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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11325 ***
+THE HAPPIEST TIME OF THEIR LIVES
+
+BY ALICE DUER MILLER
+
+Author of “Come Out of the Kitchen,” “Ladies Must Live,” “Wings in the
+Night,” etc.
+
+1918
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TO CLARENCE DAY, JR.
+
+
+... and then he added in a less satisfied tone: “But friendship is so
+uncertain. You don’t make any announcement to your friends or vows to
+each other, unless you’re at an age when you cut your initials in the
+bark of a tree. That’s what I’d like to do.”
+
+
+
+
+THE HAPPIEST TIME OF THEIR LIVES
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Little Miss Severance sat with her hands as cold as ice. The stage
+of her coming adventure was beautifully set--the conventional stage
+for the adventure of a young girl, her mother’s drawing-room. Her
+mother had the art of setting stages. The room was not large,--a New
+York brownstone front in the upper Sixties even though altered as to
+entrance, and allowed to sprawl backward over yards not originally
+intended for its use, is not a palace,--but it was a room and not a
+corridor; you had the comfortable sense of four walls about you when
+its one small door was once shut. It was filled, perhaps a little too
+much filled, with objects which seemed to have nothing in common except
+beauty; but propinquity, propinquity of older date than the house in
+which they now were, had given them harmony. Nothing in the room was
+modern except some uncommonly comfortable sofas and chairs, and the
+pink and yellow roses that stood about in Chinese bowls.
+
+Miss Severance herself was hardly aware of the charm of the room. On
+the third floor she had her own room, which she liked much better.
+There was a great deal of bright chintz in it, and maple furniture of
+a late colonial date, inherited from her mother’s family, the Lanleys,
+and discarded by her mother, who described the taste of that time as
+“pure, but provincial.” Crystal and ivories and carved wood and Italian
+embroideries did not please Miss Severance half so well as the austere
+lines of those work-tables and high-boys.
+
+It was after five, almost half-past, and he had said “about five.” Miss
+Severance, impatient to begin the delicious experience of anticipation,
+had allowed herself to be ready at a quarter before the hour. Not that
+she had been entirely without some form of anticipation since she woke
+up; not, perhaps, since she had parted from him under the windy awning
+the night before. They had held up a long line of restless motors as
+she stood huddled in her fur-trimmed cloak, and he stamped and jigged
+to keep warm, bareheaded, in his thin pumps and shining shirt-front,
+with his shoulders drawn up and his hands in his pockets, while they
+almost awkwardly arranged this meeting for the next day.
+
+Several times during the preceding evening she had thought he was going
+to say something of the kind, for they had danced together a great
+deal; but they had always danced in silence. At the time, with his
+arm about her, silence had seemed enough; but in separation there is
+something wonderfully solid and comforting in the memory of a spoken
+word; it is like a coin in the pocket. And after Miss Severance had
+bidden him good night at the long glass door of the paneled ball-room
+without his saying anything of a future meeting, she had gone up-stairs
+with a heavy heart to find her maid and her wrap. She knew as soon
+as she reached the dressing-room that she had actually hurried her
+departure for the sake of the parting; for the hope, as their time
+together grew short, of having some certainty to look forward to. But
+he had said nothing, and she had been ashamed to find that she was
+waiting, leaving her hand in his too long; so that at last she snatched
+it away, and was gone up-stairs in an instant, fearing he might have
+guessed what was going on in her mind.
+
+She had thought it just an accident that he was in the hall when she
+came down again, and he hadn’t much choice, she said to herself, about
+helping her into her motor. Then at the very last moment he had asked
+if he mightn’t come and see her the next afternoon. Miss Severance, who
+was usually sensitive to inconveniencing other people, had not cared at
+all about the motor behind hers that was tooting its horn or for the
+elderly lady in feathers and diamonds who was waiting to get into it.
+She had cared only about arranging the hour and impressing the address
+upon him. He had given her back the pleasure of her whole evening like
+a parting gift.
+
+As she drove home she couldn’t bring herself to doubt, though she tried
+to be rational about the whole experience, that it had meant as much
+to him as it had to her, perhaps more. Her lips curved a little at the
+thought, and she glanced quickly at her maid to see if the smile had
+been visible in the glare of the tall, double lamps of Fifth Avenue.
+
+To say she had not slept would be untrue, but she had slept close
+to the surface of consciousness, as if a bright light were shining
+somewhere near, and she had waked with the definite knowledge that this
+light was the certainty of seeing him that very day. The morning had
+gone very well; she had even forgotten once or twice for a few seconds,
+and then remembered with a start of joy that was almost painful:
+but, after lunch, time had begun to drag like the last day of a long
+sea-voyage.
+
+About three she had gone out with her mother in the motor, with the
+understanding that she was to be left at home at four; her mother was
+going on to tea with an elderly relation. Fifth Avenue had seemed
+unusually crowded even for Fifth Avenue, and the girl had fretted
+and wondered at the perversity of the police, who held them up just
+at the moment most promising for slipping through; and why Andrews,
+the chauffeur, could not see that he would do better by going to
+Madison Avenue. She did not speak these thoughts aloud, for she had
+not told her mother, not from any natural love of concealment, but
+because any announcement of her plans for the afternoon would have
+made them seem less certain of fulfilment. Perhaps, too, she had felt
+an unacknowledged fear of certain of her mother’s phrases that could
+delicately puncture delight.
+
+She had been dropped at the house by ten minutes after four, and
+exactly at a quarter before five she had been in the drawing-room, in
+her favorite dress, with her best slippers, her hands cold, but her
+heart warm with the knowledge that he would soon be there.
+
+Only after forty-five minutes of waiting did that faith begin to grow
+dim. She was too inexperienced in such matters to know that this was
+the inevitable consequence of being ready too early. She had had time
+to run through the whole cycle of certainty, eagerness, doubt, and she
+was now rapidly approaching despair. He was not coming. Perhaps he
+had never meant to come. Possibly he had merely yielded to a polite
+impulse; possibly her manner had betrayed her wishes so plainly that a
+clever, older person, two or three years out of college, had only too
+clearly read her in the moment when she had detained his hand at the
+door of the ball-room.
+
+There was a ring at the bell. Her heart stood perfectly still, and then
+began beating with a terrible force, as if it gathered itself into
+a hard, weighty lump again and again. Several minutes went by, too
+long for a man to give to taking off his coat. At last she got up and
+cautiously opened the door; a servant was carrying a striped cardboard
+box to her mother’s room. Miss Severance went back and sat down. She
+took a long breath; her heart returned to its normal movement.
+
+Yet, for some unexplained reason, the fact that the door-bell had rung
+once made it more possible that it would ring again, and she began to
+feel a slight return of confidence.
+
+A servant opened the door, and in the instant before she turned her
+head she had time to debate the possibility of a visitor having come in
+without ringing while the messenger with the striped box was going out.
+But, no; Pringle was alone.
+
+Pringle had been with the family since her mother was a girl, but, like
+many red-haired men, he retained an appearance of youth. He wanted to
+know if he should take away the tea.
+
+She knew perfectly why he asked. He liked to have the tea-things put
+away before he had his own supper and began his arrangements for the
+family dinner. She felt that the crisis had come.
+
+If she said yes, she knew that her visitor would come just as tea had
+disappeared. If she said no, she would sit there alone, waiting for
+another half-hour, and when she finally did ring and tell Pringle he
+could take away the tea-things, he would look wise and reproachful.
+Nevertheless, she did say no, and Pringle with admirable self-control,
+withdrew.
+
+The afternoon seemed very quiet. Miss Severance became aware of all
+sorts of bells that she had never heard before--other door-bells,
+telephone-bells in the adjacent houses, loud, hideous bells on motor
+delivery-wagons, but not her own front door-bell.
+
+Her heart felt like lead. Things would never be the same now. Probably
+there was some explanation of his not coming, but it could never be
+really atoned for. The wild romance and confidence in this first visit
+could never be regained.
+
+And then there was a loud, quick ring at the bell, and at once he was
+in the room, breathing rapidly, as if he had run up-stairs or even from
+the corner. She could do nothing but stare at him. She had tried in
+the last ten minutes to remember what he looked like, and now she was
+astonished to find how exactly he looked as she remembered him.
+
+To her horror, the change between her late despair and her present
+joy was so extreme that she wanted to cry. The best she knew how to
+do was to pucker her face into a smile and to offer him those chilly
+finger-tips.
+
+He hardly took them, but said, as if announcing a black, but
+incontrovertible, fact:
+
+“You’re not a bit glad to see me.”
+
+“Oh, yes, I am,” she returned, with an attempt at an easy social
+manner. “Will you have some tea?”
+
+“But why aren’t you glad?”
+
+Miss Severance clasped her hands on the edge of the tea-tray and looked
+down. She pressed her palms together; she set her teeth, but the
+muscles in her throat went on contracting; and the heroic struggle was
+lost.
+
+“I thought you weren’t coming,” she said, and making no further effort
+to conceal the fact that her eyes were full of tears she looked
+straight up at him.
+
+He sat down beside her on the small, low sofa and put his hand on hers.
+
+“But I was perfectly certain to come,” he said very gently, “because,
+you see, I think I love you.”
+
+“Do you think I love you?” she asked, seeking information.
+
+“I can’t tell,” he answered. “Your being sorry I did not come doesn’t
+prove anything. We’ll see. You’re so wonderfully young, my dear!”
+
+“I don’t think eighteen is so young. My mother was married before she
+was twenty.”
+
+He sat silent for a few seconds, and she felt his hand shut more firmly
+on hers. Then he got up, and, pulling a chair to the opposite side of
+the table, said briskly:
+
+“And now give me some tea. I haven’t had any lunch.”
+
+“Oh, why not?” She blew her nose, tucked away her handkerchief, and
+began her operations on the tea-tray.
+
+“I work very hard,” he returned. “You don’t know what at, do you? I’m a
+statistician.”
+
+“What’s that?”
+
+“I make reports on properties, on financial ventures, for the firm
+I’m with, Benson & Honaton. They’re brokers. When they are asked to
+underwrite a scheme--”
+
+“Underwrite? I never heard that word.”
+
+The boy laughed.
+
+“You’ll hear it a good many times if our acquaintance continues.” Then
+more gravely, but quite parenthetically, he added: “If a firm puts up
+money for a business, they want to know all about it, of course. I tell
+them. I’ve just been doing a report this afternoon, a wonder; it’s what
+made me late. Shall I tell you about it?”
+
+She nodded with the same eagerness with which ten years before she
+might have answered an inquiry as to whether he should tell her a
+fairy-story.
+
+“Well, it was on a coal-mine in Pennsylvania. I’m afraid my report is
+going to be a disappointment to the firm. The mine’s good, a sound,
+rich vein, and the labor conditions aren’t bad; but there’s one fatal
+defect--a car shortage on the only railroad that reaches it. They can’t
+make a penny on their old mine until that’s met, and that can’t be
+straightened out for a year, anyhow; and so I shall report against it.”
+
+“Car shortage,” said Miss Severance. “I never should have thought of
+that. I think you must be wonderful.”
+
+He laughed.
+
+“I wish the firm thought so,” he said. “In a way they do; they pay
+attention to what I say, but they give me an awfully small salary. In
+fact,” he added briskly, “I have almost no money at all.” There was
+a pause, and he went on, “I suppose you know that when I was sitting
+beside you just now I wanted most terribly to kiss you.”
+
+“Oh, no!”
+
+“Oh, no? Oh, yes. I wanted to, but I didn’t. Don’t worry. I won’t for a
+long time, perhaps never.”
+
+“Never?” said Miss Severance, and she smiled.
+
+“I said _perhaps_ never. You can’t tell. Life turns up some awfully
+queer tricks now and then. Last night, for example. I walked into that
+ballroom thinking of nothing, and there you were--all the rest of the
+room like a sort of shrine for you. I said to a man I was with, ‘I
+want to meet the girl who looks like cream in a gold saucer,’ and he
+introduced us. What could be stranger than that? Not, as a matter of
+fact, that I ever thought love at first sight impossible, as so many
+people do.”
+
+“But if you don’t know the very first thing about a person--” Miss
+Severance began, but he interrupted:
+
+“You have to begin some time. Every pair of lovers have to have a first
+meeting, and those who fall in love at once are just that much further
+ahead.” He smiled. “I don’t even know your first name.”
+
+It seemed miraculous good fortune to have a first name.
+
+“Mathilde.”
+
+“Mathilde,” he repeated in a lower tone, and his eyes shone
+extraordinarily.
+
+Both of them took some time to recover from the intensity of this
+moment. She wanted to ask him his, but foreseeing that she would
+immediately be required to use it, and feeling unequal to such an
+adventure, she decided it would be wiser to wait. It was he who
+presently went on:
+
+“Isn’t it strange to know so little about each other? I rather like
+it. It’s so mad--like opening a chest of buried treasure. You don’t
+know what’s going to be in it, but you know it’s certain to be rare and
+desirable. What do you do, Mathilde? Live here with your father and
+mother?”
+
+She sat looking at him. The truth was that she found everything he said
+so unexpected and thrilling that now and then she lost all sense of
+being expected to answer.
+
+“Oh, yes,” she said, suddenly remembering. “I live here with my mother
+and stepfather. My mother has married again. She is Mrs. Vincent
+Farron.”
+
+“Didn’t I tell you life played strange tricks?” he exclaimed. He sprang
+up, and took a position on the hearth-rug. “I know all about him.
+I once reported on the Electric Equipment Company. That’s the same
+Farron, isn’t it? I believe that that company is the most efficient for
+its size in this country, in the world, perhaps. And Farron is your
+stepfather! He must be a wonder.”
+
+“Yes, I think he is.”
+
+“You don’t like him?”
+
+“I like him very much. I don’t _love_ him.”
+
+“The poor devil!”
+
+“I don’t believe he wants people to love him. It would bore him. No,
+that’s not quite just. He’s kind, wonderfully kind, but he has no
+little pleasantnesses. He says things in a very quiet way that make you
+feel he’s laughing at you, though he never does laugh. He said to me
+this morning at breakfast, ‘Well, Mathilde, was it a marvelous party?’
+That made me feel as if I used the word ‘marvelous’ all the time, not
+a bit as if he really wanted to know whether I had enjoyed myself last
+night.”
+
+“And did you?”
+
+She gave him a rapid smile and went on:
+
+“Now, my grandfather, my mother’s father--his name is Lanley--(Mr.
+Lanley evidently was not in active business, for it was plain that
+Wayne, searching his memory, found nothing)--my grandfather often
+scolds me terribly for my English,--says I talk like a barmaid,
+although I tell him he ought not to know how barmaids talk,--but
+he never makes me feel small. Sometimes Mr. Farron repeats, weeks
+afterward, something I’ve said, word for word, the way I said it. It
+makes it sound so foolish. I’d rather he said straight out that he
+thought I was a goose.”
+
+“Perhaps you wouldn’t if he did.”
+
+“I like people to be human. Mr. Farron’s not human.”
+
+“Doesn’t your mother think so?”
+
+“Mama thinks he’s perfect.”
+
+“How long have they been married?”
+
+“Ages! Five years!”
+
+“And they’re just as much in love?”
+
+Miss Severance looked at him.
+
+“In love?” she said. “At their age?” He laughed at her, and she added:
+“I don’t mean they are not fond of each other, but Mr. Farron must be
+forty-five. What I mean by love--” she hesitated.
+
+“Don’t stop.”
+
+But she did stop, for her quick ears told her that some one was coming,
+and, Pringle opening the door, Mrs. Farron came in.
+
+She was a very beautiful person. In her hat and veil, lit by the
+friendly light of her own drawing-room, she seemed so young as to be
+actually girlish, except that she was too stately and finished for
+such a word. Mathilde did not inherit her blondness from her mother.
+Mrs. Farron’s hair was a dark brown, with a shade of red in it where
+it curved behind her ears. She had the white skin that often goes with
+such hair, and a high, delicate color in her cheeks. Her eyebrows were
+fine and excessively dark--penciled, many people thought.
+
+“Mama, this is Mr. Wayne,” said Mathilde. Here was another tremendous
+moment crowding upon her--the introduction of her beautiful mother to
+this new friend, but even more, the introduction to her mother of this
+wonderful new friend, whose flavor of romance and interest no one,
+she supposed, could miss. Yet Mrs. Farron seemed to be taking it all
+very calmly, greeting him, taking his chair as being a trifle more
+comfortable than the others, trying to cover the doubt in her own mind
+whether she ought to recognize him as an old acquaintance. Was he new
+or one of the ones she had seen a dozen times before?
+
+There was nothing exactly artificial in Mrs. Farron’s manner, but, like
+a great singer who has learned perfect enunciation even in the most
+trivial sentences of every-day matters, she, as a great beauty, had
+learned the perfection of self-presentation, which probably did not
+wholly desert her even in the dentist’s chair.
+
+She drew off her long, pale, spotless gloves.
+
+“No tea, my dear,” she said. “I’ve just had it,” she added to Wayne,
+“with an old aunt of mine. Aunt Alberta,” she threw over her shoulder
+to Mathilde. “I am very unfortunate, Mr. Wayne; this town is full
+of my relations, tucked away in forgotten oases, and I’m their only
+connection with the vulgar, modern world. My aunt’s favorite excitement
+is disapproving of me. She was particularly trying to-day.” Mrs. Farron
+seemed to debate whether or not it would be tiresome to go thoroughly
+into the problem of Aunt Alberta, and to decide that it would; for she
+said, with an abrupt change, “Were you at this party last night that
+Mathilde enjoyed so much?”
+
+“Yes,” said Wayne. “Why weren’t you?”
+
+“I wasn’t asked. It isn’t the fashion to ask mothers and daughters to
+the same parties any more. We dance so much better than they do.” She
+leaned over, and rang the little enamel bell that dangled at the arm of
+her daughter’s sofa. “You can’t imagine, Mr. Wayne, how much better I
+dance than Mathilde.”
+
+“I hope it needn’t be left to the imagination.”
+
+“Oh, I’m not sure. That was the subject of Aunt Alberta’s talk this
+afternoon--my still dancing. She says she put on caps at thirty-five.”
+Mrs. Farron ran her eyebrows whimsically together and looked up at her
+daughter’s visitor.
+
+Mathilde was immensely grateful to her mother for taking so much
+trouble to be charming; only now she rather spoiled it by interrupting
+Wayne in the midst of a sentence, as if she had never been as much
+interested as she had seemed. Pringle had appeared in answer to her
+ring, and she asked him sharply:
+
+“Is Mr. Farron in?”
+
+“Mr. Farron’s in his room, Madam.”
+
+At this she appeared to give her attention wholly back to Wayne, but
+Mathilde knew that she was really busy composing an escape. She seemed
+to settle back, to encourage her visitor to talk indefinitely; but when
+the moment came for her to answer, she rose to her feet in the midst of
+her sentence, and, still talking, wandered to the door and disappeared.
+
+As the door shut firmly behind her Wayne said, as if there had been no
+interruption:
+
+“It was love you were speaking of, you know.”
+
+“But don’t you think my mother is marvelous?” she asked, not content to
+take up even the absorbing topic until this other matter had received
+due attention.
+
+“I should say so! But one isn’t, of course, overwhelmed to find that
+your mother is beautiful.”
+
+“And she’s so good!” Mathilde went on. “She’s always thinking of things
+to do for me and my grandfather and Mr. Farron and all these old, old
+relations. She went away just now only because she knows that as soon
+as Mr. Farron comes in he asks for her. She’s perfect to every one.”
+
+He came and sat down beside her again.
+
+“It’s going to be much easier for her daughter,” he said: “you have to
+be perfect only to one person. Now, what was it you were going to say
+about love?”
+
+Again they looked at each other; again Miss Severance had the sensation
+of drowning, of being submerged in some strange elixir.
+
+She was rescued by Pringle’s opening the door and announcing:
+
+“Mr. Lanley.”
+
+Wayne stood up.
+
+“I suppose I must go,” he said.
+
+“No, no,” she returned a little wildly, and added, as if this were the
+reason why she opposed his departure. “This is my grandfather. You must
+see him.”
+
+Wayne sat down again, in the chair on the other side of the tea-table.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Mathilde had been wrong in telling Wayne that her mother had gone
+upstairs in obedience to an impulse of kindness. She had gone to
+quiet a small, gnawing anxiety that had been with her all the day,
+a haunting, elusive, persistent impression that something was wrong
+between her and her husband.
+
+All the day, as she had gone about from one thing to another, her mind
+had been diligently seeking in some event of the outside world an
+explanation of a slight obscuration of his spirit; but her heart, more
+egotistical, had stoutly insisted that the cause must lie in her. Did
+he love her less? Was she losing her charm for him? Were five years the
+limit of a human relation like theirs? Was she to watch the dying down
+of his flame, and try to shelter and fan it back to life as she had
+seen so many other women do?
+
+Or was the trouble only that she had done something to wound his aloof
+and sensitive spirit, seldom aloof to her? Their intimate life had
+never been a calm one. Farron’s interests were concentrated, and his
+temperament was jealous. A woman couldn’t, as Adelaide sometimes had
+occasion to say to herself, keep men from making love to her; she did
+not always want to. Farron could be relentless, and she was not without
+a certain contemptuous obstinacy. Yet such conflicts as these she had
+learned not to dread, but sometimes deliberately to precipitate, for
+they ended always in a deeper sense of unity, and, on her part, in a
+fresh sense of his supremacy.
+
+If he had been like most of the men she knew, she would have assumed
+that something had gone wrong in business. With her first husband she
+had always been able to read in his face as he entered the house the
+full history of his business day. Sometimes she had felt that there was
+something insulting in the promptness of her inquiry, “Has anything
+gone wrong, Joe?” But Severance had never appeared to feel the insult;
+only as time went on, had grown more and more ready, as her interest
+became more and more lackadaisical, to pour out the troubles and,
+much more rarely, the joys of his day. One of the things she secretly
+admired most about Farron was his independence of her in such matters.
+No half-contemptuous question would elicit confidence from him, so that
+she had come to think it a great honor if by any chance he did drop
+her a hint as to the mood that his day’s work had occasioned. But for
+the most part he was unaffected by such matters. Newspaper attacks and
+business successes did not seem to reach the area where he suffered or
+rejoiced. They were to be dealt with or ignored, but they could neither
+shadow or elate him.
+
+So that not only egotism, but experience, bade her look to her own
+conduct for some explanation of the chilly little mist that had been
+between them for twenty-four hours.
+
+As soon as the drawing-room door closed behind her she ran up-stairs
+like a girl. There was no light in his study, and she went on into
+his bedroom. He was lying on the sofa; he had taken off his coat, and
+his arms were clasped under his head; he was smoking a long cigar. To
+find him idle was unusual. His was not a contemplative nature; a trade
+journal or a detective novel were the customary solace of odd moments
+like this.
+
+He did not move as she entered, but he turned his eyes slowly and
+seriously upon her. His eyes were black. He was a very dark man, with
+a smooth, brown skin and thick, fine hair, which clung closely to his
+broad, rather massive head. He was clean shaven, so that, as Adelaide
+loved to remember a friend of his had once suggested, his business
+competitors might take note of the stern lines of his mouth and chin.
+
+She came in quickly, and shut the door behind her, and then dropping on
+her knees beside him, she laid her head against his heart. He put out
+his hand, touched her face, and said:
+
+“Take off this veil.”
+
+The taking off of Adelaide’s veil was not a process to be accomplished
+ill-advisedly or lightly. Lucie, her maid, had put it on, with much
+gathering together and looking into the glass over her mistress’s
+shoulder, and it was held in place with shining pins and hair-pins. She
+lifted her head, sank back upon her heels, and raised her arms to the
+offending cobweb of black meshes, while her husband went on in a tone
+not absolutely denuded of reproach:
+
+“You’ve been in some time.”
+
+“Yes,”--she stuck the first pin into the upholstery of the sofa,--“but
+Pringle told me Mathilde had a visitor, and I thought it was my duty to
+stop and be a little parental.”
+
+“A young man?”
+
+“Yes. I forget his name--just like all these young men nowadays, alert
+and a little too much at his ease, but amusing in his way. He said,
+among other things--”
+
+But Farron, it appeared, was not exclusively interested in the words
+of Mathilde’s visitor; for at this instant, perceiving that his wife
+had disengaged herself from her veil, he sat up, caught her to him, and
+pressed his lips to hers.
+
+“O Adelaide!” he said, and it seemed to her he spoke with a sort of
+agony.
+
+She held him away from her.
+
+“Vincent, what is it?” she asked.
+
+“What is what?”
+
+“Is anything wrong?”
+
+“Between us?”
+
+Oh, she knew that method of his, to lead her on to make definite
+statements about impressions of which nothing definite could be
+accurately said.
+
+“No, I won’t be pinned down,” she said; “but I feel it, the way a
+rheumatic feels it, when the wind goes into the east.”
+
+He continued to look at her gravely; she thought he was going to speak
+when a knock came at the door. It was Pringle announcing the visit of
+Mr. Lanley.
+
+Adelaide rose slowly to her feet, and, walking to her husband’s
+dressing-table, repinned her hat, and caught up the little stray locks
+which grew in deep, sharp points at the back of her head.
+
+“You’ll come down, too?” she said.
+
+Farron was looking about for his coat, and as he put it on he observed
+dryly:
+
+“The young man is seeing all the family.”
+
+“Oh, he won’t mind,” she answered. “He probably hasn’t the slightest
+wish to see Mathilde alone. They both struck me as sorry when I left
+them; they were running down. You can’t imagine, Vin, how little
+romance there is among all these young people.”
+
+“They leave it to us,” he answered. This was exactly in his accustomed
+manner, and as they went down-stairs together her heart felt lighter,
+though the long, black, shiny pin stuck harmlessly into the upholstery
+of the sofa was like a mile-stone, for afterward she remembered that
+her questions had gone unanswered.
+
+Wayne was still in the drawing-room, and Mathilde, who loved her
+grandfather, was making a gentle fuss over him, a process which
+consisted largely in saying: “O Grandfather! Oh, you didn’t! O
+_Grandfather_!”
+
+Mr. Lanley, though a small man and now over sixty, had a distinct
+presence. He wore excellent gray clothes of the same shade as his hair,
+and out of this neutrality of tint his bright, brown eyes sparkled
+piercingly.
+
+He had begun life with the assumption that to be a New York Lanley was
+in itself enough, a comfortable creed in which many of his relations
+had obscurely lived and died. But before he was graduated from Columbia
+College he began to doubt whether the profession of being an aristocrat
+in a democracy was a man’s job. At no time in his life did he deny
+the value of birth and breeding; but he came to regard them as a
+responsibility solemn and often irritating to those who did not possess
+them, though he was no longer content with the current views of his
+family that they were a sufficient attainment in themselves.
+
+He was graduated from college in 1873, and after a summer at the family
+place on the Hudson, hot, fertile, and inaccessible, which his sister
+Alberta was at that time occupying, he had arranged a trip round the
+world. September of that year brought the great panic, and swept away
+many larger and solider fortunes than the Lanleys’. Mr. Lanley decided
+that he must go to work, though he abandoned his traditions no further
+than to study law. His ancestors, like many of the aristocrats of the
+early days, had allowed their opinions of fashion to influence too much
+their selection of real estate. All through the late seventies, while
+his brothers and sisters were clinging sentimentally to brownstone
+fronts in Stuyvesant Square or red-brick facades in Great Jones Street,
+Mr. Lanley himself, unaffected by recollections of Uncle Joel’s
+death or grandma’s marriage, had been parting with his share in such
+properties, and investing along the east side of the park.
+
+By the time he was forty he was once more a fairly rich man. He
+had left the practice of law to become the president of the Peter
+Stuyvesant Trust Company, for which he had been counsel. After fifteen
+years he had retired from this, too, and had become, what he insisted
+nature had always intended him to be, a gentleman of leisure. He
+retained a directorship in the trust company, was a trustee of his
+university, and was a thorny and inquiring member of many charitable
+boards.
+
+He prided himself on having emancipated himself from the ideas of
+his own generation. It bored him to listen to his cousins lamenting
+the vulgarities of modern life, the lack of elegance in present-day
+English, or to hear them explain as they borrowed money from him the
+sort of thing a gentleman could or could not do for a living. But on
+the subject of what a lady might do he still held fixed and unalterable
+notions; nor did he ever find it tiresome to hear his own daughter
+expound the axioms of this subject with a finality he had taught her
+in her youth. Having freed himself from fine-gentlemanism, he had
+quite unconsciously fallen the more easily a prey to fine-ladyism; all
+his conservatism had gone into that, as a man, forced to give up his
+garden, might cherish one lovely potted plant.
+
+At a time when private schools were beginning to flourish once more he
+had been careful to educate Adelaide entirely at home with governesses.
+Every summer he took her abroad, and showed her, and talked with
+her about, books, pictures, and buildings; he inoculated her with
+such fundamentals as that a lady never wears imitation lace on her
+underclothes, and the past of the verb to “eat” is pronounced to rhyme
+with “bet.” She spoke French and German fluently, and could read
+Italian. He considered her a perfectly educated woman. She knew nothing
+of business, political economy, politics, or science. He himself had
+never been deeply interested in American politics, though very familiar
+with the lives of English statesmen. He was a great reader of memoirs
+and of the novels of Disraeli and Trollope. Of late he had taken to
+motoring.
+
+He kissed his daughter and nodded--a real New York nod--to his
+son-in-law.
+
+“I’ve come to tell you, Adelaide,” he began.
+
+“Such a thing!” murmured Mathilde, shaking her golden head above the
+cup of tea she was making for him, making in just the way he liked; for
+she was a little person who remembered people’s tastes.
+
+“I thought you’d rather hear it than read it in the papers.”
+
+“Goodness, Papa, you talk as if you had been getting married!”
+
+“No.” Mr. Lanley hesitated, and looked up at her brightly. “No; but I
+think I did have a proposal the other day.”
+
+“From Mrs. Baxter?” asked Adelaide. This was almost war. Mrs. Baxter
+was a regal and possessive widow from Baltimore whose long and regular
+visits to Mr. Lanley had once occasioned his family some alarm, though
+time had now given them a certain institutional safety.
+
+Her father was not flurried by the reference.
+
+“No,” he said; “though she writes me, I’m glad to say, that she is
+coming soon.”
+
+“You don’t tell me!” said Adelaide. The cream of the winter season was
+usually the time Mrs. Baxter selected for her visit.
+
+Her father did not notice her.
+
+“If Mrs. Baxter should ever propose to me,” he went on thoughtfully, “I
+shouldn’t refuse. I don’t think I should have the--”
+
+“The chance?” said his daughter.
+
+“I was going to say the fortitude. But this,” he went on, “was an
+elderly cousin, who expressed a wish to come and be my housekeeper.
+Perhaps matrimony was not intended. Mathilde, my dear, how does one
+tell nowadays whether one is being proposed to or not?”
+
+In this poignant and unexpected crisis Mathilde turned slowly and
+painfully crimson. How _did_ one tell? It was a question which at the
+moment was anything but clear to her.
+
+“I should always assume it in doubtful cases, sir,” said Wayne, very
+distinctly. He and Mathilde did not even glance at each other.
+
+“It wasn’t your proposal that you came to announce to us, though, was
+it, Papa?” said Adelaide.
+
+“No,” answered Mr. Lanley. “The fact is, I’ve been arrested.”
+
+“Again?”
+
+“Yes; most unjustly, most unjustly.” His brows contracted, and then
+relaxed at a happy memory. “It’s the long, low build of the car. It
+looks so powerful that the police won’t give you a chance. It was
+nosing through the park--”
+
+“At about thirty miles an hour,” said Farron.
+
+“Well, not a bit over thirty-five. A lovely morning, no one in sight,
+I may have let her out a little. All of a sudden one of these mounted
+fellows jumped out from the bushes along the bridle-path. They’re a
+fine-looking lot, Vincent.”
+
+Farron asked who the judge was, and, Mr. Lanley named him--named him
+slightly wrong, and Farron corrected him.
+
+“I’ll get you off,” he said.
+
+Adelaide looked up at her husband admiringly. This was the aspect of
+him that she loved best. It seemed to her like magic what Vincent could
+do. Her father, she thought, took it very calmly. What would have
+happened to him if she had not brought Farron into the family to rescue
+and protect? The visiting boy, she noticed, was properly impressed. She
+saw him give Farron quite a dog-like look as he took his departure.
+To Mathilde he only bowed. No arrangements had been made for a future
+meeting. Mathilde tried to convey to him in a prolonged look that if he
+would wait only five minutes all would be well, that her grandfather
+never paid long visits; but the door closed behind him. She became
+immediately overwhelmed by the fear, which had an element of desire in
+it, too, that her family would fall to discussing him, would question
+her as to how long she had known him, and why she liked him, and what
+they talked about, and whether she had been expecting a visit, sitting
+there in her best dress. Then slowly she took in the fact that they
+were going to talk about nothing but Mr. Lanley’s arrest. She marveled
+at the obtuseness of older people--to have stood at the red-hot center
+of youth and love and not even to know it! She drew her shoulders
+together, feeling very lonely and strong. As they talked, she allowed
+her eyes to rest first on one speaker and then on the other, as if she
+were following each word of the discussion. As a matter of fact she was
+rehearsing with an inner voice the tone of Wayne’s voice when he had
+said that he loved her.
+
+Then suddenly she decided that she would be much happier alone in
+her own room. She rose, patted her grandfather on the shoulder, and
+prepared to escape. He, not wishing to be interrupted at the moment,
+patted her hand in return.
+
+“Hello!” he exclaimed. “Hands are cold, my dear.”
+
+She caught Farron’s cool, black eyes, and surprised herself by
+answering:
+
+“Yes; but, then, they always are.” This was quite untrue, but every one
+was perfectly satisfied with it.
+
+As she left the room Mr. Lanley was saying:
+
+“Yes, I don’t want to go to Blackwell’s Island. Lovely spot, of course.
+My grandfather used to tell me he remembered it when the Blackwell
+family still lived there. But I shouldn’t care to wear stripes--except
+for the pleasure of telling Alberta about it. It would give her a
+year’s occupation, her suffering over my disgrace, wouldn’t it,
+Adelaide?”
+
+“She’d scold me,” said Adelaide, looking beautifully martyred. Then
+turning to her husband, she asked. “Will it be very difficult, Vincent,
+getting papa off?” She wanted it to be difficult, she wanted him to
+give her material out of which she could form a picture of him as a
+savior; but he only shook his head and said:
+
+“That young man is in love with Mathilde.”
+
+“O Vin! Those children?”
+
+Mr. Lanley pricked up his ears like a terrier.
+
+“In love?” he exclaimed. “And who is he? Not one of the East Sussex
+Waynes, I hope. Vulgar people. They always were; began life as
+auctioneers in my father’s time. Is he one of those, Adelaide?”
+
+“I have no idea who he is, if any one,” said Adelaide. “I never saw or
+heard of him before this afternoon.”
+
+“And may I ask,” said her father, “if you intend to let your daughter
+become engaged to a young man of whom you know nothing whatsoever?”
+
+Adelaide looked extremely languid, one of her methods of showing
+annoyance.
+
+“Really, Papa,” she said, “the fact that he has come once to pay
+an afternoon visit to Mathilde does not, it seems to me, make an
+engagement inevitable. My child is not absolutely repellent, you know,
+and a good many young men come to the house.” Then suddenly remembering
+that her oracle had already spoken on this subject, she asked more
+humbly, “What was it made you say he was in love, Vin?”
+
+“Just an impression,” said Farron.
+
+Mr. Lanley had been thinking it over.
+
+“It was not the custom in my day,” he began, and then remembering that
+this was one of his sister Alberta’s favorite openings, he changed the
+form of his sentence. “I never allowed you to see stray young men--”
+
+His daughter interrupted him.
+
+“But I always saw them, Papa. I used to let them come early in the
+afternoon before you came in.”
+
+In his heart Mr. Lanley doubted that this had been a regular custom,
+but he knew it would be unwise to argue the point; so he started fresh.
+
+“When a young man is attentive to a girl like Mathilde--”
+
+“But he isn’t,” said Adelaide. “At least not what I should have called
+attentive when I was a girl.”
+
+“Your experience was not long, my dear. You were married at Mathilde’s
+age.”
+
+“You may be sure of one thing, Papa, that I don’t desire an early
+marriage for my daughter.”
+
+“Very likely,” returned her father, getting up, and buttoning the last
+button of his coat; “but you may have noticed that we can’t always get
+just what we most desire for our children.”
+
+When he had gone, Vincent looked at his wife and smiled, but smiled
+without approval. She twisted her shoulders.
+
+“Oh, I suppose so,” she said; “but I do so hate to be scolded about the
+way I bring up Mathilde.”
+
+“Or about anything else, my dear.”
+
+“I don’t hate to be scolded by you,” she returned. “In fact, I
+sometimes get a sort of servile enjoyment from it. Besides,” she went
+on, “as a matter of fact, I bring Mathilde up particularly well, quite
+unlike these wild young women I see everywhere else. She tells me
+everything, and I have perfectly the power of making her hate any one I
+disapprove of. But you’ll try and find out something about this young
+man, won’t you, Vin?”
+
+“We’ll have a full report on him to-morrow. Do you know what his first
+name is?”
+
+“At the moment I don’t recall his last. Oh, yes--Wayne. I’ll ask
+Mathilde when we go up-stairs.”
+
+From her own bedroom door she called up.
+
+“Mathilde, what is the name of your young friend?”
+
+There was a little pause before Mathilde answered that she was sorry,
+but she didn’t know.
+
+Mrs. Farron turned to her husband and made a little gesture to indicate
+that this ignorance on the girl’s part did not bear out his theory;
+but she saw that he did not admit it, that he clung still to his
+impression. “And Vincent’s impressions--” she said to herself as she
+went in to dress.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Mr. Lanley was ruffled as he left his daughter’s drawing-room.
+
+“As if I had wanted her to marry at eighteen,” he said to himself; and
+he took his hat crossly from Pringle and set it hard on his head at
+the slight angle which he preferred. Then reflecting that Pringle was
+not in any way involved, he unbent slightly, and said something that
+sounded like:
+
+“Haryer, Pringle?”
+
+Pringle, despite his stalwart masculine appearance, had in speaking a
+surprisingly high, squeaky voice.
+
+“I keep my health, thank you, sir,” he said. “Anna has been somewhat
+ailing.” Anna was his wife, to whom he usually referred as “Mrs.
+Pringle”; but he made an exception in speaking to Mr. Lanley, for she
+had once been the Lanleys’ kitchen-maid. “Your car, sir?”
+
+No, Mr. Lanley was walking--walking, indeed, more quickly than usual
+under the stimulus of annoyance.
+
+Nothing had ever happened that made him suffer as he had suffered
+through his daughter’s divorce. Divorce was one of the modern ideas
+which he had imagined he had accepted. As a lawyer he had expressed
+himself as willing always to take the lady’s side; but in the cases
+which he actually took he liked to believe that the wife was perfect
+and the husband inexcusable. He could not comfort himself with any such
+belief in his daughter’s case.
+
+Adelaide’s conduct had been, as far as he could see, irreproachable;
+but, then, so had Severance’s. This was what had made the gossip,
+almost the scandal, of the thing. Even his sister Alberta had whispered
+to him that if Severance had been unfaithful to Adelaide--But poor
+Severance had not been unfaithful; he had not even become indifferent.
+He loved his wife, he said, as much as on the day he married her. He
+was extremely unhappy. Mr. Lanley grew to dread the visits of his huge,
+blond son-in-law, who used actually to sob in the library, and ask
+for explanations of something which Mr. Lanley had never been able to
+understand.
+
+And how obstinate Adelaide had been! She, who had been such a docile
+girl, and then for many years so completely under the thumb of her
+splendid-looking husband, had suddenly become utterly intractable. She
+would listen to no reason and brook no delay. She had been willing
+enough to explain; she had explained repeatedly, but the trouble was he
+could not understand the explanation. She did not love her husband any
+more, she said. Mr. Lanley pointed out to her that this was no legal
+grounds for a divorce.
+
+“Yes, but I look down upon him,” she went on.
+
+“On poor Joe?” her father had asked innocently, and had then discovered
+that this was the wrong thing to say. She had burst out, “Poor Joe!
+poor Joe!” That was the way every one considered him. Was it her fault
+if he excited pity and contempt instead of love and respect? Her love,
+she intimated, had been of a peculiarly eternal sort; Severance himself
+was to blame for its extinction. Mr. Lanley discovered that in some way
+she considered the intemperance of Severance’s habits to be involved.
+But this was absurd. It was true that for a year or two Severance
+had taken to drinking rather more than was wise; but, Mr. Lanley had
+thought at the time, the poor young man had not needed any artificial
+stimulant in the days when Adelaide had fully and constantly admired
+him. He had seen Severance come home several times not exactly drunk,
+but rather more boyishly boastful and hilarious than usual. Even Mr.
+Lanley, a naturally temperate man, had not found Joe repellent in the
+circumstances. Afterward he had been thankful for this weakness: it
+gave him the only foundation on which he could build a case not for the
+courts, of course, but for the world. Unfortunately, however, Severance
+had pulled up before there was any question of divorce.
+
+That was another confusing fact. Adelaide had managed him so
+beautifully. Her father had not known her wonderful powers until he saw
+the skill and patience with which she had dealt with Joe Severance’s
+drinking. Joe himself was eager to own that he owed his cure entirely
+to her. Mr. Lanley had been proud of her; she had turned out, he
+thought, just what a woman ought to be; and then, on top of it, she had
+come to him one day and announced that she would never live with Joe
+again.
+
+“But why not?” he had asked.
+
+“Because I don’t love him,” she had said.
+
+Then Mr. Lanley knew how little his acceptance of the idea of divorce
+in general had reconciled him to the idea of the divorce of his own
+daughter--a Lanley--Mrs. Adelaide Lanley, Mrs. Adelaide Severance. His
+sense of fitness was shocked, though he pleaded with her first on the
+ground of duty, and then under the threat of scandal. With her beauty
+and Severance’s popularity, for from his college days he had been
+extremely popular with men, the divorce excited uncommon interest.
+Severance’s unconcealed grief, a rather large circle of devoted friends
+in whom he confided, and the fact that Adelaide had to go to Nevada to
+get her divorce, led most people to believe that she had simply found
+some one she liked better. Mr. Lanley would have believed it himself,
+but he couldn’t. Farron had not appeared until she had been divorced
+for several years.
+
+Lanley still cherished an affection for Severance, who had very soon
+married again, a local belle in the Massachusetts manufacturing town
+where he now lived. She was said to resemble Adelaide.
+
+No, Mr. Lanley could not see that he had had anything to reproach
+himself with in regard to his daughter’s first marriage. They had been
+young, of course; all the better. He had known the Severances for
+years; and Joe was handsome, hard working, had rowed on his crew, and
+every one spoke well of him. Certainly they had been in love--more in
+love than he liked to see two people, at least when one of them was
+his own daughter. He had suggested their waiting a year or two, but no
+one had backed him up. The Severances had been eager for the marriage,
+naturally. Mr. Lanley could still see the young couple as they turned
+from the altar, young, beautiful, and confident.
+
+He had missed his daughter terribly, not only her physical presence in
+the house, but the exercise of his influence over her, which in old
+times had been perhaps a trifle autocratic. He had hated being told
+what Joe thought and said; yet he could hardly object to her docility.
+That was the way he had brought her up. He did not reckon pliancy in
+a woman as a weakness; or if he had had any temptation to do so, it
+had vanished in the period when Joe Severance had taken to drink. In
+that crisis Adelaide had been anything but weak. Every one had been so
+grateful to her,--he and Joe and the Severances,--and then immediately
+afterward the crash came.
+
+Women! Mr. Lanley shook his head, still moving briskly northward with
+that quick jaunty walk of his. And this second marriage--what about
+that? They seemed happy. Farron was a fine fellow, but not, it seemed
+to him, so attractive to a woman as Severance. Could he hold a woman
+like Adelaide? He wasn’t a man to stand any nonsense, though, and Mr.
+Lanley nodded; then, as it were, withdrew the nod on remembering that
+poor Joe had not wanted to stand any nonsense either. What in similar
+circumstances could Farron do? Adelaide always resented his asking how
+things were going, but how could he help being anxious? How could any
+one rest content on a hillside who had once been blown up by a volcano?
+
+He might not have been any more content if he had stayed to dinner at
+his son-in-law’s, as he had been asked to do. The Farrons were alone.
+Mathilde was going to a dinner, with a dance after. She came into the
+dining-room to say good night and to promise to be home early, not to
+stay and dance. She was not allowed two parties on successive nights,
+not because her health was anything but robust, but rather because her
+mother considered her too young for such vulgar excess.
+
+When she had gone, Farron observed:
+
+“That child has a will of iron.”
+
+“Vincent!” said his wife. “She does everything I suggest to her.”
+
+“Her will just now is to please you in everything. Wait until she
+rebels.”
+
+“But women don’t rebel against the people they love. I don’t have to
+tell you that, do I? I never have to manœuver the child, never have to
+coax or charm her to do what I want.”
+
+He smiled at her across the table.
+
+“You have great faith in those methods, haven’t you?”
+
+“They work, Vin.”
+
+He nodded as if no one knew that better than he.
+
+Soon after dinner he went up-stairs to write some letters. She followed
+him about ten o’clock. She came and leaned one hand on his shoulder and
+one on his desk.
+
+“Still working?” she said. She had been aware of no desire to see what
+he was writing, but she was instantly aware that his blotting-paper had
+fallen across the sheet, that the sheet was not a piece of note-paper,
+but one of a large pad on which he had been apparently making notes.
+
+Her diamond bracelet had slipped down her wrist and lay upon the
+blotting-paper; he slowly and carefully pushed it up her slim, round
+arm until it once more clung in place.
+
+“I’ve nearly finished,” he said; and to her ears there was some under
+sound of pain or of constraint in his tone.
+
+A little later he strolled, still dressed, into her room. She was
+already in bed, and he came and sat on the foot of the bed, with one
+foot tucked under him and his arms folded.
+
+Her mind during the interval had been exclusively occupied with the
+position of that piece of blotting-paper. Could it be there was some
+other woman whose ghost-like presence she was just beginning to feel
+haunting their relation? The impersonality of Vincent’s manner was an
+armor against such attacks, but this armor, as Adelaide knew, was more
+apparent than real. If one could get beyond that, one was at the very
+heart of the man. If some fortuitous circumstance had brought a sudden
+accidental intimacy between him and another woman--What woman loving
+strength and power could resist the sight of Vincent in action, Vincent
+as she saw him?
+
+Yet with a good capacity for believing the worst of her
+fellow-creatures, Adelaide did not really believe in the other woman.
+That, she knew, would bring a change in the fundamentals of her
+relationship with her husband. This was only a barrier that left the
+relation itself untouched.
+
+Before very long she began to think the situation was all in her own
+imagination. He was so amused, so eager to talk. Silent as he was apt
+to be with the rest of the world, with her he sometimes showed a love
+of gossip that enchanted her. And now it seemed to her that he was
+leading her on from subject to subject through a childish dislike to
+going to bed. They were actually giggling over Mr. Lanley’s adventure
+when a motor-brake squeaked in the silence of the night, a motor-door
+slammed. For the first time Adelaide remembered her daughter. It
+was after twelve o’clock. A knock came at her door. She wrapped her
+swan’s-down garment about her and went to the door.
+
+“O Mama, have you been worried?” the girl asked. She was standing in
+the narrow corridor, with her arms full of shining favors; there could
+be no question whatever that she had stayed for the dance. “Are you
+angry? Have I been keeping you awake?”
+
+“I thought you would have been home an hour ago.”
+
+“I know. I want to tell you about it. Mama, how lovely you look in that
+blue thing! Won’t you come up-stairs with me while I undress?”
+
+Adelaide shook her head.
+
+“Not to-night,” she answered.
+
+“You are angry with me,” the girl went on. “But if you will come, I
+will explain. I have something to tell you, Mama.”
+
+Mrs. Farron’s heart stood still. The phrase could mean only one thing.
+She went up-stairs with her daughter, sent the maid away, and herself
+began to undo the soft, pink silk.
+
+“It needs an extra hook,” she murmured. “I told her it did.”
+
+Mathilde craned her neck over her shoulder, as if she had ever been
+able to see the middle of her back.
+
+“But it doesn’t show, does it?” she asked.
+
+“It perfectly well might.”
+
+Mathilde stepped out of her dress, and flung it over a chair. In her
+short petticoat, with her ankles showing and her arms bare, she looked
+like a very young girl, and when she put up her hands and took the pins
+out of her hair, so that it fell over her shoulders, she might have
+been a child.
+
+The silence began to grow awkward. Mathilde put on her dressing-gown;
+it was perfectly straight, and made her look like a little white
+column. A glass of milk and some biscuits were waiting for her. She
+pushed a chair near her fire for her mother, and herself remained
+standing, with her glass of milk in her hand.
+
+“Mama,” she said suddenly, “I suppose I’m what you’d call engaged.”
+
+“O Mathilde! not to that boy who was here to-day?”
+
+“Why not to him?”
+
+“I know nothing about him.”
+
+“I don’t know very much myself. Yes, it’s Pete Wayne. Pierson his name
+is, but every one calls him Pete. How strange it was that I did not
+even know his first name when you asked me!”
+
+A single ray pierced Mrs. Farron’s depression: Vincent had known,
+Vincent’s infallibility was confirmed. She did not know what to say.
+She sat looking sadly, obliquely at the floor like a person who has
+been aggrieved. She was wondering whether she should be to her daughter
+a comrade or a ruler, a confederate or a policeman. Of course in all
+probability the thing would be better stopped. But could this be
+accomplished by immediate action, or could she invite confidences and
+yet commit herself to nothing?
+
+She raised her eyes.
+
+“I do not approve of youthful marriages,” she said.
+
+“O Mama! And you were only eighteen yourself.”
+
+“That is why.”
+
+Mathilde was frightened not only by the intense bitterness of her
+mother’s tone, but also by the obvious fact that she was face to face
+with the explanation of the separation of her parents. She had been
+only nine years old at the time. She had loved her father, had found
+him a better playfellow than her mother, had wept bitterly at parting
+with him, and had missed him. And then gradually her mother, who had
+before seemed like a beautiful, but remote, princess, had begun to make
+of her an intimate and grown-up friend, to consult her and read with
+her and arrange happinesses in her life, to win, to, if the truth must
+be told, reconquer her. Perhaps even Adelaide would not have succeeded
+so easily in effacing Severance’s image had not he himself so quickly
+remarried. Mathilde went several times to stay with the new household
+after Adelaide in secret, tearful conference with her father had been
+forced to consent.
+
+To Mathilde these visits had been an unacknowledged torture. She never
+knew quite what to mention and what to leave untouched. There was
+always a constraint between the three of them. Her father, when alone
+with her, would question her, with strange, eager pauses, as to how
+her mother looked. Her mother’s successor, whom she could not really
+like, would question her more searchingly, more embarrassingly, with
+an ill-concealed note of jealousy in every word. Even at twelve years
+Mathilde was shocked by the strain of hatred in her father’s new wife,
+who seemed to reproach her for fashion and fineness and fastidiousness,
+qualities of which the girl was utterly unaware. She could have loved
+her little half-brother when he appeared upon the scene, but Mrs.
+Severance did not encourage the bond, and gradually Mathilde’s visits
+to her father ceased.
+
+As a child she had been curious about the reasons for the parting, but
+as she grew older it had seemed mere loyalty to accept the fact without
+asking why; she had perhaps not wanted to know why. But now, she saw,
+she was to hear.
+
+“Mathilde, do you still love your father?”
+
+“I think I do, Mama. I feel very sorry for him.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“I don’t know why. I dare say he is happy.”
+
+“I dare say he is, poor Joe.” Adelaide paused. “Well, my dear, that
+was the reason of our parting. One can pity a son or a brother, but
+not a husband. Weakness kills love. A woman cannot be the leader, the
+guide, and keep any romance. O Mathilde, I never want you to feel the
+humiliation of finding yourself stronger than the man you love. That is
+why I left your father, and my justification is his present happiness.
+This inferior little person he has married, she does as well. Any one
+would have done as well.”
+
+Mathilde was puzzled by her mother’s evident conviction that the
+explanation was complete. She asked after a moment:
+
+“But what was it that made you think at first that you did love him,
+Mama?”
+
+“Just what makes you think you love this boy--youth, flattery, desire
+to love. He was magnificently handsome, your father. I saw him admired
+by other men, apparently a master; I was too young to judge, my dear.
+You shan’t be allowed to make that mistake; you shall have time to
+consider.”
+
+Mathilde smiled.
+
+“I don’t want time,” she said.
+
+“I did not know I did.”
+
+“I don’t think I feel about love as you do,” said the girl, slowly.
+
+“Every woman does.”
+
+Mathilde shook her head.
+
+“It’s just Pete as he is that I love. I don’t care which of us leads.”
+
+“But you will.”
+
+The girl had not yet reached a point where she could describe the very
+essence of her passion; she had to let this go. After a moment she said:
+
+“I see now why you chose Mr. Farron.”
+
+“You mean you have never seen before?”
+
+“Not so clearly.”
+
+Mrs. Farron bit her lips. To have missed understanding this seemed a
+sufficient proof of immaturity. She rose.
+
+“Well, my darling,” she said in a tone of extreme reasonableness, “we
+shall decide nothing to-night. I know nothing against Mr. Wayne. He may
+be just the right person. We must see more of him. Do you know anything
+about his family?”
+
+Mathilde shook her head. “He lives alone with his mother. His father is
+dead. She’s very good and interested in drunkards.”
+
+“In _drunkards_?” Mrs. Farron just shut her eyes a second.
+
+“She has a mission that reforms them.”
+
+“Is that his profession, too?”
+
+“Oh, no. He’s in Wall Street--quite a good firm. O Mama, don’t sigh
+like that! We know we can’t be married at once. We are reasonable. You
+think not, because this has all happened so suddenly; but great things
+do happen suddenly. We love each other. That’s all I wanted to tell
+you.”
+
+“Love!” Adelaide looked at the little person before her, tried to
+recall the fading image of the young man, and then thought of the
+dominating figure in her own life. “My dear, you have no idea what love
+is.”
+
+She took no notice of the queer, steady look the girl gave her in
+return. She went down-stairs. She had been gone more than an hour, and
+she knew that Vincent would have been long since asleep. He had, and
+prided himself on having, a great capacity for sleep. She tiptoed past
+his door, stole into her own room, and then, glancing in the direction
+of his, was startled to see that a light was burning. She went in; he
+was reading, and once again, as his eyes turned toward her, she thought
+she saw the same tragic appeal that she had felt that afternoon in his
+kiss. Trembling, she threw herself down beside him, clasping him to her.
+
+“O Vincent! oh, my dear!” she whispered, and began to cry. He did not
+ask her why she was crying; she wished that he would; his silence
+admitted that he knew of some adequate reason.
+
+“I feel that there is something wrong,” she sobbed, “something terribly
+wrong.”
+
+“Nothing could go wrong between you and me, my darling,” he answered.
+His tone comforted, his touch was a comfort. Perhaps she was a coward,
+she said to herself, but she questioned him no further.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Wayne was not so prompt as Mathilde in making the announcement of their
+engagement. He and his mother breakfasted together rather hastily, for
+she was going to court that morning to testify in favor of one of her
+backsliding inebriates, and Wayne had not found the moment to introduce
+his own affairs.
+
+That afternoon he came home earlier than usual; it was not five o’clock.
+He passed Dr. Parret’s flat on the first floor--Dr. Lily MacComb Parret.
+She was a great friend of his, and he felt a decided temptation to go in
+and tell her the news first; but reflecting that no one ought to hear it
+before his mother, he went on up-stairs. He lived on the fifth floor.
+
+He opened the door of the flat and went into the sitting-room. It was
+empty. He lighted the gas, which flared up, squeaking like a bagpipe. The
+room was square and crowded. Shelves ran all the way round it, tightly
+filled with books. In the center was a large writing-table, littered with
+papers, and on each side of the fireplace stood two worn, but
+comfortable, arm-chairs, each with a reading-lamp at its side. There was
+nothing beautiful in the furniture, and yet the room had its own charm.
+The house was a corner house and had once been a single dwelling. The
+shape of the room, its woodwork, its doors, its flat, white marble
+mantelpiece, belonged to an era of simple taste and good workmanship; but
+the greatest charm of the room was the view from the windows, of which it
+had four, two that looked east and two south, and gave a glimpse of the
+East River and its bridges.
+
+Wayne was not sorry his mother was out. He had begun to dread the
+announcement he had to make. At first he had thought only of her keen
+interest in his affairs, but later he had come to consider what this
+particular piece of news would mean to her. Say what you will, he
+thought, to tell your mother of your engagement is a little like casting
+off an old love.
+
+Ever since he could remember, he and his mother had lived in the
+happiest comradeship. His father, a promising young doctor, had died
+within a few years of his marriage. Pete had been brought up by his
+mother, but he had very little remembrance of any process of molding. It
+seemed to him as if they had lived in a sort of partnership since he had
+been able to walk and talk. It had been as natural for him to spend his
+hours after school in stamping and sealing her large correspondence as it
+had been for her to pinch and arrange for years so as to send him to the
+university from which his father had been graduated. She would have been
+glad, he knew, if he had decided to follow his father in the study of
+medicine, but he recoiled from so long a period of dependence; he liked
+to think that he brought to his financial reports something of a
+scientific inheritance.
+
+She had, he thought, every virtue that a mother could have, and she
+combined them with a gaiety of spirit that made her take her virtues as
+if they were the most delightful amusements. It was of this gaiety that
+he had first thought until Mathilde had pointed out to him that there was
+tragedy in the situation. “What will your mother do without you?” the
+girl kept saying. There was indeed nothing in his mother’s life that
+could fill the vacancy he would leave. She had few intimate
+relationships. For all her devotion to her drunkards, he was the only
+personal happiness in her life.
+
+He went into the kitchen in search of her. This was evidently one of
+their servant’s uncounted hours. While he was making himself some tea he
+heard his mother’s key in the door. He called to her, and she appeared.
+
+“Why my hat, Mother dear?” he asked gently as he kissed her.
+
+Mrs. Wayne smiled absently, and put up her hand to the soft felt hat she
+was wearing.
+
+“I just went out to post some letters,” she said, as if this were a
+complete explanation; then she removed a mackintosh that she happened to
+have on, though the day was fine. She was then seen to be wearing a dark
+skirt and a neat plain shirt that was open at the throat. Though no
+longer young, she somehow suggested a boy--a boy rather overtrained; she
+was far more boyish than Wayne. She had a certain queer beauty, too;
+not beauty of Adelaide’s type, of structure and coloring and elegance,
+but beauty of expression. Life itself had written some fine lines of
+humor and resolve upon her face, and her blue-gray eyes seemed actually
+to flare with hope and intention. Her hair was of that light-brown shade
+in which plentiful gray made little change of shade; it was wound in a
+knot at the back of her head and gave her trouble. She was always
+pushing it up and repinning it into place, as if it were too heavy for
+her small head.
+
+“I wonder if there’s anything to eat in the house,” her son said.
+
+“I wonder.” They moved together toward the ice-box.
+
+“Mother,” said Pete, “that piece of pie has been in the ice-box at least
+three days. Let’s throw it away.”
+
+She took the saucer thoughtfully.
+
+“I like it so much,” she said.
+
+“Then why don’t you eat it?”
+
+“It’s not good for me.” She let Wayne take the saucer. “What do you
+know?” she asked.
+
+She had adopted slang as she adopted most labor-saving devices.
+
+“Well, I do know something new,” said Wayne. He sat down on the kitchen
+table and poured out his tea. “New as the garden of Eden. I’m in love.”
+
+“O Pete!” his mother cried, and the purest, most conventional maternal
+agony was in the tone. For an instant, crushed and terrified, she looked
+at him; and then something gay and impish appeared in her eyes, and she
+asked with a grin:
+
+“Is it some one perfectly awful?”
+
+“I’m afraid you’ll think so. She’s a sheltered, young, luxurious child,
+with birth, breeding, and money, everything you hate most.”
+
+“O Pete!” she said again, but this time with a sort of sad resignation.
+Then shaking her head as if to say that she wasn’t, after all, as narrow
+as he thought, she hitched her chair nearer the table and said eagerly,
+“Well, tell me all about it.”
+
+Wayne looked down at his mother as she sat opposite him, with her elbows
+on the table, as keen as a child and as lively as a cricket. He asked
+himself if he had not drifted into a needlessly sentimental state of mind
+about her. He even asked himself, as he had done once or twice before in
+his life, whether her love for him implied the slightest dependence upon
+his society. Wasn’t it perfectly possible that his going would free her
+life, would make it easier instead of harder? Every man, he knew, felt
+the element of freedom beneath the despair of breaking even the tenderest
+of ties. Some women, he supposed, might feel the same way about their
+love-affairs. But could they feel the same about their maternal
+relations? Could it be that his mother, that pure, heroic,
+self-sacrificing soul, was now thinking more about her liberty than her
+loss? Had not their relation always been peculiarly free? he found
+himself thinking reproachfully. Once, he remembered, when he had been
+working unusually hard he had welcomed her absence at one of her
+conferences on inebriety. Never before had he imagined that she could
+feel anything but regret at his absences. “Everybody is just alike,” he
+found himself rather bitterly thinking.
+
+“What do you want to know about it?” he said aloud.
+
+“Why, everything,” she returned.
+
+“I met her,” he said, “two evenings ago at a dance. I never expected to
+fall in love at a dance.”
+
+“Isn’t it funny? No one ever really expects to fall in love at all, and
+everybody does.”
+
+He glanced at her. He had been prepared to explain to her about love; and
+now it occurred to him for the first time that she knew all about it. He
+decided to ask her the great question which had been occupying his mind
+as a lover of a scientific habit of thought.
+
+“Mother,” he said, “how much dependence is to be placed on love--one’s
+own, I mean?”
+
+“Goodness, Pete! What a question to ask!”
+
+“Well, you might take a chance and tell me what you think. I have no
+doubts. My whole nature goes out to this girl; but I can’t help knowing
+that if we go on feeling like this till we die, we shall be the
+exception. Love’s a miracle. How much can one trust to it?”
+
+The moment he had spoken he knew that he was asking a great deal. It was
+torture to his mother to express an opinion on an abstract question. She
+did not lack decision of conduct. She could resolve in an instant to send
+a drunkard to an institution or take a trip round the world; but on a
+matter of philosophy of life it was as difficult to get her to commit
+herself as if she had been upon the witness-stand. Yet it was just in
+this realm that he particularly valued her opinion.
+
+“Oh,” she said at last, “I don’t believe that it’s possible to play safe
+in love. It’s a risk, but it’s one of those risks you haven’t much choice
+about taking. Life and death are like that, too. I don’t think it pays to
+be always thinking about avoiding risks. Nothing, you know,” she added,
+as if she were letting him in to rather a horrid little secret, “is
+really safe.” And evidently glad to change the subject, she went on,
+“What will her family say?”
+
+“I can’t think they will be pleased.”
+
+“I suppose not. Who are they?”
+
+Wayne explained the family connections, but woke no associations in his
+mother’s mind until he mentioned the name of Farron. Then he was
+astonished at the violence of her interest. She sprang to her feet; her
+eyes lighted up.
+
+“Why,” she cried, “that’s the man, that’s the company, that Marty Burke
+works for! O Pete, don’t you think you could get Mr. Farron to use his
+influence over Marty about Anita?”
+
+“Dear mother, do you think you can get him to use his influence over Mrs.
+Farron for me?”
+
+Marty Burke was the leader of the district and was reckoned a bad man.
+He and Mrs. Wayne had been waging a bitter war for some time over a
+young inebriate who had seduced a girl of the neighborhood. Mrs. Wayne
+was sternly trying to prosecute the inebriate; Burke was determined to
+protect him, first, by smirching the girl’s name, and, next, by
+getting the girl’s family to consent to a marriage, a solution that
+Mrs. Wayne considered most undesirable in view of the character of the
+prospective husband.
+
+Pete felt her interest sweep away from his affairs, and it had not
+returned when the telephone rang. He came back from answering it to tell
+his mother that Mr. Lanley, the grandfather of his love, was asking if
+she would see him for a few minutes that afternoon or evening. A visit
+was arranged for nine o’clock.
+
+“What’s he like?” asked Mrs. Wayne, wrinkling her nose and looking
+very impish.
+
+“He seemed like a nice old boy; hasn’t had a new idea, I should say,
+since 1880. And, Mother dear, you’re going to dress, aren’t you?”
+
+She resented the implication.
+
+“I shall be wonderful,” she answered with emphasis. “And while he’s here,
+I think you might go down and tell this news to Lily, yourself. Oh, I
+don’t say she’s in love with you--”
+
+“Lily,” said Pete, “is leading far too exciting a life to be in love
+with any one.”
+
+Punctually at nine, Mr. Lanley rang the bell of the flat. He had paused a
+few minutes before doing so, not wishing to weaken the effect of his
+mission by arriving out of breath. Adelaide had come to see him just
+before lunch. She pretended to minimize the importance of her news, but
+he knew she did so to evade reproach for the culpable irresponsibility of
+her attitude toward the young man’s first visit.
+
+“And do you know anything more about him than you did yesterday?” he
+asked.
+
+She did. It appeared that Vincent had telephoned her from down town just
+before she came out.
+
+“Tiresome young man,” she said, twisting her shoulders. “It seems there’s
+nothing against him. His father was a doctor, his mother comes of decent
+people and is a respected reformer, the young man works for an ambitious
+new firm of brokers, who speak highly of him and give him a salary of
+$5000 a year.”
+
+“The whole thing must be put a stop to,” said Mr. Lanley.
+
+“Of course, of course,” said his daughter. “But how? I can’t forbid him
+the house because he’s just an average young man.”
+
+“I don’t see why not, or at least on the ground that he’s not the husband
+you would choose for her.”
+
+“I think the best way will be to let him come to the house,”--she spoke
+with a sort of imperishable sweetness,--“but to turn Mathilde gradually
+against him.”
+
+“But how can you turn her against him?”
+
+Adelaide looked very wistful.
+
+“You don’t trust me,” she moaned.
+
+“I only ask you how it can be done.”
+
+“Oh, there are ways. I made her perfectly hate one of them because he
+always said, ‘if you know what I mean.’ ‘It’s a very fine day, Mrs.
+Farron, if you know what I mean.’ This young man must have some horrid
+trick like that, only I haven’t studied him yet. Give me time.”
+
+“It’s risky.”
+
+Adelaide shook her head.
+
+“Not really,” she said. “These young fancies go as quickly as they come.
+Do you remember the time you took me to West Point? I had a passion for
+the adjutant. I forgot him in a week.”
+
+“You were only fifteen.”
+
+“Mathilde is immature for her age.”
+
+It was agreed between them, however, that Mr. Lanley, without authority,
+should go and look the situation over. He had been trying to get the
+Waynes’ telephone since one o’clock. He had been told at intervals of
+fifteen minutes by a resolutely cheerful central that their number did
+not answer. Mr. Lanley hated people who did not answer their telephone.
+Nor was he agreeably impressed by the four flights of stairs, or by the
+appearance of the servant who answered his ring.
+
+“Won’t do, won’t do,” he kept repeating in his own mind.
+
+He was shown into the sitting-room. It was in shadow, for only a shaded
+reading-lamp was lighted, and his first impression was of four windows;
+they appeared like four square panels of dark blue, patterned with
+stars. Then a figure rose to meet him--a figure in blue draperies, with
+heavy braids wound around the head, and a low, resonant voice said, “I
+am Mrs. Wayne.”
+
+As soon as he could he walked to the windows and looked out to the river
+and the long, lighted curves of the bridges, and beyond to Long Island,
+to just the ground where the Battle of Long Island had been fought--a
+battle in which an ancestor of his had particularly distinguished
+himself. He said something polite about the view.
+
+“Let us sit here where we can look out,” she said, and sank down on a
+low sofa drawn under the windows. As she did so she came within the
+circle of light from the lamp. She sat with her head leaned back against
+the window-frame, and he saw the fine line of her jaw, the hollows in her
+cheek, the delicate modeling about her brows, not obscured by much
+eyebrow, and her long, stretched throat. She was not quite maternal
+enough to look like a Madonna, but she did look like a saint, he thought.
+
+He knelt with one knee on the couch and peered out.
+
+“Dear me,” he said, “I fancy I used to skate as a boy on a pond just
+about where that factory is now.”
+
+He found she knew very little about the history of New York. She had
+been brought up abroad, she said; her father had been a consul in
+France. It was a subject which he liked to expound. He loved his native
+city, which he with his own eyes had seen once as hardly more than a
+village. He and his ancestors--and Mr. Lanley’s sense of identification
+with his ancestors was almost Chinese--had watched and had a little
+shaped the growth.
+
+“I suppose you had Dutch ancestry, then,” she said, trying to take
+an interest.
+
+“Dutch.” Mr. Lanley shut his eyes, resolving, since he had no idea what
+her own descent might be, that he would not explain to her the superior
+attitude of the English settlers of the eighteenth century toward their
+Dutch predecessors. However, perhaps he did not entirely conceal his
+feeling, for he said: “No, I have no Dutch blood--not a drop. Very good
+people in their way, industrious--peasants.” He hurried on to the great
+fire of 1835. “Swept between Wall Street and Coenties Slip,” he said,
+with a splendid gesture, and then discovered that she had never heard of
+“Quenches Slip,” or worse, she had pronounced it as it was spelled. He
+gently set her right there. His father had often told him that he had
+seen with his own eyes a note of hand which had been blown, during the
+course of the conflagration, as far as Flatbush. And the second fire of
+1845. His father had been a man then, married, a prominent citizen, old
+enough, as Mr. Lanley said, with a faint smile, to have lost heavily. He
+could himself remember the New York of the Civil War, the bitter family
+quarrels, the forced resignations from clubs, the duels, the draft riots.
+
+But, oddly enough, when it came to contemporary New York, it was Mrs.
+Wayne who turned out to be most at home. Had he ever walked across the
+Blackwell’s Island Bridge? (This was in the days before it bore the
+elevated trains.) No, he had driven. Ah, she said, that was wholly
+different. Above, where one walked, there was nothing to shut out the
+view of the river. Just to show that he was not a feeble old antiquarian,
+he suggested their taking a walk there at once. She held out her trailing
+garments and thin, blue slippers. And then she went on:
+
+“There’s another beautiful place I don’t believe you know, for all you’re
+such an old New-Yorker--a pier at the foot of East Eighty-something
+Street, where you can almost touch great seagoing vessels as they pass.”
+
+“Well, there at least we can go,” said Mr. Lanley, and he stood up. “I
+have a car here, but it’s open. Is it too cold? Have you a fur coat? I’ll
+send back to the house for an extra one.” He paused, brisk as he was; the
+thought of those four flights a second time dismayed him.
+
+The servant had gone out, and Pete was still absent, presumably breaking
+the news of his engagement to Dr. Parret.
+
+Mrs. Wayne had an idea. She went to a window on the south side of the
+room, opened it, and looked out. If he had good lungs, she told him, he
+could make his man hear.
+
+Mr. Lanley did not visibly recoil. He leaned out and shouted. The
+chauffeur looked up, made a motion to jump out, fearing that his employer
+was being murdered in these unfamiliar surroundings; then he caught the
+order to go home for an extra coat.
+
+Lanley drew his shoulder back into the room and shut the window; as he
+did so he saw a trace of something impish in the smile of his hostess.
+
+“Why do you smile?” he asked quickly.
+
+She did not make the mistake of trying to arrest her smile; she let
+it broaden.
+
+“I don’t suppose you have ever done such a thing before.”
+
+“Now, that does annoy me.”
+
+“Calling down five stories?”
+
+“No; your thinking I minded.”
+
+“Well, I did think so.”
+
+“You were mistaken, utterly mistaken.”
+
+“I’m glad. If you mind doing such things, you give so much time to
+arranging not to do them.”
+
+Mr. Lanley was silent. He was deciding that he should rearrange some of
+the details of his life. Not that he contemplated giving all his orders
+from the fifth story, but he saw he had always devoted too much attention
+to preventing unimportant catastrophes.
+
+Under her direction he was presently driving north; then he turned
+sharply east down a little hill, and came out on a low, flat pier. He put
+out the motor’s lights. They were only a few feet above the water, which
+was as black as liquid jet, with flat silver and gold patches on it from
+white and yellow lights. Opposite to them the lighthouse at the north end
+of Blackwell’s Island glowed like a hot coal. Then a great steamer
+obscured it.
+
+“Isn’t this nice?” Mrs. Wayne asked, and he saw that she wanted her
+discovery praised. He never lost the impression that she enjoyed
+being praised.
+
+Such a spot, within sight of half a dozen historic sites, was a
+temptation to Mr. Lanley, and he would have unresistingly yielded to it
+if Mrs. Wayne had not said:
+
+“But we haven’t said a word yet about our children.”
+
+“True,” answered Mr. Lanley. His heart sank. It is not easy, he thought,
+to explain to a person for whom you have just conceived a liking that her
+son had aspired above his station. He tapped his long, middle finger on
+the steering-wheel, just as at directors’ meetings he tapped the table
+before he spoke, and began, “In a society somewhat artificially formed as
+ours is, Mrs. Wayne, it has always been my experience that--” Do what he
+would, it kept turning into a speech, and the essence of the speech was
+that while democracy did very well for men, a strictly aristocratic
+system was the only thing possible for girls--one’s own girls, of
+course. In the dim light he could see that she had pushed all her hair
+back from her brows. She was trying to follow him exactly, so exactly
+that she confused him a little. He became more general. “In many ways,”
+he concluded, “the advantages of character and experience are with the
+lower classes.” He had not meant to use the word, but when it slipped
+out, he did not regret it.
+
+“In all ways,” she answered.
+
+He was not sure he had heard.
+
+“All the advantages?” he said.
+
+“All the advantages of character.”
+
+He had to ask her to explain. One reason, perhaps, why Mrs. Wayne
+habitually avoided a direct question was that, when once started, her
+candor had no bounds. Now she began to speak. She spoke more eagerly and
+more fluently than he, and it took him several minutes to see that quite
+unconsciously she was making him a strange, distorted complement to his
+speech, that in her mouth such words as “the leisure classes, your
+sheltered girls,” were terms of the deepest reproach. He must understand,
+she said, that as she did not know Miss Severance, there was nothing
+personal, nothing at all personal, in her feeling,--she was as careful
+not to hurt his feelings as he had tried to be not to hurt hers,--but she
+did own to a prejudice--at least Pete told her it was a prejudice--
+
+Against what, in Heaven’s name, Lanley at first wondered; and then it
+came to him.
+
+“Oh, you have a prejudice against divorce?” he said.
+
+Mrs. Wayne looked at him reproachfully.
+
+“Oh, no,” she answered. “How could you think that? But what has divorce
+to do with it? Your granddaughter hasn’t been divorced.”
+
+A sound of disgust at the mere suggestion escaped him, and he said
+coldly:
+
+“My daughter divorced her first husband.”
+
+“Oh, I did not know.”
+
+“Against what, then, is this unconquerable prejudice of yours?”
+
+“Against the daughters of the leisure class.”
+
+He was still quite at sea.
+
+“You dislike them?”
+
+“I fear them.”
+
+If she had said that she considered roses a menace, he could not have
+been more puzzled. He repeated her words aloud, as if he hoped that
+they might have some meaning for him if he heard his own lips
+pronouncing them:
+
+“You fear them.”
+
+“Yes,” she went on, now interested only in expressing her belief, “I fear
+their ignorance and idleness and irresponsibility and self-indulgence,
+and, all the more because it is so delicate and attractive and
+unconscious; and their belief that the world owes them luxury and
+happiness without their lifting a finger. I fear their cowardice and lack
+of character--”
+
+“Cowardice!” he cried, catching at the first word he could. “My dear Mrs.
+Wayne, the aristocrats in the French Revolution, the British officer--”
+
+“Oh, yes, they know how to die,” she answered; “but do they know how to
+live when the horrible, sordid little strain of every-day life begins to
+make demands upon them, their futile education, the moral feebleness that
+comes with perfect safety! I know something can be made of such girls,
+but I don’t want my son sacrificed in the process.”
+
+There was a long, dark silence; then Mr. Lanley said with a particularly
+careful and exact enunciation:
+
+“I think, my dear madam, that you cannot have known very many of the
+young women you are describing. It may be that there are some like
+that--daughters of our mushroom finance; but I can assure you that the
+children of ladies and gentlemen are not at all as you seem to imagine.”
+
+It was characteristic of Mrs. Wayne that, still absorbed by her own
+convictions, she did not notice the insult of hearing ladies and
+gentlemen described to her as if they were beings wholly alien to her
+experience; but the tone of his speech startled her, and she woke, like a
+person coming out of a trance, to all the harm she had done.
+
+“I may be old-fashioned--” he began and then threw the phrase from him;
+it was thus that Alberta, his sister, began her most offensive
+pronouncements. “It has always appeared to me that we shelter our more
+favored women as we shelter our planted trees, so that they may attain a
+stronger maturity.”
+
+“But do they, are they--are sheltered women the strongest in a crisis?”
+
+Fiend in human shape, he thought, she was making him question his
+bringing up of Adelaide. He would not bear that. His foot stole out to
+the self-starter.
+
+For the few minutes that remained of the interview she tried to undo her
+work, but the injury was too deep. His life was too near its end for
+criticism to be anything but destructive; having no time to collect new
+treasure, he simply could not listen to her suggestion that those he
+most valued were imitation. He hated her for holding such opinion. Her
+soft tones, her eager concessions, her flattering sentences, could now
+make no impression upon a man whom half an hour before they would have
+completely won.
+
+He bade her a cold good night, hardly more than bent his head, the
+chauffeur took the heavy coat from her, and the car had wheeled away
+before she was well inside her own doorway.
+
+Pete’s brown head was visible over the banisters.
+
+“Hello, Mother!” he said. “Did the old boy kidnap you?”
+
+Mrs. Wayne came up slowly, stumbling over her long, blue draperies in her
+weariness and depression.
+
+“Oh, Pete, my darling,” she said, “I think I’ve spoiled everything.”
+
+His heart stood still. He knew better than most people that his mother
+could either make or mar.
+
+“They won’t hear of it?”
+
+She nodded distractedly.
+
+“I do make such a mess of things sometimes!”
+
+He put his arm about her.
+
+“So you do, Mother,” he said; “but then think how magnificently you
+sometimes pull them out again.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Mr. Lanley had not reported the result of his interview immediately. He
+told himself that it was too late; but it was only a quarter before
+eleven when he was back safe in his own library, feeling somehow not so
+safe as usual. He felt attacked, insulted; and yet he also felt vivified
+and encouraged. He felt as he might have felt if some one, unbidden, had
+cut a vista on the Lanley estates, first outraged in his sense of
+property, but afterward delighted with the widened view and the fresher
+breeze. It was awkward, though, that he didn’t want Adelaide to go into
+details as to his visit; he did not think that the expedition to the pier
+could be given the judicial, grandfatherly tone that he wanted to give.
+So he did not communicate at all with his daughter that night.
+
+The next morning about nine, however, when she was sitting up in bed,
+with her tray on her knees, and on her feet a white satin coverlet sown
+as thickly with bright little flowers as the Milky Way with stars, her
+last words to Vincent, who was standing by the fire, with his newspaper
+folded in his hands, ready to go down-town, were interrupted, as they
+nearly always were, by the burr of the telephone.
+
+She took it up from the table by her bed, and as she did so she fixed her
+eyes on her husband and looked steadily at him all the time that central
+was making the connection; she was trying to answer that unsolved problem
+as to whether or not a mist hung between them. Then she got her
+connection.
+
+“Yes, Papa; it is Adelaide.” “Yes?” “Did she appear like a lady?” “A
+lady?” “You don’t know what I mean by that? Why, Papa!” “Well, did she
+appear respectable?” “How cross you are to me!” “I’m glad to hear it. You
+did not sound cheerful.”
+
+She hung up the receiver and turned to Vincent, making eyes of surprise.
+
+“Really, papa is too strange. Why should he be cross to me because he has
+had an unsatisfactory interview with the Wayne boy’s mother? I never
+wanted him to go, anyhow, Vin. I wanted to send _you_.”
+
+“It would probably be better for you to go yourself.”
+
+He left the room as if he had said nothing remarkable. But it was
+remarkable, in Adelaide’s experience, that he should avoid any
+responsibility, and even more so that he should shift it to her
+shoulders. For an instant she faced the possibility, the most terrible of
+any that had occurred to her, that the balance was changing between them;
+that she, so willing to be led, was to be forced to guide. She had seen
+it happen so often between married couples--the weight of character begin
+on one side of the scale, and then slowly the beam would shift. Once it
+had happened to her. Was it to happen again? No, she told herself; never
+with Farron. He would command or die, lead her or leave her.
+
+Mathilde knocked at her door, as she did every morning as soon as her
+stepfather had gone down town. She had had an earlier account of Mr.
+Lanley’s interview. It had read:
+
+  DEAREST GIRL:
+
+  The great discussion did not go very well, apparently. The opinion
+  prevails at the moment that no engagement can be allowed to exist
+  between us. I feel as if they were all meeting to discuss whether or
+  not the sun is to rise to-morrow morning. You and I, my love, have
+  special information that it will.
+
+After this it needed no courage to go down and hear her mother’s account
+of the interview. Adelaide was still in bed, but one long, pointed
+fingertip, pressed continuously upon the dangling bell, a summons that
+had long since lost its poignancy for the temperamental Lucie, indicated
+that she was about to get up.
+
+“My dear,” she said in answer to Mathilde’s question, “your grandfather’s
+principal interest seems to be to tell me nothing at all, and he has been
+wonderfully successful. I can get nothing from him, so I’m going myself.”
+
+The girl’s heart sank at hearing this. Her mother saw things clearly and
+definitely, and had a talent for expressing her impressions in
+unforgetable words. Mathilde could still remember with a pang certain
+books, poems, pictures, and even people whose charms her mother had
+destroyed in one poisonous phrase. Adelaide was too careful of her
+personal dignity to indulge in mimicry, but she had a way of catching and
+repeating the exact phrasing of some foolish sentence that was almost
+better--or worse--than mimicry. Mathilde remembered a governess, a kind
+and patient person of whom Adelaide had greatly wearied, who had a habit
+of beginning many observations, “It may strike you as strange, but I am
+the sort of person who--” Mathilde was present at luncheon one day when
+Adelaide was repeating one of these sentences. “It may strike you as
+strange, but I like to feel myself in good health.” Mathilde resented the
+laughter that followed, and sprang to her governess’s defense, yet
+sickeningly soon she came to see the innocent egotism that directed the
+choice of the phrase.
+
+She felt as if she could not bear this process to be turned against
+Pete’s mother, not because it would alter the respectful love she was
+prepared to offer this unknown figure, but because it might very slightly
+alter her attitude toward her own mother. That was one of the
+characteristics of this great emotion: all her old beliefs had to be
+revised to accord with new discoveries.
+
+This was what lay behind the shrinking of her soul as she watched her
+mother dress for the visit to Mrs. Wayne. For the first time in her life
+Mathilde wished that her mother was not so elaborate. Hitherto she had
+always gloried in Adelaide’s elegance as a part of her beauty; but now,
+as she watched the ritual of ribbons and laces and perfumes and jewels,
+she felt vaguely that there was in it all a covert insult to Pete’s
+mother, who, she knew, would not be a bit like that.
+
+“How young you are, Mama!” she exclaimed as, the whole long process
+complete, Adelaide stood holding out her hand for her gloves, like a
+little girl ready for a party.
+
+Her mother smiled.
+
+“It’s well I am,” she said, “if you go on trying to get yourself involved
+with young men who live up four flights of stairs. I have always avoided
+even dressmakers who lived above the second story,” she added wistfully.
+
+The wistful tone was repeated when her car stopped at the Wayne door and
+she stepped out.
+
+“Are you sure this is the number, Andrews?” she asked. She and the
+chauffeur looked slowly up at the house and up and down the street. They
+were at one in their feeling about it. Then Adelaide gave a very gentle
+little sigh and started the ascent.
+
+The flat did not look as well by day. Though the eastern sun poured in
+cheerfully, it revealed worn places on the backs of the arm-chairs and
+one fearful calamity with an ink-bottle that Pete had once had on the
+rug. Even Mrs. Wayne, who sprang up from behind her writing-table, had
+not the saint-like mystery that her blue draperies had given her the
+evening before.
+
+Though slim, and in excellent condition for thirty-nine, Adelaide could
+not conceal that four flights were an exertion. Her fine nostrils were
+dilated and her breath not perfectly under control as she said:
+
+“How delightful this is!” a statement that was no more untrue than to say
+good-morning on a rainy day.
+
+Most women in Mrs. Wayne’s situation would at the moment have been
+acutely aware of the ink-spot. That was one of Adelaide’s assets, on
+which she perhaps unconsciously counted, that her mere appearance made
+nine people out of ten aware of their own physical imperfections. But
+Mrs. Wayne was aware of nothing but Adelaide’s great beauty as she sank
+into one of the armchairs with hardly a hint of exhaustion.
+
+“Your son is a very charming person, Mrs. Wayne,” she said.
+
+Mrs. Wayne was standing by the mantelpiece, looking boyish and friendly;
+but now she suddenly grew grave, as if something serious had been said.
+
+“Pete has something more unusual than charm,” she said.
+
+“But what could be more unusual?” cried Adelaide, who wanted to add, “The
+only question is, does your wretched son possess it?” But she didn’t; she
+asked instead, with a tone of disarming sweetness, “Shall we be perfectly
+candid with each other?”
+
+A quick gleam came into Mrs. Wayne’s eyes. “Not much,” she seemed to say.
+She had learned to distrust nothing so much as her own candor, and her
+interview with Mr. Lanley had put her specially on her guard.
+
+“I hope you will be candid, Mrs. Farron,” she said aloud, and for her
+this was the depth of dissimulation.
+
+“Well, then,” said Adelaide, “you and I are in about the same position,
+aren’t we? We are both willing that our children should marry, and we
+have no objection to offer to their choice except our own ignorance. We
+both want time to judge. But how can we get time, Mrs. Wayne? If we do
+not take definite action _against_ an engagement, we are giving our
+consent to it. I want a little reasonable delay, but we can get delay
+only by refusing to hear of an engagement. Do you see what I mean? Will
+you help me by pretending to be a very stern parent, just so that these
+young people may have a few months to think it over without being too
+definitely committed?”
+
+Mrs. Wayne shrank back. She liked neither diplomacy nor coercion.
+
+“But I have really no control over Pete,” she said.
