawn again, Gerty, pausing before Laura in a shimmer of silver gauze that reminded one of a faintly scented moonlight, bent over and touched her cheek with feverish lips.

"It is war to the knife," she laughed; and the peculiar radiance of colour, which gave her beauty a character that was almost violent, made her at the moment appear triumphant, exultant, barbaric. To Laura she had never seemed more beautiful nor more unhappy. Then suddenly her manner underwent a curious change, and her accustomed mask—the smiling surface of a woman of the world—settled as if by magic upon her face. Perry Bridewell was at the door, and she opened it for him with an unconcern at which Laura wondered.

"Come in if you want to," she said coolly, "Laura doesn't mind."

She drew back into the middle of the room, fastening her glove with insolent indifference, while his startled gaze hung upon her in an amazement he lacked the mental readiness to hide.

"By Jove, are you going out?" he asked. "I thought you were downright ill and I was about to call up the doctor. I'm jolly glad—I declare I am," he added humbly.

From the sincere anxiety in his voice, Laura surmised at once that Gerty's exasperation had preceded by some hours her cooler judgment. He looked as uncomfortable as it was possible for a man of his optimistic habit of mind to feel, and an evident humiliation was traced upon his countenance as if by several hasty touches of a crayon pencil.

But his features were intended so manifestly to wear a look of cheerful self-esteem that his dejection, honest as it was, produced an effect of insincerity, and it seemed to Laura that his other and more natural expression was still lying somewhere beneath this superficial remorse. Considered as physical bulk he was impressive, she admitted, in a large, ruddy, highly obvious fashion; then he appeared suddenly so stupid and child-like in his discomfiture that she felt her heart softening in spite of her convictions. At the instant he resembled nothing so much as a handsome, good-humoured, but disobedient, dog patiently awaiting a reprimand.

"On my word I'm jolly glad," he repeated, and stopped because he could think of nothing further to say that did not sound foolish in his own perturbed mind.

"Oh, I'm not utterly lacking in humanity," retorted Gerty, "and one has to be not to admit a moral obligation to one's hostess. Besides," she confessed, with smiling pleasantry, "I shall rather enjoy Ada Lawley's face when she sees my gown. She told me last night that she would never be caught wearing silver gauze again until she wanted to look every day as old as she really is. It was rather hard on her, poor thing, for Arnold says she'd rather lose her character any day than her complexion—not that she has very much of either left by now," she corrected with her cutting laugh.

Before the studied insolence of her attack Perry drew back quickly in surprise, and his eyelids winked rapidly as if a lighted candle had flashed before them. Then, with that child-like need of having his eyes opened, of being made to see, his attention was fastened upon the brilliant figure of his wife, and her beauty seemed at the moment to burn itself into his slow-witted brain.

"By Jove!" he exclaimed, and again, "By Jove!"

"I'm glad you like it," replied Gerty, with a careless shrug. "I may not be a model woman from a domestic point of view, but at least I've managed to keep both my colour and my reputation." She crossed to the bureau, and opening a drawer took out a green and silver fan. "I really needn't trouble you to come, you know," she remarked indifferently. "Arnold will be there and I dare say he'll be willing to come back in my carriage."

"I dare say he will," observed Perry, not without a jealous indignation, "and I dare say you'd be pleased enough if I'd let him."

Gerty laughed as she closed the drawer with a bang. "Well, I shouldn't exactly mind," she rejoined.

Reconciliation, such as it was, the brief reunion of suspicion and broken faith was apparently in rapid progress, and, filled with a pity not unmixed with disgust, Laura put on her fur coat and went slowly down the staircase. The last sound that followed her was the flute-like music of Gerty's laugh—a little tired, heart-sick, utterly disillusioned laugh.

A man was going by on the sidewalk as she went out, and when the closing of the house door caused him instinctively to look up, she saw that it was Roger Adams. He stopped immediately and waited for her until she descended the steps.

"Are you bound now," he asked, "for Gramercy Park?"

She nodded "But I'd like to walk a block or two. I've been shut up all the afternoon with Gerty."

"She's not ill, I hope," he remarked, as he fell into step at her side. "I've always had a considerable liking for Mrs. Bridewell, and for Perry, too. He's a first-rate chap."