+
+“Surely, if he isn’t in a position to support a wife--”
+
+“He is, if she would live as he does.”
+
+Such an idea had never crossed Mrs. Farron’s mind. She looked round her
+wonderingly, and said without a trace of wilful insolence in her tone:
+
+“Live here, you mean?”
+
+“Yes, or somewhere like it.”
+
+Mrs. Farron looked down, and smoothed the delicate dark fur of her muff.
+She hardly knew how to begin at the very beginning like this. She did not
+want to hurt any one’s feelings. How could she tell this childlike,
+optimistic creature that to put Mathilde to living in surroundings like
+these would be like exposing a naked baby on a mountaintop? It wasn’t
+love of luxury, at least not if luxury meant physical self-indulgence.
+She could imagine suffering privations very happily in a Venetian palace
+or on a tropical island. It was an esthetic, not a moral, problem; it was
+a question of that profound and essential thing in the life of any woman
+who was a woman--her charm. She wished to tell Mrs. Wayne that her son
+wouldn’t really like it, that he would hate to see Mathilde going out in
+overshoes; that the background that she, Adelaide, had so expertly
+provided for her child was part of the very attraction that made him want
+to take her out of it. There was no use in saying that most poor mortals
+were forced to get on without this magic atmosphere. They had never been
+goddesses; they did not know what they were going without. But her child,
+who had been, as it were, born a fairy, would miss tragically the
+delicate beauty of her every-day life, would fade under the ugly monotony
+of poverty.
+
+But how could she say this to Mrs. Wayne, in her flat-heeled shoes and
+simple, boyish shirt and that twelfth-century saint’s profile, of which
+so much might have been made by a clever woman?
+
+At last she began, still smoothing her muff:
+
+“Mrs. Wayne, I have brought up my daughter very simply. I don’t at all
+approve of the extravagances of these modern girls, with their own motors
+and their own bills. Still, she has had a certain background. We must
+admit that marriage with your son on his income alone would mean a
+decrease in her material comforts.”
+
+Mrs. Wayne laughed.
+
+“More than you know, probably.”
+
+This was candid, and Adelaide pressed on.
+
+“Well is it wise or kind to make such a demand on a young creature when
+we know marriage is difficult at the best?” she asked.
+
+Mrs. Wayne hesitated.
+
+“You see, I have never seen your daughter, and I don’t know what her
+feeling for Pete may be.”
+
+“I’ll answer both questions. She has a pleasant, romantic sentiment for
+Mr. Wayne--you know how one feels to one’s first lover. She is a sweet,
+kind, unformed little girl, not heroic. But think of your own spirited
+son. Do you want this persistent, cruel responsibility for him?”
+
+The question was an oratorical one, and Adelaide was astonished to find
+that Mrs. Wayne was answering it.
+
+“Oh, yes,” she said; “I want responsibility for Pete. It’s exactly what
+he needs.”
+
+Adelaide stared at her in horror; she seemed the most unnatural mother
+in the world. She herself would fight to protect her daughter from the
+passive wear and tear of poverty; but she would have died to keep a son,
+if she had had one, from being driven into the active warfare of the
+support of a family.
+
+In the pause that followed there was a ring at the bell, an argument with
+the servant, something that sounded like a scuffle, and then a young man
+strolled into the room. He was tall and beautifully dressed,--at least
+that was the first impression,--though, as a matter of fact, the clothes
+were of the cheapest ready-made variety. But nothing could look cheap or
+ill made on those splendid muscles. He wore a silk shirt, a flower in his
+buttonhole, a gray tie in which was a pearl as big as a pea, long
+patent-leather shoes with elaborate buff-colored tops; he carried a thin
+stick and a pair of new gloves in one hand, but the most conspicuous
+object in his dress was a brand-new, gray felt hat, with a rather wide
+brim, which he wore at an angle greater than Mr. Lanley attempted even at
+his jauntiest. His face was long and rather dark, and his eyes were a
+bright gray blue, under dark brows. He was scowling.
+
+He strode into the middle of the room, and stood there, with his feet
+wide apart and his elbows slightly swaying. His hat was still on.
+
+“Your servant said you couldn’t see me,” he said, with his back teeth set
+together, a method of enunciation that seemed to be habitual.
+
+“Didn’t want to would be truer, Marty,” answered Mrs. Wayne, with the
+utmost good temper. “Still, as long as you’re here, what do you want?”
+
+Marty Burke didn’t answer at once. He stood looking at Mrs. Wayne under
+his lowering brows; he had stopped swinging his elbows, and was now very
+slightly twitching his cane, as an evilly disposed cat will twitch the
+end of its tail.
+
+Mrs. Farron watched him almost breathlessly. She was a little frightened,
+but the sensation was pleasurable. He was, she knew, the finest specimen
+of the human animal that she had ever seen.
+
+“What do I want?” he said at length in a deep, rich voice, shot here and
+there with strange nasal tones, and here and there with the remains of a
+brogue. “Well, I want that you should stop persecuting those poor kids.”
+
+“I persecuting them? Don’t be absurd, Marty,” answered Mrs. Wayne.
+
+“Persecuting them; what else?” retorted Marty, fiercely. “What else is
+it? They wanting to get married, and you determined to send the boy up
+the river.”
+
+“I don’t think we’ll go over that again. I have a lady here on business.”
+
+“Oh, please don’t mind me,” said Mrs. Farron, settling back, and
+wriggling her hands contentedly into her muff. She rather expected the
+frivolous courage of her tone to draw the ire of Burke’s glance upon her,
+but it did not.
+
+“Cruel is what I call it,” he went on. “She wants it, and he wants it,
+and her family wants it, and only you and the judge that you put up to
+opposing--”
+
+“Her family do not want it. Her brother--”
+
+“Her brother agrees with me. I was talking to him yesterday.”
+
+“Oh, that’s why he has a black eye, is it?” said Mrs. Wayne.
+
+“Black eyes or blue,” said Marty, with a horizontal gesture of his
+hands, “her brother wants to see her married.”
+
+“Well, I don’t,” replied Mrs. Wayne, “at least not to this boy. I will
+never give my consent to putting a child of her age in the power of a
+degenerate little drunkard like that.”
+
+Mrs. Farron listened with all her ears. She did not think herself a
+prude, and only a moment before she had been accusing Mrs. Wayne of
+ignorance of the world; but never in all her life had she heard such
+words as were now freely exchanged between Burke and his hostess on the
+subject of the degree of consent that the girl in question had given to
+the advances of Burke’s protégé. She would have been as embarrassed as a
+girl if either of the disputants had been in the least aware of her
+presence. Once, she thought, Mrs. Wayne, for the sake of good manners,
+was on the point of turning to her and explaining the whole situation;
+but fortunately the exigencies of the dispute swept her on too fast.
+Adelaide was shocked, physically rather than morally, by the nakedness of
+their talk; but she did not want them to stop. She was fascinated by the
+spectacle of Marty Burke in action. She recognized at once that he was a
+dangerous man, not dangerous to female virtue, like all the other men to
+whom she had heard the term applied, but actually dangerous to life and
+property. She was not in the least afraid of him, but she knew he was a
+real danger. She enjoyed the knowledge. In most ways she was a woman
+timid in the face of physical danger, but she had never imagined being
+afraid of another human being. That much, perhaps, her sheltered training
+had done for her. “If she goes on irritating him like this he may murder
+us both,” she thought. What she really meant was that he might murder
+Mrs. Wayne, but that, when he came to her and began to twist her neck,
+she would just say, “My dear man, don’t be silly!” and he would stop.
+
+In the meantime Burke was not so angry as he was affecting to be. Like
+most leaders of men, he had a strong dramatic instinct, and he had just
+led Mrs. Wayne to the climax of her just violence when his manner
+suddenly completely changed, and he said with the utmost good temper:
+
+“And what do you think of my get-up, Mrs. Wayne? It’s a new suit I have
+on, and a boutonniere.” The change was so sudden that no one answered,
+and he went on, “It’s clothes almost fit for a wedding that I’m wearing.”
+
+Mrs. Wayne understood him in a flash. She sprang to her feet.
+
+“Marty Burke,” she cried, “you don’t mean to say you’ve got those two
+children married!”
+
+“Not fifteen minutes ago, and I standing up with the groom.” He smiled a
+smile of the wildest, most piercing sweetness--a smile so free and
+intense that it seemed impossible to connect it with anything but the
+consciousness of a pure heart. Mrs. Farron had never seen such a smile.
+“I thought I’d just drop around and give you the news,” he said, and now
+for the first time took off his hat, displaying his crisp, black hair and
+round, pugnacious head. “Good morning, ladies.” He bowed, and for an
+instant his glance rested on Mrs. Farron with an admiration too frank to
+be exactly offensive. He put his hat on his head, turned away, and made
+his exit, whistling.
+
+He left behind him one person at least who had thoroughly enjoyed his
+triumph. To do her justice, however, Mrs. Farron was ashamed of her
+sympathy, and she said gently to Mrs. Wayne:
+
+“You think this marriage a very bad thing.”
+
+Mrs. Wayne pushed all her hair away from her temples.
+
+“Oh, yes,” she said, “it’s a bad thing for the girl; but the worst is
+having Marty Burke put anything over. The district is absolutely under
+his thumb. I do wish, Mrs. Farron, you would get your husband to put the
+fear of God into him.”
+
+“My husband?”
+
+“Yes; he works for your husband. He has charge of the loading and
+unloading of the trucks. He’s proud of his job, and it gives him power
+over the laborers. He wouldn’t want to lose his place. If your husband
+would send for him and say--” Mrs. Wayne hastily outlined the things Mr.
+Farron might say.
+
+“He works for Vincent,” Adelaide repeated. It seemed to her an absolutely
+stupendous coincidence, and her imagination pictured the clash between
+them--the effort of Vincent to put the fear of God into this man. Would
+he be able to? Which one would win? Never before had she doubted the
+superior power of her husband; now she did. “I think it would be hard to
+put the fear of God into that young man,” she said aloud.
+
+“I do wish Mr. Farron would try.”
+
+“Try,” thought Adelaide, “and fail?” Could she stand that? Was her
+whole relation to Vincent about to be put to the test? What weapons had
+he against Marty Burke? And if he had none, how stripped he would
+appear in her eyes!
+
+“Won’t you ask him, Mrs. Farron?”
+
+Adelaide recoiled. She did not want to be the one to throw her glove
+among the lions.
+
+“I don’t think I understand well enough what it is you want. Why don’t
+you ask him yourself?” She hesitated, knowing that no opportunity for
+this would offer unless she herself arranged it. “Why don’t you come and
+dine with us to-night, and,” she added more slowly, “bring your son?”
+
+She had made the bait very attractive, and Mrs. Wayne did not refuse.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+As she drove home, Adelaide’s whole being was stirred by the prospect of
+that conflict between Burke and her husband, and it was not until she saw
+Mathilde, pale with an hour of waiting, that she recalled the real object
+of her recent visit. Not, of course, that Adelaide was more interested in
+Marty Burke than in her daughter’s future, but a titanic struggle fired
+her imagination more than a pitiful little romance. She felt a pang of
+self-reproach when she saw that Mr. Lanley had come to share the child’s
+vigil, that he seemed to be suffering under an anxiety almost as keen as
+Mathilde’s.
+
+They did not have to question her; she threw out her hands, casting her
+muff from her as she did so.
+
+“Oh,” she said, “I’m a weak, soft-hearted creature! I’ve asked them both
+to dine tonight.”
+
+Mathilde flung herself into her mother’s arms.
+
+“O Mama, how marvelous you are!” she exclaimed.
+
+Over her daughter’s shoulder Adelaide noted her father’s expression, a
+stiffening of the mouth and a brightening of the eyes.
+
+“Your grandfather disapproves of me, Mathilde,” she said.
+
+“He couldn’t be so unkind,” returned the girl.
+
+“After all,” said Mr. Lanley, trying to induce a slight scowl, “if we are
+not going to consent to an engagement--”
+
+“But you are,” said Mathilde.
+
+“We are not,” said her mother; “but there is no reason why we should
+not meet and talk it over like sensible creatures--talk it over
+here”--Adelaide looked lovingly around her own subdued room--“instead
+of five stories up. For really--” She stopped, running her eyebrows
+together at the recollection.
+
+“But the flat is rather--rather comfortable when you get there,” said Mr.
+Lanley, suddenly becoming embarrassed over his choice of an adjective.
+
+Adelaide looked at him sharply.
+
+“Dear Papa,” she asked, “since when have you become an admirer of
+painted shelves and dirty rugs? And I don’t doubt,” she added very
+gently, “that for the same money they could have found something quite
+tolerable in the country.”
+
+“Perhaps they don’t want to live in the country,” said Mr. Lanley, rather
+sharply: “I’m sure there is nothing that you’d hate more, Adelaide.”
+
+She opened her dark eyes.
+
+“But I don’t have to choose between squalor here or--”
+
+“Squalor!” said Mr. Lanley. “Don’t be ridiculous!”
+
+Mathilde broke in gently at this point:
+
+“I think you must have liked Mrs. Wayne, Mama, to ask her to dine.”
+
+Adelaide saw an opportunity to exercise one of her important talents.
+
+“Yes,” she said. “She has a certain naïve friendliness. Of course I don’t
+advocate, after fifty, dressing like an Eton boy; I always think an
+elderly face above a turned-down collar--”
+
+“Mama,” broke in Mathilde, quietly, “would you mind not talking of Mrs.
+Wayne like that? You know, she’s Pete’s mother.”
+
+Adelaide was really surprised.
+
+“Why, my love,” she answered, “I haven’t said half the things I might
+say. I rather thought I was sparing your feelings. After all, when you
+see her, you will admit that she _does_ dress like an Eton boy.”
+
+“She didn’t when I saw her,” said Mr. Lanley.
+
+Adelaide turned to her father.
+
+“Papa, I leave it to you. Did I say anything that should have wounded
+anybody’s susceptibilities?”
+
+Mr. Lanley hesitated.
+
+“It was the tone Mathilde did not like, I think.”
+
+Adelaide raised her shoulders and looked beautifully hurt.
+
+“My tone?” she wailed.
+
+“It hurt me,” said Mathilde, laying her little hand on her heart.
+
+Mr. Lanley smiled at her, and then, springing up, kissed her tenderly on
+the forehead. He said it was time for him to be going on.
+
+“You’ll come to dinner to-night, Papa?”
+
+Rather hastily, Mr. Lanley said no, he couldn’t; he had an engagement.
+But his daughter did not let him get to the door.
+
+“What are you going to do to-night, Papa?” she asked, firmly.
+
+“There is a governor’s meeting--”
+
+“Two in a week, Papa?”
+
+Suddenly Mr. Lanley dropped all pretense of not coming, and said he would
+be there at eight.
+
+During the rest of the day Mathilde’s heart never wholly regained its
+normal beat. Not only was she to see Pete again, and see him under the
+gaze of her united family, but she was to see this mother of his, whom he
+loved and admired so much. She pictured her as white-haired, benignant,
+brooding, the essential mother, with all her own mother’s grace and charm
+left out, yet with these qualities not ill replaced by others which
+Mathilde sometimes dimly apprehended were lacking in her own beautiful
+parent. She looked at herself in the glass. “My son’s wife,” was the
+phrase in her mind.
+
+On her way up-stairs to dress for dinner she tried to confide her
+anxieties to her mother.
+
+“Mama,” she said, “if you had a son, how would you feel toward the girl
+he wanted to marry?”
+
+“Oh, I should think her a cat, of course,” Adelaide answered; and
+added an instant later, “and I should probably be able to make him
+think so, too.”
+
+Mathilde sighed and went on up-stairs. Here she decided on an act of some
+insubordination. She would wear her best dress that evening, the dress
+which her mother considered too old for her. She did not want Pete’s
+mother to think he had chosen a perfect baby.
+
+Mr. Lanley, too, was a trifle nervous during the afternoon. He tried to
+say to himself that it was because the future of his darling little
+Mathilde was about to be settled. He shook his head, indicating that to
+settle the future of the young was a risky business; and then in a burst
+of self-knowledge he suddenly admitted that what was really making him
+nervous was the incident of the pier. If Mrs. Wayne referred to it, and
+of course there was no possible reason why she should not refer to it,
+Adelaide would never let him hear the last of it. It would be natural for
+Adelaide to think it queer that he hadn’t told her about it. And the
+reason he hadn’t told was perfectly clear: it was on that infernal pier
+that he had formed such an adverse opinion of Mrs. Wayne. But of course
+he did not wish to prejudice Adelaide; he wanted to leave her free to
+form her own opinions, and he was glad, excessively glad, that she had
+formed so favorable a one as to ask the woman to dinner. There was no
+question about his being glad; he surprised his servant by whistling as
+he put on his white waistcoat, and fastened the buckle rather more snugly
+than usual. Self-knowledge for the moment was not on hand.
+
+He arrived at exactly the hour at which he always arrived, five minutes
+after eight, a moment not too early to embarrass the hostess and not too
+late to endanger the dinner.
+
+No one was in the drawing-room but Mathilde and Farron. Adelaide, for one
+who had been almost perfectly brought up, did sometimes commit the fault
+of allowing her guests to wait for her.
+
+“’Lo, my dear,” said Mr. Lanley, kissing Mathilde. “What’s that you have
+on? Never saw it before. Not so becoming as the dress you were wearing
+the last time I was here.”
+
+Mathilde felt that it would be almost easier to die immediately, and was
+revived only when she heard Farron saying:
+
+“Oh, don’t you like this? I was just thinking I had never seen Mathilde
+looking so well, in her rather more mature and subtle vein.”
+
+It was just as she wished to appear, but she glanced at her stepfather,
+disturbed by her constant suspicion that he read her heart more clearly
+than any one else, more clearly than she liked.
+
+“How shockingly late they are!” said Adelaide, suddenly appearing in
+the utmost splendor. She moved about, kissing her father and arranging
+the chairs. “Do you know, Vin, why it is that Pringle likes to make the
+room look as if it were arranged for a funeral? Why do you suppose they
+don’t come?”
+
+“Any one who arrives after Adelaide is apt to be in wrong,” observed
+her husband.
+
+“Well, I think it’s awfully incompetent always to be waiting for other
+people,” she returned, just laying her hand an instant on his shoulder to
+indicate that he alone was privileged to make fun of her.
+
+“That perhaps is what the Waynes think,” he answered.
+
+Mathilde’s heart sank a little at this. She knew her mother did not like
+to be kept waiting for dinner.
+
+“When I was a young man--” began Mr. Lanley.
+
+“It was the custom,” interrupted Adelaide in exactly the same tone, “for
+a hostess to be in her drawing-room at least five minutes before the hour
+set for the arrival of the guests.”
+
+“Adelaide,” her father pleaded, “I don’t talk like that; at least
+not often.”
+
+“You would, though, if you didn’t have me to correct you,” she retorted.
+“There’s the bell at last; but it always takes people like that forever
+to get their wraps off.”
+
+“It’s only ten minutes past eight,” said Farron, and Mathilde blessed
+him with a look.
+
+Mrs. Wayne came quickly into the room, so fast that her dress floated
+behind her; she was in black and very grand. No one would have supposed
+that she had murmured to Pete just before the drawing-room door was
+opened, “I hope they haven’t run in any old relations on us.”
+
+“I’m afraid I’m late,” she began.
+
+“She always is,” Pete murmured to Mathilde as he took her hand and quite
+openly squeezed it, and then, before Adelaide had time for the rather
+casual introduction she had planned, he himself put the hand he was
+holding into his mother’s. “This is my girl, Mother,” he said. They
+smiled at each other. Mathilde tried to say something. Mrs. Wayne stooped
+and kissed her. Mr. Lanley was obviously affected. Adelaide wasn’t going
+to have any scene like that.
+
+“Late?” she said, as if not an instant had passed since Mrs. Wayne’s
+entrance. “Oh, no, you’re not late; exactly on time, I think. I’m only
+just down myself. Isn’t that true, Vincent?”
+
+Vincent was studying Mrs. Wayne, and withdrew his eyes slowly. But
+Adelaide’s object was accomplished: no public betrothal had taken place.
+
+Pringle announced dinner. Mr. Lanley, rather to his own surprise, found
+that he was insisting on giving Mrs. Wayne his arm; he was not so angry
+at her as he had supposed. He did not think her offensive or unfeminine
+or half baked or socialistic or any of the things he had been saying to
+himself at lengthening intervals for the last twenty-four hours.
+
+Pete saw an opportunity, and tucked Mathilde’s hand within his own arm,
+nipping it closely to his heart.
+
+The very instant they were at table Adelaide looked down the alley
+between the candles, for the low, golden dish of hot-house fruit did not
+obstruct her view of Vincent, and said:
+
+“Why have you never told me about Marty Burke?”
+
+“Who’s he?” asked Mr. Lanley, quickly, for he had been trying to start a
+little conversational hare of his own, just to keep the conversation away
+from the water-front.
+
+“He’s a splendid young super-tough in my employ,” said Vincent. “What do
+you know about him, Adelaide?”
+
+The guarded surprise in his tone stimulated her.
+
+“Oh, I know all about him--as much, that is, as one ever can of a
+stupendous natural phenomenon.”
+
+“Where did you hear of him?”
+
+“Hear of him? I’ve seen him. I saw him this morning at Mrs. Wayne’s. He
+just dropped in while I was there and, metaphorically speaking, dragged
+us about by the hair of our heads.”
+
+“Some women, I believe, confess to enjoying that sensation,”
+Vincent observed.
+
+“Yes, it’s exciting,” answered his wife.
+
+“It’s an easy excitement to attain.”
+
+“Oh, one wants it done in good style.”
+
+Something so stimulating that it was almost hostile flashed through the
+interchange.
+
+Mathilde murmured to Pete:
+
+“Who are they talking about?”
+
+“A mixture of Alcibiades and _Bill Sykes_,” said Adelaide, catching the
+low tone, as she always did.
+
+“He’s the district leader and a very bad influence,” said Mrs. Wayne.
+
+“He’s a champion middle-weight boxer,” said Pete.
+
+“He’s the head of my stevedores,” said Farron.
+
+“O Mr. Farron,” Mrs. Wayne exclaimed, “I do wish you would use your
+influence over him.”
+
+“My influence? It consists of paying him eighty-five dollars a month and
+giving him a box of cigars at Christmas.”
+
+“Don’t you think you could tone him down?” pleaded Mrs. Wayne. “He does
+so much harm.”
+
+“But I don’t want him toned down. His value to me is his being just as he
+is. He’s a myth, a hero, a power on the water-front, and I employ him.”
+
+“You employ him, but do you control him?” asked Adelaide, languidly, and
+yet with a certain emphasis.
+
+Her husband glanced at her.
+
+“What is it you want, Adelaide?” he said.
+
+She gave a little laugh.
+
+“Oh, I want nothing. It’s Mrs. Wayne who wants you to do
+something--rather difficult, too, I should imagine.”
+
+He turned gravely to their guest.
+
+“What is it you want, Mrs. Wayne?”
+
+Mrs. Wayne considered an instant, and as she was about to find words for
+her request her son spoke:
+
+“She’ll tell you after dinner.”
+
+“Pete, I wasn’t going to tell the story,” his mother put in protestingly.
+“You really do me injustice at times.”
+
+Adelaide, remembering the conversation of the morning, wondered whether
+he did. She felt grateful to him for wishing to spare Mathilde the
+hearing of such a story, and she turned to him with a caressing
+graciousness in which she was extremely at her ease. Mathilde,
+recognizing that her mother was pleased, though not being very clear why,
+could not resist joining in their conversation; and Mrs. Wayne was thus
+given an opportunity of murmuring the unfortunate Anita’s story into
+Vincent’s ear.
+
+Adelaide, holding Pete with a flattering gaze, seeming to drink in every
+word he was saying, heard Mrs. Wayne finish and heard Vincent say:
+
+“And you think you can get it annulled if only Burke doesn’t interfere?”
+
+“Yes, if he doesn’t get hold of the boy and tell him that his dignity as
+a man is involved.”
+
+Adelaide withdrew her gaze from Pete and fixed it on Vincent. Was he
+going to accept that challenge? She wanted him to, and yet she thought he
+would be defeated, and she did not want him to be defeated. She waited
+almost breathless.
+
+“Well, I’ll see what I can do,” he said. This was an acceptance.
+This from Vincent meant that the matter, as far as he was concerned,
+was settled.
+
+“You two plotters!” exclaimed Adelaide. “For my part, I’m on Marty
+Burke’s side. I hate to see wild creatures in cages.”
+
+“Dangerous to side with wild beasts,” observed Vincent.
+
+“Why?”
+
+“They get the worst of it in the long run.”
+
+Adelaide dropped her eyes. It was exactly the right answer. For a moment
+she felt his complete supremacy. Then another thought shot through her
+mind: it was exactly the right answer if he could make it good.
+
+In the meantime Mr. Lanley began to grow dissatisfied with the prolonged
+role of spectator. He preferred danger to oblivion; and turning to Mrs.
+Wayne, he said, with his politest smile:
+
+“How are the bridges?”
+
+“Oh, dear,” she answered, “I must have been terribly tactless--to make
+you so angry.”
+
+Mr. Lanley drew himself up.
+
+“I was not angry,” he said.
+
+She looked at him with a sort of gentle wonder.
+
+“You gave me the impression of being.”
+
+The very temperateness of the reply made him see that he had been
+inaccurate.
+
+“Of course I was angry,” he said. “What I mean is that I don’t understand
+why I was.”
+
+Meantime, on the opposite side of the table, Mathilde and Pete were
+equally immersed, murmuring sentences of the profoundest meaning behind
+faces which they felt were mask-like.
+
+Farron looked down the table at his wife. Why, he wondered, did she want
+to tease him to-night, of all nights in his life?
+
+When they came out of the dining-room Pete said to Mathilde with the
+utmost clearness:
+
+“And what was that magazine you spoke of?”
+
+She had spoken of no magazine, but she caught the idea, the clever,
+rather wicked idea. He made her work her mind almost too fast sometimes,
+but she enjoyed it.
+
+“Wasn’t it this?” she asked, with a beating heart.
+
+They sat down on the sofa and bent their heads over it with student-like
+absorption.
+
+“I haven’t any idea what it is,” she whispered.
+
+“Oh, well, I suppose there’s something or other in it.”
+
+“I think your mother is perfectly wonderful--wonderful.”
+
+“I love you so.”
+
+The older people took a little longer to settle down. Mr. Lanley stood on
+the hearth-rug, with a cigar in his mouth and his head thrown very far
+back. Adelaide sank into a chair, looking, as she often did, as if she
+had just been brilliantly well posed for a photograph. Farron was
+silent. Mrs. Wayne sat, as she had a bad habit of doing, on one foot. The
+two groups were sufficiently separated for distinct conversations.
+
+“Is this a conference?” asked Farron.
+
+Mrs. Wayne made it so by her reply.
+
+“The whole question is, Are they really in love? At least, that’s my
+view.”
+
+“In love!” Adelaide twisted her shoulders. “What can they know of it for
+another ten years? You must have some character, some knowledge to fall
+in love. And these babes--”
+
+“No,” said Mr. Lanley, stoutly; “you’re all wrong, Adelaide. It’s first
+love that matters--_Romeo_ and _Juliet_, you know. Afterward we all get
+hardened and world-worn and cynical and material.” He stopped short in
+his eloquence at the thought that Mrs. Wayne was quite obviously not
+hardened or world-worn or cynical or material. “By Jove!” he thought to
+himself, “that’s it. The woman’s spirit is as fresh as a girl’s.” He had
+by this time utterly forgotten what he had meant to say.
+
+Adelaide turned to her husband.
+
+“Do you think they are in love, Vin?”
+
+Vincent looked at her for a second, and then he nodded two or
+three times.
+
+Though no one at once recognized the fact, the engagement was settled at
+that moment.
+
+It seemed obvious that Mr. Lanley should take the Waynes home in his car.
+Mrs. Wayne, who had prepared for walking with overshoes and with pins for
+her trailing skirt, did not seem too enthusiastic at the suggestion. She
+stood a moment on the step and looked at the sky, where Orion, like a
+banner, was hung across the easterly opening of the side street.
+
+“It’s a lovely night,” she said.
+
+It was Pete who drew her into the car. Her reluctance deprived Mr.
+Lanley of the delight of bestowing a benefit, but gave him a faint sense
+of capture.
+
+In the drawing-room Mathilde was looking from one to the other of her
+natural guardians, like a well-trained puppy who wants to be fed. She
+wanted Pete praised. Instead, Adelaide said:
+
+“Really, papa is growing too secretive! Do you know, Vin, he and Mrs.
+Wayne quarreled like mad last evening, and he never told me a word
+about it!”
+
+“How do you know?”
+
+“Oh, I heard them trying to smooth it out at dinner.”
+
+“O Mama,” wailed Mathilde, between admiration and complaint, “you hear
+everything!”
+
+“Certainly, I do,” Adelaide returned lightly. “Yes, and I heard you, too,
+and understood everything that you meant.”
+
+Vincent couldn’t help smiling at his stepdaughter’s horrified look.
+
+“What a brute you are, Adelaide!” he said.
+
+“Oh, my dear, you’re much worse,” she retorted. “You don’t have to
+overhear. You just read the human heart by some black magic of your own.
+That’s really more cruel than my gross methods.”
+
+“Well, Mathilde,” said Farron, “as a reader of the human heart, I want to
+tell you that I approve of the young man. He has a fine, delicate touch
+on life, which, I am inclined to think, goes only with a good deal of
+strength.”
+
+Mathilde blinked her eyes. Gratitude and delight had brought
+tears to them.
+
+“He thinks you’re wonderful, Mr. Farron,” she answered a little huskily.
+
+“Better and better,” answered Vincent, and he held out his hand for a
+letter that Pringle was bringing to him on a tray.
+
+“What’s that?” asked Adelaide. One of the first things she had impressed
+on Joe Severance was that he must never inquire about her mail; but she
+always asked Farron about his.
+
+He seemed to be thinking and didn’t answer her.
+
+Mathilde, now simply insatiable, pressed nearer to him and asked:
+
+“And what do you think of Mrs. Wayne?”
+
+He raised his eyes from the envelope, and answered with a certain
+absence of tone:
+
+“I thought she was an elderly wood-nymph.”
+
+Adelaide glanced over his shoulder, and, seeing that the letter had a
+printed address in the corner, lost interest.
+
+“You may shut the house, Pringle,” she said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+Pringle, the last servant up, was soon heard discreetly drawing bolts and
+turning out electric lights. Mathilde went straight up-stairs without
+even an attempt at drawing her mother into an evening gossip. She was
+aware of being tired after two nights rendered almost sleepless by her
+awareness of joy. She went to her room and shut the door. Her bed was
+piled high with extra covers, soft, light blankets and a down coverlet
+covered with pink silk. She took a certain hygienic pride in the extent
+to which she always opened her bedroom windows even when, as at present,
+the night was bitterly cold. In the morning she ran, huddling on her
+dressing-gown, into a heated bathroom, and when she emerged from this,
+the maid had always lighted her fire, and laid her breakfast-tray close
+to the blaze. To-night, when she went to open her window, she noticed
+that the houses opposite had lost courage and showed only cracks. She
+stood a second looking up at the stars, twinkling with tiny blue rays
+through the clear air. By turning her head to the west she could look
+down on the park, with its surface of bare, blurred tree-branches pierced
+by rows of lights. The familiar sight suddenly seemed to her almost
+intolerably beautiful. “Oh, I love him so much!” she said to herself, and
+her lips actually whispered the words, “so much! so much!”
+
+She threw the window high as a reproof of those shivers across the way,
+and, jumping into bed, hastily sandwiched her small body between the warm
+bedclothes. She was almost instantly asleep.
+
+Overhead the faint, but heavy, footfall of Pringle ceased. The house was
+silent; the city had become so. An occasional Madison Avenue car could be
+heard ringing along the cold rails, or rhythmically bounding down hill on
+a flat wheel. Once some distance away came the long, continuous complaint
+of the siren of a fire-engine and the bells and gongs of its comrades;
+and then a young man went past, whistling with the purest accuracy of
+time and tune the air to which he had just been dancing.
+
+At half-past five the kitchen-maid, a young Swede who feared not God,
+neither regarded man, but lived in absolute subjection to the cook, to
+whom, unknown to any one else, she every morning carried up breakfast,
+was stealing down with a candle in her hand. Her senses were alert, for a
+friend of hers had been strangled by burglars in similar circumstances,
+and she had never overcome her own terror of the cold, dark house in
+these early hours of a winter morning.
+
+She went down not the back stairs, for Mr. Pringle objected that she woke
+him as she passed, whereas the carpet on the front stairs was so thick
+that there wasn’t the least chance of waking the family. As she passed
+Mrs. Farron’s room she was surprised to see a fine crack of light coming
+from under it. She paused, wondering if she was going to be caught, and
+if she had better run back and take to the back stairs despite Pringle’s
+well-earned rest; and as she hesitated she heard a sob, then
+another--wild, hysterical sobs. The girl looked startled and then went
+on, shaking her head. What people like that had to cry about beat her.
+But she was glad, because she knew such a splendid bit of news would
+soften the heart of the cook when she took up her breakfast.
+
+By five o’clock it seemed to Adelaide that a whole eternity had passed
+and that another was ahead of her, that this night would never end.
+
+When they went up-stairs, while she was brushing her hair--her hair
+rewarded brushing, for it was fine and long and took a polish like
+bronze--she had wandered into Vincent’s room to discuss with him the
+question of her father’s secretiveness about Mrs. Wayne. It was not, she
+explained, standing in front of his fire, that she suspected anything,
+but that it was so unfriendly: it deprived one of so much legitimate
+amusement if one’s own family practised that kind of reserve. Her just
+anger kept her from observing Farron very closely. As she talked she laid
+her brush on the mantelpiece, and as she did so she knocked down the
+letter that had come for him just before they went up-stairs. She
+stooped, and picked it up without attention, and stood holding it; she
+gesticulated a little with it as she repeated, for her own amusement
+rather than for Vincent’s, phrases she had caught at dinner.
+
+The horror to Farron of seeing her standing there chattering, with that
+death-dealing letter in her hand, suddenly and illogically broke down his
+resolution of silence. It was cruel, and though he might have denied
+himself her help, he could not endure cruelty.
+
+“Adelaide,” he said in a tone that drove every other sensation
+away--“Adelaide, that letter. No, don’t read it.” He took it from her
+and laid it on his dressing-table. “My dear love, it has very bad
+news in it.”
+
+“There _has_ been something, then?”
+
+“Yes. I have been worried about my health for some time. This letter
+tells me the worst is true. Well, my dear, we did not enter matrimony
+with the idea that either of us was immortal.”
+
+But that was his last effort to be superior to the crisis, to pretend
+that the bitterness of death was any less to him than to any other human
+creature, to conceal that he needed help, all the help that he could get.
+
+And Adelaide gave him help. Artificial as she often was in daily
+contact, in a moment like this she was splendidly, almost primitively
+real. She did not conceal her own passionate despair, her conviction that
+her life couldn’t go on without his; she did not curb her desire to know
+every detail on which his opinion and his doctor’s had been founded; she
+clung to him and wept, refusing to let him discuss business arrangements,
+in which for some reason he seemed to find a certain respite; and yet
+with it all, she gave him strength, the sense that he had an indissoluble
+and loyal companion in the losing fight that lay before him.
+
+Once she was aware of thinking: “Oh, why did he tell me to-night? Things
+are so terrible by night,” but it was only a second before she put such a
+thought away from her. What had these nights been to him? The night when
+she had found his light burning so late, and other nights when he had
+probably denied himself the consolation of reading for fear of rousing
+her suspicions. She did not attempt to pity or advise him, she did not
+treat him as a mixture of child and idiot, as affection so often treats
+illness. She simply gave him her love.
+
+Toward morning he fell asleep in her arms, and then she stole back to
+her own room. There everything was unchanged, the light still burning,
+her satin slippers stepping on each other just as she had left them. She
+looked at herself in the glass; she did not look so very different. A
+headache had often ravaged her appearance more.
+
+She had always thought herself a coward, she feared death with a terrible
+repugnance; but now she found, to her surprise, that she would have
+light-heartedly changed places with her husband. She had much more
+courage to die than to watch him die--to watch Vincent die, to see him
+day by day grow weak and pitiful. That was what was intolerable. If he
+would only die now, to-night, or if she could! It was at this moment that
+the kitchen maid had heard her sobbing.
+
+Because there was nothing else to do, she got into bed, and lay there
+staring at the electric light, which she had forgotten to put out. Toward
+seven she got up and gave orders that Mr. Farron was not to be disturbed,
+that the house was to be kept quiet. Strange, she thought, that he could
+sleep like an exhausted child, while she, awake, was a mass of pain. Her
+heart ached, her eyes burned, her very body felt sore. She arranged for
+his sleep, but she wanted him to wake up; she begrudged every moment of
+his absence. Alas! she thought, how long would she continue to do so?
+
+Yet with her suffering came a wonderful ease, an ability to deal with the
+details of life. When at eight o’clock her maid came in and, pulling the
+curtains, exclaimed with Gallic candor, “Oh, comme madame a mauvaise mine
+ce matin!” she smiled at her with unusual gentleness. Later, when
+Mathilde came down at her accustomed hour, and lying across the foot of
+her mother’s bed, began to read her scraps of the morning paper, Adelaide
+felt a rush of tenderness for the child, who was so unaware of the
+hideous bargain life really was. Surprising as it was, she found she
+could talk more easily than usual and with a more undivided attention,
+though everything they said was trivial enough.
+
+Then suddenly her heart stood still, for the door opened, and Vincent, in
+his dressing-gown, came in. He had evidently had his bath, for his hair
+was wet and shiny. Thank God! he showed no signs of defeat!
+
+“Oh,” cried Mathilde, jumping up, “I thought Mr. Farron had gone
+down-town ages ago.”
+
+“He overslept,” said Adelaide.
+
+“I had an excellent night,” he answered, and she knew he looked at her to
+discover that she had not.
+
+“I’ll go,” said Mathilde; but with unusual sharpness they both turned to
+her and said simultaneously, “No, no; stay.” They knew no better than she
+did why they were so eager to keep her.
+
+“Are you going down-town, Vin?” Adelaide asked, and her voice shook a
+little on the question; she was so eager that he should not institute any
+change in his routine so soon.
+
+“Of course,” he answered.
+
+They looked at each other, yet their look said nothing in particular.
+Presently he said:
+
+“I wonder if I might have breakfast in here. I’ll go and shave if you’ll
+order it; and don’t let Mathilde go. I have something to say to her.”
+
+When he was gone, Mathilde went and stood at the window, looking out, and
+tying knots in the window-shade’s cord. It was a trick Adelaide had
+always objected to, and she was quite surprised to hear herself saying
+now, just as usual:
+
+“Mathilde, don’t tie knots in that cord.”
+
+Mathilde threw it from her as one whose mind was engaged on higher
+things.
+
+“You know,” she observed, “I believe I’m only just beginning to
+appreciate Mr. Farron. He’s so wise. I see what you meant about his being
+strong, and he’s so clever. He knows just what you’re thinking all the
+time. Isn’t it nice that he likes Pete? Did he say anything more about
+him after you went up-stairs? I mean, he really does like him, doesn’t
+he? He doesn’t say that just to please me?”
+
+Presently Vincent came back fully dressed and sat down to his breakfast.
+Oddly enough, there was a spirit of real gaiety in the air.
+
+“What was it you were going to say to me?” Mathilde asked greedily.
+Farron looked at her blankly. Adelaide knew that he had quite forgotten
+the phrase, but he concealed the fact by not allowing the least
+illumination of his expression as he remembered.
+
+“Oh, yes,” he said. “I wish to correct myself. I told you that Mrs.
+Wayne was an elderly wood-nymph; but I was wrong. Of course the truth is
+that she’s a very young witch.”
+
+Mathilde laughed, but not whole-heartedly. She had already identified
+herself so much with the Waynes that she could not take them quite in
+this tone of impersonality.
+
+Farron threw down his napkin, stood up, pulled down his waistcoat.
+
+“I must be off,” he said. He went and kissed his wife. Both had to nerve
+themselves for that.
+
+She held his arm in both her hands, feeling it solid, real, and as
+hard as iron.
+
+“You’ll be up-town early?”
+
+“I’ve a busy day.”
+
+“By four?”
+
+“I’ll telephone.” She loved him for refusing to yield to her just at this
+moment of all moments. Some men, she thought, would have hidden their own
+self-pity under the excuse of the necessity of being kind to her.
+
+She was to lunch out with a few critical contemporaries. She was
+horrified when she looked at herself by morning light. Her skin had an
+ivory hue, and there were many fine wrinkles about her eyes. She began to
+repair these damages with the utmost frankness, talking meantime to
+Mathilde and the maid. She swept her whole face with a white lotion,
+rouged lightly, but to her very eyelids, touched a red pencil to her
+lips, all with discretion. The result was satisfactory. The improvement
+in her appearance made her feel braver. She couldn’t have faced these
+people--she did not know whether to think of them as intimate enemies or
+hostile friends--if she had been looking anything but her best.
+
+But they were just what she needed; they would be hard and amusing and
+keep her at some tension. She thought rather crossly that she could not
+sit through a meal at home and listen to Mathilde rambling on about love
+and Mr. Farron.
+
+She was inexcusably late, and they had sat down to luncheon--three men
+and two women--by the time she arrived. They had all been, or had wanted
+to go, to an auction sale of _objets d’art_ that had taken place the
+night before. They were discussing it, praising their own purchases, and
+decrying the value of everybody else’s when Adelaide came in.
+
+“Oh, Adelaide,” said her hostess, “we were just wondering what you paid
+originally for your tapestry.”
+
+“The one in the hall?”
+
+“No, the one with the Turk in it.”
+
+“I haven’t an idea,--” Adelaide was distinctly languid,--“I got it from
+my grandfather.”
+
+“Wouldn’t you know she’d say that?” exclaimed one of the women. “Not that
+I deny it’s true; only, you know, Adelaide, whenever you do want to throw
+a veil over one of your pieces, you always call on the prestige of your
+ancestors.”
+
+Adelaide raised her eyebrows.
+
+“Really,” she answered, “there isn’t anything so very conspicuous about
+having had a grandfather.”
+
+“No,” her hostess echoed, “even I, so well and favorably known for my
+vulgarity--even _I_ had a grandfather.”
+
+“But he wasn’t a connoisseur in tapestries, Minnie darling.”
+
+“No, but he was in pigs, the dear vulgarian.”
+
+“True vulgarity,” said one of the men, “vulgarity in the best sense, I
+mean, should betray no consciousness of its own existence. Only thus can
+it be really great.”
+
+“Oh, Minnie’s vulgarity is just artificial, assumed because she found it
+worked so well.”
+
+“Surely you accord her some natural talent along those lines.”
+
+“I suspect her secret mind is refined.”
+
+“Oh, that’s not fair. Vulgar is as vulgar does.”
+
+Adelaide stood up, pushing back her chair. She found them utterly
+intolerable. Besides, as they talked she had suddenly seen clearly that
+she must herself speak to Vincent’s doctor without an instant’s delay. “I
+have to telephone, Minnie,” she said, and swept out of the room. She
+never returned.
+
+“Not one of the perfect lady’s golden days, I should say,” said one of
+the men, raising his eyebrows. “I wonder what’s gone wrong?”
+
+“Can Vincent have been straying from the straight and narrow?”
+
+“Something wrong. I could tell by her looks.”
+
+“Ah, my dear, I’m afraid her looks is what’s wrong.”
+
+Adelaide meantime was in her motor on her way to the doctor’s office. He
+had given up his sacred lunch-hour in response to her imperious demand
+and to his own intense pity for her sorrow.
+
+He did not know her, but he had had her pointed out to him, and though
+he recognized the unreason of such an attitude, he was aware that her
+great beauty dramatized her suffering, so that his pity for her was
+uncommonly alive.
+
+He was a young man, with a finely cut face and a blond complexion. His
+pity was visible, quivering a little under his mask of impassivity.
+Adelaide’s first thought on seeing him was, “Good Heavens! another man to
+be emotionally calmed before I can get at the truth!” She had to be
+tactful, to let him see that she was not going to make a scene. She knew
+that he felt it himself, but she was not grateful to him. What business
+had he to feel it? His feeling was an added burden, and she felt that she
+had enough to carry.
+
+He did not make the mistake, however, of expressing his sympathy
+verbally. His answers were as cold and clear as she could wish. She
+questioned him on the chances of an operation. He could not reduce his
+judgment to a mathematical one; he was inclined to advocate an operation
+on psychological grounds, he said.
+
+“It keeps up the patient’s courage to know something is being done.” He
+added, “That will be your work, Mrs. Farron, to keep his courage up.”
+
+Most women like to know they had their part to play, but Adelaide shook
+her head quickly.
+
+“I would so much rather go through it myself!” she cried.
+
+“Naturally, naturally,” he agreed, without getting the full passion
+of her cry.
+
+She stood up.
+
+“Oh,” she said, “if it could only be kill or cure!”
+
+He glanced at her.
+
+“We have hardly reached that point yet,” he answered.
+
+She went away dissatisfied. He had answered every question, he had even
+encouraged her to hope a little more than her interpretation of what
+Vincent said had allowed her; but as she drove away she knew he had
+failed her. For she had gone to him in order to have Vincent presented to
+her as a hero, as a man who had looked upon the face of death without a
+quiver. Instead, he had been presented to her as a patient, just one of
+the long procession that passed through that office. The doctor had said
+nothing to contradict the heroic picture, but he had said nothing to
+contribute to it. And surely, if Farron had stood out in his calmness and
+courage above all other men, the doctor would have mentioned it, couldn’t
+have helped doing so; he certainly would not have spent so much time in
+telling her how she was to guard and encourage him. To the doctor he was
+only a patient, a pitiful human being, a victim of mortality. Was that
+what he was going to become in her eyes, too?
+
+At four she drove down-town to his office. He came out with another man;
+they stood a moment on the steps talking and smiling. Then he drew his
+friend to the car window and introduced him to Adelaide. The man took
+off his hat.
+
+“I was just telling your husband, Mrs. Farron, that I’ve been looking at
+offices in this building. By the spring he and I will be neighbors.”
+
+Adelaide just shut her eyes, and did not open them again until Vincent
+had got in beside her and she felt his arm about her shoulder.
+
+“My poor darling!” he said. “What you need is to go home and get some
+sleep.” It was said in his old, cherishing tone, and she, leaning back,
+with her head against the point of his shoulder, felt that, black as it
+was, life for the first time since the night before had assumed its
+normal aspect again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+The morning after their drive up-town Vincent told his wife that all
+his arrangements were made to go to the hospital that night, and to be
+operated upon the next day. She reproached him for having made his
+decision without consulting her, but she loved him for his proud
+independence.
+
+Somehow this second day under the shadow of death was less terrible than
+the first. Vincent stayed up-town, and was very natural and very busy. He
+saw a few people,--men who owed him money, his lawyer, his partner,--but
+most of the time he and Adelaide sat together in his study, as they had
+sat on many other holidays. He insisted on going alone to the hospital,
+although she was to be in the building during the operation.
+
+Mathilde had been told, and inexperienced in disaster, she had felt
+convinced that the outcome couldn’t be fatal, yet despite her conviction
+that people did not really die, she was aware of a shyness and
+awkwardness in the tragic situation.
+
+Mr. Lanley had been told, and his attitude was just the opposite. To
+him it seemed absolutely certain that Farron would die,--every one
+did,--but he had for some time been aware of a growing hardness on his
+part toward the death of other people, as if he were thus preparing
+himself for his own.
+
+“Poor Vincent!” he said to himself. “Hard luck at his age, when an old
+man like me is left.” But this was not quite honest. In his heart he
+felt there was nothing unnatural in Vincent’s being taken or in his
+being left.
+
+As usual in a crisis, Adelaide’s behavior was perfect. She contrived to
+make her husband feel every instant the depth, the strength, the passion
+of her love for him without allowing it to add to the weight he was
+already carrying. Alone together, he and she had flashes of real gaiety,
+sometimes not very far from tears.
+
+To Mathilde the brisk naturalness of her mother’s manner was a source of
+comfort. All the day the girl suffered from a sense of strangeness and
+isolation, and a fear of doing or saying something unsuitable--something
+either too special or too every-day. She longed to evince sympathy for
+Mr. Farron, but was afraid that, if she did, it would be like intimating
+that he was as good as dead. She was caught between the negative danger
+of seeming indifferent and the positive one of being tactless.
+
+As soon as Vincent had left the house, Adelaide’s thought turned to her
+daughter. He had gone about six o’clock. He and she had been sitting by
+his study fire when Pringle announced that the motor was waiting. Vincent
+got up quietly, and so did she. They stood with their arms about each
+other, as if they meant never to forget the sense of that contact; and
+then without any protest they went down-stairs together.
+
+In the hall he had shaken hands with Mr. Lanley and had kissed Mathilde,
+who, do what she would, couldn’t help choking a little. All this time
+Adelaide stood on the stairs, very erect, with one hand on the stair-rail
+and one on the wall, not only her eyes, but her whole face, radiating an
+uplifted peace. So angelic and majestic did she seem that Mathilde,
+looking up at her, would hardly have been surprised if she had floated
+out into space from her vantage-ground on the staircase.
+
+Then Farron lit a last cigar, gave a quick, steady glance at his wife,
+and went out. The front door ended the incident as sharply as a shot
+would have done.
+
+It was then that Mathilde expected to see her mother break down. Under
+all her sympathy there was a faint human curiosity as to how people
+contrived to live through such crises. If Pete were on the brink of
+death, she thought that she would go mad: but, then, she and Pete were
+not a middle-aged married couple; they were young, and new to love.
+
+They all went into the drawing-room, Adelaide the calmest of the three.
+
+“I wonder,” she said, “if you two would mind dining a little earlier than
+usual. I might sleep if I could get to bed early, and I must be at the
+hospital before eight.”
+
+Mr. Lanley agreed a little more quickly than it was his habit to speak.
+
+“O Mama, I think you’re so marvelous!” said Mathilde, and touched at her
+own words, she burst into tears. Her mother put her arm about her, and
+Mr. Lanley patted her shoulder--his sovereign care.
+
+“There, there, my dear,” he murmured, “you must not cry. You know Vincent
+has a very good chance, a very good chance.”
+
+The assumption that he hadn’t was just the one Mathilde did not want to
+appear to make. Her mother saw this and said gently:
+
+“She’s overstrained, that’s all.”
+
+The girl wiped her eyes.
+
+“I’m ashamed, when you are so calm and wonderful.”
+
+“I’m not wonderful,” said her mother. “I have no wish to cry. I’m beyond
+it. Other people’s trouble often makes us behave more emotionally than
+our own. If it were your Pete, I should be in tears.” She smiled, and
+looked across the girl’s head at Mr. Lanley. “She would like to see him,
+Papa. Telephone Pete Wayne, will you, and ask him to come and see her
+this evening? You’ll be here, won’t you?”
+
+Mr. Lanley nodded without cordiality; he did not approve of encouraging
+the affair unnecessarily.
+
+“How kind you are, Mama!” exclaimed Mathilde, almost inaudibly. It was
+just what she wanted, just what she had been wanting all day, to see her
+own man, to assure herself, since death was seen to be hot on the trail
+of all mortals, that he and she were not wasting their brief time in
+separation.
+
+“We might take a turn in the motor,” said Mr. Lanley, thinking that Mrs.
+Wayne might enjoy that.
+
+“It would do you both good.”
+
+“And leave you alone, Mama?”
+
+“It’s what I really want, dear.”
+
+The plan did not fulfil itself quite as Mr. Lanley had imagined. Mrs.
+Wayne was out at some sort of meeting. They waited a moment for Pete.
+Mathilde fixed her eyes on the lighted doorway, and said to herself that
+in a few seconds the thing of all others that she desired would
+happen--he would come through it. And almost at once he did, looking
+particularly young and alive; so that, as he jumped in beside her on the
+back seat, both her hands went out and caught his arm and clung to him.
+Her realization of mortality had been so acute that she felt as if he had
+been restored to her from the dead. She told him the horrors of the day.
+Particularly, she wanted to share with him her gratitude for her mother’s
+almost magic kindness.
+
+“I wanted you so much, Pete,” she whispered; “but I thought it would be
+heartless even to suggest my having wishes at such a time. And then for
+her to think of it herself--”
+
+“It means they are not really going to oppose our marriage.”
+
+They talked about their marriage and the twenty or thirty years of joy
+which they might reasonably hope to snatch from life.
+
+“Think of it,” he said--“twenty or thirty years, longer than either of us
+have lived.”
+
+“If I could have five years, even one year, with you, I think I could
+bear to die; but not now, Pete.”
+
+In the meantime Mr. Lanley, alone on the front seat, for he had left
+his chauffeur at home, was driving north along the Hudson and saying
+to himself:
+
+“Sixty-four. Well, I may be able to knock out ten or twelve pretty
+satisfactory years. On the other hand, might die to-morrow; hope I
+don’t, though. As long as I can drive a car and everything goes well
+with Adelaide and this child, I’d be content to live my full time--and a
+little bit more. Not many men are healthier than I am. Poor Vincent! A
+good deal more to live for than I have, most people would say; but I
+don’t know that he enjoys it any more than I do.” Turning his head a
+little, he shouted over his shoulder to Pete, “Sorry your mother
+couldn’t come.”
+
+Mathilde made a hasty effort to withdraw her hands; but Wayne, more
+practical, understanding better the limits put upon a driver, held
+them tightly as he answered in a civil tone: “Yes, she would have
+enjoyed this.”
+
+“She must come some other time,” shouted Mr. Lanley, and reflected that
+it was not always necessary to bring the young people with you.
+
+“You know, he could not possibly have turned enough to see,” Pete
+whispered reprovingly to Mathilde.
+
+“I suppose not; and yet it seemed so queer to be talking to my
+grandfather with--”
+
+“You must try and adapt yourself to your environment,” he returned, and
+put his arm about her.
+
+The cold of the last few days had given place to a thaw. The melting ice
+in the river was streaked in strange curves, and the bare trees along the
+straight heights of the Palisades were blurred by a faint bluish mist,
+out of which white lights and yellow ones peered like eyes.
+
+“Doesn’t it seem cruel to be so happy when Mama and poor Mr. Farron--”
+Mathilde began.
+
+“It’s the only lesson to learn,” he answered--“to be happy while we are
+young and together.”
+
+About ten o’clock Mr. Lanley left her at home, and she tiptoed up-stairs
+and hardly dared to draw breath as she undressed for fear she might wake
+her unhappy mother on the floor below her.
+
+She had resolved to wake early, to breakfast with her mother, to ask to
+be allowed to accompany her to the hospital; but it was nine o’clock when
+she was awakened by her maid’s coming in with her breakfast and the
+announcement not only that Mrs. Farron had been gone for more than an
+hour, but that there had already been good news from the hospital.
+
+“Il paraît que monsieur est très fort,” she said, with that absolute
+neutrality of accent that sounds in Anglo-Saxon ears almost like a
+complaint.
+
+Adelaide had been in no need of companionship. She was perfectly able
+to go through her day. It seemed as if her soul, with a soul’s
+capacity for suffering, had suddenly withdrawn from her body, had
+retreated into some unknown fortress, and left in its place a hard,
+trivial, practical intelligence which tossed off plan after plan for
+the future detail of life. As she drove from her house to the hospital
+she arranged how she would apportion the household in case of a
+prolonged illness, where she would put the nurses. Nor was she less
+clear as to what should be done in case of Vincent’s death. The whole
+thing unrolled before her like a panorama.
+
+At the hospital, after a little delay, she was guided to Vincent’s own
+room, recently deserted. A nurse came to tell her that all was going
+well; Mr. Farron had had a good night, and was taking the anesthetic
+nicely. Adelaide found the young woman’s manner offensively encouraging,
+and received the news with an insolent reserve.
+
+“That girl is too wildly, spiritually bright,” she said to herself. But
+no manner would have pleased her.
+
+Left alone, she sat down in a rocking-chair near the window. Vincent’s
+bag stood in the corner, his brushes were on the dressing-table, his tie
+hung on the electric light. Immortal trifles, she thought, that might be
+in existence for years.
+
+She began poignantly to regret that she had not insisted on seeing him
+again that morning. She had thought only of what was easiest for him. She
+ought to have thought of herself, of what would make it possible for her
+to go on living without him. If she could have seen him again, he might
+have given her some precept, some master word, by which she could have
+guided her life. She would have welcomed something imprisoning and safe.
+It was cruel of him, she thought, to toss her out like this, rudderless
+and alone. She wondered what he would have given her as a commandment,
+and remembered suddenly the apocryphal last words which Vincent was fond
+of attributing to George Washington, “Never trust a nigger with a gun.”
+She found herself smiling over them. Vincent was more likely to have
+quoted the apparition’s advice to Macbeth: “Be bloody, bold, and
+resolute.” That would have been his motto for himself, but not for her.
+What was the principle by which he infallibly guided her?
+
+How could he have left her so spiritually unprovided for? She felt
+imposed upon, deserted. The busily planning little mind that had suddenly
+taken possession of her could not help her in the larger aspects of her
+existence. It would be much simpler, she thought, to die than to attempt
+life again without Vincent.
+
+She went to the window and looked out at the roofs of neighboring
+houses, a disordered conglomeration of water-tanks and skylights and
+chimney-pots. Then nearer, almost under her feet, she looked into a
+courtyard of the hospital and saw a pale, emaciated man in a wheel-chair.
+She drew back as if it were something indecent. Would Vincent ever become
+like that? she thought. If so, she would rather he died now under the
+anesthetic.
+
+A little while later the nurse came in, and said almost sternly that Dr.
+Crew had sent her to tell Mrs. Farron that the conditions seemed
+extremely favorable, and that all immediate danger was over.
+
+“You mean,” said Adelaide, fiercely, “that Mr. Farron will live?”
+
+“I certainly inferred that to be the doctor’s meaning,” answered the
+nurse. “But here is the assistant, Dr. Withers.”
+
+Dr. Withers, bringing with him an intolerable smell of disinfectants and
+chloroform, hurried in, with his hair mussed from the haste with which he
+had removed his operating-garments. He had small, bright, brown eyes,
+with little lines about them that seemed to suggest humor, but actually
+indicated that he buoyed up his life not by exaltation of himself, but by
+half-laughing depreciation of every one else.
+
+“I thought you’d be glad to know, Mrs. Farron,” he said, “that any danger
+that may have existed is now over. Your husband--”
+
+“That _may_ have existed,” cried Adelaide. “Do you mean to say there
+hasn’t been any real danger?”
+
+The young doctor’s eyes twinkled.
+
+“An operation even in the best hands is always a danger,” he replied.
+
+“But you mean there was no other?” Adelaide asked, aware of a growing
+coldness about her hands and feet.
+
+Withers looked as just as Aristides.
+
+“It was probably wise to operate,” he said. “Your husband ought to be up
+and about in three weeks.”
+
+Everything grew black and rotatory before Adelaide’s eyes, and she sank
+slowly forward into the young doctor’s arms.
+
+As he laid her on the bed, he glanced whimsically at the nurse and
+shook his head.
+
+But she made no response, an omission which may not have meant loyalty to
+Dr. Crew so much as unwillingness to support Dr. Withers.
+
+Adelaide returned to consciousness only in time to be hurried away to
+make room for Vincent. His long, limp figure was carried past her in the
+corridor. She was told that in a few hours she might see him. But she
+wasn’t, as a matter of fact, very eager to see him. The knowledge that he
+was to live, the lifting of the weight of dread, was enough. The maternal
+strain did not mingle with her love for him; she saw no possible reward,
+no increased sense of possession, in his illness. On the contrary, she
+wanted him to stride back in one day from death to his old powerful,
+dominating self.
+
+She grew to hate the hospital routine, the fixed hours, the regulated
+food. “These rules, these hovering women,” she exclaimed, “these
+trays--they make me think of the nursery.” But what she really hated was
+Vincent’s submission to it all. In her heart she would have been glad to
+see him breaking the rules, defying the doctors, and bullying his nurses.
+
+Before long a strong, silent antagonism grew up between her and the
+bright-eyed, cheerful nurse, Miss Gregory. It irritated Adelaide to gain
+access to her husband through other people’s consent; it irritated her to
+see the girl’s understanding of the case, and her competent arrangements
+for her patient’s comfort. If Vincent had showed any disposition to
+revolt, Adelaide would have pleaded with him to submit; but as it was,
+she watched his docility with a scornful eye.
+
+“That girl rules you with a rod of iron,” she said one day. But even then
+Vincent did not rouse himself.
+
+“She knows her business,” he said admiringly.
+
+To any other invalid Adelaide could have been a soothing visitor, could
+have adapted the quick turns of her mind to the relaxed attention of
+the sick; but, honestly enough, there seemed to her an impertinence,
+almost an insult, in treating Vincent in such a way. The result was
+that her visits were exhausting, and she knew it. And yet, she said to
+herself, he was ill, not insane; how could she conceal from him the
+happenings of every day? Vincent would be the last person to be
+grateful to her for that.
+
+She saw him one day grow pale; his eyes began to close. She had made up
+her mind to leave him when Miss Gregory came in, and with a quicker eye
+and a more active habit of mind, said at once:
+
+“I think Mr. Farron has had enough excitement for one day.”
+
+Adelaide smiled up at the girl almost insolently.
+
+“Is a visit from a wife an excitement?” she asked. Miss Gregory was
+perfectly grave.
+
+“The greatest,” she said.
+
+Adelaide yielded to her own irritation.
+
+“Well,” she said, “I shan’t stay much longer.”
+
+“It would be better if you went now, I think, Mrs. Farron.”
+
+Adelaide looked at Vincent. It was silly of him, she thought, to pretend
+he didn’t hear. She bent over him.
+
+“Your nurse is driving me away from you, dearest,” she murmured.
+
+He opened his eyes and took her hand.
+
+“Come back to-morrow early--as early as you can,” he said.
+
+She never remembered his siding against her before, and she swept out
+into the hallway, saying to herself that it was childish to be annoyed at
+the whims of an invalid.
+
+Miss Gregory had followed her.
+
+“Mrs. Farron,” she said, “do you mind my suggesting that for the present
+it would be better not to talk to Mr. Farron about anything that might
+worry him, even trifles?”
+
+Adelaide laughed.
+
+“You know very little of Mr. Farron,” she said, “if you think he worries
+over trifles.”
+
+“Any one worries over trifles when he is in a nervous state.”
+
+Adelaide passed by without answering, passed by as if she had not heard.
+The suggestion of Vincent nervously worrying over trifles was one of the
+most repellent pictures that had ever been presented to her imagination.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+The firm for which Wayne worked was young and small--Benson & Honaton.
+They made a specialty of circularization in connection with the bond
+issues in which they were interested, and Wayne had charge of their
+“literature,” as they described it. He often felt, after he had finished
+a report, that his work deserved the title. A certain number of people in
+Wall Street disapproved of the firm’s methods. Sometimes Pete thought
+this was because, for a young firm, they had succeeded too quickly to
+please the more deliberate; but sometimes in darker moments he thought
+there might be some justice in the idea.
+
+During the weeks that Farron was in the hospital Pete, despite his
+constant availability to Mathilde, had been at work on his report on a
+coal property in Pennsylvania. He was extremely pleased with the
+thoroughness with which he had done the job. His report was not
+favorable. The day after it was finished, a little after three, he
+received word that the firm wanted to see him. He was always annoyed with
+himself that these messages caused his heart to beat a trifle faster. He
+couldn’t help associating them with former hours with his head-master or
+in the dean’s office. Only he had respected his head-master and even the
+dean, whereas he was not at all sure he respected Mr. Benson and he was
+quite sure he did not respect Mr. Honaton.
+
+He rose slowly from his desk, exchanging with the office boy who brought
+the message a long, severe look, under which something very comic lurked,
+though neither knew what.
+
+“And don’t miss J.B.’s socks,” said the boy.
+
+Mr. Honaton--J.B.--was considered in his office a very beautiful dresser,
+as indeed in some ways he was. He was a tall young man, built like a
+greyhound, with a small, pointed head, a long waist, and a very long
+throat, from which, however, the strongest, loudest voice could issue
+when he so desired. This was his priceless asset. He was the board
+member, and generally admitted to be an excellent broker. It always
+seemed to Pete that he was a broker exactly as a beaver is a
+dam-builder, because nature had adapted him to that task. But outside of
+this one instinctive capacity he had no sense whatsoever. He rarely
+appeared in the office. He was met at the Broad Street entrance of the
+exchange at one minute to ten by a boy with the morning’s orders, and
+sometimes he came in for a few minutes after the closing; but usually by
+three-fifteen he had disappeared from financial circles, and was
+understood to be relaxing in the higher social spheres to which he
+belonged. So when Pete, entering Mr. Benson’s private office, saw Honaton
+leaning against the window-frame, with his hat-brim held against his
+thigh exactly like a fashion-plate, he knew that something of importance
+must be pending.
+
+Benson, the senior member, was a very different person. He looked like a
+fat, white, pugnacious cat. His hair, which had turned white early, had a
+tendency to grow in a bang; his arms were short--so short that when he
+put his hands on the arms of his swing-chair he hardly bent his elbows.
+He had them there now as Pete entered, and was swinging through short
+arcs in rather a nervous rhythm. He was of Irish parentage, and was
+understood to have political influence.
+
+“Wayne,” said Benson, “how would you like to go to China?”
+
+And Honaton repeated portentously, “China,” as if Benson might have made
+a mistake in the name of the country if he had not been at his elbow to
+correct him.
+
+Wayne laughed.
+
+“Well,” he said, “I have nothing against China.”
+
+Benson outlined the situation quickly. The firm had acquired property in
+China not entirely through their own choice, and they wanted a thorough,
+clear report on it; they knew of no one--_no one_, Benson emphasized--who
+could do that as impartially and as well as Wayne. They would pay him a
+good sum and his expenses. It would take him a year, perhaps a year and a
+half. They named the figure. It was one that made marriage possible. They
+talked of the situation and the property and the demand for copper until
+Honaton began to look at his watch, a flat platinum watch, perfectly
+plain, you might have thought, until you caught a glimpse of a narrow
+line of brilliants along its almost imperceptible rim. His usual working
+day was over in half an hour.
+
+“And when I come back, Mr. Benson?” said Wayne.
+
+“Your place will be open for you here.”
+
+There was a pause.
+
+“Well, what do you say?” said Honaton.
+
+“I feel very grateful for the offer,” said Pete, “but of course I can’t
+give you an answer now.”
+
+“Why not, why not?” returned Honaton, who felt that he had given up half
+an hour for nothing if the thing couldn’t be settled on the spot; and
+even Benson, Wayne noticed, began to glower.
+
+“You could probably give us as good an answer to-day as to-morrow,”
+he said.
+
+Nothing roused Pete’s spirit like feeling a tremor in his own soul, and
+so he now answered with great firmness:
+
+“I cannot give you an answer to-day _or_ to-morrow.”
+
+“It’s all off, then, all off,” said Honaton, moving to the door.
+
+“When do the Chinese boats sail, Mr. Honaton?” said Pete, with the
+innocence of manner that an employee should use when putting his superior
+in a hole.
+
+“I don’t see what difference that makes to you, Wayne, if you’re not
+taking them,” said Honaton, as if he were triumphantly concealing the
+fact that he didn’t know.
+
+“Don’t feel you have to wait, Jack, if you’re in a hurry,” said his
+partner, and when the other had slid out of the office Benson turned to
+Wayne and went on: “You wouldn’t have to go until a week from Saturday.
+You would have to get off then, and we should have to know in time to
+find some one else in case you don’t care for it.”
+
+Pete asked for three days, and presently left the office.
+
+He had a friend, one of his mother’s reformed drunkards, who as janitor
+lived on the top floor of a tall building. He and his wife offered Wayne
+the hospitality of their balcony, and now and then, in moments like this,
+he availed himself of it. Not, indeed, that there had ever been a moment
+quite like this; for he knew that he was facing the most important
+decision he had ever been forced to make.
+
+In the elevator he met the janitor’s cat Susan going home after an
+afternoon visit to the restaurant on the sixteenth floor. The elevator
+boy loved to tell how she never made a mistake in the floor.
+
+“Do you think she’d get off at the fifteenth or the seventeenth? Not she.
+Sometimes she puts her nose out and smells at the other floors, but she
+won’t get off until I stop at the right one. Sometimes she has to ride up
+and down three or four times before any one wants the sixteenth. Eh,
+Susan?” he added in caressing tones; but Susan was watching the floors
+flash past and paid no attention until, arrived at the top, she and Pete
+stepped off together.
+
+It was a cool, clear day, for the wind was from the north, but on the
+southern balcony the sun was warm. Pete sat down in the kitchen-chair
+set for him, tilted back, and looked out over the Statue of Liberty,
+which stood like a stunted baby, to the blue Narrows. He saw one
+thing clearly, and that was that he would not go if Mathilde would not
+go with him.
+
+He envied people who could make up their minds by thinking. At least
+sometimes he envied them and sometimes he thought they lied. He could
+only think _about_ a subject and wait for the unknown gods to bring him a
+decision. And this is what he now did, with his eyes fixed on the towers
+and tanks and tenements, on the pale winter sky, and, when he got up and
+leaned his elbows on the parapet, on the crowds that looked like a flood
+of purple insects in the streets.
+
+He thought of Mathilde’s youth and his own untried capacities for
+success, of poverty and children, of the probable opposition of
+Mathilde’s family and of a strange, sinister, disintegrating power he
+felt or suspected in Mrs. Farron. He felt that it was a terrible risk to
+ask a young girl to take and that it was almost an insult to be afraid to
+ask her to take it. That was what his mother had always said about these
+cherished, protected creatures: they were not prepared to meet any strain
+in life. He knew he would not have hesitated to ask a girl differently
+brought up. Ought he to ask Mathilde or ought he not even to hesitate
+about asking her? In his own future he had confidence. He had an unusual
+power of getting his facts together so that they meant something. In a
+small way his work was recognized. A report of his had some weight. He
+felt certain that if on his return he wanted another position he could
+get it unless he made a terrible fiasco in China. Should he consult any
+one? He knew beforehand what they would all think about it. Mr. Lanley
+would think that it was sheer impertinence to want to marry his
+granddaughter on less than fifteen thousand dollars a year; Mrs. Farron
+would think that there were lots of equally agreeable young men in the
+world who would not take a girl to China; and his mother, whom he could
+not help considering the wisest of the three, would think that Mathilde
+lacked discipline and strength of will for such an adventure. And on this
+he found he made up his mind. “After all,” he said to himself as he put
+the chair back against the wall, “everything else would be failure, and
+this may be success.”
+
+It was the afternoon that Farron was brought back from the hospital, and
+he and Mathilde were sure of having the drawing-room to themselves. He
+told her the situation slowly and with a great deal of detail,
+chronologically, introducing the Chinese trip at the very end. But she
+did not at once understand.
+
+“O Pete, you would not go away from me!” she said. “I could not
+face that.”
+
+“Couldn’t you? Remember that everything you say is going to be used
+against you.”
+
+“Would you be willing to go, Pete?”
+
+“Only if you will go with me.”
+
+“Oh!” she clasped her hands to her breast, shrinking back to look at
+him. So that was what he had meant, this stranger whom she had known for
+such a short time. As she looked she half expected that he would smile,
+and say it was all a joke; but his eyes were steadily and seriously
+fixed on hers. It was very queer, she thought. Their meeting, their
+first kiss, their engagement, had all seemed so inevitable, so natural,
+there had not been a hint of doubt or decision about it; but now all of
+a sudden she found herself faced by a situation in which it was
+impossible to say yes or no.
+
+“It would be wonderful, of course,” she said, after a minute, but her
+tone showed she was not considering it as a possibility.
+
+Wayne’s heart sank; he saw that he had thought it possible that he would
+not allow her to go, but that he had never seriously faced the chance of
+her refusing.
+
+“Mathilde,” he said, “it’s far and sudden, and we shall be poor, and I
+can’t promise that I shall succeed more than other fellows; and yet
+against all that--”
+
+She looked at him.
+
+“You don’t think I care for those things? I don’t care if you succeed or
+fail, or live all your life in Siam.”
+
+“What is it, then?”
+
+“Pete, it’s my mother. She would never consent.”
+
+Wayne was aware of this, but, then, as he pointed out to Mathilde with
+great care, Mrs. Farron could not bear for her daughter the pain of
+separation.
+
+“Separation!” cried the girl, “But you just said you would not go if
+I did not.”
+
+“If you put your mother before me, mayn’t I put my profession
+before you?”
+
+“My dear, don’t speak in that tone.”
+
+“Why, Mathilde,” he said, and he sprang up and stood looking down at her
+from a little distance, “this is the real test. We have thought we loved
+each other--”
+
+“Thought!” she interrupted.
+
+“But to get engaged with no immediate prospect of marriage, with all
+our families and friends grouped about, that doesn’t mean such a
+lot, does it?”
+
+“It does to me,” she answered almost proudly.
+
+“Now, one of us has to sacrifice something. I want to go on this
+expedition. I want to succeed. That may be egotism or legitimate
+ambition. I don’t know, but I want to go. I think I mean to go. Ought
+I to give it up because you are afraid of your mother?”
+
+“It’s love, not fear, Pete.”
+
+“You love me, too, you say.”
+
+“I feel an obligation to her.”
+
+“And, good Heavens! do you feel none to me?”
+
+“No, no. I love you too much to feel an obligation to you.”
+
+“But you love your mother _and_ feel an obligation to her. Why, Mathilde,
+that feeling of obligation _is_ love--love in its most serious form.
+That’s what you don’t feel for me. That’s why you won’t go.”
+
+“I haven’t said I wouldn’t go.”
+
+“You never even thought of going.”
+
+“I have, I do. But how can I help hesitating? You must know I want to
+go.”
+
+“I see very little sign of it,” he murmured. The interview had not gone
+as he intended. He had not meant, he never imagined, that he would
+attempt to urge and coerce her; but her very detachment seemed to set a
+fire burning within him.
+
+“I think,” he said with an effort to sound friendly, “that I had better
+go and let you think this over by yourself.”
+
+He was actually moving to the door when she sprang up and put her arms
+about him.
+
+“Weren’t you even going to kiss me, Pete?”
+
+He stooped, and touched her cheek with his lips.
+
+“Do you call that a kiss?”
+
+“O Mathilde, do you think any kiss will change the facts?” he answered,
+and was gone.
+
+As soon as he had left her the desire for tears left her, too. She felt
+calm and more herself, more an isolated, independent human being than
+ever before in her life. She thought of all the things she ought to have
+said to Pete. The reason why she felt no obligation to him was that she
+was one with him. She was prepared to sacrifice him exactly as she was,
+or ought to be, willing to sacrifice herself; whereas her mother--it
+seemed as if her mother’s power surrounded her in every direction, as
+solid as the ancients believed the dome of heaven.
+
+Pringle appeared in the doorway in his eternal hunt for the tea-things.
+
+“May I take the tray, miss?” he said.
+
+She nodded, hardly glancing at the untouched tea-table. Pringle, as he
+bent over it, observed that it was nice to have Mr. Farron back.
+Mathilde remembered that she, too, had once been interested in her
+stepfather’s return.
+
+“Where’s my mother, Pringle?”
+
+“Mrs. Farron’s in her room, I think, miss, and Mr. Lanley’s with her.”
+
+Lanley had stopped as usual to ask after his son-in-law. He found his
+daughter writing letters in her room. He thought her looking cross, but
+in deference to her recent anxieties he called it, even in his own mind,
+overstrained.
+
+“Vincent is doing very well, I believe,” she answered in response to his
+question. “He ought to be. He is in charge of two lovely young creatures
+hardly Mathilde’s age who have already taken complete control of the
+household.”
+
+“You’ve seen him, of course.”
+
+“For a few minutes; they allow me a few minutes. They communicate by
+secret signals when they think I have stayed long enough.”
+
+Mr. Lanley never knew how to treat this mood of his daughter’s, which
+seemed to him as unreasonable as if it were emotional, and yet as cold as
+if it were logic itself. He changed the subject and said boldly:
+
+“Mrs. Baxter is coming to-morrow.”
+
+Adelaide’s eyes faintly flashed.
+
+“Oh, wouldn’t you know it!” she murmured. “Just at the most inconvenient
+time--inconvenient for me, I mean. Really, lovers are the only people you
+can depend on. I wish I had a lover.”
+
+“Adelaide,” said her father with some sternness, “even in fun you should
+not say such a thing. If Mathilde heard you--”
+
+“Mathilde is the person who made me see it. Her boy is here all the
+time, trying to think of something to please her. And who have I?
+Vincent has his nurses; and you have your old upholstered lady. I can’t
+help wishing I had a lover. They are the only people who, as the Wayne
+boy would say, ‘stick around.’ But don’t worry, Papa, I have a loyal
+nature.” She was interrupted by a knock at the door, and a nurse--the
+same who had been too encouraging to please her at the hospital--put in
+her head and said brightly:
+
+“You may see Mr. Farron now, Mrs. Farron.”
+
+Adelaide turned to her father and made a little bow.
+
+“See how I am favored,” she said, and left him.
+
+Nothing of this mood was apparent when she entered her husband’s room,
+though she noticed that the arrangement of the furniture had been
+changed, and, what she disliked even more, that they had brushed his hair
+in a new way. This, with his pallor and thinness, made him look strange
+to her. She bent over, and laid her cheek to his almost motionless lips.
+
+“Well, dear,” she said, “have you seen the church-warden part they have
+given your hair?”
+
+He shook his head impatiently, and she saw she had made the mistake of
+trying to give the tone to an interview in which she was not the leading
+character.
+
+“Who has the room above mine, Adelaide?” he asked.
+
+“My maid.”
+
+“Ask her not to practice the fox-trot, will you?”
+
+“O Vincent, she is never there.”
+
+“My mistake,” he answered, and shut his eyes.
+
+She repented at once.
+
+“Of course I’ll tell her. I’m sorry that you were disturbed.” But she
+was thinking only of his tone. He was not an irritable man, and he had
+never used such a tone to her before. All pleasure in the interview was
+over. She was actually glad when one of the nurses came in and began to
+move about the room in a manner that suggested dismissal.
+
+“Of course I’m not angry,” she said to herself. “He’s so weak one must
+humor him like a child.”
+
+She derived some satisfaction, however, from the idea of sending for her
+maid Lucie and making her uncomfortable; but on her way she met Mathilde
+in the hall.
+
+“May I speak to you, Mama?” she said.
+
+Mrs. Farron laughed.
+
+“May you speak to me?” she said. “Why, yes; you may have the unusual
+privilege. What is it?”
+
+Mathilde followed her mother into the bedroom and shut the door.
+
+“Pete has just been here. He has been offered a position in China.”
+
+“In China?” said Mrs. Farron. This was the first piece of luck that had
+come to her in a long time, but she did not betray the least pleasure. “I
+hope it is a good one.”
+
+“Yes, he thinks it good. He sails in two weeks.”
+
+“In two weeks?” And this time she could not prevent her eye lighting a
+little. She thought how nicely that small complication had settled
+itself, and how clever she had been to have the mother to dinner and
+behave as if she were friendly. She did not notice that her daughter was
+trembling; she couldn’t, of course, be expected to know that the girl’s
+hands were like ice, and that she had waited several seconds to steady
+her voice sufficiently to pronounce the fatal sentence:
+
+“He wants me to go with him, Mama.”
+
+She watched her mother in an agony for the effect of these words.
+Mrs. Farron had suddenly detected a new burn in the hearth-rug. She
+bent over it.
+
+“This wood does snap so!” she murmured.
+
+The rug was a beautiful old Persian carpet of roses and urns.
+
+“Did you understand what I said, Mama?”
+
+“Yes, dear; that Mr. Wayne was going to China in two weeks and wanted you
+to go, too. Was it just a _politesse_, or does he actually imagine that
+you could?”
+
+“He thinks I can.”
+
+Mrs. Farron laughed good-temperedly.
+
+“Did you go and see about having your pink silk shortened?” she said.
+
+Mathilde stared at her mother, and in the momentary silence Lucie came in
+and asked what madame wanted for the evening, and Adelaide in her fluent
+French began explaining that what she really desired most was that Lucie
+should not make so much noise in her room that monsieur could not sleep.
+In the midst of it she stopped and turned to her daughter.
+
+“Won’t you be late for dinner, darling?” she said.
+
+Mathilde thought it very possible, and went away to get dressed. She went
+into her own room and shut the door sharply behind her.
+
+All the time she was dressing she tried to rehearse her case--that it
+was her life, her love, her chance; but all the time she had a sickening
+sense that a lifted eye-brow of her mother’s would make it sound childish
+and absurd even in her own ears. She had counted on a long evening, but
+when she went down-stairs she found three or four friends of her mother’s
+were to dine and go to the theater. The dinner was amusing, the talk,
+though avowedly hampered by the presence of Mathilde, was witty and
+unexpected enough; but Mathilde was not amused by it, for she
+particularly dreaded her mother in such a mood of ruthless gaiety. At the
+theater they were extremely critical, and though they missed almost the
+whole first act, appeared, in the entr’acte, to feel no hesitation in
+condemning it. They spoke of French and Italian actors by name, laughed
+heartily over the playwright’s conception of social usages, and made
+Mathilde feel as if her own unacknowledged enjoyment of the play was the
+guiltiest of secrets.
+
+As they drove home, she was again alone with her mother, and she said at
+once the sentence she had determined on:
+
+“I don’t think you understood, Mama, how seriously I meant what I said
+this afternoon.”
+
+Mrs. Farron was bending her long-waisted figure forward to get a good
+look at a picture which, small, lonely, and brightly lighted, hung in a
+picture-dealer’s window. It was a picture of an empty room. Hot summer
+sunlight filtered through the lowered Venetian blinds, and fell in bands
+on the golden wood of the floor. Outside the air was burned and dusty,
+but inside the room all was clear, cool, and pure.
+
+“How perfect his things are,” murmured Mrs. Farron to herself, and then
+added to her daughter: “Yes, my dear, I did take in what you said. You
+really think you are in love with this Wayne boy, don’t you? It’s
+immensely to your credit, darling,” she went on, her tone taking on a
+flattering sweetness, “to care so much about any one who has such funny,
+stubby little hands--most unattractive hands,” she added almost dreamily.
+
+There was a long pause during which an extraordinary thing happened to
+Mathilde. She found that it didn’t make the very slightest difference to
+her what her mother thought of Pete or his hands, that it would never
+make any difference to her again. It was as if her will had suddenly
+been born, and the first act of that will was to decide to go with the
+man she loved. How could she have doubted for an instant? It was so
+simple, and no opposition would or could mean anything to her. She was
+not in the least angry; on the contrary, she felt extremely pitiful, as
+if she were saying good-by to some one who did not know she was going
+away, as if in a sense she had now parted from her mother forever. Tears
+came into her eyes.
+
+“Ah, Mama!” she said like a sigh.
+
+Mrs. Farron felt she had been cruel, but without regretting it; for that,
+she thought, was often a parent’s duty.
+
+“I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Mathilde. The boy is a nice enough
+little person, but really I could not let you set off for China at a
+minute’s notice with any broker’s clerk who happened to fall in love with
+your golden hair. When you have a little more experience you will
+discriminate between the men you like to have love you and the men there
+is the smallest chance of your loving. I assure you, if little Wayne were
+not in love with you, you would think him a perfectly commonplace boy. If
+one of your friends were engaged to him, you would be the first to say
+that you wondered what it was she saw in him. That isn’t the way one
+wants people to feel about one’s husband, is it? And as to going to China
+with him, you know that’s impossible, don’t you?”
+
+“It would be impossible to let him go without me.”
+
+“Really, Mathilde!” said Mrs. Farron, gently, as if she, so willing to
+play fair, were being put off with fantasies. “I don’t understand you,”
+she added.
+
+“No, Mama; you don’t.”
+
+The motor stopped at the door, and they went in silence to Mrs. Farron’s
+room, where for a bitter hour they talked, neither yielding an inch. At
+last Adelaide sent the girl to bed. Mathilde was aware of profound
+physical exhaustion, and yet underneath there was a high knowledge of
+something unbreakable within her.
+
+Left alone, Adelaide turned instinctively toward her husband’s door.
+There were her strength and vision. Then she remembered, and drew back;
+but presently, hearing a stir there, she knocked very softly. A nurse
+appeared on the instant.
+
+“Oh, _please_, Mrs. Farron! Mr. Farron has just got to sleep.”
+
+Adelaide stood alone in the middle of the floor. Once again, she thought,
+in a crisis of her life she had no one to depend on but herself. She
+lifted her shoulders. No one was to blame, but there the fact was. They
+urged you to cling and be guided, but when the pinch came, you had to act
+for yourself. She had learned her lesson now. Henceforward she took her
+own life over into her own hands.
+
+She reviewed her past dependences. Her youth, with its dependence on her
+father, particularly in matters of dress. She recalled her early
+photographs with a shudder. Had she really dressed so badly or was it
+only the change of fashion? And then her dependence on Joe Severance.
+What could be more ridiculous than for a woman of her intelligence to
+allow herself to be guided in everything by a man like Joe, who had
+nothing himself but a certain shrewd masculinity? And now Vincent. She
+was still under the spell of his superiority, but perhaps she would come
+to judge him too. She had learned much from him. Perhaps she had learned
+all he had to teach her. Her face looked as if it were carved out of some
+smooth white stone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+After she had gone up-stairs, Mathilde went down again to telephone Pete
+that she had made her decision. She went boldly snapping electric
+switches, for her going was a sort of assertion of her right to
+independent action. She would have hesitated even less if she had known
+how welcome her news was, how he had suffered since their parting.
+
+On going home from his interview with her, he found his mother dressing
+to dine with Mr. Lanley, a party arranged before the unexpected arrival
+of Mrs. Baxter. The only part of dressing that delayed Mrs. Wayne was her
+hair, which was so long that the brushing of it took time. In this
+process she was engaged when her son, in response to her answer, came
+into her room.
+
+“How is Mr. Farron?” she asked at once, and he, rather touched at the
+genuineness of her interest, answered her in detail before her next
+exclamation betrayed that it was entirely for the employer of Marty
+Burke that she was solicitous. “Isn’t it too bad he was taken ill just
+now?” she said.
+
+The bitterness and doubt from which Wayne was suffering were not emotions
+that disposed him to confidence. He did not want to tell his mother what
+he was going through, for the obvious and perhaps unworthy reason that it
+was just what she would have expected him to go through. At the same time
+a real deceit was involved in concealing it, and so, tipping his chair
+back against her wall, he said:
+
+“The firm has asked me to go to China for them.”
+
+His mother turned, her whole face lit up with interest.
+
+“To China! How interesting!” she said. “China is a wonderful country. How
+I should like to go to China!”
+
+“Come along. I don’t start for two weeks.”
+
+She shook her head.
+
+“No, if you go, I’ll make a trip to that hypnotic clinic of Dr.
+Platerbridge’s; and if I can learn the trick, I will open one here.”
+
+The idea crossed Wayne’s mind that perhaps he had not the power of
+inspiring affection.
+
+“You don’t miss people a bit, do you, Mother?” he said.
+
+“Yes, Pete, I do; only there is so much to be done. What does Mathilde
+say to you going off like this? How long will you be gone?”
+
+“More than a year.”
+
+“Pete, how awful for her!”
+
+“There is nothing to prevent her going with me.”
+
+“You couldn’t take that child to China.”
+
+“You may be glad to know that she is cordially of your opinion.”
+
+The feeling behind his tone at last attracted his mother’s full
+attention.
+
+“But, my dear boy,” she said gently, “she has never been anywhere in her
+life without a maid. She probably doesn’t know how to do her hair or mend
+her clothes or anything practical.”
+
+“Mother dear, you are not so awfully practical yourself,” he answered;
+“but you would have gone.”
+
+Mrs. Wayne looked impish.
+
+“I always loved that sort of thing,” she said; and then, becoming more
+maternal, she added, “and that doesn’t mean it would be sensible because
+I’d do it.”
+
+“Well,”--Wayne stood up preparatory to leaving the room,--“I mean to take
+her if she’ll go.”
+
+His mother, who had now finished winding her braid very neatly around her
+head, sank into a chair.
+
+“Oh, dear!” she said, “I almost wish I weren’t dining with Mr. Lanley.
+He’ll think it’s all my fault.”
+
+“I doubt if he knows about it.”
+
+Mrs. Wayne’s eyes twinkled.
+
+“May I tell him? I should like to see his face.”
+
+“Tell him I am going, if you like. Don’t say I want to take her with me.”
+
+Her face fell.
+
+“That wouldn’t be much fun,” she answered, “because I suppose the truth
+is they won’t be sorry to have you out of the way.”
+
+“I suppose not,” he said, and shut the door behind him. He could not
+truthfully say that his mother had been much of a comfort. He had
+suddenly thought that he would go down to the first floor and get Lily
+Parret to go to the theater with him. He and she had the warm friendship
+for each other of two handsome, healthy young people of opposite sexes
+who might have everything to give each other except time. She was
+perhaps ten years older than he, extremely handsome, with dimples and
+dark red hair and blue eyes. She had a large practice among the poor,
+and might have made a conspicuous success of her profession if it had
+not been for her intense and too widely diffused interest. She wanted to
+strike a blow at every abuse that came to her attention, and as, in the
+course of her work, a great many turned up, she was always striking
+blows and never following them up. She went through life in a series of
+springs, each one in a different direction; but the motion of her
+attack was as splendid as that of a tiger. Often she was successful, and
+always she enjoyed herself.
+
+When she answered Pete’s ring, and he looked up at her magnificent
+height, her dimples appeared in welcome. She really was glad to see him.
+
+“Come out and dine with me, Lily, and go to the theater.”
+
+“Come to a meeting at Cooper Union on capital punishment. I’m going to
+speak, and I’m going to be very good.”
+
+“No, Lily; I want to explain to you what a pitiable sex you belong to.
+You have no character, no will--”
+
+She shook her head, laughing.
+
+“You are a personal lot, you young men,” she said. “You change your mind
+about women every day, according to how one of them treats you.”
+
+“They don’t amount to a row of pins, Lily.”
+
+“Certainly some men select that kind, Pete.”
+
+“O Lily,” he answered, “don’t talk to me like that! I want some one to
+tell me I’m perfect, and, strangely enough, no one will.”
+
+“I will,” she answered, with beaming good nature, “and I pretty near
+think so, too. But I can’t dine with you, Pete. Wouldn’t you like to go
+to my meeting?”
+
+“I should perfectly hate to,” he answered, and went off crossly, to
+dine at his college’s local club. Here he found an old friend, who most
+fortunately said something derogatory of the firm of Benson & Honaton.
+The opinion coincided with certain phases of Wayne’s own views, but he
+contradicted it, held it up to ridicule, and ended by quoting incidents
+in the history of his friend’s own firm which, as he said, were
+probably among the crookedest things that had ever been put over in
+Wall Street. Lily would not have distracted his mind more completely.
+He felt almost cheerful when he went home about ten o’clock. His mother
+was still out, and there was no letter from Mathilde. He had been
+counting on finding one.
+
+Before long his mother came in. She was looking very fine. She had on a
+new gray dress that she had had made for her by a fallen woman from an
+asylum, but which had turned out better than such ventures of Mrs.
+Wayne’s usually did.
+
+She had supposed she and Mr. Lanley were to dine alone, an idea which
+had not struck her as revolutionary. Accustomed to strange meals in
+strange company--a bowl of milk with a prison chaplain at a dairy
+lunch-room, or even, on one occasion, a supper in an Owl Lunch Wagon with
+a wavering drunkard,--she had thought that a quiet, perfect dinner with
+Mr. Lanley sounded pleasant enough. But she was not sorry to find it had
+been enlarged. She liked to meet new people. She was extremely
+optimistic, and always hoped that they would prove either spiritually
+rewarding, or practically useful to some of her projects. When she saw
+Mrs. Baxter, with her jetty hair, jeweled collar, and eyes a trifle too
+saurian for perfect beauty, she at once saw a subscription to the
+working-girl’s club. The fourth person Mr. Wilsey, Lanley’s lawyer, she
+knew well by reputation. She wondered if she could make him see that his
+position on the eight-hour law was absolutely anti-social.
+
+Mr. Lanley enjoyed a small triumph when she entered. He had been so
+discreet in his description of her to Mrs. Baxter, he had been so careful
+not to hint that she was an illuminating personality who had suddenly
+come into his life, that he knew he had left his old friend with the
+general impression that Mrs. Wayne was merely the mother of an
+undesirable suitor of Mathilde’s who spent most of her life in the
+company of drunkards. So when she came in, a little late as usual, in her
+long, soft, gray dress, with a pink rose at her girdle, looking far more
+feminine than Mrs. Baxter, about whom Adelaide’s offensive adjective
+“upholstered” still clung, he felt the full effect of her appearance. He
+even enjoyed the obviously suspicious glance which Mrs. Baxter
+immediately afterward turned upon him.
+
+At dinner things began well. They talked about people and events of which
+Mrs. Wayne knew nothing, but her interest and good temper made her not an
+outsider, but an audience. Anecdotes which even Mr. Lanley might have
+felt were trivial gossip became, through her attention to them, incidents
+of the highest human interest. Such an uncritical interest was perhaps
+too stimulating.
+
+He expected nothing dangerous when, during the game course, Mrs. Baxter
+turned to him and asked how Mathilde had enjoyed what she referred to as
+“her first winter.”
+
+Mr. Lanley liked to talk about Mathilde. He described, with a little
+natural exaggeration, how much she had enjoyed herself and how popular
+she had been.
+
+“I hope she hasn’t been bitten by any of those modern notions,” said
+Mrs. Baxter.
+
+Mr. Wilsey broke in.
+
+“Oh, these modern, restless young women!” he said. “They don’t seem able
+to find their natural contentment in their own homes. My daughter came to
+me the other day with a wonderful scheme of working all day long with
+charity organizations. I said to her, ‘My dear, charity begins at home.’
+My wife, Mrs. Baxter, is an old-fashioned housekeeper. She gives out all
+supplies used in my house; she knows where the servants are at every
+minute of the day, and we have nine. She--”
+
+“Oh, how is dear Mrs. Wilsey?” said Mrs. Baxter, perhaps not eager for
+the full list of her activities.
+
+“Well, at present she is in a sanatorium,” replied her husband, “from
+overwork, just plain overwork.”
+
+Mr. Lanley, catching Mrs. Wayne’s twinkling eye, could only pray that
+she would not point out that a sojourn in a sanatorium was not
+complete contentment in the home; but before she had a chance, Mrs.
+Baxter had gone on.
+
+“That’s so like the modern girl--anything but her obvious duty. She’ll
+help any one but her mother and work anywhere but in the home. We’ve had
+a very painful case at home lately. One of our most charming young girls
+has suddenly developed an absolutely morbid curiosity about the things
+that take place in the women’s courts. Why, as her poor father said to
+me, ‘Mrs. Baxter, old as I am, I hear things in those courts so shocking
+I have hard work forgetting them; and yet Imogen wants me to let her go
+into those courts day after day--’”
+
+“Oh, that’s abnormal, almost perverted,” said Mr. Wilsey, judicially.
+“The women’s courts are places where no--” he hesitated a bare instant,
+and Mrs. Wayne asked:
+
+“No woman should go?”
+
+“No girl should go.”
+
+“Yet many of the girls who come there are under sixteen.”
+
+Mr. Wilsey hid a slight annoyance under a manner peculiarly bland.
+
+“Ah, dear lady,” he said, “you must forgive my saying that that remark is
+a trifle irrelevant.”
+
+“Is it?” she asked, meaning him to answer her; but he only looked
+benevolently at her, and turned to listen to Mrs. Baxter, who was saying:
+
+“Yes, everywhere we look nowadays we see women rushing into things they
+don’t understand, and of course we all know what women are--”
+
+“What are they?” asked Mrs. Wayne, and Lanley’s heart sank.
+
+“Oh, emotional and inaccurate and untrustworthy and spiteful.”
+
+“Mrs. Baxter, I’m sure you’re not like that.”
+
+“My dear Madam!” exclaimed Wilsey.
+
+“But isn’t that logical?” Mrs. Wayne pursued. “If all women are so, and
+she’s a woman?”
+
+“Ah, logic, dear lady,” said Wilsey, holding up a finger--“logic, you
+know, has never been the specialty of your sex.”
+
+“Of course it’s logic,” said Lanley, crossly. “If you say all Americans
+are liars, Wilsey, and you’re an American, the logical inference is that
+you think yourself a liar. But Mrs. Baxter doesn’t mean that she thinks
+all women are inferior--”
+
+“I must say I prefer men,” she answered almost coquettishly.
+
+“If all women were like you, Mrs. Baxter, I’d believe in giving them the
+vote,” said Wilsey.
+
+“Please don’t,” she answered. “I don’t want it.”
+
+“Ah, the clever ones don’t.”
+
+“I never pretended to be clever.”
+
+“Perhaps not; but I’d trust your intuition where I would pay no attention
+to a clever person.”
+
+Lanley laughed.
+
+“I think you’d better express that a little differently, Wilsey,” he
+said; but his legal adviser did not notice him.
+
+“My daughter came to me the other day,” he went on to Mrs. Baxter, “and
+said, ‘Father, don’t you think women ought to have the vote some day?’
+and I said, ‘Yes, my dear, just as soon as men have the babies.’”
+
+“There’s no answer to that,” said Mrs. Baxter.
+
+“I fancy not,” said Wilsey. “I think I put the essence of it in that
+sentence.”
+
+“If ever women get into power in this country, I shall live abroad.”
+
+“O Mrs. Baxter,” said Mrs. Wayne, “really you don’t understand women--”
+
+“I don’t? Why, Mrs. Wayne, I am a woman.”
+
+“All human beings are spiteful and inaccurate and all those things you
+said; but that isn’t _all_ they are. The women I see, the wives of my
+poor drunkards are so wonderful, so patient. They are mothers and
+wage-earners and sick nurses, too; they’re not the sort of women you
+describe. Perhaps,” she added, with one of her fatal impulses toward
+concession, “perhaps your friends are untrustworthy and spiteful, as
+you say--”
+
+Mrs. Baxter drew herself up. “My friends, Mrs. Wayne,” she said--“my
+friends, I think, will compare favorably even with the wives of your
+drunkards.”
+
+Mr. Lanley rose to his feet.
+
+“Shall we go up-stairs?” he said. Mr. Wilsey offered Mrs. Baxter his
+arm. “An admirable answer that of yours,” he murmured as he led her from
+the room, “admirable snub to her perfectly unwarranted attack on you and
+your friends.”
+
+“Of course you realize that she doesn’t know any of the people I know,”
+said Mrs. Baxter. “Why should she begin to abuse them?”
+
+Mr. Wilsey laughed, and shook his finger.
+
+“Just because she doesn’t know them. That, I’m afraid, is the rub. That’s
+what I usually find lies behind the socialism of socialists--the sense of
+being excluded. This poor lady has evidently very little _usage du
+monde_. It is her pitiful little protest, dear Madam, against your charm,
+your background, your grand manner.”
+
+They sank upon an ample sofa near the fire, and though the other end of
+the large room was chilly, Lanley and Mrs. Wayne moved thither with a
+common impulse.
+
+Mrs. Wayne turned almost tearfully to Lanley.
+
+“I’m so sorry I’ve spoiled your party,” she said.
+
+“You’ve done much worse than that,” he returned gravely.
+
+“O Mr. Lanley,” she wailed, “what have I done?”
+
+“You’ve spoiled a friendship.”
+
+“Between you and me?”
+
+He shook his head.
+
+“Between them and me. I never heard people talk such nonsense, and yet
+I’ve been hearing people talk like that all my life, and have never taken
+it in. Mrs. Wayne, I want you to tell me something frankly--”
+
+“Oh, I’m so terrible when I’m frank,” she said.
+
+“Do I talk like that?”
+
+She looked at him and looked away again.
+
+“Good God! you think I do!”
+
+“No, you don’t talk like that often, but I think you feel that way a
+good deal.”
+
+“I don’t want to,” he answered. “I’m sixty-four, but I don’t ever want to
+talk like Wilsey. Won’t you stop me whenever I do?”
+
+Mrs. Wayne sighed.
+
+“It will make you angry.”
+
+“And if it does?”
+
+“I hate to make people angry. I was distressed that evening on the pier.”
+
+He looked up, startled.
+
+“I suppose I talked like Wilsey that night?”
+
+“You said you might be old-fashioned but--”
+
+“Don’t, please, tell me what I said, Mrs. Wayne.” He went on more
+seriously: “I’ve got to an age when I can’t expect great happiness from
+life--just a continuance of fairly satisfactory outside conditions; but
+since I’ve known you, I’ve felt a lightening, a brightening, an
+intensifying of my own inner life that I believe comes as near happiness
+as anything I’ve ever felt, and I don’t want to lose it on account of a
+reactionary old couple like that on the sofa over there.”
+
+He dreaded being left alone with the reactionary old couple when
+presently Mrs. Wayne, very well pleased with her evening, took her
+departure. He assisted her into her taxi, and as he came upstairs with a
+buoyant step, he wished it were not ridiculous at his age to feel so
+light-hearted.
+
+He saw that his absence had given his guests an instant of freer
+criticism, for they were tucking away smiles as he entered.
+
+“A very unusual type, is she not, our friend, Mrs. Wayne?” said Wilsey.
+
+“A little bit of a reformer, I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Baxter.
+
+“Don’t be too hard on her,” answered Lanley.
+
+“Oh, very charming, very charming,” put in Wilsey, feeling, perhaps, that
+Mrs. Baxter had been severe; “but the poor lady’s mind is evidently
+seething with a good many undigested ideas.”
+
+“You should have pointed out the flaws in her reasoning, Wilsey,”
+said his host.
+
+“Argue with a woman, Lanley!” Mr. Wilsey held up his hand in protest.
+“No, no, I never argue with a woman. They take it so personally.”
+
+“I think we had an example of that this evening,” said Mrs. Baxter.
+
+“Yes, indeed,” the lawyer went on. “See how the dear lady missed the
+point, and became so illogical and excited under our little discussion.”
+
+“Funny,” said Lanley. “I got just the opposite impression.”
+
+“Opposite?”
+
+“I thought it was you who missed the point, Wilsey.”
+
+He saw how deeply he had betrayed himself as the others exchanged a
+startled glance. It was Mrs. Baxter who thought of the correct reply.
+
+“_Were_ there any points?” she asked.
+
+Wilsey shook his finger.
+
+“Ah, don’t be cruel!” he said, and held out his hand to say good night;
+but Lanley was smoking, with his head tilted up and his eyes on the
+ceiling. What he was thinking was, “It isn’t good for an old man to get
+as angry as I am.”
+
+“Good night, Lanley; a delightful evening.”
+
+Mr. Lanley’s chin came down.
+
+“Oh, good night, Wilsey; glad you found it so.”
+
+When he was gone, Mrs. Baxter observed that he was a most agreeable
+companion.
+
+“So witty, so amiable, and, for a leader at the bar, he has an
+extraordinarily light touch.”
+
+Mr. Lanley had resumed his position on the hearth-rug and his
+contemplation of the ceiling.
+
+“Wilsey’s not a leader at the bar,” he said, with open crossness.
+
+He showed no disposition to sit and chat over the events of the evening.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Early the next morning, in Mrs. Baxter’s parlance,--that is to say, some
+little time before the sun had reached the meridian,--she was ringing
+Adelaide’s door-bell, while she minutely observed the curtains, the
+door-mat, the ivy plants in the vestibule, and the brightness of the
+brass knobs on the railing. In this she had a double motive: what was
+evil she would criticize, what was good she would copy.
+
+Adelaide was sitting with her husband when her visitor’s name was brought
+up. Since she had discovered that she was to be nothing but a sort of
+super-nurse to him, she found herself expert at rendering such service.
+She had brought in his favorite flowers, chosen a book for his bedside,
+and now sat gossiping beside him, not bringing him, as she said to
+herself, any of her real troubles; that would not be good for him. How
+extraordinarily easy it was to conceal, she thought. She heard her own
+tones, as gay and intimate as ever, as satisfactory to Vincent; and yet
+all the time her mind was working apart on her anxieties about
+Mathilde--anxieties with which, of course, one couldn’t bother a poor
+sick creature. She smoothed his pillow with the utmost tenderness.
+
+“Oh, Pringle,” she said, in answer to his announcement that Mrs. Baxter
+was down-stairs, “you haven’t let her in?”
+
+“She’s in the drawing-room, Madam.” And Pringle added as a clear
+indication of what he considered her duty, “She came in Mr. Lanley’s
+motor.”
+
+“Of course she did. Well, say I’ll be down,” and as Pringle went away
+with this encouraging intelligence, Adelaide sank even farther back in
+her chair and looked at her husband. “What I am called upon to sacrifice
+to other people’s love affairs! The Waynes and Mrs. Baxter--I never have
+time for my own friends. I don’t mind Mrs. Baxter when you’re well, and I
+can have a dinner; I ask all the stupid people together to whom I owe
+parties, and she is so pleased with them, and thinks they represent the
+most brilliant New York circle; but to have to go down and actually talk
+to her, isn’t that hard, Vin?”
+
+“Hard on me,” said Farron.
+
+“Oh, I shall come back--exhausted.”
+
+“By what you have given out?”
+
+“No, but by her intense intimacy. You have no idea how well she knows me.
+It’s Adelaide this and Adelaide that and ‘the last time you stayed with
+me in Baltimore.’ You know, Vin, I never stayed with her but once, and
+that only because she found me in the hotel and kidnapped me.
+However,”--Adelaide stood up with determination,--“one good thing is, I
+have begun to have an effect on my father. He does not like her any more.
+He was distinctly bored at the prospect of her visit this time. He did
+not resent it at all when I called her an upholstered old lady. I really
+think,” she added, with modest justice, “that I am rather good at
+poisoning people’s minds against their undesirable friends.” She paused,
+debating how long it would take her to separate Mathilde from the Wayne
+boy; and recalling that this was no topic for an invalid, she smiled at
+him and went down-stairs.
+
+“My dear Adelaide!” said Mrs. Baxter, enveloping her in a powdery
+caress.
+
+“How wonderfully you’re looking, Mrs. Baxter,” said Adelaide, choosing
+her adverb with intention.
+
+“Now tell me, dear,” said Mrs. Baxter, with a wave of a gloved hand,
+“what are those Italian embroideries?”
+
+“Those?” Adelaide lifted her eyebrows. “Ah, you’re in fun! A collector
+like you! Surely you know what those are.”
+
+“No,” answered Mrs. Baxter, firmly, though she wished she had selected
+something else to comment on.
+
+“Oh, they are the Villanelli embroideries,” said Adelaide, carelessly,
+very much as if she had said they were the Raphael cartoons, so that Mrs.
+Baxter was forced to reply in an awestruck tone:
+
+“You don’t tell me! Are they, really?”
+
+Adelaide nodded brightly. She had not actually made up the name. It
+was that of an obscure little palace where she had bought the
+hangings, and if Mrs. Baxter had had the courage to acknowledge
+ignorance, Adelaide would have told the truth. As it was, she
+recognized that by methods such as this she could retain absolute
+control over people like Mrs. Baxter.
+
+The lady from Baltimore decided on a more general scope.
+
+“Ah, your room!” she said. “Do you know whose it always reminds me
+of--that lovely salon of Madame de Liantour’s?”
+
+“What, of poor little Henrietta’s!” cried Adelaide, and she laid her hand
+appealingly for an instant on Mrs. Baxter’s knee. “That’s a cruel thing
+to say. All her good things, you know, were sold years ago. Everything
+she has is a reproduction. Am I really like her?”
+
+Getting out of this as best she could on a vague statement about
+atmosphere and sunshine and charm, Mrs. Baxter took refuge in inquiries
+about Vincent’s health, “your charming child,” and “your dear father.”
+
+“You know more about my dear father than I do,” returned Adelaide,
+sweetly. It was Mrs. Baxter’s cue.
+
+“I did not feel last evening that I knew anything about him at all. He
+is in a new phase, almost a new personality. Tell me, who is this
+Mrs. Wayne?”
+
+“Mrs. Wayne?” Mrs. Baxter must have felt herself revenged by the complete
+surprise of Adelaide’s tone.
+
+“Yes, she dined at the house last evening. Apparently it was to have been
+a tête-à-tête dinner, but my arrival changed it to a _partie carrée_.”
+She talked on about Wilsey and the conversation of the evening, but it
+made little difference what she said, for her full idea had reached
+Adelaide from the start, and had gathered to itself in an instant a
+hundred confirmatory memories. Like a picture, she saw before her Mrs.
+Wayne’s sitting-room, with the ink-spots on the rug. Who would not wish
+to exchange that for Mr. Lanley’s series of fresh, beautiful rooms?
+Suddenly she gave her attention back to Mrs. Baxter, who was saying:
+
+“I assure you, when we were alone I was prepared for a formal
+announcement.”
+
+It was not safe to be the bearer of ill tidings to Adelaide.
+
+“An announcement?” she said wonderingly. “Oh, no, Mrs. Baxter, my father
+will never marry again. There have always been rumors, and you can’t
+imagine how he and I have laughed over them together.”
+
+As the indisputable subject of such rumors in past times, Mrs. Baxter
+fitted a little arrow in her bow.
+
+“In the past,” she said, “women of suitable age have not perhaps been
+willing to consider the question, but this lady seems to me
+distinctly willing.”
+
+“More than willingness on the lady’s part has been needed,” answered
+Adelaide, and then Pringle’s ample form appeared in the doorway. “There’s
+a man from the office here, Madam, asking to see Mr. Farron.”
+
+“Mr. Farron can see no one.” A sudden light flashed upon her. “What is
+his name, Pringle?”
+
+“Burke, Madam.”
+
+“Oh, let him come in.” Adelaide turned to Mrs. Baxter. “I will show
+you,” she said, “one of the finest sights you ever saw.” The next
+instant Marty was in the room. Not so gorgeous as in his
+wedding-attire, he was still an exceedingly fine young animal. He was
+not so magnificently defiant as before, but he scowled at his
+unaccustomed surroundings under his dark brows.
+
+“It’s Mr. Farron I wanted to see,” he said, a soft roll to his r’s. At
+Mrs. Wayne’s Adelaide had suffered from being out of her own
+surroundings, but here she was on her own field, and she meant to make
+Burke feel it. She was leaning with her elbow on the back of the sofa,
+and now she slipped her bright rings down her slim fingers and shook them
+back again as she looked up at Burke and spoke to him as she would have
+done to a servant.
+
+“Mr. Farron cannot see you.”
+
+Cleverer people than Burke had struggled vainly against the poison of
+inferiority which this tone instilled into their minds.
+
+“That’s what they keep telling me down-town. I never knew him sick
+before.”
+
+“No?”
+
+“It wouldn’t take five minutes.”
+
+“Mr. Farron is too weak to see you.”
+
+Marty made a strange grating sound in his throat, and Adelaide asked
+like a queen bending from the throne:
+
+“What seems to be the matter, Burke?”
+
+“Why,”--Burke turned upon her the flare of his light, fierce eyes,--“they
+have it on me on the dock that as soon as he comes back he means to
+bounce me.”
+
+“To bounce you,” repeated Adelaide, and she almost smiled as she thought
+of that poor exhausted figure up-stairs.
+
+“I don’t care if he does or not,” Marty went on. “I’m not so damned stuck
+on the job. There’s others.”
+
+“There are maidens in Scotland more lovely by far,” murmured Adelaide.
+
+Again he scowled, feeling the approach of something hostile to him.
+
+“What’s that?” he asked, surmising that she was insulting him.
+
+“I said I supposed you could get a better job if you tried.”
+
+He did not like this tone either.
+
+“Well, whether I could or not,” he said, “this is no way. I’m losing my
+hold of my men.”
+
+“Oh, I can’t imagine your doing that, Burke.”
+
+He turned on her to see if she were really daring to laugh at him, and
+met an eye as steady as his own.
+
+“I guess I’m wasting my time here,” he said, and something intimated that
+some one would pay for that expenditure.
+
+“Shall I take a message to Mr. Farron for you?” said Adelaide.
+
+He nodded.
+
+“Yes. Tell him that if I’m to go, I’ll go to-day.”
+
+“I see.” She rose slowly, as if in response to a vague, amusing caprice.
+“Just that. If you go, you’ll go to-day.”
+
+For the first time Burke, regaining his self-confidence, saw that she was
+not an enemy, but an appreciative spectator, and his face broke up in a
+smile, queer, crooked, wrinkled, but brilliant.
+
+“I guess you’ll get it about right,” he said, and no compliment had ever
+pleased Adelaide half so much.
+
+“I think so,” she confidently answered, and then at the door she
+turned. “Oh, Mrs. Baxter,” she said, “this is Marty Burke, a very
+important person.”
+
+Importance, especially Adelaide Farron’s idea of importance, was a
+category for which Mrs. Baxter had the highest esteem, so almost against
+her will she looked at Burke, and found him looking her over with such a
+shrewd eye that she looked away, and then looked back again to find that
+his gaze was still upon her. He had made his living since he was a child
+by his faculty for sizing people up, and at his first glimpse of Mrs.
+Baxter’s shifting glance he had sized her up; so that now, when she
+remarked with an amiability at once ponderous and shaky that it was a
+very fine day, he replied in exactly the same tone, “It is that,” and
+began to walk about the room looking at the pictures. Presently a low,
+but sweet, whistle broke from his lips. He made her feel uncommonly
+uncomfortable, so uncomfortable that she was driven to conversation.
+
+“Are you fond of pictures, Burke?” she asked. He just looked at her over
+his shoulder without answering. She began to wish that Adelaide would
+come back.
+
+Adelaide had found her husband still accessible. He received in silence
+the announcement that Burke was down-stairs. She told the message
+without bias.
+
+“He says that they have it on him on the dock that he is to be bounced.
+He asked me to say this to you: that if he is to go, he’ll go to-day.”
+
+“What was his manner?”
+
+Adelaide could not resist a note of enjoyment entering into her tone as
+she replied:
+
+“Insolent in the extreme.”
+
+She was leaning against the wall at the foot of his bed, and though she
+was not looking at him, she felt his eyes on her.
+
+“Adelaide,” he said, “you should not have brought me that message.”
+
+“You mean it is bad for your health to be worried, dearest?” she asked
+in a tone so soft that only an expert in tones could have detected
+something not at all soft beneath it. She glanced at her husband under
+her lashes. Wasn’t he any more an expert in her tones?
+
+“I mean,” he answered, “that you should have told him to go to the
+devil.”
+
+“Oh, I leave that to you, Vin.” She laughed, and added after a second’s
+pause, “I was only a messenger.”
+
+“Tell him I shall be down-town next week.”
+
+“Oh, Vin, no; not next week.”
+
+“Tell him next week.”
+
+“I can’t do that.”
+
+“I thought you were only a messenger.”
+
+“Your doctor would not hear of it. It would be madness.”
+
+Farron leaned over and touched his bell. The nurse was instantly in
+the room, looking at Vincent, Adelaide thought, as a water-dog looks
+at its master when it perceives that a stick is about to be thrown
+into the pond.
+
+“Miss Gregory,” said Vincent, “there’s a young man from my office
+down-stairs. Will you tell him that I can’t see him to-day, but that I
+shall be down-town next week, and I’ll see him then?”
+
+Miss Gregory was almost at the door before Adelaide stopped her.
+
+“You must know that Mr. Farron cannot get down-town next week.”
+
+“Has the doctor said not?”
+
+Adelaide shook her head impatiently.
+
+“I don’t suppose any one has been so insane as to ask him,” she answered.
+
+Miss Gregory smiled temperately.
+
+“Oh, next week is a long time off,” she said, and left the room. Adelaide
+turned to her husband.
+
+“Do you enjoy being humored?” she asked.
+
+Farron had closed his eyes, and now opened them.
+
+“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I didn’t hear.”
+
+“She knows quite well that you can’t go down-town next week. She takes
+your message just to humor you.”
+
+“She’s an excellent nurse,” said Farron.
+
+“For babies,” Adelaide felt like answering, but she didn’t. She said
+instead, “Anyhow, Burke will never accept that as an answer.” She was
+surprised to hear something almost boastful in her own tone.
+
+“Oh, I think he will.”
+
+She waited breathlessly for some sound from down-stairs or even for the
+flurried reëntrance of Miss Gregory. There was a short silence, and
+then came the sound of the shutting of the front door. Marty had
+actually gone.
+
+Vincent did not even open his eyes when Miss Gregory returned; he did not
+exert himself to ask how his message had been received. Adelaide waited
+an instant, and then went back to Mrs. Baxter with a strange sense of
+having sustained a small personal defeat.
+
+Mrs. Baxter was so thoroughly ruffled that she was prepared to attack
+even the sacrosanct Adelaide. But she was not given the chance.
+
+“Well, how did Marty treat you?” said Adelaide.
+
+Mrs. Baxter sniffed.
+
+“We had not very much in common,” she returned.
+
+“No; Marty’s a very real person.” There was a pause. “What became of him?
+Did he go?”
+
+“Yes, your husband’s trained nurse gave him a message, and he went away.”
+
+“Quietly?” The note of disappointment was so plain that Mrs. Baxter asked
+in answer:
+
+“What would you have wanted him to do?”
+
+Adelaide laughed.
+
+“I suppose it would have been too much to expect that he would drag you
+and Miss Gregory about by your hair,” she said, “but I own I should have
+liked some little demonstration. But perhaps,” she added more brightly,
+“he has gone back to wreck the docks.”
+
+At this moment Mathilde entered the room in her hat and furs, and
+distracted the conversation from Burke. Adelaide, who was fond of
+enunciating the belief that you could tell when people were in love by
+the frequency with which they wore their best clothes, noticed now how
+wonderfully lovely Mathilde was looking; but she noticed it quite
+unsuspiciously, for she was thinking, “My child is really a beauty.”
+
+“You remember Mrs. Baxter, my dear.”
+
+Mathilde did not remember her in the least, though she smiled
+sufficiently. To her Mrs. Baxter seemed just one of many dressy old
+ladies who drifted across the horizon only too often. If any one had told
+her that her grandfather had ever been supposed to be in danger of
+succumbing to charms such as these, she would have thought the notion an
+ugly example of grown-up pessimism.
+
+Mrs. Baxter held her hand and patted it.
+
+“Where does she get that lovely golden hair?” she asked. “Not from you,
+does she?”
+
+“She gets it from her father,” answered Adelaide, and her expression
+added, “you dreadful old goose.”
+
+In the pause Mathilde made her escape unquestioned. She knew even before
+a last pathetic glance that her mother was unutterably wearied with her
+visitor. In other circumstances she would have stayed to effect a
+rescue, but at present she was engaged in a deed of some recklessness on
+her own account. She was going to meet Pete Wayne secretly at the
+Metropolitan Museum.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+In all her life Mathilde had never felt so conspicuous as she did going
+up the long flight of stairs at the Fifth Avenue entrance of the museum.
+It seemed to her that people, those walking past in the sunshine on the
+sidewalk, and the strangers in town seeing the sights from the top of the
+green busses, were saying to one another as they looked at her, “There
+goes a New York girl to meet her lover in one of the more ancient of the
+Egyptian rooms.”
+
+She started as she heard the voice of the guard, though he was saying
+nothing but “Check your umbrella” to a man behind her. She sped across
+the marble floor of the great tapestry hall as a little, furry wild
+animal darts across an open space in the woods. She was thinking that she
+could not bear it if Pete were not there. How could she wait many minutes
+under the eyes of the guards, who must know better than any one else that
+no flesh-and-blood girl took any real interest in Egyptian antiquities?
+The round, unambitious dial at the entrance, like an enlarged
+kitchen-clock, had pointed to the exact hour set for the meeting. She
+ought not to expect that Pete, getting away from the office in business
+hours, could be as punctual as an eager, idle creature like herself.
+
+She had made up her mind so clearly that when she entered the night-blue
+room there would be nothing but tombs and mummies that when she saw Pete
+standing with his overcoat over his arm, in the blue-serge clothes she
+particularly liked, she felt as much surprised as if their meeting were
+accidental.
+
+She tried to draw a long breath.
+
+“I shall never get used to it,” she said. “If we had been married a
+thousand years, I should always feel just like this when I see you.”
+
+“Oh, no, you won’t,” he answered. “I hope the very next time we meet you
+will say, quite in a wife’s orthodox tone: ‘My dear, I’ve been waiting
+twenty minutes. Not that I mind at all; only I was afraid I must have
+misunderstood you.’”
+
+“You hope? Oh, I hope we shall never be like that.”
+
+“Really? Why, I enjoy the idea. I shall enjoy saying to total strangers,
+‘Ah, gentlemen, if my wife were ever on time--’ It makes me feel so
+indissolubly united to you.”
+
+“I like it best as we are now.”
+
+“We might try different methods alternate years: one year we could be
+domestic, and the next, detached, and so on.”
+
+By this time they had discovered that they were leaning on a mummy-case,
+and Mathilde drew back with an exclamation. “Poor thing!” she said. “I
+suppose she once had a lover, too.”
+
+“And very likely met him in the room of Chinese antiquities in the Temple
+Museum,” said Pete, and then, changing his tone, he added: “But come
+along. I want to show you a few little things which I have selected to
+furnish our home. I think you’ll like them.”
+
+Pete was always inventing games like this, and calling on her to enter in
+without the slightest warning. One of them was about a fancy ball he was
+giving in the main hall of the Pennsylvania Station. But this new idea,
+to treat the whole museum as a sort of super-department store, made her
+laugh in a faint, dependent way that she knew Pete liked. She believed
+that such forms of play were peculiar to themselves, so she guarded them
+as the deepest kind of secret; for she thought, if her mother ever found
+out about them, she would at once conclude that the whole relation was
+childish. To all other lovers Mathilde attributed a uniform seriousness.
+
+It took them a long time to choose their house-furnishings: there was a
+piece of black-and-gold lacquer; a set of painted panels; a Persian rug,
+swept by the tails of two haughty peacocks; some cloud-gray Chinese
+porcelains; a set of Du Barry vases; a crystal-and-enamel box, designed
+probably for some sacred purpose, but contributed by Pete as an excellent
+receptacle for chocolates at her bedside. “The Boy with the Sword” for
+the dining-room, Ver Meer’s “Women at the Window,” the small Bonnington,
+and then, since Mathilde wanted the portrait of Mrs. Fitzherbert, and
+Wayne felt a faint weariness with the English school, a compromise was
+effected by the selection of Constable’s landscape of a bridge. Wayne
+kept constantly repeating that he was exactly like Warren Hastings,
+astonished at his own moderation. They had hardly begun, indeed, before
+Mathilde felt herself overcome by that peculiar exhaustion that overtakes
+even the robust in museums.
+
+Wayne guided her to a little sofa in a room of gold and jade.
+
+“How beautifully you know your way about here!” she said. “I suppose
+you’ve brought lots of girls here before me.”
+
+“A glorious army,” said Pete, “the matron and the maid. You ought to see
+my mother in a museum. She’s lost before she gets well inside the
+turnstile.”
+
+But Mathilde was thinking.
+
+“How strange it is,” she observed, “that I never should have thought
+before about your caring for any one else. Pete, did you ever ask any one
+else to marry you?”
+
+Wayne nodded.
+
+“Yes; when I was in college. I asked a girl to marry me. She was having
+rather a rotten time.”
+
+“Were you in love with her?”
+
+He shook his head, and in the silence shuffling and staccato footsteps
+were heard, announcing the approach of a youthful art class and their
+teacher. “Jade,” said the voice of the lady, “one of the hardest of known
+substances, has yet been beautifully worked from time immemorial--”
+
+More pairs of eyes in that art class were fixed on the obviously guilty
+couple in the corner than on the beautiful cloudy objects in the cases,
+and it was not until they had all followed their guide to the armor-room,
+and had grouped themselves about the casque of Joan of Arc, that Wayne
+went on as if no interruption had occurred:
+
+“If you want to know whether I have ever experienced anything like my
+feeling for you since the first moment I saw you, I never have and never
+shall, and thereto I plight thee my troth.”
+
+Mathilde turned her full face toward him, shedding gratitude and
+affection as a lamp sheds light before she answered:
+
+“You were terribly unkind to me yesterday.”
+
+“I know. I’m sorry.”
+
+“I shall never forget the way you kissed me, as if I were a rather
+repulsive piece of wood.”
+
+Pete craned his neck, and met the suspicious eye of a guard.
+
+“I don’t think anything can be done about it at the moment,” he said;
+and added in explanation, “You see, I felt as if you had suddenly
+deserted me.”
+
+“Pete, I couldn’t ever desert you--unless I committed suicide.”
+
+Presently he stood up, declaring that this was not the fitting place for
+arranging the details of their marriage.
+
+“Come to one of the smaller picture galleries,” he said, “and as we go
+I’ll show you a portrait of my mother.”
+
+“Your mother? I did not know she had had a portrait done. By whom?”
+
+“A fellow called Bellini. He thought he was doing the Madonna.”
+
+When they reached the picture, a figure was already before it. Mr.
+Lanley was sitting, with his arms folded and his feet stretched out far
+before him, his head bent, but his eyes raised and fixed on the picture.
+They saw him first, and had two or three seconds to take in the profound
+contemplation of his mood. Then he slowly raised his eyes and
+encountered theirs.
+
+There is surely nothing compromising in an elderly gentleman spending a
+contemplative morning alone at the Metropolitan Museum. It might well be
+his daily custom; but the knowledge that it was not, the consciousness of
+the rarity of the mood that had brought him there, oppressed Mr. Lanley
+almost like a crime. He felt caught, outraged, ashamed as he saw them.
+“That’s the age which has a right to it,” he said to himself. And then as
+if in a mirror he saw an expression of embarrassment on their faces, and
+was reminded that their meeting must have been illicit, too. He stood up
+and looked at them sternly.
+
+“Up-town at this hour, Wayne?” he said.
+
+“Grandfather, I never knew you came here much,” said Mathilde.
+
+“It’s near me, you know,” he answered weakly, so weakly that he felt
+impelled to give an explanation. “Sometimes, my dear,” he said, “you will
+find that even the most welcome guest rather fills the house.”
+
+“You need not worry about yours,” returned Mathilde. “I left her
+with Mama.”
+
+Mr. Lanley felt that his brief moment of peace was indeed over. He could
+imagine the impressions that Mrs. Baxter was perhaps at that very moment
+sharing with Adelaide. He longed to question his granddaughter, but did
+not know how to put it.
+
+“How was your mother looking?” he finally decided upon.
+
+“Dreary,” answered Mathilde, with a laugh.
+
+“Does this picture remind you of any one?” asked Wayne, suddenly.
+
+Mr. Lanley looked at him as if he hadn’t heard, and frowned.
+
+“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.
+
+“Don’t you think there’s a look of my mother about it?”
+
+“No,” said Mr. Lanley, rather loudly, and then added, “Well, I see what
+you mean, though I shouldn’t--” He stopped and turning to them with some
+sternness, he asked them how they accounted for their presence in the
+museum at such an hour and alone.
+
+There was nothing to do but to tell him the truth. And when Wayne had
+finished, Mathilde was surprised at her grandfather’s question. She
+thought he would ask what her mother thought of it. If they had been
+alone, she would have told him that Adelaide thought Wayne a commonplace
+young man with stubby hands; but as it was, she had resolved to put her
+mother’s opposition on a more dignified plane. Only Mr. Lanley did not
+ask the question of her. It was to Wayne he was speaking, when he said:
+
+“What does your mother think of it?”
+
+“Oh, my mother,” answered Pete. “Well, she thinks that if she were a girl
+she’d like to go to China.”
+
+Mr. Lanley looked up, and they both smiled with the most perfect
+understanding.
+
+“She would,” said the older man, and then he became intensely serious.
+“It’s quite out of the question,” he said.
+
+“O Grandfather,” Mathilde exclaimed, clasping her hands about his
+arm, “don’t talk like that! It wouldn’t be possible for me to let him
+go without me. O Grandfather, can’t you remember what it was like to
+be in love?”
+
+A complete silence followed this little speech--a silence that went on
+and on and seemed to be stronger than human power. Perhaps for the first
+time in his life Lanley felt hostile toward the girl beside him. “Oh,
+dear,” Mathilde was thinking, “I suppose I’ve made him remember my
+grandmother and his youth!” “Can love be remembered,” Pete was saying to
+himself, “or is it like a perfume that can be recognized, but not
+recalled?”
+
+Lanley turned at last to Wayne.
+
+“It’s out of the question,” he said, “that you should take this child to
+China at two weeks’ notice. You must see that.”
+
+“I see perfectly that many people will think it so. But you must see that
+to us it is the inevitable thing to do.”
+
+“If every one else agreed, I should oppose it.”
+
+“O Grandfather!” wailed Mathilde. “And you were our great hope--you and
+Mrs. Wayne!”
+
+“In a matter like this I shall stand by your mother, Mathilde,” he said,
+and Mathilde imagined he meant as opposed to herself. But he was making
+an even greater renunciation.
+
+Adelaide was surprised and not pleased when Mathilde came home late for
+lunch, bringing the Wayne boy with her. It was not that she had expected
+her one little phrase about Wayne’s hands to change her daughter’s love
+into repugnance,--that sentence had been only the first drop in a
+distillation that would do its poisonous work gradually,--but she had
+supposed that Mathilde would be too sensitive to expose Pete to further
+criticism. Indeed, there seemed something obtuse, if not actually
+indelicate, in being willing to create a situation in which every one
+was bound to suffer. Obtuseness was not a defect with which Adelaide had
+much patience.
+
+Mathilde saw at once that her mother was going to be what in the family
+slang was called “grand.” The grandeur consisted in a polite inattention;
+it went with a soft voice and immobile expression. In this mood Adelaide
+answered you about three seconds later than you expected, and though she
+answered you accurately, it was as if she had forced her mind back from a
+more congenial ether. She seemed to be wrapped in an agreeable cloud
+until you gave her some opening, and then she came out of her cloud like
+a flash of lightning.
+
+Wayne, who had lived his life so far with a woman who did not believe in
+the use of force in human relations, viewed these symptoms of coercion
+with the utmost indifference; but Mathilde had not so far freed herself
+as to ignore them. She was not afraid, but easy conversation under the
+menace was beyond her. She couldn’t think of anything to say.
+
+Adelaide was accustomed by these methods to drive the inexperienced--and
+she considered Pete pitifully inexperienced in social fine points--into a
+state of conversational unrest in which they would finally ask
+recklessly, “Have you been to the theater lately?” and she would question
+gently, “The theater?” as much as to say, “I’ve heard that word
+somewhere before,” until the conscientious conversationalist, rushing
+from futility to futility, would be finally engulfed in some yawning
+banality and sink out of sight forever.
+
+But Wayne resisted this temptation, or, rather, he did not feel it. He
+had the courage to be unafraid of silences, and he ate his luncheon and
+thought about the pictures he had been seeing, and at last began to talk
+to Mathilde about them, while Adelaide made it clear that she was not
+listening, until she caught a phrase that drove her grandeur away.
+
+“Near where we met my grandfather?” Mathilde asked.
+
+By this time Adelaide had gathered that the two had been in the museum,
+and the knowledge annoyed her not only as a mother, but as an
+aristocrat. Without being clear about it, she regarded the love of
+beauty--artificial beauty, that is--as a class distinction. It seemed to
+her possible enough that the masses should love mountains and moonlight
+and the sea and sunsets; but it struck her as unfitting that any one but
+the people she knew, and only a few of them, should really care for
+porcelains and pictures. As she held herself aloof from the conversation
+she was annoyed at noticing that Wayne was showing a more
+discriminating taste than her own carefully nurtured child. But all such
+considerations were driven away by the mention of her father, for Mr.
+Lanley had been in her mind ever since Mrs. Baxter had taken her
+unimpeded departure just before luncheon.
+
+“Your grandfather?” she said, coming out of the clouds. “Was he in the
+Metropolitan?”
+
+“Yes,” said Mathilde, thankful to be directly addressed. “Wasn’t it
+queer? Pete was taking me to see a picture that looks exactly like Mrs.
+Wayne, only Mrs. Wayne hasn’t such a round face, and there in front of it
+was grandpapa.”
+
+Adelaide rose very slowly from table, lunch being fortunately over. She
+felt as if she could have borne almost anything but this--the idea of her
+father vaporing before a picture of the Madonna. Phrases came into her
+head: silly old man, the time has come to protect him against himself;
+the Wayne family must be suppressed.
+
+Her silence in the drawing-room was of a more concentrated sort, and when
+she had taken her coffee and cigarette she said to Mathilde:
+
+“My dear, I promised to go back to Vincent at this time. Will you go
+instead? I want to have a word with Mr. Wayne.”
+
+Adelaide had never entered any contest in her life, whether it was a
+dispute with a dressmaker or a quarrel with her husband, without
+remembering the comfortable fact that she was a beauty. With men she did
+not neglect the advantage that being a woman gave her, and with the
+particular man now before her she had, she knew, a third line of defense;
+she was the mother of his love, and she thought she detected in him a
+special weakness for mothers. But it would have been better if he had
+respected women and mothers less, for he thought so highly of them that
+he believed they ought to play fair.
+
+Sitting in a very low chair, she looked up at him.
+
+“Mathilde has been telling me something about a plan of yours to take her
+to China with you. We could not consent to that, you know.”
+
+“I’m sorry,” said Pete. The tone was pleasant. That was the trouble;
+it was too pleasant a tone for a man relinquishing a cherished hope.
+It sounded almost as if he regretted the inevitable disappointment of
+the family.
+
+Adelaide tried a new attack.
+
+“Your mother--have you consulted her?”
+
+“Yes, I’ve told her our plans.”
+
+“And she approves?”
+
+Wayne might choose to betray his mother in the full irresponsibility of
+her attitude to so sympathetic a listener as Mr. Lanley, but he had no
+intention of giving Mrs. Farron such a weapon. At the same time he did
+not intend to be untruthful. His answer was this:
+
+“My mother,” he said, “is not like most women of her age. She
+believes in love.”
+
+“In all love, quite indiscriminately?”
+
+He hesitated an instant.
+
+“I put it wrong,” he answered. “I meant that she believes in the
+importance of real love.”
+
+“And has she a spell by which she tells real love?”
+
+“She believes mine to be real.”
+
+“Oh, yours! Very likely. Perhaps it’s maternal vanity on my part, Mr.
+Wayne, but I must own I can imagine a man’s contriving to love my
+daughter, so gentle, so intelligent, and so extraordinarily lovely to
+look at. I was not thinking of your feelings, but of hers.”
+
+“You can see no reason why she should love me?”
+
+Adelaide moved her shoulders about.
+
+“Well, I want it explained, that’s all, from your own point of view. I
+see my daughter as an unusual person, ignorant of life, to whom it seems
+to me all things are possible. And I see you, a very nice young man. But
+what else? I ask to be told why you fulfil all possibilities. Don’t
+misunderstand me. I am not mercenary. Mathilde will have plenty of money
+of her own some day. I don’t want a millionaire. I want a _person_.”
+
+“Of course, if you ask me why Mathilde should love me--”
+
+“Don’t be untruthful, Mr. Wayne. I thought better of you. If you should
+come back from China next year to find her engaged to some one else, you
+could tell a great many reasons why he was not good enough for her. Now
+tell me some of the reasons why you are. And please don’t include
+because you love her so much, for almost any one would do that.”
+
+Pete fought down his panic, reminding himself that no man living could
+hear such words without terror. His egotism, never colossal, stood
+feebly between him and Mrs. Farron’s estimate of him. He seemed to sink
+back into the general human species. If he had felt inclined to detail
+his own qualities, he could not have thought of one. There was a long
+silence, while Adelaide sat with a look of docile teachableness upon her
+expectant face.
+
+At last Wayne stood up.
+
+“It’s no use, Mrs. Farron,” he said. “That question of yours can’t be
+answered. I believe she loves me. It’s my bet against yours.”
+
+“I won’t gamble with my child’s future,” she returned. “I did with my
+own. Sit down again, Mr. Wayne. You have heard, I suppose, that I have
+been married twice?”
+
+“Yes.” He sat down again reluctantly.
+
+“I was Mathilde’s age--a little older. I was more in love than she. And
+if he had been asked the question I just asked you, he could have
+answered it. He could have said: ‘I have been a leader in a group in
+which I was, an athlete, an oarsman, and the most superb physical
+specimen of my race’--brought up, too, he might have added, in the same
+traditions that I had had. Well, that wasn’t enough, Mr. Wayne, and that
+was a good deal. If my father had only made me wait, only given me time
+to see that my choice was the choice of ignorance, that the man I thought
+a hero was, oh, the most pitifully commonplace clay--Mathilde shan’t make
+my mistake.”
+
+Wayne’s eyes lit up.
+
+“But that’s it,” he said. “She wouldn’t make your mistake. She’d choose
+right. That’s what I ought to have said. You spoke of Mathilde’s spirit.
+She has a feeling for the right thing. Some people have, and some people
+are bound to choose wrong.”
+
+Adelaide laid her hand on her breast.
+
+“You mean me?” she asked, too much interested to be angry.
+
+He was too absorbed in his own interests to give his full
+attention to hers.
+
+“Yes,” he answered. “I mean your principles of choice weren’t right
+ones--leaders of men, you know, and all that. It never works out.
+Leaders of men are the ones who always cry on their wives’ shoulders, and
+the martinets at home are imposed on by every one else.” He gave out this
+dictum in passing: “But don’t trouble about your responsibility in this,
+Mrs. Farron. It’s out of your hands. It’s our chance, and Mathilde and I
+mean to take it. I don’t want to give you a warning, exactly, but--it’s
+going to go through.”
+
+She looked at him with large, terrified eyes. She was repeating, ‘they
+cry on their wives’ shoulders,’ or, he might have said, ‘on the
+shoulders of their trained nurses.’ She knew that he was talking to her,
+saying something. She couldn’t listen to it. And then he was gone. She
+was glad he was.
+
+She sat quite still, with her hands lying idly, softly in her lap. It was
+possible that what he said was true. Perhaps all these people who made
+such a show of strength to the world were those who sucked double
+strength by sapping the vitality of a life’s companion. It had been true
+of Joe Severance. She had heard him praised for the courage with which
+he went forth against temptation, but she had known that it was her
+strength he was using. She looked up, to see her daughter, pale and
+eager, standing before her.
+
+“O Mama, was it very terrible?”
+
+“What, dear?”
+
+“Did Pete tell you of our plan?”
+
+Adelaide wished she could have listened to those last sentences of his;
+but they were gone completely.
+
+She put up her hand and patted the unutterably soft cheek before her.
+
+“He told me something about putting through your absurd idea of an
+immediate marriage,” she said.
+
+“We don’t want to do it in a sneaky way, Mama.”
+
+“I know. You want to have your own way and to have every one approve of
+you, too. Is that it?”
+
+Mathilde’s lips trembled.
+
+“O Mama,” she cried, “you are so different from what you used to be!”
+
+Adelaide nodded.
+
+“One changes,” she said. “One’s life changes.” She had meant this
+sentence to end the interview, but when she saw the girl still standing
+before her, she said to herself that it made little difference that she
+hadn’t heard the plans of the Wayne boy, since Mathilde, her own
+tractable daughter, was still within her power. She moved into the corner
+of the sofa. “Sit down, dear,” she said, and when Mathilde had obeyed
+with an almost imperceptible shrinking in her attitude, Adelaide went on,
+with a sort of serious ease of manner:
+
+“I’ve never been a particularly flattering mother, have I? Never thought
+you were perfect just because you were mine? Well, I hope you’ll pay the
+more attention to what I have to say. You are remarkable. You are going
+to be one of the most attractive women that ever was. Years ago old Count
+Bartiani--do you remember him, at Lucerne?”
+
+“The one who used scent and used to look so long at me?”
+
+“Yes, he was old and rather horrid, but he knew what he was talking
+about. He said then you would be the most attractive woman in Europe. I
+heard the same thing from all my friends, and it’s true. You have
+something rare and perfect--”
+
+These were great words. Mathilde, accustomed all her life to receive
+information from her mother, received this; and for the first time felt
+the egotism of her beauty awake, a sense of her own importance the more
+vivid because she had always been humble-minded. She did not look at her
+mother; she sat up very straight and stared as if at new fields before
+her, while a faint smile flickered at the corners of her mouth--a smile
+of an awakening sense of power.
+
+“What you have,” Adelaide went on, “ought to bring great happiness,
+great position, great love; and how can I let you throw yourself away
+at eighteen on a commonplace boy with a glib tongue and a high opinion
+of himself? Don’t tell me that it will make you happy. That would be
+the worst of all, if you turned out to be so limited that you were
+satisfied,--that would be a living death. O my darling, I give you my
+word that if you will give up this idea, ten years from now, when you
+see this boy, still glib, still vain, and perhaps a little fat, you
+will actually shudder when you think how near he came to cutting you
+off from the wonderful, full life that you were entitled to.” And then,
+as if she could not hope to better this, Adelaide sprang up, and left
+the girl alone.
+
+Mathilde rose, too, and looked at herself in the glass. She was stirred,
+she was changed, she was awakened, but awakened to something her mother
+had not counted on. Almost too gentle, too humble, too reasonable, as she
+had always been, the drop of egotism which her mother had succeeded in
+instilling into her nature served to solidify her will, to inspire her
+with a needed power of aggression.
+
+She nodded once at her image in the mirror.
+
+“Well,” she said, “it’s my life, and I’m willing to take the
+consequences.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+When Mathilde emerged from the subway into the sunlight of City Hall
+Park, Pete was nowhere to be seen. She had spent several minutes
+wandering in the subterranean labyrinth which threatened to bring her to
+Brooklyn Bridge and nowhere else, so she was a little late for her
+appointment; and yet Pete was not there. He had promised to be waiting
+for her. This was a more important occasion than the meeting in the
+museum and more terrifying, too.
+
+Their plans were simple. They were going to get their marriage license,
+they were going to be married immediately, they were then going to inform
+their respective families, and start two days later for San Francisco.
+
+Mathilde stared furtively about her. A policeman strolled past, striking
+terror to a guilty heart; a gentleman of evidently unbroken leisure
+regarded her with a benevolent eye completely ringed by red. Crowds were
+surging in and out of the newspaper offices and the Municipal Building
+and the post office, but stare where she would, she couldn’t find Pete.
+
+She had ten minutes to think of horrors before she saw him rushing across
+the park toward her, and she had the idea of saying to him those words
+which he himself had selected as typically wifely, “Not that I mind at
+all, but I was afraid I must have misunderstood you.” But she did not get
+very far in her mild little joke, for it was evident at once that
+something had happened.
+
+“My dear love,” he said, “it’s no go. We can’t sail, we can’t be married.
+I think I’m out of a job.”
+
+As they stood there, her pretty clothes, the bright sun shining on her
+golden hair and dark furs and polished shoes, her beauty, but, above all,
+their complete absorption in each other, made them conspicuous. They were
+utterly oblivious.
+
+Pete told her exactly what had happened. Some months before he had been
+sent to make a report on a coal property in Pennsylvania. He had made it
+under the assumption that the firm was thinking of underwriting its
+bonds. He had been mistaken. As owners Honaton & Benson had already
+acquired the majority of interest in it. His report,--she remembered his
+report, for he had told her about it the first day he came to see
+her,--had been favorable except for one important fact. There was in that
+district a car shortage which for at least a year would hamper the
+marketing of the supply. That had been the point of the whole thing. He
+had advised against taking the property over until this defect could be
+remedied or allowed for. They had accepted the report.
+
+Well, late in the afternoon of the preceding day he had gone to the
+office to say good-by to the firm. He could not help being touched by the
+friendliness of both men’s manner. Honaton gave him a silver
+traveling-flask, plain except for an offensive cat’s-eye set in the top.
+Benson, more humane and practical, gave him a check.
+
+“I think I’ve cleared up everything before I leave,” Wayne said, trying
+to be conscientious in return for their kindness, “except one thing.
+I’ve never corrected the proof of my report on the Southerland coal
+property.”
+
+For a second there was something strange in the air. The partners
+exchanged the merest flicker of a look, which Wayne, as far as he thought
+of it at all, supposed to be a recognition on their part of his
+carefulness in thinking of such a detail.
+
+“You need not give that another thought,” said Benson. “We are not
+thinking of publishing that report at present. And when we do, I have
+your manuscript. I’ll go over the proof myself.”
+
+Relieved to be spared another task, Wayne shook hands with his employers
+and withdrew. Outside he met David.
+
+“Say,” said David, “I am sorry you’re leaving us; but, gee!” he added,
+his face twisting with joy, “ain’t the firm glad to have you go!”
+
+It had long been Wayne’s habit to pay strict attention to the
+impressions of David.
+
+“Why do you think they are glad?” he asked.
+
+“Oh, they’re glad all right,” said David. “I heard the old man say
+yesterday, ‘And by next Saturday he will be at sea.’ It was as if
+he was going to get a Christmas present.” And David went on about
+other business.
+
+Once put on the right track, it was not difficult to get the idea. He
+went to the firm’s printer, but found they had had no orders for printing
+his report. The next morning, instead of spending his time with his own
+last arrangements, he began hunting up other printing offices, and
+finally found what he was looking for. His report was already in print,
+with one paragraph left out--that one which related to the shortage of
+cars. His name was signed to it, with a little preamble by the firm,
+urging the investment on the favorable notice of their customers, and
+spoke in high terms of the accuracy of his estimates.
+
+To say that Pete did not once contemplate continuing his arrangements as
+if nothing had happened would not be true. All he had to do was to go.
+The thing was dishonest, clearly enough, but it was not his action. His
+original report would always be proof of his own integrity, and on his
+return he could sever his connection with the firm on some other pretext.
+On the other hand, to break his connection with Honaton & Benson, to
+force the suppression of the report unless given in full, to give up his
+trip, to confess that immediate marriage was impossible, that he himself
+was out of a job, that the whole basis of his good fortune was a fraud
+that he had been too stupid to discover--all this seemed to him more than
+man could be asked to do.
+
+But that was what he decided must be done. From the printer’s he
+telephoned to the Farrons, but found that Miss Severance was out. He knew
+she must have already started for their appointment in the City Hall
+Park. He had made up his mind, and yet when he saw her, so confident of
+the next step, waiting for him, he very nearly yielded to a sudden
+temptation to make her his wife, to be sure of that, whatever else might
+have to be altered.
+
+He had known she wouldn’t reproach him, but he was deeply grateful to her
+for being so unaware that there was any grounds for reproach. She
+understood the courage his renunciation had required. That seemed to be
+what she cared for most.
+
+At length he said to her:
+
+“Now I must go and get this off my chest with the firm. Go home, and I’ll
+come as soon as ever I can.”
+
+But here she shook her head.
+
+“I couldn’t go home,” she answered. “It might all come out before you
+arrived, and I could not listen to things that”--she avoided naming her
+mother--“that will be said about you, Pete. Isn’t there somewhere I can
+wait while you have your interview?”
+
+There was the outer office of Honaton & Benson. He let her go with him,
+and turned her over to the care of David, who found her a corner out of
+the way, and left her only once. That was to say to a friend of his in
+the cage: “When you go out, cast your eye over Pete’s girl. Somewhat of a
+peacherino.”
+
+In the meantime Wayne went into Benson’s office. There wasn’t a flicker
+of alarm on the senior partner’s face on seeing him.
+
+“Hullo, Pete!” he said, “I thought you’d be packing your bags.”
+
+“I’m not packing anything,” said Wayne. “I’ve come to tell you I can’t go
+to China for you. Mr. Benson.”
+
+“Oh, come, come,” said the other, very paternally, “we can’t let you off
+like that. This is business, my dear boy. It would cost us money, after
+having made all our arrangements, if you changed your mind.”
+
+“So I understand.”
+
+“What do you mean?”
+
+“I mean just what you think I mean, Mr. Benson.”
+
+Wayne would have said that he could never forget the presence under any
+circumstances of his future wife, waiting, probably nervously, in the
+outer office; but he did. The interest of the next hour drove out
+everything else. Honaton was sent for from the exchange, a lawsuit was
+threatened, a bribe--he couldn’t mistake it--offered. He was told he
+might find it difficult to find another position if he left their firm
+under such conditions.
+
+“On the contrary,” said Pete, firmly, “from what I have heard, I believe
+it will improve my standing.”
+
+That he came off well in the struggle was due not so much to his
+ability, but to the fact that he now had nothing to lose or gain from the
+situation. As soon as Benson grasped this fact he began a masterly
+retreat. Wayne noticed the difference between the partners: Honaton, the
+less able of the two, wanted to save the situation, but before everything
+else wanted to leave in Wayne’s mind the sense that he had made a fool of
+himself. Benson, more practical, would have been glad to put Pete in jail
+if he could; but as he couldn’t do that, his interest was in nothing but
+saving the situation. The only way to do this was to give up all idea of
+publishing any report. He did this by assuming that Wayne had simply
+changed his mind or had at least utterly failed to convey his meaning in
+his written words. He made this point of view very plausible by quoting
+the more laudatory of Wayne’s sentences; and when Pete explained that the
+whole point of his report was in the sentence that had been omitted,
+Benson leaned back, chuckling, and biting off the end of his cigar.
+
+“Oh, you college men!” he said. “I’m afraid I’m not up to your
+subtleties. When you said it was the richest vein and favorably situated,
+I supposed that was what you meant. If you meant just the opposite, well,
+let it go. Honaton & Benson certainly don’t want to get out a report
+contrary to fact.”
+
+“That’s what he has accused us of,” said Honaton.
+
+“Oh, no, no,” said Benson; “don’t be too literal, Jack. In the heat of
+argument we all say things we don’t mean. Pete here doesn’t like to have
+his lovely English all messed up by a practical dub like me. I doubt if
+he wants to sever his connection with this firm.”
+
+Honaton yielded.
+
+“Oh,” he said, “I’m willing enough he should stay, if--”
+
+“Well, I’m not,” said Pete, and put an end to the conversation by walking
+out of the room. He found David explaining the filing system to Mathilde,
+and she, hanging on his every word, partly on account of his native
+charm, partly on account of her own interest in anything neat, but most
+because she imagined the knowledge might some day make her a more
+serviceable wife to Pete.
+
+Pete dreaded the coming interview with Mrs. Farron more than that with
+the firm--more, indeed, than he had ever dreaded anything. He and
+Mathilde reached the house about a quarter before one, and Adelaide was
+not in. This was fortunate, for while they waited they discovered a
+difference of intention. Mathilde saw no reason for mentioning the fact
+that they had actually been on the point of taking out their marriage
+license. She thought it was enough to tell her mother that the trip had
+been abandoned and that Pete had given up his job. Pete contemplated
+nothing less than the whole truth.
+
+“You can’t tell people half a story,” he said. “It never works.”
+
+Mathilde really quailed.
+
+“It will be terrible to tell mama that,” she groaned. “She thinks
+failure is worse than crime.”
+
+“And she’s dead right,” said Pete.
+
+When Adelaide came in she had Mr. Lanley with her. She had seen him
+walking down Fifth Avenue with his hat at quite an outrageous angle, and
+she had ordered the motor to stop, and had beckoned him to her. It was
+two days since her interview with Mrs. Baxter, and she had had no good
+opportunity of speaking to him. The suspicion that he was avoiding her
+nerved her hand; but there was no hint of discipline in her smile, and
+she knew as well as if he had said it that he was thinking as he came to
+the side of the car how handsome and how creditable a daughter she was.
+“Come to lunch with me,” she said; “or must you go home to your guest?”
+
+“No, I was going to the club. She’s lunching with a mysterious relation
+near Columbia University.”
+
+“Don’t you know who it is? Tell him home.”
+
+“Home, Andrews. No, she never says.”
+
+“Don’t put your stick against the glass, there’s an angel. I’ll tell you
+who it is. An elder sister who supported and educated her, of whom she’s
+ashamed now.”
+
+“How do you know? It wouldn’t break the glass.”
+
+“No; but I hate the noise. I don’t know; I just made it up because it’s
+so likely.”
+
+“She always speaks so affectionately of you.”
+
+“She’s a coward; that’s the only difference. She hates me just as much.”
+
+“Well, you’ve never been nice to her, Adelaide.”
+
+“I should think not.”
+
+“She’s not as bad as you think,” said Mr. Lanley, who believed in
+old-fashioned loyalty.
+
+“I can’t bear her,” said Adelaide.
+
+“Why not?” As far as his feelings went, this seemed a perfectly safe
+question; but it wasn’t.
+
+“Because she tries so hard to make you ridiculous. Oh, not intentionally;
+but she talks of you as if you were a _Don Juan_ of twenty-five. You
+ought to be flattered, Papa dear, at having jealous scenes made about you
+when you are--what is it?--sixty-five.”
+
+“Four,” said Mr. Lanley.
+
+“Yes; such a morning as I had! Not a minute with poor Vincent because you
+had had Mrs. Wayne to dine. I’m not complaining, but I don’t like my
+father represented as a sort of comic-paper old man, you poor
+dear,”--and she laid her long, gloved hand on his knee,--“who have always
+been so conspicuously dignified.”
+
+“If I have,” said her father, “I don’t know that anything she says can
+change it.”
+
+“No, of course; only it was horrible to me to hear her describing you in
+the grip of a boyish passion. But don’t let’s talk of it. I hear,” she
+said, as if she were changing the subject, “that you have taken to going
+to the Metropolitan Museum at odd moments.”
+
+He felt utterly stripped, and said without hope:
+
+“Yes; I’m a trustee, you know.”
+
+Adelaide just glanced at him.
+
+“You always have been, I think.” They drove home in silence.
+
+One reason why she was determined to have her father come home was that
+it was the first time that Vincent was to take luncheon downstairs, and
+when Adelaide had a part to play she liked to have an audience. She was
+even glad to find Wayne in the drawing-room, though she did wonder to
+herself if the little creature had entirely given up earning his living.
+It was a very different occasion from Pete’s last luncheon there; every
+one was as pleasant as possible. As soon as the meal was over, Adelaide
+put her hand on her husband’s shoulder.
+
+“You’re going to lie down at once, Vin.”
+
+He rose obediently, but Wayne interposed. It seemed to him that it would
+be possible to tell his story to Farron.
+
+“Oh, can’t Mr. Farron stay a few minutes?” he said. “I want so much to
+speak to you and him together about--”
+
+Adelaide cut him short.
+
+“No, he can’t. It’s more important that he should get strong than
+anything else is. You can talk to me all you like when I come down.
+Come, Vin.”
+
+When they were up-stairs, and she was tucking him up on his sofa, he
+asked gently:
+
+“What did that boy want?”
+
+Adelaide made a little face.
+
+“Nothing of any importance,” she said.
+
+Things had indeed changed between them if he would accept such an answer
+as that. She thought his indifference like the studied oblivion of the
+debtor who says, “Don’t I owe you something?” and is content with the
+most non-committal reply. He lay back and smiled at her. His expression
+was not easy to read.
+
+She went down-stairs, where conversation had not prospered. Mr. Lanley
+was smoking, with his cigar drooping from a corner of his mouth. He felt
+very unhappy. Mathilde was frightened. Wayne had recast his opening
+sentence a dozen times. He kept saying to himself that he wanted it to be
+perfectly simple, but not infantile, and each phrase he thought of in
+conformity with his one rule sounded like the opening lines of the stage
+child’s speech.
+
+In the crisis of Adelaide’s being actually back again in the room he
+found himself saying:
+
+“Mrs. Farron, I think you ought to know exactly what has been happening.”
+
+“Don’t I?” she asked.
+
+“No. You know that I was going to San Francisco the day after
+to-morrow--”
+
+“Oh dear,” said Adelaide, regretfully, “is it given up?”
+
+He told her rather slowly the whole story. The most terrible moment was,
+as he had expected, when he explained that they had met, he and Mathilde,
+to apply for their marriage license. Adelaide turned, and looked full at
+her daughter.
+
+“You were going to treat me like that?” Mathilde burst into tears. She
+had long been on the brink of them, and now they came more from nerves
+than from a sense of the justice of her mother’s complaint. But the sound
+of them upset Wayne hopelessly. He couldn’t go on for a minute, and Mr.
+Lanley rose to his feet.
+
+“Good Lord! good Lord!” he said, “that was dishonorable! Can’t you see
+that that is dishonorable, to marry her on the sly when we trusted her to
+go about with you--”
+
+“O Papa, never mind about the dishonorableness,” said Adelaide. “The
+point is”--and she looked at Wayne--“that they were building their
+elopement on something that turned out to be a fraud. That doesn’t make
+one think very highly of your judgment, Mr. Wayne.”
+
+“I made a mistake, Mrs. Farron.”
+
+“It was a bad moment to make one. You have worked three years with this
+firm and never suspected anything wrong?”
+
+“Yes, sometimes I have--”
+
+Adelaide’s eyebrows went up.
+
+“Oh, you have suspected. You had reason to think the whole thing might be
+dishonest, but you were willing to run away with Mathilde and let her get
+inextricably committed before you found out--”
+
+“That’s irresponsible, sir,” said Lanley. “I don’t suppose you
+understood what you were doing, but it was utterly irresponsible.”
+
+“I think,” said Adelaide, “that it finally answers the question as to
+whether or not you are too young to be married.”
+
+“Mama, I will marry Pete,” said Mathilde, trying to make a voice broken
+with sobs sound firm and resolute.
+
+“Mr. Wayne at the moment has no means whatsoever, as I understand it,”
+said Adelaide.
+
+“I don’t care whether he has or not,” said Mathilde.
+
+Adelaide laughed. The laugh rather shocked Mr. Lanley. He tried to
+explain.
+
+“I feel sorry for you, but you can’t imagine how painful it is to us to
+think that Mathilde came so near to being mixed up with a crooked deal
+like that--Mathilde, of all people. You ought to see that for yourself.”
+
+“I see it, thank you,” said Pete.
+
+“Really, Mr. Wayne, I don’t think that’s quite the tone to take,” put
+in Adelaide.
+
+“I don’t think it is,” said Wayne.
+
+Mathilde, making one last grasp at self-control, said:
+
+“They wouldn’t be so horrid to you, Pete, if they understood--” But the
+muscles of her throat contracted, and she never got any further.
+
+“I suppose I shall be thought a very cruel parent,” said Adelaide, almost
+airily, “but this sort of thing can’t go on, really, you know.”
+
+“No, it really can’t,” said Mr. Lanley. “We feel you have abused our
+confidence.”
+
+“No, I don’t reproach Mr. Wayne along those lines,” said Adelaide. “He
+owes me nothing. I had not supposed Mathilde would deceive me, but we
+won’t discuss that now. It isn’t anything against Mr. Wayne to say he has
+made a mistake. Five years from now, I’m sure, he would not put himself,
+or let himself be put, in such an extremely humiliating position. And I
+don’t say that if he came back five years from now with some financial
+standing I should be any more opposed to him than to any one else. Only
+in the meantime there can be no engagement.” Adelaide looked very
+reasonable. “You must see that.”
+
+“You mean I’m not to see him?”
+
+“Of course not.”
+
+“I must see him,” said Mathilde.
+
+Lanley looked at Wayne.
+
+“This is an opportunity for you to rehabilitate yourself. You ought to be
+man enough to promise you won’t see her until you are in a position to
+ask her to be your wife.”
+
+“I have asked her that already, you know,” returned Wayne with an attempt
+at a smile.
+
+“Pete, you wouldn’t desert me?” said Mathilde.
+
+“If Mr. Wayne had any pride, my dear, he would not wish to come to a
+house where he was unwelcome,” said her mother.
+
+“I’m afraid I haven’t any of that sort of pride at all, Mrs. Farron.”
+
+Adelaide made a little gesture, as much as to say, with her traditions,
+she really did not know how to deal with people who hadn’t.
+
+“Mathilde,”--Wayne spoke very gently,--“don’t you think you could
+stop crying?”
+
+“I’m trying all the time, Pete. You won’t go away, no matter what
+they say?”
+
+“Of course not.”
+
+“It seems to be a question between what I think best for my daughter as
+opposed to what you think best--for yourself,” observed Adelaide.
+
+“Nobody wants to turn you out of the house, you know,” said Mr. Lanley in
+a conciliatory tone, “but the engagement is at an end.”
+
+“If you do turn him out, I’ll go with him,” said Mathilde, and she took
+his hand and held it in a tight, moist clasp.
+
+They looked so young and so distressed as they stood there hand in hand
+that Lanley found himself relenting.
+
+“We don’t say that your marriage will never be possible,” he said. “We
+are asking you to wait--consent to a separation of six months.”
+
+“Six months!” wailed Mathilde.
+
+“With your whole life before you?” her grandfather returned wistfully.
+
+“I’m afraid I am asking a little more than that, Papa,” said Adelaide. “I
+have never been enthusiastic about this engagement, but while I was
+watching and trying to be coöperative, it seems Mr. Wayne intended to run
+off with my daughter. I know Mathilde is young and easily influenced, but
+I don’t think, I don’t really think,”--Adelaide made it evident that she
+was being just,--“that any other of all the young men who come to the
+house would have tried to do that, and none of them would have got
+themselves into this difficulty. I mean,”--she looked up at Wayne,--“I
+think almost any of them would have had a little better business judgment
+than you have shown.”
+
+“Mama,” put in her daughter, “can’t you see how honest it was of Pete not
+to go, anyhow?”
+
+Adelaide smiled ironically.
+
+“No; I can’t think that an unusually high standard, dear.”
+
+This seemed to represent the final outrage to Mathilde. She turned.
+
+“O Pete, wouldn’t your mother take me in?” she asked.
+
+And as if to answer the question, Pringle opened the door and announced
+Mrs. Wayne.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+In all the short, but crowded, time since Lanley had first known Mrs.
+Wayne he had never been otherwise than glad to see her, but now his heart
+sank. It seemed to him that an abyss was about to open between them, and
+that all their differences of spirit, stimulating enough while they
+remained in the abstract, were about to be cast into concrete form.
+
+Mathilde and Pete were so glad to see her that they said nothing, but
+looked at her beamingly. Whatever Adelaide’s feelings may have been,
+she greeted her guest with a positive courtesy, and she was the only
+one who did.
+
+Mrs. Wayne nodded to her son, smiled more formally at Mr. Lanley, and
+then her eyes falling upon Mathilde, she realized that she had intruded
+on some sort of conference. She had a natural dread of such meetings, at
+which it seemed to her that the only thing which she must not do was the
+only thing that she knew how to do, namely, to speak her mind. So she at
+once decided to withdraw.
+
+“Your man insisted on my coming in, Mrs. Farron,” she said. “I came to
+ask about Mr. Farron; but I see you are in the midst of a family
+discussion, and so I won’t--”
+
+Everybody separately cried out to her to stay as she began to retreat to
+the door, and no one more firmly than Adelaide, who thought it as
+careless as Mr. Lanley thought it creditable that a mother would be
+willing to go away and leave the discussion of her son’s life to others.
+Adelaide saw an opportunity of killing two birds.
+
+“You are just the person for whom I have been longing, Mrs. Wayne,” she
+said. “Now you have come, we can settle the whole question.”
+
+“And just what is the question?” asked Mrs. Wayne. She sat down,
+looking distressed and rather guilty. She knew they were going to ask
+her what she knew about all the things that had been going on, and a
+hasty examination of her consciousness showed her that she knew
+everything, though she had avoided Pete’s full confidence. She knew
+simply by knowing that any two young people who loved each other would
+rather marry than separate for a year. But she was aware that this
+deduction, so inevitable to her, was exactly the one which would be
+denied by the others. So she sat, with a nervously pleasant smile on
+her usually untroubled face, and waited for Adelaide to speak. She did
+not have long to wait.
+
+“You did not know, I am sure, Mrs. Wayne, that your son intended to run
+away with my daughter?”
+
+All four of them stared at her, making her feel more and more guilty; and
+at last Lanley, unable to bear it, asked:
+
+“Did you know that, Mrs. Wayne?”
+
+“Oh, dear!” said Mrs. Wayne. “Yes. I knew it was possible; so did you.
+Pete didn’t tell me about it, though.”
+
+“But I did tell Mrs. Farron,” said Pete.
+
+Adelaide protested at once.
+
+“You told me?” Then she remembered that a cloud had obscured the end of
+their last interview, but she did not withdraw her protest.
+
+“You know, Mrs. Farron, you have a bad habit of not listening to what is
+said to you,” Wayne answered firmly.
+
+This sort of impersonal criticism was to Adelaide the greatest
+impertinence, and she showed her annoyance.
+
+“In spite of the disabilities of age, Mr. Wayne,” she said, “I find I
+usually can get a simple idea if clearly presented.”
+
+“Why, how absurd that is, Wayne!” put in Mr. Lanley. “You don’t mean to
+say that you told Mrs. Farron you were going to elope with her daughter,
+and she didn’t take in what you said?”
+
+“And yet that is just what took place.”
+
+Adelaide glanced at her father, as much as to say, “You see what kind of
+young man it is,” and then went on:
+
+“One fact at least I have learned only this minute--that is that the
+finances for this romantic trip were to be furnished by a dishonorable
+firm from which your son has been dismissed; or, no, resigned, isn’t it?”
+
+The human interest attached to losing a job brought mother and son
+together on the instant.
+
+“O Pete, you’ve left the firm!”
+
+He nodded.
+
+“O my poor boy!”
+
+He made a gesture, indicating that this was not the time to discuss the
+economic situation, and Adelaide went smoothly on:
+
+“And now, Mrs. Wayne, the point is this. I am considered harsh because I
+insist that a young man without an income who has just come near to
+running off with my child on money that was almost a bribe is not a
+person in whom I have unlimited confidence. I ask--it seems a tolerably
+mild request--that they do not see each other for six months.”
+
+“I cannot agree to that,” said Wayne decidedly.
+
+“Really, Mr. Wayne, do you feel yourself in a position to agree or
+disagree? We have never consented to your engagement. We have never
+thought the marriage a suitable one, have we, Papa?”
+
+“No,” said Mr. Lanley in a tone strangely dead.
+
+“Why is it not suitable?” asked Mrs. Wayne, as if she really hoped that
+an agreement might be reached by rational discussion.
+
+“Why?” said Adelaide, and smiled. “Dear Mrs. Wayne, these things are
+rather difficult to explain. Wouldn’t it be easier for all of us if you
+would just accept the statement that we think so without trying to decide
+whether we are right or wrong?”
+
+“I’m afraid it must be discussed,” answered Mrs. Wayne.
+
+Adelaide leaned back, still with her faint smile, as if defying, though
+very politely, any one to discuss it with _her_.
+
+It was inevitable that Mrs. Wayne should turn to Mr. Lanley.
+
+“You, too, think it unsuitable?”
+
+He bowed gravely.
+
+“You dislike my son?”
+
+“Quite the contrary.”
+
+“Then you must be able to tell me the reason.”
+
+“I will try,” he said. He felt like a soldier called upon to defend a
+lost cause. It was his cause, he couldn’t desert it. His daughter and
+his granddaughter needed his protection; but he knew he was giving up
+something that he valued more than his life as he began to speak. “We
+feel the difference in background,” he said, “of early traditions, of
+judging life from the same point of view. Such differences can be
+overcome by time and money--” He stopped, for she was looking at him with
+the same wondering interest, devoid of anger, with which he had seen her
+study Wilsey. “I express myself badly,” he murmured.
+
+Mrs. Wayne rose to her feet.
+
+“The trouble isn’t with your expression,” she said.
+
+“You mean that what I am trying to express is wrong?”
+
+“It seems so to me.”
+
+“What is wrong about it?”
+
+She seemed to think over the possibilities for an instant, and then she
+shook her head.
+
+“I don’t think I could make you understand,” she answered. She said it
+very gently, but it was cruel, and he turned white under the pain,
+suffering all the more that she was so entirely without malice. She
+turned to her son. “I’m going, Pete. Don’t you think you might as well
+come, too?”
+
+Mathilde sprang up and caught Mrs. Wayne’s hand.
+
+“Oh, don’t go!” she cried. “Don’t take him away! You know they are trying
+to separate us. Oh, Mrs. Wayne, won’t you take me in? Can’t I stay with
+you while we are waiting?”
+
+At this every one focused their eyes on Mrs. Wayne. Pete felt sorry for
+his mother, knowing how she hated to make a sudden decision, knowing how
+she hated to do anything disagreeable to those about her; but he never
+for an instant doubted what her decision would be. Therefore he could
+hardly believe his eyes when he saw her shaking her head.
+
+“I couldn’t do that, my dear.”
+
+“Mother!”
+
+“Of course you couldn’t,” said Mr. Lanley, blowing his nose immediately
+after under the tremendous emotion of finding that she was not an enemy,
+after all. Adelaide smiled to herself. She was thinking, “You could and
+would, if I hadn’t put in that sting about his failures.”
+
+“Why can’t you, Mother?” asked Pete.
+
+“We’ll talk that over at home.”
+
+“My dear boy,” said Mr. Lanley, kindly, “no one over thirty would have
+to ask why.”
+
+“No parent likes to assist at the kidnapping of another parent’s child,”
+said Adelaide.
+
+“Good Heavens! my mother has kidnapped so many children in her day!”
+
+“From the wrong sort of home, I suppose,” said Lanley, in explanation, to
+no one, perhaps, so much as to himself.
+
+“Am I to infer that she thinks mine the right sort? How delightful!”
+said Adelaide.
+
+“Mrs. Wayne, is it because I’m richer than Pete that you won’t take me
+in?” asked Mathilde, visions of bestowing her wealth in charity flitting
+across her mind.
+
+The other nodded. Wayne stared.
+
+“Mother,” he said, “you don’t mean to say you are letting yourself be
+influenced by a taunt like that of Mrs. Farron’s, which she didn’t even
+believe herself?”
+
+Mrs. Wayne was shocked.
+
+“Oh, no; not that, Pete. It isn’t that at all. But when a girl has been
+brought up--”
+
+Wayne saw it all in an instant.
+
+“Oh, yes, I see. We’ll talk of that later.”
+
+But Adelaide had seen, too.
+
+“No; do go on, Mrs. Wayne. You don’t approve of the way my daughter has
+been brought up.”
+
+“I don’t think she has been brought up to be a poor man’s wife.”
+
+“No. I own I did not have that particular destiny in mind.”
+
+“And when I heard you assuming just now that every one was always
+concerned about money, and when I realized that the girl must have been
+brought up in that atmosphere and belief--”
+
+“I see. You thought she was not quite the right wife for your son?”
+
+“But I would try so hard,” said Mathilde. “I would learn; I--”
+
+“Mathilde,” interrupted her mother, “when a lady tells you you are not
+good enough for her son, you must not protest.”
+
+“Come, come, Adelaide, there is no use in being disagreeable,” said
+Mr. Lanley.
+
+“Disagreeable!” returned his daughter. “Mrs. Wayne and I are entirely
+agreed. She thinks her son too good for my daughter, and I think my
+daughter too good for her son. Really, there seems nothing more to be
+said. Good-by, Mr. Wayne.” She held out her long, white hand to him. Mrs.
+Wayne was trying to make her position clearer to Mathilde, but Pete
+thought this an undesirable moment for such an attempt.
+
+Partly as an assertion of his rights, partly because she looked so young
+and helpless, he stooped and kissed her.
+
+“I’ll come and see you about half-past ten tomorrow morning,” he said
+very clearly, so that every one could hear. Adelaide looked blank; she
+was thinking that on Pringle she could absolutely depend. Wayne saw his
+mother and Lanley bow to each other, and the next moment he had contrived
+to get her out of the house.
+
+Mathilde rushed away to her own room, and Adelaide and her father were
+left alone. She turned to him with one of her rare caresses.
+
+“Dear Papa,” she said, “what a comfort you are to me! What should I do
+without you? You’ll never desert me, will you?” And she put her head on
+his shoulder. He patted her with an absent-minded rhythm, and then he
+said, as if he were answering some secret train of thought:
+
+“I don’t see what else I could have done.”
+
+“You couldn’t have done anything else,” replied his daughter, still
+nestling against him. “But Mrs. Baxter had frightened me with her account
+of your sentimental admiration for Mrs. Wayne, and I thought you might
+want to make yourself agreeable to her at the expense of my poor child.”
+
+She felt his shoulder heave with a longer breath.
+
+“I can’t imagine putting anything before Mathilde’s happiness,” he said,
+and after a pause he added: “I really must go home. Mrs. Baxter will
+think me a neglectful host.”
+
+“Don’t you want to bring her to dine here to-night? I’ll try and get
+some one to meet her. Let me see. She thinks Mr. Wilsey--”
+
+“Oh, I can’t stand Wilsey,” answered her father, crossly.
+
+“Well, I’ll think of some one to sacrifice on the altar of your
+friendship. I certainly don’t want to dine alone with Mathilde. And, by
+the way, Papa, I haven’t mentioned any of this to Vincent.”
+
+He thought it was admirable of her to bear her anxieties alone so as to
+spare her sick husband.
+
+“Poor girl!” he said. “You’ve had a lot of trouble lately.”
+
+In the meantime Wayne and his mother walked slowly home.
+
+“I suppose you’re furious at me, Pete,” she said.