For a moment Laura walked on rapidly, without replying. It seemed to her abominable that Adams should confess to an admiration for Perry Bridewell, and the generous humanity which she had formerly respected in him now offended her.

"He is not a favourite of mine," she commented indifferently; then moved by a flitting impulse, she added after a pause, "By the way, do you know, I've met his cousin."

Adams looked a little mystified as he echoed her remark.

"His cousin?" But in an instant further light broke upon him. "Oh, you mean Arnold Kemper!"

"I met him at Gerty's," explained Laura, "but I can't say honestly that he particularly appealed to me. There's something about him—I don't know what—that runs up against my prejudices."

Adams laughed.

"I rather fancy the prejudices are more than half gossip," he observed.

"I'd forgotten what I'd heard about him," rejoined Laura, shaking her head.

They had reached a crossing, and he dropped a little behind her while she walked on with the flowing yet energetic step she had inherited from her Southern mother. On the opposite corner he came up with her again and resumed the conversation where they had let it fall.

"I never see Kemper now," he said, "but I still feel that we are friends in a way, and I believe if I were to run across him to-morrow he'd be quite as glad to see me as if we hadn't parted fifteen years ago. The last time I saw much of him, by the way, we roughed it together one autumn on the coast of Nova Scotia, and I remember he volunteered there to go out in the first heavy gale to bring in some fishermen who had been caught out in the ice. They tied a rope around his waist and he went and brought the men in, too, though we feared for a time that his hands would be frozen off."

"Oh, I dare say he has pluck," observed Laura, and though her voice was constrained, she was conscious of a sudden moral exhilaration, such as she sometimes experienced after reading a great poem or seeing a Shakespearian tragedy upon the stage. The lights and the noises and the people in the street became singularly vivid, while she moved on in an excitement which she could not explain though she felt that it was wholly pleasurable. Kemper was present to her now in a nobler, almost a glorified, aspect, and she began, though she herself was hardly aware of it, to idealise him with the fatal ardour of a poet and a dreamer. There was a splendour to her in his old heroic deed—a glow that transfigured, like some clear northern light, the storm and the danger and even the ice bound fishermen—and she told herself that it would be impossible ever to atone to him for her past rudeness.

"Perhaps I was unjust," she remarked presently, "but one is never proof against intuitive impressions, and after all it does not greatly matter."

Then she looked at Roger Adams as he walked in the electric light beside her. She saw how haggard were the lines in his face, that he was bent in the shoulders as if from some mental burden, and the delicacy of his long, slender figure appeared to her almost as a physical infirmity. It occurred to her at the instant that his bodily defects had never before showed so plainly to her eyes, and it was with a flash of acute self-consciousness—a flash as from a lantern that has been turned inward—that she realised that she was comparing him with Arnold Kemper.



CHAPTER X

SHOWS THE HERO TO BE LACKING IN HEROIC QUALITIES

When he had parted from Laura Adams walked down Fifth Avenue to Thirty-fifth Street and then turned east in the direction of his own house. He found upon entering that Connie, as usual, was dining out, and after he had eaten his poorly served dinner alone in the dining-room, he went upstairs with the intention of slipping into his smoking jacket and returning to his study for a peaceful smoke. The electric lights were blazing in Connie's bedroom, and when he went in to extinguish them, moved by some instinct of economy, he found that the room was in even greater disorder than that to which he had grown, after years of uncomplaining discomfort, outwardly if not inwardly resigned. Of a naturally systematic habit of thought, Connie's carelessness had been for him one of those petty annoyances of daily life to meet which he had always felt that philosophy had been especially designed; but to-night the chaos struck him so forcibly that he found himself vaguely questioning if it were possible for a human creature to sleep in such a spot? Picking up several gowns from the middle of the floor, he returned them to the wardrobe, and set himself to clearing the bed of an array of satin shoes. Her silver hair brushes had fallen on the hearth rug, and in replacing them upon the bureau his eye fell on a small, half-empty phial lying beneath a pile of lace-edged handkerchiefs. Looking at it a little closer he found that it contained a solution of cocaine.