+
+“Not a bit,” he answered. “For a moment, when I saw what you were going
+to say, I was terrified. But no amount of tact would have made Mrs.
+Farron feel differently, and I think they might as well know what we
+really think and feel. I was only sorry if it hurt Mathilde.”
+
+“Oh dear, it’s so hard to be truthful!” exclaimed his mother. He
+laughed, for he wished she sometimes found it harder; and she went on:
+
+“Poor little Mathilde! You know I wouldn’t hurt her if I could help it.
+It’s not her fault. But what a terrible system it is, and how money does
+blind people! They can’t see you at all as you are, and yet if you had
+fifty thousand dollars a year, they’d be more aware of your good points
+than I am. They can’t see that you have resolution and charm and a sense
+of honor. They don’t see the person, they just see the lack of income.”
+
+Pete smiled.
+
+“A person is all Mrs. Farron says she asks for her daughter.”
+
+“She does not know a person when she sees one.”
+
+“She knew one when she married Farron.”
+
+Mrs. Wayne sniffed.
+
+“Perhaps he married her,” she replied.
+
+Her son thought this likely, but he did not answer, for she had given him
+an idea--to see Farron. Farron would at least understand the situation.
+His mother approved of the suggestion.
+
+“Of course he’s not Mathilde’s father.”
+
+“He’s not a snob.”
+
+They had reached the house, and Pete was fishing in his pocket for his
+keys.
+
+“Do you think Mr. Lanley is a snob?” he asked.
+
+As usual Mrs. Wayne evaded the direct answer.
+
+“I got an unfavorable impression of him this afternoon.”
+
+“For failing to see that I was a king among men?”
+
+“For backing up every stupid thing his daughter said.”
+
+“Loyalty is a fine quality.”
+
+“Justice is better,” answered his mother.
+
+“Oh, well, he’s old,” said Wayne, dismissing the whole subject.
+
+They walked up their four flights in silence, and then Wayne remembered
+to ask something that had been in his mind several times.
+
+“By the way, Mother, how did you happen to come to the Farrons at all?”
+
+She laughed rather self-consciously.
+
+“I hoped perhaps Mr. Farron might be well enough to see me a moment
+about Marty. The truth is, Pete, Mr. Farron is the real person in that
+whole family.”
+
+That evening he wrote Farron a note, asking him to see him the next
+morning at half-past ten about “this trouble of which, of course,
+Mrs. Farron has told you.” He added a request that he would tell
+Pringle of his intention in case he could give the interview, because
+Mrs. Farron had been quite frank in saying that she would give orders
+not to let him in.
+
+Farron received this note with his breakfast. Adelaide was not there. He
+had had no hint from her of any crisis. He had not come down to dinner
+the evening before to meet Mrs. Baxter and the useful people asked to
+entertain her, but he had seen Mathilde’s tear-stained face, and in a few
+minutes with his father-in-law had encountered one or two evident
+evasions. Only Adelaide had been unfathomable.
+
+After he had read the letter and thought over the situation, he sent for
+Pringle, and gave orders that when Mr. Wayne came he would see him.
+
+Pringle did not exactly make an objection, but stated a fact when he
+replied that Mrs. Farron had given orders that Mr. Wayne was not to be
+allowed to see Miss Severance.
+
+“Exactly,” said Farron. “Show him here.” Here was his own study.
+
+As it happened, Adelaide was sitting with him, making very good invalid’s
+talk, when Pringle announced, “Mr. Wayne.”
+
+“Pringle, I told you--” Adelaide began, but her husband cut her short.
+
+“He has an appointment with me, Adelaide.”
+
+“You don’t understand, Vin. You mustn’t see him.”
+
+Wayne was by this time in the room.
+
+“But I wish to see him, my dear Adelaide, and,” Farron added, “I wish to
+see him alone.”
+
+“No,” she answered, with a good deal of excitement; “that you cannot.
+This is my affair, Vincent--the affair of my child.”
+
+He looked at her for a second, and then opening the door into his
+bedroom, he said to Wayne:
+
+“Will you come in here?” The door was closed behind the two men.
+
+Wayne was not a coward, although he had dreaded his interview with
+Adelaide; it was his very respect for Farron that kept him from feeling
+even nervous.
+
+“Perhaps I ought not to have asked you to see me,” he began.
+
+“I’m very glad to see you,” answered Farron. “Sit down, and tell me the
+story as you see it from the beginning.”
+
+It was a comfort to tell the story at last to an expert. Wayne, who had
+been trying for twenty-four hours to explain what underwriting meant,
+what were the responsibilities of brokers in such matters, what was the
+function of such a report as his, felt as if he had suddenly groped his
+way out of a fog as he talked, with hardly an interruption but a nod or a
+lightening eye from Farron. He spoke of Benson. “I know the man,” said
+Farron; of Honaton, “He was in my office once.” Wayne told how Mathilde,
+and then he himself, had tried to inform Mrs. Farron of the definiteness
+of their plans to be married.
+
+“How long has this been going on?” Farron asked.
+
+“At least ten days.”
+
+Farron nodded. Then Wayne told of the discovery of the proof at the
+printer’s and his hurried meeting in the park to tell Mathilde. Here
+Farron stopped him suddenly.
+
+“What was it kept you from going through with it just the same?”
+
+“You’re the first person who has asked me that,” answered Pete.
+
+“Perhaps you did not even think of such a thing?”
+
+“No one could help thinking of it who saw her there--”
+
+“And you didn’t do it?”
+
+“It wasn’t consideration for her family that held me back.”
+
+“What was it?”
+
+Pete found a moral scruple was a difficult motive to avow.
+
+“It was Mathilde herself. That would not have been treating her as
+an equal.”
+
+“You intend always to treat her as an equal?”
+
+Wayne was ashamed to find how difficult it was to answer truthfully. The
+tone of the question gave him no clue to the speaker’s own thoughts.
+
+“Yes, I do,” he said; and then blurted out hastily, “Don’t you believe in
+treating a woman as an equal?”
+
+“I believe in treating her exactly as she wants to be treated.”
+
+“But every one wants to be treated as an equal, if they’re any good.”
+Farron smiled, showing those blue-white teeth for an instant, and Wayne,
+feeling he was not quite doing himself justice, added, “I call that just
+ordinary respect, you know, and I could not love any one I didn’t
+respect. Could you?”
+
+The question was, or Farron chose to consider it, a purely rhetorical
+one.
+
+“I suppose,” he observed, “that they are to be counted the most fortunate
+who love and respect at the same time.”
+
+“Of course,” said Wayne.
+
+Farron nodded.
+
+“And yet perhaps they miss a good deal.”
+
+“I don’t know _what_ they miss,” answered Wayne, to whom the sentiment
+was as shocking as anything not understood can be.
+
+“No; I’m sure you don’t,” answered his future stepfather-in-law. “Go on
+with your story.”
+
+Wayne went on, but not as rapidly as he had expected. Farron kept him a
+long time on the interview of the afternoon before, and particularly on
+Mrs. Farron’s part, just the point Wayne did not want to discuss for fear
+of betraying the bitterness he felt toward her. But again and again
+Farron made him quote her words wherever he could remember them; and
+then, as if this had not been clear enough, he asked:
+
+“You think my wife has definitely made up her mind against the marriage?”
+
+“Irrevocably.”
+
+“Irrevocably?” Farron questioned more as if it were the sound of the word
+than the meaning that he was doubting.
+
+“Ah, you’ve been rather out of it lately, sir,” said Wayne. “You haven’t
+followed, perhaps, all that’s been going on.”
+
+“Perhaps not.”
+
+Wayne felt he must be candid.
+
+“If it is your idea that your wife’s opposition could be changed, I’m
+afraid I must tell you, Mr. Farron--” He paused, meeting a quick, sudden
+look; then Farron turned his head, and stared, with folded arms, out of
+the window. Wayne had plenty of time to wonder what he was going to say.
+What he did say was surprising.
+
+“I think you are an honest man, and I should be glad to have you working
+for me. I could make you one of my secretaries, with a salary of six
+thousand dollars.”
+
+In the shock Pete heard himself saying the first thing that came
+into his head:
+
+“That’s a large salary, sir.”
+
+“Some people would say large enough to marry on.”
+
+Wayne drew back.
+
+“Don’t you think you ought to consult Mrs. Farron before you offer it to
+me?” he asked hesitatingly.
+
+“Don’t carry honesty too far. No, I don’t consult my wife about my
+office appointments.”
+
+“It isn’t honesty; but I couldn’t stand having you change your
+mind when--”
+
+“When my wife tells me to? I promise you not to do that.”
+
+Wayne found that the interview was over, although he had not been able to
+express his gratitude.
+
+“I know what you are feeling,” said Farron. “Good-by.”
+
+“I can’t understand why you are doing it, Mr. Farron; but--”
+
+“It needn’t matter to you. Good-by.”
+
+With a sensation that in another instant he might be out of the house,
+Wayne metaphorically caught at the door-post.
+
+“I must see Mathilde before I go,” he said.
+
+Farron shook his head.
+
+“No, not to-day.”
+
+“She’s terribly afraid I am going to be moved by insults to desert her,”
+Wayne urged.
+
+“I’ll see she understands. I’ll send for you in a day or two; then it
+will be all right.” They shook hands. He was glad Farron showed him out
+through the corridor and not through the study, where, he knew, Mrs.
+Farron was still waiting like a fine, sleek cat at a rat-hole.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+During this interview Adelaide sat in her husband’s study and waited. She
+looked back upon that other period of suspense--the hour when she had
+waited at the hospital during his operation--as a time of comparative
+peace. She had been able then, she remembered, to sit still, to pursue,
+if not a train of thought, at least a set of connected images; but now
+her whole spirit seemed to be seething with a sort of poison that made
+her muscles jerk and start and her mind dart and faint. Then she had
+foreseen loss through the fate common to humanity; now she foresaw it
+through the action of her own tyrannical contempt for anything that
+seemed to her weak.
+
+She had never rebelled against coercion from Vincent. She had even loved
+it, but she had loved it when he had seemed to her a superior being;
+coercion from one who only yesterday had been under the dominion of
+nerves and nurses was intolerable to her. She was at heart a courtier,
+would do menial service to a king, and refuse common civility to an
+inferior. She knew how St. Christopher had felt at seeing his satanic
+captain tremble at the sign of the cross; and though, unlike the saint,
+she had no intention of setting out to discover the stronger lord, she
+knew that he might now any day appear.
+
+From any one not an acknowledged superior that shut door was an insult to
+be avenged, and she sat and waited for the moment to arrive when she
+would most adequately avenge it. There was still something terrifying in
+the idea of going out to do battle with Vincent. Hitherto in their
+quarrels he had always been the aggressor, had always startled her out of
+an innocent calm by an accusation or complaint. But this, as she said to
+herself, was not a quarrel, but a readjustment, of which probably he was
+still unaware. She hoped he was. She hoped he would come in with his
+accustomed manner and say civilly, “Forgive me for shutting the door; but
+my reason was--”
+
+And she would answer, “Really, I don’t think we need trouble about your
+reasons, Vincent.” She knew just the tone she would use, just the
+expression of a smile suppressed. Then his quick eyes would fasten
+themselves on her face, and perhaps at the first glance would read the
+story of his defeat. She knew her own glance would not waver.
+
+At the end of half an hour she heard the low tones of conversation change
+to the brisk notes of leave-taking. Her heart began to beat with fear,
+but not the kind of fear that makes people run away; rather the kind that
+makes them abdicate all reason and fan their emotions into a sort of
+inspiring flame.
+
+She heard the door open into the corridor, but even then Vincent did not
+immediately come. Miss Gregory had been waiting to say good-by to him. As
+a case he was finished. Adelaide heard her clear voice say gaily:
+
+“Well, I’m off, Mr. Vincent.”
+
+They went back into the room and shut the door. Adelaide clenched her
+hands; these delays were hard to bear.
+
+It was not a long delay, though in that next room a very human bond
+was about to be broken. Possibly if Vincent had done exactly what
+his impulses prompted, he would have taken Miss Gregory in his arms
+and kissed her. But instead he said quietly, for his manner had not
+much range:
+
+“I shall miss you.”
+
+“It’s time I went.”
+
+“To some case more interestingly dangerous?”
+
+“Your case was dangerous enough for me,” said the girl; and then for fear
+he might miss her meaning, “I never met any one like you, Mr. Farron.”
+
+“I’ve never been taken care of as you took care of me.”
+
+“I wish”--she looked straight up at him--“I could take care of you
+altogether.”
+
+“That,” he answered, “would end in my taking care of you.”
+
+“And your hands are pretty full as it is?”
+
+He nodded, and she went away without even shaking hands. She omitted her
+farewells to any other member of the family except Pringle, who, Farron
+heard, was congratulating her on her consideration for servants as he put
+her into her taxi.
+
+Then he opened the door of his study, went to the chair he had risen
+from, and took up the paper at the paragraph at which he had dropped it.
+Adelaide’s eyes followed him like search-lights.
+
+“May I ask,” she said with her edged voice, “if you have been disposing
+of my child’s future in there without consulting me?”
+
+If their places had been reversed, Adelaide would have raised her
+eyebrows and repeated, “Your child’s future?” but Farron was more direct.
+
+“I have been engaging Wayne as a secretary,” he said, and, turning to the
+financial page, glanced down the quotations.
+
+“Then you must dismiss him again.”
+
+“He will be a useful man to me,” said Farron, as if she had not spoken.
+“I have needed some one whom I could depend on--”
+
+“Vincent, it is absurd for you to pretend you don’t know he wanted to
+marry Mathilde.”
+
+He did not raise his eyes.
+
+“Yes,” he said; “I remember you and I had some talk about it before my
+operation.”
+
+“Since then circumstances have arisen of which you know nothing--things
+I did not tell you.”
+
+“Do you think that was wise?”
+
+With a sense that a rapid and resistless current was carrying them both
+to destruction she saw for the first time that he was as angry as she.
+
+“I do not like your tone,” she said.
+
+“What’s the matter with it?”
+
+“It isn’t polite; it isn’t friendly.”
+
+“Why should it be?”
+
+“Why? What a question! Love--”
+
+“I doubt if it is any longer a question of love between you and me.”
+
+These words, which so exactly embodied her own idea, came to her as a
+shock, a brutal blow from him.
+
+“Vincent!” she cried protestingly.
+
+“I don’t know what it is that has your attention now, what private
+anxieties that I am not privileged to share--”
+
+“You have been ill.”
+
+“But not imbecile. Do you suppose I’ve missed one tone of your voice, or
+haven’t understood what has been going on in your mind? Have you lived
+with me five years and think me a forgiving man--”
+
+“May I ask what you have to forgive?”
+
+“Do you suppose a pat to my pillow or an occasional kind word takes the
+place to me of what our relation used to be?”
+
+“You speak as if our relation was over.”
+
+“Have you been imagining I was going to come whining to you for a return
+of your love and respect? What nonsense! Love makes love, and
+indifference makes indifference.”
+
+“You expect me to say I am indifferent to you?”
+
+“I care very little what you say. I judge your conduct.”
+
+She had an unerring instinct for what would wound him. If she had
+answered with conviction, “Yes, I am indifferent to you,” there would
+have been enough temper and exaggeration in it for him to discount the
+whole statement. But to say, “No, I still love you, Vincent,” in a tone
+that conceded the very utmost that she could,--namely, that she still
+loved him for the old, rather pitiful association,--that would be to
+inflict the most painful wound possible. And so that was what she said.
+She was prepared to have him take it up and cry: “You still love me? Do
+you mean as you love your Aunt Alberta?” and she, still trying to be
+just, would answer: “Oh, more than Aunt Alberta. Only, of course--”
+
+The trouble was he did not make the right answer. When she said, “No, I
+still love you, Vincent,” he answered:
+
+“I cannot say the same.”
+
+It was one of those replies that change the face of the world. It drove
+every other idea out of her head. She stared at him for an instant.
+
+“Nobody,” she answered, “need tell me such a thing as that twice.” It
+was a fine phrase to cover a retreat; she left him and went to her own
+room. It no more occurred to her to ask whether he meant what he said
+than if she had been struck in the head she would have inquired if the
+blow was real.
+
+She did not come down to lunch. Vincent and Mathilde ate alone. Mathilde,
+as she told Pete, had begun to understand her stepfather, but she had not
+progressed so far as to see in his silence anything but an
+unapproachable sternness. It never crossed her mind that this middle-aged
+man, who seemed to control his life so completely, was suffering far more
+than she, and she was suffering a good deal.
+
+Pete had promised to come that morning, and she hadn’t seen him yet. She
+supposed he had come, and that, though she had been on the lookout for
+him, she had missed him. She felt as if they were never going to see each
+other again. When she found she was to be alone at luncheon with Farron,
+she thought of appealing to him, but was restrained by two
+considerations. She was a kind person, and her mother had repeatedly
+impressed upon her how badly at present Mr. Farron supported any anxiety.
+More important than this, however, was her belief that he would never
+work at cross-purposes with his wife. What were she and Pete to do? she
+thought. Mrs. Wayne would not take her in, her mother would not let Pete
+come to the house, and they had no money.
+
+Both cups of soup left the table almost untasted.
+
+“I’m sorry Mama has one of her headaches,” said Mathilde.
+
+“Yes,” said Farron. “You’d better take some of that chicken, Mathilde.
+It’s very good.”
+
+She did not notice that the piece he had taken on his own plate was
+untouched.
+
+“I’m not hungry,” she answered.
+
+“Anything wrong?”
+
+She could not lie, and so she looked at him and smiled and answered:
+
+“Nothing, as Mama would say, to trouble an invalid with.”
+
+She did not have a great success. In fact, his brows showed a slight
+disposition to contract, and after a moment of silence he said:
+
+“Does your mother say that?”
+
+“She’s always trying to protect you nowadays, Mr. Farron.”
+
+“I saw your friend Pete Wayne this morning.”
+
+“You saw--” Surprise, excitement, alarm flooded her face with crimson.
+“Oh, why did _you_ see him?”
+
+“I saw him by appointment. He asked me to tell you--only, I’m afraid,
+other things put it out of my head--that he has accepted a job I
+offered him.”
+
+“O Mr. Farron, what kind of job?”
+
+“Well, the kind of job that would enable two self-denying young people to
+marry, I think.”
+
+Not knowing how clearly all that she felt was written on her face
+Mathilde tried to put it all into words.
+
+“How wonderful! how kind! But my mother--”
+
+“I will arrange it with your mother.”
+
+“Have you known all along? Oh, why did you do this wonderful thing?”
+
+“Because--perhaps you won’t agree with me--I have taken rather a fancy to
+this young man. And I had other reasons.”
+
+Mathilde took her stepfather’s hand as it lay upon the table.
+
+“I’ve only just begun to understand you, Mr. Farron. To understand,
+I mean, what Mama means when she says you are the strongest, wisest
+person--”
+
+He pretended to smile.
+
+“When did your mother say that?”
+
+“Oh, ages ago.” She stopped, aware of a faint motion to withdraw on the
+part of the hand she held. “I suppose you want to go to her.”
+
+“No. The sort of headache she has is better left alone, I think, though
+you might stop as you go up.”
+
+“I will. When do you think I can see Pete?”
+
+“I’d wait a day or two; but you might telephone him at once, if you like,
+and say--or do you know what to say?”
+
+She laughed.
+
+“It used to frighten me when you made fun of me like that; but now--It
+must be simply delirious to be able to make people as happy as you’ve
+just made us.”
+
+He smiled at her word.
+
+“Other people’s happiness is not exactly delirious,” he said.
+
+She was moving in the direction of the nearest telephone, but she said
+over her shoulder:
+
+“Oh, well, I think you did pretty well for yourself when you chose Mama.”
+
+She left him sipping his black coffee; he took every drop of that.
+
+When he had finished he did not go back to his study, but to the
+drawing-room, where he sat down in a large chair by the fire. He lit a
+cigar. It was a quiet hour in the house, and he might have been supposed
+to be a man entirely at peace.
+
+Mr. Lanley, coming in about an hour later, certainly imagined he was
+rousing an invalid from a refreshing rest. He tried to retreat, but found
+Vincent’s black eyes were on him.
+
+“I’m sorry to disturb you,” he said. “Just wanted to see Adelaide.”
+
+“Adelaide has a headache.”
+
+Life was taking so many wrong turnings that Mr. Lanley had grown
+apprehensive. He suddenly remembered how many headaches Adelaide had had
+just before he knew of her troubles with Severance.
+
+“A headache?” he said nervously.
+
+“Nothing serious.” Vincent looked more closely at his father-in-law. “You
+yourself don’t look just the thing, sir.”
+
+Mr. Lanley sat down more limply than was his custom.
+
+“I’m getting to an age,” he said, “when I can’t stand scenes. We had
+something of a scene here yesterday afternoon. God bless my soul! though,
+I believe Adelaide told me not to mention it to you.”
+
+“Adelaide is very considerate,” replied her husband. His extreme
+susceptibility to sorrow made Mr. Lanley notice a tone which ordinarily
+would have escaped him, and he looked up so sharply that Farron was
+forced to add quickly: “But you haven’t made a break. I know about what
+took place.”
+
+The egotism of suffering, the distorted vision of a sleepless night, made
+Mr. Lanley blurt out suddenly:
+
+“I want to ask you, Vincent, do you think I could have done anything
+different?”
+
+Now, none of the accounts which Farron had received had made any mention
+of Mr. Lanley’s part in the proceedings at all, and so he paused a
+moment, and in that pause Mr. Lanley went on:
+
+“It’s a difficult position--before a boy’s mother. There isn’t anything
+against him, of course. One’s reasons for not wanting the marriage do
+sound a little snobbish when one says them--right out. In fact, I suppose
+they are snobbish. Do you find it hard to get away from early prejudices,
+Vincent? I do. I think Adelaide is quite right; and yet the boy is a nice
+boy. What do you think of him?”
+
+“I have taken him into my office.”
+
+Mr. Lanley was startled by a courage so far beyond his own.
+
+“But,” he asked, “did you consult Adelaide?”
+
+Farron shook his head.
+
+“But, Vincent, was that quite loyal?”
+
+A change in Farron’s expression made Mr. Lanley turn his head, and he saw
+that Adelaide had come into the room. Her appearance bore out the legend
+of her headache: she looked like a garden after an early frost. But
+perhaps the most terrifying thing about her aspect was her complete
+indifference to it. A recollection suddenly came to Mr. Lanley of a
+railway accident that he and Adelaide had been in. He had seen her
+stepping toward him through the debris, buttoning her gloves. She was far
+beyond such considerations now.
+
+She had come to put her very life to the test. There was one hope, there
+was one way in which Vincent could rehabilitate himself, and that was by
+showing himself victor in the hardest of all struggles, the personal
+struggle with her. That would be hard, because she would make it so, if
+she perished in the attempt.
+
+The crisis came in the first meeting of their eyes. If his glance had
+said: “My poor dear, you’re tired. Rest. All will be well,” his cause
+would have been lost. But his glance said nothing, only studied her
+coolly, and she began to speak.
+
+“Oh, Papa, Vincent does not consider such minor points as loyalty to me.”
+Her voice and manner left Mr. Lanley in no doubt that if he stayed an
+instant he would witness a domestic quarrel. The idea shocked him
+unspeakably. That these two reserved and dignified people should quarrel
+at all was bad enough, but that they should have reached a point where
+they were indifferent to the presence of a third person was terrible. He
+got himself out of the room without ceremony, but not before he saw
+Vincent rise and heard the first words of his sentence:
+
+“And what right have you to speak of loyalty?” Here, fortunately,
+Lanley shut the door behind him, for Vincent’s next words would have
+shocked him still more: “A prostitute would have stuck better to a man
+when he was ill.”
+
+But Adelaide was now in good fighting trim. She laughed out loud.
+
+“Really, Vincent,” she said, “your language! You must make your complaint
+against me a little more definite.”
+
+“Not much; and give you a chance to get up a little rational explanation.
+Besides, we neither of us need explanations. We know what has been
+happening.”
+
+“You mean you really doubt my feeling for you? No, Vincent, I still
+love you,” and her voice had a flute-like quality which, though it was
+without a trace of conviction, very few people who had ever heard it
+had resisted.
+
+“I am aware of that,” said Vincent quietly.
+
+She looked beautifully dazed.
+
+“Yet this morning you spoke--as if--”
+
+“But what is love such as yours worth? A man must be on the crest of the
+wave to keep it; otherwise it changes automatically into contempt. I
+don’t care about it, Adelaide. I can’t use it in a life like mine.”
+
+She looked at him, and a dreamlike state began to come over her. She
+simply couldn’t believe in the state of mind of those sick-room days; she
+could never really, she thought, have been less passionately admiring
+than she was at that minute, yet the half-recollection confused her and
+kept her silent.
+
+“Perhaps it’s vanity on my part,” he said, “but contempt like yours is
+something I could never forgive.”
+
+“You would forgive me anything if you loved me.” Her tone was noble
+and sincere.
+
+“Perhaps.”
+
+“You mean you don’t?”
+
+“Adelaide, there are times when a person chooses between loving and
+being loved.”
+
+The sentence made her feel sick with fear, but she asked:
+
+“Tell me just what you mean.”
+
+“Perhaps I could keep on loving you if I shut my eyes to the kind of
+person you are; but if I did that, I could not hold you an instant.”
+
+She stared at him as fascinated as a bird by a snake. This, it seemed to
+her, was the truth, the final summing up of their relation. She had lost
+him, and yet she was eternally his.
+
+As she looked at him she became aware that he was growing slowly pale. He
+was standing, and he put his hand out to the mantelpiece to steady
+himself. She thought he was going to faint.
+
+“Vincent,” she said, “let me help you to the sofa.”
+
+She wanted now to see him falter, to feel his hand on her shoulder,
+anything for a closer touch with him. For half a minute, perhaps, they
+remained motionless, and then the color began to come back into his face.
+
+He smiled bitterly.
+
+“They tell me you are such a good sick nurse, Mrs. Farron,” he said, “so
+considerate to the weak. But I don’t need your help, thank you.”
+
+She covered her face with her hands. He seemed to her stronger and more
+cruel than anything she had imagined. In a minute he left her alone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+Farron cared, perhaps, no more for appearances than Adelaide did, but
+his habitual manner was much better adapted to concealment. In him the
+fluctuations between the deepest depression and the highest elation were
+accompanied by such slight variations of look and tone that they escaped
+almost every one but Adelaide herself. He came down to dinner that
+evening, and while Adelaide sat in silence, with her elbows on the table
+and her long fingers clasping and unclasping themselves in a sort of
+rhythmic desperation, conversation went on pleasantly enough between
+Mathilde and Vincent. This was facilitated by the fact that Mathilde had
+now transferred to Vincent the flattering affection which she used to
+give to her grandfather. She agreed with, wondered at, and drank in
+every word.
+
+Naturally, Mathilde attributed her mother’s distress to the crisis in her
+own love-affairs. She had had no word with her as to Wayne’s new
+position, and it came to her in a flash that it would be daring, but
+wise, to take the matter up in the presence of her stepfather. So, as
+soon as they were in the drawing-room, and Farron had opened the evening
+paper, and his wife, with a wild decision, had opened a book, Mathilde
+ruthlessly interrupted them both, recalling them from what appeared to be
+the depths of absorptions in their respective pages by saying:
+
+“Mr. Farron, did you tell Mama what you had done about Pete?”
+
+Farron raised his eyes and said:
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“And what did she say?”
+
+“What is there for me to say?” answered Adelaide in the terrible, crisp
+voice that Mathilde hated.
+
+There was a pause. To Mathilde it seemed extraordinary the way older
+people sometimes stalled and shifted about perfectly obvious issues; but,
+wishing to be patient, she explained:
+
+“Don’t you see it makes some difference in our situation?”
+
+“The greatest, I should think,” said Adelaide, and just hinted that she
+might go back to her book at any instant.
+
+“But don’t you think--” Mathilde began again, when Farron interrupted her
+almost sharply.
+
+“Mathilde,” he said, “there’s a well-known business axiom, not to try to
+get things on paper too early.”
+
+She bent her head a trifle on one side in the way a puppy will when an
+unusual strain is being put upon its faculties. It seemed to her curious,
+but she saw she was being advised to drop the subject. Suddenly Adelaide
+sprang to her feet and said she was going to bed.
+
+“I hope your headache will be better, Mama,” Mathilde hazarded; but
+Adelaide went without answering. Mathilde looked at Mr. Farron.
+
+“You haven’t learned to wait,” he said.
+
+“It’s so hard to wait when you are on bad terms with people you love!”
+
+She was surprised that he smiled--a smile that conveyed more pain than
+amusement.
+
+“It is hard,” he said.
+
+This closed the evening. The next morning Vincent went down-town. He
+went about half-past ten. Adelaide, breakfasting in her room and dressing
+at her leisure, did not appear until after eleven, and then discovered
+for the first time that her husband had gone. She was angry at Mathilde,
+who had breakfasted with him, at Pringle, for not telling her what was
+happening.
+
+“You shouldn’t have let him go, Mathilde,” she said. “You are old enough
+to have some judgment in such matters. He is not strong enough. He almost
+fainted yesterday.”
+
+“But, Mama,” protested the girl, “I could not stop Mr. Farron. I don’t
+think even you could have if he’d made up his mind.”
+
+“Tell Pringle to order the motor at once,” was her mother’s answer.
+
+Her distraction at her husband’s imprudence touched Mathilde so that she
+forgot everything else between them.
+
+“O Mama,” she said, “I’m so sorry you’re worried! I’m sorry I’m one of
+your worries; but don’t you see I love Pete just as you do Mr. Farron?”
+
+“God help you, then!” said Adelaide, quickly, and went to her room to
+put on with a haste none the less meticulous her small velvet hat, her
+veil, her spotless, pale gloves, her muff, and warm coat.
+
+She drove to Vincent’s office. It was not really care for his health that
+drove her, but the restlessness of despair; she had reached a point where
+she was more wretched away from him than with him.
+
+The office was high in a gigantic building. Every one knew her by sight,
+the giant at the door and the men in the elevators. Once in the office
+itself, a junior partner hurried to her side.
+
+“So glad to see Vincent back again,” he said, proud of the fact that he
+called his present partner and late employer by his first name. “You want
+to see him?” There was a short hesitation. “He left word not to be
+disturbed--”
+
+“Who is there?” Adelaide asked.
+
+“Dr. Parret.”
+
+“He’s not been taken ill?”
+
+He tried to reassure her, but Adelaide, without waiting or listening,
+moved at once to Vincent’s door and opened it. As she did so she heard
+him laughing and then she saw that he was laughing at the words of the
+handsomest woman she had ever seen. A great many people had this first
+impression of Lily Parret. Lily was standing on the opposite side of the
+table from him, leaning with both palms flat on the polished wood,
+telling him some continued narrative that made her blue eyes shine and
+her dimples deepen.
+
+Adelaide was not temperamentally jealous. She did not, like Vincent, hate
+and fear any person or thing or idea that drew his attention away; on the
+contrary, she wanted him to give his full attention to anything that
+would make for his power and success. She was not jealous, but it did
+cross her mind that she was looking now at her successor.
+
+They stopped laughing as she entered, and Vincent said:
+
+“Thank you, Dr. Parret, you have given me just what I wanted.”
+
+“Marty would just as lief as not stick a knife in me if he knew,” said
+Lily, not as if she were afraid, but as if this was one of the normal
+risks of her profession. She turned to Adelaide, “O Mrs. Farron, I’ve
+heard of you from Pete Wayne. Isn’t he perfectly delightful? But, then,
+he ought to be with such a mother.”
+
+Adelaide had a very useful smile, which could maintain a long, but
+somewhat meaningless, brilliance. She employed it now, and it lasted
+until Lily had gone.
+
+“That’s a very remarkable girl,” said Farron, remembrances of smiles
+still on his lips.
+
+“Does she think every one perfect?”
+
+“Almost every one; that’s how she keeps going at such a rate.”
+
+“How long have you known her?”
+
+“About ten minutes. Pete got her here. She knew something about Marty
+that I needed.” He spoke as if he was really interested in the business
+before him; he did not betray by so much as a glance the recognition that
+they were alone, though she was calling his attention to the fact by
+every line of her figure and expression of her face. She saw his hand
+move on his desk. Was it coming to hers? He rang a bell. “Is Burke in the
+outer office? Send him in.”
+
+Adelaide’s heart began to beat as Marty, in his working-clothes,
+entered. He was more suppressed and more sulky than she had yet seen him.
+
+“I’ve been trying to see you, Mr. Farron,” he began; but Vincent cut in:
+
+“One moment, Burke. I have something to say to you. That bout you said
+you had with O’Hallohan--”
+
+“Well, what of it?” answered Marty, suddenly raising his voice.
+
+“He knocked you out.”
+
+“Who says so?” roared Burke.
+
+“He knocked you out,” repeated Vincent.
+
+“Who says so?” Burke roared again, and somehow there was less confidence
+in the same volume of sound.
+
+“Well, not O’Hallohan; He stayed bought. But I have it straight. No, I’m
+not trying to draw you out on a guess. I don’t play that kind of game. If
+I tell you I know it for a fact, I do.”
+
+“Well, and what of it?” said Marty.
+
+“Just this. I wouldn’t dismiss a man for getting knocked out by a
+bigger man--”
+
+“He ain’t bigger.”
+
+“By a better fighter, then; but I doubt whether or not I want a
+foreman who has to resort to that kind of thing--to buying off the man
+who licked--”
+
+“I didn’t _buy_ him off,” said Burke, as if he knew the distinction, even
+in his own mind, was a fine one.
+
+“Oh, yes, you did,” answered Farron. And getting up, with his hands in
+his pockets, he added, “I’m afraid your usefulness to me is over, Burke.”
+
+“The hell it is!”
+
+“My wife is here, Marty,” said Farron, very pleasantly. “But this story
+isn’t the only thing I have against you. My friend Mrs. Wayne tells me
+you are exerting a bad influence over a fellow whose marriage she wants
+to get annulled.”
+
+“Oh, let ’em get it annulled!” shouted Marty on a high and rising key.
+“What do I care? I’ll do anything to oblige if I’m asked right; but when
+Mrs. Wayne and that gang come around bullying me, I won’t do a thing for
+them. But, if you ask me to, Mr. Farron, why, I’m glad to oblige you.”
+
+“Thank you, Marty,” returned his employer, cordially. “If you arrange
+that for me, I must own it would make me feel differently. I tell
+you,” he added, as one who suggests an honorable compromise, “you get
+that settled up, you get that marriage annulled--that is, if you think
+you can--”
+
+“Sure I can,” Burke replied, swaying his body about from the waist up, as
+if to indicate the ease with which it could be accomplished.
+
+“Well, when that’s done, come back, and we’ll talk over the other matter.
+Perhaps, after all--well, we’ll talk it over.”
+
+Burke walked to the door with his usual conquering step, but there
+turned.
+
+“Say,” he said, “that story about the fight--” He looked at Adelaide.
+“Ladies don’t always understand these matters. Tell her, will you, that
+it’s done in some first-class fights?”
+
+“I’ll explain,” answered Vincent.
+
+“And there ain’t any use in the story’s getting about,” Burke added.
+
+“It won’t,” said Vincent. On which assurance Marty went away and left the
+husband and wife alone.
+
+Adelaide got up and went to the window and looked out toward the
+Palisades. Marty Burke had been a symbol that enabled her to recall some
+of her former attitudes of mind. She remembered that dinner where she had
+pitted him against her husband. She felt deeply humiliated in her own
+sight and in Vincent’s, for she was now ready to believe that he had read
+her mind from the beginning. It seemed to her as if she had been mad, and
+in that madness had thrown away the only thing in the world she would
+ever value. The thought of acknowledging her fault was not repugnant to
+her; she had no special objection to groveling, but she knew it would do
+no good. Vincent, though not ungenerous, saw clearly; and he had summed
+up the situation in that terrible phrase about choosing between loving
+and being loved. “I suppose I shouldn’t respect him much if he did
+forgive me,” she thought; and suddenly she felt his arms about her; he
+snatched her to him, turned her face to his, calling her by strange,
+unpremeditated terms of endearment. Beyond these, no words at all were
+exchanged between them; they were undesired. Adelaide did not know
+whether it were servile or superb to care little about knowing his
+opinion and intentions in regard to her. All that she cared about was
+that in her eyes he was once more supreme and that his arms were about
+her. Words, she knew, would have been her enemies, and she did not make
+use of them.
+
+When they went out, they passed Wayne in the outer office.
+
+“Come to dinner to-night, Pete,” said Farron, and added, turning to his
+wife, “That’s all right, isn’t it, Adelaide?”
+
+She indicated that it was perfect, like everything he did.
+
+Wayne looked at his future mother-in-law in surprise. His pride had been
+unforgetably stung by some of her sentences, but he could have forgiven
+those more easily than the easy smile with which she now nodded at her
+husband’s invitation, as if a pleasant intention on her part could wipe
+out everything that had gone before. That, it seemed to him, was the very
+essence of insolence.
+
+Appreciating that some sort of doubt was disturbing him, Adelaide said
+most graciously:
+
+“Yes, you really must come, Mr. Wayne.”
+
+At this moment Farron’s own stenographer, Chandler, approached him with
+an unsigned letter in his hand.
+
+Chandler took the routine of the office more seriously than Farron did,
+and acquired thereby a certain power over his employer. He had something
+of the attitude of a child’s nurse, who, knowing that her charge has
+almost passed beyond her care, recognizes that she has no authority
+except that bestowed by devotion.
+
+“I think you meant to sign this letter, Mr. Farron,” he said, just as a
+nurse might say before strangers, “You weren’t going to the party
+without washing your hands?”
+
+“Oh.” Farron fished in his waistcoat for his pen, and while he was
+writing, and Chandler just keeping an eye on him to see that it was done
+right, Adelaide said:
+
+“And how is Mrs. Chandler?”
+
+Chandler’s face lit up as he received the letter back.
+
+“Oh, much better, thank you, Mrs. Farron--out of all danger.”
+
+Wayne saw, what Chandler did not, that Adelaide had never even heard of
+Mrs. Chandler’s ill health; but she murmured as she turned away:
+
+“I’m so glad. You must have been very anxious.”
+
+When they were gone, Wayne and Chandler were left a minute alone.
+
+“What a personality!” Chandler exclaimed. “Imagine her remembering my
+troubles, when you think what she has had to worry about! A remarkable
+couple, Mr. Wayne. I have been up to the house a number of times since
+Mr. Farron’s illness, and she is always there, so brave, so attentive. A
+queenly woman, and,” he added, as if the two did not always go together,
+“a good wife.”
+
+Wayne could think of no answer to this eulogy, and as they stood in
+silence the office door opened and Mr. Lanley came in. He nodded to each
+of the two, and moved to Vincent’s room.
+
+“Mr. Farron has just gone,” said Chandler, firmly. He could not bear to
+have people running in and out of Farron’s room.
+
+“Gone?” said Lanley, as if it were somebody’s fault.
+
+“Mrs. Farron came down for him in the motor. He appeared to stand his
+first day very well.”
+
+Mr. Lanley glanced quickly from one to the other. This did not sound as
+if any final break had occurred between the Farrons, yet on this subject
+he could hardly question his son-in-law’s secretaries. He made one
+further effort.
+
+“I suppose Mr. Farron thought he was good for a whole day’s work.”
+
+Chandler smiled.
+
+“Mr. Farron, like all wise men, sir, does what his wife tells him.” And
+then, as he loved his own work far more than conversation, Chandler
+hurried back to his desk.
+
+“I understand,” said Lanley to Wayne, “that you are here regularly now.”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Like your work?” Lanley was obviously delaying, hoping that some
+information would turn up unexpectedly.
+
+“Very much.”
+
+“Humph! What does your mother think about it?”
+
+“About my new job?” Wayne smiled. “You know those aren’t the kind of
+facts--jobs and salaries--that my mother scrutinizes very closely.”
+
+Lanley stared at him with brows slightly contracted.
+
+“What does she scrutinize?” he asked.
+
+“Oh, motives--spiritual things.”
+
+“I see.” Mr. Lanley couldn’t go a step further, couldn’t take this young
+man into his confidence an inch further. He stuck his stick into his
+overcoat-pocket so that it stood upright, and wheeled sharply.
+
+“Good-by,” he said, and added at the door, “I suppose you think this
+makes a difference in your prospects.”
+
+“Mrs. Farron has asked me to come to dinner to-night.”
+
+Lanley wheeled back again.
+
+“What?” he said.
+
+“Yes, she almost urged me, though I didn’t need urging.”
+
+Lanley didn’t answer, but presently went out in silence. He was
+experiencing the extreme loneliness that follows being more royalist
+than the king.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+On Mondays and Thursdays, the only days Mr. Lanley went down-town, he
+expected to have the corner table at the restaurant where he always
+lunched and where, on leaving Farron’s office, he went. He had barely
+finished ordering luncheon--oyster stew, cold tongue, salad, and a
+bottle of Rhine wine--when, looking up, he saw Wilsey was approaching
+him, beaming.
+
+“Haryer, Wilsey?” he said, without cordiality.
+
+Wilsey, it fortunately appeared, had already had his midday meal, and had
+only a moment or two to give to sociability.
+
+“Haven’t seen you since that delightful evening,” he murmured. “I hope
+Mrs. Baxter got my card.” He mentioned his card as if it had been a gift,
+not munificent, but not negligible, either.
+
+“Suppose she got it if you left it,” said Mr. Lanley, who had heard her
+comment on it. “My man’s pretty good at that sort of thing.”
+
+“Ah, how rare they are getting!” said Wilsey, with a sigh--“good
+servants. Upon my word, Lanley, I’m almost ready to go.”
+
+“Because you can’t get good servants?” said his friend, who was drumming
+on the table and looking blankly about.
+
+“Because all the old order is passing, all the standards and backgrounds
+that I value. I don’t think I’m a snob--”
+
+“Of course you’re a snob, Wilsey.”
+
+Mr. Wilsey smiled temperately.
+
+“What do you mean by the word?”
+
+It was a question about which Lanley had been thinking, and he answered:
+
+“I mean a person who values himself for qualities that have no moral,
+financial, or intellectual value whatsoever. You, for instance, Wilsey,
+value yourself not because you are a pretty good lawyer, but because your
+great-grandfather signed the Declaration.”
+
+A shade of slight embarrassment crossed the lawyer’s face.
+
+“I own,” he said, “that I value birth, but so do you, Lanley. You attach
+importance to being a New York Lanley.”
+
+“I do,” answered Lanley; “but I have sense enough to be ashamed of doing
+so. You’re proud of being proud of your old Signer.”
+
+“As a matter of fact,” Mr. Wilsey remarked slowly, “Josiah Wilsey did not
+sign the Declaration.”
+
+“What!” cried Lanley. “You’ve always told me he did.”
+
+Wilsey shook his head gently, as one who went about correcting errors.
+
+“No. What I said was that I feel no moral doubt he would have signed it
+if an attack of illness--”
+
+Lanley gave a short roar.
+
+“That’s just like _you_, Wilsey. You wouldn’t have signed it, either. You
+would have said that while in cordial sympathy with the ideas set forth,
+you would not care to put your name to a document that might give pain to
+a monarch who, though not as liberal as some of us could wish, was yet--”
+
+“As a matter of fact,” Wilsey began again even more coldly, “I should
+have signed--”
+
+“Oh, you think so now. A hundred years from now you’d sign a petition for
+the eight-hour law.”
+
+“Never!” said Wilsey, raising his hand. “I should never put my name to a
+document--” He stopped at another roar from his friend, and never took
+the sentence up again, but indicated with a gesture that only legal minds
+were worth arguing with on points of this sort.
+
+When he had gone, Lanley dipped the spoon in his oyster stew with not a
+little pleasure. Nothing, apparently, could have raised his spirits more
+than the knowledge that old Josiah Wilsey had not signed the Declaration.
+He actually chuckled a little. “So like Wilsey himself,” he thought. “No
+moral courage; calls it conservatism.” Then his joy abated. Just so, he
+thought, must he himself appear to Mrs. Wayne. Yet his self-respect
+insisted that his case was different. Loyalty had been responsible not
+for his conservatism, but for the pig-headedness with which he had acted
+upon it. He would have asked nothing better than to profess himself
+open-minded to Mrs. Wayne’s views, only he could not desert Adelaide in
+the moment of her struggle for beliefs in which he himself had brought
+her up. And now she had deserted him. He alone was left to flaunt a
+banner the motto of which he didn’t wholly believe, while Adelaide, at a
+word from Vincent, had gone over to the other side. And no one knew what
+his loyalty had cost him. Long ago, in his first year at college, he had
+flunked the examination of the professor whom he reverenced above all
+others. No one had cared, no one had long remembered, except Lanley
+himself, and he had remembered because some one had told him what the
+professor said on reading his paper. It was nothing but, “I had supposed
+Lanley was intelligent.” Never again had he had that professor’s
+attention for a single instant. This, it seemed to him, was about to
+happen to him again, now when it was too late in his life to do anything
+but despair.
+
+He called the waiter, paid his bill and tip,--he was an extremely liberal
+tipper; “it’s expected of us,” he used to say, meaning that it was
+expected of people like the New York Lanleys,--and went away.
+
+In old times he had been an inventor of many clever tricks for getting
+up-town by unpopular elevated trains and horse-cars that avoided the
+crowd, but the subway was a great leveler, and he knew no magic except to
+take a local in rush hours. At three o’clock, however, even this was not
+necessary. He took an express, and got off at the Grand Central, turned
+up Park Avenue, and then east. He had just found out that he was going to
+visit Mrs. Wayne.
+
+He read the names in the vestibule, never doubting that Dr. Parret was
+a masculine practitioner, and hesitated at the name of Wayne. He
+thought he ought to ring the bell, but he wanted to go straight up.
+Some one had left the front door unlatched. He pushed it open and began
+the steep ascent.
+
+She came to the door of the flat herself. She had a funny little gray
+shawl about her shoulders and a pen in her hand. She tried to make her
+voice sound very cordial as she greeted him, but he thought he caught
+something that sounded as if, while perfectly well disposed to him, she
+couldn’t for the life of her imagine why he had come.
+
+“Come in,” she said, “though I’m afraid it’s a little cold in here. Our
+janitor--”
+
+“Let me light your fire for you,” he answered, and extracting a
+parlor-match from his pocket,--safety-matches were his bugbear,--he
+stooped, and put the flame to the fire. As he did so he understood
+that it was not the mere forgetfulness of a servant that had left it
+unlighted, but probably a deliberate economy, and he rose crimson
+and unhappy.
+
+It took him some time to recover, and during the entire time she sat in
+her gray shawl, looking very amiable, but plainly unable to think of
+anything to say.
+
+“I saw your son in Farron’s office to-day.”
+
+“Mr. Farron has been so kind, so wonderfully kind!”
+
+Only a guilty conscience could have found reproach in this statement, and
+Lanley said:
+
+“And I hear he is dining at my daughter’s this evening.”
+
+Mrs. Wayne had had a telephone message to that effect.
+
+“I wondered, if you were alone--” Lanley hesitated. He had of course been
+going to ask her to come and dine with him, but a better inspiration came
+to him. “I wondered if you would ask me to dine with you.”
+
+“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Mrs. Wayne, “but I can’t. I have a boy coming.
+He’s studying for the ministry, the most interesting person. He had not
+been sober for three years when I took hold of him, and now he hasn’t
+touched a drop for two.”
+
+He sighed. She said she was sorry, but he could see plainly enough that
+any reformed, or even more any unreformed, drunkard would always far
+surpass him in ability to command her interest. He did not belong to a
+generation that cleared things up with words; he would have thought it
+impertinent, almost ungentlemanly, to probe her attitude of mind about
+the scene at Adelaide’s; and he would have considered himself unmanly to
+make any plea to her on the ground of his own suffering. One simply
+supported such things as best one could; it was expected of one, like
+tipping waiters. He had neither the vocabulary nor the habit of mind that
+made an impersonal exposition of an emotional difficulty possible; but
+even had he possessed these powers he would have retained his tradition
+against using them. Perhaps, if she had been his sister or his wife, he
+might have admitted that he had had a hard day or that every one had
+moments of depression; but that was not the way to talk in a lady’s
+drawing-room. In the silence he saw her eyes steal longingly to her
+writing-table, deeply and hopelessly littered with papers and open books.
+
+“I’m afraid I’m detaining you,” he said. The visit had been a failure.
+
+“Oh, not at all,” she replied, and then added in a tone of more
+sincerity: “I do have the most terrible time with my check-book. And,”
+she added, as one confessing to an absurdly romantic ideal, “I was trying
+to balance it.”
+
+“You should not be troubled with such things,” said Mr. Lanley, thinking
+how long it was since any one but a secretary had balanced his books.
+
+Pete, it appeared, usually did attend to his mother’s checks, but of
+late she had not liked to bother him, and that was just the moment the
+bank had chosen to notify her that she had overdrawn. “I don’t see how I
+can be,” she said, too hopeless to deny it.
+
+“If you would allow me,” said Mr. Lanley. “I am an excellent bookkeeper.”
+
+“Oh, I shouldn’t like to trouble you,” said Mrs. Wayne, but she made it
+clear she would like it above everything; so Lanley put on his
+spectacles, drew up his chair, and squared his elbows to the job.
+
+“It hasn’t been balanced since--dear me! not since October,” he said.
+
+“I know; but I draw such small checks.”
+
+“But you draw a good many.”
+
+She had risen, and was standing before the fire, with her hands behind
+her back. Her shawl had slipped off, and she looked, in her short
+walking-skirt, rather like a school-girl being reprimanded for a poor
+exercise. She felt so when, looking up at her over his spectacles, he
+observed severely:
+
+“You really must be more careful about carrying forward. Twice you have
+carried forward an amount from two pages back instead of--”
+
+“That’s always the way,” she interrupted. “Whenever people look at my
+check-book they take so long scolding me about the way I do it that
+there’s no time left for putting it right.”
+
+“I won’t say another word,” returned Lanley; “only it would really
+help you--”
+
+“I don’t want any one to do it who says my sevens are like fours,” she
+went on. Lanley compressed his lips slightly, but contented himself by
+merely lengthening the tail of a seven. He said nothing more, but every
+time he found an error he gave a little shake of his head that went
+through her like a knife.
+
+The task was a long one. The light of the winter afternoon faded, and she
+lit the lamps before he finished. At first he had tried not to be aware
+of revelations that the book made; but as he went on and he found he was
+obliged now and then to question her about payments and receipts, he saw
+that she was so utterly without any sense of privacy in the matter that
+his own decreased.
+
+He had never thought of her as being particularly poor, not at least in
+the sense of worrying over every bill, but now when he saw the small
+margin between the amounts paid in and the amounts paid out, when he
+noticed how large a proportion of what she had she spent in free gifts
+and not in living expenses, he found himself facing something he could
+not tolerate. He put his pen down carefully in the crease of the book,
+and rose to his feet.
+
+“Mrs. Wayne,” he said, “I must tell you something.”
+
+“You’re going to say, after all, that my sevens are like fours.”
+
+“I’m going to say something worse--more inexcusable. I’m going to tell
+you how much I want you to honor me by becoming my wife.”
+
+She pronounced only one syllable. She said, “_Oh_!” as crowds say it when
+a rocket goes off.
+
+“I suppose you think it ridiculous in a man of my age to speak of love,
+but it’s not ridiculous, by Heaven! It’s tragic. I shouldn’t have
+presumed, though, to mention the subject to you, only it is intolerable
+to me to think of your lacking anything when I have so much. I can’t
+explain why this knowledge gave me courage. I know that you care nothing
+for luxuries and money, less than any one I know; but the fact that you
+haven’t everything that you ought to have makes me suffer so much that I
+hope you will at least listen to me.”
+
+“But you know it doesn’t make me suffer a bit,” said Mrs. Wayne.
+
+“To know you at all has been such a happiness that I am shocked at my own
+presumption in asking for your companionship for the rest of my life, and
+if in addition to that I could take care of you, share with you--”
+
+No one ever presented a proposition to Mrs. Wayne without finding her
+willing to consider it, an open-mindedness that often led her into the
+consideration of absurdities. And now the sacred cupidity of the
+reformer did for an instant leap up within her. All the distressed
+persons, all the tottering causes in which she was interested, seemed to
+parade before her eyes. Then, too, the childish streak in her character
+made her remember how amusing it would be to be Adelaide Farron’s
+mother-in-law, and Pete’s grandmother by marriage. Nor was she at all
+indifferent to the flattery of the offer or the touching reserves of her
+suitor’s nature.
+
+“I should think you would be so lonely!” he said gently.
+
+She nodded.
+
+“I am often. I miss not having any one to talk to over the little things
+that”--she laughed--“I probably wouldn’t talk over if I had some one.
+But even with Pete I am lonely. I want to be first with some one again.”
+
+“You will always be first with me.”
+
+“Even if I don’t marry you?”
+
+“Whatever you do.”
+
+Like the veriest coquette, she instantly decided to take all and give
+nothing--to take his interest, his devotion, his loyalty, all of the
+first degree, and give him in return a divided interest, a loyalty too
+much infected by humor to be complete, and a devotion in which several
+causes and Pete took precedence. She did not do this in ignorance. On the
+contrary, she knew just how it would be; that he would wait and she be
+late, that he would adjust himself and she remain unchanged, that he
+would give and give and she would never remember that it would be kind
+some day to ask. Yet it did not seem to her an unfair bargain, and
+perhaps she was right.
+
+“I couldn’t marry you,” she said. “I couldn’t change. All your pretty
+things and the way you live--it would be like a cage to me. I like my
+life the way it is; but yours--”
+
+“Do you think I would ask Wilsey to dinner every night or try to mold you
+to be like Mrs. Baxter?”
+
+She laughed.
+
+“You’d have a hard time. I never could have married again. I’d make you a
+poor wife, but I’m a wonderful friend.”
+
+“Your friendship would be more happiness than I had any right to hope
+for,” and then he added in a less satisfied tone: “But friendship is so
+uncertain. You don’t make any announcements to your friends or vows to
+each other, unless you’re at an age when you cut your initials in the
+bark of a tree. That’s what I’d like to do. I suppose you think I’m an
+old fool.”
+
+“Two of us,” said Mrs. Wayne, and wiped her eyes. She cried easily, and
+had never felt the least shame about it.
+
+It was a strange compact--strange at least for her, considering that only
+a few hours before she had thought of him as a friendly, but
+narrow-minded, old stranger. Something weak and malleable in her nature
+made her enter lightly into the compact, although all the time she knew
+that something more deeply serious and responsible would never allow her
+to break it. A faint regret for even an atom of lost freedom, a vein of
+caution and candor, made her say:
+
+“I’m so afraid you’ll find me unsatisfactory. Every one has, even Pete.”
+
+“I think I shall ask less than any one,” he returned.
+
+The answer pleased her strangely.
+
+Presently a ring came at the bell--a telegram. The expected guest was
+detained at the seminary. Lanley watched with agonized attention. She
+appeared to be delighted.
+
+“Now you’ll stay to dine,” she said. “I can’t remember what there is
+for dinner.”
+
+“Now, that’s not friendly at the start,” said he, “to think I
+care so much.”
+
+“Well, you’re not like a theological student.”
+
+“A good deal better, probably,” answered Lanley, with a gruffness that
+only partly hid his happiness. There was no real cloud in his sky. If
+Mrs. Wayne had accepted his offer of marriage, by this time he would have
+begun to think of the horror of telling Adelaide and Mathilde and his own
+servants. Now he thought of nothing but the agreeable evening before him,
+one of many.
+
+When Pete came in to dress, Lanley was just in the act of drawing the
+last neat double lines for his balance. He had been delayed by the fact
+that Mrs. Wayne had been talking to him almost continuously since his
+return to figuring. She was in high spirits, for even saints are
+stimulated by a respectful adoration.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+Recognizing the neat back of Mr. Lanley’s gray head, Pete’s first idea
+was that he must have come to induce Mrs. Wayne to conspire with him
+against the marriage; but he abandoned this notion on seeing his
+occupation.
+
+“Hullo, Mr. Lanley,” he said, stooping to kiss his mother with the casual
+affection of the domesticated male. “You have my job.”
+
+“It is a great pleasure to be of any service,” said Mr. Lanley.
+
+“It was in a terrible state, it seems, Pete,” said his mother.
+
+“She makes her fours just like sevens, doesn’t she?” observed Pete.
+
+“I did not notice the similarity,” replied Mr. Lanley. He glanced at Mrs.
+Wayne, however, and enjoyed his denial almost as much as he had enjoyed
+the discovery that the Wilsey ancestor had not been a Signer. He felt
+that somehow, owing to his late-nineteenth-century tact, the breach
+between him and Pete had been healed.
+
+“Mr. Lanley is going to stay and dine with me,” said Mrs. Wayne.
+
+Pete looked a little grave, but his next sentence explained the cause of
+his anxiety.
+
+“Wouldn’t you like me to go out and get something to eat, Mother?”
+
+“No, no,” answered his mother, firmly. “This time there really is
+something in the house quite good. I don’t remember what it is.”
+
+And then Pete, who felt he had done his duty, went off to dress. Soon,
+however, his voice called from an adjoining room.
+
+“Hasn’t that woman sent back any of my collars, Mother dear?”
+
+“O Pete, her daughter got out of the reformatory only yesterday,” Mrs.
+Wayne replied. Lanley saw that the Wayne housekeeping was immensely
+complicated by crime. “I believe I am the only person in your employ not
+a criminal,” he said, closing the books. “These balance now.”
+
+“Have I anything left?”
+
+“Only about a hundred and fifty.”
+
+She brightened at this.
+
+“Oh, come,” she said, “that’s not so bad. I couldn’t have been so
+terribly overdrawn, after all.”
+
+“You ought not to overdraw at all,” said Mr. Lanley, severely. “It’s not
+fair to the bank.”
+
+“Well, I never mean to,” she replied, as if no one could ask more
+than that.
+
+Presently she left him to go and dress for dinner. He felt
+extraordinarily at home, left alone like this among her belongings. He
+wandered about looking at the photographs--photographs of Pete as a
+child, a photograph of an old white house with wisteria-vines on it; a
+picture of her looking very much as she did now, with Pete as a little
+boy, in a sailor suit, leaning against her; and then a little photograph
+of her as a girl not much older than Mathilde, he thought--a girl who
+looked a little frightened and awkward, as girls so often looked, and yet
+to whom the French photographer--for it was taken in the Place de la
+Madeleine--had somehow contrived to give a Parisian air. He had never
+thought of her in Paris. He took the picture up; it was dated May, 1884.
+He thought back carefully. Yes, he had been in Paris himself that spring,
+a man of thirty-three or so, feeling as old almost as he did to-day, a
+widower with his little girl. If only they might have met then, he and
+that serious, starry-eyed girl in the photograph!
+
+Hearing Pete coming, he set the photograph back in its place, and,
+sitting down, picked up the first paper within reach.
+
+“Good night, sir,” said Pete from the doorway.
+
+“Good night, my dear boy. Good luck!” They shook hands.
+
+“Funny old duck,” Pete thought as he went down-stairs whistling,
+“sitting there so contentedly reading ‘The Harvard Lampoon.’ Wonder what
+he thinks of it.”
+
+He did not wonder long, though, for more interesting subjects of
+consideration were at hand. What reception would he meet at the Farrons?
+What arrangements would be made, what assumptions permitted? But even
+more immediate than this was the problem how could he contrive to greet
+Mrs. Farron? He was shocked to find how little he had been able to
+forgive her. There was something devilish, he thought, in the way she had
+contrived to shake his self-confidence at the moment of all others when
+he had needed it. He could never forget a certain contemptuous curve in
+her fine, clear profile or the smooth delight of her tone at some of her
+own cruelties. Some day he would have it out with her when the right
+moment came. Before he reached the house he had had time to sketch a
+number of scenes in which she, caught extraordinarily red-handed, was
+forced to listen to his exposition of the evil of such methods as hers.
+He would say to her, “I remember that you once said to me, Mrs.
+Farron--” Anger cut short his vision as a cloud of her phrases came back
+to him, like stinging bees.
+
+He had hoped for a minute alone with Mathilde, but as Pringle opened the
+drawing-room door for him he heard the sound of laughter, and seeing that
+even Mrs. Farron herself was down, he exclaimed quickly:
+
+“What, am I late?”
+
+Every one laughed all the more at this.
+
+“That’s just what Mr. Farron said you would say at finding that Mama was
+dressed in time,” exclaimed Mathilde, casting an admiring glance at her
+stepfather.
+
+“You’d suppose I’d never been in time for dinner before,” remarked
+Adelaide, giving Wayne her long hand.
+
+“But isn’t it wonderful, Pete,” put in Mathilde, “how Mr. Farron is
+always right?”
+
+“Oh, I hope he isn’t,” said Adelaide; “for what do you think he has just
+been telling me--that you’d always hate me, Pete, as long as you lived.
+You see,” she went on, the little knot coming in her eyebrows, “I’ve been
+telling him all the things I said to you yesterday. They did sound rather
+awful, and I think I’ve forgotten some of the worst.”
+
+“_I_ haven’t,” said Pete.
+
+“I remember I told you you were no one.”
+
+“You said I was a perfectly nice young man.”
+
+“And that you had no business judgment.”
+
+“And that I was mixing Mathilde up with a fraud.”
+
+“And that I couldn’t see any particular reason why she cared about you.”
+
+“That you only asked that your son-in-law should be a person.”
+
+“I am afraid I said something about not coming to a house where you
+weren’t welcome.”
+
+“I know you said something about a bribe.”
+
+At this Adelaide laughed out loud.
+
+“I believe I did,” she said. “What things one does say sometimes! There’s
+dinner.” She rose, and tucked her hand under his arm. “Will you take me
+in to dinner, Pete, or do you think I’m too despicable to be fed?”
+
+The truth was that they were all four in such high spirits that they
+could no more help playing together than four colts could help playing in
+a grass field. Besides, Vincent had taunted Adelaide with her inability
+ever to make it up with Wayne. She left no trick unturned.
+
+“I don’t know,” she went on as they sat down at table, “that a marriage
+is quite legal unless you hate your mother-in-law. I ought to give you
+some opportunity to go home and say to Mrs. Wayne, ‘But I’m afraid I
+shall never be able to get on with Mrs. Farron.’”
+
+“Oh, he’s said that already,” remarked Vincent.
+
+“Many a time,” said Pete.
+
+Mathilde glanced a little fearfully at her mother. The talk seemed to her
+amusing, but dangerous.
+
+“Well, then, shall we have a feud, Pete?” said Adelaide in a
+glass-of-wine-with-you-sir tone. “A good feud in a family can be made
+very amusing.”
+
+“It would be all right for us, of course,” said Pete, “but it would be
+rather hard on Mathilde.”
+
+“Mathilde is a better fighter than either of you,” put in Vincent.
+“Adelaide has no continuity of purpose, and you, Pete, are wretchedly
+kind-hearted; but Mathilde would go into it to the death.”
+
+“Oh, I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Farron,” exclaimed Mathilde,
+tremendously flattered, and hoping he would go on. “I don’t like
+to fight.”
+
+“Neither did Stonewall Jackson, I believe, until they fixed bayonets.”
+
+Mathilde, dropping her eyes, saw Pete’s hand lying on the table. It was
+stubby, and she loved it the better for being so; it was firm and boyish
+and exactly like Pete. Looking up, she caught her mother’s eye, and they
+both remembered. For an instant indecision flickered in Adelaide’s look,
+but she lacked the complete courage to add that to the list--to tell any
+human being that she had said his hands were stubby; and so her eyes fell
+before her daughter’s.
+
+As dinner went on the adjustment between the four became more nearly
+perfect; the gaiety, directed by Adelaide, lost all sting. But even as
+she talked to Pete she was only dimly aware of his existence. Her
+audience was her husband. She was playing for his praise and admiration,
+and before soup was over she knew she had it; she knew better than words
+could tell her that he thought her the most desirable woman in the world.
+Fortified by that knowledge, the pacification of a cross boy seemed to
+Adelaide an inconsiderable task.
+
+By the time they rose from table it was accomplished. As they went into
+the drawing-room Adelaide was thinking that young men were really rather
+geese, but, then, one wouldn’t have them different if one could.
+
+Vincent was thinking how completely attaching a nature like hers would
+always be to him, since when she yielded her will to his she did it with
+such complete generosity.
+
+Mathilde was saying to herself:
+
+“Of course I knew Pete’s charm would win Mama at last, but even I did not
+suppose he could do it the very first evening.”
+
+And Pete was thinking:
+
+“A former beauty thinks she can put anything over, and in a way she can.
+I feel rather friendly toward her.”
+
+The Farrons had decided while they were dressing that after dinner they
+would retire to Vincent’s study and give the lovers a few minutes to
+themselves.
+
+Left alone, Pete and Mathilde stood looking seriously at each other, and
+then at the room which only a few weeks before had witnessed their first
+prolonged talk.
+
+“I never saw your mother look a quarter as beautiful as she does this
+evening,” said Wayne.
+
+“Isn’t she marvelous, the way she can make up for everything when she
+wants?” Mathilde answered with enthusiasm.
+
+Pete shook his head.
+
+“She can never make up for one thing.”
+
+“O Pete!”
+
+“She can never give me back my first instinctive, egotistical, divine
+conviction that there was every reason why you should love me. I shall
+always hear her voice saying, ‘But why should Mathilde love you?’ And I
+shall never know a good answer.”
+
+“What,” cried Mathilde, “don’t you know the answer to that! I do. Mama
+doesn’t, of course. Mama loves people for reasons outside themselves: she
+loves me because I’m her child, and Grandpapa because he’s her father,
+and Mr. Farron because she thinks he’s strong. If she didn’t think him
+strong, I’m not sure she’d love him. But _I_ love _you_ for being just as
+you are, because you are my choice. Whatever you do or say, that can’t be
+changed--”
+
+The door opened, and Pringle entered with a tray in his hand, and his
+eyes began darting about in search of empty coffee-cups. Mathilde and
+Pete were aware of a common feeling of guilt, not that they were
+concealing the cups, though there was something of that accusation in
+Pringle’s expression, but because the pause between them was so obvious.
+So Mathilde said suddenly:
+
+“Pringle, Mr. Wayne and I are engaged to be married.”
+
+“Indeed, Miss?” said Pringle, with a smile; and so seldom was this
+phenomenon seen to take place that Wayne noted for the first time that
+Pringle’s teeth were false. “I’m delighted to hear it; and you, too, sir.
+This is a bad world to go through alone.”
+
+“Do you approve of marriage, Pringle?” said Wayne.
+
+The cups, revealing themselves one by one, were secured as Pringle
+answered:
+
+“In my class of life, sir, we don’t give much time to considering what we
+approve of and disapprove of. But young people are all alike when they’re
+first engaged, always wondering how it is going to turn out, and hoping
+the other party won’t know that they’re wondering. But when you get old,
+and you look back on all the mistakes and the disadvantages and the
+sacrifices, you’ll find that you won’t be able to imagine that you could
+have gone through it with any other person--in spite of her faults,” he
+added almost to himself.
+
+When he was gone, Pete and Mathilde turned and kissed each other.
+
+“When we get old--” they murmured.
+
+They really believed that it could never happen to them.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11325 ***
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+      The Happiest Time of Their Lives | Project Gutenberg
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11325 ***</div>
+
+
+<h1>THE HAPPIEST TIME OF THEIR LIVES</h1>
+
+<p class="center big p2">BY ALICE DUER MILLER</p>
+
+<p class="center">Author of “Come Out of the Kitchen,” “Ladies Must Live,” “Wings in the
+Night,” etc.</p>
+
+<p class="center p2">1918</p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="center big">TO CLARENCE DAY, JR.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="blockquot">... and then he added in a less satisfied tone: “But friendship is so
+uncertain. You don’t make any announcement to your friends or vows to
+each other, unless you’re at an age when you cut your initials in the
+bark of a tree. That’s what I’d like to do.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="center xbig">THE HAPPIEST TIME OF THEIR LIVES</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="tb">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Little Miss Severance sat with her hands as cold as ice. The stage
+of her coming adventure was beautifully set—the conventional stage
+for the adventure of a young girl, her mother’s drawing-room. Her
+mother had the art of setting stages. The room was not large,—a New
+York brownstone front in the upper Sixties even though altered as to
+entrance, and allowed to sprawl backward over yards not originally
+intended for its use, is not a palace,—but it was a room and not a
+corridor; you had the comfortable sense of four walls about you when
+its one small door was once shut. It was filled, perhaps a little too
+much filled, with objects which seemed to have nothing in common except
+beauty; but propinquity, propinquity of older date than the house in
+which they now were, had given them harmony. Nothing in the room was
+modern except some uncommonly comfortable sofas and chairs, and the
+pink and yellow roses that stood about in Chinese bowls.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Severance herself was hardly aware of the charm of the room. On
+the third floor she had her own room, which she liked much better.
+There was a great deal of bright chintz in it, and maple furniture of
+a late colonial date, inherited from her mother’s family, the Lanleys,
+and discarded by her mother, who described the taste of that time as
+“pure, but provincial.” Crystal and ivories and carved wood and Italian
+embroideries did not please Miss Severance half so well as the austere
+lines of those work-tables and high-boys.</p>
+
+<p>It was after five, almost half-past, and he had said “about five.” Miss
+Severance, impatient to begin the delicious experience of anticipation,
+had allowed herself to be ready at a quarter before the hour. Not that
+she had been entirely without some form of anticipation since she woke
+up; not, perhaps, since she had parted from him under the windy awning
+the night before. They had held up a long line of restless motors as
+she stood huddled in her fur-trimmed cloak, and he stamped and jigged
+to keep warm, bareheaded, in his thin pumps and shining shirt-front,
+with his shoulders drawn up and his hands in his pockets, while they
+almost awkwardly arranged this meeting for the next day.</p>
+
+<p>Several times during the preceding evening she had thought he was going
+to say something of the kind, for they had danced together a great
+deal; but they had always danced in silence. At the time, with his
+arm about her, silence had seemed enough; but in separation there is
+something wonderfully solid and comforting in the memory of a spoken
+word; it is like a coin in the pocket. And after Miss Severance had
+bidden him good night at the long glass door of the paneled ball-room
+without his saying anything of a future meeting, she had gone up-stairs
+with a heavy heart to find her maid and her wrap. She knew as soon
+as she reached the dressing-room that she had actually hurried her
+departure for the sake of the parting; for the hope, as their time
+together grew short, of having some certainty to look forward to. But
+he had said nothing, and she had been ashamed to find that she was
+waiting, leaving her hand in his too long; so that at last she snatched
+it away, and was gone up-stairs in an instant, fearing he might have
+guessed what was going on in her mind.</p>
+
+<p>She had thought it just an accident that he was in the hall when she
+came down again, and he hadn’t much choice, she said to herself, about
+helping her into her motor. Then at the very last moment he had asked
+if he mightn’t come and see her the next afternoon. Miss Severance, who
+was usually sensitive to inconveniencing other people, had not cared at
+all about the motor behind hers that was tooting its horn or for the
+elderly lady in feathers and diamonds who was waiting to get into it.
+She had cared only about arranging the hour and impressing the address
+upon him. He had given her back the pleasure of her whole evening like
+a parting gift.</p>
+
+<p>As she drove home she couldn’t bring herself to doubt, though she tried
+to be rational about the whole experience, that it had meant as much
+to him as it had to her, perhaps more. Her lips curved a little at the
+thought, and she glanced quickly at her maid to see if the smile had
+been visible in the glare of the tall, double lamps of Fifth Avenue.</p>
+
+<p>To say she had not slept would be untrue, but she had slept close
+to the surface of consciousness, as if a bright light were shining
+somewhere near, and she had waked with the definite knowledge that this
+light was the certainty of seeing him that very day. The morning had
+gone very well; she had even forgotten once or twice for a few seconds,
+and then remembered with a start of joy that was almost painful:
+but, after lunch, time had begun to drag like the last day of a long
+sea-voyage.</p>
+
+<p>About three she had gone out with her mother in the motor, with the
+understanding that she was to be left at home at four; her mother was
+going on to tea with an elderly relation. Fifth Avenue had seemed
+unusually crowded even for Fifth Avenue, and the girl had fretted
+and wondered at the perversity of the police, who held them up just
+at the moment most promising for slipping through; and why Andrews,
+the chauffeur, could not see that he would do better by going to
+Madison Avenue. She did not speak these thoughts aloud, for she had
+not told her mother, not from any natural love of concealment, but
+because any announcement of her plans for the afternoon would have
+made them seem less certain of fulfilment. Perhaps, too, she had felt
+an unacknowledged fear of certain of her mother’s phrases that could
+delicately puncture delight.</p>
+
+<p>She had been dropped at the house by ten minutes after four, and
+exactly at a quarter before five she had been in the drawing-room, in
+her favorite dress, with her best slippers, her hands cold, but her
+heart warm with the knowledge that he would soon be there.</p>
+
+<p>Only after forty-five minutes of waiting did that faith begin to grow
+dim. She was too inexperienced in such matters to know that this was
+the inevitable consequence of being ready too early. She had had time
+to run through the whole cycle of certainty, eagerness, doubt, and she
+was now rapidly approaching despair. He was not coming. Perhaps he
+had never meant to come. Possibly he had merely yielded to a polite
+impulse; possibly her manner had betrayed her wishes so plainly that a
+clever, older person, two or three years out of college, had only too
+clearly read her in the moment when she had detained his hand at the
+door of the ball-room.</p>
+
+<p>There was a ring at the bell. Her heart stood perfectly still, and then
+began beating with a terrible force, as if it gathered itself into
+a hard, weighty lump again and again. Several minutes went by, too
+long for a man to give to taking off his coat. At last she got up and
+cautiously opened the door; a servant was carrying a striped cardboard
+box to her mother’s room. Miss Severance went back and sat down. She
+took a long breath; her heart returned to its normal movement.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, for some unexplained reason, the fact that the door-bell had rung
+once made it more possible that it would ring again, and she began to
+feel a slight return of confidence.</p>
+
+<p>A servant opened the door, and in the instant before she turned her
+head she had time to debate the possibility of a visitor having come in
+without ringing while the messenger with the striped box was going out.
+But, no; Pringle was alone.</p>
+
+<p>Pringle had been with the family since her mother was a girl, but, like
+many red-haired men, he retained an appearance of youth. He wanted to
+know if he should take away the tea.</p>
+
+<p>She knew perfectly why he asked. He liked to have the tea-things put
+away before he had his own supper and began his arrangements for the
+family dinner. She felt that the crisis had come.</p>
+
+<p>If she said yes, she knew that her visitor would come just as tea had
+disappeared. If she said no, she would sit there alone, waiting for
+another half-hour, and when she finally did ring and tell Pringle he
+could take away the tea-things, he would look wise and reproachful.
+Nevertheless, she did say no, and Pringle with admirable self-control,
+withdrew.</p>
+
+<p>The afternoon seemed very quiet. Miss Severance became aware of all
+sorts of bells that she had never heard before—other door-bells,
+telephone-bells in the adjacent houses, loud, hideous bells on motor
+delivery-wagons, but not her own front door-bell.</p>
+
+<p>Her heart felt like lead. Things would never be the same now. Probably
+there was some explanation of his not coming, but it could never be
+really atoned for. The wild romance and confidence in this first visit
+could never be regained.</p>
+
+<p>And then there was a loud, quick ring at the bell, and at once he was
+in the room, breathing rapidly, as if he had run up-stairs or even from
+the corner. She could do nothing but stare at him. She had tried in
+the last ten minutes to remember what he looked like, and now she was
+astonished to find how exactly he looked as she remembered him.</p>
+
+<p>To her horror, the change between her late despair and her present
+joy was so extreme that she wanted to cry. The best she knew how to
+do was to pucker her face into a smile and to offer him those chilly
+finger-tips.</p>
+
+<p>He hardly took them, but said, as if announcing a black, but
+incontrovertible, fact:</p>
+
+<p>“You’re not a bit glad to see me.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes, I am,” she returned, with an attempt at an easy social
+manner. “Will you have some tea?”</p>
+
+<p>“But why aren’t you glad?”</p>
+
+<p>Miss Severance clasped her hands on the edge of the tea-tray and looked
+down. She pressed her palms together; she set her teeth, but the
+muscles in her throat went on contracting; and the heroic struggle was
+lost.</p>
+
+<p>“I thought you weren’t coming,” she said, and making no further effort
+to conceal the fact that her eyes were full of tears she looked
+straight up at him.</p>
+
+<p>He sat down beside her on the small, low sofa and put his hand on hers.</p>
+
+<p>“But I was perfectly certain to come,” he said very gently, “because,
+you see, I think I love you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Do you think I love you?” she asked, seeking information.</p>
+
+<p>“I can’t tell,” he answered. “Your being sorry I did not come doesn’t
+prove anything. We’ll see. You’re so wonderfully young, my dear!”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t think eighteen is so young. My mother was married before she
+was twenty.”</p>
+
+<p>He sat silent for a few seconds, and she felt his hand shut more firmly
+on hers. Then he got up, and, pulling a chair to the opposite side of
+the table, said briskly:</p>
+
+<p>“And now give me some tea. I haven’t had any lunch.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, why not?” She blew her nose, tucked away her handkerchief, and
+began her operations on the tea-tray.</p>
+
+<p>“I work very hard,” he returned. “You don’t know what at, do you? I’m a
+statistician.”</p>
+
+<p>“What’s that?”</p>
+
+<p>“I make reports on properties, on financial ventures, for the firm
+I’m with, Benson &amp; Honaton. They’re brokers. When they are asked to
+underwrite a scheme—”</p>
+
+<p>“Underwrite? I never heard that word.”</p>
+
+<p>The boy laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“You’ll hear it a good many times if our acquaintance continues.” Then
+more gravely, but quite parenthetically, he added: “If a firm puts up
+money for a business, they want to know all about it, of course. I tell
+them. I’ve just been doing a report this afternoon, a wonder; it’s what
+made me late. Shall I tell you about it?”</p>
+
+<p>She nodded with the same eagerness with which ten years before she
+might have answered an inquiry as to whether he should tell her a
+fairy-story.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, it was on a coal-mine in Pennsylvania. I’m afraid my report is
+going to be a disappointment to the firm. The mine’s good, a sound,
+rich vein, and the labor conditions aren’t bad; but there’s one fatal
+defect—a car shortage on the only railroad that reaches it. They can’t
+make a penny on their old mine until that’s met, and that can’t be
+straightened out for a year, anyhow; and so I shall report against it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Car shortage,” said Miss Severance. “I never should have thought of
+that. I think you must be wonderful.”</p>
+
+<p>He laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“I wish the firm thought so,” he said. “In a way they do; they pay
+attention to what I say, but they give me an awfully small salary. In
+fact,” he added briskly, “I have almost no money at all.” There was
+a pause, and he went on, “I suppose you know that when I was sitting
+beside you just now I wanted most terribly to kiss you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, no!”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, no? Oh, yes. I wanted to, but I didn’t. Don’t worry. I won’t for a
+long time, perhaps never.”</p>
+
+<p>“Never?” said Miss Severance, and she smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“I said <i>perhaps</i> never. You can’t tell. Life turns up some awfully
+queer tricks now and then. Last night, for example. I walked into that
+ballroom thinking of nothing, and there you were—all the rest of the
+room like a sort of shrine for you. I said to a man I was with, ‘I
+want to meet the girl who looks like cream in a gold saucer,’ and he
+introduced us. What could be stranger than that? Not, as a matter of
+fact, that I ever thought love at first sight impossible, as so many
+people do.”</p>
+
+<p>“But if you don’t know the very first thing about a person—” Miss
+Severance began, but he interrupted:</p>
+
+<p>“You have to begin some time. Every pair of lovers have to have a first
+meeting, and those who fall in love at once are just that much further
+ahead.” He smiled. “I don’t even know your first name.”</p>
+
+<p>It seemed miraculous good fortune to have a first name.</p>
+
+<p>“Mathilde.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mathilde,” he repeated in a lower tone, and his eyes shone
+extraordinarily.</p>
+
+<p>Both of them took some time to recover from the intensity of this
+moment. She wanted to ask him his, but foreseeing that she would
+immediately be required to use it, and feeling unequal to such an
+adventure, she decided it would be wiser to wait. It was he who
+presently went on:</p>
+
+<p>“Isn’t it strange to know so little about each other? I rather like
+it. It’s so mad—like opening a chest of buried treasure. You don’t
+know what’s going to be in it, but you know it’s certain to be rare and
+desirable. What do you do, Mathilde? Live here with your father and
+mother?”</p>
+
+<p>She sat looking at him. The truth was that she found everything he said
+so unexpected and thrilling that now and then she lost all sense of
+being expected to answer.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes,” she said, suddenly remembering. “I live here with my mother
+and stepfather. My mother has married again. She is Mrs. Vincent
+Farron.”</p>
+
+<p>“Didn’t I tell you life played strange tricks?” he exclaimed. He sprang
+up, and took a position on the hearth-rug. “I know all about him.
+I once reported on the Electric Equipment Company. That’s the same
+Farron, isn’t it? I believe that that company is the most efficient for
+its size in this country, in the world, perhaps. And Farron is your
+stepfather! He must be a wonder.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I think he is.”</p>
+
+<p>“You don’t like him?”</p>
+
+<p>“I like him very much. I don’t <i>love</i> him.”</p>
+
+<p>“The poor devil!”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t believe he wants people to love him. It would bore him. No,
+that’s not quite just. He’s kind, wonderfully kind, but he has no
+little pleasantnesses. He says things in a very quiet way that make you
+feel he’s laughing at you, though he never does laugh. He said to me
+this morning at breakfast, ‘Well, Mathilde, was it a marvelous party?’
+That made me feel as if I used the word ‘marvelous’ all the time, not
+a bit as if he really wanted to know whether I had enjoyed myself last
+night.”</p>
+
+<p>“And did you?”</p>
+
+<p>She gave him a rapid smile and went on:</p>
+
+<p>“Now, my grandfather, my mother’s father—his name is Lanley—(Mr.
+Lanley evidently was not in active business, for it was plain that
+Wayne, searching his memory, found nothing)—my grandfather often
+scolds me terribly for my English,—says I talk like a barmaid,
+although I tell him he ought not to know how barmaids talk,—but
+he never makes me feel small. Sometimes Mr. Farron repeats, weeks
+afterward, something I’ve said, word for word, the way I said it. It
+makes it sound so foolish. I’d rather he said straight out that he
+thought I was a goose.”</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps you wouldn’t if he did.”</p>
+
+<p>“I like people to be human. Mr. Farron’s not human.”</p>
+
+<p>“Doesn’t your mother think so?”</p>
+
+<p>“Mama thinks he’s perfect.”</p>
+
+<p>“How long have they been married?”</p>
+
+<p>“Ages! Five years!”</p>
+
+<p>“And they’re just as much in love?”</p>
+
+<p>Miss Severance looked at him.</p>
+
+<p>“In love?” she said. “At their age?” He laughed at her, and she added:
+“I don’t mean they are not fond of each other, but Mr. Farron must be
+forty-five. What I mean by love—” she hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t stop.”</p>
+
+<p>But she did stop, for her quick ears told her that some one was coming,
+and, Pringle opening the door, Mrs. Farron came in.</p>
+
+<p>She was a very beautiful person. In her hat and veil, lit by the
+friendly light of her own drawing-room, she seemed so young as to be
+actually girlish, except that she was too stately and finished for
+such a word. Mathilde did not inherit her blondness from her mother.
+Mrs. Farron’s hair was a dark brown, with a shade of red in it where
+it curved behind her ears. She had the white skin that often goes with
+such hair, and a high, delicate color in her cheeks. Her eyebrows were
+fine and excessively dark—penciled, many people thought.</p>
+
+<p>“Mama, this is Mr. Wayne,” said Mathilde. Here was another tremendous
+moment crowding upon her—the introduction of her beautiful mother to
+this new friend, but even more, the introduction to her mother of this
+wonderful new friend, whose flavor of romance and interest no one,
+she supposed, could miss. Yet Mrs. Farron seemed to be taking it all
+very calmly, greeting him, taking his chair as being a trifle more
+comfortable than the others, trying to cover the doubt in her own mind
+whether she ought to recognize him as an old acquaintance. Was he new
+or one of the ones she had seen a dozen times before?</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing exactly artificial in Mrs. Farron’s manner, but, like
+a great singer who has learned perfect enunciation even in the most
+trivial sentences of every-day matters, she, as a great beauty, had
+learned the perfection of self-presentation, which probably did not
+wholly desert her even in the dentist’s chair.</p>
+
+<p>She drew off her long, pale, spotless gloves.</p>
+
+<p>“No tea, my dear,” she said. “I’ve just had it,” she added to Wayne,
+“with an old aunt of mine. Aunt Alberta,” she threw over her shoulder
+to Mathilde. “I am very unfortunate, Mr. Wayne; this town is full
+of my relations, tucked away in forgotten oases, and I’m their only
+connection with the vulgar, modern world. My aunt’s favorite excitement
+is disapproving of me. She was particularly trying to-day.” Mrs. Farron
+seemed to debate whether or not it would be tiresome to go thoroughly
+into the problem of Aunt Alberta, and to decide that it would; for she
+said, with an abrupt change, “Were you at this party last night that
+Mathilde enjoyed so much?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” said Wayne. “Why weren’t you?”</p>
+
+<p>“I wasn’t asked. It isn’t the fashion to ask mothers and daughters to
+the same parties any more. We dance so much better than they do.” She
+leaned over, and rang the little enamel bell that dangled at the arm of
+her daughter’s sofa. “You can’t imagine, Mr. Wayne, how much better I
+dance than Mathilde.”</p>
+
+<p>“I hope it needn’t be left to the imagination.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I’m not sure. That was the subject of Aunt Alberta’s talk this
+afternoon—my still dancing. She says she put on caps at thirty-five.”
+Mrs. Farron ran her eyebrows whimsically together and looked up at her
+daughter’s visitor.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde was immensely grateful to her mother for taking so much
+trouble to be charming; only now she rather spoiled it by interrupting
+Wayne in the midst of a sentence, as if she had never been as much
+interested as she had seemed. Pringle had appeared in answer to her
+ring, and she asked him sharply:</p>
+
+<p>“Is Mr. Farron in?”</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Farron’s in his room, Madam.”</p>
+
+<p>At this she appeared to give her attention wholly back to Wayne, but
+Mathilde knew that she was really busy composing an escape. She seemed
+to settle back, to encourage her visitor to talk indefinitely; but when
+the moment came for her to answer, she rose to her feet in the midst of
+her sentence, and, still talking, wandered to the door and disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>As the door shut firmly behind her Wayne said, as if there had been no
+interruption:</p>
+
+<p>“It was love you were speaking of, you know.”</p>
+
+<p>“But don’t you think my mother is marvelous?” she asked, not content to
+take up even the absorbing topic until this other matter had received
+due attention.</p>
+
+<p>“I should say so! But one isn’t, of course, overwhelmed to find that
+your mother is beautiful.”</p>
+
+<p>“And she’s so good!” Mathilde went on. “She’s always thinking of things
+to do for me and my grandfather and Mr. Farron and all these old, old
+relations. She went away just now only because she knows that as soon
+as Mr. Farron comes in he asks for her. She’s perfect to every one.”</p>
+
+<p>He came and sat down beside her again.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s going to be much easier for her daughter,” he said: “you have to
+be perfect only to one person. Now, what was it you were going to say
+about love?”</p>
+
+<p>Again they looked at each other; again Miss Severance had the sensation
+of drowning, of being submerged in some strange elixir.</p>
+
+<p>She was rescued by Pringle’s opening the door and announcing:</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Lanley.”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose I must go,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“No, no,” she returned a little wildly, and added, as if this were the
+reason why she opposed his departure. “This is my grandfather. You must
+see him.”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne sat down again, in the chair on the other side of the tea-table.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Mathilde had been wrong in telling Wayne that her mother had gone
+upstairs in obedience to an impulse of kindness. She had gone to
+quiet a small, gnawing anxiety that had been with her all the day,
+a haunting, elusive, persistent impression that something was wrong
+between her and her husband.</p>
+
+<p>All the day, as she had gone about from one thing to another, her mind
+had been diligently seeking in some event of the outside world an
+explanation of a slight obscuration of his spirit; but her heart, more
+egotistical, had stoutly insisted that the cause must lie in her. Did
+he love her less? Was she losing her charm for him? Were five years the
+limit of a human relation like theirs? Was she to watch the dying down
+of his flame, and try to shelter and fan it back to life as she had
+seen so many other women do?</p>
+
+<p>Or was the trouble only that she had done something to wound his aloof
+and sensitive spirit, seldom aloof to her? Their intimate life had
+never been a calm one. Farron’s interests were concentrated, and his
+temperament was jealous. A woman couldn’t, as Adelaide sometimes had
+occasion to say to herself, keep men from making love to her; she did
+not always want to. Farron could be relentless, and she was not without
+a certain contemptuous obstinacy. Yet such conflicts as these she had
+learned not to dread, but sometimes deliberately to precipitate, for
+they ended always in a deeper sense of unity, and, on her part, in a
+fresh sense of his supremacy.</p>
+
+<p>If he had been like most of the men she knew, she would have assumed
+that something had gone wrong in business. With her first husband she
+had always been able to read in his face as he entered the house the
+full history of his business day. Sometimes she had felt that there was
+something insulting in the promptness of her inquiry, “Has anything
+gone wrong, Joe?” But Severance had never appeared to feel the insult;
+only as time went on, had grown more and more ready, as her interest
+became more and more lackadaisical, to pour out the troubles and,
+much more rarely, the joys of his day. One of the things she secretly
+admired most about Farron was his independence of her in such matters.
+No half-contemptuous question would elicit confidence from him, so that
+she had come to think it a great honor if by any chance he did drop
+her a hint as to the mood that his day’s work had occasioned. But for
+the most part he was unaffected by such matters. Newspaper attacks and
+business successes did not seem to reach the area where he suffered or
+rejoiced. They were to be dealt with or ignored, but they could neither
+shadow or elate him.</p>
+
+<p>So that not only egotism, but experience, bade her look to her own
+conduct for some explanation of the chilly little mist that had been
+between them for twenty-four hours.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as the drawing-room door closed behind her she ran up-stairs
+like a girl. There was no light in his study, and she went on into
+his bedroom. He was lying on the sofa; he had taken off his coat, and
+his arms were clasped under his head; he was smoking a long cigar. To
+find him idle was unusual. His was not a contemplative nature; a trade
+journal or a detective novel were the customary solace of odd moments
+like this.</p>
+
+<p>He did not move as she entered, but he turned his eyes slowly and
+seriously upon her. His eyes were black. He was a very dark man, with
+a smooth, brown skin and thick, fine hair, which clung closely to his
+broad, rather massive head. He was clean shaven, so that, as Adelaide
+loved to remember a friend of his had once suggested, his business
+competitors might take note of the stern lines of his mouth and chin.</p>
+
+<p>She came in quickly, and shut the door behind her, and then dropping on
+her knees beside him, she laid her head against his heart. He put out
+his hand, touched her face, and said:</p>
+
+<p>“Take off this veil.”</p>
+
+<p>The taking off of Adelaide’s veil was not a process to be accomplished
+ill-advisedly or lightly. Lucie, her maid, had put it on, with much
+gathering together and looking into the glass over her mistress’s
+shoulder, and it was held in place with shining pins and hair-pins. She
+lifted her head, sank back upon her heels, and raised her arms to the
+offending cobweb of black meshes, while her husband went on in a tone
+not absolutely denuded of reproach:</p>
+
+<p>“You’ve been in some time.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,”—she stuck the first pin into the upholstery of the sofa,—“but
+Pringle told me Mathilde had a visitor, and I thought it was my duty to
+stop and be a little parental.”</p>
+
+<p>“A young man?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. I forget his name—just like all these young men nowadays, alert
+and a little too much at his ease, but amusing in his way. He said,
+among other things—”</p>
+
+<p>But Farron, it appeared, was not exclusively interested in the words
+of Mathilde’s visitor; for at this instant, perceiving that his wife
+had disengaged herself from her veil, he sat up, caught her to him, and
+pressed his lips to hers.</p>
+
+<p>“O Adelaide!” he said, and it seemed to her he spoke with a sort of
+agony.</p>
+
+<p>She held him away from her.</p>
+
+<p>“Vincent, what is it?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>“What is what?”</p>
+
+<p>“Is anything wrong?”</p>
+
+<p>“Between us?”</p>
+
+<p>Oh, she knew that method of his, to lead her on to make definite
+statements about impressions of which nothing definite could be
+accurately said.</p>
+
+<p>“No, I won’t be pinned down,” she said; “but I feel it, the way a
+rheumatic feels it, when the wind goes into the east.”</p>
+
+<p>He continued to look at her gravely; she thought he was going to speak
+when a knock came at the door. It was Pringle announcing the visit of
+Mr. Lanley.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide rose slowly to her feet, and, walking to her husband’s
+dressing-table, repinned her hat, and caught up the little stray locks
+which grew in deep, sharp points at the back of her head.</p>
+
+<p>“You’ll come down, too?” she said.</p>
+
+<p>Farron was looking about for his coat, and as he put it on he observed
+dryly:</p>
+
+<p>“The young man is seeing all the family.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, he won’t mind,” she answered. “He probably hasn’t the slightest
+wish to see Mathilde alone. They both struck me as sorry when I left
+them; they were running down. You can’t imagine, Vin, how little
+romance there is among all these young people.”</p>
+
+<p>“They leave it to us,” he answered. This was exactly in his accustomed
+manner, and as they went down-stairs together her heart felt lighter,
+though the long, black, shiny pin stuck harmlessly into the upholstery
+of the sofa was like a mile-stone, for afterward she remembered that
+her questions had gone unanswered.</p>
+
+<p>Wayne was still in the drawing-room, and Mathilde, who loved her
+grandfather, was making a gentle fuss over him, a process which
+consisted largely in saying: “O Grandfather! Oh, you didn’t! O
+<i>Grandfather</i>!”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley, though a small man and now over sixty, had a distinct
+presence. He wore excellent gray clothes of the same shade as his hair,
+and out of this neutrality of tint his bright, brown eyes sparkled
+piercingly.</p>
+
+<p>He had begun life with the assumption that to be a New York Lanley was
+in itself enough, a comfortable creed in which many of his relations
+had obscurely lived and died. But before he was graduated from Columbia
+College he began to doubt whether the profession of being an aristocrat
+in a democracy was a man’s job. At no time in his life did he deny
+the value of birth and breeding; but he came to regard them as a
+responsibility solemn and often irritating to those who did not possess
+them, though he was no longer content with the current views of his
+family that they were a sufficient attainment in themselves.</p>
+
+<p>He was graduated from college in 1873, and after a summer at the family
+place on the Hudson, hot, fertile, and inaccessible, which his sister
+Alberta was at that time occupying, he had arranged a trip round the
+world. September of that year brought the great panic, and swept away
+many larger and solider fortunes than the Lanleys’. Mr. Lanley decided
+that he must go to work, though he abandoned his traditions no further
+than to study law. His ancestors, like many of the aristocrats of the
+early days, had allowed their opinions of fashion to influence too much
+their selection of real estate. All through the late seventies, while
+his brothers and sisters were clinging sentimentally to brownstone
+fronts in Stuyvesant Square or red-brick facades in Great Jones Street,
+Mr. Lanley himself, unaffected by recollections of Uncle Joel’s
+death or grandma’s marriage, had been parting with his share in such
+properties, and investing along the east side of the park.</p>
+
+<p>By the time he was forty he was once more a fairly rich man. He
+had left the practice of law to become the president of the Peter
+Stuyvesant Trust Company, for which he had been counsel. After fifteen
+years he had retired from this, too, and had become, what he insisted
+nature had always intended him to be, a gentleman of leisure. He
+retained a directorship in the trust company, was a trustee of his
+university, and was a thorny and inquiring member of many charitable
+boards.</p>
+
+<p>He prided himself on having emancipated himself from the ideas of
+his own generation. It bored him to listen to his cousins lamenting
+the vulgarities of modern life, the lack of elegance in present-day
+English, or to hear them explain as they borrowed money from him the
+sort of thing a gentleman could or could not do for a living. But on
+the subject of what a lady might do he still held fixed and unalterable
+notions; nor did he ever find it tiresome to hear his own daughter
+expound the axioms of this subject with a finality he had taught her
+in her youth. Having freed himself from fine-gentlemanism, he had
+quite unconsciously fallen the more easily a prey to fine-ladyism; all
+his conservatism had gone into that, as a man, forced to give up his
+garden, might cherish one lovely potted plant.</p>
+
+<p>At a time when private schools were beginning to flourish once more he
+had been careful to educate Adelaide entirely at home with governesses.
+Every summer he took her abroad, and showed her, and talked with
+her about, books, pictures, and buildings; he inoculated her with
+such fundamentals as that a lady never wears imitation lace on her
+underclothes, and the past of the verb to “eat” is pronounced to rhyme
+with “bet.” She spoke French and German fluently, and could read
+Italian. He considered her a perfectly educated woman. She knew nothing
+of business, political economy, politics, or science. He himself had
+never been deeply interested in American politics, though very familiar
+with the lives of English statesmen. He was a great reader of memoirs
+and of the novels of Disraeli and Trollope. Of late he had taken to
+motoring.</p>
+
+<p>He kissed his daughter and nodded—a real New York nod—to his
+son-in-law.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve come to tell you, Adelaide,” he began.</p>
+
+<p>“Such a thing!” murmured Mathilde, shaking her golden head above the
+cup of tea she was making for him, making in just the way he liked; for
+she was a little person who remembered people’s tastes.</p>
+
+<p>“I thought you’d rather hear it than read it in the papers.”</p>
+
+<p>“Goodness, Papa, you talk as if you had been getting married!”</p>
+
+<p>“No.” Mr. Lanley hesitated, and looked up at her brightly. “No; but I
+think I did have a proposal the other day.”</p>
+
+<p>“From Mrs. Baxter?” asked Adelaide. This was almost war. Mrs. Baxter
+was a regal and possessive widow from Baltimore whose long and regular
+visits to Mr. Lanley had once occasioned his family some alarm, though
+time had now given them a certain institutional safety.</p>
+
+<p>Her father was not flurried by the reference.</p>
+
+<p>“No,” he said; “though she writes me, I’m glad to say, that she is
+coming soon.”</p>
+
+<p>“You don’t tell me!” said Adelaide. The cream of the winter season was
+usually the time Mrs. Baxter selected for her visit.</p>
+
+<p>Her father did not notice her.</p>
+
+<p>“If Mrs. Baxter should ever propose to me,” he went on thoughtfully, “I
+shouldn’t refuse. I don’t think I should have the—”</p>
+
+<p>“The chance?” said his daughter.</p>
+
+<p>“I was going to say the fortitude. But this,” he went on, “was an
+elderly cousin, who expressed a wish to come and be my housekeeper.
+Perhaps matrimony was not intended. Mathilde, my dear, how does one
+tell nowadays whether one is being proposed to or not?”</p>
+
+<p>In this poignant and unexpected crisis Mathilde turned slowly and
+painfully crimson. How <i>did</i> one tell? It was a question which at the
+moment was anything but clear to her.</p>
+
+<p>“I should always assume it in doubtful cases, sir,” said Wayne, very
+distinctly. He and Mathilde did not even glance at each other.</p>
+
+<p>“It wasn’t your proposal that you came to announce to us, though, was
+it, Papa?” said Adelaide.</p>
+
+<p>“No,” answered Mr. Lanley. “The fact is, I’ve been arrested.”</p>
+
+<p>“Again?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; most unjustly, most unjustly.” His brows contracted, and then
+relaxed at a happy memory. “It’s the long, low build of the car. It
+looks so powerful that the police won’t give you a chance. It was
+nosing through the park—”</p>
+
+<p>“At about thirty miles an hour,” said Farron.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, not a bit over thirty-five. A lovely morning, no one in sight,
+I may have let her out a little. All of a sudden one of these mounted
+fellows jumped out from the bushes along the bridle-path. They’re a
+fine-looking lot, Vincent.”</p>
+
+<p>Farron asked who the judge was, and, Mr. Lanley named him—named him
+slightly wrong, and Farron corrected him.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll get you off,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide looked up at her husband admiringly. This was the aspect of
+him that she loved best. It seemed to her like magic what Vincent could
+do. Her father, she thought, took it very calmly. What would have
+happened to him if she had not brought Farron into the family to rescue
+and protect? The visiting boy, she noticed, was properly impressed. She
+saw him give Farron quite a dog-like look as he took his departure.
+To Mathilde he only bowed. No arrangements had been made for a future
+meeting. Mathilde tried to convey to him in a prolonged look that if he
+would wait only five minutes all would be well, that her grandfather
+never paid long visits; but the door closed behind him. She became
+immediately overwhelmed by the fear, which had an element of desire in
+it, too, that her family would fall to discussing him, would question
+her as to how long she had known him, and why she liked him, and what
+they talked about, and whether she had been expecting a visit, sitting
+there in her best dress. Then slowly she took in the fact that they
+were going to talk about nothing but Mr. Lanley’s arrest. She marveled
+at the obtuseness of older people—to have stood at the red-hot center
+of youth and love and not even to know it! She drew her shoulders
+together, feeling very lonely and strong. As they talked, she allowed
+her eyes to rest first on one speaker and then on the other, as if she
+were following each word of the discussion. As a matter of fact she was
+rehearsing with an inner voice the tone of Wayne’s voice when he had
+said that he loved her.</p>
+
+<p>Then suddenly she decided that she would be much happier alone in
+her own room. She rose, patted her grandfather on the shoulder, and
+prepared to escape. He, not wishing to be interrupted at the moment,
+patted her hand in return.</p>
+
+<p>“Hello!” he exclaimed. “Hands are cold, my dear.”</p>
+
+<p>She caught Farron’s cool, black eyes, and surprised herself by
+answering:</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; but, then, they always are.” This was quite untrue, but every one
+was perfectly satisfied with it.</p>
+
+<p>As she left the room Mr. Lanley was saying:</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I don’t want to go to Blackwell’s Island. Lovely spot, of course.
+My grandfather used to tell me he remembered it when the Blackwell
+family still lived there. But I shouldn’t care to wear stripes—except
+for the pleasure of telling Alberta about it. It would give her a
+year’s occupation, her suffering over my disgrace, wouldn’t it,
+Adelaide?”</p>
+
+<p>“She’d scold me,” said Adelaide, looking beautifully martyred. Then
+turning to her husband, she asked. “Will it be very difficult, Vincent,
+getting papa off?” She wanted it to be difficult, she wanted him to
+give her material out of which she could form a picture of him as a
+savior; but he only shook his head and said:</p>
+
+<p>“That young man is in love with Mathilde.”</p>
+
+<p>“O Vin! Those children?”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley pricked up his ears like a terrier.</p>
+
+<p>“In love?” he exclaimed. “And who is he? Not one of the East Sussex
+Waynes, I hope. Vulgar people. They always were; began life as
+auctioneers in my father’s time. Is he one of those, Adelaide?”</p>
+
+<p>“I have no idea who he is, if any one,” said Adelaide. “I never saw or
+heard of him before this afternoon.”</p>
+
+<p>“And may I ask,” said her father, “if you intend to let your daughter
+become engaged to a young man of whom you know nothing whatsoever?”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide looked extremely languid, one of her methods of showing
+annoyance.</p>
+
+<p>“Really, Papa,” she said, “the fact that he has come once to pay
+an afternoon visit to Mathilde does not, it seems to me, make an
+engagement inevitable. My child is not absolutely repellent, you know,
+and a good many young men come to the house.” Then suddenly remembering
+that her oracle had already spoken on this subject, she asked more
+humbly, “What was it made you say he was in love, Vin?”</p>
+
+<p>“Just an impression,” said Farron.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley had been thinking it over.</p>
+
+<p>“It was not the custom in my day,” he began, and then remembering that
+this was one of his sister Alberta’s favorite openings, he changed the
+form of his sentence. “I never allowed you to see stray young men—”</p>
+
+<p>His daughter interrupted him.</p>
+
+<p>“But I always saw them, Papa. I used to let them come early in the
+afternoon before you came in.”</p>
+
+<p>In his heart Mr. Lanley doubted that this had been a regular custom,
+but he knew it would be unwise to argue the point; so he started fresh.</p>
+
+<p>“When a young man is attentive to a girl like Mathilde—”</p>
+
+<p>“But he isn’t,” said Adelaide. “At least not what I should have called
+attentive when I was a girl.”</p>
+
+<p>“Your experience was not long, my dear. You were married at Mathilde’s
+age.”</p>
+
+<p>“You may be sure of one thing, Papa, that I don’t desire an early
+marriage for my daughter.”</p>
+
+<p>“Very likely,” returned her father, getting up, and buttoning the last
+button of his coat; “but you may have noticed that we can’t always get
+just what we most desire for our children.”</p>
+
+<p>When he had gone, Vincent looked at his wife and smiled, but smiled
+without approval. She twisted her shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I suppose so,” she said; “but I do so hate to be scolded about the
+way I bring up Mathilde.”</p>
+
+<p>“Or about anything else, my dear.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t hate to be scolded by you,” she returned. “In fact, I
+sometimes get a sort of servile enjoyment from it. Besides,” she went
+on, “as a matter of fact, I bring Mathilde up particularly well, quite
+unlike these wild young women I see everywhere else. She tells me
+everything, and I have perfectly the power of making her hate any one I
+disapprove of. But you’ll try and find out something about this young
+man, won’t you, Vin?”</p>
+
+<p>“We’ll have a full report on him to-morrow. Do you know what his first
+name is?”</p>
+
+<p>“At the moment I don’t recall his last. Oh, yes—Wayne. I’ll ask
+Mathilde when we go up-stairs.”</p>
+
+<p>From her own bedroom door she called up.</p>
+
+<p>“Mathilde, what is the name of your young friend?”</p>
+
+<p>There was a little pause before Mathilde answered that she was sorry,
+but she didn’t know.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Farron turned to her husband and made a little gesture to indicate
+that this ignorance on the girl’s part did not bear out his theory;
+but she saw that he did not admit it, that he clung still to his
+impression. “And Vincent’s impressions—” she said to herself as she
+went in to dress.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley was ruffled as he left his daughter’s drawing-room.</p>
+
+<p>“As if I had wanted her to marry at eighteen,” he said to himself; and
+he took his hat crossly from Pringle and set it hard on his head at
+the slight angle which he preferred. Then reflecting that Pringle was
+not in any way involved, he unbent slightly, and said something that
+sounded like:</p>
+
+<p>“Haryer, Pringle?”</p>
+
+<p>Pringle, despite his stalwart masculine appearance, had in speaking a
+surprisingly high, squeaky voice.</p>
+
+<p>“I keep my health, thank you, sir,” he said. “Anna has been somewhat
+ailing.” Anna was his wife, to whom he usually referred as “Mrs.
+Pringle”; but he made an exception in speaking to Mr. Lanley, for she
+had once been the Lanleys’ kitchen-maid. “Your car, sir?”</p>
+
+<p>No, Mr. Lanley was walking—walking, indeed, more quickly than usual
+under the stimulus of annoyance.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing had ever happened that made him suffer as he had suffered
+through his daughter’s divorce. Divorce was one of the modern ideas
+which he had imagined he had accepted. As a lawyer he had expressed
+himself as willing always to take the lady’s side; but in the cases
+which he actually took he liked to believe that the wife was perfect
+and the husband inexcusable. He could not comfort himself with any such
+belief in his daughter’s case.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide’s conduct had been, as far as he could see, irreproachable;
+but, then, so had Severance’s. This was what had made the gossip,
+almost the scandal, of the thing. Even his sister Alberta had whispered
+to him that if Severance had been unfaithful to Adelaide—But poor
+Severance had not been unfaithful; he had not even become indifferent.
+He loved his wife, he said, as much as on the day he married her. He
+was extremely unhappy. Mr. Lanley grew to dread the visits of his huge,
+blond son-in-law, who used actually to sob in the library, and ask
+for explanations of something which Mr. Lanley had never been able to
+understand.</p>
+
+<p>And how obstinate Adelaide had been! She, who had been such a docile
+girl, and then for many years so completely under the thumb of her
+splendid-looking husband, had suddenly become utterly intractable. She
+would listen to no reason and brook no delay. She had been willing
+enough to explain; she had explained repeatedly, but the trouble was he
+could not understand the explanation. She did not love her husband any
+more, she said. Mr. Lanley pointed out to her that this was no legal
+grounds for a divorce.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, but I look down upon him,” she went on.</p>
+
+<p>“On poor Joe?” her father had asked innocently, and had then discovered
+that this was the wrong thing to say. She had burst out, “Poor Joe!
+poor Joe!” That was the way every one considered him. Was it her fault
+if he excited pity and contempt instead of love and respect? Her love,
+she intimated, had been of a peculiarly eternal sort; Severance himself
+was to blame for its extinction. Mr. Lanley discovered that in some way
+she considered the intemperance of Severance’s habits to be involved.
+But this was absurd. It was true that for a year or two Severance
+had taken to drinking rather more than was wise; but, Mr. Lanley had
+thought at the time, the poor young man had not needed any artificial
+stimulant in the days when Adelaide had fully and constantly admired
+him. He had seen Severance come home several times not exactly drunk,
+but rather more boyishly boastful and hilarious than usual. Even Mr.
+Lanley, a naturally temperate man, had not found Joe repellent in the
+circumstances. Afterward he had been thankful for this weakness: it
+gave him the only foundation on which he could build a case not for the
+courts, of course, but for the world. Unfortunately, however, Severance
+had pulled up before there was any question of divorce.</p>
+
+<p>That was another confusing fact. Adelaide had managed him so
+beautifully. Her father had not known her wonderful powers until he saw
+the skill and patience with which she had dealt with Joe Severance’s
+drinking. Joe himself was eager to own that he owed his cure entirely
+to her. Mr. Lanley had been proud of her; she had turned out, he
+thought, just what a woman ought to be; and then, on top of it, she had
+come to him one day and announced that she would never live with Joe
+again.</p>
+
+<p>“But why not?” he had asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Because I don’t love him,” she had said.</p>
+
+<p>Then Mr. Lanley knew how little his acceptance of the idea of divorce
+in general had reconciled him to the idea of the divorce of his own
+daughter—a Lanley—Mrs. Adelaide Lanley, Mrs. Adelaide Severance. His
+sense of fitness was shocked, though he pleaded with her first on the
+ground of duty, and then under the threat of scandal. With her beauty
+and Severance’s popularity, for from his college days he had been
+extremely popular with men, the divorce excited uncommon interest.
+Severance’s unconcealed grief, a rather large circle of devoted friends
+in whom he confided, and the fact that Adelaide had to go to Nevada to
+get her divorce, led most people to believe that she had simply found
+some one she liked better. Mr. Lanley would have believed it himself,
+but he couldn’t. Farron had not appeared until she had been divorced
+for several years.</p>
+
+<p>Lanley still cherished an affection for Severance, who had very soon
+married again, a local belle in the Massachusetts manufacturing town
+where he now lived. She was said to resemble Adelaide.</p>
+
+<p>No, Mr. Lanley could not see that he had had anything to reproach
+himself with in regard to his daughter’s first marriage. They had been
+young, of course; all the better. He had known the Severances for
+years; and Joe was handsome, hard working, had rowed on his crew, and
+every one spoke well of him. Certainly they had been in love—more in
+love than he liked to see two people, at least when one of them was
+his own daughter. He had suggested their waiting a year or two, but no
+one had backed him up. The Severances had been eager for the marriage,
+naturally. Mr. Lanley could still see the young couple as they turned
+from the altar, young, beautiful, and confident.</p>
+
+<p>He had missed his daughter terribly, not only her physical presence in
+the house, but the exercise of his influence over her, which in old
+times had been perhaps a trifle autocratic. He had hated being told
+what Joe thought and said; yet he could hardly object to her docility.
+That was the way he had brought her up. He did not reckon pliancy in
+a woman as a weakness; or if he had had any temptation to do so, it
+had vanished in the period when Joe Severance had taken to drink. In
+that crisis Adelaide had been anything but weak. Every one had been so
+grateful to her,—he and Joe and the Severances,—and then immediately
+afterward the crash came.</p>
+
+<p>Women! Mr. Lanley shook his head, still moving briskly northward with
+that quick jaunty walk of his. And this second marriage—what about
+that? They seemed happy. Farron was a fine fellow, but not, it seemed
+to him, so attractive to a woman as Severance. Could he hold a woman
+like Adelaide? He wasn’t a man to stand any nonsense, though, and Mr.
+Lanley nodded; then, as it were, withdrew the nod on remembering that
+poor Joe had not wanted to stand any nonsense either. What in similar
+circumstances could Farron do? Adelaide always resented his asking how
+things were going, but how could he help being anxious? How could any
+one rest content on a hillside who had once been blown up by a volcano?</p>
+
+<p>He might not have been any more content if he had stayed to dinner at
+his son-in-law’s, as he had been asked to do. The Farrons were alone.
+Mathilde was going to a dinner, with a dance after. She came into the
+dining-room to say good night and to promise to be home early, not to
+stay and dance. She was not allowed two parties on successive nights,
+not because her health was anything but robust, but rather because her
+mother considered her too young for such vulgar excess.</p>
+
+<p>When she had gone, Farron observed:</p>
+
+<p>“That child has a will of iron.”</p>
+
+<p>“Vincent!” said his wife. “She does everything I suggest to her.”</p>
+
+<p>“Her will just now is to please you in everything. Wait until she
+rebels.”</p>
+
+<p>“But women don’t rebel against the people they love. I don’t have to
+tell you that, do I? I never have to manœuver the child, never have to
+coax or charm her to do what I want.”</p>
+
+<p>He smiled at her across the table.</p>
+
+<p>“You have great faith in those methods, haven’t you?”</p>
+
+<p>“They work, Vin.”</p>
+
+<p>He nodded as if no one knew that better than he.</p>
+
+<p>Soon after dinner he went up-stairs to write some letters. She followed
+him about ten o’clock. She came and leaned one hand on his shoulder and
+one on his desk.</p>
+
+<p>“Still working?” she said. She had been aware of no desire to see what
+he was writing, but she was instantly aware that his blotting-paper had
+fallen across the sheet, that the sheet was not a piece of note-paper,
+but one of a large pad on which he had been apparently making notes.</p>
+
+<p>Her diamond bracelet had slipped down her wrist and lay upon the
+blotting-paper; he slowly and carefully pushed it up her slim, round
+arm until it once more clung in place.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve nearly finished,” he said; and to her ears there was some under
+sound of pain or of constraint in his tone.</p>
+
+<p>A little later he strolled, still dressed, into her room. She was
+already in bed, and he came and sat on the foot of the bed, with one
+foot tucked under him and his arms folded.</p>
+
+<p>Her mind during the interval had been exclusively occupied with the
+position of that piece of blotting-paper. Could it be there was some
+other woman whose ghost-like presence she was just beginning to feel
+haunting their relation? The impersonality of Vincent’s manner was an
+armor against such attacks, but this armor, as Adelaide knew, was more
+apparent than real. If one could get beyond that, one was at the very
+heart of the man. If some fortuitous circumstance had brought a sudden
+accidental intimacy between him and another woman—What woman loving
+strength and power could resist the sight of Vincent in action, Vincent
+as she saw him?</p>
+
+<p>Yet with a good capacity for believing the worst of her
+fellow-creatures, Adelaide did not really believe in the other woman.
+That, she knew, would bring a change in the fundamentals of her
+relationship with her husband. This was only a barrier that left the
+relation itself untouched.</p>
+
+<p>Before very long she began to think the situation was all in her own
+imagination. He was so amused, so eager to talk. Silent as he was apt
+to be with the rest of the world, with her he sometimes showed a love
+of gossip that enchanted her. And now it seemed to her that he was
+leading her on from subject to subject through a childish dislike to
+going to bed. They were actually giggling over Mr. Lanley’s adventure
+when a motor-brake squeaked in the silence of the night, a motor-door
+slammed. For the first time Adelaide remembered her daughter. It
+was after twelve o’clock. A knock came at her door. She wrapped her
+swan’s-down garment about her and went to the door.</p>
+
+<p>“O Mama, have you been worried?” the girl asked. She was standing in
+the narrow corridor, with her arms full of shining favors; there could
+be no question whatever that she had stayed for the dance. “Are you
+angry? Have I been keeping you awake?”</p>
+
+<p>“I thought you would have been home an hour ago.”</p>
+
+<p>“I know. I want to tell you about it. Mama, how lovely you look in that
+blue thing! Won’t you come up-stairs with me while I undress?”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>“Not to-night,” she answered.</p>
+
+<p>“You are angry with me,” the girl went on. “But if you will come, I
+will explain. I have something to tell you, Mama.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Farron’s heart stood still. The phrase could mean only one thing.
+She went up-stairs with her daughter, sent the maid away, and herself
+began to undo the soft, pink silk.</p>
+
+<p>“It needs an extra hook,” she murmured. “I told her it did.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde craned her neck over her shoulder, as if she had ever been
+able to see the middle of her back.</p>
+
+<p>“But it doesn’t show, does it?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>“It perfectly well might.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde stepped out of her dress, and flung it over a chair. In her
+short petticoat, with her ankles showing and her arms bare, she looked
+like a very young girl, and when she put up her hands and took the pins
+out of her hair, so that it fell over her shoulders, she might have
+been a child.</p>
+
+<p>The silence began to grow awkward. Mathilde put on her dressing-gown;
+it was perfectly straight, and made her look like a little white
+column. A glass of milk and some biscuits were waiting for her. She
+pushed a chair near her fire for her mother, and herself remained
+standing, with her glass of milk in her hand.</p>
+
+<p>“Mama,” she said suddenly, “I suppose I’m what you’d call engaged.”</p>
+
+<p>“O Mathilde! not to that boy who was here to-day?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why not to him?”</p>
+
+<p>“I know nothing about him.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know very much myself. Yes, it’s Pete Wayne. Pierson his name
+is, but every one calls him Pete. How strange it was that I did not
+even know his first name when you asked me!”</p>
+
+<p>A single ray pierced Mrs. Farron’s depression: Vincent had known,
+Vincent’s infallibility was confirmed. She did not know what to say.
+She sat looking sadly, obliquely at the floor like a person who has
+been aggrieved. She was wondering whether she should be to her daughter
+a comrade or a ruler, a confederate or a policeman. Of course in all
+probability the thing would be better stopped. But could this be
+accomplished by immediate action, or could she invite confidences and
+yet commit herself to nothing?</p>
+
+<p>She raised her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“I do not approve of youthful marriages,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“O Mama! And you were only eighteen yourself.”</p>
+
+<p>“That is why.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde was frightened not only by the intense bitterness of her
+mother’s tone, but also by the obvious fact that she was face to face
+with the explanation of the separation of her parents. She had been
+only nine years old at the time. She had loved her father, had found
+him a better playfellow than her mother, had wept bitterly at parting
+with him, and had missed him. And then gradually her mother, who had
+before seemed like a beautiful, but remote, princess, had begun to make
+of her an intimate and grown-up friend, to consult her and read with
+her and arrange happinesses in her life, to win, to, if the truth must
+be told, reconquer her. Perhaps even Adelaide would not have succeeded
+so easily in effacing Severance’s image had not he himself so quickly
+remarried. Mathilde went several times to stay with the new household
+after Adelaide in secret, tearful conference with her father had been
+forced to consent.</p>
+
+<p>To Mathilde these visits had been an unacknowledged torture. She never
+knew quite what to mention and what to leave untouched. There was
+always a constraint between the three of them. Her father, when alone
+with her, would question her, with strange, eager pauses, as to how
+her mother looked. Her mother’s successor, whom she could not really
+like, would question her more searchingly, more embarrassingly, with
+an ill-concealed note of jealousy in every word. Even at twelve years
+Mathilde was shocked by the strain of hatred in her father’s new wife,
+who seemed to reproach her for fashion and fineness and fastidiousness,
+qualities of which the girl was utterly unaware. She could have loved
+her little half-brother when he appeared upon the scene, but Mrs.
+Severance did not encourage the bond, and gradually Mathilde’s visits
+to her father ceased.</p>
+
+<p>As a child she had been curious about the reasons for the parting, but
+as she grew older it had seemed mere loyalty to accept the fact without
+asking why; she had perhaps not wanted to know why. But now, she saw,
+she was to hear.</p>
+
+<p>“Mathilde, do you still love your father?”</p>
+
+<p>“I think I do, Mama. I feel very sorry for him.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why?”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know why. I dare say he is happy.”</p>
+
+<p>“I dare say he is, poor Joe.” Adelaide paused. “Well, my dear, that
+was the reason of our parting. One can pity a son or a brother, but
+not a husband. Weakness kills love. A woman cannot be the leader, the
+guide, and keep any romance. O Mathilde, I never want you to feel the
+humiliation of finding yourself stronger than the man you love. That is
+why I left your father, and my justification is his present happiness.
+This inferior little person he has married, she does as well. Any one
+would have done as well.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde was puzzled by her mother’s evident conviction that the
+explanation was complete. She asked after a moment:</p>
+
+<p>“But what was it that made you think at first that you did love him,
+Mama?”</p>
+
+<p>“Just what makes you think you love this boy—youth, flattery, desire
+to love. He was magnificently handsome, your father. I saw him admired
+by other men, apparently a master; I was too young to judge, my dear.
+You shan’t be allowed to make that mistake; you shall have time to
+consider.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t want time,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“I did not know I did.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t think I feel about love as you do,” said the girl, slowly.</p>
+
+<p>“Every woman does.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s just Pete as he is that I love. I don’t care which of us leads.”</p>
+
+<p>“But you will.”</p>
+
+<p>The girl had not yet reached a point where she could describe the very
+essence of her passion; she had to let this go. After a moment she said:</p>
+
+<p>“I see now why you chose Mr. Farron.”</p>
+
+<p>“You mean you have never seen before?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not so clearly.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Farron bit her lips. To have missed understanding this seemed a
+sufficient proof of immaturity. She rose.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, my darling,” she said in a tone of extreme reasonableness, “we
+shall decide nothing to-night. I know nothing against Mr. Wayne. He may
+be just the right person. We must see more of him. Do you know anything
+about his family?”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde shook her head. “He lives alone with his mother. His father is
+dead. She’s very good and interested in drunkards.”</p>
+
+<p>“In <i>drunkards</i>?” Mrs. Farron just shut her eyes a second.</p>
+
+<p>“She has a mission that reforms them.”</p>
+
+<p>“Is that his profession, too?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, no. He’s in Wall Street—quite a good firm. O Mama, don’t sigh
+like that! We know we can’t be married at once. We are reasonable. You
+think not, because this has all happened so suddenly; but great things
+do happen suddenly. We love each other. That’s all I wanted to tell
+you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Love!” Adelaide looked at the little person before her, tried to
+recall the fading image of the young man, and then thought of the
+dominating figure in her own life. “My dear, you have no idea what love
+is.”</p>
+
+<p>She took no notice of the queer, steady look the girl gave her in
+return. She went down-stairs. She had been gone more than an hour, and
+she knew that Vincent would have been long since asleep. He had, and
+prided himself on having, a great capacity for sleep. She tiptoed past
+his door, stole into her own room, and then, glancing in the direction
+of his, was startled to see that a light was burning. She went in; he
+was reading, and once again, as his eyes turned toward her, she thought
+she saw the same tragic appeal that she had felt that afternoon in his
+kiss. Trembling, she threw herself down beside him, clasping him to her.</p>
+
+<p>“O Vincent! oh, my dear!” she whispered, and began to cry. He did not
+ask her why she was crying; she wished that he would; his silence
+admitted that he knew of some adequate reason.</p>
+
+<p>“I feel that there is something wrong,” she sobbed, “something terribly
+wrong.”</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing could go wrong between you and me, my darling,” he answered.
+His tone comforted, his touch was a comfort. Perhaps she was a coward,
+she said to herself, but she questioned him no further.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Wayne was not so prompt as Mathilde in making the announcement of their
+engagement. He and his mother breakfasted together rather hastily, for
+she was going to court that morning to testify in favor of one of her
+backsliding inebriates, and Wayne had not found the moment to introduce
+his own affairs.</p>
+
+<p>That afternoon he came home earlier than usual; it was not five o’clock.
+He passed Dr. Parret’s flat on the first floor—Dr. Lily MacComb Parret.
+She was a great friend of his, and he felt a decided temptation to go in
+and tell her the news first; but reflecting that no one ought to hear it
+before his mother, he went on up-stairs. He lived on the fifth floor.</p>
+
+<p>He opened the door of the flat and went into the sitting-room. It was
+empty. He lighted the gas, which flared up, squeaking like a bagpipe. The
+room was square and crowded. Shelves ran all the way round it, tightly
+filled with books. In the center was a large writing-table, littered with
+papers, and on each side of the fireplace stood two worn, but
+comfortable, arm-chairs, each with a reading-lamp at its side. There was
+nothing beautiful in the furniture, and yet the room had its own charm.
+The house was a corner house and had once been a single dwelling. The
+shape of the room, its woodwork, its doors, its flat, white marble
+mantelpiece, belonged to an era of simple taste and good workmanship; but
+the greatest charm of the room was the view from the windows, of which it
+had four, two that looked east and two south, and gave a glimpse of the
+East River and its bridges.</p>
+
+<p>Wayne was not sorry his mother was out. He had begun to dread the
+announcement he had to make. At first he had thought only of her keen
+interest in his affairs, but later he had come to consider what this
+particular piece of news would mean to her. Say what you will, he
+thought, to tell your mother of your engagement is a little like casting
+off an old love.</p>
+
+<p>Ever since he could remember, he and his mother had lived in the
+happiest comradeship. His father, a promising young doctor, had died
+within a few years of his marriage. Pete had been brought up by his
+mother, but he had very little remembrance of any process of molding. It
+seemed to him as if they had lived in a sort of partnership since he had
+been able to walk and talk. It had been as natural for him to spend his
+hours after school in stamping and sealing her large correspondence as it
+had been for her to pinch and arrange for years so as to send him to the
+university from which his father had been graduated. She would have been
+glad, he knew, if he had decided to follow his father in the study of
+medicine, but he recoiled from so long a period of dependence; he liked
+to think that he brought to his financial reports something of a
+scientific inheritance.</p>
+
+<p>She had, he thought, every virtue that a mother could have, and she
+combined them with a gaiety of spirit that made her take her virtues as
+if they were the most delightful amusements. It was of this gaiety that
+he had first thought until Mathilde had pointed out to him that there was
+tragedy in the situation. “What will your mother do without you?” the
+girl kept saying. There was indeed nothing in his mother’s life that
+could fill the vacancy he would leave. She had few intimate
+relationships. For all her devotion to her drunkards, he was the only
+personal happiness in her life.</p>
+
+<p>He went into the kitchen in search of her. This was evidently one of
+their servant’s uncounted hours. While he was making himself some tea he
+heard his mother’s key in the door. He called to her, and she appeared.</p>
+
+<p>“Why my hat, Mother dear?” he asked gently as he kissed her.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne smiled absently, and put up her hand to the soft felt hat she
+was wearing.</p>
+
+<p>“I just went out to post some letters,” she said, as if this were a
+complete explanation; then she removed a mackintosh that she happened to
+have on, though the day was fine. She was then seen to be wearing a dark
+skirt and a neat plain shirt that was open at the throat. Though no
+longer young, she somehow suggested a boy—a boy rather overtrained; she
+was far more boyish than Wayne. She had a certain queer beauty, too;
+not beauty of Adelaide’s type, of structure and coloring and elegance,
+but beauty of expression. Life itself had written some fine lines of
+humor and resolve upon her face, and her blue-gray eyes seemed actually
+to flare with hope and intention. Her hair was of that light-brown shade
+in which plentiful gray made little change of shade; it was wound in a
+knot at the back of her head and gave her trouble. She was always
+pushing it up and repinning it into place, as if it were too heavy for
+her small head.</p>
+
+<p>“I wonder if there’s anything to eat in the house,” her son said.</p>
+
+<p>“I wonder.” They moved together toward the ice-box.</p>
+
+<p>“Mother,” said Pete, “that piece of pie has been in the ice-box at least
+three days. Let’s throw it away.”</p>
+
+<p>She took the saucer thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>“I like it so much,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“Then why don’t you eat it?”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s not good for me.” She let Wayne take the saucer. “What do you
+know?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>She had adopted slang as she adopted most labor-saving devices.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I do know something new,” said Wayne. He sat down on the kitchen
+table and poured out his tea. “New as the garden of Eden. I’m in love.”</p>
+
+<p>“O Pete!” his mother cried, and the purest, most conventional maternal
+agony was in the tone. For an instant, crushed and terrified, she looked
+at him; and then something gay and impish appeared in her eyes, and she
+asked with a grin:</p>
+
+<p>“Is it some one perfectly awful?”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m afraid you’ll think so. She’s a sheltered, young, luxurious child,
+with birth, breeding, and money, everything you hate most.”</p>
+
+<p>“O Pete!” she said again, but this time with a sort of sad resignation.
+Then shaking her head as if to say that she wasn’t, after all, as narrow
+as he thought, she hitched her chair nearer the table and said eagerly,
+“Well, tell me all about it.”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne looked down at his mother as she sat opposite him, with her elbows
+on the table, as keen as a child and as lively as a cricket. He asked
+himself if he had not drifted into a needlessly sentimental state of mind
+about her. He even asked himself, as he had done once or twice before in
+his life, whether her love for him implied the slightest dependence upon
+his society. Wasn’t it perfectly possible that his going would free her
+life, would make it easier instead of harder? Every man, he knew, felt
+the element of freedom beneath the despair of breaking even the tenderest
+of ties. Some women, he supposed, might feel the same way about their
+love-affairs. But could they feel the same about their maternal
+relations? Could it be that his mother, that pure, heroic,
+self-sacrificing soul, was now thinking more about her liberty than her
+loss? Had not their relation always been peculiarly free? he found
+himself thinking reproachfully. Once, he remembered, when he had been
+working unusually hard he had welcomed her absence at one of her
+conferences on inebriety. Never before had he imagined that she could
+feel anything but regret at his absences. “Everybody is just alike,” he
+found himself rather bitterly thinking.</p>
+
+<p>“What do you want to know about it?” he said aloud.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, everything,” she returned.</p>
+
+<p>“I met her,” he said, “two evenings ago at a dance. I never expected to
+fall in love at a dance.”</p>
+
+<p>“Isn’t it funny? No one ever really expects to fall in love at all, and
+everybody does.”</p>
+
+<p>He glanced at her. He had been prepared to explain to her about love; and
+now it occurred to him for the first time that she knew all about it. He
+decided to ask her the great question which had been occupying his mind
+as a lover of a scientific habit of thought.</p>
+
+<p>“Mother,” he said, “how much dependence is to be placed on love—one’s
+own, I mean?”</p>
+
+<p>“Goodness, Pete! What a question to ask!”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, you might take a chance and tell me what you think. I have no
+doubts. My whole nature goes out to this girl; but I can’t help knowing
+that if we go on feeling like this till we die, we shall be the
+exception. Love’s a miracle. How much can one trust to it?”</p>
+
+<p>The moment he had spoken he knew that he was asking a great deal. It was
+torture to his mother to express an opinion on an abstract question. She
+did not lack decision of conduct. She could resolve in an instant to send
+a drunkard to an institution or take a trip round the world; but on a
+matter of philosophy of life it was as difficult to get her to commit
+herself as if she had been upon the witness-stand. Yet it was just in
+this realm that he particularly valued her opinion.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” she said at last, “I don’t believe that it’s possible to play safe
+in love. It’s a risk, but it’s one of those risks you haven’t much choice
+about taking. Life and death are like that, too. I don’t think it pays to
+be always thinking about avoiding risks. Nothing, you know,” she added,
+as if she were letting him in to rather a horrid little secret, “is
+really safe.” And evidently glad to change the subject, she went on,
+“What will her family say?”</p>
+
+<p>“I can’t think they will be pleased.”</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose not. Who are they?”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne explained the family connections, but woke no associations in his
+mother’s mind until he mentioned the name of Farron. Then he was
+astonished at the violence of her interest. She sprang to her feet; her
+eyes lighted up.</p>
+
+<p>“Why,” she cried, “that’s the man, that’s the company, that Marty Burke
+works for! O Pete, don’t you think you could get Mr. Farron to use his
+influence over Marty about Anita?”</p>
+
+<p>“Dear mother, do you think you can get him to use his influence over Mrs.
+Farron for me?”</p>
+
+<p>Marty Burke was the leader of the district and was reckoned a bad man.
+He and Mrs. Wayne had been waging a bitter war for some time over a
+young inebriate who had seduced a girl of the neighborhood. Mrs. Wayne
+was sternly trying to prosecute the inebriate; Burke was determined to
+protect him, first, by smirching the girl’s name, and, next, by
+getting the girl’s family to consent to a marriage, a solution that
+Mrs. Wayne considered most undesirable in view of the character of the
+prospective husband.</p>
+
+<p>Pete felt her interest sweep away from his affairs, and it had not
+returned when the telephone rang. He came back from answering it to tell
+his mother that Mr. Lanley, the grandfather of his love, was asking if
+she would see him for a few minutes that afternoon or evening. A visit
+was arranged for nine o’clock.</p>
+
+<p>“What’s he like?” asked Mrs. Wayne, wrinkling her nose and looking
+very impish.</p>
+
+<p>“He seemed like a nice old boy; hasn’t had a new idea, I should say,
+since 1880. And, Mother dear, you’re going to dress, aren’t you?”</p>
+
+<p>She resented the implication.</p>
+
+<p>“I shall be wonderful,” she answered with emphasis. “And while he’s here,
+I think you might go down and tell this news to Lily, yourself. Oh, I
+don’t say she’s in love with you—”</p>
+
+<p>“Lily,” said Pete, “is leading far too exciting a life to be in love
+with any one.”</p>
+
+<p>Punctually at nine, Mr. Lanley rang the bell of the flat. He had paused a
+few minutes before doing so, not wishing to weaken the effect of his
+mission by arriving out of breath. Adelaide had come to see him just
+before lunch. She pretended to minimize the importance of her news, but
+he knew she did so to evade reproach for the culpable irresponsibility of
+her attitude toward the young man’s first visit.</p>
+
+<p>“And do you know anything more about him than you did yesterday?” he
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>She did. It appeared that Vincent had telephoned her from down town just
+before she came out.</p>
+
+<p>“Tiresome young man,” she said, twisting her shoulders. “It seems there’s
+nothing against him. His father was a doctor, his mother comes of decent
+people and is a respected reformer, the young man works for an ambitious
+new firm of brokers, who speak highly of him and give him a salary of
+$5000 a year.”</p>
+
+<p>“The whole thing must be put a stop to,” said Mr. Lanley.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course, of course,” said his daughter. “But how? I can’t forbid him
+the house because he’s just an average young man.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t see why not, or at least on the ground that he’s not the husband
+you would choose for her.”</p>
+
+<p>“I think the best way will be to let him come to the house,”—she spoke
+with a sort of imperishable sweetness,—“but to turn Mathilde gradually
+against him.”</p>
+
+<p>“But how can you turn her against him?”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide looked very wistful.</p>
+
+<p>“You don’t trust me,” she moaned.</p>
+
+<p>“I only ask you how it can be done.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, there are ways. I made her perfectly hate one of them because he
+always said, ‘if you know what I mean.’ ‘It’s a very fine day, Mrs.
+Farron, if you know what I mean.’ This young man must have some horrid
+trick like that, only I haven’t studied him yet. Give me time.”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s risky.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>“Not really,” she said. “These young fancies go as quickly as they come.
+Do you remember the time you took me to West Point? I had a passion for
+the adjutant. I forgot him in a week.”</p>
+
+<p>“You were only fifteen.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mathilde is immature for her age.”</p>
+
+<p>It was agreed between them, however, that Mr. Lanley, without authority,
+should go and look the situation over. He had been trying to get the
+Waynes’ telephone since one o’clock. He had been told at intervals of
+fifteen minutes by a resolutely cheerful central that their number did
+not answer. Mr. Lanley hated people who did not answer their telephone.
+Nor was he agreeably impressed by the four flights of stairs, or by the
+appearance of the servant who answered his ring.</p>
+
+<p>“Won’t do, won’t do,” he kept repeating in his own mind.</p>
+
+<p>He was shown into the sitting-room. It was in shadow, for only a shaded
+reading-lamp was lighted, and his first impression was of four windows;
+they appeared like four square panels of dark blue, patterned with
+stars. Then a figure rose to meet him—a figure in blue draperies, with
+heavy braids wound around the head, and a low, resonant voice said, “I
+am Mrs. Wayne.”</p>
+
+<p>As soon as he could he walked to the windows and looked out to the river
+and the long, lighted curves of the bridges, and beyond to Long Island,
+to just the ground where the Battle of Long Island had been fought—a
+battle in which an ancestor of his had particularly distinguished
+himself. He said something polite about the view.</p>
+
+<p>“Let us sit here where we can look out,” she said, and sank down on a
+low sofa drawn under the windows. As she did so she came within the
+circle of light from the lamp. She sat with her head leaned back against
+the window-frame, and he saw the fine line of her jaw, the hollows in her
+cheek, the delicate modeling about her brows, not obscured by much
+eyebrow, and her long, stretched throat. She was not quite maternal
+enough to look like a Madonna, but she did look like a saint, he thought.</p>
+
+<p>He knelt with one knee on the couch and peered out.</p>
+
+<p>“Dear me,” he said, “I fancy I used to skate as a boy on a pond just
+about where that factory is now.”</p>
+
+<p>He found she knew very little about the history of New York. She had
+been brought up abroad, she said; her father had been a consul in
+France. It was a subject which he liked to expound. He loved his native
+city, which he with his own eyes had seen once as hardly more than a
+village. He and his ancestors—and Mr. Lanley’s sense of identification
+with his ancestors was almost Chinese—had watched and had a little
+shaped the growth.</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose you had Dutch ancestry, then,” she said, trying to take
+an interest.</p>
+
+<p>“Dutch.” Mr. Lanley shut his eyes, resolving, since he had no idea what
+her own descent might be, that he would not explain to her the superior
+attitude of the English settlers of the eighteenth century toward their
+Dutch predecessors. However, perhaps he did not entirely conceal his
+feeling, for he said: “No, I have no Dutch blood—not a drop. Very good
+people in their way, industrious—peasants.” He hurried on to the great
+fire of 1835. “Swept between Wall Street and Coenties Slip,” he said,
+with a splendid gesture, and then discovered that she had never heard of
+“Quenches Slip,” or worse, she had pronounced it as it was spelled. He
+gently set her right there. His father had often told him that he had
+seen with his own eyes a note of hand which had been blown, during the
+course of the conflagration, as far as Flatbush. And the second fire of
+1845. His father had been a man then, married, a prominent citizen, old
+enough, as Mr. Lanley said, with a faint smile, to have lost heavily. He
+could himself remember the New York of the Civil War, the bitter family
+quarrels, the forced resignations from clubs, the duels, the draft riots.</p>
+
+<p>But, oddly enough, when it came to contemporary New York, it was Mrs.
+Wayne who turned out to be most at home. Had he ever walked across the
+Blackwell’s Island Bridge? (This was in the days before it bore the
+elevated trains.) No, he had driven. Ah, she said, that was wholly
+different. Above, where one walked, there was nothing to shut out the
+view of the river. Just to show that he was not a feeble old antiquarian,
+he suggested their taking a walk there at once. She held out her trailing
+garments and thin, blue slippers. And then she went on:</p>
+
+<p>“There’s another beautiful place I don’t believe you know, for all you’re
+such an old New-Yorker—a pier at the foot of East Eighty-something
+Street, where you can almost touch great seagoing vessels as they pass.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, there at least we can go,” said Mr. Lanley, and he stood up. “I
+have a car here, but it’s open. Is it too cold? Have you a fur coat? I’ll
+send back to the house for an extra one.” He paused, brisk as he was; the
+thought of those four flights a second time dismayed him.</p>
+
+<p>The servant had gone out, and Pete was still absent, presumably breaking
+the news of his engagement to Dr. Parret.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne had an idea. She went to a window on the south side of the
+room, opened it, and looked out. If he had good lungs, she told him, he
+could make his man hear.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley did not visibly recoil. He leaned out and shouted. The
+chauffeur looked up, made a motion to jump out, fearing that his employer
+was being murdered in these unfamiliar surroundings; then he caught the
+order to go home for an extra coat.</p>
+
+<p>Lanley drew his shoulder back into the room and shut the window; as he
+did so he saw a trace of something impish in the smile of his hostess.</p>
+
+<p>“Why do you smile?” he asked quickly.</p>
+
+<p>She did not make the mistake of trying to arrest her smile; she let
+it broaden.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t suppose you have ever done such a thing before.”</p>
+
+<p>“Now, that does annoy me.”</p>
+
+<p>“Calling down five stories?”</p>
+
+<p>“No; your thinking I minded.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I did think so.”</p>
+
+<p>“You were mistaken, utterly mistaken.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m glad. If you mind doing such things, you give so much time to
+arranging not to do them.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley was silent. He was deciding that he should rearrange some of
+the details of his life. Not that he contemplated giving all his orders
+from the fifth story, but he saw he had always devoted too much attention
+to preventing unimportant catastrophes.</p>
+
+<p>Under her direction he was presently driving north; then he turned
+sharply east down a little hill, and came out on a low, flat pier. He put
+out the motor’s lights. They were only a few feet above the water, which
+was as black as liquid jet, with flat silver and gold patches on it from
+white and yellow lights. Opposite to them the lighthouse at the north end
+of Blackwell’s Island glowed like a hot coal. Then a great steamer
+obscured it.</p>
+
+<p>“Isn’t this nice?” Mrs. Wayne asked, and he saw that she wanted her
+discovery praised. He never lost the impression that she enjoyed
+being praised.</p>
+
+<p>Such a spot, within sight of half a dozen historic sites, was a
+temptation to Mr. Lanley, and he would have unresistingly yielded to it
+if Mrs. Wayne had not said:</p>
+
+<p>“But we haven’t said a word yet about our children.”</p>
+
+<p>“True,” answered Mr. Lanley. His heart sank. It is not easy, he thought,
+to explain to a person for whom you have just conceived a liking that her
+son had aspired above his station. He tapped his long, middle finger on
+the steering-wheel, just as at directors’ meetings he tapped the table
+before he spoke, and began, “In a society somewhat artificially formed as
+ours is, Mrs. Wayne, it has always been my experience that—” Do what he
+would, it kept turning into a speech, and the essence of the speech was
+that while democracy did very well for men, a strictly aristocratic
+system was the only thing possible for girls—one’s own girls, of
+course. In the dim light he could see that she had pushed all her hair
+back from her brows. She was trying to follow him exactly, so exactly
+that she confused him a little. He became more general. “In many ways,”
+he concluded, “the advantages of character and experience are with the
+lower classes.” He had not meant to use the word, but when it slipped
+out, he did not regret it.</p>
+
+<p>“In all ways,” she answered.</p>
+
+<p>He was not sure he had heard.</p>
+
+<p>“All the advantages?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“All the advantages of character.”</p>
+
+<p>He had to ask her to explain. One reason, perhaps, why Mrs. Wayne
+habitually avoided a direct question was that, when once started, her
+candor had no bounds. Now she began to speak. She spoke more eagerly and
+more fluently than he, and it took him several minutes to see that quite
+unconsciously she was making him a strange, distorted complement to his
+speech, that in her mouth such words as “the leisure classes, your
+sheltered girls,” were terms of the deepest reproach. He must understand,
+she said, that as she did not know Miss Severance, there was nothing
+personal, nothing at all personal, in her feeling,—she was as careful
+not to hurt his feelings as he had tried to be not to hurt hers,—but she
+did own to a prejudice—at least Pete told her it was a prejudice—</p>
+
+<p>Against what, in Heaven’s name, Lanley at first wondered; and then it
+came to him.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, you have a prejudice against divorce?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne looked at him reproachfully.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, no,” she answered. “How could you think that? But what has divorce
+to do with it? Your granddaughter hasn’t been divorced.”</p>
+
+<p>A sound of disgust at the mere suggestion escaped him, and he said
+coldly:</p>
+
+<p>“My daughter divorced her first husband.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I did not know.”</p>
+
+<p>“Against what, then, is this unconquerable prejudice of yours?”</p>
+
+<p>“Against the daughters of the leisure class.”</p>
+
+<p>He was still quite at sea.</p>
+
+<p>“You dislike them?”</p>
+
+<p>“I fear them.”</p>
+
+<p>If she had said that she considered roses a menace, he could not have
+been more puzzled. He repeated her words aloud, as if he hoped that
+they might have some meaning for him if he heard his own lips
+pronouncing them:</p>
+
+<p>“You fear them.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” she went on, now interested only in expressing her belief, “I fear
+their ignorance and idleness and irresponsibility and self-indulgence,
+and, all the more because it is so delicate and attractive and
+unconscious; and their belief that the world owes them luxury and
+happiness without their lifting a finger. I fear their cowardice and lack
+of character—”</p>
+
+<p>“Cowardice!” he cried, catching at the first word he could. “My dear Mrs.
+Wayne, the aristocrats in the French Revolution, the British officer—”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes, they know how to die,” she answered; “but do they know how to
+live when the horrible, sordid little strain of every-day life begins to
+make demands upon them, their futile education, the moral feebleness that
+comes with perfect safety! I know something can be made of such girls,
+but I don’t want my son sacrificed in the process.”</p>
+
+<p>There was a long, dark silence; then Mr. Lanley said with a particularly
+careful and exact enunciation:</p>
+
+<p>“I think, my dear madam, that you cannot have known very many of the
+young women you are describing. It may be that there are some like
+that—daughters of our mushroom finance; but I can assure you that the
+children of ladies and gentlemen are not at all as you seem to imagine.”</p>
+
+<p>It was characteristic of Mrs. Wayne that, still absorbed by her own
+convictions, she did not notice the insult of hearing ladies and
+gentlemen described to her as if they were beings wholly alien to her
+experience; but the tone of his speech startled her, and she woke, like a
+person coming out of a trance, to all the harm she had done.</p>
+
+<p>“I may be old-fashioned—” he began and then threw the phrase from him;
+it was thus that Alberta, his sister, began her most offensive
+pronouncements. “It has always appeared to me that we shelter our more
+favored women as we shelter our planted trees, so that they may attain a
+stronger maturity.”</p>
+
+<p>“But do they, are they—are sheltered women the strongest in a crisis?”</p>
+
+<p>Fiend in human shape, he thought, she was making him question his
+bringing up of Adelaide. He would not bear that. His foot stole out to
+the self-starter.</p>
+
+<p>For the few minutes that remained of the interview she tried to undo her
+work, but the injury was too deep. His life was too near its end for
+criticism to be anything but destructive; having no time to collect new
+treasure, he simply could not listen to her suggestion that those he
+most valued were imitation. He hated her for holding such opinion. Her
+soft tones, her eager concessions, her flattering sentences, could now
+make no impression upon a man whom half an hour before they would have
+completely won.</p>
+
+<p>He bade her a cold good night, hardly more than bent his head, the
+chauffeur took the heavy coat from her, and the car had wheeled away
+before she was well inside her own doorway.</p>
+
+<p>Pete’s brown head was visible over the banisters.</p>
+
+<p>“Hello, Mother!” he said. “Did the old boy kidnap you?”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne came up slowly, stumbling over her long, blue draperies in her
+weariness and depression.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Pete, my darling,” she said, “I think I’ve spoiled everything.”</p>
+
+<p>His heart stood still. He knew better than most people that his mother
+could either make or mar.</p>
+
+<p>“They won’t hear of it?”</p>
+
+<p>She nodded distractedly.</p>
+
+<p>“I do make such a mess of things sometimes!”</p>
+
+<p>He put his arm about her.</p>
+
+<p>“So you do, Mother,” he said; “but then think how magnificently you
+sometimes pull them out again.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley had not reported the result of his interview immediately. He
+told himself that it was too late; but it was only a quarter before
+eleven when he was back safe in his own library, feeling somehow not so
+safe as usual. He felt attacked, insulted; and yet he also felt vivified
+and encouraged. He felt as he might have felt if some one, unbidden, had
+cut a vista on the Lanley estates, first outraged in his sense of
+property, but afterward delighted with the widened view and the fresher
+breeze. It was awkward, though, that he didn’t want Adelaide to go into
+details as to his visit; he did not think that the expedition to the pier
+could be given the judicial, grandfatherly tone that he wanted to give.
+So he did not communicate at all with his daughter that night.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning about nine, however, when she was sitting up in bed,
+with her tray on her knees, and on her feet a white satin coverlet sown
+as thickly with bright little flowers as the Milky Way with stars, her
+last words to Vincent, who was standing by the fire, with his newspaper
+folded in his hands, ready to go down-town, were interrupted, as they
+nearly always were, by the burr of the telephone.</p>
+
+<p>She took it up from the table by her bed, and as she did so she fixed her
+eyes on her husband and looked steadily at him all the time that central
+was making the connection; she was trying to answer that unsolved problem
+as to whether or not a mist hung between them. Then she got her
+connection.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Papa; it is Adelaide.” “Yes?” “Did she appear like a lady?” “A
+lady?” “You don’t know what I mean by that? Why, Papa!” “Well, did she
+appear respectable?” “How cross you are to me!” “I’m glad to hear it. You
+did not sound cheerful.”</p>
+
+<p>She hung up the receiver and turned to Vincent, making eyes of surprise.</p>
+
+<p>“Really, papa is too strange. Why should he be cross to me because he has
+had an unsatisfactory interview with the Wayne boy’s mother? I never
+wanted him to go, anyhow, Vin. I wanted to send <i>you</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>“It would probably be better for you to go yourself.”</p>
+
+<p>He left the room as if he had said nothing remarkable. But it was
+remarkable, in Adelaide’s experience, that he should avoid any
+responsibility, and even more so that he should shift it to her
+shoulders. For an instant she faced the possibility, the most terrible of
+any that had occurred to her, that the balance was changing between them;
+that she, so willing to be led, was to be forced to guide. She had seen
+it happen so often between married couples—the weight of character begin
+on one side of the scale, and then slowly the beam would shift. Once it
+had happened to her. Was it to happen again? No, she told herself; never
+with Farron. He would command or die, lead her or leave her.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde knocked at her door, as she did every morning as soon as her
+stepfather had gone down town. She had had an earlier account of Mr.
+Lanley’s interview. It had read:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">Dearest Girl:</span></p>
+
+<p>The great discussion did not go very well, apparently. The opinion prevails at the moment 
+that no engagement can be allowed to exist
+between us. I feel as if they were all meeting to discuss whether or
+not the sun is to rise to-morrow morning. You and I, my love, have
+special information that it will.</p></div>
+
+<p>After this it needed no courage to go down and hear her mother’s account
+of the interview. Adelaide was still in bed, but one long, pointed
+fingertip, pressed continuously upon the dangling bell, a summons that
+had long since lost its poignancy for the temperamental Lucie, indicated
+that she was about to get up.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear,” she said in answer to Mathilde’s question, “your grandfather’s
+principal interest seems to be to tell me nothing at all, and he has been
+wonderfully successful. I can get nothing from him, so I’m going myself.”</p>
+
+<p>The girl’s heart sank at hearing this. Her mother saw things clearly and
+definitely, and had a talent for expressing her impressions in
+unforgetable words. Mathilde could still remember with a pang certain
+books, poems, pictures, and even people whose charms her mother had
+destroyed in one poisonous phrase. Adelaide was too careful of her
+personal dignity to indulge in mimicry, but she had a way of catching and
+repeating the exact phrasing of some foolish sentence that was almost
+better—or worse—than mimicry. Mathilde remembered a governess, a kind
+and patient person of whom Adelaide had greatly wearied, who had a habit
+of beginning many observations, “It may strike you as strange, but I am
+the sort of person who—” Mathilde was present at luncheon one day when
+Adelaide was repeating one of these sentences. “It may strike you as
+strange, but I like to feel myself in good health.” Mathilde resented the
+laughter that followed, and sprang to her governess’s defense, yet
+sickeningly soon she came to see the innocent egotism that directed the
+choice of the phrase.</p>
+
+<p>She felt as if she could not bear this process to be turned against
+Pete’s mother, not because it would alter the respectful love she was
+prepared to offer this unknown figure, but because it might very slightly
+alter her attitude toward her own mother. That was one of the
+characteristics of this great emotion: all her old beliefs had to be
+revised to accord with new discoveries.</p>
+
+<p>This was what lay behind the shrinking of her soul as she watched her
+mother dress for the visit to Mrs. Wayne. For the first time in her life
+Mathilde wished that her mother was not so elaborate. Hitherto she had
+always gloried in Adelaide’s elegance as a part of her beauty; but now,
+as she watched the ritual of ribbons and laces and perfumes and jewels,
+she felt vaguely that there was in it all a covert insult to Pete’s
+mother, who, she knew, would not be a bit like that.</p>
+
+<p>“How young you are, Mama!” she exclaimed as, the whole long process
+complete, Adelaide stood holding out her hand for her gloves, like a
+little girl ready for a party.</p>
+
+<p>Her mother smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s well I am,” she said, “if you go on trying to get yourself involved
+with young men who live up four flights of stairs. I have always avoided
+even dressmakers who lived above the second story,” she added wistfully.</p>
+
+<p>The wistful tone was repeated when her car stopped at the Wayne door and
+she stepped out.</p>
+
+<p>“Are you sure this is the number, Andrews?” she asked. She and the
+chauffeur looked slowly up at the house and up and down the street. They
+were at one in their feeling about it. Then Adelaide gave a very gentle
+little sigh and started the ascent.</p>
+
+<p>The flat did not look as well by day. Though the eastern sun poured in
+cheerfully, it revealed worn places on the backs of the arm-chairs and
+one fearful calamity with an ink-bottle that Pete had once had on the
+rug. Even Mrs. Wayne, who sprang up from behind her writing-table, had
+not the saint-like mystery that her blue draperies had given her the
+evening before.</p>
+
+<p>Though slim, and in excellent condition for thirty-nine, Adelaide could
+not conceal that four flights were an exertion. Her fine nostrils were
+dilated and her breath not perfectly under control as she said:</p>
+
+<p>“How delightful this is!” a statement that was no more untrue than to say
+good-morning on a rainy day.</p>
+
+<p>Most women in Mrs. Wayne’s situation would at the moment have been
+acutely aware of the ink-spot. That was one of Adelaide’s assets, on
+which she perhaps unconsciously counted, that her mere appearance made
+nine people out of ten aware of their own physical imperfections. But
+Mrs. Wayne was aware of nothing but Adelaide’s great beauty as she sank
+into one of the armchairs with hardly a hint of exhaustion.</p>
+
+<p>“Your son is a very charming person, Mrs. Wayne,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne was standing by the mantelpiece, looking boyish and friendly;
+but now she suddenly grew grave, as if something serious had been said.</p>
+
+<p>“Pete has something more unusual than charm,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“But what could be more unusual?” cried Adelaide, who wanted to add, “The
+only question is, does your wretched son possess it?” But she didn’t; she
+asked instead, with a tone of disarming sweetness, “Shall we be perfectly
+candid with each other?”</p>
+
+<p>A quick gleam came into Mrs. Wayne’s eyes. “Not much,” she seemed to say.
+She had learned to distrust nothing so much as her own candor, and her
+interview with Mr. Lanley had put her specially on her guard.</p>
+
+<p>“I hope you will be candid, Mrs. Farron,” she said aloud, and for her
+this was the depth of dissimulation.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then,” said Adelaide, “you and I are in about the same position,
+aren’t we? We are both willing that our children should marry, and we
+have no objection to offer to their choice except our own ignorance. We
+both want time to judge. But how can we get time, Mrs. Wayne? If we do
+not take definite action <i>against</i> an engagement, we are giving our
+consent to it. I want a little reasonable delay, but we can get delay
+only by refusing to hear of an engagement. Do you see what I mean? Will
+you help me by pretending to be a very stern parent, just so that these
+young people may have a few months to think it over without being too
+definitely committed?”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne shrank back. She liked neither diplomacy nor coercion.</p>
+
+<p>“But I have really no control over Pete,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“Surely, if he isn’t in a position to support a wife—”</p>
+
+<p>“He is, if she would live as he does.”</p>
+
+<p>Such an idea had never crossed Mrs. Farron’s mind. She looked round her
+wonderingly, and said without a trace of wilful insolence in her tone:</p>
+
+<p>“Live here, you mean?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, or somewhere like it.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Farron looked down, and smoothed the delicate dark fur of her muff.
+She hardly knew how to begin at the very beginning like this. She did not
+want to hurt any one’s feelings. How could she tell this childlike,
+optimistic creature that to put Mathilde to living in surroundings like
+these would be like exposing a naked baby on a mountaintop? It wasn’t
+love of luxury, at least not if luxury meant physical self-indulgence.
+She could imagine suffering privations very happily in a Venetian palace
+or on a tropical island. It was an esthetic, not a moral, problem; it was
+a question of that profound and essential thing in the life of any woman
+who was a woman—her charm. She wished to tell Mrs. Wayne that her son
+wouldn’t really like it, that he would hate to see Mathilde going out in
+overshoes; that the background that she, Adelaide, had so expertly
+provided for her child was part of the very attraction that made him want
+to take her out of it. There was no use in saying that most poor mortals
+were forced to get on without this magic atmosphere. They had never been
+goddesses; they did not know what they were going without. But her child,
+who had been, as it were, born a fairy, would miss tragically the
+delicate beauty of her every-day life, would fade under the ugly monotony
+of poverty.</p>
+
+<p>But how could she say this to Mrs. Wayne, in her flat-heeled shoes and
+simple, boyish shirt and that twelfth-century saint’s profile, of which
+so much might have been made by a clever woman?</p>
+
+<p>At last she began, still smoothing her muff:</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Wayne, I have brought up my daughter very simply. I don’t at all
+approve of the extravagances of these modern girls, with their own motors
+and their own bills. Still, she has had a certain background. We must
+admit that marriage with your son on his income alone would mean a
+decrease in her material comforts.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“More than you know, probably.”</p>
+
+<p>This was candid, and Adelaide pressed on.</p>
+
+<p>“Well is it wise or kind to make such a demand on a young creature when
+we know marriage is difficult at the best?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>“You see, I have never seen your daughter, and I don’t know what her
+feeling for Pete may be.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll answer both questions. She has a pleasant, romantic sentiment for
+Mr. Wayne—you know how one feels to one’s first lover. She is a sweet,
+kind, unformed little girl, not heroic. But think of your own spirited
+son. Do you want this persistent, cruel responsibility for him?”</p>
+
+<p>The question was an oratorical one, and Adelaide was astonished to find
+that Mrs. Wayne was answering it.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes,” she said; “I want responsibility for Pete. It’s exactly what
+he needs.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide stared at her in horror; she seemed the most unnatural mother
+in the world. She herself would fight to protect her daughter from the
+passive wear and tear of poverty; but she would have died to keep a son,
+if she had had one, from being driven into the active warfare of the
+support of a family.</p>
+
+<p>In the pause that followed there was a ring at the bell, an argument with
+the servant, something that sounded like a scuffle, and then a young man
+strolled into the room. He was tall and beautifully dressed,—at least
+that was the first impression,—though, as a matter of fact, the clothes
+were of the cheapest ready-made variety. But nothing could look cheap or
+ill made on those splendid muscles. He wore a silk shirt, a flower in his
+buttonhole, a gray tie in which was a pearl as big as a pea, long
+patent-leather shoes with elaborate buff-colored tops; he carried a thin
+stick and a pair of new gloves in one hand, but the most conspicuous
+object in his dress was a brand-new, gray felt hat, with a rather wide
+brim, which he wore at an angle greater than Mr. Lanley attempted even at
+his jauntiest. His face was long and rather dark, and his eyes were a
+bright gray blue, under dark brows. He was scowling.</p>
+
+<p>He strode into the middle of the room, and stood there, with his feet
+wide apart and his elbows slightly swaying. His hat was still on.</p>
+
+<p>“Your servant said you couldn’t see me,” he said, with his back teeth set
+together, a method of enunciation that seemed to be habitual.</p>
+
+<p>“Didn’t want to would be truer, Marty,” answered Mrs. Wayne, with the
+utmost good temper. “Still, as long as you’re here, what do you want?”</p>
+
+<p>Marty Burke didn’t answer at once. He stood looking at Mrs. Wayne under
+his lowering brows; he had stopped swinging his elbows, and was now very
+slightly twitching his cane, as an evilly disposed cat will twitch the
+end of its tail.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Farron watched him almost breathlessly. She was a little frightened,
+but the sensation was pleasurable. He was, she knew, the finest specimen
+of the human animal that she had ever seen.</p>
+
+<p>“What do I want?” he said at length in a deep, rich voice, shot here and
+there with strange nasal tones, and here and there with the remains of a
+brogue. “Well, I want that you should stop persecuting those poor kids.”</p>
+
+<p>“I persecuting them? Don’t be absurd, Marty,” answered Mrs. Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>“Persecuting them; what else?” retorted Marty, fiercely. “What else is
+it? They wanting to get married, and you determined to send the boy up
+the river.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t think we’ll go over that again. I have a lady here on business.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, please don’t mind me,” said Mrs. Farron, settling back, and
+wriggling her hands contentedly into her muff. She rather expected the
+frivolous courage of her tone to draw the ire of Burke’s glance upon her,
+but it did not.</p>
+
+<p>“Cruel is what I call it,” he went on. “She wants it, and he wants it,
+and her family wants it, and only you and the judge that you put up to
+opposing—”</p>
+
+<p>“Her family do not want it. Her brother—”</p>
+
+<p>“Her brother agrees with me. I was talking to him yesterday.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, that’s why he has a black eye, is it?” said Mrs. Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>“Black eyes or blue,” said Marty, with a horizontal gesture of his
+hands, “her brother wants to see her married.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I don’t,” replied Mrs. Wayne, “at least not to this boy. I will
+never give my consent to putting a child of her age in the power of a
+degenerate little drunkard like that.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Farron listened with all her ears. She did not think herself a
+prude, and only a moment before she had been accusing Mrs. Wayne of
+ignorance of the world; but never in all her life had she heard such
+words as were now freely exchanged between Burke and his hostess on the
+subject of the degree of consent that the girl in question had given to
+the advances of Burke’s protégé. She would have been as embarrassed as a
+girl if either of the disputants had been in the least aware of her
+presence. Once, she thought, Mrs. Wayne, for the sake of good manners,
+was on the point of turning to her and explaining the whole situation;
+but fortunately the exigencies of the dispute swept her on too fast.
+Adelaide was shocked, physically rather than morally, by the nakedness of
+their talk; but she did not want them to stop. She was fascinated by the
+spectacle of Marty Burke in action. She recognized at once that he was a
+dangerous man, not dangerous to female virtue, like all the other men to
+whom she had heard the term applied, but actually dangerous to life and
+property. She was not in the least afraid of him, but she knew he was a
+real danger. She enjoyed the knowledge. In most ways she was a woman
+timid in the face of physical danger, but she had never imagined being
+afraid of another human being. That much, perhaps, her sheltered training
+had done for her. “If she goes on irritating him like this he may murder
+us both,” she thought. What she really meant was that he might murder
+Mrs. Wayne, but that, when he came to her and began to twist her neck,
+she would just say, “My dear man, don’t be silly!” and he would stop.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime Burke was not so angry as he was affecting to be. Like
+most leaders of men, he had a strong dramatic instinct, and he had just
+led Mrs. Wayne to the climax of her just violence when his manner
+suddenly completely changed, and he said with the utmost good temper:</p>
+
+<p>“And what do you think of my get-up, Mrs. Wayne? It’s a new suit I have
+on, and a boutonniere.” The change was so sudden that no one answered,
+and he went on, “It’s clothes almost fit for a wedding that I’m wearing.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne understood him in a flash. She sprang to her feet.</p>
+
+<p>“Marty Burke,” she cried, “you don’t mean to say you’ve got those two
+children married!”</p>
+
+<p>“Not fifteen minutes ago, and I standing up with the groom.” He smiled a
+smile of the wildest, most piercing sweetness—a smile so free and
+intense that it seemed impossible to connect it with anything but the
+consciousness of a pure heart. Mrs. Farron had never seen such a smile.
+“I thought I’d just drop around and give you the news,” he said, and now
+for the first time took off his hat, displaying his crisp, black hair and
+round, pugnacious head. “Good morning, ladies.” He bowed, and for an
+instant his glance rested on Mrs. Farron with an admiration too frank to
+be exactly offensive. He put his hat on his head, turned away, and made
+his exit, whistling.</p>
+
+<p>He left behind him one person at least who had thoroughly enjoyed his
+triumph. To do her justice, however, Mrs. Farron was ashamed of her
+sympathy, and she said gently to Mrs. Wayne:</p>
+
+<p>“You think this marriage a very bad thing.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne pushed all her hair away from her temples.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes,” she said, “it’s a bad thing for the girl; but the worst is
+having Marty Burke put anything over. The district is absolutely under
+his thumb. I do wish, Mrs. Farron, you would get your husband to put the
+fear of God into him.”</p>
+
+<p>“My husband?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; he works for your husband. He has charge of the loading and
+unloading of the trucks. He’s proud of his job, and it gives him power
+over the laborers. He wouldn’t want to lose his place. If your husband
+would send for him and say—” Mrs. Wayne hastily outlined the things Mr.
+Farron might say.</p>
+
+<p>“He works for Vincent,” Adelaide repeated. It seemed to her an absolutely
+stupendous coincidence, and her imagination pictured the clash between
+them—the effort of Vincent to put the fear of God into this man. Would
+he be able to? Which one would win? Never before had she doubted the
+superior power of her husband; now she did. “I think it would be hard to
+put the fear of God into that young man,” she said aloud.</p>
+
+<p>“I do wish Mr. Farron would try.”</p>
+
+<p>“Try,” thought Adelaide, “and fail?” Could she stand that? Was her
+whole relation to Vincent about to be put to the test? What weapons had
+he against Marty Burke? And if he had none, how stripped he would
+appear in her eyes!</p>
+
+<p>“Won’t you ask him, Mrs. Farron?”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide recoiled. She did not want to be the one to throw her glove
+among the lions.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t think I understand well enough what it is you want. Why don’t
+you ask him yourself?” She hesitated, knowing that no opportunity for
+this would offer unless she herself arranged it. “Why don’t you come and
+dine with us to-night, and,” she added more slowly, “bring your son?”</p>
+
+<p>She had made the bait very attractive, and Mrs. Wayne did not refuse.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>As she drove home, Adelaide’s whole being was stirred by the prospect of
+that conflict between Burke and her husband, and it was not until she saw
+Mathilde, pale with an hour of waiting, that she recalled the real object
+of her recent visit. Not, of course, that Adelaide was more interested in
+Marty Burke than in her daughter’s future, but a titanic struggle fired
+her imagination more than a pitiful little romance. She felt a pang of
+self-reproach when she saw that Mr. Lanley had come to share the child’s
+vigil, that he seemed to be suffering under an anxiety almost as keen as
+Mathilde’s.</p>
+
+<p>They did not have to question her; she threw out her hands, casting her
+muff from her as she did so.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” she said, “I’m a weak, soft-hearted creature! I’ve asked them both
+to dine tonight.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde flung herself into her mother’s arms.</p>
+
+<p>“O Mama, how marvelous you are!” she exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>Over her daughter’s shoulder Adelaide noted her father’s expression, a
+stiffening of the mouth and a brightening of the eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Your grandfather disapproves of me, Mathilde,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“He couldn’t be so unkind,” returned the girl.</p>
+
+<p>“After all,” said Mr. Lanley, trying to induce a slight scowl, “if we are
+not going to consent to an engagement—”</p>
+
+<p>“But you are,” said Mathilde.</p>
+
+<p>“We are not,” said her mother; “but there is no reason why we should
+not meet and talk it over like sensible creatures—talk it over
+here”—Adelaide looked lovingly around her own subdued room—“instead
+of five stories up. For really—” She stopped, running her eyebrows
+together at the recollection.</p>
+
+<p>“But the flat is rather—rather comfortable when you get there,” said Mr.
+Lanley, suddenly becoming embarrassed over his choice of an adjective.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide looked at him sharply.</p>
+
+<p>“Dear Papa,” she asked, “since when have you become an admirer of
+painted shelves and dirty rugs? And I don’t doubt,” she added very
+gently, “that for the same money they could have found something quite
+tolerable in the country.”</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps they don’t want to live in the country,” said Mr. Lanley, rather
+sharply: “I’m sure there is nothing that you’d hate more, Adelaide.”</p>
+
+<p>She opened her dark eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“But I don’t have to choose between squalor here or—”</p>
+
+<p>“Squalor!” said Mr. Lanley. “Don’t be ridiculous!”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde broke in gently at this point:</p>
+
+<p>“I think you must have liked Mrs. Wayne, Mama, to ask her to dine.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide saw an opportunity to exercise one of her important talents.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” she said. “She has a certain naïve friendliness. Of course I don’t
+advocate, after fifty, dressing like an Eton boy; I always think an
+elderly face above a turned-down collar—”</p>
+
+<p>“Mama,” broke in Mathilde, quietly, “would you mind not talking of Mrs.
+Wayne like that? You know, she’s Pete’s mother.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide was really surprised.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, my love,” she answered, “I haven’t said half the things I might
+say. I rather thought I was sparing your feelings. After all, when you
+see her, you will admit that she <i>does</i> dress like an Eton boy.”</p>
+
+<p>“She didn’t when I saw her,” said Mr. Lanley.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide turned to her father.</p>
+
+<p>“Papa, I leave it to you. Did I say anything that should have wounded
+anybody’s susceptibilities?”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>“It was the tone Mathilde did not like, I think.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide raised her shoulders and looked beautifully hurt.</p>
+
+<p>“My tone?” she wailed.</p>
+
+<p>“It hurt me,” said Mathilde, laying her little hand on her heart.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley smiled at her, and then, springing up, kissed her tenderly on
+the forehead. He said it was time for him to be going on.</p>
+
+<p>“You’ll come to dinner to-night, Papa?”</p>
+
+<p>Rather hastily, Mr. Lanley said no, he couldn’t; he had an engagement.
+But his daughter did not let him get to the door.</p>
+
+<p>“What are you going to do to-night, Papa?” she asked, firmly.</p>
+
+<p>“There is a governor’s meeting—”</p>
+
+<p>“Two in a week, Papa?”</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly Mr. Lanley dropped all pretense of not coming, and said he would
+be there at eight.</p>
+
+<p>During the rest of the day Mathilde’s heart never wholly regained its
+normal beat. Not only was she to see Pete again, and see him under the
+gaze of her united family, but she was to see this mother of his, whom he
+loved and admired so much. She pictured her as white-haired, benignant,
+brooding, the essential mother, with all her own mother’s grace and charm
+left out, yet with these qualities not ill replaced by others which
+Mathilde sometimes dimly apprehended were lacking in her own beautiful
+parent. She looked at herself in the glass. “My son’s wife,” was the
+phrase in her mind.</p>
+
+<p>On her way up-stairs to dress for dinner she tried to confide her
+anxieties to her mother.</p>
+
+<p>“Mama,” she said, “if you had a son, how would you feel toward the girl
+he wanted to marry?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I should think her a cat, of course,” Adelaide answered; and
+added an instant later, “and I should probably be able to make him
+think so, too.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde sighed and went on up-stairs. Here she decided on an act of some
+insubordination. She would wear her best dress that evening, the dress
+which her mother considered too old for her. She did not want Pete’s
+mother to think he had chosen a perfect baby.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley, too, was a trifle nervous during the afternoon. He tried to
+say to himself that it was because the future of his darling little
+Mathilde was about to be settled. He shook his head, indicating that to
+settle the future of the young was a risky business; and then in a burst
+of self-knowledge he suddenly admitted that what was really making him
+nervous was the incident of the pier. If Mrs. Wayne referred to it, and
+of course there was no possible reason why she should not refer to it,
+Adelaide would never let him hear the last of it. It would be natural for
+Adelaide to think it queer that he hadn’t told her about it. And the
+reason he hadn’t told was perfectly clear: it was on that infernal pier
+that he had formed such an adverse opinion of Mrs. Wayne. But of course
+he did not wish to prejudice Adelaide; he wanted to leave her free to
+form her own opinions, and he was glad, excessively glad, that she had
+formed so favorable a one as to ask the woman to dinner. There was no
+question about his being glad; he surprised his servant by whistling as
+he put on his white waistcoat, and fastened the buckle rather more snugly
+than usual. Self-knowledge for the moment was not on hand.</p>
+
+<p>He arrived at exactly the hour at which he always arrived, five minutes
+after eight, a moment not too early to embarrass the hostess and not too
+late to endanger the dinner.</p>
+
+<p>No one was in the drawing-room but Mathilde and Farron. Adelaide, for one
+who had been almost perfectly brought up, did sometimes commit the fault
+of allowing her guests to wait for her.</p>
+
+<p>“’Lo, my dear,” said Mr. Lanley, kissing Mathilde. “What’s that you have
+on? Never saw it before. Not so becoming as the dress you were wearing
+the last time I was here.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde felt that it would be almost easier to die immediately, and was
+revived only when she heard Farron saying:</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, don’t you like this? I was just thinking I had never seen Mathilde
+looking so well, in her rather more mature and subtle vein.”</p>
+
+<p>It was just as she wished to appear, but she glanced at her stepfather,
+disturbed by her constant suspicion that he read her heart more clearly
+than any one else, more clearly than she liked.</p>
+
+<p>“How shockingly late they are!” said Adelaide, suddenly appearing in
+the utmost splendor. She moved about, kissing her father and arranging
+the chairs. “Do you know, Vin, why it is that Pringle likes to make the
+room look as if it were arranged for a funeral? Why do you suppose they
+don’t come?”</p>
+
+<p>“Any one who arrives after Adelaide is apt to be in wrong,” observed
+her husband.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I think it’s awfully incompetent always to be waiting for other
+people,” she returned, just laying her hand an instant on his shoulder to
+indicate that he alone was privileged to make fun of her.</p>
+
+<p>“That perhaps is what the Waynes think,” he answered.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde’s heart sank a little at this. She knew her mother did not like
+to be kept waiting for dinner.</p>
+
+<p>“When I was a young man—” began Mr. Lanley.</p>
+
+<p>“It was the custom,” interrupted Adelaide in exactly the same tone, “for
+a hostess to be in her drawing-room at least five minutes before the hour
+set for the arrival of the guests.”</p>
+
+<p>“Adelaide,” her father pleaded, “I don’t talk like that; at least
+not often.”</p>
+
+<p>“You would, though, if you didn’t have me to correct you,” she retorted.