For a moment surprise held him motionless; then as if to refute and explain away any ordinary reason for her possession of the drug, he remembered, in a comprehensive flash the recent violent changes in her character—her uncontrollable attacks of nervousness, her spasmodic movements and her sudden flowing, almost hysterical, volubility of speech. His heart contracted with a sensation like that of terror, and he was turning away again when his glance was arrested by a heap of crumpled bills lying loosely in one corner of the open drawer. Recollecting that she had complained the day before of the smallness of her allowance, he drew out the papers for a casual examination—but it needed much less, in fact, than this to assure him that her expenses had not only gone immeasurably beyond her own limited allowance, but that they had considerably exceeded his slightly larger income. Her debts had evidently run up to a sum which she had lost the courage to confess even to herself, and, while the gravity of the situation entered into him, he smoothed out the torn and crumpled sheets and went with them to his study. Until to-night he had looked upon Connie's extravagance merely as an innocent childish failing, resulting from an inherent incapacity, as she laughingly said, "to do sums," but now as he sat under the green lamp shade, anxiously multiplying item after item, it seemed to him that this recent recklessness involved not only her private happiness but his own personal honour. He was a hot-tempered man by nature, and at first the very absurdity of her expenditures, the useless, costly trifles which made up the amount, produced in him an unreasoning passion of anger. Had she been in the house he would have gone to her in the first shock of his temper, but her ceaseless pursuit of pleasure had put her beyond his reach, so he sat silently staring at the neatly arranged heap of papers while his exasperation cooled within him.

Presently, still sitting motionless in his chair, he felt the absolute quiet of the room take effect upon his mood, and with the peculiar tolerance confirmed as much by balked ambition as by years of enforced and bitter patience he began with a philosophic and impersonal leniency to soften in his judgment of Connie's case. At the moment there was no tenderness, he told himself, in the view he took, and he gave to her merely the distant, habitual charity that he would have extended to the stranger in the street. To give to her in the very least seemed to him suddenly almost impossible when he remembered that from a forlornly foolish caprice she had plunged him into a debt of several years. He had worked hard, with broken health, in a profession of small financial returns, but to his own simple tastes his income might have brought not only perfect material ease, but the enjoyment of comparative luxury. Still there was Connie—he had always in every situation remembered that there was Connie—and in order to insure her present comfort as well as to provide for her future livelihood, he had contrived to limit his expenses to the merest necessities. One only gratification he had allowed himself—his eyes travelled gloomily round his precious book-lined walls and he found himself wondering if those particular treasures would bring their full value in the open market? He regarded them meditatively, almost religiously, with the impassioned eye of the collector who is born not cultivated. Yet there were among them no high-priced, particular rarities, for he had always counted the cost with the deliberation which he felt to be the better part of impulse. Financially they did not represent a great deal, he admitted; then, as if flinching before a threatened sacrilege, he looked away again, while he remembered with a quick recognition of the ludicrous, that among the articles for which Connie had not paid was a pair of pearl ear-rings. The item had taken a prominence oddly out of keeping with its significance, and he found that it irritated him more than the thought of objects of a decidedly greater cost. That any woman, that his wife in particular, should want a pair of ear-rings appeared to him little short of the barbaric.

But the incident was trifling, and a minute later it had faded entirely from his reflections. As he sat there in his easy-chair in the lamp light his thoughts turned slowly backward, travelling over the tragic yet uneventful history of his life. He remembered his childhood on a little Western farm, the commonplace poverty of his people, and his own burning, agonised ambition, which had sent him through college on a pittance, swept the highest honours from his graduation year, and wrecked at last what had been at his starting out a fairly promising physical constitution. He recalled, too, the sleepless enthusiasm of his last term at Harvard, the terrible exhaustion which had made his final triumph barren, and the long illness which had brought him in the end, with shattered health, to the door of the great specialist in lung diseases. At this day he could shut his eyes and summon back with distinctness the smallest detail of the interview. He went over again his tedious wait in the outer office—the scattered magazines upon the table, the utterly inartistic prints upon the wall, the ticking of the tall bronze clock on the mantel, and even the number of the page he had been reading in a periodical, for—following a methodical habit—he had unconsciously made a mental note of the figures when he laid the magazine aside to face the examination behind the folding doors. With the patient attention to minutia which was a part of his literary instinct, his memory followed the great man across the ugly yellow squares in the carpet and fixed itself upon a row of small green bottles standing in a wooden rack upon the table. Through the half hour of his visit, which brief as it was casually dismissed him to his death, those slender green phials seemed to his fancy to hold an absurd and grotesque prominence. "In a climate like this I'd give you three years—maybe a little longer—yes, I think I may grant a little longer," the great man had remarked, with what seemed to Adams a ridiculous assumption of yielding a concession. "In a dryer air you might even be good, we may say, until thirty-five or forty." He shrugged his shoulders with a gesture intended to convey his sympathy but which succeeded only in expressing his personal importance, and Adams had walked out from the stuffy little ether-smelling office with a feeling curiously like that he had known as a boy when during a school game of football, he found himself suddenly thumped upon the heart. On the doorstep he had stopped and laughed aloud, struck by the persistency with which the green bottles dominated his impressions.