+“There’s the bell at last; but it always takes people like that forever
+to get their wraps off.”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s only ten minutes past eight,” said Farron, and Mathilde blessed
+him with a look.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne came quickly into the room, so fast that her dress floated
+behind her; she was in black and very grand. No one would have supposed
+that she had murmured to Pete just before the drawing-room door was
+opened, “I hope they haven’t run in any old relations on us.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m afraid I’m late,” she began.</p>
+
+<p>“She always is,” Pete murmured to Mathilde as he took her hand and quite
+openly squeezed it, and then, before Adelaide had time for the rather
+casual introduction she had planned, he himself put the hand he was
+holding into his mother’s. “This is my girl, Mother,” he said. They
+smiled at each other. Mathilde tried to say something. Mrs. Wayne stooped
+and kissed her. Mr. Lanley was obviously affected. Adelaide wasn’t going
+to have any scene like that.</p>
+
+<p>“Late?” she said, as if not an instant had passed since Mrs. Wayne’s
+entrance. “Oh, no, you’re not late; exactly on time, I think. I’m only
+just down myself. Isn’t that true, Vincent?”</p>
+
+<p>Vincent was studying Mrs. Wayne, and withdrew his eyes slowly. But
+Adelaide’s object was accomplished: no public betrothal had taken place.</p>
+
+<p>Pringle announced dinner. Mr. Lanley, rather to his own surprise, found
+that he was insisting on giving Mrs. Wayne his arm; he was not so angry
+at her as he had supposed. He did not think her offensive or unfeminine
+or half baked or socialistic or any of the things he had been saying to
+himself at lengthening intervals for the last twenty-four hours.</p>
+
+<p>Pete saw an opportunity, and tucked Mathilde’s hand within his own arm,
+nipping it closely to his heart.</p>
+
+<p>The very instant they were at table Adelaide looked down the alley
+between the candles, for the low, golden dish of hot-house fruit did not
+obstruct her view of Vincent, and said:</p>
+
+<p>“Why have you never told me about Marty Burke?”</p>
+
+<p>“Who’s he?” asked Mr. Lanley, quickly, for he had been trying to start a
+little conversational hare of his own, just to keep the conversation away
+from the water-front.</p>
+
+<p>“He’s a splendid young super-tough in my employ,” said Vincent. “What do
+you know about him, Adelaide?”</p>
+
+<p>The guarded surprise in his tone stimulated her.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I know all about him—as much, that is, as one ever can of a
+stupendous natural phenomenon.”</p>
+
+<p>“Where did you hear of him?”</p>
+
+<p>“Hear of him? I’ve seen him. I saw him this morning at Mrs. Wayne’s. He
+just dropped in while I was there and, metaphorically speaking, dragged
+us about by the hair of our heads.”</p>
+
+<p>“Some women, I believe, confess to enjoying that sensation,”
+Vincent observed.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, it’s exciting,” answered his wife.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s an easy excitement to attain.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, one wants it done in good style.”</p>
+
+<p>Something so stimulating that it was almost hostile flashed through the
+interchange.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde murmured to Pete:</p>
+
+<p>“Who are they talking about?”</p>
+
+<p>“A mixture of Alcibiades and <i>Bill Sykes</i>,” said Adelaide, catching the
+low tone, as she always did.</p>
+
+<p>“He’s the district leader and a very bad influence,” said Mrs. Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>“He’s a champion middle-weight boxer,” said Pete.</p>
+
+<p>“He’s the head of my stevedores,” said Farron.</p>
+
+<p>“O Mr. Farron,” Mrs. Wayne exclaimed, “I do wish you would use your
+influence over him.”</p>
+
+<p>“My influence? It consists of paying him eighty-five dollars a month and
+giving him a box of cigars at Christmas.”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t you think you could tone him down?” pleaded Mrs. Wayne. “He does
+so much harm.”</p>
+
+<p>“But I don’t want him toned down. His value to me is his being just as he
+is. He’s a myth, a hero, a power on the water-front, and I employ him.”</p>
+
+<p>“You employ him, but do you control him?” asked Adelaide, languidly, and
+yet with a certain emphasis.</p>
+
+<p>Her husband glanced at her.</p>
+
+<p>“What is it you want, Adelaide?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>She gave a little laugh.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I want nothing. It’s Mrs. Wayne who wants you to do
+something—rather difficult, too, I should imagine.”</p>
+
+<p>He turned gravely to their guest.</p>
+
+<p>“What is it you want, Mrs. Wayne?”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne considered an instant, and as she was about to find words for
+her request her son spoke:</p>
+
+<p>“She’ll tell you after dinner.”</p>
+
+<p>“Pete, I wasn’t going to tell the story,” his mother put in protestingly.
+“You really do me injustice at times.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide, remembering the conversation of the morning, wondered whether
+he did. She felt grateful to him for wishing to spare Mathilde the
+hearing of such a story, and she turned to him with a caressing
+graciousness in which she was extremely at her ease. Mathilde,
+recognizing that her mother was pleased, though not being very clear why,
+could not resist joining in their conversation; and Mrs. Wayne was thus
+given an opportunity of murmuring the unfortunate Anita’s story into
+Vincent’s ear.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide, holding Pete with a flattering gaze, seeming to drink in every
+word he was saying, heard Mrs. Wayne finish and heard Vincent say:</p>
+
+<p>“And you think you can get it annulled if only Burke doesn’t interfere?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, if he doesn’t get hold of the boy and tell him that his dignity as
+a man is involved.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide withdrew her gaze from Pete and fixed it on Vincent. Was he
+going to accept that challenge? She wanted him to, and yet she thought he
+would be defeated, and she did not want him to be defeated. She waited
+almost breathless.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I’ll see what I can do,” he said. This was an acceptance.
+This from Vincent meant that the matter, as far as he was concerned,
+was settled.</p>
+
+<p>“You two plotters!” exclaimed Adelaide. “For my part, I’m on Marty
+Burke’s side. I hate to see wild creatures in cages.”</p>
+
+<p>“Dangerous to side with wild beasts,” observed Vincent.</p>
+
+<p>“Why?”</p>
+
+<p>“They get the worst of it in the long run.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide dropped her eyes. It was exactly the right answer. For a moment
+she felt his complete supremacy. Then another thought shot through her
+mind: it was exactly the right answer if he could make it good.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime Mr. Lanley began to grow dissatisfied with the prolonged
+role of spectator. He preferred danger to oblivion; and turning to Mrs.
+Wayne, he said, with his politest smile:</p>
+
+<p>“How are the bridges?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, dear,” she answered, “I must have been terribly tactless—to make
+you so angry.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley drew himself up.</p>
+
+<p>“I was not angry,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him with a sort of gentle wonder.</p>
+
+<p>“You gave me the impression of being.”</p>
+
+<p>The very temperateness of the reply made him see that he had been
+inaccurate.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course I was angry,” he said. “What I mean is that I don’t understand
+why I was.”</p>
+
+<p>Meantime, on the opposite side of the table, Mathilde and Pete were
+equally immersed, murmuring sentences of the profoundest meaning behind
+faces which they felt were mask-like.</p>
+
+<p>Farron looked down the table at his wife. Why, he wondered, did she want
+to tease him to-night, of all nights in his life?</p>
+
+<p>When they came out of the dining-room Pete said to Mathilde with the
+utmost clearness:</p>
+
+<p>“And what was that magazine you spoke of?”</p>
+
+<p>She had spoken of no magazine, but she caught the idea, the clever,
+rather wicked idea. He made her work her mind almost too fast sometimes,
+but she enjoyed it.</p>
+
+<p>“Wasn’t it this?” she asked, with a beating heart.</p>
+
+<p>They sat down on the sofa and bent their heads over it with student-like
+absorption.</p>
+
+<p>“I haven’t any idea what it is,” she whispered.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, well, I suppose there’s something or other in it.”</p>
+
+<p>“I think your mother is perfectly wonderful—wonderful.”</p>
+
+<p>“I love you so.”</p>
+
+<p>The older people took a little longer to settle down. Mr. Lanley stood on
+the hearth-rug, with a cigar in his mouth and his head thrown very far
+back. Adelaide sank into a chair, looking, as she often did, as if she
+had just been brilliantly well posed for a photograph. Farron was
+silent. Mrs. Wayne sat, as she had a bad habit of doing, on one foot. The
+two groups were sufficiently separated for distinct conversations.</p>
+
+<p>“Is this a conference?” asked Farron.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne made it so by her reply.</p>
+
+<p>“The whole question is, Are they really in love? At least, that’s my
+view.”</p>
+
+<p>“In love!” Adelaide twisted her shoulders. “What can they know of it for
+another ten years? You must have some character, some knowledge to fall
+in love. And these babes—”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” said Mr. Lanley, stoutly; “you’re all wrong, Adelaide. It’s first
+love that matters—<i>Romeo</i> and <i>Juliet</i>, you know. Afterward we all get
+hardened and world-worn and cynical and material.” He stopped short in
+his eloquence at the thought that Mrs. Wayne was quite obviously not
+hardened or world-worn or cynical or material. “By Jove!” he thought to
+himself, “that’s it. The woman’s spirit is as fresh as a girl’s.” He had
+by this time utterly forgotten what he had meant to say.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide turned to her husband.</p>
+
+<p>“Do you think they are in love, Vin?”</p>
+
+<p>Vincent looked at her for a second, and then he nodded two or
+three times.</p>
+
+<p>Though no one at once recognized the fact, the engagement was settled at
+that moment.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed obvious that Mr. Lanley should take the Waynes home in his car.
+Mrs. Wayne, who had prepared for walking with overshoes and with pins for
+her trailing skirt, did not seem too enthusiastic at the suggestion. She
+stood a moment on the step and looked at the sky, where Orion, like a
+banner, was hung across the easterly opening of the side street.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s a lovely night,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>It was Pete who drew her into the car. Her reluctance deprived Mr.
+Lanley of the delight of bestowing a benefit, but gave him a faint sense
+of capture.</p>
+
+<p>In the drawing-room Mathilde was looking from one to the other of her
+natural guardians, like a well-trained puppy who wants to be fed. She
+wanted Pete praised. Instead, Adelaide said:</p>
+
+<p>“Really, papa is growing too secretive! Do you know, Vin, he and Mrs.
+Wayne quarreled like mad last evening, and he never told me a word
+about it!”</p>
+
+<p>“How do you know?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I heard them trying to smooth it out at dinner.”</p>
+
+<p>“O Mama,” wailed Mathilde, between admiration and complaint, “you hear
+everything!”</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly, I do,” Adelaide returned lightly. “Yes, and I heard you, too,
+and understood everything that you meant.”</p>
+
+<p>Vincent couldn’t help smiling at his stepdaughter’s horrified look.</p>
+
+<p>“What a brute you are, Adelaide!” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, my dear, you’re much worse,” she retorted. “You don’t have to
+overhear. You just read the human heart by some black magic of your own.
+That’s really more cruel than my gross methods.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, Mathilde,” said Farron, “as a reader of the human heart, I want to
+tell you that I approve of the young man. He has a fine, delicate touch
+on life, which, I am inclined to think, goes only with a good deal of
+strength.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde blinked her eyes. Gratitude and delight had brought
+tears to them.</p>
+
+<p>“He thinks you’re wonderful, Mr. Farron,” she answered a little huskily.</p>
+
+<p>“Better and better,” answered Vincent, and he held out his hand for a
+letter that Pringle was bringing to him on a tray.</p>
+
+<p>“What’s that?” asked Adelaide. One of the first things she had impressed
+on Joe Severance was that he must never inquire about her mail; but she
+always asked Farron about his.</p>
+
+<p>He seemed to be thinking and didn’t answer her.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde, now simply insatiable, pressed nearer to him and asked:</p>
+
+<p>“And what do you think of Mrs. Wayne?”</p>
+
+<p>He raised his eyes from the envelope, and answered with a certain
+absence of tone:</p>
+
+<p>“I thought she was an elderly wood-nymph.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide glanced over his shoulder, and, seeing that the letter had a
+printed address in the corner, lost interest.</p>
+
+<p>“You may shut the house, Pringle,” she said.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Pringle, the last servant up, was soon heard discreetly drawing bolts and
+turning out electric lights. Mathilde went straight up-stairs without
+even an attempt at drawing her mother into an evening gossip. She was
+aware of being tired after two nights rendered almost sleepless by her
+awareness of joy. She went to her room and shut the door. Her bed was
+piled high with extra covers, soft, light blankets and a down coverlet
+covered with pink silk. She took a certain hygienic pride in the extent
+to which she always opened her bedroom windows even when, as at present,
+the night was bitterly cold. In the morning she ran, huddling on her
+dressing-gown, into a heated bathroom, and when she emerged from this,
+the maid had always lighted her fire, and laid her breakfast-tray close
+to the blaze. To-night, when she went to open her window, she noticed
+that the houses opposite had lost courage and showed only cracks. She
+stood a second looking up at the stars, twinkling with tiny blue rays
+through the clear air. By turning her head to the west she could look
+down on the park, with its surface of bare, blurred tree-branches pierced
+by rows of lights. The familiar sight suddenly seemed to her almost
+intolerably beautiful. “Oh, I love him so much!” she said to herself, and
+her lips actually whispered the words, “so much! so much!”</p>
+
+<p>She threw the window high as a reproof of those shivers across the way,
+and, jumping into bed, hastily sandwiched her small body between the warm
+bedclothes. She was almost instantly asleep.</p>
+
+<p>Overhead the faint, but heavy, footfall of Pringle ceased. The house was
+silent; the city had become so. An occasional Madison Avenue car could be
+heard ringing along the cold rails, or rhythmically bounding down hill on
+a flat wheel. Once some distance away came the long, continuous complaint
+of the siren of a fire-engine and the bells and gongs of its comrades;
+and then a young man went past, whistling with the purest accuracy of
+time and tune the air to which he had just been dancing.</p>
+
+<p>At half-past five the kitchen-maid, a young Swede who feared not God,
+neither regarded man, but lived in absolute subjection to the cook, to
+whom, unknown to any one else, she every morning carried up breakfast,
+was stealing down with a candle in her hand. Her senses were alert, for a
+friend of hers had been strangled by burglars in similar circumstances,
+and she had never overcome her own terror of the cold, dark house in
+these early hours of a winter morning.</p>
+
+<p>She went down not the back stairs, for Mr. Pringle objected that she woke
+him as she passed, whereas the carpet on the front stairs was so thick
+that there wasn’t the least chance of waking the family. As she passed
+Mrs. Farron’s room she was surprised to see a fine crack of light coming
+from under it. She paused, wondering if she was going to be caught, and
+if she had better run back and take to the back stairs despite Pringle’s
+well-earned rest; and as she hesitated she heard a sob, then
+another—wild, hysterical sobs. The girl looked startled and then went
+on, shaking her head. What people like that had to cry about beat her.
+But she was glad, because she knew such a splendid bit of news would
+soften the heart of the cook when she took up her breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>By five o’clock it seemed to Adelaide that a whole eternity had passed
+and that another was ahead of her, that this night would never end.</p>
+
+<p>When they went up-stairs, while she was brushing her hair—her hair
+rewarded brushing, for it was fine and long and took a polish like
+bronze—she had wandered into Vincent’s room to discuss with him the
+question of her father’s secretiveness about Mrs. Wayne. It was not, she
+explained, standing in front of his fire, that she suspected anything,
+but that it was so unfriendly: it deprived one of so much legitimate
+amusement if one’s own family practised that kind of reserve. Her just
+anger kept her from observing Farron very closely. As she talked she laid
+her brush on the mantelpiece, and as she did so she knocked down the
+letter that had come for him just before they went up-stairs. She
+stooped, and picked it up without attention, and stood holding it; she
+gesticulated a little with it as she repeated, for her own amusement
+rather than for Vincent’s, phrases she had caught at dinner.</p>
+
+<p>The horror to Farron of seeing her standing there chattering, with that
+death-dealing letter in her hand, suddenly and illogically broke down his
+resolution of silence. It was cruel, and though he might have denied
+himself her help, he could not endure cruelty.</p>
+
+<p>“Adelaide,” he said in a tone that drove every other sensation
+away—“Adelaide, that letter. No, don’t read it.” He took it from her
+and laid it on his dressing-table. “My dear love, it has very bad
+news in it.”</p>
+
+<p>“There <i>has</i> been something, then?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. I have been worried about my health for some time. This letter
+tells me the worst is true. Well, my dear, we did not enter matrimony
+with the idea that either of us was immortal.”</p>
+
+<p>But that was his last effort to be superior to the crisis, to pretend
+that the bitterness of death was any less to him than to any other human
+creature, to conceal that he needed help, all the help that he could get.</p>
+
+<p>And Adelaide gave him help. Artificial as she often was in daily
+contact, in a moment like this she was splendidly, almost primitively
+real. She did not conceal her own passionate despair, her conviction that
+her life couldn’t go on without his; she did not curb her desire to know
+every detail on which his opinion and his doctor’s had been founded; she
+clung to him and wept, refusing to let him discuss business arrangements,
+in which for some reason he seemed to find a certain respite; and yet
+with it all, she gave him strength, the sense that he had an indissoluble
+and loyal companion in the losing fight that lay before him.</p>
+
+<p>Once she was aware of thinking: “Oh, why did he tell me to-night? Things
+are so terrible by night,” but it was only a second before she put such a
+thought away from her. What had these nights been to him? The night when
+she had found his light burning so late, and other nights when he had
+probably denied himself the consolation of reading for fear of rousing
+her suspicions. She did not attempt to pity or advise him, she did not
+treat him as a mixture of child and idiot, as affection so often treats
+illness. She simply gave him her love.</p>
+
+<p>Toward morning he fell asleep in her arms, and then she stole back to
+her own room. There everything was unchanged, the light still burning,
+her satin slippers stepping on each other just as she had left them. She
+looked at herself in the glass; she did not look so very different. A
+headache had often ravaged her appearance more.</p>
+
+<p>She had always thought herself a coward, she feared death with a terrible
+repugnance; but now she found, to her surprise, that she would have
+light-heartedly changed places with her husband. She had much more
+courage to die than to watch him die—to watch Vincent die, to see him
+day by day grow weak and pitiful. That was what was intolerable. If he
+would only die now, to-night, or if she could! It was at this moment that
+the kitchen maid had heard her sobbing.</p>
+
+<p>Because there was nothing else to do, she got into bed, and lay there
+staring at the electric light, which she had forgotten to put out. Toward
+seven she got up and gave orders that Mr. Farron was not to be disturbed,
+that the house was to be kept quiet. Strange, she thought, that he could
+sleep like an exhausted child, while she, awake, was a mass of pain. Her
+heart ached, her eyes burned, her very body felt sore. She arranged for
+his sleep, but she wanted him to wake up; she begrudged every moment of
+his absence. Alas! she thought, how long would she continue to do so?</p>
+
+<p>Yet with her suffering came a wonderful ease, an ability to deal with the
+details of life. When at eight o’clock her maid came in and, pulling the
+curtains, exclaimed with Gallic candor, “Oh, comme madame a mauvaise mine
+ce matin!” she smiled at her with unusual gentleness. Later, when
+Mathilde came down at her accustomed hour, and lying across the foot of
+her mother’s bed, began to read her scraps of the morning paper, Adelaide
+felt a rush of tenderness for the child, who was so unaware of the
+hideous bargain life really was. Surprising as it was, she found she
+could talk more easily than usual and with a more undivided attention,
+though everything they said was trivial enough.</p>
+
+<p>Then suddenly her heart stood still, for the door opened, and Vincent, in
+his dressing-gown, came in. He had evidently had his bath, for his hair
+was wet and shiny. Thank God! he showed no signs of defeat!</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” cried Mathilde, jumping up, “I thought Mr. Farron had gone
+down-town ages ago.”</p>
+
+<p>“He overslept,” said Adelaide.</p>
+
+<p>“I had an excellent night,” he answered, and she knew he looked at her to
+discover that she had not.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll go,” said Mathilde; but with unusual sharpness they both turned to
+her and said simultaneously, “No, no; stay.” They knew no better than she
+did why they were so eager to keep her.</p>
+
+<p>“Are you going down-town, Vin?” Adelaide asked, and her voice shook a
+little on the question; she was so eager that he should not institute any
+change in his routine so soon.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course,” he answered.</p>
+
+<p>They looked at each other, yet their look said nothing in particular.
+Presently he said:</p>
+
+<p>“I wonder if I might have breakfast in here. I’ll go and shave if you’ll
+order it; and don’t let Mathilde go. I have something to say to her.”</p>
+
+<p>When he was gone, Mathilde went and stood at the window, looking out, and
+tying knots in the window-shade’s cord. It was a trick Adelaide had
+always objected to, and she was quite surprised to hear herself saying
+now, just as usual:</p>
+
+<p>“Mathilde, don’t tie knots in that cord.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde threw it from her as one whose mind was engaged on higher
+things.</p>
+
+<p>“You know,” she observed, “I believe I’m only just beginning to
+appreciate Mr. Farron. He’s so wise. I see what you meant about his being
+strong, and he’s so clever. He knows just what you’re thinking all the
+time. Isn’t it nice that he likes Pete? Did he say anything more about
+him after you went up-stairs? I mean, he really does like him, doesn’t
+he? He doesn’t say that just to please me?”</p>
+
+<p>Presently Vincent came back fully dressed and sat down to his breakfast.
+Oddly enough, there was a spirit of real gaiety in the air.</p>
+
+<p>“What was it you were going to say to me?” Mathilde asked greedily.
+Farron looked at her blankly. Adelaide knew that he had quite forgotten
+the phrase, but he concealed the fact by not allowing the least
+illumination of his expression as he remembered.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes,” he said. “I wish to correct myself. I told you that Mrs.
+Wayne was an elderly wood-nymph; but I was wrong. Of course the truth is
+that she’s a very young witch.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde laughed, but not whole-heartedly. She had already identified
+herself so much with the Waynes that she could not take them quite in
+this tone of impersonality.</p>
+
+<p>Farron threw down his napkin, stood up, pulled down his waistcoat.</p>
+
+<p>“I must be off,” he said. He went and kissed his wife. Both had to nerve
+themselves for that.</p>
+
+<p>She held his arm in both her hands, feeling it solid, real, and as
+hard as iron.</p>
+
+<p>“You’ll be up-town early?”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve a busy day.”</p>
+
+<p>“By four?”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll telephone.” She loved him for refusing to yield to her just at this
+moment of all moments. Some men, she thought, would have hidden their own
+self-pity under the excuse of the necessity of being kind to her.</p>
+
+<p>She was to lunch out with a few critical contemporaries. She was
+horrified when she looked at herself by morning light. Her skin had an
+ivory hue, and there were many fine wrinkles about her eyes. She began to
+repair these damages with the utmost frankness, talking meantime to
+Mathilde and the maid. She swept her whole face with a white lotion,
+rouged lightly, but to her very eyelids, touched a red pencil to her
+lips, all with discretion. The result was satisfactory. The improvement
+in her appearance made her feel braver. She couldn’t have faced these
+people—she did not know whether to think of them as intimate enemies or
+hostile friends—if she had been looking anything but her best.</p>
+
+<p>But they were just what she needed; they would be hard and amusing and
+keep her at some tension. She thought rather crossly that she could not
+sit through a meal at home and listen to Mathilde rambling on about love
+and Mr. Farron.</p>
+
+<p>She was inexcusably late, and they had sat down to luncheon—three men
+and two women—by the time she arrived. They had all been, or had wanted
+to go, to an auction sale of <i>objets d’art</i> that had taken place the
+night before. They were discussing it, praising their own purchases, and
+decrying the value of everybody else’s when Adelaide came in.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Adelaide,” said her hostess, “we were just wondering what you paid
+originally for your tapestry.”</p>
+
+<p>“The one in the hall?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, the one with the Turk in it.”</p>
+
+<p>“I haven’t an idea,—” Adelaide was distinctly languid,—“I got it from
+my grandfather.”</p>
+
+<p>“Wouldn’t you know she’d say that?” exclaimed one of the women. “Not that
+I deny it’s true; only, you know, Adelaide, whenever you do want to throw
+a veil over one of your pieces, you always call on the prestige of your
+ancestors.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide raised her eyebrows.</p>
+
+<p>“Really,” she answered, “there isn’t anything so very conspicuous about
+having had a grandfather.”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” her hostess echoed, “even I, so well and favorably known for my
+vulgarity—even <i>I</i> had a grandfather.”</p>
+
+<p>“But he wasn’t a connoisseur in tapestries, Minnie darling.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, but he was in pigs, the dear vulgarian.”</p>
+
+<p>“True vulgarity,” said one of the men, “vulgarity in the best sense, I
+mean, should betray no consciousness of its own existence. Only thus can
+it be really great.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Minnie’s vulgarity is just artificial, assumed because she found it
+worked so well.”</p>
+
+<p>“Surely you accord her some natural talent along those lines.”</p>
+
+<p>“I suspect her secret mind is refined.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, that’s not fair. Vulgar is as vulgar does.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide stood up, pushing back her chair. She found them utterly
+intolerable. Besides, as they talked she had suddenly seen clearly that
+she must herself speak to Vincent’s doctor without an instant’s delay. “I
+have to telephone, Minnie,” she said, and swept out of the room. She
+never returned.</p>
+
+<p>“Not one of the perfect lady’s golden days, I should say,” said one of
+the men, raising his eyebrows. “I wonder what’s gone wrong?”</p>
+
+<p>“Can Vincent have been straying from the straight and narrow?”</p>
+
+<p>“Something wrong. I could tell by her looks.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, my dear, I’m afraid her looks is what’s wrong.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide meantime was in her motor on her way to the doctor’s office. He
+had given up his sacred lunch-hour in response to her imperious demand
+and to his own intense pity for her sorrow.</p>
+
+<p>He did not know her, but he had had her pointed out to him, and though
+he recognized the unreason of such an attitude, he was aware that her
+great beauty dramatized her suffering, so that his pity for her was
+uncommonly alive.</p>
+
+<p>He was a young man, with a finely cut face and a blond complexion. His
+pity was visible, quivering a little under his mask of impassivity.
+Adelaide’s first thought on seeing him was, “Good Heavens! another man to
+be emotionally calmed before I can get at the truth!” She had to be
+tactful, to let him see that she was not going to make a scene. She knew
+that he felt it himself, but she was not grateful to him. What business
+had he to feel it? His feeling was an added burden, and she felt that she
+had enough to carry.</p>
+
+<p>He did not make the mistake, however, of expressing his sympathy
+verbally. His answers were as cold and clear as she could wish. She
+questioned him on the chances of an operation. He could not reduce his
+judgment to a mathematical one; he was inclined to advocate an operation
+on psychological grounds, he said.</p>
+
+<p>“It keeps up the patient’s courage to know something is being done.” He
+added, “That will be your work, Mrs. Farron, to keep his courage up.”</p>
+
+<p>Most women like to know they had their part to play, but Adelaide shook
+her head quickly.</p>
+
+<p>“I would so much rather go through it myself!” she cried.</p>
+
+<p>“Naturally, naturally,” he agreed, without getting the full passion
+of her cry.</p>
+
+<p>She stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” she said, “if it could only be kill or cure!”</p>
+
+<p>He glanced at her.</p>
+
+<p>“We have hardly reached that point yet,” he answered.</p>
+
+<p>She went away dissatisfied. He had answered every question, he had even
+encouraged her to hope a little more than her interpretation of what
+Vincent said had allowed her; but as she drove away she knew he had
+failed her. For she had gone to him in order to have Vincent presented to
+her as a hero, as a man who had looked upon the face of death without a
+quiver. Instead, he had been presented to her as a patient, just one of
+the long procession that passed through that office. The doctor had said
+nothing to contradict the heroic picture, but he had said nothing to
+contribute to it. And surely, if Farron had stood out in his calmness and
+courage above all other men, the doctor would have mentioned it, couldn’t
+have helped doing so; he certainly would not have spent so much time in
+telling her how she was to guard and encourage him. To the doctor he was
+only a patient, a pitiful human being, a victim of mortality. Was that
+what he was going to become in her eyes, too?</p>
+
+<p>At four she drove down-town to his office. He came out with another man;
+they stood a moment on the steps talking and smiling. Then he drew his
+friend to the car window and introduced him to Adelaide. The man took
+off his hat.</p>
+
+<p>“I was just telling your husband, Mrs. Farron, that I’ve been looking at
+offices in this building. By the spring he and I will be neighbors.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide just shut her eyes, and did not open them again until Vincent
+had got in beside her and she felt his arm about her shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>“My poor darling!” he said. “What you need is to go home and get some
+sleep.” It was said in his old, cherishing tone, and she, leaning back,
+with her head against the point of his shoulder, felt that, black as it
+was, life for the first time since the night before had assumed its
+normal aspect again.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>The morning after their drive up-town Vincent told his wife that all
+his arrangements were made to go to the hospital that night, and to be
+operated upon the next day. She reproached him for having made his
+decision without consulting her, but she loved him for his proud
+independence.</p>
+
+<p>Somehow this second day under the shadow of death was less terrible than
+the first. Vincent stayed up-town, and was very natural and very busy. He
+saw a few people,—men who owed him money, his lawyer, his partner,—but
+most of the time he and Adelaide sat together in his study, as they had
+sat on many other holidays. He insisted on going alone to the hospital,
+although she was to be in the building during the operation.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde had been told, and inexperienced in disaster, she had felt
+convinced that the outcome couldn’t be fatal, yet despite her conviction
+that people did not really die, she was aware of a shyness and
+awkwardness in the tragic situation.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley had been told, and his attitude was just the opposite. To
+him it seemed absolutely certain that Farron would die,—every one
+did,—but he had for some time been aware of a growing hardness on his
+part toward the death of other people, as if he were thus preparing
+himself for his own.</p>
+
+<p>“Poor Vincent!” he said to himself. “Hard luck at his age, when an old
+man like me is left.” But this was not quite honest. In his heart he
+felt there was nothing unnatural in Vincent’s being taken or in his
+being left.</p>
+
+<p>As usual in a crisis, Adelaide’s behavior was perfect. She contrived to
+make her husband feel every instant the depth, the strength, the passion
+of her love for him without allowing it to add to the weight he was
+already carrying. Alone together, he and she had flashes of real gaiety,
+sometimes not very far from tears.</p>
+
+<p>To Mathilde the brisk naturalness of her mother’s manner was a source of
+comfort. All the day the girl suffered from a sense of strangeness and
+isolation, and a fear of doing or saying something unsuitable—something
+either too special or too every-day. She longed to evince sympathy for
+Mr. Farron, but was afraid that, if she did, it would be like intimating
+that he was as good as dead. She was caught between the negative danger
+of seeming indifferent and the positive one of being tactless.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as Vincent had left the house, Adelaide’s thought turned to her
+daughter. He had gone about six o’clock. He and she had been sitting by
+his study fire when Pringle announced that the motor was waiting. Vincent
+got up quietly, and so did she. They stood with their arms about each
+other, as if they meant never to forget the sense of that contact; and
+then without any protest they went down-stairs together.</p>
+
+<p>In the hall he had shaken hands with Mr. Lanley and had kissed Mathilde,
+who, do what she would, couldn’t help choking a little. All this time
+Adelaide stood on the stairs, very erect, with one hand on the stair-rail
+and one on the wall, not only her eyes, but her whole face, radiating an
+uplifted peace. So angelic and majestic did she seem that Mathilde,
+looking up at her, would hardly have been surprised if she had floated
+out into space from her vantage-ground on the staircase.</p>
+
+<p>Then Farron lit a last cigar, gave a quick, steady glance at his wife,
+and went out. The front door ended the incident as sharply as a shot
+would have done.</p>
+
+<p>It was then that Mathilde expected to see her mother break down. Under
+all her sympathy there was a faint human curiosity as to how people
+contrived to live through such crises. If Pete were on the brink of
+death, she thought that she would go mad: but, then, she and Pete were
+not a middle-aged married couple; they were young, and new to love.</p>
+
+<p>They all went into the drawing-room, Adelaide the calmest of the three.</p>
+
+<p>“I wonder,” she said, “if you two would mind dining a little earlier than
+usual. I might sleep if I could get to bed early, and I must be at the
+hospital before eight.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley agreed a little more quickly than it was his habit to speak.</p>
+
+<p>“O Mama, I think you’re so marvelous!” said Mathilde, and touched at her
+own words, she burst into tears. Her mother put her arm about her, and
+Mr. Lanley patted her shoulder—his sovereign care.</p>
+
+<p>“There, there, my dear,” he murmured, “you must not cry. You know Vincent
+has a very good chance, a very good chance.”</p>
+
+<p>The assumption that he hadn’t was just the one Mathilde did not want to
+appear to make. Her mother saw this and said gently:</p>
+
+<p>“She’s overstrained, that’s all.”</p>
+
+<p>The girl wiped her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m ashamed, when you are so calm and wonderful.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m not wonderful,” said her mother. “I have no wish to cry. I’m beyond
+it. Other people’s trouble often makes us behave more emotionally than
+our own. If it were your Pete, I should be in tears.” She smiled, and
+looked across the girl’s head at Mr. Lanley. “She would like to see him,
+Papa. Telephone Pete Wayne, will you, and ask him to come and see her
+this evening? You’ll be here, won’t you?”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley nodded without cordiality; he did not approve of encouraging
+the affair unnecessarily.</p>
+
+<p>“How kind you are, Mama!” exclaimed Mathilde, almost inaudibly. It was
+just what she wanted, just what she had been wanting all day, to see her
+own man, to assure herself, since death was seen to be hot on the trail
+of all mortals, that he and she were not wasting their brief time in
+separation.</p>
+
+<p>“We might take a turn in the motor,” said Mr. Lanley, thinking that Mrs.
+Wayne might enjoy that.</p>
+
+<p>“It would do you both good.”</p>
+
+<p>“And leave you alone, Mama?”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s what I really want, dear.”</p>
+
+<p>The plan did not fulfil itself quite as Mr. Lanley had imagined. Mrs.
+Wayne was out at some sort of meeting. They waited a moment for Pete.
+Mathilde fixed her eyes on the lighted doorway, and said to herself that
+in a few seconds the thing of all others that she desired would
+happen—he would come through it. And almost at once he did, looking
+particularly young and alive; so that, as he jumped in beside her on the
+back seat, both her hands went out and caught his arm and clung to him.
+Her realization of mortality had been so acute that she felt as if he had
+been restored to her from the dead. She told him the horrors of the day.
+Particularly, she wanted to share with him her gratitude for her mother’s
+almost magic kindness.</p>
+
+<p>“I wanted you so much, Pete,” she whispered; “but I thought it would be
+heartless even to suggest my having wishes at such a time. And then for
+her to think of it herself—”</p>
+
+<p>“It means they are not really going to oppose our marriage.”</p>
+
+<p>They talked about their marriage and the twenty or thirty years of joy
+which they might reasonably hope to snatch from life.</p>
+
+<p>“Think of it,” he said—“twenty or thirty years, longer than either of us
+have lived.”</p>
+
+<p>“If I could have five years, even one year, with you, I think I could
+bear to die; but not now, Pete.”</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime Mr. Lanley, alone on the front seat, for he had left
+his chauffeur at home, was driving north along the Hudson and saying
+to himself:</p>
+
+<p>“Sixty-four. Well, I may be able to knock out ten or twelve pretty
+satisfactory years. On the other hand, might die to-morrow; hope I
+don’t, though. As long as I can drive a car and everything goes well
+with Adelaide and this child, I’d be content to live my full time—and a
+little bit more. Not many men are healthier than I am. Poor Vincent! A
+good deal more to live for than I have, most people would say; but I
+don’t know that he enjoys it any more than I do.” Turning his head a
+little, he shouted over his shoulder to Pete, “Sorry your mother
+couldn’t come.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde made a hasty effort to withdraw her hands; but Wayne, more
+practical, understanding better the limits put upon a driver, held
+them tightly as he answered in a civil tone: “Yes, she would have
+enjoyed this.”</p>
+
+<p>“She must come some other time,” shouted Mr. Lanley, and reflected that
+it was not always necessary to bring the young people with you.</p>
+
+<p>“You know, he could not possibly have turned enough to see,” Pete
+whispered reprovingly to Mathilde.</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose not; and yet it seemed so queer to be talking to my
+grandfather with—”</p>
+
+<p>“You must try and adapt yourself to your environment,” he returned, and
+put his arm about her.</p>
+
+<p>The cold of the last few days had given place to a thaw. The melting ice
+in the river was streaked in strange curves, and the bare trees along the
+straight heights of the Palisades were blurred by a faint bluish mist,
+out of which white lights and yellow ones peered like eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Doesn’t it seem cruel to be so happy when Mama and poor Mr. Farron—”
+Mathilde began.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s the only lesson to learn,” he answered—“to be happy while we are
+young and together.”</p>
+
+<p>About ten o’clock Mr. Lanley left her at home, and she tiptoed up-stairs
+and hardly dared to draw breath as she undressed for fear she might wake
+her unhappy mother on the floor below her.</p>
+
+<p>She had resolved to wake early, to breakfast with her mother, to ask to
+be allowed to accompany her to the hospital; but it was nine o’clock when
+she was awakened by her maid’s coming in with her breakfast and the
+announcement not only that Mrs. Farron had been gone for more than an
+hour, but that there had already been good news from the hospital.</p>
+
+<p>“Il paraît que monsieur est très fort,” she said, with that absolute
+neutrality of accent that sounds in Anglo-Saxon ears almost like a
+complaint.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide had been in no need of companionship. She was perfectly able
+to go through her day. It seemed as if her soul, with a soul’s
+capacity for suffering, had suddenly withdrawn from her body, had
+retreated into some unknown fortress, and left in its place a hard,
+trivial, practical intelligence which tossed off plan after plan for
+the future detail of life. As she drove from her house to the hospital
+she arranged how she would apportion the household in case of a
+prolonged illness, where she would put the nurses. Nor was she less
+clear as to what should be done in case of Vincent’s death. The whole
+thing unrolled before her like a panorama.</p>
+
+<p>At the hospital, after a little delay, she was guided to Vincent’s own
+room, recently deserted. A nurse came to tell her that all was going
+well; Mr. Farron had had a good night, and was taking the anesthetic
+nicely. Adelaide found the young woman’s manner offensively encouraging,
+and received the news with an insolent reserve.</p>
+
+<p>“That girl is too wildly, spiritually bright,” she said to herself. But
+no manner would have pleased her.</p>
+
+<p>Left alone, she sat down in a rocking-chair near the window. Vincent’s
+bag stood in the corner, his brushes were on the dressing-table, his tie
+hung on the electric light. Immortal trifles, she thought, that might be
+in existence for years.</p>
+
+<p>She began poignantly to regret that she had not insisted on seeing him
+again that morning. She had thought only of what was easiest for him. She
+ought to have thought of herself, of what would make it possible for her
+to go on living without him. If she could have seen him again, he might
+have given her some precept, some master word, by which she could have
+guided her life. She would have welcomed something imprisoning and safe.
+It was cruel of him, she thought, to toss her out like this, rudderless
+and alone. She wondered what he would have given her as a commandment,
+and remembered suddenly the apocryphal last words which Vincent was fond
+of attributing to George Washington, “Never trust a nigger with a gun.”
+She found herself smiling over them. Vincent was more likely to have
+quoted the apparition’s advice to Macbeth: “Be bloody, bold, and
+resolute.” That would have been his motto for himself, but not for her.
+What was the principle by which he infallibly guided her?</p>
+
+<p>How could he have left her so spiritually unprovided for? She felt
+imposed upon, deserted. The busily planning little mind that had suddenly
+taken possession of her could not help her in the larger aspects of her
+existence. It would be much simpler, she thought, to die than to attempt
+life again without Vincent.</p>
+
+<p>She went to the window and looked out at the roofs of neighboring
+houses, a disordered conglomeration of water-tanks and skylights and
+chimney-pots. Then nearer, almost under her feet, she looked into a
+courtyard of the hospital and saw a pale, emaciated man in a wheel-chair.
+She drew back as if it were something indecent. Would Vincent ever become
+like that? she thought. If so, she would rather he died now under the
+anesthetic.</p>
+
+<p>A little while later the nurse came in, and said almost sternly that Dr.
+Crew had sent her to tell Mrs. Farron that the conditions seemed
+extremely favorable, and that all immediate danger was over.</p>
+
+<p>“You mean,” said Adelaide, fiercely, “that Mr. Farron will live?”</p>
+
+<p>“I certainly inferred that to be the doctor’s meaning,” answered the
+nurse. “But here is the assistant, Dr. Withers.”</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Withers, bringing with him an intolerable smell of disinfectants and
+chloroform, hurried in, with his hair mussed from the haste with which he
+had removed his operating-garments. He had small, bright, brown eyes,
+with little lines about them that seemed to suggest humor, but actually
+indicated that he buoyed up his life not by exaltation of himself, but by
+half-laughing depreciation of every one else.</p>
+
+<p>“I thought you’d be glad to know, Mrs. Farron,” he said, “that any danger
+that may have existed is now over. Your husband—”</p>
+
+<p>“That <i>may</i> have existed,” cried Adelaide. “Do you mean to say there
+hasn’t been any real danger?”</p>
+
+<p>The young doctor’s eyes twinkled.</p>
+
+<p>“An operation even in the best hands is always a danger,” he replied.</p>
+
+<p>“But you mean there was no other?” Adelaide asked, aware of a growing
+coldness about her hands and feet.</p>
+
+<p>Withers looked as just as Aristides.</p>
+
+<p>“It was probably wise to operate,” he said. “Your husband ought to be up
+and about in three weeks.”</p>
+
+<p>Everything grew black and rotatory before Adelaide’s eyes, and she sank
+slowly forward into the young doctor’s arms.</p>
+
+<p>As he laid her on the bed, he glanced whimsically at the nurse and
+shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>But she made no response, an omission which may not have meant loyalty to
+Dr. Crew so much as unwillingness to support Dr. Withers.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide returned to consciousness only in time to be hurried away to
+make room for Vincent. His long, limp figure was carried past her in the
+corridor. She was told that in a few hours she might see him. But she
+wasn’t, as a matter of fact, very eager to see him. The knowledge that he
+was to live, the lifting of the weight of dread, was enough. The maternal
+strain did not mingle with her love for him; she saw no possible reward,
+no increased sense of possession, in his illness. On the contrary, she
+wanted him to stride back in one day from death to his old powerful,
+dominating self.</p>
+
+<p>She grew to hate the hospital routine, the fixed hours, the regulated
+food. “These rules, these hovering women,” she exclaimed, “these
+trays—they make me think of the nursery.” But what she really hated was
+Vincent’s submission to it all. In her heart she would have been glad to
+see him breaking the rules, defying the doctors, and bullying his nurses.</p>
+
+<p>Before long a strong, silent antagonism grew up between her and the
+bright-eyed, cheerful nurse, Miss Gregory. It irritated Adelaide to gain
+access to her husband through other people’s consent; it irritated her to
+see the girl’s understanding of the case, and her competent arrangements
+for her patient’s comfort. If Vincent had showed any disposition to
+revolt, Adelaide would have pleaded with him to submit; but as it was,
+she watched his docility with a scornful eye.</p>
+
+<p>“That girl rules you with a rod of iron,” she said one day. But even then
+Vincent did not rouse himself.</p>
+
+<p>“She knows her business,” he said admiringly.</p>
+
+<p>To any other invalid Adelaide could have been a soothing visitor, could
+have adapted the quick turns of her mind to the relaxed attention of
+the sick; but, honestly enough, there seemed to her an impertinence,
+almost an insult, in treating Vincent in such a way. The result was
+that her visits were exhausting, and she knew it. And yet, she said to
+herself, he was ill, not insane; how could she conceal from him the
+happenings of every day? Vincent would be the last person to be
+grateful to her for that.</p>
+
+<p>She saw him one day grow pale; his eyes began to close. She had made up
+her mind to leave him when Miss Gregory came in, and with a quicker eye
+and a more active habit of mind, said at once:</p>
+
+<p>“I think Mr. Farron has had enough excitement for one day.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide smiled up at the girl almost insolently.</p>
+
+<p>“Is a visit from a wife an excitement?” she asked. Miss Gregory was
+perfectly grave.</p>
+
+<p>“The greatest,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide yielded to her own irritation.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” she said, “I shan’t stay much longer.”</p>
+
+<p>“It would be better if you went now, I think, Mrs. Farron.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide looked at Vincent. It was silly of him, she thought, to pretend
+he didn’t hear. She bent over him.</p>
+
+<p>“Your nurse is driving me away from you, dearest,” she murmured.</p>
+
+<p>He opened his eyes and took her hand.</p>
+
+<p>“Come back to-morrow early—as early as you can,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>She never remembered his siding against her before, and she swept out
+into the hallway, saying to herself that it was childish to be annoyed at
+the whims of an invalid.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Gregory had followed her.</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Farron,” she said, “do you mind my suggesting that for the present
+it would be better not to talk to Mr. Farron about anything that might
+worry him, even trifles?”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“You know very little of Mr. Farron,” she said, “if you think he worries
+over trifles.”</p>
+
+<p>“Any one worries over trifles when he is in a nervous state.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide passed by without answering, passed by as if she had not heard.
+The suggestion of Vincent nervously worrying over trifles was one of the
+most repellent pictures that had ever been presented to her imagination.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>The firm for which Wayne worked was young and small—Benson &amp; Honaton.
+They made a specialty of circularization in connection with the bond
+issues in which they were interested, and Wayne had charge of their
+“literature,” as they described it. He often felt, after he had finished
+a report, that his work deserved the title. A certain number of people in
+Wall Street disapproved of the firm’s methods. Sometimes Pete thought
+this was because, for a young firm, they had succeeded too quickly to
+please the more deliberate; but sometimes in darker moments he thought
+there might be some justice in the idea.</p>
+
+<p>During the weeks that Farron was in the hospital Pete, despite his
+constant availability to Mathilde, had been at work on his report on a
+coal property in Pennsylvania. He was extremely pleased with the
+thoroughness with which he had done the job. His report was not
+favorable. The day after it was finished, a little after three, he
+received word that the firm wanted to see him. He was always annoyed with
+himself that these messages caused his heart to beat a trifle faster. He
+couldn’t help associating them with former hours with his head-master or
+in the dean’s office. Only he had respected his head-master and even the
+dean, whereas he was not at all sure he respected Mr. Benson and he was
+quite sure he did not respect Mr. Honaton.</p>
+
+<p>He rose slowly from his desk, exchanging with the office boy who brought
+the message a long, severe look, under which something very comic lurked,
+though neither knew what.</p>
+
+<p>“And don’t miss J.B.’s socks,” said the boy.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Honaton—J.B.—was considered in his office a very beautiful dresser,
+as indeed in some ways he was. He was a tall young man, built like a
+greyhound, with a small, pointed head, a long waist, and a very long
+throat, from which, however, the strongest, loudest voice could issue
+when he so desired. This was his priceless asset. He was the board
+member, and generally admitted to be an excellent broker. It always
+seemed to Pete that he was a broker exactly as a beaver is a
+dam-builder, because nature had adapted him to that task. But outside of
+this one instinctive capacity he had no sense whatsoever. He rarely
+appeared in the office. He was met at the Broad Street entrance of the
+exchange at one minute to ten by a boy with the morning’s orders, and
+sometimes he came in for a few minutes after the closing; but usually by
+three-fifteen he had disappeared from financial circles, and was
+understood to be relaxing in the higher social spheres to which he
+belonged. So when Pete, entering Mr. Benson’s private office, saw Honaton
+leaning against the window-frame, with his hat-brim held against his
+thigh exactly like a fashion-plate, he knew that something of importance
+must be pending.</p>
+
+<p>Benson, the senior member, was a very different person. He looked like a
+fat, white, pugnacious cat. His hair, which had turned white early, had a
+tendency to grow in a bang; his arms were short—so short that when he
+put his hands on the arms of his swing-chair he hardly bent his elbows.
+He had them there now as Pete entered, and was swinging through short
+arcs in rather a nervous rhythm. He was of Irish parentage, and was
+understood to have political influence.</p>
+
+<p>“Wayne,” said Benson, “how would you like to go to China?”</p>
+
+<p>And Honaton repeated portentously, “China,” as if Benson might have made
+a mistake in the name of the country if he had not been at his elbow to
+correct him.</p>
+
+<p>Wayne laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” he said, “I have nothing against China.”</p>
+
+<p>Benson outlined the situation quickly. The firm had acquired property in
+China not entirely through their own choice, and they wanted a thorough,
+clear report on it; they knew of no one—<i>no one</i>, Benson emphasized—who
+could do that as impartially and as well as Wayne. They would pay him a
+good sum and his expenses. It would take him a year, perhaps a year and a
+half. They named the figure. It was one that made marriage possible. They
+talked of the situation and the property and the demand for copper until
+Honaton began to look at his watch, a flat platinum watch, perfectly
+plain, you might have thought, until you caught a glimpse of a narrow
+line of brilliants along its almost imperceptible rim. His usual working
+day was over in half an hour.</p>
+
+<p>“And when I come back, Mr. Benson?” said Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>“Your place will be open for you here.”</p>
+
+<p>There was a pause.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, what do you say?” said Honaton.</p>
+
+<p>“I feel very grateful for the offer,” said Pete, “but of course I can’t
+give you an answer now.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why not, why not?” returned Honaton, who felt that he had given up half
+an hour for nothing if the thing couldn’t be settled on the spot; and
+even Benson, Wayne noticed, began to glower.</p>
+
+<p>“You could probably give us as good an answer to-day as to-morrow,”
+he said.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing roused Pete’s spirit like feeling a tremor in his own soul, and
+so he now answered with great firmness:</p>
+
+<p>“I cannot give you an answer to-day <i>or</i> to-morrow.”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s all off, then, all off,” said Honaton, moving to the door.</p>
+
+<p>“When do the Chinese boats sail, Mr. Honaton?” said Pete, with the
+innocence of manner that an employee should use when putting his superior
+in a hole.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t see what difference that makes to you, Wayne, if you’re not
+taking them,” said Honaton, as if he were triumphantly concealing the
+fact that he didn’t know.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t feel you have to wait, Jack, if you’re in a hurry,” said his
+partner, and when the other had slid out of the office Benson turned to
+Wayne and went on: “You wouldn’t have to go until a week from Saturday.
+You would have to get off then, and we should have to know in time to
+find some one else in case you don’t care for it.”</p>
+
+<p>Pete asked for three days, and presently left the office.</p>
+
+<p>He had a friend, one of his mother’s reformed drunkards, who as janitor
+lived on the top floor of a tall building. He and his wife offered Wayne
+the hospitality of their balcony, and now and then, in moments like this,
+he availed himself of it. Not, indeed, that there had ever been a moment
+quite like this; for he knew that he was facing the most important
+decision he had ever been forced to make.</p>
+
+<p>In the elevator he met the janitor’s cat Susan going home after an
+afternoon visit to the restaurant on the sixteenth floor. The elevator
+boy loved to tell how she never made a mistake in the floor.</p>
+
+<p>“Do you think she’d get off at the fifteenth or the seventeenth? Not she.
+Sometimes she puts her nose out and smells at the other floors, but she
+won’t get off until I stop at the right one. Sometimes she has to ride up
+and down three or four times before any one wants the sixteenth. Eh,
+Susan?” he added in caressing tones; but Susan was watching the floors
+flash past and paid no attention until, arrived at the top, she and Pete
+stepped off together.</p>
+
+<p>It was a cool, clear day, for the wind was from the north, but on the
+southern balcony the sun was warm. Pete sat down in the kitchen-chair
+set for him, tilted back, and looked out over the Statue of Liberty,
+which stood like a stunted baby, to the blue Narrows. He saw one
+thing clearly, and that was that he would not go if Mathilde would not
+go with him.</p>
+
+<p>He envied people who could make up their minds by thinking. At least
+sometimes he envied them and sometimes he thought they lied. He could
+only think <i>about</i> a subject and wait for the unknown gods to bring him a
+decision. And this is what he now did, with his eyes fixed on the towers
+and tanks and tenements, on the pale winter sky, and, when he got up and
+leaned his elbows on the parapet, on the crowds that looked like a flood
+of purple insects in the streets.</p>
+
+<p>He thought of Mathilde’s youth and his own untried capacities for
+success, of poverty and children, of the probable opposition of
+Mathilde’s family and of a strange, sinister, disintegrating power he
+felt or suspected in Mrs. Farron. He felt that it was a terrible risk to
+ask a young girl to take and that it was almost an insult to be afraid to
+ask her to take it. That was what his mother had always said about these
+cherished, protected creatures: they were not prepared to meet any strain
+in life. He knew he would not have hesitated to ask a girl differently
+brought up. Ought he to ask Mathilde or ought he not even to hesitate
+about asking her? In his own future he had confidence. He had an unusual
+power of getting his facts together so that they meant something. In a
+small way his work was recognized. A report of his had some weight. He
+felt certain that if on his return he wanted another position he could
+get it unless he made a terrible fiasco in China. Should he consult any
+one? He knew beforehand what they would all think about it. Mr. Lanley
+would think that it was sheer impertinence to want to marry his
+granddaughter on less than fifteen thousand dollars a year; Mrs. Farron
+would think that there were lots of equally agreeable young men in the
+world who would not take a girl to China; and his mother, whom he could
+not help considering the wisest of the three, would think that Mathilde
+lacked discipline and strength of will for such an adventure. And on this
+he found he made up his mind. “After all,” he said to himself as he put
+the chair back against the wall, “everything else would be failure, and
+this may be success.”</p>
+
+<p>It was the afternoon that Farron was brought back from the hospital, and
+he and Mathilde were sure of having the drawing-room to themselves. He
+told her the situation slowly and with a great deal of detail,
+chronologically, introducing the Chinese trip at the very end. But she
+did not at once understand.</p>
+
+<p>“O Pete, you would not go away from me!” she said. “I could not
+face that.”</p>
+
+<p>“Couldn’t you? Remember that everything you say is going to be used
+against you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Would you be willing to go, Pete?”</p>
+
+<p>“Only if you will go with me.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh!” she clasped her hands to her breast, shrinking back to look at
+him. So that was what he had meant, this stranger whom she had known for
+such a short time. As she looked she half expected that he would smile,
+and say it was all a joke; but his eyes were steadily and seriously
+fixed on hers. It was very queer, she thought. Their meeting, their
+first kiss, their engagement, had all seemed so inevitable, so natural,
+there had not been a hint of doubt or decision about it; but now all of
+a sudden she found herself faced by a situation in which it was
+impossible to say yes or no.</p>
+
+<p>“It would be wonderful, of course,” she said, after a minute, but her
+tone showed she was not considering it as a possibility.</p>
+
+<p>Wayne’s heart sank; he saw that he had thought it possible that he would
+not allow her to go, but that he had never seriously faced the chance of
+her refusing.</p>
+
+<p>“Mathilde,” he said, “it’s far and sudden, and we shall be poor, and I
+can’t promise that I shall succeed more than other fellows; and yet
+against all that—”</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him.</p>
+
+<p>“You don’t think I care for those things? I don’t care if you succeed or
+fail, or live all your life in Siam.”</p>
+
+<p>“What is it, then?”</p>
+
+<p>“Pete, it’s my mother. She would never consent.”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne was aware of this, but, then, as he pointed out to Mathilde with
+great care, Mrs. Farron could not bear for her daughter the pain of
+separation.</p>
+
+<p>“Separation!” cried the girl, “But you just said you would not go if
+I did not.”</p>
+
+<p>“If you put your mother before me, mayn’t I put my profession
+before you?”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear, don’t speak in that tone.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, Mathilde,” he said, and he sprang up and stood looking down at her
+from a little distance, “this is the real test. We have thought we loved
+each other—”</p>
+
+<p>“Thought!” she interrupted.</p>
+
+<p>“But to get engaged with no immediate prospect of marriage, with all
+our families and friends grouped about, that doesn’t mean such a
+lot, does it?”</p>
+
+<p>“It does to me,” she answered almost proudly.</p>
+
+<p>“Now, one of us has to sacrifice something. I want to go on this
+expedition. I want to succeed. That may be egotism or legitimate
+ambition. I don’t know, but I want to go. I think I mean to go. Ought
+I to give it up because you are afraid of your mother?”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s love, not fear, Pete.”</p>
+
+<p>“You love me, too, you say.”</p>
+
+<p>“I feel an obligation to her.”</p>
+
+<p>“And, good Heavens! do you feel none to me?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, no. I love you too much to feel an obligation to you.”</p>
+
+<p>“But you love your mother <i>and</i> feel an obligation to her. Why, Mathilde,
+that feeling of obligation <i>is</i> love—love in its most serious form.
+That’s what you don’t feel for me. That’s why you won’t go.”</p>
+
+<p>“I haven’t said I wouldn’t go.”</p>
+
+<p>“You never even thought of going.”</p>
+
+<p>“I have, I do. But how can I help hesitating? You must know I want to
+go.”</p>
+
+<p>“I see very little sign of it,” he murmured. The interview had not gone
+as he intended. He had not meant, he never imagined, that he would
+attempt to urge and coerce her; but her very detachment seemed to set a
+fire burning within him.</p>
+
+<p>“I think,” he said with an effort to sound friendly, “that I had better
+go and let you think this over by yourself.”</p>
+
+<p>He was actually moving to the door when she sprang up and put her arms
+about him.</p>
+
+<p>“Weren’t you even going to kiss me, Pete?”</p>
+
+<p>He stooped, and touched her cheek with his lips.</p>
+
+<p>“Do you call that a kiss?”</p>
+
+<p>“O Mathilde, do you think any kiss will change the facts?” he answered,
+and was gone.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as he had left her the desire for tears left her, too. She felt
+calm and more herself, more an isolated, independent human being than
+ever before in her life. She thought of all the things she ought to have
+said to Pete. The reason why she felt no obligation to him was that she
+was one with him. She was prepared to sacrifice him exactly as she was,
+or ought to be, willing to sacrifice herself; whereas her mother—it
+seemed as if her mother’s power surrounded her in every direction, as
+solid as the ancients believed the dome of heaven.</p>
+
+<p>Pringle appeared in the doorway in his eternal hunt for the tea-things.</p>
+
+<p>“May I take the tray, miss?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>She nodded, hardly glancing at the untouched tea-table. Pringle, as he
+bent over it, observed that it was nice to have Mr. Farron back.
+Mathilde remembered that she, too, had once been interested in her
+stepfather’s return.</p>
+
+<p>“Where’s my mother, Pringle?”</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Farron’s in her room, I think, miss, and Mr. Lanley’s with her.”</p>
+
+<p>Lanley had stopped as usual to ask after his son-in-law. He found his
+daughter writing letters in her room. He thought her looking cross, but
+in deference to her recent anxieties he called it, even in his own mind,
+overstrained.</p>
+
+<p>“Vincent is doing very well, I believe,” she answered in response to his
+question. “He ought to be. He is in charge of two lovely young creatures
+hardly Mathilde’s age who have already taken complete control of the
+household.”</p>
+
+<p>“You’ve seen him, of course.”</p>
+
+<p>“For a few minutes; they allow me a few minutes. They communicate by
+secret signals when they think I have stayed long enough.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley never knew how to treat this mood of his daughter’s, which
+seemed to him as unreasonable as if it were emotional, and yet as cold as
+if it were logic itself. He changed the subject and said boldly:</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Baxter is coming to-morrow.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide’s eyes faintly flashed.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, wouldn’t you know it!” she murmured. “Just at the most inconvenient
+time—inconvenient for me, I mean. Really, lovers are the only people you
+can depend on. I wish I had a lover.”</p>
+
+<p>“Adelaide,” said her father with some sternness, “even in fun you should
+not say such a thing. If Mathilde heard you—”</p>
+
+<p>“Mathilde is the person who made me see it. Her boy is here all the
+time, trying to think of something to please her. And who have I?
+Vincent has his nurses; and you have your old upholstered lady. I can’t
+help wishing I had a lover. They are the only people who, as the Wayne
+boy would say, ‘stick around.’ But don’t worry, Papa, I have a loyal
+nature.” She was interrupted by a knock at the door, and a nurse—the
+same who had been too encouraging to please her at the hospital—put in
+her head and said brightly:</p>
+
+<p>“You may see Mr. Farron now, Mrs. Farron.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide turned to her father and made a little bow.</p>
+
+<p>“See how I am favored,” she said, and left him.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing of this mood was apparent when she entered her husband’s room,
+though she noticed that the arrangement of the furniture had been
+changed, and, what she disliked even more, that they had brushed his hair
+in a new way. This, with his pallor and thinness, made him look strange
+to her. She bent over, and laid her cheek to his almost motionless lips.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, dear,” she said, “have you seen the church-warden part they have
+given your hair?”</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head impatiently, and she saw she had made the mistake of
+trying to give the tone to an interview in which she was not the leading
+character.</p>
+
+<p>“Who has the room above mine, Adelaide?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“My maid.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ask her not to practice the fox-trot, will you?”</p>
+
+<p>“O Vincent, she is never there.”</p>
+
+<p>“My mistake,” he answered, and shut his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>She repented at once.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course I’ll tell her. I’m sorry that you were disturbed.” But she
+was thinking only of his tone. He was not an irritable man, and he had
+never used such a tone to her before. All pleasure in the interview was
+over. She was actually glad when one of the nurses came in and began to
+move about the room in a manner that suggested dismissal.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course I’m not angry,” she said to herself. “He’s so weak one must
+humor him like a child.”</p>
+
+<p>She derived some satisfaction, however, from the idea of sending for her
+maid Lucie and making her uncomfortable; but on her way she met Mathilde
+in the hall.</p>
+
+<p>“May I speak to you, Mama?” she said.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Farron laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“May you speak to me?” she said. “Why, yes; you may have the unusual
+privilege. What is it?”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde followed her mother into the bedroom and shut the door.</p>
+
+<p>“Pete has just been here. He has been offered a position in China.”</p>
+
+<p>“In China?” said Mrs. Farron. This was the first piece of luck that had
+come to her in a long time, but she did not betray the least pleasure. “I
+hope it is a good one.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, he thinks it good. He sails in two weeks.”</p>
+
+<p>“In two weeks?” And this time she could not prevent her eye lighting a
+little. She thought how nicely that small complication had settled
+itself, and how clever she had been to have the mother to dinner and
+behave as if she were friendly. She did not notice that her daughter was
+trembling; she couldn’t, of course, be expected to know that the girl’s
+hands were like ice, and that she had waited several seconds to steady
+her voice sufficiently to pronounce the fatal sentence:</p>
+
+<p>“He wants me to go with him, Mama.”</p>
+
+<p>She watched her mother in an agony for the effect of these words.
+Mrs. Farron had suddenly detected a new burn in the hearth-rug. She
+bent over it.</p>
+
+<p>“This wood does snap so!” she murmured.</p>
+
+<p>The rug was a beautiful old Persian carpet of roses and urns.</p>
+
+<p>“Did you understand what I said, Mama?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, dear; that Mr. Wayne was going to China in two weeks and wanted you
+to go, too. Was it just a <i>politesse</i>, or does he actually imagine that
+you could?”</p>
+
+<p>“He thinks I can.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Farron laughed good-temperedly.</p>
+
+<p>“Did you go and see about having your pink silk shortened?” she said.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde stared at her mother, and in the momentary silence Lucie came in
+and asked what madame wanted for the evening, and Adelaide in her fluent
+French began explaining that what she really desired most was that Lucie
+should not make so much noise in her room that monsieur could not sleep.
+In the midst of it she stopped and turned to her daughter.</p>
+
+<p>“Won’t you be late for dinner, darling?” she said.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde thought it very possible, and went away to get dressed. She went
+into her own room and shut the door sharply behind her.</p>
+
+<p>All the time she was dressing she tried to rehearse her case—that it
+was her life, her love, her chance; but all the time she had a sickening
+sense that a lifted eye-brow of her mother’s would make it sound childish
+and absurd even in her own ears. She had counted on a long evening, but
+when she went down-stairs she found three or four friends of her mother’s
+were to dine and go to the theater. The dinner was amusing, the talk,
+though avowedly hampered by the presence of Mathilde, was witty and
+unexpected enough; but Mathilde was not amused by it, for she
+particularly dreaded her mother in such a mood of ruthless gaiety. At the
+theater they were extremely critical, and though they missed almost the
+whole first act, appeared, in the entr’acte, to feel no hesitation in
+condemning it. They spoke of French and Italian actors by name, laughed
+heartily over the playwright’s conception of social usages, and made
+Mathilde feel as if her own unacknowledged enjoyment of the play was the
+guiltiest of secrets.</p>
+
+<p>As they drove home, she was again alone with her mother, and she said at
+once the sentence she had determined on:</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t think you understood, Mama, how seriously I meant what I said
+this afternoon.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Farron was bending her long-waisted figure forward to get a good
+look at a picture which, small, lonely, and brightly lighted, hung in a
+picture-dealer’s window. It was a picture of an empty room. Hot summer
+sunlight filtered through the lowered Venetian blinds, and fell in bands
+on the golden wood of the floor. Outside the air was burned and dusty,
+but inside the room all was clear, cool, and pure.</p>
+
+<p>“How perfect his things are,” murmured Mrs. Farron to herself, and then
+added to her daughter: “Yes, my dear, I did take in what you said. You
+really think you are in love with this Wayne boy, don’t you? It’s
+immensely to your credit, darling,” she went on, her tone taking on a
+flattering sweetness, “to care so much about any one who has such funny,
+stubby little hands—most unattractive hands,” she added almost dreamily.</p>
+
+<p>There was a long pause during which an extraordinary thing happened to
+Mathilde. She found that it didn’t make the very slightest difference to
+her what her mother thought of Pete or his hands, that it would never
+make any difference to her again. It was as if her will had suddenly
+been born, and the first act of that will was to decide to go with the
+man she loved. How could she have doubted for an instant? It was so
+simple, and no opposition would or could mean anything to her. She was
+not in the least angry; on the contrary, she felt extremely pitiful, as
+if she were saying good-by to some one who did not know she was going
+away, as if in a sense she had now parted from her mother forever. Tears
+came into her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, Mama!” she said like a sigh.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Farron felt she had been cruel, but without regretting it; for that,
+she thought, was often a parent’s duty.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Mathilde. The boy is a nice enough
+little person, but really I could not let you set off for China at a
+minute’s notice with any broker’s clerk who happened to fall in love with
+your golden hair. When you have a little more experience you will
+discriminate between the men you like to have love you and the men there
+is the smallest chance of your loving. I assure you, if little Wayne were
+not in love with you, you would think him a perfectly commonplace boy. If
+one of your friends were engaged to him, you would be the first to say
+that you wondered what it was she saw in him. That isn’t the way one
+wants people to feel about one’s husband, is it? And as to going to China
+with him, you know that’s impossible, don’t you?”</p>
+
+<p>“It would be impossible to let him go without me.”</p>
+
+<p>“Really, Mathilde!” said Mrs. Farron, gently, as if she, so willing to
+play fair, were being put off with fantasies. “I don’t understand you,”
+she added.</p>
+
+<p>“No, Mama; you don’t.”</p>
+
+<p>The motor stopped at the door, and they went in silence to Mrs. Farron’s
+room, where for a bitter hour they talked, neither yielding an inch. At
+last Adelaide sent the girl to bed. Mathilde was aware of profound
+physical exhaustion, and yet underneath there was a high knowledge of
+something unbreakable within her.</p>
+
+<p>Left alone, Adelaide turned instinctively toward her husband’s door.
+There were her strength and vision. Then she remembered, and drew back;
+but presently, hearing a stir there, she knocked very softly. A nurse
+appeared on the instant.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, <i>please</i>, Mrs. Farron! Mr. Farron has just got to sleep.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide stood alone in the middle of the floor. Once again, she thought,
+in a crisis of her life she had no one to depend on but herself. She
+lifted her shoulders. No one was to blame, but there the fact was. They
+urged you to cling and be guided, but when the pinch came, you had to act
+for yourself. She had learned her lesson now. Henceforward she took her
+own life over into her own hands.</p>
+
+<p>She reviewed her past dependences. Her youth, with its dependence on her
+father, particularly in matters of dress. She recalled her early
+photographs with a shudder. Had she really dressed so badly or was it
+only the change of fashion? And then her dependence on Joe Severance.
+What could be more ridiculous than for a woman of her intelligence to
+allow herself to be guided in everything by a man like Joe, who had
+nothing himself but a certain shrewd masculinity? And now Vincent. She
+was still under the spell of his superiority, but perhaps she would come
+to judge him too. She had learned much from him. Perhaps she had learned
+all he had to teach her. Her face looked as if it were carved out of some
+smooth white stone.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_X">CHAPTER X</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>After she had gone up-stairs, Mathilde went down again to telephone Pete
+that she had made her decision. She went boldly snapping electric
+switches, for her going was a sort of assertion of her right to
+independent action. She would have hesitated even less if she had known
+how welcome her news was, how he had suffered since their parting.</p>
+
+<p>On going home from his interview with her, he found his mother dressing
+to dine with Mr. Lanley, a party arranged before the unexpected arrival
+of Mrs. Baxter. The only part of dressing that delayed Mrs. Wayne was her
+hair, which was so long that the brushing of it took time. In this
+process she was engaged when her son, in response to her answer, came
+into her room.</p>
+
+<p>“How is Mr. Farron?” she asked at once, and he, rather touched at the
+genuineness of her interest, answered her in detail before her next
+exclamation betrayed that it was entirely for the employer of Marty
+Burke that she was solicitous. “Isn’t it too bad he was taken ill just
+now?” she said.</p>
+
+<p>The bitterness and doubt from which Wayne was suffering were not emotions
+that disposed him to confidence. He did not want to tell his mother what
+he was going through, for the obvious and perhaps unworthy reason that it
+was just what she would have expected him to go through. At the same time
+a real deceit was involved in concealing it, and so, tipping his chair
+back against her wall, he said:</p>
+
+<p>“The firm has asked me to go to China for them.”</p>
+
+<p>His mother turned, her whole face lit up with interest.</p>
+
+<p>“To China! How interesting!” she said. “China is a wonderful country. How
+I should like to go to China!”</p>
+
+<p>“Come along. I don’t start for two weeks.”</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>“No, if you go, I’ll make a trip to that hypnotic clinic of Dr.
+Platerbridge’s; and if I can learn the trick, I will open one here.”</p>
+
+<p>The idea crossed Wayne’s mind that perhaps he had not the power of
+inspiring affection.</p>
+
+<p>“You don’t miss people a bit, do you, Mother?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Pete, I do; only there is so much to be done. What does Mathilde
+say to you going off like this? How long will you be gone?”</p>
+
+<p>“More than a year.”</p>
+
+<p>“Pete, how awful for her!”</p>
+
+<p>“There is nothing to prevent her going with me.”</p>
+
+<p>“You couldn’t take that child to China.”</p>
+
+<p>“You may be glad to know that she is cordially of your opinion.”</p>
+
+<p>The feeling behind his tone at last attracted his mother’s full
+attention.</p>
+
+<p>“But, my dear boy,” she said gently, “she has never been anywhere in her
+life without a maid. She probably doesn’t know how to do her hair or mend
+her clothes or anything practical.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mother dear, you are not so awfully practical yourself,” he answered;
+“but you would have gone.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne looked impish.</p>
+
+<p>“I always loved that sort of thing,” she said; and then, becoming more
+maternal, she added, “and that doesn’t mean it would be sensible because
+I’d do it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,”—Wayne stood up preparatory to leaving the room,—“I mean to take
+her if she’ll go.”</p>
+
+<p>His mother, who had now finished winding her braid very neatly around her
+head, sank into a chair.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, dear!” she said, “I almost wish I weren’t dining with Mr. Lanley.
+He’ll think it’s all my fault.”</p>
+
+<p>“I doubt if he knows about it.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne’s eyes twinkled.</p>
+
+<p>“May I tell him? I should like to see his face.”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell him I am going, if you like. Don’t say I want to take her with me.”</p>
+
+<p>Her face fell.</p>
+
+<p>“That wouldn’t be much fun,” she answered, “because I suppose the truth
+is they won’t be sorry to have you out of the way.”</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose not,” he said, and shut the door behind him. He could not
+truthfully say that his mother had been much of a comfort. He had
+suddenly thought that he would go down to the first floor and get Lily
+Parret to go to the theater with him. He and she had the warm friendship
+for each other of two handsome, healthy young people of opposite sexes
+who might have everything to give each other except time. She was
+perhaps ten years older than he, extremely handsome, with dimples and
+dark red hair and blue eyes. She had a large practice among the poor,
+and might have made a conspicuous success of her profession if it had
+not been for her intense and too widely diffused interest. She wanted to
+strike a blow at every abuse that came to her attention, and as, in the
+course of her work, a great many turned up, she was always striking
+blows and never following them up. She went through life in a series of
+springs, each one in a different direction; but the motion of her
+attack was as splendid as that of a tiger. Often she was successful, and
+always she enjoyed herself.</p>
+
+<p>When she answered Pete’s ring, and he looked up at her magnificent
+height, her dimples appeared in welcome. She really was glad to see him.</p>
+
+<p>“Come out and dine with me, Lily, and go to the theater.”</p>
+
+<p>“Come to a meeting at Cooper Union on capital punishment. I’m going to
+speak, and I’m going to be very good.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, Lily; I want to explain to you what a pitiable sex you belong to.
+You have no character, no will—”</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head, laughing.</p>
+
+<p>“You are a personal lot, you young men,” she said. “You change your mind
+about women every day, according to how one of them treats you.”</p>
+
+<p>“They don’t amount to a row of pins, Lily.”</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly some men select that kind, Pete.”</p>
+
+<p>“O Lily,” he answered, “don’t talk to me like that! I want some one to
+tell me I’m perfect, and, strangely enough, no one will.”</p>
+
+<p>“I will,” she answered, with beaming good nature, “and I pretty near
+think so, too. But I can’t dine with you, Pete. Wouldn’t you like to go
+to my meeting?”</p>
+
+<p>“I should perfectly hate to,” he answered, and went off crossly, to
+dine at his college’s local club. Here he found an old friend, who most
+fortunately said something derogatory of the firm of Benson &amp; Honaton.
+The opinion coincided with certain phases of Wayne’s own views, but he
+contradicted it, held it up to ridicule, and ended by quoting incidents
+in the history of his friend’s own firm which, as he said, were
+probably among the crookedest things that had ever been put over in
+Wall Street. Lily would not have distracted his mind more completely.
+He felt almost cheerful when he went home about ten o’clock. His mother
+was still out, and there was no letter from Mathilde. He had been
+counting on finding one.</p>
+
+<p>Before long his mother came in. She was looking very fine. She had on a
+new gray dress that she had had made for her by a fallen woman from an
+asylum, but which had turned out better than such ventures of Mrs.
+Wayne’s usually did.</p>
+
+<p>She had supposed she and Mr. Lanley were to dine alone, an idea which
+had not struck her as revolutionary. Accustomed to strange meals in
+strange company—a bowl of milk with a prison chaplain at a dairy
+lunch-room, or even, on one occasion, a supper in an Owl Lunch Wagon with
+a wavering drunkard,—she had thought that a quiet, perfect dinner with
+Mr. Lanley sounded pleasant enough. But she was not sorry to find it had
+been enlarged. She liked to meet new people. She was extremely
+optimistic, and always hoped that they would prove either spiritually
+rewarding, or practically useful to some of her projects. When she saw
+Mrs. Baxter, with her jetty hair, jeweled collar, and eyes a trifle too
+saurian for perfect beauty, she at once saw a subscription to the
+working-girl’s club. The fourth person Mr. Wilsey, Lanley’s lawyer, she
+knew well by reputation. She wondered if she could make him see that his
+position on the eight-hour law was absolutely anti-social.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley enjoyed a small triumph when she entered. He had been so
+discreet in his description of her to Mrs. Baxter, he had been so careful
+not to hint that she was an illuminating personality who had suddenly
+come into his life, that he knew he had left his old friend with the
+general impression that Mrs. Wayne was merely the mother of an
+undesirable suitor of Mathilde’s who spent most of her life in the
+company of drunkards. So when she came in, a little late as usual, in her
+long, soft, gray dress, with a pink rose at her girdle, looking far more
+feminine than Mrs. Baxter, about whom Adelaide’s offensive adjective
+“upholstered” still clung, he felt the full effect of her appearance. He
+even enjoyed the obviously suspicious glance which Mrs. Baxter
+immediately afterward turned upon him.</p>
+
+<p>At dinner things began well. They talked about people and events of which
+Mrs. Wayne knew nothing, but her interest and good temper made her not an
+outsider, but an audience. Anecdotes which even Mr. Lanley might have
+felt were trivial gossip became, through her attention to them, incidents
+of the highest human interest. Such an uncritical interest was perhaps
+too stimulating.</p>
+
+<p>He expected nothing dangerous when, during the game course, Mrs. Baxter
+turned to him and asked how Mathilde had enjoyed what she referred to as
+“her first winter.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley liked to talk about Mathilde. He described, with a little
+natural exaggeration, how much she had enjoyed herself and how popular
+she had been.</p>
+
+<p>“I hope she hasn’t been bitten by any of those modern notions,” said
+Mrs. Baxter.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Wilsey broke in.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, these modern, restless young women!” he said. “They don’t seem able
+to find their natural contentment in their own homes. My daughter came to
+me the other day with a wonderful scheme of working all day long with
+charity organizations. I said to her, ‘My dear, charity begins at home.’
+My wife, Mrs. Baxter, is an old-fashioned housekeeper. She gives out all
+supplies used in my house; she knows where the servants are at every
+minute of the day, and we have nine. She—”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, how is dear Mrs. Wilsey?” said Mrs. Baxter, perhaps not eager for
+the full list of her activities.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, at present she is in a sanatorium,” replied her husband, “from
+overwork, just plain overwork.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley, catching Mrs. Wayne’s twinkling eye, could only pray that
+she would not point out that a sojourn in a sanatorium was not
+complete contentment in the home; but before she had a chance, Mrs.
+Baxter had gone on.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s so like the modern girl—anything but her obvious duty. She’ll
+help any one but her mother and work anywhere but in the home. We’ve had
+a very painful case at home lately. One of our most charming young girls
+has suddenly developed an absolutely morbid curiosity about the things
+that take place in the women’s courts. Why, as her poor father said to
+me, ‘Mrs. Baxter, old as I am, I hear things in those courts so shocking
+I have hard work forgetting them; and yet Imogen wants me to let her go
+into those courts day after day—’”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, that’s abnormal, almost perverted,” said Mr. Wilsey, judicially.
+“The women’s courts are places where no—” he hesitated a bare instant,
+and Mrs. Wayne asked:</p>
+
+<p>“No woman should go?”</p>
+
+<p>“No girl should go.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yet many of the girls who come there are under sixteen.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Wilsey hid a slight annoyance under a manner peculiarly bland.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, dear lady,” he said, “you must forgive my saying that that remark is
+a trifle irrelevant.”</p>
+
+<p>“Is it?” she asked, meaning him to answer her; but he only looked
+benevolently at her, and turned to listen to Mrs. Baxter, who was saying:</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, everywhere we look nowadays we see women rushing into things they
+don’t understand, and of course we all know what women are—”</p>
+
+<p>“What are they?” asked Mrs. Wayne, and Lanley’s heart sank.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, emotional and inaccurate and untrustworthy and spiteful.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Baxter, I’m sure you’re not like that.”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear Madam!” exclaimed Wilsey.</p>
+
+<p>“But isn’t that logical?” Mrs. Wayne pursued. “If all women are so, and
+she’s a woman?”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, logic, dear lady,” said Wilsey, holding up a finger—“logic, you
+know, has never been the specialty of your sex.”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course it’s logic,” said Lanley, crossly. “If you say all Americans
+are liars, Wilsey, and you’re an American, the logical inference is that
+you think yourself a liar. But Mrs. Baxter doesn’t mean that she thinks
+all women are inferior—”</p>
+
+<p>“I must say I prefer men,” she answered almost coquettishly.</p>
+
+<p>“If all women were like you, Mrs. Baxter, I’d believe in giving them the
+vote,” said Wilsey.</p>
+
+<p>“Please don’t,” she answered. “I don’t want it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, the clever ones don’t.”</p>
+
+<p>“I never pretended to be clever.”</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps not; but I’d trust your intuition where I would pay no attention
+to a clever person.”</p>
+
+<p>Lanley laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“I think you’d better express that a little differently, Wilsey,” he
+said; but his legal adviser did not notice him.</p>
+
+<p>“My daughter came to me the other day,” he went on to Mrs. Baxter, “and
+said, ‘Father, don’t you think women ought to have the vote some day?’
+and I said, ‘Yes, my dear, just as soon as men have the babies.’”</p>
+
+<p>“There’s no answer to that,” said Mrs. Baxter.</p>
+
+<p>“I fancy not,” said Wilsey. “I think I put the essence of it in that
+sentence.”</p>
+
+<p>“If ever women get into power in this country, I shall live abroad.”</p>
+
+<p>“O Mrs. Baxter,” said Mrs. Wayne, “really you don’t understand women—”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t? Why, Mrs. Wayne, I am a woman.”</p>
+
+<p>“All human beings are spiteful and inaccurate and all those things you
+said; but that isn’t <i>all</i> they are. The women I see, the wives of my
+poor drunkards are so wonderful, so patient. They are mothers and
+wage-earners and sick nurses, too; they’re not the sort of women you
+describe. Perhaps,” she added, with one of her fatal impulses toward
+concession, “perhaps your friends are untrustworthy and spiteful, as
+you say—”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Baxter drew herself up. “My friends, Mrs. Wayne,” she said—“my
+friends, I think, will compare favorably even with the wives of your
+drunkards.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley rose to his feet.</p>
+
+<p>“Shall we go up-stairs?” he said. Mr. Wilsey offered Mrs. Baxter his
+arm. “An admirable answer that of yours,” he murmured as he led her from
+the room, “admirable snub to her perfectly unwarranted attack on you and
+your friends.”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course you realize that she doesn’t know any of the people I know,”
+said Mrs. Baxter. “Why should she begin to abuse them?”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Wilsey laughed, and shook his finger.</p>
+
+<p>“Just because she doesn’t know them. That, I’m afraid, is the rub. That’s
+what I usually find lies behind the socialism of socialists—the sense of
+being excluded. This poor lady has evidently very little <i>usage du
+monde</i>. It is her pitiful little protest, dear Madam, against your charm,
+your background, your grand manner.”</p>
+
+<p>They sank upon an ample sofa near the fire, and though the other end of
+the large room was chilly, Lanley and Mrs. Wayne moved thither with a
+common impulse.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne turned almost tearfully to Lanley.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m so sorry I’ve spoiled your party,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“You’ve done much worse than that,” he returned gravely.</p>
+
+<p>“O Mr. Lanley,” she wailed, “what have I done?”</p>
+
+<p>“You’ve spoiled a friendship.”</p>
+
+<p>“Between you and me?”</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“Between them and me. I never heard people talk such nonsense, and yet
+I’ve been hearing people talk like that all my life, and have never taken
+it in. Mrs. Wayne, I want you to tell me something frankly—”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I’m so terrible when I’m frank,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“Do I talk like that?”</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him and looked away again.</p>
+
+<p>“Good God! you think I do!”</p>
+
+<p>“No, you don’t talk like that often, but I think you feel that way a
+good deal.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t want to,” he answered. “I’m sixty-four, but I don’t ever want to
+talk like Wilsey. Won’t you stop me whenever I do?”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne sighed.</p>
+
+<p>“It will make you angry.”</p>
+
+<p>“And if it does?”</p>
+
+<p>“I hate to make people angry. I was distressed that evening on the pier.”</p>
+
+<p>He looked up, startled.</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose I talked like Wilsey that night?”</p>
+
+<p>“You said you might be old-fashioned but—”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t, please, tell me what I said, Mrs. Wayne.” He went on more
+seriously: “I’ve got to an age when I can’t expect great happiness from
+life—just a continuance of fairly satisfactory outside conditions; but
+since I’ve known you, I’ve felt a lightening, a brightening, an
+intensifying of my own inner life that I believe comes as near happiness
+as anything I’ve ever felt, and I don’t want to lose it on account of a
+reactionary old couple like that on the sofa over there.”</p>
+
+<p>He dreaded being left alone with the reactionary old couple when
+presently Mrs. Wayne, very well pleased with her evening, took her
+departure. He assisted her into her taxi, and as he came upstairs with a
+buoyant step, he wished it were not ridiculous at his age to feel so
+light-hearted.</p>
+
+<p>He saw that his absence had given his guests an instant of freer
+criticism, for they were tucking away smiles as he entered.</p>
+
+<p>“A very unusual type, is she not, our friend, Mrs. Wayne?” said Wilsey.</p>
+
+<p>“A little bit of a reformer, I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Baxter.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t be too hard on her,” answered Lanley.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, very charming, very charming,” put in Wilsey, feeling, perhaps, that
+Mrs. Baxter had been severe; “but the poor lady’s mind is evidently
+seething with a good many undigested ideas.”</p>
+
+<p>“You should have pointed out the flaws in her reasoning, Wilsey,”
+said his host.</p>
+
+<p>“Argue with a woman, Lanley!” Mr. Wilsey held up his hand in protest.
+“No, no, I never argue with a woman. They take it so personally.”</p>
+
+<p>“I think we had an example of that this evening,” said Mrs. Baxter.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, indeed,” the lawyer went on. “See how the dear lady missed the
+point, and became so illogical and excited under our little discussion.”</p>
+
+<p>“Funny,” said Lanley. “I got just the opposite impression.”</p>
+
+<p>“Opposite?”</p>
+
+<p>“I thought it was you who missed the point, Wilsey.”</p>
+
+<p>He saw how deeply he had betrayed himself as the others exchanged a
+startled glance. It was Mrs. Baxter who thought of the correct reply.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Were</i> there any points?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>Wilsey shook his finger.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, don’t be cruel!” he said, and held out his hand to say good night;
+but Lanley was smoking, with his head tilted up and his eyes on the
+ceiling. What he was thinking was, “It isn’t good for an old man to get
+as angry as I am.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good night, Lanley; a delightful evening.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley’s chin came down.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, good night, Wilsey; glad you found it so.”</p>
+
+<p>When he was gone, Mrs. Baxter observed that he was a most agreeable
+companion.</p>
+
+<p>“So witty, so amiable, and, for a leader at the bar, he has an
+extraordinarily light touch.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley had resumed his position on the hearth-rug and his
+contemplation of the ceiling.</p>
+
+<p>“Wilsey’s not a leader at the bar,” he said, with open crossness.</p>
+
+<p>He showed no disposition to sit and chat over the events of the evening.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER XI</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Early the next morning, in Mrs. Baxter’s parlance,—that is to say, some
+little time before the sun had reached the meridian,—she was ringing
+Adelaide’s door-bell, while she minutely observed the curtains, the
+door-mat, the ivy plants in the vestibule, and the brightness of the
+brass knobs on the railing. In this she had a double motive: what was
+evil she would criticize, what was good she would copy.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide was sitting with her husband when her visitor’s name was brought
+up. Since she had discovered that she was to be nothing but a sort of
+super-nurse to him, she found herself expert at rendering such service.
+She had brought in his favorite flowers, chosen a book for his bedside,
+and now sat gossiping beside him, not bringing him, as she said to
+herself, any of her real troubles; that would not be good for him. How
+extraordinarily easy it was to conceal, she thought. She heard her own
+tones, as gay and intimate as ever, as satisfactory to Vincent; and yet
+all the time her mind was working apart on her anxieties about
+Mathilde—anxieties with which, of course, one couldn’t bother a poor
+sick creature. She smoothed his pillow with the utmost tenderness.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Pringle,” she said, in answer to his announcement that Mrs. Baxter
+was down-stairs, “you haven’t let her in?”</p>
+
+<p>“She’s in the drawing-room, Madam.” And Pringle added as a clear
+indication of what he considered her duty, “She came in Mr. Lanley’s
+motor.”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course she did. Well, say I’ll be down,” and as Pringle went away
+with this encouraging intelligence, Adelaide sank even farther back in
+her chair and looked at her husband. “What I am called upon to sacrifice
+to other people’s love affairs! The Waynes and Mrs. Baxter—I never have
+time for my own friends. I don’t mind Mrs. Baxter when you’re well, and I
+can have a dinner; I ask all the stupid people together to whom I owe
+parties, and she is so pleased with them, and thinks they represent the
+most brilliant New York circle; but to have to go down and actually talk
+to her, isn’t that hard, Vin?”</p>
+
+<p>“Hard on me,” said Farron.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I shall come back—exhausted.”</p>
+
+<p>“By what you have given out?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, but by her intense intimacy. You have no idea how well she knows me.
+It’s Adelaide this and Adelaide that and ‘the last time you stayed with
+me in Baltimore.’ You know, Vin, I never stayed with her but once, and
+that only because she found me in the hotel and kidnapped me.
+However,”—Adelaide stood up with determination,—“one good thing is, I
+have begun to have an effect on my father. He does not like her any more.
+He was distinctly bored at the prospect of her visit this time. He did
+not resent it at all when I called her an upholstered old lady. I really
+think,” she added, with modest justice, “that I am rather good at
+poisoning people’s minds against their undesirable friends.” She paused,
+debating how long it would take her to separate Mathilde from the Wayne
+boy; and recalling that this was no topic for an invalid, she smiled at
+him and went down-stairs.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear Adelaide!” said Mrs. Baxter, enveloping her in a powdery
+caress.</p>
+
+<p>“How wonderfully you’re looking, Mrs. Baxter,” said Adelaide, choosing
+her adverb with intention.</p>
+
+<p>“Now tell me, dear,” said Mrs. Baxter, with a wave of a gloved hand,
+“what are those Italian embroideries?”</p>
+
+<p>“Those?” Adelaide lifted her eyebrows. “Ah, you’re in fun! A collector
+like you! Surely you know what those are.”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” answered Mrs. Baxter, firmly, though she wished she had selected
+something else to comment on.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, they are the Villanelli embroideries,” said Adelaide, carelessly,
+very much as if she had said they were the Raphael cartoons, so that Mrs.
+Baxter was forced to reply in an awestruck tone:</p>
+
+<p>“You don’t tell me! Are they, really?”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide nodded brightly. She had not actually made up the name. It
+was that of an obscure little palace where she had bought the
+hangings, and if Mrs. Baxter had had the courage to acknowledge
+ignorance, Adelaide would have told the truth. As it was, she
+recognized that by methods such as this she could retain absolute
+control over people like Mrs. Baxter.</p>
+
+<p>The lady from Baltimore decided on a more general scope.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, your room!” she said. “Do you know whose it always reminds me
+of—that lovely salon of Madame de Liantour’s?”</p>
+
+<p>“What, of poor little Henrietta’s!” cried Adelaide, and she laid her hand
+appealingly for an instant on Mrs. Baxter’s knee. “That’s a cruel thing
+to say. All her good things, you know, were sold years ago. Everything
+she has is a reproduction. Am I really like her?”</p>
+
+<p>Getting out of this as best she could on a vague statement about
+atmosphere and sunshine and charm, Mrs. Baxter took refuge in inquiries
+about Vincent’s health, “your charming child,” and “your dear father.”</p>
+
+<p>“You know more about my dear father than I do,” returned Adelaide,
+sweetly. It was Mrs. Baxter’s cue.</p>
+
+<p>“I did not feel last evening that I knew anything about him at all. He
+is in a new phase, almost a new personality. Tell me, who is this
+Mrs. Wayne?”</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Wayne?” Mrs. Baxter must have felt herself revenged by the complete
+surprise of Adelaide’s tone.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, she dined at the house last evening. Apparently it was to have been
+a tête-à-tête dinner, but my arrival changed it to a <i>partie carrée</i>.”
+She talked on about Wilsey and the conversation of the evening, but it
+made little difference what she said, for her full idea had reached
+Adelaide from the start, and had gathered to itself in an instant a
+hundred confirmatory memories. Like a picture, she saw before her Mrs.
+Wayne’s sitting-room, with the ink-spots on the rug. Who would not wish
+to exchange that for Mr. Lanley’s series of fresh, beautiful rooms?
+Suddenly she gave her attention back to Mrs. Baxter, who was saying:</p>
+
+<p>“I assure you, when we were alone I was prepared for a formal
+announcement.”</p>
+
+<p>It was not safe to be the bearer of ill tidings to Adelaide.</p>
+
+<p>“An announcement?” she said wonderingly. “Oh, no, Mrs. Baxter, my father
+will never marry again. There have always been rumors, and you can’t
+imagine how he and I have laughed over them together.”</p>
+
+<p>As the indisputable subject of such rumors in past times, Mrs. Baxter
+fitted a little arrow in her bow.</p>
+
+<p>“In the past,” she said, “women of suitable age have not perhaps been
+willing to consider the question, but this lady seems to me
+distinctly willing.”</p>
+
+<p>“More than willingness on the lady’s part has been needed,” answered
+Adelaide, and then Pringle’s ample form appeared in the doorway. “There’s
+a man from the office here, Madam, asking to see Mr. Farron.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Farron can see no one.” A sudden light flashed upon her. “What is
+his name, Pringle?”</p>
+
+<p>“Burke, Madam.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, let him come in.” Adelaide turned to Mrs. Baxter. “I will show
+you,” she said, “one of the finest sights you ever saw.” The next
+instant Marty was in the room. Not so gorgeous as in his
+wedding-attire, he was still an exceedingly fine young animal. He was
+not so magnificently defiant as before, but he scowled at his
+unaccustomed surroundings under his dark brows.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s Mr. Farron I wanted to see,” he said, a soft roll to his r’s. At
+Mrs. Wayne’s Adelaide had suffered from being out of her own
+surroundings, but here she was on her own field, and she meant to make
+Burke feel it. She was leaning with her elbow on the back of the sofa,
+and now she slipped her bright rings down her slim fingers and shook them
+back again as she looked up at Burke and spoke to him as she would have
+done to a servant.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Farron cannot see you.”</p>
+
+<p>Cleverer people than Burke had struggled vainly against the poison of
+inferiority which this tone instilled into their minds.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s what they keep telling me down-town. I never knew him sick
+before.”</p>
+
+<p>“No?”</p>
+
+<p>“It wouldn’t take five minutes.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Farron is too weak to see you.”</p>
+
+<p>Marty made a strange grating sound in his throat, and Adelaide asked
+like a queen bending from the throne:</p>
+
+<p>“What seems to be the matter, Burke?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why,”—Burke turned upon her the flare of his light, fierce eyes,—“they
+have it on me on the dock that as soon as he comes back he means to
+bounce me.”</p>
+
+<p>“To bounce you,” repeated Adelaide, and she almost smiled as she thought
+of that poor exhausted figure up-stairs.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t care if he does or not,” Marty went on. “I’m not so damned stuck
+on the job. There’s others.”</p>
+
+<p>“There are maidens in Scotland more lovely by far,” murmured Adelaide.</p>
+
+<p>Again he scowled, feeling the approach of something hostile to him.</p>
+
+<p>“What’s that?” he asked, surmising that she was insulting him.</p>
+
+<p>“I said I supposed you could get a better job if you tried.”</p>
+
+<p>He did not like this tone either.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, whether I could or not,” he said, “this is no way. I’m losing my
+hold of my men.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I can’t imagine your doing that, Burke.”</p>
+
+<p>He turned on her to see if she were really daring to laugh at him, and
+met an eye as steady as his own.</p>
+
+<p>“I guess I’m wasting my time here,” he said, and something intimated that
+some one would pay for that expenditure.</p>
+
+<p>“Shall I take a message to Mr. Farron for you?” said Adelaide.</p>
+
+<p>He nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. Tell him that if I’m to go, I’ll go to-day.”</p>
+
+<p>“I see.” She rose slowly, as if in response to a vague, amusing caprice.
+“Just that. If you go, you’ll go to-day.”</p>
+
+<p>For the first time Burke, regaining his self-confidence, saw that she was
+not an enemy, but an appreciative spectator, and his face broke up in a
+smile, queer, crooked, wrinkled, but brilliant.</p>
+
+<p>“I guess you’ll get it about right,” he said, and no compliment had ever
+pleased Adelaide half so much.</p>
+
+<p>“I think so,” she confidently answered, and then at the door she
+turned. “Oh, Mrs. Baxter,” she said, “this is Marty Burke, a very
+important person.”</p>
+
+<p>Importance, especially Adelaide Farron’s idea of importance, was a
+category for which Mrs. Baxter had the highest esteem, so almost against
+her will she looked at Burke, and found him looking her over with such a
+shrewd eye that she looked away, and then looked back again to find that
+his gaze was still upon her. He had made his living since he was a child
+by his faculty for sizing people up, and at his first glimpse of Mrs.
+Baxter’s shifting glance he had sized her up; so that now, when she
+remarked with an amiability at once ponderous and shaky that it was a
+very fine day, he replied in exactly the same tone, “It is that,” and
+began to walk about the room looking at the pictures. Presently a low,
+but sweet, whistle broke from his lips. He made her feel uncommonly
+uncomfortable, so uncomfortable that she was driven to conversation.</p>
+
+<p>“Are you fond of pictures, Burke?” she asked. He just looked at her over
+his shoulder without answering. She began to wish that Adelaide would
+come back.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide had found her husband still accessible. He received in silence
+the announcement that Burke was down-stairs. She told the message
+without bias.</p>
+
+<p>“He says that they have it on him on the dock that he is to be bounced.
+He asked me to say this to you: that if he is to go, he’ll go to-day.”</p>
+
+<p>“What was his manner?”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide could not resist a note of enjoyment entering into her tone as
+she replied:</p>
+
+<p>“Insolent in the extreme.”</p>
+
+<p>She was leaning against the wall at the foot of his bed, and though she
+was not looking at him, she felt his eyes on her.</p>
+
+<p>“Adelaide,” he said, “you should not have brought me that message.”</p>
+
+<p>“You mean it is bad for your health to be worried, dearest?” she asked
+in a tone so soft that only an expert in tones could have detected
+something not at all soft beneath it. She glanced at her husband under
+her lashes. Wasn’t he any more an expert in her tones?</p>
+
+<p>“I mean,” he answered, “that you should have told him to go to the
+devil.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I leave that to you, Vin.” She laughed, and added after a second’s
+pause, “I was only a messenger.”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell him I shall be down-town next week.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Vin, no; not next week.”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell him next week.”</p>
+
+<p>“I can’t do that.”</p>
+
+<p>“I thought you were only a messenger.”</p>
+
+<p>“Your doctor would not hear of it. It would be madness.”</p>
+
+<p>Farron leaned over and touched his bell. The nurse was instantly in
+the room, looking at Vincent, Adelaide thought, as a water-dog looks
+at its master when it perceives that a stick is about to be thrown
+into the pond.</p>
+
+<p>“Miss Gregory,” said Vincent, “there’s a young man from my office
+down-stairs. Will you tell him that I can’t see him to-day, but that I
+shall be down-town next week, and I’ll see him then?”</p>
+
+<p>Miss Gregory was almost at the door before Adelaide stopped her.</p>
+
+<p>“You must know that Mr. Farron cannot get down-town next week.”</p>
+
+<p>“Has the doctor said not?”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide shook her head impatiently.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t suppose any one has been so insane as to ask him,” she answered.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Gregory smiled temperately.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, next week is a long time off,” she said, and left the room. Adelaide
+turned to her husband.</p>
+
+<p>“Do you enjoy being humored?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>Farron had closed his eyes, and now opened them.</p>
+
+<p>“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I didn’t hear.”</p>
+
+<p>“She knows quite well that you can’t go down-town next week. She takes
+your message just to humor you.”</p>
+
+<p>“She’s an excellent nurse,” said Farron.</p>
+
+<p>“For babies,” Adelaide felt like answering, but she didn’t. She said
+instead, “Anyhow, Burke will never accept that as an answer.” She was
+surprised to hear something almost boastful in her own tone.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I think he will.”</p>
+
+<p>She waited breathlessly for some sound from down-stairs or even for the
+flurried reëntrance of Miss Gregory. There was a short silence, and
+then came the sound of the shutting of the front door. Marty had
+actually gone.</p>
+
+<p>Vincent did not even open his eyes when Miss Gregory returned; he did not
+exert himself to ask how his message had been received. Adelaide waited
+an instant, and then went back to Mrs. Baxter with a strange sense of
+having sustained a small personal defeat.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Baxter was so thoroughly ruffled that she was prepared to attack
+even the sacrosanct Adelaide. But she was not given the chance.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, how did Marty treat you?” said Adelaide.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Baxter sniffed.</p>
+
+<p>“We had not very much in common,” she returned.</p>
+
+<p>“No; Marty’s a very real person.” There was a pause. “What became of him?
+Did he go?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, your husband’s trained nurse gave him a message, and he went away.”</p>
+
+<p>“Quietly?” The note of disappointment was so plain that Mrs. Baxter asked
+in answer:</p>
+
+<p>“What would you have wanted him to do?”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose it would have been too much to expect that he would drag you
+and Miss Gregory about by your hair,” she said, “but I own I should have
+liked some little demonstration. But perhaps,” she added more brightly,
+“he has gone back to wreck the docks.”</p>
+
+<p>At this moment Mathilde entered the room in her hat and furs, and
+distracted the conversation from Burke. Adelaide, who was fond of
+enunciating the belief that you could tell when people were in love by
+the frequency with which they wore their best clothes, noticed now how
+wonderfully lovely Mathilde was looking; but she noticed it quite
+unsuspiciously, for she was thinking, “My child is really a beauty.”</p>
+
+<p>“You remember Mrs. Baxter, my dear.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde did not remember her in the least, though she smiled
+sufficiently. To her Mrs. Baxter seemed just one of many dressy old
+ladies who drifted across the horizon only too often. If any one had told
+her that her grandfather had ever been supposed to be in danger of
+succumbing to charms such as these, she would have thought the notion an
+ugly example of grown-up pessimism.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Baxter held her hand and patted it.</p>
+
+<p>“Where does she get that lovely golden hair?” she asked. “Not from you,
+does she?”</p>
+
+<p>“She gets it from her father,” answered Adelaide, and her expression
+added, “you dreadful old goose.”</p>
+
+<p>In the pause Mathilde made her escape unquestioned. She knew even before
+a last pathetic glance that her mother was unutterably wearied with her
+visitor. In other circumstances she would have stayed to effect a
+rescue, but at present she was engaged in a deed of some recklessness on
+her own account. She was going to meet Pete Wayne secretly at the
+Metropolitan Museum.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XII">CHAPTER XII</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>In all her life Mathilde had never felt so conspicuous as she did going
+up the long flight of stairs at the Fifth Avenue entrance of the museum.
+It seemed to her that people, those walking past in the sunshine on the
+sidewalk, and the strangers in town seeing the sights from the top of the
+green busses, were saying to one another as they looked at her, “There
+goes a New York girl to meet her lover in one of the more ancient of the
+Egyptian rooms.”</p>
+
+<p>She started as she heard the voice of the guard, though he was saying
+nothing but “Check your umbrella” to a man behind her. She sped across
+the marble floor of the great tapestry hall as a little, furry wild
+animal darts across an open space in the woods. She was thinking that she
+could not bear it if Pete were not there. How could she wait many minutes
+under the eyes of the guards, who must know better than any one else that
+no flesh-and-blood girl took any real interest in Egyptian antiquities?
+The round, unambitious dial at the entrance, like an enlarged
+kitchen-clock, had pointed to the exact hour set for the meeting. She
+ought not to expect that Pete, getting away from the office in business
+hours, could be as punctual as an eager, idle creature like herself.</p>
+
+<p>She had made up her mind so clearly that when she entered the night-blue
+room there would be nothing but tombs and mummies that when she saw Pete
+standing with his overcoat over his arm, in the blue-serge clothes she
+particularly liked, she felt as much surprised as if their meeting were
+accidental.</p>
+
+<p>She tried to draw a long breath.</p>
+
+<p>“I shall never get used to it,” she said. “If we had been married a
+thousand years, I should always feel just like this when I see you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, no, you won’t,” he answered. “I hope the very next time we meet you
+will say, quite in a wife’s orthodox tone: ‘My dear, I’ve been waiting
+twenty minutes. Not that I mind at all; only I was afraid I must have
+misunderstood you.’”</p>
+
+<p>“You hope? Oh, I hope we shall never be like that.”</p>
+
+<p>“Really? Why, I enjoy the idea. I shall enjoy saying to total strangers,
+‘Ah, gentlemen, if my wife were ever on time—’ It makes me feel so
+indissolubly united to you.”</p>
+
+<p>“I like it best as we are now.”</p>
+
+<p>“We might try different methods alternate years: one year we could be
+domestic, and the next, detached, and so on.”</p>
+
+<p>By this time they had discovered that they were leaning on a mummy-case,
+and Mathilde drew back with an exclamation. “Poor thing!” she said. “I
+suppose she once had a lover, too.”</p>
+
+<p>“And very likely met him in the room of Chinese antiquities in the Temple
+Museum,” said Pete, and then, changing his tone, he added: “But come
+along. I want to show you a few little things which I have selected to
+furnish our home. I think you’ll like them.”</p>
+
+<p>Pete was always inventing games like this, and calling on her to enter in
+without the slightest warning. One of them was about a fancy ball he was
+giving in the main hall of the Pennsylvania Station. But this new idea,
+to treat the whole museum as a sort of super-department store, made her
+laugh in a faint, dependent way that she knew Pete liked. She believed
+that such forms of play were peculiar to themselves, so she guarded them
+as the deepest kind of secret; for she thought, if her mother ever found
+out about them, she would at once conclude that the whole relation was
+childish. To all other lovers Mathilde attributed a uniform seriousness.</p>
+
+<p>It took them a long time to choose their house-furnishings: there was a
+piece of black-and-gold lacquer; a set of painted panels; a Persian rug,
+swept by the tails of two haughty peacocks; some cloud-gray Chinese
+porcelains; a set of Du Barry vases; a crystal-and-enamel box, designed
+probably for some sacred purpose, but contributed by Pete as an excellent
+receptacle for chocolates at her bedside. “The Boy with the Sword” for
+the dining-room, Ver Meer’s “Women at the Window,” the small Bonnington,
+and then, since Mathilde wanted the portrait of Mrs. Fitzherbert, and
+Wayne felt a faint weariness with the English school, a compromise was
+effected by the selection of Constable’s landscape of a bridge. Wayne
+kept constantly repeating that he was exactly like Warren Hastings,
+astonished at his own moderation. They had hardly begun, indeed, before
+Mathilde felt herself overcome by that peculiar exhaustion that overtakes
+even the robust in museums.</p>
+
+<p>Wayne guided her to a little sofa in a room of gold and jade.</p>
+
+<p>“How beautifully you know your way about here!” she said. “I suppose
+you’ve brought lots of girls here before me.”</p>
+
+<p>“A glorious army,” said Pete, “the matron and the maid. You ought to see
+my mother in a museum. She’s lost before she gets well inside the
+turnstile.”</p>
+
+<p>But Mathilde was thinking.</p>
+
+<p>“How strange it is,” she observed, “that I never should have thought
+before about your caring for any one else. Pete, did you ever ask any one
+else to marry you?”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; when I was in college. I asked a girl to marry me. She was having
+rather a rotten time.”</p>
+
+<p>“Were you in love with her?”</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head, and in the silence shuffling and staccato footsteps
+were heard, announcing the approach of a youthful art class and their
+teacher. “Jade,” said the voice of the lady, “one of the hardest of known
+substances, has yet been beautifully worked from time immemorial—”</p>
+
+<p>More pairs of eyes in that art class were fixed on the obviously guilty
+couple in the corner than on the beautiful cloudy objects in the cases,
+and it was not until they had all followed their guide to the armor-room,
+and had grouped themselves about the casque of Joan of Arc, that Wayne
+went on as if no interruption had occurred:</p>
+
+<p>“If you want to know whether I have ever experienced anything like my
+feeling for you since the first moment I saw you, I never have and never
+shall, and thereto I plight thee my troth.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde turned her full face toward him, shedding gratitude and
+affection as a lamp sheds light before she answered:</p>
+
+<p>“You were terribly unkind to me yesterday.”</p>
+
+<p>“I know. I’m sorry.”</p>
+
+<p>“I shall never forget the way you kissed me, as if I were a rather
+repulsive piece of wood.”</p>
+
+<p>Pete craned his neck, and met the suspicious eye of a guard.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t think anything can be done about it at the moment,” he said;
+and added in explanation, “You see, I felt as if you had suddenly
+deserted me.”</p>
+
+<p>“Pete, I couldn’t ever desert you—unless I committed suicide.”</p>
+
+<p>Presently he stood up, declaring that this was not the fitting place for
+arranging the details of their marriage.</p>
+
+<p>“Come to one of the smaller picture galleries,” he said, “and as we go
+I’ll show you a portrait of my mother.”</p>
+
+<p>“Your mother? I did not know she had had a portrait done. By whom?”</p>
+
+<p>“A fellow called Bellini. He thought he was doing the Madonna.”</p>
+
+<p>When they reached the picture, a figure was already before it. Mr.
+Lanley was sitting, with his arms folded and his feet stretched out far
+before him, his head bent, but his eyes raised and fixed on the picture.
+They saw him first, and had two or three seconds to take in the profound
+contemplation of his mood. Then he slowly raised his eyes and
+encountered theirs.</p>
+
+<p>There is surely nothing compromising in an elderly gentleman spending a
+contemplative morning alone at the Metropolitan Museum. It might well be
+his daily custom; but the knowledge that it was not, the consciousness of
+the rarity of the mood that had brought him there, oppressed Mr. Lanley
+almost like a crime. He felt caught, outraged, ashamed as he saw them.
+“That’s the age which has a right to it,” he said to himself. And then as
+if in a mirror he saw an expression of embarrassment on their faces, and
+was reminded that their meeting must have been illicit, too. He stood up
+and looked at them sternly.</p>
+
+<p>“Up-town at this hour, Wayne?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Grandfather, I never knew you came here much,” said Mathilde.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s near me, you know,” he answered weakly, so weakly that he felt
+impelled to give an explanation. “Sometimes, my dear,” he said, “you will
+find that even the most welcome guest rather fills the house.”</p>
+
+<p>“You need not worry about yours,” returned Mathilde. “I left her
+with Mama.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley felt that his brief moment of peace was indeed over. He could
+imagine the impressions that Mrs. Baxter was perhaps at that very moment
+sharing with Adelaide. He longed to question his granddaughter, but did
+not know how to put it.</p>
+
+<p>“How was your mother looking?” he finally decided upon.</p>
+
+<p>“Dreary,” answered Mathilde, with a laugh.</p>
+
+<p>“Does this picture remind you of any one?” asked Wayne, suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley looked at him as if he hadn’t heard, and frowned.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t you think there’s a look of my mother about it?”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” said Mr. Lanley, rather loudly, and then added, “Well, I see what
+you mean, though I shouldn’t—” He stopped and turning to them with some
+sternness, he asked them how they accounted for their presence in the
+museum at such an hour and alone.</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing to do but to tell him the truth. And when Wayne had
+finished, Mathilde was surprised at her grandfather’s question. She
+thought he would ask what her mother thought of it. If they had been
+alone, she would have told him that Adelaide thought Wayne a commonplace
+young man with stubby hands; but as it was, she had resolved to put her
+mother’s opposition on a more dignified plane. Only Mr. Lanley did not
+ask the question of her. It was to Wayne he was speaking, when he said:</p>
+
+<p>“What does your mother think of it?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, my mother,” answered Pete. “Well, she thinks that if she were a girl
+she’d like to go to China.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley looked up, and they both smiled with the most perfect
+understanding.</p>
+
+<p>“She would,” said the older man, and then he became intensely serious.
+“It’s quite out of the question,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“O Grandfather,” Mathilde exclaimed, clasping her hands about his
+arm, “don’t talk like that! It wouldn’t be possible for me to let him
+go without me. O Grandfather, can’t you remember what it was like to
+be in love?”</p>
+
+<p>A complete silence followed this little speech—a silence that went on
+and on and seemed to be stronger than human power. Perhaps for the first
+time in his life Lanley felt hostile toward the girl beside him. “Oh,
+dear,” Mathilde was thinking, “I suppose I’ve made him remember my
+grandmother and his youth!” “Can love be remembered,” Pete was saying to
+himself, “or is it like a perfume that can be recognized, but not
+recalled?”</p>
+
+<p>Lanley turned at last to Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s out of the question,” he said, “that you should take this child to
+China at two weeks’ notice. You must see that.”</p>
+
+<p>“I see perfectly that many people will think it so. But you must see that
+to us it is the inevitable thing to do.”</p>
+
+<p>“If every one else agreed, I should oppose it.”</p>
+
+<p>“O Grandfather!” wailed Mathilde. “And you were our great hope—you and
+Mrs. Wayne!”</p>
+
+<p>“In a matter like this I shall stand by your mother, Mathilde,” he said,
+and Mathilde imagined he meant as opposed to herself. But he was making
+an even greater renunciation.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide was surprised and not pleased when Mathilde came home late for
+lunch, bringing the Wayne boy with her. It was not that she had expected
+her one little phrase about Wayne’s hands to change her daughter’s love
+into repugnance,—that sentence had been only the first drop in a
+distillation that would do its poisonous work gradually,—but she had
+supposed that Mathilde would be too sensitive to expose Pete to further
+criticism. Indeed, there seemed something obtuse, if not actually
+indelicate, in being willing to create a situation in which every one
+was bound to suffer. Obtuseness was not a defect with which Adelaide had
+much patience.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde saw at once that her mother was going to be what in the family
+slang was called “grand.” The grandeur consisted in a polite inattention;
+it went with a soft voice and immobile expression. In this mood Adelaide
+answered you about three seconds later than you expected, and though she
+answered you accurately, it was as if she had forced her mind back from a
+more congenial ether. She seemed to be wrapped in an agreeable cloud
+until you gave her some opening, and then she came out of her cloud like
+a flash of lightning.</p>
+
+<p>Wayne, who had lived his life so far with a woman who did not believe in
+the use of force in human relations, viewed these symptoms of coercion
+with the utmost indifference; but Mathilde had not so far freed herself
+as to ignore them. She was not afraid, but easy conversation under the
+menace was beyond her. She couldn’t think of anything to say.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide was accustomed by these methods to drive the inexperienced—and
+she considered Pete pitifully inexperienced in social fine points—into a
+state of conversational unrest in which they would finally ask
+recklessly, “Have you been to the theater lately?” and she would question
+gently, “The theater?” as much as to say, “I’ve heard that word
+somewhere before,” until the conscientious conversationalist, rushing
+from futility to futility, would be finally engulfed in some yawning
+banality and sink out of sight forever.</p>
+
+<p>But Wayne resisted this temptation, or, rather, he did not feel it. He
+had the courage to be unafraid of silences, and he ate his luncheon and
+thought about the pictures he had been seeing, and at last began to talk
+to Mathilde about them, while Adelaide made it clear that she was not
+listening, until she caught a phrase that drove her grandeur away.</p>
+
+<p>“Near where we met my grandfather?” Mathilde asked.</p>
+
+<p>By this time Adelaide had gathered that the two had been in the museum,
+and the knowledge annoyed her not only as a mother, but as an
+aristocrat. Without being clear about it, she regarded the love of
+beauty—artificial beauty, that is—as a class distinction. It seemed to
+her possible enough that the masses should love mountains and moonlight
+and the sea and sunsets; but it struck her as unfitting that any one but
+the people she knew, and only a few of them, should really care for
+porcelains and pictures. As she held herself aloof from the conversation
+she was annoyed at noticing that Wayne was showing a more
+discriminating taste than her own carefully nurtured child. But all such
+considerations were driven away by the mention of her father, for Mr.
+Lanley had been in her mind ever since Mrs. Baxter had taken her
+unimpeded departure just before luncheon.</p>
+
+<p>“Your grandfather?” she said, coming out of the clouds. “Was he in the
+Metropolitan?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” said Mathilde, thankful to be directly addressed. “Wasn’t it
+queer? Pete was taking me to see a picture that looks exactly like Mrs.
+Wayne, only Mrs. Wayne hasn’t such a round face, and there in front of it
+was grandpapa.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide rose very slowly from table, lunch being fortunately over. She
+felt as if she could have borne almost anything but this—the idea of her
+father vaporing before a picture of the Madonna. Phrases came into her
+head: silly old man, the time has come to protect him against himself;
+the Wayne family must be suppressed.</p>
+
+<p>Her silence in the drawing-room was of a more concentrated sort, and when
+she had taken her coffee and cigarette she said to Mathilde:</p>
+
+<p>“My dear, I promised to go back to Vincent at this time. Will you go
+instead? I want to have a word with Mr. Wayne.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide had never entered any contest in her life, whether it was a
+dispute with a dressmaker or a quarrel with her husband, without
+remembering the comfortable fact that she was a beauty. With men she did
+not neglect the advantage that being a woman gave her, and with the
+particular man now before her she had, she knew, a third line of defense;
+she was the mother of his love, and she thought she detected in him a
+special weakness for mothers. But it would have been better if he had
+respected women and mothers less, for he thought so highly of them that
+he believed they ought to play fair.</p>
+
+<p>Sitting in a very low chair, she looked up at him.</p>
+
+<p>“Mathilde has been telling me something about a plan of yours to take her
+to China with you. We could not consent to that, you know.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m sorry,” said Pete. The tone was pleasant. That was the trouble;
+it was too pleasant a tone for a man relinquishing a cherished hope.
+It sounded almost as if he regretted the inevitable disappointment of
+the family.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide tried a new attack.</p>
+
+<p>“Your mother—have you consulted her?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I’ve told her our plans.”</p>
+
+<p>“And she approves?”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne might choose to betray his mother in the full irresponsibility of
+her attitude to so sympathetic a listener as Mr. Lanley, but he had no
+intention of giving Mrs. Farron such a weapon. At the same time he did
+not intend to be untruthful. His answer was this:</p>
+
+<p>“My mother,” he said, “is not like most women of her age. She
+believes in love.”</p>
+
+<p>“In all love, quite indiscriminately?”</p>
+
+<p>He hesitated an instant.</p>
+
+<p>“I put it wrong,” he answered. “I meant that she believes in the
+importance of real love.”</p>
+
+<p>“And has she a spell by which she tells real love?”</p>
+
+<p>“She believes mine to be real.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yours! Very likely. Perhaps it’s maternal vanity on my part, Mr.
+Wayne, but I must own I can imagine a man’s contriving to love my
+daughter, so gentle, so intelligent, and so extraordinarily lovely to
+look at. I was not thinking of your feelings, but of hers.”</p>
+
+<p>“You can see no reason why she should love me?”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide moved her shoulders about.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I want it explained, that’s all, from your own point of view. I
+see my daughter as an unusual person, ignorant of life, to whom it seems
+to me all things are possible. And I see you, a very nice young man. But
+what else? I ask to be told why you fulfil all possibilities. Don’t
+misunderstand me. I am not mercenary. Mathilde will have plenty of money
+of her own some day. I don’t want a millionaire. I want a <i>person</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course, if you ask me why Mathilde should love me—”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t be untruthful, Mr. Wayne. I thought better of you. If you should
+come back from China next year to find her engaged to some one else, you
+could tell a great many reasons why he was not good enough for her. Now
+tell me some of the reasons why you are. And please don’t include
+because you love her so much, for almost any one would do that.”</p>
+
+<p>Pete fought down his panic, reminding himself that no man living could
+hear such words without terror. His egotism, never colossal, stood
+feebly between him and Mrs. Farron’s estimate of him. He seemed to sink
+back into the general human species. If he had felt inclined to detail
+his own qualities, he could not have thought of one. There was a long
+silence, while Adelaide sat with a look of docile teachableness upon her
+expectant face.</p>
+
+<p>At last Wayne stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s no use, Mrs. Farron,” he said. “That question of yours can’t be
+answered. I believe she loves me. It’s my bet against yours.”</p>
+
+<p>“I won’t gamble with my child’s future,” she returned. “I did with my
+own. Sit down again, Mr. Wayne. You have heard, I suppose, that I have
+been married twice?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes.” He sat down again reluctantly.</p>
+
+<p>“I was Mathilde’s age—a little older. I was more in love than she. And
+if he had been asked the question I just asked you, he could have
+answered it. He could have said: ‘I have been a leader in a group in
+which I was, an athlete, an oarsman, and the most superb physical
+specimen of my race’—brought up, too, he might have added, in the same
+traditions that I had had. Well, that wasn’t enough, Mr. Wayne, and that
+was a good deal. If my father had only made me wait, only given me time
+to see that my choice was the choice of ignorance, that the man I thought
+a hero was, oh, the most pitifully commonplace clay—Mathilde shan’t make
+my mistake.”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne’s eyes lit up.</p>
+
+<p>“But that’s it,” he said. “She wouldn’t make your mistake. She’d choose
+right. That’s what I ought to have said. You spoke of Mathilde’s spirit.
+She has a feeling for the right thing. Some people have, and some people
+are bound to choose wrong.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide laid her hand on her breast.</p>
+
+<p>“You mean me?” she asked, too much interested to be angry.</p>
+
+<p>He was too absorbed in his own interests to give his full
+attention to hers.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” he answered. “I mean your principles of choice weren’t right
+ones—leaders of men, you know, and all that. It never works out.
+Leaders of men are the ones who always cry on their wives’ shoulders, and
+the martinets at home are imposed on by every one else.” He gave out this
+dictum in passing: “But don’t trouble about your responsibility in this,
+Mrs. Farron. It’s out of your hands. It’s our chance, and Mathilde and I
+mean to take it. I don’t want to give you a warning, exactly, but—it’s
+going to go through.”</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him with large, terrified eyes. She was repeating, ‘they
+cry on their wives’ shoulders,’ or, he might have said, ‘on the
+shoulders of their trained nurses.’ She knew that he was talking to her,
+saying something. She couldn’t listen to it. And then he was gone. She
+was glad he was.</p>
+
+<p>She sat quite still, with her hands lying idly, softly in her lap. It was
+possible that what he said was true. Perhaps all these people who made
+such a show of strength to the world were those who sucked double
+strength by sapping the vitality of a life’s companion. It had been true
+of Joe Severance. She had heard him praised for the courage with which
+he went forth against temptation, but she had known that it was her
+strength he was using. She looked up, to see her daughter, pale and
+eager, standing before her.</p>
+
+<p>“O Mama, was it very terrible?”</p>
+
+<p>“What, dear?”</p>
+
+<p>“Did Pete tell you of our plan?”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide wished she could have listened to those last sentences of his;
+but they were gone completely.</p>
+
+<p>She put up her hand and patted the unutterably soft cheek before her.</p>
+
+<p>“He told me something about putting through your absurd idea of an
+immediate marriage,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“We don’t want to do it in a sneaky way, Mama.”</p>
+
+<p>“I know. You want to have your own way and to have every one approve of
+you, too. Is that it?”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde’s lips trembled.</p>
+
+<p>“O Mama,” she cried, “you are so different from what you used to be!”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“One changes,” she said. “One’s life changes.” She had meant this
+sentence to end the interview, but when she saw the girl still standing
+before her, she said to herself that it made little difference that she
+hadn’t heard the plans of the Wayne boy, since Mathilde, her own
+tractable daughter, was still within her power. She moved into the corner
+of the sofa. “Sit down, dear,” she said, and when Mathilde had obeyed
+with an almost imperceptible shrinking in her attitude, Adelaide went on,
+with a sort of serious ease of manner:</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve never been a particularly flattering mother, have I? Never thought
+you were perfect just because you were mine? Well, I hope you’ll pay the
+more attention to what I have to say. You are remarkable. You are going
+to be one of the most attractive women that ever was. Years ago old Count
+Bartiani—do you remember him, at Lucerne?”</p>
+
+<p>“The one who used scent and used to look so long at me?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, he was old and rather horrid, but he knew what he was talking
+about. He said then you would be the most attractive woman in Europe. I
+heard the same thing from all my friends, and it’s true. You have
+something rare and perfect—”</p>
+
+<p>These were great words. Mathilde, accustomed all her life to receive
+information from her mother, received this; and for the first time felt
+the egotism of her beauty awake, a sense of her own importance the more
+vivid because she had always been humble-minded. She did not look at her
+mother; she sat up very straight and stared as if at new fields before
+her, while a faint smile flickered at the corners of her mouth—a smile
+of an awakening sense of power.</p>
+
+<p>“What you have,” Adelaide went on, “ought to bring great happiness,
+great position, great love; and how can I let you throw yourself away
+at eighteen on a commonplace boy with a glib tongue and a high opinion
+of himself? Don’t tell me that it will make you happy. That would be
+the worst of all, if you turned out to be so limited that you were
+satisfied,—that would be a living death. O my darling, I give you my
+word that if you will give up this idea, ten years from now, when you
+see this boy, still glib, still vain, and perhaps a little fat, you
+will actually shudder when you think how near he came to cutting you
+off from the wonderful, full life that you were entitled to.” And then,
+as if she could not hope to better this, Adelaide sprang up, and left
+the girl alone.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde rose, too, and looked at herself in the glass. She was stirred,
+she was changed, she was awakened, but awakened to something her mother
+had not counted on. Almost too gentle, too humble, too reasonable, as she
+had always been, the drop of egotism which her mother had succeeded in
+instilling into her nature served to solidify her will, to inspire her
+with a needed power of aggression.</p>
+
+<p>She nodded once at her image in the mirror.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” she said, “it’s my life, and I’m willing to take the
+consequences.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XIII">CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>When Mathilde emerged from the subway into the sunlight of City Hall
+Park, Pete was nowhere to be seen. She had spent several minutes
+wandering in the subterranean labyrinth which threatened to bring her to
+Brooklyn Bridge and nowhere else, so she was a little late for her
+appointment; and yet Pete was not there. He had promised to be waiting
+for her. This was a more important occasion than the meeting in the
+museum and more terrifying, too.</p>
+
+<p>Their plans were simple. They were going to get their marriage license,
+they were going to be married immediately, they were then going to inform
+their respective families, and start two days later for San Francisco.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde stared furtively about her. A policeman strolled past, striking
+terror to a guilty heart; a gentleman of evidently unbroken leisure
+regarded her with a benevolent eye completely ringed by red. Crowds were
+surging in and out of the newspaper offices and the Municipal Building
+and the post office, but stare where she would, she couldn’t find Pete.</p>
+
+<p>She had ten minutes to think of horrors before she saw him rushing across
+the park toward her, and she had the idea of saying to him those words
+which he himself had selected as typically wifely, “Not that I mind at
+all, but I was afraid I must have misunderstood you.” But she did not get
+very far in her mild little joke, for it was evident at once that
+something had happened.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear love,” he said, “it’s no go. We can’t sail, we can’t be married.
+I think I’m out of a job.”</p>
+
+<p>As they stood there, her pretty clothes, the bright sun shining on her
+golden hair and dark furs and polished shoes, her beauty, but, above all,
+their complete absorption in each other, made them conspicuous. They were
+utterly oblivious.</p>
+
+<p>Pete told her exactly what had happened. Some months before he had been
+sent to make a report on a coal property in Pennsylvania. He had made it
+under the assumption that the firm was thinking of underwriting its
+bonds. He had been mistaken. As owners Honaton &amp; Benson had already
+acquired the majority of interest in it. His report,—she remembered his
+report, for he had told her about it the first day he came to see
+her,—had been favorable except for one important fact. There was in that
+district a car shortage which for at least a year would hamper the
+marketing of the supply. That had been the point of the whole thing. He
+had advised against taking the property over until this defect could be
+remedied or allowed for. They had accepted the report.</p>
+
+<p>Well, late in the afternoon of the preceding day he had gone to the
+office to say good-by to the firm. He could not help being touched by the
+friendliness of both men’s manner. Honaton gave him a silver
+traveling-flask, plain except for an offensive cat’s-eye set in the top.
+Benson, more humane and practical, gave him a check.</p>
+
+<p>“I think I’ve cleared up everything before I leave,” Wayne said, trying
+to be conscientious in return for their kindness, “except one thing.
+I’ve never corrected the proof of my report on the Southerland coal
+property.”</p>
+
+<p>For a second there was something strange in the air. The partners
+exchanged the merest flicker of a look, which Wayne, as far as he thought
+of it at all, supposed to be a recognition on their part of his
+carefulness in thinking of such a detail.</p>
+
+<p>“You need not give that another thought,” said Benson. “We are not
+thinking of publishing that report at present. And when we do, I have
+your manuscript. I’ll go over the proof myself.”</p>
+
+<p>Relieved to be spared another task, Wayne shook hands with his employers
+and withdrew. Outside he met David.</p>
+
+<p>“Say,” said David, “I am sorry you’re leaving us; but, gee!” he added,
+his face twisting with joy, “ain’t the firm glad to have you go!”</p>
+
+<p>It had long been Wayne’s habit to pay strict attention to the
+impressions of David.</p>
+
+<p>“Why do you think they are glad?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, they’re glad all right,” said David. “I heard the old man say
+yesterday, ‘And by next Saturday he will be at sea.’ It was as if
+he was going to get a Christmas present.” And David went on about
+other business.</p>
+
+<p>Once put on the right track, it was not difficult to get the idea. He
+went to the firm’s printer, but found they had had no orders for printing
+his report. The next morning, instead of spending his time with his own
+last arrangements, he began hunting up other printing offices, and
+finally found what he was looking for. His report was already in print,
+with one paragraph left out—that one which related to the shortage of
+cars. His name was signed to it, with a little preamble by the firm,
+urging the investment on the favorable notice of their customers, and
+spoke in high terms of the accuracy of his estimates.</p>
+
+<p>To say that Pete did not once contemplate continuing his arrangements as
+if nothing had happened would not be true. All he had to do was to go.
+The thing was dishonest, clearly enough, but it was not his action. His
+original report would always be proof of his own integrity, and on his
+return he could sever his connection with the firm on some other pretext.
+On the other hand, to break his connection with Honaton &amp; Benson, to
+force the suppression of the report unless given in full, to give up his
+trip, to confess that immediate marriage was impossible, that he himself
+was out of a job, that the whole basis of his good fortune was a fraud
+that he had been too stupid to discover—all this seemed to him more than
+man could be asked to do.</p>
+
+<p>But that was what he decided must be done. From the printer’s he
+telephoned to the Farrons, but found that Miss Severance was out. He knew
+she must have already started for their appointment in the City Hall
+Park. He had made up his mind, and yet when he saw her, so confident of
+the next step, waiting for him, he very nearly yielded to a sudden
+temptation to make her his wife, to be sure of that, whatever else might
+have to be altered.</p>
+
+<p>He had known she wouldn’t reproach him, but he was deeply grateful to her
+for being so unaware that there was any grounds for reproach. She
+understood the courage his renunciation had required. That seemed to be
+what she cared for most.</p>
+
+<p>At length he said to her:</p>
+
+<p>“Now I must go and get this off my chest with the firm. Go home, and I’ll
+come as soon as ever I can.”</p>
+
+<p>But here she shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>“I couldn’t go home,” she answered. “It might all come out before you
+arrived, and I could not listen to things that”—she avoided naming her
+mother—“that will be said about you, Pete. Isn’t there somewhere I can
+wait while you have your interview?”</p>
+
+<p>There was the outer office of Honaton &amp; Benson. He let her go with him,
+and turned her over to the care of David, who found her a corner out of
+the way, and left her only once. That was to say to a friend of his in
+the cage: “When you go out, cast your eye over Pete’s girl. Somewhat of a
+peacherino.”</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime Wayne went into Benson’s office. There wasn’t a flicker
+of alarm on the senior partner’s face on seeing him.</p>
+
+<p>“Hullo, Pete!” he said, “I thought you’d be packing your bags.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m not packing anything,” said Wayne. “I’ve come to tell you I can’t go
+to China for you. Mr. Benson.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, come, come,” said the other, very paternally, “we can’t let you off
+like that. This is business, my dear boy. It would cost us money, after
+having made all our arrangements, if you changed your mind.”</p>
+
+<p>“So I understand.”</p>
+
+<p>“What do you mean?”</p>
+
+<p>“I mean just what you think I mean, Mr. Benson.”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne would have said that he could never forget the presence under any
+circumstances of his future wife, waiting, probably nervously, in the
+outer office; but he did. The interest of the next hour drove out
+everything else. Honaton was sent for from the exchange, a lawsuit was
+threatened, a bribe—he couldn’t mistake it—offered. He was told he
+might find it difficult to find another position if he left their firm
+under such conditions.</p>
+
+<p>“On the contrary,” said Pete, firmly, “from what I have heard, I believe
+it will improve my standing.”</p>
+
+<p>That he came off well in the struggle was due not so much to his
+ability, but to the fact that he now had nothing to lose or gain from the
+situation. As soon as Benson grasped this fact he began a masterly
+retreat. Wayne noticed the difference between the partners: Honaton, the
+less able of the two, wanted to save the situation, but before everything
+else wanted to leave in Wayne’s mind the sense that he had made a fool of
+himself. Benson, more practical, would have been glad to put Pete in jail
+if he could; but as he couldn’t do that, his interest was in nothing but
+saving the situation. The only way to do this was to give up all idea of
+publishing any report. He did this by assuming that Wayne had simply
+changed his mind or had at least utterly failed to convey his meaning in
+his written words. He made this point of view very plausible by quoting
+the more laudatory of Wayne’s sentences; and when Pete explained that the
+whole point of his report was in the sentence that had been omitted,
+Benson leaned back, chuckling, and biting off the end of his cigar.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, you college men!” he said. “I’m afraid I’m not up to your
+subtleties. When you said it was the richest vein and favorably situated,
+I supposed that was what you meant. If you meant just the opposite, well,
+let it go. Honaton &amp; Benson certainly don’t want to get out a report
+contrary to fact.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s what he has accused us of,” said Honaton.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, no, no,” said Benson; “don’t be too literal, Jack. In the heat of
+argument we all say things we don’t mean. Pete here doesn’t like to have
+his lovely English all messed up by a practical dub like me. I doubt if
+he wants to sever his connection with this firm.”</p>
+
+<p>Honaton yielded.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” he said, “I’m willing enough he should stay, if—”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I’m not,” said Pete, and put an end to the conversation by walking
+out of the room. He found David explaining the filing system to Mathilde,
+and she, hanging on his every word, partly on account of his native
+charm, partly on account of her own interest in anything neat, but most
+because she imagined the knowledge might some day make her a more
+serviceable wife to Pete.</p>
+
+<p>Pete dreaded the coming interview with Mrs. Farron more than that with
+the firm—more, indeed, than he had ever dreaded anything. He and
+Mathilde reached the house about a quarter before one, and Adelaide was
+not in. This was fortunate, for while they waited they discovered a
+difference of intention. Mathilde saw no reason for mentioning the fact
+that they had actually been on the point of taking out their marriage
+license. She thought it was enough to tell her mother that the trip had
+been abandoned and that Pete had given up his job. Pete contemplated
+nothing less than the whole truth.</p>
+
+<p>“You can’t tell people half a story,” he said. “It never works.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde really quailed.</p>
+
+<p>“It will be terrible to tell mama that,” she groaned. “She thinks
+failure is worse than crime.”</p>
+
+<p>“And she’s dead right,” said Pete.</p>
+
+<p>When Adelaide came in she had Mr. Lanley with her. She had seen him
+walking down Fifth Avenue with his hat at quite an outrageous angle, and
+she had ordered the motor to stop, and had beckoned him to her. It was
+two days since her interview with Mrs. Baxter, and she had had no good
+opportunity of speaking to him. The suspicion that he was avoiding her
+nerved her hand; but there was no hint of discipline in her smile, and
+she knew as well as if he had said it that he was thinking as he came to
+the side of the car how handsome and how creditable a daughter she was.
+“Come to lunch with me,” she said; “or must you go home to your guest?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, I was going to the club. She’s lunching with a mysterious relation
+near Columbia University.”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t you know who it is? Tell him home.”</p>
+
+<p>“Home, Andrews. No, she never says.”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t put your stick against the glass, there’s an angel. I’ll tell you
+who it is. An elder sister who supported and educated her, of whom she’s
+ashamed now.”</p>
+
+<p>“How do you know? It wouldn’t break the glass.”</p>
+
+<p>“No; but I hate the noise. I don’t know; I just made it up because it’s
+so likely.”</p>
+
+<p>“She always speaks so affectionately of you.”</p>
+
+<p>“She’s a coward; that’s the only difference. She hates me just as much.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, you’ve never been nice to her, Adelaide.”</p>
+
+<p>“I should think not.”</p>
+
+<p>“She’s not as bad as you think,” said Mr. Lanley, who believed in
+old-fashioned loyalty.</p>
+
+<p>“I can’t bear her,” said Adelaide.</p>
+
+<p>“Why not?” As far as his feelings went, this seemed a perfectly safe
+question; but it wasn’t.</p>
+
+<p>“Because she tries so hard to make you ridiculous. Oh, not intentionally;
+but she talks of you as if you were a <i>Don Juan</i> of twenty-five. You
+ought to be flattered, Papa dear, at having jealous scenes made about you
+when you are—what is it?—sixty-five.”</p>
+
+<p>“Four,” said Mr. Lanley.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; such a morning as I had! Not a minute with poor Vincent because you
+had had Mrs. Wayne to dine. I’m not complaining, but I don’t like my
+father represented as a sort of comic-paper old man, you poor
+dear,”—and she laid her long, gloved hand on his knee,—“who have always
+been so conspicuously dignified.”</p>
+
+<p>“If I have,” said her father, “I don’t know that anything she says can
+change it.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, of course; only it was horrible to me to hear her describing you in
+the grip of a boyish passion. But don’t let’s talk of it. I hear,” she
+said, as if she were changing the subject, “that you have taken to going
+to the Metropolitan Museum at odd moments.”</p>
+
+<p>He felt utterly stripped, and said without hope:</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; I’m a trustee, you know.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide just glanced at him.</p>
+
+<p>“You always have been, I think.” They drove home in silence.</p>
+
+<p>One reason why she was determined to have her father come home was that
+it was the first time that Vincent was to take luncheon downstairs, and
+when Adelaide had a part to play she liked to have an audience. She was
+even glad to find Wayne in the drawing-room, though she did wonder to
+herself if the little creature had entirely given up earning his living.
+It was a very different occasion from Pete’s last luncheon there; every
+one was as pleasant as possible. As soon as the meal was over, Adelaide
+put her hand on her husband’s shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>“You’re going to lie down at once, Vin.”</p>
+
+<p>He rose obediently, but Wayne interposed. It seemed to him that it would
+be possible to tell his story to Farron.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, can’t Mr. Farron stay a few minutes?” he said. “I want so much to
+speak to you and him together about—”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide cut him short.</p>
+
+<p>“No, he can’t. It’s more important that he should get strong than
+anything else is. You can talk to me all you like when I come down.
+Come, Vin.”</p>
+
+<p>When they were up-stairs, and she was tucking him up on his sofa, he
+asked gently:</p>
+
+<p>“What did that boy want?”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide made a little face.</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing of any importance,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>Things had indeed changed between them if he would accept such an answer
+as that. She thought his indifference like the studied oblivion of the
+debtor who says, “Don’t I owe you something?” and is content with the
+most non-committal reply. He lay back and smiled at her. His expression
+was not easy to read.</p>
+
+<p>She went down-stairs, where conversation had not prospered. Mr. Lanley
+was smoking, with his cigar drooping from a corner of his mouth. He felt
+very unhappy. Mathilde was frightened. Wayne had recast his opening
+sentence a dozen times. He kept saying to himself that he wanted it to be
+perfectly simple, but not infantile, and each phrase he thought of in
+conformity with his one rule sounded like the opening lines of the stage
+child’s speech.</p>
+
+<p>In the crisis of Adelaide’s being actually back again in the room he
+found himself saying:</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Farron, I think you ought to know exactly what has been happening.”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t I?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>“No. You know that I was going to San Francisco the day after
+to-morrow—”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh dear,” said Adelaide, regretfully, “is it given up?”</p>
+
+<p>He told her rather slowly the whole story. The most terrible moment was,
+as he had expected, when he explained that they had met, he and Mathilde,
+to apply for their marriage license. Adelaide turned, and looked full at
+her daughter.</p>
+
+<p>“You were going to treat me like that?” Mathilde burst into tears. She
+had long been on the brink of them, and now they came more from nerves
+than from a sense of the justice of her mother’s complaint. But the sound
+of them upset Wayne hopelessly. He couldn’t go on for a minute, and Mr.
+Lanley rose to his feet.</p>
+
+<p>“Good Lord! good Lord!” he said, “that was dishonorable! Can’t you see
+that that is dishonorable, to marry her on the sly when we trusted her to
+go about with you—”</p>
+
+<p>“O Papa, never mind about the dishonorableness,” said Adelaide. “The
+point is”—and she looked at Wayne—“that they were building their
+elopement on something that turned out to be a fraud. That doesn’t make
+one think very highly of your judgment, Mr. Wayne.”</p>
+
+<p>“I made a mistake, Mrs. Farron.”</p>
+
+<p>“It was a bad moment to make one. You have worked three years with this
+firm and never suspected anything wrong?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, sometimes I have—”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide’s eyebrows went up.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, you have suspected. You had reason to think the whole thing might be
+dishonest, but you were willing to run away with Mathilde and let her get
+inextricably committed before you found out—”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s irresponsible, sir,” said Lanley. “I don’t suppose you
+understood what you were doing, but it was utterly irresponsible.”</p>
+
+<p>“I think,” said Adelaide, “that it finally answers the question as to
+whether or not you are too young to be married.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mama, I will marry Pete,” said Mathilde, trying to make a voice broken
+with sobs sound firm and resolute.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Wayne at the moment has no means whatsoever, as I understand it,”
+said Adelaide.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t care whether he has or not,” said Mathilde.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide laughed. The laugh rather shocked Mr. Lanley. He tried to
+explain.</p>
+
+<p>“I feel sorry for you, but you can’t imagine how painful it is to us to
+think that Mathilde came so near to being mixed up with a crooked deal
+like that—Mathilde, of all people. You ought to see that for yourself.”</p>
+
+<p>“I see it, thank you,” said Pete.</p>
+
+<p>“Really, Mr. Wayne, I don’t think that’s quite the tone to take,” put
+in Adelaide.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t think it is,” said Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde, making one last grasp at self-control, said:</p>
+
+<p>“They wouldn’t be so horrid to you, Pete, if they understood—” But the
+muscles of her throat contracted, and she never got any further.</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose I shall be thought a very cruel parent,” said Adelaide, almost
+airily, “but this sort of thing can’t go on, really, you know.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, it really can’t,” said Mr. Lanley. “We feel you have abused our
+confidence.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, I don’t reproach Mr. Wayne along those lines,” said Adelaide. “He
+owes me nothing. I had not supposed Mathilde would deceive me, but we
+won’t discuss that now. It isn’t anything against Mr. Wayne to say he has
+made a mistake. Five years from now, I’m sure, he would not put himself,
+or let himself be put, in such an extremely humiliating position. And I
+don’t say that if he came back five years from now with some financial
+standing I should be any more opposed to him than to any one else. Only
+in the meantime there can be no engagement.” Adelaide looked very
+reasonable. “You must see that.”</p>
+
+<p>“You mean I’m not to see him?”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course not.”</p>
+
+<p>“I must see him,” said Mathilde.</p>
+
+<p>Lanley looked at Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>“This is an opportunity for you to rehabilitate yourself. You ought to be
+man enough to promise you won’t see her until you are in a position to
+ask her to be your wife.”</p>
+
+<p>“I have asked her that already, you know,” returned Wayne with an attempt
+at a smile.</p>
+
+<p>“Pete, you wouldn’t desert me?” said Mathilde.</p>
+
+<p>“If Mr. Wayne had any pride, my dear, he would not wish to come to a
+house where he was unwelcome,” said her mother.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m afraid I haven’t any of that sort of pride at all, Mrs. Farron.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide made a little gesture, as much as to say, with her traditions,
+she really did not know how to deal with people who hadn’t.</p>
+
+<p>“Mathilde,”—Wayne spoke very gently,—“don’t you think you could
+stop crying?”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m trying all the time, Pete. You won’t go away, no matter what
+they say?”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course not.”</p>
+
+<p>“It seems to be a question between what I think best for my daughter as
+opposed to what you think best—for yourself,” observed Adelaide.</p>
+
+<p>“Nobody wants to turn you out of the house, you know,” said Mr. Lanley in
+a conciliatory tone, “but the engagement is at an end.”</p>
+
+<p>“If you do turn him out, I’ll go with him,” said Mathilde, and she took
+his hand and held it in a tight, moist clasp.</p>
+
+<p>They looked so young and so distressed as they stood there hand in hand
+that Lanley found himself relenting.</p>
+
+<p>“We don’t say that your marriage will never be possible,” he said. “We
+are asking you to wait—consent to a separation of six months.”</p>
+
+<p>“Six months!” wailed Mathilde.</p>
+
+<p>“With your whole life before you?” her grandfather returned wistfully.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m afraid I am asking a little more than that, Papa,” said Adelaide. “I
+have never been enthusiastic about this engagement, but while I was
+watching and trying to be coöperative, it seems Mr. Wayne intended to run
+off with my daughter. I know Mathilde is young and easily influenced, but
+I don’t think, I don’t really think,”—Adelaide made it evident that she
+was being just,—“that any other of all the young men who come to the
+house would have tried to do that, and none of them would have got
+themselves into this difficulty. I mean,”—she looked up at Wayne,—“I
+think almost any of them would have had a little better business judgment
+than you have shown.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mama,” put in her daughter, “can’t you see how honest it was of Pete not
+to go, anyhow?”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide smiled ironically.</p>
+
+<p>“No; I can’t think that an unusually high standard, dear.”</p>
+
+<p>This seemed to represent the final outrage to Mathilde. She turned.</p>
+
+<p>“O Pete, wouldn’t your mother take me in?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>And as if to answer the question, Pringle opened the door and announced
+Mrs. Wayne.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XIV">CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>In all the short, but crowded, time since Lanley had first known Mrs.
+Wayne he had never been otherwise than glad to see her, but now his heart
+sank. It seemed to him that an abyss was about to open between them, and
+that all their differences of spirit, stimulating enough while they
+remained in the abstract, were about to be cast into concrete form.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde and Pete were so glad to see her that they said nothing, but
+looked at her beamingly. Whatever Adelaide’s feelings may have been,
+she greeted her guest with a positive courtesy, and she was the only
+one who did.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne nodded to her son, smiled more formally at Mr. Lanley, and
+then her eyes falling upon Mathilde, she realized that she had intruded
+on some sort of conference. She had a natural dread of such meetings, at
+which it seemed to her that the only thing which she must not do was the
+only thing that she knew how to do, namely, to speak her mind. So she at
+once decided to withdraw.</p>
+
+<p>“Your man insisted on my coming in, Mrs. Farron,” she said. “I came to
+ask about Mr. Farron; but I see you are in the midst of a family
+discussion, and so I won’t—”</p>
+
+<p>Everybody separately cried out to her to stay as she began to retreat to
+the door, and no one more firmly than Adelaide, who thought it as
+careless as Mr. Lanley thought it creditable that a mother would be
+willing to go away and leave the discussion of her son’s life to others.
+Adelaide saw an opportunity of killing two birds.</p>
+
+<p>“You are just the person for whom I have been longing, Mrs. Wayne,” she
+said. “Now you have come, we can settle the whole question.”</p>
+
+<p>“And just what is the question?” asked Mrs. Wayne. She sat down,
+looking distressed and rather guilty. She knew they were going to ask
+her what she knew about all the things that had been going on, and a
+hasty examination of her consciousness showed her that she knew
+everything, though she had avoided Pete’s full confidence. She knew
+simply by knowing that any two young people who loved each other would
+rather marry than separate for a year. But she was aware that this
+deduction, so inevitable to her, was exactly the one which would be
+denied by the others. So she sat, with a nervously pleasant smile on
+her usually untroubled face, and waited for Adelaide to speak. She did
+not have long to wait.</p>
+
+<p>“You did not know, I am sure, Mrs. Wayne, that your son intended to run
+away with my daughter?”</p>
+
+<p>All four of them stared at her, making her feel more and more guilty; and
+at last Lanley, unable to bear it, asked:</p>
+
+<p>“Did you know that, Mrs. Wayne?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, dear!” said Mrs. Wayne. “Yes. I knew it was possible; so did you.
+Pete didn’t tell me about it, though.”</p>
+
+<p>“But I did tell Mrs. Farron,” said Pete.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide protested at once.</p>
+
+<p>“You told me?” Then she remembered that a cloud had obscured the end of
+their last interview, but she did not withdraw her protest.</p>
+
+<p>“You know, Mrs. Farron, you have a bad habit of not listening to what is
+said to you,” Wayne answered firmly.</p>
+
+<p>This sort of impersonal criticism was to Adelaide the greatest
+impertinence, and she showed her annoyance.</p>
+
+<p>“In spite of the disabilities of age, Mr. Wayne,” she said, “I find I
+usually can get a simple idea if clearly presented.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, how absurd that is, Wayne!” put in Mr. Lanley. “You don’t mean to
+say that you told Mrs. Farron you were going to elope with her daughter,
+and she didn’t take in what you said?”</p>
+
+<p>“And yet that is just what took place.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide glanced at her father, as much as to say, “You see what kind of
+young man it is,” and then went on:</p>
+
+<p>“One fact at least I have learned only this minute—that is that the
+finances for this romantic trip were to be furnished by a dishonorable
+firm from which your son has been dismissed; or, no, resigned, isn’t it?”</p>
+
+<p>The human interest attached to losing a job brought mother and son
+together on the instant.</p>
+
+<p>“O Pete, you’ve left the firm!”</p>
+
+<p>He nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“O my poor boy!”</p>
+
+<p>He made a gesture, indicating that this was not the time to discuss the
+economic situation, and Adelaide went smoothly on:</p>
+
+<p>“And now, Mrs. Wayne, the point is this. I am considered harsh because I
+insist that a young man without an income who has just come near to
+running off with my child on money that was almost a bribe is not a
+person in whom I have unlimited confidence. I ask—it seems a tolerably
+mild request—that they do not see each other for six months.”</p>
+
+<p>“I cannot agree to that,” said Wayne decidedly.</p>
+
+<p>“Really, Mr. Wayne, do you feel yourself in a position to agree or
+disagree? We have never consented to your engagement. We have never
+thought the marriage a suitable one, have we, Papa?”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” said Mr. Lanley in a tone strangely dead.</p>
+
+<p>“Why is it not suitable?” asked Mrs. Wayne, as if she really hoped that
+an agreement might be reached by rational discussion.</p>
+
+<p>“Why?” said Adelaide, and smiled. “Dear Mrs. Wayne, these things are
+rather difficult to explain. Wouldn’t it be easier for all of us if you
+would just accept the statement that we think so without trying to decide
+whether we are right or wrong?”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m afraid it must be discussed,” answered Mrs. Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide leaned back, still with her faint smile, as if defying, though
+very politely, any one to discuss it with <i>her</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It was inevitable that Mrs. Wayne should turn to Mr. Lanley.</p>
+
+<p>“You, too, think it unsuitable?”</p>
+
+<p>He bowed gravely.</p>
+
+<p>“You dislike my son?”</p>
+
+<p>“Quite the contrary.”</p>
+
+<p>“Then you must be able to tell me the reason.”</p>
+
+<p>“I will try,” he said. He felt like a soldier called upon to defend a
+lost cause. It was his cause, he couldn’t desert it. His daughter and
+his granddaughter needed his protection; but he knew he was giving up
+something that he valued more than his life as he began to speak. “We
+feel the difference in background,” he said, “of early traditions, of
+judging life from the same point of view. Such differences can be
+overcome by time and money—” He stopped, for she was looking at him with
+the same wondering interest, devoid of anger, with which he had seen her
+study Wilsey. “I express myself badly,” he murmured.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne rose to her feet.</p>
+
+<p>“The trouble isn’t with your expression,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“You mean that what I am trying to express is wrong?”</p>
+
+<p>“It seems so to me.”</p>
+
+<p>“What is wrong about it?”</p>
+
+<p>She seemed to think over the possibilities for an instant, and then she
+shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t think I could make you understand,” she answered. She said it
+very gently, but it was cruel, and he turned white under the pain,
+suffering all the more that she was so entirely without malice. She
+turned to her son. “I’m going, Pete. Don’t you think you might as well
+come, too?”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde sprang up and caught Mrs. Wayne’s hand.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, don’t go!” she cried. “Don’t take him away! You know they are trying
+to separate us. Oh, Mrs. Wayne, won’t you take me in? Can’t I stay with
+you while we are waiting?”</p>
+
+<p>At this every one focused their eyes on Mrs. Wayne. Pete felt sorry for
+his mother, knowing how she hated to make a sudden decision, knowing how
+she hated to do anything disagreeable to those about her; but he never
+for an instant doubted what her decision would be. Therefore he could
+hardly believe his eyes when he saw her shaking her head.</p>
+
+<p>“I couldn’t do that, my dear.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mother!”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course you couldn’t,” said Mr. Lanley, blowing his nose immediately
+after under the tremendous emotion of finding that she was not an enemy,
+after all. Adelaide smiled to herself. She was thinking, “You could and
+would, if I hadn’t put in that sting about his failures.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why can’t you, Mother?” asked Pete.</p>
+
+<p>“We’ll talk that over at home.”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear boy,” said Mr. Lanley, kindly, “no one over thirty would have
+to ask why.”</p>
+
+<p>“No parent likes to assist at the kidnapping of another parent’s child,”
+said Adelaide.</p>
+
+<p>“Good Heavens! my mother has kidnapped so many children in her day!”</p>
+
+<p>“From the wrong sort of home, I suppose,” said Lanley, in explanation, to
+no one, perhaps, so much as to himself.</p>
+
+<p>“Am I to infer that she thinks mine the right sort? How delightful!”
+said Adelaide.</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Wayne, is it because I’m richer than Pete that you won’t take me
+in?” asked Mathilde, visions of bestowing her wealth in charity flitting
+across her mind.</p>
+
+<p>The other nodded. Wayne stared.</p>
+
+<p>“Mother,” he said, “you don’t mean to say you are letting yourself be
+influenced by a taunt like that of Mrs. Farron’s, which she didn’t even
+believe herself?”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne was shocked.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, no; not that, Pete. It isn’t that at all. But when a girl has been
+brought up—”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne saw it all in an instant.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes, I see. We’ll talk of that later.”</p>
+
+<p>But Adelaide had seen, too.</p>
+
+<p>“No; do go on, Mrs. Wayne. You don’t approve of the way my daughter has
+been brought up.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t think she has been brought up to be a poor man’s wife.”</p>
+
+<p>“No. I own I did not have that particular destiny in mind.”</p>
+
+<p>“And when I heard you assuming just now that every one was always
+concerned about money, and when I realized that the girl must have been
+brought up in that atmosphere and belief—”</p>
+
+<p>“I see. You thought she was not quite the right wife for your son?”</p>
+
+<p>“But I would try so hard,” said Mathilde. “I would learn; I—”</p>
+
+<p>“Mathilde,” interrupted her mother, “when a lady tells you you are not
+good enough for her son, you must not protest.”</p>
+
+<p>“Come, come, Adelaide, there is no use in being disagreeable,” said
+Mr. Lanley.</p>
+
+<p>“Disagreeable!” returned his daughter. “Mrs. Wayne and I are entirely
+agreed. She thinks her son too good for my daughter, and I think my
+daughter too good for her son. Really, there seems nothing more to be
+said. Good-by, Mr. Wayne.” She held out her long, white hand to him. Mrs.
+Wayne was trying to make her position clearer to Mathilde, but Pete
+thought this an undesirable moment for such an attempt.</p>
+
+<p>Partly as an assertion of his rights, partly because she looked so young
+and helpless, he stooped and kissed her.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll come and see you about half-past ten tomorrow morning,” he said
+very clearly, so that every one could hear. Adelaide looked blank; she
+was thinking that on Pringle she could absolutely depend. Wayne saw his
+mother and Lanley bow to each other, and the next moment he had contrived
+to get her out of the house.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde rushed away to her own room, and Adelaide and her father were
+left alone. She turned to him with one of her rare caresses.</p>
+
+<p>“Dear Papa,” she said, “what a comfort you are to me! What should I do
+without you? You’ll never desert me, will you?” And she put her head on
+his shoulder. He patted her with an absent-minded rhythm, and then he
+said, as if he were answering some secret train of thought:</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t see what else I could have done.”</p>
+
+<p>“You couldn’t have done anything else,” replied his daughter, still
+nestling against him. “But Mrs. Baxter had frightened me with her account
+of your sentimental admiration for Mrs. Wayne, and I thought you might
+want to make yourself agreeable to her at the expense of my poor child.”</p>
+
+<p>She felt his shoulder heave with a longer breath.</p>
+
+<p>“I can’t imagine putting anything before Mathilde’s happiness,” he said,
+and after a pause he added: “I really must go home. Mrs. Baxter will
+think me a neglectful host.”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t you want to bring her to dine here to-night? I’ll try and get
+some one to meet her. Let me see. She thinks Mr. Wilsey—”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I can’t stand Wilsey,” answered her father, crossly.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I’ll think of some one to sacrifice on the altar of your
+friendship. I certainly don’t want to dine alone with Mathilde. And, by
+the way, Papa, I haven’t mentioned any of this to Vincent.”</p>
+
+<p>He thought it was admirable of her to bear her anxieties alone so as to
+spare her sick husband.</p>
+
+<p>“Poor girl!” he said. “You’ve had a lot of trouble lately.”</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime Wayne and his mother walked slowly home.</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose you’re furious at me, Pete,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“Not a bit,” he answered. “For a moment, when I saw what you were going
+to say, I was terrified. But no amount of tact would have made Mrs.
+Farron feel differently, and I think they might as well know what we
+really think and feel. I was only sorry if it hurt Mathilde.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh dear, it’s so hard to be truthful!” exclaimed his mother. He
+laughed, for he wished she sometimes found it harder; and she went on:</p>
+
+<p>“Poor little Mathilde! You know I wouldn’t hurt her if I could help it.
+It’s not her fault. But what a terrible system it is, and how money does
+blind people! They can’t see you at all as you are, and yet if you had
+fifty thousand dollars a year, they’d be more aware of your good points
+than I am. They can’t see that you have resolution and charm and a sense
+of honor. They don’t see the person, they just see the lack of income.”</p>
+
+<p>Pete smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“A person is all Mrs. Farron says she asks for her daughter.”</p>
+
+<p>“She does not know a person when she sees one.”</p>
+
+<p>“She knew one when she married Farron.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne sniffed.</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps he married her,” she replied.</p>
+
+<p>Her son thought this likely, but he did not answer, for she had given him
+an idea—to see Farron. Farron would at least understand the situation.
+His mother approved of the suggestion.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course he’s not Mathilde’s father.”</p>
+
+<p>“He’s not a snob.”</p>
+
+<p>They had reached the house, and Pete was fishing in his pocket for his
+keys.</p>
+
+<p>“Do you think Mr. Lanley is a snob?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>As usual Mrs. Wayne evaded the direct answer.</p>
+
+<p>“I got an unfavorable impression of him this afternoon.”</p>
+
+<p>“For failing to see that I was a king among men?”</p>
+
+<p>“For backing up every stupid thing his daughter said.”</p>
+
+<p>“Loyalty is a fine quality.”</p>
+
+<p>“Justice is better,” answered his mother.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, well, he’s old,” said Wayne, dismissing the whole subject.</p>
+
+<p>They walked up their four flights in silence, and then Wayne remembered
+to ask something that had been in his mind several times.</p>
+
+<p>“By the way, Mother, how did you happen to come to the Farrons at all?”</p>
+
+<p>She laughed rather self-consciously.</p>
+
+<p>“I hoped perhaps Mr. Farron might be well enough to see me a moment
+about Marty. The truth is, Pete, Mr. Farron is the real person in that
+whole family.”</p>
+
+<p>That evening he wrote Farron a note, asking him to see him the next
+morning at half-past ten about “this trouble of which, of course,
+Mrs. Farron has told you.” He added a request that he would tell
+Pringle of his intention in case he could give the interview, because
+Mrs. Farron had been quite frank in saying that she would give orders
+not to let him in.</p>
+
+<p>Farron received this note with his breakfast. Adelaide was not there. He
+had had no hint from her of any crisis. He had not come down to dinner
+the evening before to meet Mrs. Baxter and the useful people asked to
+entertain her, but he had seen Mathilde’s tear-stained face, and in a few
+minutes with his father-in-law had encountered one or two evident
+evasions. Only Adelaide had been unfathomable.</p>
+
+<p>After he had read the letter and thought over the situation, he sent for
+Pringle, and gave orders that when Mr. Wayne came he would see him.</p>
+
+<p>Pringle did not exactly make an objection, but stated a fact when he
+replied that Mrs. Farron had given orders that Mr. Wayne was not to be
+allowed to see Miss Severance.</p>
+
+<p>“Exactly,” said Farron. “Show him here.” Here was his own study.</p>
+
+<p>As it happened, Adelaide was sitting with him, making very good invalid’s
+talk, when Pringle announced, “Mr. Wayne.”</p>
+
+<p>“Pringle, I told you—” Adelaide began, but her husband cut her short.</p>
+
+<p>“He has an appointment with me, Adelaide.”</p>
+
+<p>“You don’t understand, Vin. You mustn’t see him.”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne was by this time in the room.</p>
+
+<p>“But I wish to see him, my dear Adelaide, and,” Farron added, “I wish to
+see him alone.”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” she answered, with a good deal of excitement; “that you cannot.
+This is my affair, Vincent—the affair of my child.”</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her for a second, and then opening the door into his
+bedroom, he said to Wayne:</p>
+
+<p>“Will you come in here?” The door was closed behind the two men.</p>
+
+<p>Wayne was not a coward, although he had dreaded his interview with
+Adelaide; it was his very respect for Farron that kept him from feeling
+even nervous.</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps I ought not to have asked you to see me,” he began.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m very glad to see you,” answered Farron. “Sit down, and tell me the
+story as you see it from the beginning.”</p>
+
+<p>It was a comfort to tell the story at last to an expert. Wayne, who had
+been trying for twenty-four hours to explain what underwriting meant,
+what were the responsibilities of brokers in such matters, what was the
+function of such a report as his, felt as if he had suddenly groped his
+way out of a fog as he talked, with hardly an interruption but a nod or a
+lightening eye from Farron. He spoke of Benson. “I know the man,” said
+Farron; of Honaton, “He was in my office once.” Wayne told how Mathilde,
+and then he himself, had tried to inform Mrs. Farron of the definiteness
+of their plans to be married.</p>
+
+<p>“How long has this been going on?” Farron asked.</p>
+
+<p>“At least ten days.”</p>
+
+<p>Farron nodded. Then Wayne told of the discovery of the proof at the
+printer’s and his hurried meeting in the park to tell Mathilde. Here
+Farron stopped him suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>“What was it kept you from going through with it just the same?”</p>
+
+<p>“You’re the first person who has asked me that,” answered Pete.</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps you did not even think of such a thing?”</p>
+
+<p>“No one could help thinking of it who saw her there—”</p>
+
+<p>“And you didn’t do it?”</p>
+
+<p>“It wasn’t consideration for her family that held me back.”</p>
+
+<p>“What was it?”</p>
+
+<p>Pete found a moral scruple was a difficult motive to avow.</p>
+
+<p>“It was Mathilde herself. That would not have been treating her as
+an equal.”</p>
+
+<p>“You intend always to treat her as an equal?”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne was ashamed to find how difficult it was to answer truthfully. The
+tone of the question gave him no clue to the speaker’s own thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I do,” he said; and then blurted out hastily, “Don’t you believe in
+treating a woman as an equal?”</p>
+
+<p>“I believe in treating her exactly as she wants to be treated.”</p>
+
+<p>“But every one wants to be treated as an equal, if they’re any good.”
+Farron smiled, showing those blue-white teeth for an instant, and Wayne,
+feeling he was not quite doing himself justice, added, “I call that just
+ordinary respect, you know, and I could not love any one I didn’t
+respect. Could you?”</p>
+
+<p>The question was, or Farron chose to consider it, a purely rhetorical
+one.</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose,” he observed, “that they are to be counted the most fortunate
+who love and respect at the same time.”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course,” said Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>Farron nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“And yet perhaps they miss a good deal.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know <i>what</i> they miss,” answered Wayne, to whom the sentiment
+was as shocking as anything not understood can be.</p>
+
+<p>“No; I’m sure you don’t,” answered his future stepfather-in-law. “Go on
+with your story.”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne went on, but not as rapidly as he had expected. Farron kept him a
+long time on the interview of the afternoon before, and particularly on
+Mrs. Farron’s part, just the point Wayne did not want to discuss for fear
+of betraying the bitterness he felt toward her. But again and again
+Farron made him quote her words wherever he could remember them; and
+then, as if this had not been clear enough, he asked:</p>
+
+<p>“You think my wife has definitely made up her mind against the marriage?”</p>
+
+<p>“Irrevocably.”</p>
+
+<p>“Irrevocably?” Farron questioned more as if it were the sound of the word
+than the meaning that he was doubting.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, you’ve been rather out of it lately, sir,” said Wayne. “You haven’t
+followed, perhaps, all that’s been going on.”</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps not.”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne felt he must be candid.</p>
+
+<p>“If it is your idea that your wife’s opposition could be changed, I’m
+afraid I must tell you, Mr. Farron—” He paused, meeting a quick, sudden
+look; then Farron turned his head, and stared, with folded arms, out of
+the window. Wayne had plenty of time to wonder what he was going to say.
+What he did say was surprising.</p>
+
+<p>“I think you are an honest man, and I should be glad to have you working
+for me. I could make you one of my secretaries, with a salary of six
+thousand dollars.”</p>
+
+<p>In the shock Pete heard himself saying the first thing that came
+into his head:</p>
+
+<p>“That’s a large salary, sir.”</p>
+
+<p>“Some people would say large enough to marry on.”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne drew back.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t you think you ought to consult Mrs. Farron before you offer it to
+me?” he asked hesitatingly.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t carry honesty too far. No, I don’t consult my wife about my
+office appointments.”</p>
+
+<p>“It isn’t honesty; but I couldn’t stand having you change your
+mind when—”</p>
+
+<p>“When my wife tells me to? I promise you not to do that.”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne found that the interview was over, although he had not been able to
+express his gratitude.</p>
+
+<p>“I know what you are feeling,” said Farron. “Good-by.”</p>
+
+<p>“I can’t understand why you are doing it, Mr. Farron; but—”</p>
+
+<p>“It needn’t matter to you. Good-by.”</p>
+
+<p>With a sensation that in another instant he might be out of the house,
+Wayne metaphorically caught at the door-post.</p>
+
+<p>“I must see Mathilde before I go,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Farron shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“No, not to-day.”</p>
+
+<p>“She’s terribly afraid I am going to be moved by insults to desert her,”
+Wayne urged.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll see she understands. I’ll send for you in a day or two; then it
+will be all right.” They shook hands. He was glad Farron showed him out
+through the corridor and not through the study, where, he knew, Mrs.
+Farron was still waiting like a fine, sleek cat at a rat-hole.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XV">CHAPTER XV</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>During this interview Adelaide sat in her husband’s study and waited. She
+looked back upon that other period of suspense—the hour when she had
+waited at the hospital during his operation—as a time of comparative
+peace. She had been able then, she remembered, to sit still, to pursue,
+if not a train of thought, at least a set of connected images; but now
+her whole spirit seemed to be seething with a sort of poison that made
+her muscles jerk and start and her mind dart and faint. Then she had
+foreseen loss through the fate common to humanity; now she foresaw it
+through the action of her own tyrannical contempt for anything that
+seemed to her weak.</p>
+
+<p>She had never rebelled against coercion from Vincent. She had even loved
+it, but she had loved it when he had seemed to her a superior being;
+coercion from one who only yesterday had been under the dominion of
+nerves and nurses was intolerable to her. She was at heart a courtier,
+would do menial service to a king, and refuse common civility to an
+inferior. She knew how St. Christopher had felt at seeing his satanic
+captain tremble at the sign of the cross; and though, unlike the saint,
+she had no intention of setting out to discover the stronger lord, she
+knew that he might now any day appear.</p>
+
+<p>From any one not an acknowledged superior that shut door was an insult to
+be avenged, and she sat and waited for the moment to arrive when she
+would most adequately avenge it. There was still something terrifying in
+the idea of going out to do battle with Vincent. Hitherto in their
+quarrels he had always been the aggressor, had always startled her out of
+an innocent calm by an accusation or complaint. But this, as she said to
+herself, was not a quarrel, but a readjustment, of which probably he was
+still unaware. She hoped he was. She hoped he would come in with his
+accustomed manner and say civilly, “Forgive me for shutting the door; but
+my reason was—”</p>
+
+<p>And she would answer, “Really, I don’t think we need trouble about your
+reasons, Vincent.” She knew just the tone she would use, just the
+expression of a smile suppressed. Then his quick eyes would fasten
+themselves on her face, and perhaps at the first glance would read the
+story of his defeat. She knew her own glance would not waver.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of half an hour she heard the low tones of conversation change
+to the brisk notes of leave-taking. Her heart began to beat with fear,
+but not the kind of fear that makes people run away; rather the kind that
+makes them abdicate all reason and fan their emotions into a sort of
+inspiring flame.</p>
+
+<p>She heard the door open into the corridor, but even then Vincent did not
+immediately come. Miss Gregory had been waiting to say good-by to him. As
+a case he was finished. Adelaide heard her clear voice say gaily:</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I’m off, Mr. Vincent.”</p>
+
+<p>They went back into the room and shut the door. Adelaide clenched her
+hands; these delays were hard to bear.</p>
+
+<p>It was not a long delay, though in that next room a very human bond
+was about to be broken. Possibly if Vincent had done exactly what
+his impulses prompted, he would have taken Miss Gregory in his arms
+and kissed her. But instead he said quietly, for his manner had not
+much range:</p>
+
+<p>“I shall miss you.”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s time I went.”</p>
+
+<p>“To some case more interestingly dangerous?”</p>
+
+<p>“Your case was dangerous enough for me,” said the girl; and then for fear
+he might miss her meaning, “I never met any one like you, Mr. Farron.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve never been taken care of as you took care of me.”</p>
+
+<p>“I wish”—she looked straight up at him—“I could take care of you
+altogether.”</p>
+
+<p>“That,” he answered, “would end in my taking care of you.”</p>
+
+<p>“And your hands are pretty full as it is?”</p>
+
+<p>He nodded, and she went away without even shaking hands. She omitted her
+farewells to any other member of the family except Pringle, who, Farron
+heard, was congratulating her on her consideration for servants as he put
+her into her taxi.</p>
+
+<p>Then he opened the door of his study, went to the chair he had risen
+from, and took up the paper at the paragraph at which he had dropped it.
+Adelaide’s eyes followed him like search-lights.</p>
+
+<p>“May I ask,” she said with her edged voice, “if you have been disposing
+of my child’s future in there without consulting me?”</p>
+
+<p>If their places had been reversed, Adelaide would have raised her
+eyebrows and repeated, “Your child’s future?” but Farron was more direct.</p>
+
+<p>“I have been engaging Wayne as a secretary,” he said, and, turning to the
+financial page, glanced down the quotations.</p>
+
+<p>“Then you must dismiss him again.”</p>
+
+<p>“He will be a useful man to me,” said Farron, as if she had not spoken.