After this there had come a blank of a few weeks—a blank of which he remembered nothing except that he had struggled like an entrapped beast against his fate—against his fruitless labour, his sacrificed ambition, the unavailing bitterness of his self-denial—against the world, destiny, life, death, God! But the very intensity of his rebellion had brought reaction, and it was in the succeeding apathy of spirit that he had packed his few belongings and started for the Colorado country. Behind him he was leaving all that made life endurable in his eyes, and yet he was leaving it from some half animal instinct which caused him to preserve the mere naked strip of existence that he no longer valued. He hated himself for going, yet he went that he might hate himself the more bitterly with each step of the journey.

The lamp on his desk flared up fitfully and as he turned to lower the wick his eyes fell on Connie's picture. The uplifted babyish face came back to him as he had first seen it under floating cherry-colored ribbons, and his anger of the last half-hour melted and vanished utterly away. For the sake of those few months, when the waning fire within him had leaped despairingly toward the flame of life, he knew that he could never quite put Connie from his heart—for the sake of his short romance and for the sake, too, of his child that had lived three hours. The thin, heavily veined hand on the arm of his chair quivered for an instant, and he felt his pulses throb quickly as if from acute physical pain. From the pitiable failure of his marriage, from his loneliness and disillusionment there came back to him the three hours when he had looked upon the face of his living child—the hours of his profoundest emotion, his completest reconciliation. He had never regarded himself as an emotionally religious man, yet ten years ago, on the night that his boy died, he had felt that an immortal and indissoluble part of himself had gone out into the void. For the first time he had come to the deeper reality of life—through the flowing of the agonised longing within himself toward that permanent universal consciousness of which all human longings are but detached and wandering forms. From that time death had held for him a more personal promise; and the obligation to live, to fulfil one's present opportunities, had become charged with another meaning than he had been used to read into what he called his mere animal responsibility. The boy who had died was for him in a close, an intimate relation, still vitally alive; and with one of those quaint yet pathetic blendings of memory with imagination the little undeveloped soul had blossomed, not invisibly, incommunicably, but into actual daily companionship with his thoughts.

Sitting there under the green lamp, he himself showed as an insignificant figure to possess an ear for the divine silences, an eye for the invisible beauty. His long, gaunt body lay relaxed and inert upon the leather cushions, and his knotted, bony hands—the hands of a scholar and a thinker—were stretched, palms downward, on the rolled arms of his chair. There was nothing in his appearance—nothing in his worn, humorous face under the thin brown hair, to suggest the valiant lover, the impressionable dreamer. Yet in the innermost truth of his own nature he was both, and his grief, of which in his strange, almost savage, reserve he had never spoken even to his wife, had softened gradually into the gentlest of his dreams as well as the profoundest of his regrets. "The little chap," as he always called the child, in his thoughts, had grown for him into an individuality which for all its nearness was yet clearly distinct from his own. Adams had lived day by day with him, had sat face to face with him in his lamp-lighted room, had carried him successfully through the first childish books that he might have studied, had even launched him into the Latin he might have learned. A boy to train, to educate, a mental companionship such as he loved to fancy he would have found in a young, eager mind, had since his marriage become the one burning desire of his heart, and even to-night sitting, as he so often did, alone in his house, his thoughts dwelt with a playful tenderness upon the boy who might have brought his Caesar to his footstool. He was a man of instinctive moral cleanness, and even in his imagination he had always kept the riotous senses severely in the check of reason. In the domain of the affections he had wanted nothing desperately, he told himself, except his child; and so intense had this yearning of fatherhood become in him that there were moments of bitter loneliness when he seemed almost to feel the touch of the boy's hand upon his knee. He had strange hours, even when his dream became more vivid to him than the pressing reality of events.