+“I have needed some one whom I could depend on—”</p>
+
+<p>“Vincent, it is absurd for you to pretend you don’t know he wanted to
+marry Mathilde.”</p>
+
+<p>He did not raise his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” he said; “I remember you and I had some talk about it before my
+operation.”</p>
+
+<p>“Since then circumstances have arisen of which you know nothing—things
+I did not tell you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Do you think that was wise?”</p>
+
+<p>With a sense that a rapid and resistless current was carrying them both
+to destruction she saw for the first time that he was as angry as she.</p>
+
+<p>“I do not like your tone,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“What’s the matter with it?”</p>
+
+<p>“It isn’t polite; it isn’t friendly.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why should it be?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why? What a question! Love—”</p>
+
+<p>“I doubt if it is any longer a question of love between you and me.”</p>
+
+<p>These words, which so exactly embodied her own idea, came to her as a
+shock, a brutal blow from him.</p>
+
+<p>“Vincent!” she cried protestingly.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know what it is that has your attention now, what private
+anxieties that I am not privileged to share—”</p>
+
+<p>“You have been ill.”</p>
+
+<p>“But not imbecile. Do you suppose I’ve missed one tone of your voice, or
+haven’t understood what has been going on in your mind? Have you lived
+with me five years and think me a forgiving man—”</p>
+
+<p>“May I ask what you have to forgive?”</p>
+
+<p>“Do you suppose a pat to my pillow or an occasional kind word takes the
+place to me of what our relation used to be?”</p>
+
+<p>“You speak as if our relation was over.”</p>
+
+<p>“Have you been imagining I was going to come whining to you for a return
+of your love and respect? What nonsense! Love makes love, and
+indifference makes indifference.”</p>
+
+<p>“You expect me to say I am indifferent to you?”</p>
+
+<p>“I care very little what you say. I judge your conduct.”</p>
+
+<p>She had an unerring instinct for what would wound him. If she had
+answered with conviction, “Yes, I am indifferent to you,” there would
+have been enough temper and exaggeration in it for him to discount the
+whole statement. But to say, “No, I still love you, Vincent,” in a tone
+that conceded the very utmost that she could,—namely, that she still
+loved him for the old, rather pitiful association,—that would be to
+inflict the most painful wound possible. And so that was what she said.
+She was prepared to have him take it up and cry: “You still love me? Do
+you mean as you love your Aunt Alberta?” and she, still trying to be
+just, would answer: “Oh, more than Aunt Alberta. Only, of course—”</p>
+
+<p>The trouble was he did not make the right answer. When she said, “No, I
+still love you, Vincent,” he answered:</p>
+
+<p>“I cannot say the same.”</p>
+
+<p>It was one of those replies that change the face of the world. It drove
+every other idea out of her head. She stared at him for an instant.</p>
+
+<p>“Nobody,” she answered, “need tell me such a thing as that twice.” It
+was a fine phrase to cover a retreat; she left him and went to her own
+room. It no more occurred to her to ask whether he meant what he said
+than if she had been struck in the head she would have inquired if the
+blow was real.</p>
+
+<p>She did not come down to lunch. Vincent and Mathilde ate alone. Mathilde,
+as she told Pete, had begun to understand her stepfather, but she had not
+progressed so far as to see in his silence anything but an
+unapproachable sternness. It never crossed her mind that this middle-aged
+man, who seemed to control his life so completely, was suffering far more
+than she, and she was suffering a good deal.</p>
+
+<p>Pete had promised to come that morning, and she hadn’t seen him yet. She
+supposed he had come, and that, though she had been on the lookout for
+him, she had missed him. She felt as if they were never going to see each
+other again. When she found she was to be alone at luncheon with Farron,
+she thought of appealing to him, but was restrained by two
+considerations. She was a kind person, and her mother had repeatedly
+impressed upon her how badly at present Mr. Farron supported any anxiety.
+More important than this, however, was her belief that he would never
+work at cross-purposes with his wife. What were she and Pete to do? she
+thought. Mrs. Wayne would not take her in, her mother would not let Pete
+come to the house, and they had no money.</p>
+
+<p>Both cups of soup left the table almost untasted.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m sorry Mama has one of her headaches,” said Mathilde.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” said Farron. “You’d better take some of that chicken, Mathilde.
+It’s very good.”</p>
+
+<p>She did not notice that the piece he had taken on his own plate was
+untouched.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m not hungry,” she answered.</p>
+
+<p>“Anything wrong?”</p>
+
+<p>She could not lie, and so she looked at him and smiled and answered:</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing, as Mama would say, to trouble an invalid with.”</p>
+
+<p>She did not have a great success. In fact, his brows showed a slight
+disposition to contract, and after a moment of silence he said:</p>
+
+<p>“Does your mother say that?”</p>
+
+<p>“She’s always trying to protect you nowadays, Mr. Farron.”</p>
+
+<p>“I saw your friend Pete Wayne this morning.”</p>
+
+<p>“You saw—” Surprise, excitement, alarm flooded her face with crimson.
+“Oh, why did <i>you</i> see him?”</p>
+
+<p>“I saw him by appointment. He asked me to tell you—only, I’m afraid,
+other things put it out of my head—that he has accepted a job I
+offered him.”</p>
+
+<p>“O Mr. Farron, what kind of job?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, the kind of job that would enable two self-denying young people to
+marry, I think.”</p>
+
+<p>Not knowing how clearly all that she felt was written on her face
+Mathilde tried to put it all into words.</p>
+
+<p>“How wonderful! how kind! But my mother—”</p>
+
+<p>“I will arrange it with your mother.”</p>
+
+<p>“Have you known all along? Oh, why did you do this wonderful thing?”</p>
+
+<p>“Because—perhaps you won’t agree with me—I have taken rather a fancy to
+this young man. And I had other reasons.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde took her stepfather’s hand as it lay upon the table.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve only just begun to understand you, Mr. Farron. To understand,
+I mean, what Mama means when she says you are the strongest, wisest
+person—”</p>
+
+<p>He pretended to smile.</p>
+
+<p>“When did your mother say that?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, ages ago.” She stopped, aware of a faint motion to withdraw on the
+part of the hand she held. “I suppose you want to go to her.”</p>
+
+<p>“No. The sort of headache she has is better left alone, I think, though
+you might stop as you go up.”</p>
+
+<p>“I will. When do you think I can see Pete?”</p>
+
+<p>“I’d wait a day or two; but you might telephone him at once, if you like,
+and say—or do you know what to say?”</p>
+
+<p>She laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“It used to frighten me when you made fun of me like that; but now—It
+must be simply delirious to be able to make people as happy as you’ve
+just made us.”</p>
+
+<p>He smiled at her word.</p>
+
+<p>“Other people’s happiness is not exactly delirious,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>She was moving in the direction of the nearest telephone, but she said
+over her shoulder:</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, well, I think you did pretty well for yourself when you chose Mama.”</p>
+
+<p>She left him sipping his black coffee; he took every drop of that.</p>
+
+<p>When he had finished he did not go back to his study, but to the
+drawing-room, where he sat down in a large chair by the fire. He lit a
+cigar. It was a quiet hour in the house, and he might have been supposed
+to be a man entirely at peace.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley, coming in about an hour later, certainly imagined he was
+rousing an invalid from a refreshing rest. He tried to retreat, but found
+Vincent’s black eyes were on him.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m sorry to disturb you,” he said. “Just wanted to see Adelaide.”</p>
+
+<p>“Adelaide has a headache.”</p>
+
+<p>Life was taking so many wrong turnings that Mr. Lanley had grown
+apprehensive. He suddenly remembered how many headaches Adelaide had had
+just before he knew of her troubles with Severance.</p>
+
+<p>“A headache?” he said nervously.</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing serious.” Vincent looked more closely at his father-in-law. “You
+yourself don’t look just the thing, sir.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley sat down more limply than was his custom.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m getting to an age,” he said, “when I can’t stand scenes. We had
+something of a scene here yesterday afternoon. God bless my soul! though,
+I believe Adelaide told me not to mention it to you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Adelaide is very considerate,” replied her husband. His extreme
+susceptibility to sorrow made Mr. Lanley notice a tone which ordinarily
+would have escaped him, and he looked up so sharply that Farron was
+forced to add quickly: “But you haven’t made a break. I know about what
+took place.”</p>
+
+<p>The egotism of suffering, the distorted vision of a sleepless night, made
+Mr. Lanley blurt out suddenly:</p>
+
+<p>“I want to ask you, Vincent, do you think I could have done anything
+different?”</p>
+
+<p>Now, none of the accounts which Farron had received had made any mention
+of Mr. Lanley’s part in the proceedings at all, and so he paused a
+moment, and in that pause Mr. Lanley went on:</p>
+
+<p>“It’s a difficult position—before a boy’s mother. There isn’t anything
+against him, of course. One’s reasons for not wanting the marriage do
+sound a little snobbish when one says them—right out. In fact, I suppose
+they are snobbish. Do you find it hard to get away from early prejudices,
+Vincent? I do. I think Adelaide is quite right; and yet the boy is a nice
+boy. What do you think of him?”</p>
+
+<p>“I have taken him into my office.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley was startled by a courage so far beyond his own.</p>
+
+<p>“But,” he asked, “did you consult Adelaide?”</p>
+
+<p>Farron shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“But, Vincent, was that quite loyal?”</p>
+
+<p>A change in Farron’s expression made Mr. Lanley turn his head, and he saw
+that Adelaide had come into the room. Her appearance bore out the legend
+of her headache: she looked like a garden after an early frost. But
+perhaps the most terrifying thing about her aspect was her complete
+indifference to it. A recollection suddenly came to Mr. Lanley of a
+railway accident that he and Adelaide had been in. He had seen her
+stepping toward him through the debris, buttoning her gloves. She was far
+beyond such considerations now.</p>
+
+<p>She had come to put her very life to the test. There was one hope, there
+was one way in which Vincent could rehabilitate himself, and that was by
+showing himself victor in the hardest of all struggles, the personal
+struggle with her. That would be hard, because she would make it so, if
+she perished in the attempt.</p>
+
+<p>The crisis came in the first meeting of their eyes. If his glance had
+said: “My poor dear, you’re tired. Rest. All will be well,” his cause
+would have been lost. But his glance said nothing, only studied her
+coolly, and she began to speak.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Papa, Vincent does not consider such minor points as loyalty to me.”
+Her voice and manner left Mr. Lanley in no doubt that if he stayed an
+instant he would witness a domestic quarrel. The idea shocked him
+unspeakably. That these two reserved and dignified people should quarrel
+at all was bad enough, but that they should have reached a point where
+they were indifferent to the presence of a third person was terrible. He
+got himself out of the room without ceremony, but not before he saw
+Vincent rise and heard the first words of his sentence:</p>
+
+<p>“And what right have you to speak of loyalty?” Here, fortunately,
+Lanley shut the door behind him, for Vincent’s next words would have
+shocked him still more: “A prostitute would have stuck better to a man
+when he was ill.”</p>
+
+<p>But Adelaide was now in good fighting trim. She laughed out loud.</p>
+
+<p>“Really, Vincent,” she said, “your language! You must make your complaint
+against me a little more definite.”</p>
+
+<p>“Not much; and give you a chance to get up a little rational explanation.
+Besides, we neither of us need explanations. We know what has been
+happening.”</p>
+
+<p>“You mean you really doubt my feeling for you? No, Vincent, I still
+love you,” and her voice had a flute-like quality which, though it was
+without a trace of conviction, very few people who had ever heard it
+had resisted.</p>
+
+<p>“I am aware of that,” said Vincent quietly.</p>
+
+<p>She looked beautifully dazed.</p>
+
+<p>“Yet this morning you spoke—as if—”</p>
+
+<p>“But what is love such as yours worth? A man must be on the crest of the
+wave to keep it; otherwise it changes automatically into contempt. I
+don’t care about it, Adelaide. I can’t use it in a life like mine.”</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him, and a dreamlike state began to come over her. She
+simply couldn’t believe in the state of mind of those sick-room days; she
+could never really, she thought, have been less passionately admiring
+than she was at that minute, yet the half-recollection confused her and
+kept her silent.</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps it’s vanity on my part,” he said, “but contempt like yours is
+something I could never forgive.”</p>
+
+<p>“You would forgive me anything if you loved me.” Her tone was noble
+and sincere.</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps.”</p>
+
+<p>“You mean you don’t?”</p>
+
+<p>“Adelaide, there are times when a person chooses between loving and
+being loved.”</p>
+
+<p>The sentence made her feel sick with fear, but she asked:</p>
+
+<p>“Tell me just what you mean.”</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps I could keep on loving you if I shut my eyes to the kind of
+person you are; but if I did that, I could not hold you an instant.”</p>
+
+<p>She stared at him as fascinated as a bird by a snake. This, it seemed to
+her, was the truth, the final summing up of their relation. She had lost
+him, and yet she was eternally his.</p>
+
+<p>As she looked at him she became aware that he was growing slowly pale. He
+was standing, and he put his hand out to the mantelpiece to steady
+himself. She thought he was going to faint.</p>
+
+<p>“Vincent,” she said, “let me help you to the sofa.”</p>
+
+<p>She wanted now to see him falter, to feel his hand on her shoulder,
+anything for a closer touch with him. For half a minute, perhaps, they
+remained motionless, and then the color began to come back into his face.</p>
+
+<p>He smiled bitterly.</p>
+
+<p>“They tell me you are such a good sick nurse, Mrs. Farron,” he said, “so
+considerate to the weak. But I don’t need your help, thank you.”</p>
+
+<p>She covered her face with her hands. He seemed to her stronger and more
+cruel than anything she had imagined. In a minute he left her alone.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XVI">CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Farron cared, perhaps, no more for appearances than Adelaide did, but
+his habitual manner was much better adapted to concealment. In him the
+fluctuations between the deepest depression and the highest elation were
+accompanied by such slight variations of look and tone that they escaped
+almost every one but Adelaide herself. He came down to dinner that
+evening, and while Adelaide sat in silence, with her elbows on the table
+and her long fingers clasping and unclasping themselves in a sort of
+rhythmic desperation, conversation went on pleasantly enough between
+Mathilde and Vincent. This was facilitated by the fact that Mathilde had
+now transferred to Vincent the flattering affection which she used to
+give to her grandfather. She agreed with, wondered at, and drank in
+every word.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally, Mathilde attributed her mother’s distress to the crisis in her
+own love-affairs. She had had no word with her as to Wayne’s new
+position, and it came to her in a flash that it would be daring, but
+wise, to take the matter up in the presence of her stepfather. So, as
+soon as they were in the drawing-room, and Farron had opened the evening
+paper, and his wife, with a wild decision, had opened a book, Mathilde
+ruthlessly interrupted them both, recalling them from what appeared to be
+the depths of absorptions in their respective pages by saying:</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Farron, did you tell Mama what you had done about Pete?”</p>
+
+<p>Farron raised his eyes and said:</p>
+
+<p>“Yes.”</p>
+
+<p>“And what did she say?”</p>
+
+<p>“What is there for me to say?” answered Adelaide in the terrible, crisp
+voice that Mathilde hated.</p>
+
+<p>There was a pause. To Mathilde it seemed extraordinary the way older
+people sometimes stalled and shifted about perfectly obvious issues; but,
+wishing to be patient, she explained:</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t you see it makes some difference in our situation?”</p>
+
+<p>“The greatest, I should think,” said Adelaide, and just hinted that she
+might go back to her book at any instant.</p>
+
+<p>“But don’t you think—” Mathilde began again, when Farron interrupted her
+almost sharply.</p>
+
+<p>“Mathilde,” he said, “there’s a well-known business axiom, not to try to
+get things on paper too early.”</p>
+
+<p>She bent her head a trifle on one side in the way a puppy will when an
+unusual strain is being put upon its faculties. It seemed to her curious,
+but she saw she was being advised to drop the subject. Suddenly Adelaide
+sprang to her feet and said she was going to bed.</p>
+
+<p>“I hope your headache will be better, Mama,” Mathilde hazarded; but
+Adelaide went without answering. Mathilde looked at Mr. Farron.</p>
+
+<p>“You haven’t learned to wait,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s so hard to wait when you are on bad terms with people you love!”</p>
+
+<p>She was surprised that he smiled—a smile that conveyed more pain than
+amusement.</p>
+
+<p>“It is hard,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>This closed the evening. The next morning Vincent went down-town. He
+went about half-past ten. Adelaide, breakfasting in her room and dressing
+at her leisure, did not appear until after eleven, and then discovered
+for the first time that her husband had gone. She was angry at Mathilde,
+who had breakfasted with him, at Pringle, for not telling her what was
+happening.</p>
+
+<p>“You shouldn’t have let him go, Mathilde,” she said. “You are old enough
+to have some judgment in such matters. He is not strong enough. He almost
+fainted yesterday.”</p>
+
+<p>“But, Mama,” protested the girl, “I could not stop Mr. Farron. I don’t
+think even you could have if he’d made up his mind.”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell Pringle to order the motor at once,” was her mother’s answer.</p>
+
+<p>Her distraction at her husband’s imprudence touched Mathilde so that she
+forgot everything else between them.</p>
+
+<p>“O Mama,” she said, “I’m so sorry you’re worried! I’m sorry I’m one of
+your worries; but don’t you see I love Pete just as you do Mr. Farron?”</p>
+
+<p>“God help you, then!” said Adelaide, quickly, and went to her room to
+put on with a haste none the less meticulous her small velvet hat, her
+veil, her spotless, pale gloves, her muff, and warm coat.</p>
+
+<p>She drove to Vincent’s office. It was not really care for his health that
+drove her, but the restlessness of despair; she had reached a point where
+she was more wretched away from him than with him.</p>
+
+<p>The office was high in a gigantic building. Every one knew her by sight,
+the giant at the door and the men in the elevators. Once in the office
+itself, a junior partner hurried to her side.</p>
+
+<p>“So glad to see Vincent back again,” he said, proud of the fact that he
+called his present partner and late employer by his first name. “You want
+to see him?” There was a short hesitation. “He left word not to be
+disturbed—”</p>
+
+<p>“Who is there?” Adelaide asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Dr. Parret.”</p>
+
+<p>“He’s not been taken ill?”</p>
+
+<p>He tried to reassure her, but Adelaide, without waiting or listening,
+moved at once to Vincent’s door and opened it. As she did so she heard
+him laughing and then she saw that he was laughing at the words of the
+handsomest woman she had ever seen. A great many people had this first
+impression of Lily Parret. Lily was standing on the opposite side of the
+table from him, leaning with both palms flat on the polished wood,
+telling him some continued narrative that made her blue eyes shine and
+her dimples deepen.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide was not temperamentally jealous. She did not, like Vincent, hate
+and fear any person or thing or idea that drew his attention away; on the
+contrary, she wanted him to give his full attention to anything that
+would make for his power and success. She was not jealous, but it did
+cross her mind that she was looking now at her successor.</p>
+
+<p>They stopped laughing as she entered, and Vincent said:</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you, Dr. Parret, you have given me just what I wanted.”</p>
+
+<p>“Marty would just as lief as not stick a knife in me if he knew,” said
+Lily, not as if she were afraid, but as if this was one of the normal
+risks of her profession. She turned to Adelaide, “O Mrs. Farron, I’ve
+heard of you from Pete Wayne. Isn’t he perfectly delightful? But, then,
+he ought to be with such a mother.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide had a very useful smile, which could maintain a long, but
+somewhat meaningless, brilliance. She employed it now, and it lasted
+until Lily had gone.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s a very remarkable girl,” said Farron, remembrances of smiles
+still on his lips.</p>
+
+<p>“Does she think every one perfect?”</p>
+
+<p>“Almost every one; that’s how she keeps going at such a rate.”</p>
+
+<p>“How long have you known her?”</p>
+
+<p>“About ten minutes. Pete got her here. She knew something about Marty
+that I needed.” He spoke as if he was really interested in the business
+before him; he did not betray by so much as a glance the recognition that
+they were alone, though she was calling his attention to the fact by
+every line of her figure and expression of her face. She saw his hand
+move on his desk. Was it coming to hers? He rang a bell. “Is Burke in the
+outer office? Send him in.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide’s heart began to beat as Marty, in his working-clothes,
+entered. He was more suppressed and more sulky than she had yet seen him.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve been trying to see you, Mr. Farron,” he began; but Vincent cut in:</p>
+
+<p>“One moment, Burke. I have something to say to you. That bout you said
+you had with O’Hallohan—”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, what of it?” answered Marty, suddenly raising his voice.</p>
+
+<p>“He knocked you out.”</p>
+
+<p>“Who says so?” roared Burke.</p>
+
+<p>“He knocked you out,” repeated Vincent.</p>
+
+<p>“Who says so?” Burke roared again, and somehow there was less confidence
+in the same volume of sound.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, not O’Hallohan; He stayed bought. But I have it straight. No, I’m
+not trying to draw you out on a guess. I don’t play that kind of game. If
+I tell you I know it for a fact, I do.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, and what of it?” said Marty.</p>
+
+<p>“Just this. I wouldn’t dismiss a man for getting knocked out by a
+bigger man—”</p>
+
+<p>“He ain’t bigger.”</p>
+
+<p>“By a better fighter, then; but I doubt whether or not I want a
+foreman who has to resort to that kind of thing—to buying off the man
+who licked—”</p>
+
+<p>“I didn’t <i>buy</i> him off,” said Burke, as if he knew the distinction, even
+in his own mind, was a fine one.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes, you did,” answered Farron. And getting up, with his hands in
+his pockets, he added, “I’m afraid your usefulness to me is over, Burke.”</p>
+
+<p>“The hell it is!”</p>
+
+<p>“My wife is here, Marty,” said Farron, very pleasantly. “But this story
+isn’t the only thing I have against you. My friend Mrs. Wayne tells me
+you are exerting a bad influence over a fellow whose marriage she wants
+to get annulled.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, let ’em get it annulled!” shouted Marty on a high and rising key.
+“What do I care? I’ll do anything to oblige if I’m asked right; but when
+Mrs. Wayne and that gang come around bullying me, I won’t do a thing for
+them. But, if you ask me to, Mr. Farron, why, I’m glad to oblige you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you, Marty,” returned his employer, cordially. “If you arrange
+that for me, I must own it would make me feel differently. I tell
+you,” he added, as one who suggests an honorable compromise, “you get
+that settled up, you get that marriage annulled—that is, if you think
+you can—”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure I can,” Burke replied, swaying his body about from the waist up, as
+if to indicate the ease with which it could be accomplished.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, when that’s done, come back, and we’ll talk over the other matter.
+Perhaps, after all—well, we’ll talk it over.”</p>
+
+<p>Burke walked to the door with his usual conquering step, but there
+turned.</p>
+
+<p>“Say,” he said, “that story about the fight—” He looked at Adelaide.
+“Ladies don’t always understand these matters. Tell her, will you, that
+it’s done in some first-class fights?”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll explain,” answered Vincent.</p>
+
+<p>“And there ain’t any use in the story’s getting about,” Burke added.</p>
+
+<p>“It won’t,” said Vincent. On which assurance Marty went away and left the
+husband and wife alone.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide got up and went to the window and looked out toward the
+Palisades. Marty Burke had been a symbol that enabled her to recall some
+of her former attitudes of mind. She remembered that dinner where she had
+pitted him against her husband. She felt deeply humiliated in her own
+sight and in Vincent’s, for she was now ready to believe that he had read
+her mind from the beginning. It seemed to her as if she had been mad, and
+in that madness had thrown away the only thing in the world she would
+ever value. The thought of acknowledging her fault was not repugnant to
+her; she had no special objection to groveling, but she knew it would do
+no good. Vincent, though not ungenerous, saw clearly; and he had summed
+up the situation in that terrible phrase about choosing between loving
+and being loved. “I suppose I shouldn’t respect him much if he did
+forgive me,” she thought; and suddenly she felt his arms about her; he
+snatched her to him, turned her face to his, calling her by strange,
+unpremeditated terms of endearment. Beyond these, no words at all were
+exchanged between them; they were undesired. Adelaide did not know
+whether it were servile or superb to care little about knowing his
+opinion and intentions in regard to her. All that she cared about was
+that in her eyes he was once more supreme and that his arms were about
+her. Words, she knew, would have been her enemies, and she did not make
+use of them.</p>
+
+<p>When they went out, they passed Wayne in the outer office.</p>
+
+<p>“Come to dinner to-night, Pete,” said Farron, and added, turning to his
+wife, “That’s all right, isn’t it, Adelaide?”</p>
+
+<p>She indicated that it was perfect, like everything he did.</p>
+
+<p>Wayne looked at his future mother-in-law in surprise. His pride had been
+unforgetably stung by some of her sentences, but he could have forgiven
+those more easily than the easy smile with which she now nodded at her
+husband’s invitation, as if a pleasant intention on her part could wipe
+out everything that had gone before. That, it seemed to him, was the very
+essence of insolence.</p>
+
+<p>Appreciating that some sort of doubt was disturbing him, Adelaide said
+most graciously:</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, you really must come, Mr. Wayne.”</p>
+
+<p>At this moment Farron’s own stenographer, Chandler, approached him with
+an unsigned letter in his hand.</p>
+
+<p>Chandler took the routine of the office more seriously than Farron did,
+and acquired thereby a certain power over his employer. He had something
+of the attitude of a child’s nurse, who, knowing that her charge has
+almost passed beyond her care, recognizes that she has no authority
+except that bestowed by devotion.</p>
+
+<p>“I think you meant to sign this letter, Mr. Farron,” he said, just as a
+nurse might say before strangers, “You weren’t going to the party
+without washing your hands?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh.” Farron fished in his waistcoat for his pen, and while he was
+writing, and Chandler just keeping an eye on him to see that it was done
+right, Adelaide said:</p>
+
+<p>“And how is Mrs. Chandler?”</p>
+
+<p>Chandler’s face lit up as he received the letter back.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, much better, thank you, Mrs. Farron—out of all danger.”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne saw, what Chandler did not, that Adelaide had never even heard of
+Mrs. Chandler’s ill health; but she murmured as she turned away:</p>
+
+<p>“I’m so glad. You must have been very anxious.”</p>
+
+<p>When they were gone, Wayne and Chandler were left a minute alone.</p>
+
+<p>“What a personality!” Chandler exclaimed. “Imagine her remembering my
+troubles, when you think what she has had to worry about! A remarkable
+couple, Mr. Wayne. I have been up to the house a number of times since
+Mr. Farron’s illness, and she is always there, so brave, so attentive. A
+queenly woman, and,” he added, as if the two did not always go together,
+“a good wife.”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne could think of no answer to this eulogy, and as they stood in
+silence the office door opened and Mr. Lanley came in. He nodded to each
+of the two, and moved to Vincent’s room.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Farron has just gone,” said Chandler, firmly. He could not bear to
+have people running in and out of Farron’s room.</p>
+
+<p>“Gone?” said Lanley, as if it were somebody’s fault.</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Farron came down for him in the motor. He appeared to stand his
+first day very well.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley glanced quickly from one to the other. This did not sound as
+if any final break had occurred between the Farrons, yet on this subject
+he could hardly question his son-in-law’s secretaries. He made one
+further effort.</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose Mr. Farron thought he was good for a whole day’s work.”</p>
+
+<p>Chandler smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Farron, like all wise men, sir, does what his wife tells him.” And
+then, as he loved his own work far more than conversation, Chandler
+hurried back to his desk.</p>
+
+<p>“I understand,” said Lanley to Wayne, “that you are here regularly now.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes.”</p>
+
+<p>“Like your work?” Lanley was obviously delaying, hoping that some
+information would turn up unexpectedly.</p>
+
+<p>“Very much.”</p>
+
+<p>“Humph! What does your mother think about it?”</p>
+
+<p>“About my new job?” Wayne smiled. “You know those aren’t the kind of
+facts—jobs and salaries—that my mother scrutinizes very closely.”</p>
+
+<p>Lanley stared at him with brows slightly contracted.</p>
+
+<p>“What does she scrutinize?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, motives—spiritual things.”</p>
+
+<p>“I see.” Mr. Lanley couldn’t go a step further, couldn’t take this young
+man into his confidence an inch further. He stuck his stick into his
+overcoat-pocket so that it stood upright, and wheeled sharply.</p>
+
+<p>“Good-by,” he said, and added at the door, “I suppose you think this
+makes a difference in your prospects.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Farron has asked me to come to dinner to-night.”</p>
+
+<p>Lanley wheeled back again.</p>
+
+<p>“What?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, she almost urged me, though I didn’t need urging.”</p>
+
+<p>Lanley didn’t answer, but presently went out in silence. He was
+experiencing the extreme loneliness that follows being more royalist
+than the king.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XVII">CHAPTER XVII</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>On Mondays and Thursdays, the only days Mr. Lanley went down-town, he
+expected to have the corner table at the restaurant where he always
+lunched and where, on leaving Farron’s office, he went. He had barely
+finished ordering luncheon—oyster stew, cold tongue, salad, and a
+bottle of Rhine wine—when, looking up, he saw Wilsey was approaching
+him, beaming.</p>
+
+<p>“Haryer, Wilsey?” he said, without cordiality.</p>
+
+<p>Wilsey, it fortunately appeared, had already had his midday meal, and had
+only a moment or two to give to sociability.</p>
+
+<p>“Haven’t seen you since that delightful evening,” he murmured. “I hope
+Mrs. Baxter got my card.” He mentioned his card as if it had been a gift,
+not munificent, but not negligible, either.</p>
+
+<p>“Suppose she got it if you left it,” said Mr. Lanley, who had heard her
+comment on it. “My man’s pretty good at that sort of thing.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, how rare they are getting!” said Wilsey, with a sigh—“good
+servants. Upon my word, Lanley, I’m almost ready to go.”</p>
+
+<p>“Because you can’t get good servants?” said his friend, who was drumming
+on the table and looking blankly about.</p>
+
+<p>“Because all the old order is passing, all the standards and backgrounds
+that I value. I don’t think I’m a snob—”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course you’re a snob, Wilsey.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Wilsey smiled temperately.</p>
+
+<p>“What do you mean by the word?”</p>
+
+<p>It was a question about which Lanley had been thinking, and he answered:</p>
+
+<p>“I mean a person who values himself for qualities that have no moral,
+financial, or intellectual value whatsoever. You, for instance, Wilsey,
+value yourself not because you are a pretty good lawyer, but because your
+great-grandfather signed the Declaration.”</p>
+
+<p>A shade of slight embarrassment crossed the lawyer’s face.</p>
+
+<p>“I own,” he said, “that I value birth, but so do you, Lanley. You attach
+importance to being a New York Lanley.”</p>
+
+<p>“I do,” answered Lanley; “but I have sense enough to be ashamed of doing
+so. You’re proud of being proud of your old Signer.”</p>
+
+<p>“As a matter of fact,” Mr. Wilsey remarked slowly, “Josiah Wilsey did not
+sign the Declaration.”</p>
+
+<p>“What!” cried Lanley. “You’ve always told me he did.”</p>
+
+<p>Wilsey shook his head gently, as one who went about correcting errors.</p>
+
+<p>“No. What I said was that I feel no moral doubt he would have signed it
+if an attack of illness—”</p>
+
+<p>Lanley gave a short roar.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s just like <i>you</i>, Wilsey. You wouldn’t have signed it, either. You
+would have said that while in cordial sympathy with the ideas set forth,
+you would not care to put your name to a document that might give pain to
+a monarch who, though not as liberal as some of us could wish, was yet—”</p>
+
+<p>“As a matter of fact,” Wilsey began again even more coldly, “I should
+have signed—”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, you think so now. A hundred years from now you’d sign a petition for
+the eight-hour law.”</p>
+
+<p>“Never!” said Wilsey, raising his hand. “I should never put my name to a
+document—” He stopped at another roar from his friend, and never took
+the sentence up again, but indicated with a gesture that only legal minds
+were worth arguing with on points of this sort.</p>
+
+<p>When he had gone, Lanley dipped the spoon in his oyster stew with not a
+little pleasure. Nothing, apparently, could have raised his spirits more
+than the knowledge that old Josiah Wilsey had not signed the Declaration.
+He actually chuckled a little. “So like Wilsey himself,” he thought. “No
+moral courage; calls it conservatism.” Then his joy abated. Just so, he
+thought, must he himself appear to Mrs. Wayne. Yet his self-respect
+insisted that his case was different. Loyalty had been responsible not
+for his conservatism, but for the pig-headedness with which he had acted
+upon it. He would have asked nothing better than to profess himself
+open-minded to Mrs. Wayne’s views, only he could not desert Adelaide in
+the moment of her struggle for beliefs in which he himself had brought
+her up. And now she had deserted him. He alone was left to flaunt a
+banner the motto of which he didn’t wholly believe, while Adelaide, at a
+word from Vincent, had gone over to the other side. And no one knew what
+his loyalty had cost him. Long ago, in his first year at college, he had
+flunked the examination of the professor whom he reverenced above all
+others. No one had cared, no one had long remembered, except Lanley
+himself, and he had remembered because some one had told him what the
+professor said on reading his paper. It was nothing but, “I had supposed
+Lanley was intelligent.” Never again had he had that professor’s
+attention for a single instant. This, it seemed to him, was about to
+happen to him again, now when it was too late in his life to do anything
+but despair.</p>
+
+<p>He called the waiter, paid his bill and tip,—he was an extremely liberal
+tipper; “it’s expected of us,” he used to say, meaning that it was
+expected of people like the New York Lanleys,—and went away.</p>
+
+<p>In old times he had been an inventor of many clever tricks for getting
+up-town by unpopular elevated trains and horse-cars that avoided the
+crowd, but the subway was a great leveler, and he knew no magic except to
+take a local in rush hours. At three o’clock, however, even this was not
+necessary. He took an express, and got off at the Grand Central, turned
+up Park Avenue, and then east. He had just found out that he was going to
+visit Mrs. Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>He read the names in the vestibule, never doubting that Dr. Parret was
+a masculine practitioner, and hesitated at the name of Wayne. He
+thought he ought to ring the bell, but he wanted to go straight up.
+Some one had left the front door unlatched. He pushed it open and began
+the steep ascent.</p>
+
+<p>She came to the door of the flat herself. She had a funny little gray
+shawl about her shoulders and a pen in her hand. She tried to make her
+voice sound very cordial as she greeted him, but he thought he caught
+something that sounded as if, while perfectly well disposed to him, she
+couldn’t for the life of her imagine why he had come.</p>
+
+<p>“Come in,” she said, “though I’m afraid it’s a little cold in here. Our
+janitor—”</p>
+
+<p>“Let me light your fire for you,” he answered, and extracting a
+parlor-match from his pocket,—safety-matches were his bugbear,—he
+stooped, and put the flame to the fire. As he did so he understood
+that it was not the mere forgetfulness of a servant that had left it
+unlighted, but probably a deliberate economy, and he rose crimson
+and unhappy.</p>
+
+<p>It took him some time to recover, and during the entire time she sat in
+her gray shawl, looking very amiable, but plainly unable to think of
+anything to say.</p>
+
+<p>“I saw your son in Farron’s office to-day.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Farron has been so kind, so wonderfully kind!”</p>
+
+<p>Only a guilty conscience could have found reproach in this statement, and
+Lanley said:</p>
+
+<p>“And I hear he is dining at my daughter’s this evening.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne had had a telephone message to that effect.</p>
+
+<p>“I wondered, if you were alone—” Lanley hesitated. He had of course been
+going to ask her to come and dine with him, but a better inspiration came
+to him. “I wondered if you would ask me to dine with you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Mrs. Wayne, “but I can’t. I have a boy coming.
+He’s studying for the ministry, the most interesting person. He had not
+been sober for three years when I took hold of him, and now he hasn’t
+touched a drop for two.”</p>
+
+<p>He sighed. She said she was sorry, but he could see plainly enough that
+any reformed, or even more any unreformed, drunkard would always far
+surpass him in ability to command her interest. He did not belong to a
+generation that cleared things up with words; he would have thought it
+impertinent, almost ungentlemanly, to probe her attitude of mind about
+the scene at Adelaide’s; and he would have considered himself unmanly to
+make any plea to her on the ground of his own suffering. One simply
+supported such things as best one could; it was expected of one, like
+tipping waiters. He had neither the vocabulary nor the habit of mind that
+made an impersonal exposition of an emotional difficulty possible; but
+even had he possessed these powers he would have retained his tradition
+against using them. Perhaps, if she had been his sister or his wife, he
+might have admitted that he had had a hard day or that every one had
+moments of depression; but that was not the way to talk in a lady’s
+drawing-room. In the silence he saw her eyes steal longingly to her
+writing-table, deeply and hopelessly littered with papers and open books.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m afraid I’m detaining you,” he said. The visit had been a failure.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, not at all,” she replied, and then added in a tone of more
+sincerity: “I do have the most terrible time with my check-book. And,”
+she added, as one confessing to an absurdly romantic ideal, “I was trying
+to balance it.”</p>
+
+<p>“You should not be troubled with such things,” said Mr. Lanley, thinking
+how long it was since any one but a secretary had balanced his books.</p>
+
+<p>Pete, it appeared, usually did attend to his mother’s checks, but of
+late she had not liked to bother him, and that was just the moment the
+bank had chosen to notify her that she had overdrawn. “I don’t see how I
+can be,” she said, too hopeless to deny it.</p>
+
+<p>“If you would allow me,” said Mr. Lanley. “I am an excellent bookkeeper.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I shouldn’t like to trouble you,” said Mrs. Wayne, but she made it
+clear she would like it above everything; so Lanley put on his
+spectacles, drew up his chair, and squared his elbows to the job.</p>
+
+<p>“It hasn’t been balanced since—dear me! not since October,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“I know; but I draw such small checks.”</p>
+
+<p>“But you draw a good many.”</p>
+
+<p>She had risen, and was standing before the fire, with her hands behind
+her back. Her shawl had slipped off, and she looked, in her short
+walking-skirt, rather like a school-girl being reprimanded for a poor
+exercise. She felt so when, looking up at her over his spectacles, he
+observed severely:</p>
+
+<p>“You really must be more careful about carrying forward. Twice you have
+carried forward an amount from two pages back instead of—”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s always the way,” she interrupted. “Whenever people look at my
+check-book they take so long scolding me about the way I do it that
+there’s no time left for putting it right.”</p>
+
+<p>“I won’t say another word,” returned Lanley; “only it would really
+help you—”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t want any one to do it who says my sevens are like fours,” she
+went on. Lanley compressed his lips slightly, but contented himself by
+merely lengthening the tail of a seven. He said nothing more, but every
+time he found an error he gave a little shake of his head that went
+through her like a knife.</p>
+
+<p>The task was a long one. The light of the winter afternoon faded, and she
+lit the lamps before he finished. At first he had tried not to be aware
+of revelations that the book made; but as he went on and he found he was
+obliged now and then to question her about payments and receipts, he saw
+that she was so utterly without any sense of privacy in the matter that
+his own decreased.</p>
+
+<p>He had never thought of her as being particularly poor, not at least in
+the sense of worrying over every bill, but now when he saw the small
+margin between the amounts paid in and the amounts paid out, when he
+noticed how large a proportion of what she had she spent in free gifts
+and not in living expenses, he found himself facing something he could
+not tolerate. He put his pen down carefully in the crease of the book,
+and rose to his feet.</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Wayne,” he said, “I must tell you something.”</p>
+
+<p>“You’re going to say, after all, that my sevens are like fours.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m going to say something worse—more inexcusable. I’m going to tell
+you how much I want you to honor me by becoming my wife.”</p>
+
+<p>She pronounced only one syllable. She said, “<i>Oh</i>!” as crowds say it when
+a rocket goes off.</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose you think it ridiculous in a man of my age to speak of love,
+but it’s not ridiculous, by Heaven! It’s tragic. I shouldn’t have
+presumed, though, to mention the subject to you, only it is intolerable
+to me to think of your lacking anything when I have so much. I can’t
+explain why this knowledge gave me courage. I know that you care nothing
+for luxuries and money, less than any one I know; but the fact that you
+haven’t everything that you ought to have makes me suffer so much that I
+hope you will at least listen to me.”</p>
+
+<p>“But you know it doesn’t make me suffer a bit,” said Mrs. Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>“To know you at all has been such a happiness that I am shocked at my own
+presumption in asking for your companionship for the rest of my life, and
+if in addition to that I could take care of you, share with you—”</p>
+
+<p>No one ever presented a proposition to Mrs. Wayne without finding her
+willing to consider it, an open-mindedness that often led her into the
+consideration of absurdities. And now the sacred cupidity of the
+reformer did for an instant leap up within her. All the distressed
+persons, all the tottering causes in which she was interested, seemed to
+parade before her eyes. Then, too, the childish streak in her character
+made her remember how amusing it would be to be Adelaide Farron’s
+mother-in-law, and Pete’s grandmother by marriage. Nor was she at all
+indifferent to the flattery of the offer or the touching reserves of her
+suitor’s nature.</p>
+
+<p>“I should think you would be so lonely!” he said gently.</p>
+
+<p>She nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“I am often. I miss not having any one to talk to over the little things
+that”—she laughed—“I probably wouldn’t talk over if I had some one.
+But even with Pete I am lonely. I want to be first with some one again.”</p>
+
+<p>“You will always be first with me.”</p>
+
+<p>“Even if I don’t marry you?”</p>
+
+<p>“Whatever you do.”</p>
+
+<p>Like the veriest coquette, she instantly decided to take all and give
+nothing—to take his interest, his devotion, his loyalty, all of the
+first degree, and give him in return a divided interest, a loyalty too
+much infected by humor to be complete, and a devotion in which several
+causes and Pete took precedence. She did not do this in ignorance. On the
+contrary, she knew just how it would be; that he would wait and she be
+late, that he would adjust himself and she remain unchanged, that he
+would give and give and she would never remember that it would be kind
+some day to ask. Yet it did not seem to her an unfair bargain, and
+perhaps she was right.</p>
+
+<p>“I couldn’t marry you,” she said. “I couldn’t change. All your pretty
+things and the way you live—it would be like a cage to me. I like my
+life the way it is; but yours—”</p>
+
+<p>“Do you think I would ask Wilsey to dinner every night or try to mold you
+to be like Mrs. Baxter?”</p>
+
+<p>She laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“You’d have a hard time. I never could have married again. I’d make you a
+poor wife, but I’m a wonderful friend.”</p>
+
+<p>“Your friendship would be more happiness than I had any right to hope
+for,” and then he added in a less satisfied tone: “But friendship is so
+uncertain. You don’t make any announcements to your friends or vows to
+each other, unless you’re at an age when you cut your initials in the
+bark of a tree. That’s what I’d like to do. I suppose you think I’m an
+old fool.”</p>
+
+<p>“Two of us,” said Mrs. Wayne, and wiped her eyes. She cried easily, and
+had never felt the least shame about it.</p>
+
+<p>It was a strange compact—strange at least for her, considering that only
+a few hours before she had thought of him as a friendly, but
+narrow-minded, old stranger. Something weak and malleable in her nature
+made her enter lightly into the compact, although all the time she knew
+that something more deeply serious and responsible would never allow her
+to break it. A faint regret for even an atom of lost freedom, a vein of
+caution and candor, made her say:</p>
+
+<p>“I’m so afraid you’ll find me unsatisfactory. Every one has, even Pete.”</p>
+
+<p>“I think I shall ask less than any one,” he returned.</p>
+
+<p>The answer pleased her strangely.</p>
+
+<p>Presently a ring came at the bell—a telegram. The expected guest was
+detained at the seminary. Lanley watched with agonized attention. She
+appeared to be delighted.</p>
+
+<p>“Now you’ll stay to dine,” she said. “I can’t remember what there is
+for dinner.”</p>
+
+<p>“Now, that’s not friendly at the start,” said he, “to think I
+care so much.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, you’re not like a theological student.”</p>
+
+<p>“A good deal better, probably,” answered Lanley, with a gruffness that
+only partly hid his happiness. There was no real cloud in his sky. If
+Mrs. Wayne had accepted his offer of marriage, by this time he would have
+begun to think of the horror of telling Adelaide and Mathilde and his own
+servants. Now he thought of nothing but the agreeable evening before him,
+one of many.</p>
+
+<p>When Pete came in to dress, Lanley was just in the act of drawing the
+last neat double lines for his balance. He had been delayed by the fact
+that Mrs. Wayne had been talking to him almost continuously since his
+return to figuring. She was in high spirits, for even saints are
+stimulated by a respectful adoration.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XVIII">CHAPTER XVIII</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Recognizing the neat back of Mr. Lanley’s gray head, Pete’s first idea
+was that he must have come to induce Mrs. Wayne to conspire with him
+against the marriage; but he abandoned this notion on seeing his
+occupation.</p>
+
+<p>“Hullo, Mr. Lanley,” he said, stooping to kiss his mother with the casual
+affection of the domesticated male. “You have my job.”</p>
+
+<p>“It is a great pleasure to be of any service,” said Mr. Lanley.</p>
+
+<p>“It was in a terrible state, it seems, Pete,” said his mother.</p>
+
+<p>“She makes her fours just like sevens, doesn’t she?” observed Pete.</p>
+
+<p>“I did not notice the similarity,” replied Mr. Lanley. He glanced at Mrs.
+Wayne, however, and enjoyed his denial almost as much as he had enjoyed
+the discovery that the Wilsey ancestor had not been a Signer. He felt
+that somehow, owing to his late-nineteenth-century tact, the breach
+between him and Pete had been healed.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Lanley is going to stay and dine with me,” said Mrs. Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>Pete looked a little grave, but his next sentence explained the cause of
+his anxiety.</p>
+
+<p>“Wouldn’t you like me to go out and get something to eat, Mother?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, no,” answered his mother, firmly. “This time there really is
+something in the house quite good. I don’t remember what it is.”</p>
+
+<p>And then Pete, who felt he had done his duty, went off to dress. Soon,
+however, his voice called from an adjoining room.</p>
+
+<p>“Hasn’t that woman sent back any of my collars, Mother dear?”</p>
+
+<p>“O Pete, her daughter got out of the reformatory only yesterday,” Mrs.
+Wayne replied. Lanley saw that the Wayne housekeeping was immensely
+complicated by crime. “I believe I am the only person in your employ not
+a criminal,” he said, closing the books. “These balance now.”</p>
+
+<p>“Have I anything left?”</p>
+
+<p>“Only about a hundred and fifty.”</p>
+
+<p>She brightened at this.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, come,” she said, “that’s not so bad. I couldn’t have been so
+terribly overdrawn, after all.”</p>
+
+<p>“You ought not to overdraw at all,” said Mr. Lanley, severely. “It’s not
+fair to the bank.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I never mean to,” she replied, as if no one could ask more
+than that.</p>
+
+<p>Presently she left him to go and dress for dinner. He felt
+extraordinarily at home, left alone like this among her belongings. He
+wandered about looking at the photographs—photographs of Pete as a
+child, a photograph of an old white house with wisteria-vines on it; a
+picture of her looking very much as she did now, with Pete as a little
+boy, in a sailor suit, leaning against her; and then a little photograph
+of her as a girl not much older than Mathilde, he thought—a girl who
+looked a little frightened and awkward, as girls so often looked, and yet
+to whom the French photographer—for it was taken in the Place de la
+Madeleine—had somehow contrived to give a Parisian air. He had never
+thought of her in Paris. He took the picture up; it was dated May, 1884.
+He thought back carefully. Yes, he had been in Paris himself that spring,
+a man of thirty-three or so, feeling as old almost as he did to-day, a
+widower with his little girl. If only they might have met then, he and
+that serious, starry-eyed girl in the photograph!</p>
+
+<p>Hearing Pete coming, he set the photograph back in its place, and,
+sitting down, picked up the first paper within reach.</p>
+
+<p>“Good night, sir,” said Pete from the doorway.</p>
+
+<p>“Good night, my dear boy. Good luck!” They shook hands.</p>
+
+<p>“Funny old duck,” Pete thought as he went down-stairs whistling,
+“sitting there so contentedly reading ‘The Harvard Lampoon.’ Wonder what
+he thinks of it.”</p>
+
+<p>He did not wonder long, though, for more interesting subjects of
+consideration were at hand. What reception would he meet at the Farrons?
+What arrangements would be made, what assumptions permitted? But even
+more immediate than this was the problem how could he contrive to greet
+Mrs. Farron? He was shocked to find how little he had been able to
+forgive her. There was something devilish, he thought, in the way she had
+contrived to shake his self-confidence at the moment of all others when
+he had needed it. He could never forget a certain contemptuous curve in
+her fine, clear profile or the smooth delight of her tone at some of her
+own cruelties. Some day he would have it out with her when the right
+moment came. Before he reached the house he had had time to sketch a
+number of scenes in which she, caught extraordinarily red-handed, was
+forced to listen to his exposition of the evil of such methods as hers.
+He would say to her, “I remember that you once said to me, Mrs.
+Farron—” Anger cut short his vision as a cloud of her phrases came back
+to him, like stinging bees.</p>
+
+<p>He had hoped for a minute alone with Mathilde, but as Pringle opened the
+drawing-room door for him he heard the sound of laughter, and seeing that
+even Mrs. Farron herself was down, he exclaimed quickly:</p>
+
+<p>“What, am I late?”</p>
+
+<p>Every one laughed all the more at this.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s just what Mr. Farron said you would say at finding that Mama was
+dressed in time,” exclaimed Mathilde, casting an admiring glance at her
+stepfather.</p>
+
+<p>“You’d suppose I’d never been in time for dinner before,” remarked
+Adelaide, giving Wayne her long hand.</p>
+
+<p>“But isn’t it wonderful, Pete,” put in Mathilde, “how Mr. Farron is
+always right?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I hope he isn’t,” said Adelaide; “for what do you think he has just
+been telling me—that you’d always hate me, Pete, as long as you lived.
+You see,” she went on, the little knot coming in her eyebrows, “I’ve been
+telling him all the things I said to you yesterday. They did sound rather
+awful, and I think I’ve forgotten some of the worst.”</p>
+
+<p>“<i>I</i> haven’t,” said Pete.</p>
+
+<p>“I remember I told you you were no one.”</p>
+
+<p>“You said I was a perfectly nice young man.”</p>
+
+<p>“And that you had no business judgment.”</p>
+
+<p>“And that I was mixing Mathilde up with a fraud.”</p>
+
+<p>“And that I couldn’t see any particular reason why she cared about you.”</p>
+
+<p>“That you only asked that your son-in-law should be a person.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am afraid I said something about not coming to a house where you
+weren’t welcome.”</p>
+
+<p>“I know you said something about a bribe.”</p>
+
+<p>At this Adelaide laughed out loud.</p>
+
+<p>“I believe I did,” she said. “What things one does say sometimes! There’s
+dinner.” She rose, and tucked her hand under his arm. “Will you take me
+in to dinner, Pete, or do you think I’m too despicable to be fed?”</p>
+
+<p>The truth was that they were all four in such high spirits that they
+could no more help playing together than four colts could help playing in
+a grass field. Besides, Vincent had taunted Adelaide with her inability
+ever to make it up with Wayne. She left no trick unturned.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know,” she went on as they sat down at table, “that a marriage
+is quite legal unless you hate your mother-in-law. I ought to give you
+some opportunity to go home and say to Mrs. Wayne, ‘But I’m afraid I
+shall never be able to get on with Mrs. Farron.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, he’s said that already,” remarked Vincent.</p>
+
+<p>“Many a time,” said Pete.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde glanced a little fearfully at her mother. The talk seemed to her
+amusing, but dangerous.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then, shall we have a feud, Pete?” said Adelaide in a
+glass-of-wine-with-you-sir tone. “A good feud in a family can be made
+very amusing.”</p>
+
+<p>“It would be all right for us, of course,” said Pete, “but it would be
+rather hard on Mathilde.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mathilde is a better fighter than either of you,” put in Vincent.
+“Adelaide has no continuity of purpose, and you, Pete, are wretchedly
+kind-hearted; but Mathilde would go into it to the death.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Farron,” exclaimed Mathilde,
+tremendously flattered, and hoping he would go on. “I don’t like
+to fight.”</p>
+
+<p>“Neither did Stonewall Jackson, I believe, until they fixed bayonets.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde, dropping her eyes, saw Pete’s hand lying on the table. It was
+stubby, and she loved it the better for being so; it was firm and boyish
+and exactly like Pete. Looking up, she caught her mother’s eye, and they
+both remembered. For an instant indecision flickered in Adelaide’s look,
+but she lacked the complete courage to add that to the list—to tell any
+human being that she had said his hands were stubby; and so her eyes fell
+before her daughter’s.</p>
+
+<p>As dinner went on the adjustment between the four became more nearly
+perfect; the gaiety, directed by Adelaide, lost all sting. But even as
+she talked to Pete she was only dimly aware of his existence. Her
+audience was her husband. She was playing for his praise and admiration,
+and before soup was over she knew she had it; she knew better than words
+could tell her that he thought her the most desirable woman in the world.
+Fortified by that knowledge, the pacification of a cross boy seemed to
+Adelaide an inconsiderable task.</p>
+
+<p>By the time they rose from table it was accomplished. As they went into
+the drawing-room Adelaide was thinking that young men were really rather
+geese, but, then, one wouldn’t have them different if one could.</p>
+
+<p>Vincent was thinking how completely attaching a nature like hers would
+always be to him, since when she yielded her will to his she did it with
+such complete generosity.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde was saying to herself:</p>
+
+<p>“Of course I knew Pete’s charm would win Mama at last, but even I did not
+suppose he could do it the very first evening.”</p>
+
+<p>And Pete was thinking:</p>
+
+<p>“A former beauty thinks she can put anything over, and in a way she can.
+I feel rather friendly toward her.”</p>
+
+<p>The Farrons had decided while they were dressing that after dinner they
+would retire to Vincent’s study and give the lovers a few minutes to
+themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Left alone, Pete and Mathilde stood looking seriously at each other, and
+then at the room which only a few weeks before had witnessed their first
+prolonged talk.</p>
+
+<p>“I never saw your mother look a quarter as beautiful as she does this
+evening,” said Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>“Isn’t she marvelous, the way she can make up for everything when she
+wants?” Mathilde answered with enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p>Pete shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“She can never make up for one thing.”</p>
+
+<p>“O Pete!”</p>
+
+<p>“She can never give me back my first instinctive, egotistical, divine
+conviction that there was every reason why you should love me. I shall
+always hear her voice saying, ‘But why should Mathilde love you?’ And I
+shall never know a good answer.”</p>
+
+<p>“What,” cried Mathilde, “don’t you know the answer to that! I do. Mama
+doesn’t, of course. Mama loves people for reasons outside themselves: she
+loves me because I’m her child, and Grandpapa because he’s her father,
+and Mr. Farron because she thinks he’s strong. If she didn’t think him
+strong, I’m not sure she’d love him. But <i>I</i> love <i>you</i> for being just as
+you are, because you are my choice. Whatever you do or say, that can’t be
+changed—”</p>
+
+<p>The door opened, and Pringle entered with a tray in his hand, and his
+eyes began darting about in search of empty coffee-cups. Mathilde and
+Pete were aware of a common feeling of guilt, not that they were
+concealing the cups, though there was something of that accusation in
+Pringle’s expression, but because the pause between them was so obvious.
+So Mathilde said suddenly:</p>
+
+<p>“Pringle, Mr. Wayne and I are engaged to be married.”</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed, Miss?” said Pringle, with a smile; and so seldom was this
+phenomenon seen to take place that Wayne noted for the first time that
+Pringle’s teeth were false. “I’m delighted to hear it; and you, too, sir.
+This is a bad world to go through alone.”</p>
+
+<p>“Do you approve of marriage, Pringle?” said Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>The cups, revealing themselves one by one, were secured as Pringle
+answered:</p>
+
+<p>“In my class of life, sir, we don’t give much time to considering what we
+approve of and disapprove of. But young people are all alike when they’re
+first engaged, always wondering how it is going to turn out, and hoping
+the other party won’t know that they’re wondering. But when you get old,
+and you look back on all the mistakes and the disadvantages and the
+sacrifices, you’ll find that you won’t be able to imagine that you could
+have gone through it with any other person—in spite of her faults,” he
+added almost to himself.</p>
+
+<p>When he was gone, Pete and Mathilde turned and kissed each other.</p>
+
+<p>“When we get old—” they murmured.</p>
+
+<p>They really believed that it could never happen to them.
+</p>
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11325 ***</div>
+</body>
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+
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+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #11325 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11325)
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11325 ***
+
+
+
+
+THE HAPPIEST TIME OF THEIR LIVES
+
+BY ALICE DUER MILLER
+
+Author of “Come Out of the Kitchen,” “Ladies Must Live,” “Wings in the
+Night,” etc.
+
+1918
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TO CLARENCE DAY, JR.
+
+
+... and then he added in a less satisfied tone: “But friendship is so
+uncertain. You don’t make any announcement to your friends or vows to
+each other, unless you’re at an age when you cut your initials in the
+bark of a tree. That’s what I’d like to do.”
+
+
+
+
+THE HAPPIEST TIME OF THEIR LIVES
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Little Miss Severance sat with her hands as cold as ice. The stage
+of her coming adventure was beautifully set--the conventional stage
+for the adventure of a young girl, her mother’s drawing-room. Her
+mother had the art of setting stages. The room was not large,--a New
+York brownstone front in the upper Sixties even though altered as to
+entrance, and allowed to sprawl backward over yards not originally
+intended for its use, is not a palace,--but it was a room and not a
+corridor; you had the comfortable sense of four walls about you when
+its one small door was once shut. It was filled, perhaps a little too
+much filled, with objects which seemed to have nothing in common except
+beauty; but propinquity, propinquity of older date than the house in
+which they now were, had given them harmony. Nothing in the room was
+modern except some uncommonly comfortable sofas and chairs, and the
+pink and yellow roses that stood about in Chinese bowls.
+
+Miss Severance herself was hardly aware of the charm of the room. On
+the third floor she had her own room, which she liked much better.
+There was a great deal of bright chintz in it, and maple furniture of
+a late colonial date, inherited from her mother’s family, the Lanleys,
+and discarded by her mother, who described the taste of that time as
+“pure, but provincial.” Crystal and ivories and carved wood and Italian
+embroideries did not please Miss Severance half so well as the austere
+lines of those work-tables and high-boys.
+
+It was after five, almost half-past, and he had said “about five.” Miss
+Severance, impatient to begin the delicious experience of anticipation,
+had allowed herself to be ready at a quarter before the hour. Not that
+she had been entirely without some form of anticipation since she woke
+up; not, perhaps, since she had parted from him under the windy awning
+the night before. They had held up a long line of restless motors as
+she stood huddled in her fur-trimmed cloak, and he stamped and jigged
+to keep warm, bareheaded, in his thin pumps and shining shirt-front,
+with his shoulders drawn up and his hands in his pockets, while they
+almost awkwardly arranged this meeting for the next day.
+
+Several times during the preceding evening she had thought he was going
+to say something of the kind, for they had danced together a great
+deal; but they had always danced in silence. At the time, with his
+arm about her, silence had seemed enough; but in separation there is
+something wonderfully solid and comforting in the memory of a spoken
+word; it is like a coin in the pocket. And after Miss Severance had
+bidden him good night at the long glass door of the paneled ball-room
+without his saying anything of a future meeting, she had gone up-stairs
+with a heavy heart to find her maid and her wrap. She knew as soon
+as she reached the dressing-room that she had actually hurried her
+departure for the sake of the parting; for the hope, as their time
+together grew short, of having some certainty to look forward to. But
+he had said nothing, and she had been ashamed to find that she was
+waiting, leaving her hand in his too long; so that at last she snatched
+it away, and was gone up-stairs in an instant, fearing he might have
+guessed what was going on in her mind.
+
+She had thought it just an accident that he was in the hall when she
+came down again, and he hadn’t much choice, she said to herself, about
+helping her into her motor. Then at the very last moment he had asked
+if he mightn’t come and see her the next afternoon. Miss Severance, who
+was usually sensitive to inconveniencing other people, had not cared at
+all about the motor behind hers that was tooting its horn or for the
+elderly lady in feathers and diamonds who was waiting to get into it.
+She had cared only about arranging the hour and impressing the address
+upon him. He had given her back the pleasure of her whole evening like
+a parting gift.
+
+As she drove home she couldn’t bring herself to doubt, though she tried
+to be rational about the whole experience, that it had meant as much
+to him as it had to her, perhaps more. Her lips curved a little at the
+thought, and she glanced quickly at her maid to see if the smile had
+been visible in the glare of the tall, double lamps of Fifth Avenue.
+
+To say she had not slept would be untrue, but she had slept close
+to the surface of consciousness, as if a bright light were shining
+somewhere near, and she had waked with the definite knowledge that this
+light was the certainty of seeing him that very day. The morning had
+gone very well; she had even forgotten once or twice for a few seconds,
+and then remembered with a start of joy that was almost painful:
+but, after lunch, time had begun to drag like the last day of a long
+sea-voyage.
+
+About three she had gone out with her mother in the motor, with the
+understanding that she was to be left at home at four; her mother was
+going on to tea with an elderly relation. Fifth Avenue had seemed
+unusually crowded even for Fifth Avenue, and the girl had fretted
+and wondered at the perversity of the police, who held them up just
+at the moment most promising for slipping through; and why Andrews,
+the chauffeur, could not see that he would do better by going to
+Madison Avenue. She did not speak these thoughts aloud, for she had
+not told her mother, not from any natural love of concealment, but
+because any announcement of her plans for the afternoon would have
+made them seem less certain of fulfilment. Perhaps, too, she had felt
+an unacknowledged fear of certain of her mother’s phrases that could
+delicately puncture delight.
+
+She had been dropped at the house by ten minutes after four, and
+exactly at a quarter before five she had been in the drawing-room, in
+her favorite dress, with her best slippers, her hands cold, but her
+heart warm with the knowledge that he would soon be there.
+
+Only after forty-five minutes of waiting did that faith begin to grow
+dim. She was too inexperienced in such matters to know that this was
+the inevitable consequence of being ready too early. She had had time
+to run through the whole cycle of certainty, eagerness, doubt, and she
+was now rapidly approaching despair. He was not coming. Perhaps he
+had never meant to come. Possibly he had merely yielded to a polite
+impulse; possibly her manner had betrayed her wishes so plainly that a
+clever, older person, two or three years out of college, had only too
+clearly read her in the moment when she had detained his hand at the
+door of the ball-room.
+
+There was a ring at the bell. Her heart stood perfectly still, and then
+began beating with a terrible force, as if it gathered itself into
+a hard, weighty lump again and again. Several minutes went by, too
+long for a man to give to taking off his coat. At last she got up and
+cautiously opened the door; a servant was carrying a striped cardboard
+box to her mother’s room. Miss Severance went back and sat down. She
+took a long breath; her heart returned to its normal movement.
+
+Yet, for some unexplained reason, the fact that the door-bell had rung
+once made it more possible that it would ring again, and she began to
+feel a slight return of confidence.
+
+A servant opened the door, and in the instant before she turned her
+head she had time to debate the possibility of a visitor having come in
+without ringing while the messenger with the striped box was going out.
+But, no; Pringle was alone.
+
+Pringle had been with the family since her mother was a girl, but, like
+many red-haired men, he retained an appearance of youth. He wanted to
+know if he should take away the tea.
+
+She knew perfectly why he asked. He liked to have the tea-things put
+away before he had his own supper and began his arrangements for the
+family dinner. She felt that the crisis had come.
+
+If she said yes, she knew that her visitor would come just as tea had
+disappeared. If she said no, she would sit there alone, waiting for
+another half-hour, and when she finally did ring and tell Pringle he
+could take away the tea-things, he would look wise and reproachful.
+Nevertheless, she did say no, and Pringle with admirable self-control,
+withdrew.
+
+The afternoon seemed very quiet. Miss Severance became aware of all
+sorts of bells that she had never heard before--other door-bells,
+telephone-bells in the adjacent houses, loud, hideous bells on motor
+delivery-wagons, but not her own front door-bell.
+
+Her heart felt like lead. Things would never be the same now. Probably
+there was some explanation of his not coming, but it could never be
+really atoned for. The wild romance and confidence in this first visit
+could never be regained.
+
+And then there was a loud, quick ring at the bell, and at once he was
+in the room, breathing rapidly, as if he had run up-stairs or even from
+the corner. She could do nothing but stare at him. She had tried in
+the last ten minutes to remember what he looked like, and now she was
+astonished to find how exactly he looked as she remembered him.
+
+To her horror, the change between her late despair and her present
+joy was so extreme that she wanted to cry. The best she knew how to
+do was to pucker her face into a smile and to offer him those chilly
+finger-tips.
+
+He hardly took them, but said, as if announcing a black, but
+incontrovertible, fact:
+
+“You’re not a bit glad to see me.”
+
+“Oh, yes, I am,” she returned, with an attempt at an easy social
+manner. “Will you have some tea?”
+
+“But why aren’t you glad?”
+
+Miss Severance clasped her hands on the edge of the tea-tray and looked
+down. She pressed her palms together; she set her teeth, but the
+muscles in her throat went on contracting; and the heroic struggle was
+lost.
+
+“I thought you weren’t coming,” she said, and making no further effort
+to conceal the fact that her eyes were full of tears she looked
+straight up at him.
+
+He sat down beside her on the small, low sofa and put his hand on hers.
+
+“But I was perfectly certain to come,” he said very gently, “because,
+you see, I think I love you.”
+
+“Do you think I love you?” she asked, seeking information.
+
+“I can’t tell,” he answered. “Your being sorry I did not come doesn’t
+prove anything. We’ll see. You’re so wonderfully young, my dear!”
+
+“I don’t think eighteen is so young. My mother was married before she
+was twenty.”
+
+He sat silent for a few seconds, and she felt his hand shut more firmly
+on hers. Then he got up, and, pulling a chair to the opposite side of
+the table, said briskly:
+
+“And now give me some tea. I haven’t had any lunch.”
+
+“Oh, why not?” She blew her nose, tucked away her handkerchief, and
+began her operations on the tea-tray.
+
+“I work very hard,” he returned. “You don’t know what at, do you? I’m a
+statistician.”
+
+“What’s that?”
+
+“I make reports on properties, on financial ventures, for the firm
+I’m with, Benson & Honaton. They’re brokers. When they are asked to
+underwrite a scheme--”
+
+“Underwrite? I never heard that word.”
+
+The boy laughed.
+
+“You’ll hear it a good many times if our acquaintance continues.” Then
+more gravely, but quite parenthetically, he added: “If a firm puts up
+money for a business, they want to know all about it, of course. I tell
+them. I’ve just been doing a report this afternoon, a wonder; it’s what
+made me late. Shall I tell you about it?”
+
+She nodded with the same eagerness with which ten years before she
+might have answered an inquiry as to whether he should tell her a
+fairy-story.
+
+“Well, it was on a coal-mine in Pennsylvania. I’m afraid my report is
+going to be a disappointment to the firm. The mine’s good, a sound,
+rich vein, and the labor conditions aren’t bad; but there’s one fatal
+defect--a car shortage on the only railroad that reaches it. They can’t
+make a penny on their old mine until that’s met, and that can’t be
+straightened out for a year, anyhow; and so I shall report against it.”
+
+“Car shortage,” said Miss Severance. “I never should have thought of
+that. I think you must be wonderful.”
+
+He laughed.
+
+“I wish the firm thought so,” he said. “In a way they do; they pay
+attention to what I say, but they give me an awfully small salary. In
+fact,” he added briskly, “I have almost no money at all.” There was
+a pause, and he went on, “I suppose you know that when I was sitting
+beside you just now I wanted most terribly to kiss you.”
+
+“Oh, no!”
+
+“Oh, no? Oh, yes. I wanted to, but I didn’t. Don’t worry. I won’t for a
+long time, perhaps never.”
+
+“Never?” said Miss Severance, and she smiled.
+
+“I said _perhaps_ never. You can’t tell. Life turns up some awfully
+queer tricks now and then. Last night, for example. I walked into that
+ballroom thinking of nothing, and there you were--all the rest of the
+room like a sort of shrine for you. I said to a man I was with, ‘I
+want to meet the girl who looks like cream in a gold saucer,’ and he
+introduced us. What could be stranger than that? Not, as a matter of
+fact, that I ever thought love at first sight impossible, as so many
+people do.”
+
+“But if you don’t know the very first thing about a person--” Miss
+Severance began, but he interrupted:
+
+“You have to begin some time. Every pair of lovers have to have a first
+meeting, and those who fall in love at once are just that much further
+ahead.” He smiled. “I don’t even know your first name.”
+
+It seemed miraculous good fortune to have a first name.
+
+“Mathilde.”
+
+“Mathilde,” he repeated in a lower tone, and his eyes shone
+extraordinarily.
+
+Both of them took some time to recover from the intensity of this
+moment. She wanted to ask him his, but foreseeing that she would
+immediately be required to use it, and feeling unequal to such an
+adventure, she decided it would be wiser to wait. It was he who
+presently went on:
+
+“Isn’t it strange to know so little about each other? I rather like
+it. It’s so mad--like opening a chest of buried treasure. You don’t
+know what’s going to be in it, but you know it’s certain to be rare and
+desirable. What do you do, Mathilde? Live here with your father and
+mother?”
+
+She sat looking at him. The truth was that she found everything he said
+so unexpected and thrilling that now and then she lost all sense of
+being expected to answer.
+
+“Oh, yes,” she said, suddenly remembering. “I live here with my mother
+and stepfather. My mother has married again. She is Mrs. Vincent
+Farron.”
+
+“Didn’t I tell you life played strange tricks?” he exclaimed. He sprang
+up, and took a position on the hearth-rug. “I know all about him.
+I once reported on the Electric Equipment Company. That’s the same
+Farron, isn’t it? I believe that that company is the most efficient for
+its size in this country, in the world, perhaps. And Farron is your
+stepfather! He must be a wonder.”
+
+“Yes, I think he is.”
+
+“You don’t like him?”
+
+“I like him very much. I don’t _love_ him.”
+
+“The poor devil!”
+
+“I don’t believe he wants people to love him. It would bore him. No,
+that’s not quite just. He’s kind, wonderfully kind, but he has no
+little pleasantnesses. He says things in a very quiet way that make you
+feel he’s laughing at you, though he never does laugh. He said to me
+this morning at breakfast, ‘Well, Mathilde, was it a marvelous party?’
+That made me feel as if I used the word ‘marvelous’ all the time, not
+a bit as if he really wanted to know whether I had enjoyed myself last
+night.”
+
+“And did you?”
+
+She gave him a rapid smile and went on:
+
+“Now, my grandfather, my mother’s father--his name is Lanley--(Mr.
+Lanley evidently was not in active business, for it was plain that
+Wayne, searching his memory, found nothing)--my grandfather often
+scolds me terribly for my English,--says I talk like a barmaid,
+although I tell him he ought not to know how barmaids talk,--but
+he never makes me feel small. Sometimes Mr. Farron repeats, weeks
+afterward, something I’ve said, word for word, the way I said it. It
+makes it sound so foolish. I’d rather he said straight out that he
+thought I was a goose.”
+
+“Perhaps you wouldn’t if he did.”
+
+“I like people to be human. Mr. Farron’s not human.”
+
+“Doesn’t your mother think so?”
+
+“Mama thinks he’s perfect.”
+
+“How long have they been married?”
+
+“Ages! Five years!”
+
+“And they’re just as much in love?”
+
+Miss Severance looked at him.
+
+“In love?” she said. “At their age?” He laughed at her, and she added:
+“I don’t mean they are not fond of each other, but Mr. Farron must be
+forty-five. What I mean by love--” she hesitated.
+
+“Don’t stop.”
+
+But she did stop, for her quick ears told her that some one was coming,
+and, Pringle opening the door, Mrs. Farron came in.
+
+She was a very beautiful person. In her hat and veil, lit by the
+friendly light of her own drawing-room, she seemed so young as to be
+actually girlish, except that she was too stately and finished for
+such a word. Mathilde did not inherit her blondness from her mother.
+Mrs. Farron’s hair was a dark brown, with a shade of red in it where
+it curved behind her ears. She had the white skin that often goes with
+such hair, and a high, delicate color in her cheeks. Her eyebrows were
+fine and excessively dark--penciled, many people thought.
+
+“Mama, this is Mr. Wayne,” said Mathilde. Here was another tremendous
+moment crowding upon her--the introduction of her beautiful mother to
+this new friend, but even more, the introduction to her mother of this
+wonderful new friend, whose flavor of romance and interest no one,
+she supposed, could miss. Yet Mrs. Farron seemed to be taking it all
+very calmly, greeting him, taking his chair as being a trifle more
+comfortable than the others, trying to cover the doubt in her own mind
+whether she ought to recognize him as an old acquaintance. Was he new
+or one of the ones she had seen a dozen times before?
+
+There was nothing exactly artificial in Mrs. Farron’s manner, but, like
+a great singer who has learned perfect enunciation even in the most
+trivial sentences of every-day matters, she, as a great beauty, had
+learned the perfection of self-presentation, which probably did not
+wholly desert her even in the dentist’s chair.
+
+She drew off her long, pale, spotless gloves.
+
+“No tea, my dear,” she said. “I’ve just had it,” she added to Wayne,
+“with an old aunt of mine. Aunt Alberta,” she threw over her shoulder
+to Mathilde. “I am very unfortunate, Mr. Wayne; this town is full
+of my relations, tucked away in forgotten oases, and I’m their only
+connection with the vulgar, modern world. My aunt’s favorite excitement
+is disapproving of me. She was particularly trying to-day.” Mrs. Farron
+seemed to debate whether or not it would be tiresome to go thoroughly
+into the problem of Aunt Alberta, and to decide that it would; for she
+said, with an abrupt change, “Were you at this party last night that
+Mathilde enjoyed so much?”
+
+“Yes,” said Wayne. “Why weren’t you?”
+
+“I wasn’t asked. It isn’t the fashion to ask mothers and daughters to
+the same parties any more. We dance so much better than they do.” She
+leaned over, and rang the little enamel bell that dangled at the arm of
+her daughter’s sofa. “You can’t imagine, Mr. Wayne, how much better I
+dance than Mathilde.”
+
+“I hope it needn’t be left to the imagination.”
+
+“Oh, I’m not sure. That was the subject of Aunt Alberta’s talk this
+afternoon--my still dancing. She says she put on caps at thirty-five.”
+Mrs. Farron ran her eyebrows whimsically together and looked up at her
+daughter’s visitor.
+
+Mathilde was immensely grateful to her mother for taking so much
+trouble to be charming; only now she rather spoiled it by interrupting
+Wayne in the midst of a sentence, as if she had never been as much
+interested as she had seemed. Pringle had appeared in answer to her
+ring, and she asked him sharply:
+
+“Is Mr. Farron in?”
+
+“Mr. Farron’s in his room, Madam.”
+
+At this she appeared to give her attention wholly back to Wayne, but
+Mathilde knew that she was really busy composing an escape. She seemed
+to settle back, to encourage her visitor to talk indefinitely; but when
+the moment came for her to answer, she rose to her feet in the midst of
+her sentence, and, still talking, wandered to the door and disappeared.
+
+As the door shut firmly behind her Wayne said, as if there had been no
+interruption:
+
+“It was love you were speaking of, you know.”
+
+“But don’t you think my mother is marvelous?” she asked, not content to
+take up even the absorbing topic until this other matter had received
+due attention.
+
+“I should say so! But one isn’t, of course, overwhelmed to find that
+your mother is beautiful.”
+
+“And she’s so good!” Mathilde went on. “She’s always thinking of things
+to do for me and my grandfather and Mr. Farron and all these old, old
+relations. She went away just now only because she knows that as soon
+as Mr. Farron comes in he asks for her. She’s perfect to every one.”
+
+He came and sat down beside her again.
+
+“It’s going to be much easier for her daughter,” he said: “you have to
+be perfect only to one person. Now, what was it you were going to say
+about love?”
+
+Again they looked at each other; again Miss Severance had the sensation
+of drowning, of being submerged in some strange elixir.
+
+She was rescued by Pringle’s opening the door and announcing:
+
+“Mr. Lanley.”
+
+Wayne stood up.
+
+“I suppose I must go,” he said.
+
+“No, no,” she returned a little wildly, and added, as if this were the
+reason why she opposed his departure. “This is my grandfather. You must
+see him.”
+
+Wayne sat down again, in the chair on the other side of the tea-table.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Mathilde had been wrong in telling Wayne that her mother had gone
+upstairs in obedience to an impulse of kindness. She had gone to
+quiet a small, gnawing anxiety that had been with her all the day,
+a haunting, elusive, persistent impression that something was wrong
+between her and her husband.
+
+All the day, as she had gone about from one thing to another, her mind
+had been diligently seeking in some event of the outside world an
+explanation of a slight obscuration of his spirit; but her heart, more
+egotistical, had stoutly insisted that the cause must lie in her. Did
+he love her less? Was she losing her charm for him? Were five years the
+limit of a human relation like theirs? Was she to watch the dying down
+of his flame, and try to shelter and fan it back to life as she had
+seen so many other women do?
+
+Or was the trouble only that she had done something to wound his aloof
+and sensitive spirit, seldom aloof to her? Their intimate life had
+never been a calm one. Farron’s interests were concentrated, and his
+temperament was jealous. A woman couldn’t, as Adelaide sometimes had
+occasion to say to herself, keep men from making love to her; she did
+not always want to. Farron could be relentless, and she was not without
+a certain contemptuous obstinacy. Yet such conflicts as these she had
+learned not to dread, but sometimes deliberately to precipitate, for
+they ended always in a deeper sense of unity, and, on her part, in a
+fresh sense of his supremacy.
+
+If he had been like most of the men she knew, she would have assumed
+that something had gone wrong in business. With her first husband she
+had always been able to read in his face as he entered the house the
+full history of his business day. Sometimes she had felt that there was
+something insulting in the promptness of her inquiry, “Has anything
+gone wrong, Joe?” But Severance had never appeared to feel the insult;
+only as time went on, had grown more and more ready, as her interest
+became more and more lackadaisical, to pour out the troubles and,
+much more rarely, the joys of his day. One of the things she secretly
+admired most about Farron was his independence of her in such matters.
+No half-contemptuous question would elicit confidence from him, so that
+she had come to think it a great honor if by any chance he did drop
+her a hint as to the mood that his day’s work had occasioned. But for
+the most part he was unaffected by such matters. Newspaper attacks and
+business successes did not seem to reach the area where he suffered or
+rejoiced. They were to be dealt with or ignored, but they could neither
+shadow or elate him.
+
+So that not only egotism, but experience, bade her look to her own
+conduct for some explanation of the chilly little mist that had been
+between them for twenty-four hours.
+
+As soon as the drawing-room door closed behind her she ran up-stairs
+like a girl. There was no light in his study, and she went on into
+his bedroom. He was lying on the sofa; he had taken off his coat, and
+his arms were clasped under his head; he was smoking a long cigar. To
+find him idle was unusual. His was not a contemplative nature; a trade
+journal or a detective novel were the customary solace of odd moments
+like this.
+
+He did not move as she entered, but he turned his eyes slowly and
+seriously upon her. His eyes were black. He was a very dark man, with
+a smooth, brown skin and thick, fine hair, which clung closely to his
+broad, rather massive head. He was clean shaven, so that, as Adelaide
+loved to remember a friend of his had once suggested, his business
+competitors might take note of the stern lines of his mouth and chin.
+
+She came in quickly, and shut the door behind her, and then dropping on
+her knees beside him, she laid her head against his heart. He put out
+his hand, touched her face, and said:
+
+“Take off this veil.”
+
+The taking off of Adelaide’s veil was not a process to be accomplished
+ill-advisedly or lightly. Lucie, her maid, had put it on, with much
+gathering together and looking into the glass over her mistress’s
+shoulder, and it was held in place with shining pins and hair-pins. She
+lifted her head, sank back upon her heels, and raised her arms to the
+offending cobweb of black meshes, while her husband went on in a tone
+not absolutely denuded of reproach:
+
+“You’ve been in some time.”
+
+“Yes,”--she stuck the first pin into the upholstery of the sofa,--“but
+Pringle told me Mathilde had a visitor, and I thought it was my duty to
+stop and be a little parental.”
+
+“A young man?”
+
+“Yes. I forget his name--just like all these young men nowadays, alert
+and a little too much at his ease, but amusing in his way. He said,
+among other things--”
+
+But Farron, it appeared, was not exclusively interested in the words
+of Mathilde’s visitor; for at this instant, perceiving that his wife
+had disengaged herself from her veil, he sat up, caught her to him, and
+pressed his lips to hers.
+
+“O Adelaide!” he said, and it seemed to her he spoke with a sort of
+agony.
+
+She held him away from her.
+
+“Vincent, what is it?” she asked.
+
+“What is what?”
+
+“Is anything wrong?”
+
+“Between us?”
+
+Oh, she knew that method of his, to lead her on to make definite
+statements about impressions of which nothing definite could be
+accurately said.
+
+“No, I won’t be pinned down,” she said; “but I feel it, the way a
+rheumatic feels it, when the wind goes into the east.”
+
+He continued to look at her gravely; she thought he was going to speak
+when a knock came at the door. It was Pringle announcing the visit of
+Mr. Lanley.
+
+Adelaide rose slowly to her feet, and, walking to her husband’s
+dressing-table, repinned her hat, and caught up the little stray locks
+which grew in deep, sharp points at the back of her head.
+
+“You’ll come down, too?” she said.
+
+Farron was looking about for his coat, and as he put it on he observed
+dryly:
+
+“The young man is seeing all the family.”
+
+“Oh, he won’t mind,” she answered. “He probably hasn’t the slightest
+wish to see Mathilde alone. They both struck me as sorry when I left
+them; they were running down. You can’t imagine, Vin, how little
+romance there is among all these young people.”
+
+“They leave it to us,” he answered. This was exactly in his accustomed
+manner, and as they went down-stairs together her heart felt lighter,
+though the long, black, shiny pin stuck harmlessly into the upholstery
+of the sofa was like a mile-stone, for afterward she remembered that
+her questions had gone unanswered.
+
+Wayne was still in the drawing-room, and Mathilde, who loved her
+grandfather, was making a gentle fuss over him, a process which
+consisted largely in saying: “O Grandfather! Oh, you didn’t! O
+_Grandfather_!”
+
+Mr. Lanley, though a small man and now over sixty, had a distinct
+presence. He wore excellent gray clothes of the same shade as his hair,
+and out of this neutrality of tint his bright, brown eyes sparkled
+piercingly.
+
+He had begun life with the assumption that to be a New York Lanley was
+in itself enough, a comfortable creed in which many of his relations
+had obscurely lived and died. But before he was graduated from Columbia
+College he began to doubt whether the profession of being an aristocrat
+in a democracy was a man’s job. At no time in his life did he deny
+the value of birth and breeding; but he came to regard them as a
+responsibility solemn and often irritating to those who did not possess
+them, though he was no longer content with the current views of his
+family that they were a sufficient attainment in themselves.
+
+He was graduated from college in 1873, and after a summer at the family
+place on the Hudson, hot, fertile, and inaccessible, which his sister
+Alberta was at that time occupying, he had arranged a trip round the
+world. September of that year brought the great panic, and swept away
+many larger and solider fortunes than the Lanleys’. Mr. Lanley decided
+that he must go to work, though he abandoned his traditions no further
+than to study law. His ancestors, like many of the aristocrats of the
+early days, had allowed their opinions of fashion to influence too much
+their selection of real estate. All through the late seventies, while
+his brothers and sisters were clinging sentimentally to brownstone
+fronts in Stuyvesant Square or red-brick facades in Great Jones Street,
+Mr. Lanley himself, unaffected by recollections of Uncle Joel’s
+death or grandma’s marriage, had been parting with his share in such
+properties, and investing along the east side of the park.
+
+By the time he was forty he was once more a fairly rich man. He
+had left the practice of law to become the president of the Peter
+Stuyvesant Trust Company, for which he had been counsel. After fifteen
+years he had retired from this, too, and had become, what he insisted
+nature had always intended him to be, a gentleman of leisure. He
+retained a directorship in the trust company, was a trustee of his
+university, and was a thorny and inquiring member of many charitable
+boards.
+
+He prided himself on having emancipated himself from the ideas of
+his own generation. It bored him to listen to his cousins lamenting
+the vulgarities of modern life, the lack of elegance in present-day
+English, or to hear them explain as they borrowed money from him the
+sort of thing a gentleman could or could not do for a living. But on
+the subject of what a lady might do he still held fixed and unalterable
+notions; nor did he ever find it tiresome to hear his own daughter
+expound the axioms of this subject with a finality he had taught her
+in her youth. Having freed himself from fine-gentlemanism, he had
+quite unconsciously fallen the more easily a prey to fine-ladyism; all
+his conservatism had gone into that, as a man, forced to give up his
+garden, might cherish one lovely potted plant.
+
+At a time when private schools were beginning to flourish once more he
+had been careful to educate Adelaide entirely at home with governesses.
+Every summer he took her abroad, and showed her, and talked with
+her about, books, pictures, and buildings; he inoculated her with
+such fundamentals as that a lady never wears imitation lace on her
+underclothes, and the past of the verb to “eat” is pronounced to rhyme
+with “bet.” She spoke French and German fluently, and could read
+Italian. He considered her a perfectly educated woman. She knew nothing
+of business, political economy, politics, or science. He himself had
+never been deeply interested in American politics, though very familiar
+with the lives of English statesmen. He was a great reader of memoirs
+and of the novels of Disraeli and Trollope. Of late he had taken to
+motoring.
+
+He kissed his daughter and nodded--a real New York nod--to his
+son-in-law.
+
+“I’ve come to tell you, Adelaide,” he began.
+
+“Such a thing!” murmured Mathilde, shaking her golden head above the
+cup of tea she was making for him, making in just the way he liked; for
+she was a little person who remembered people’s tastes.
+
+“I thought you’d rather hear it than read it in the papers.”
+
+“Goodness, Papa, you talk as if you had been getting married!”
+
+“No.” Mr. Lanley hesitated, and looked up at her brightly. “No; but I
+think I did have a proposal the other day.”
+
+“From Mrs. Baxter?” asked Adelaide. This was almost war. Mrs. Baxter
+was a regal and possessive widow from Baltimore whose long and regular
+visits to Mr. Lanley had once occasioned his family some alarm, though
+time had now given them a certain institutional safety.
+
+Her father was not flurried by the reference.
+
+“No,” he said; “though she writes me, I’m glad to say, that she is
+coming soon.”
+
+“You don’t tell me!” said Adelaide. The cream of the winter season was
+usually the time Mrs. Baxter selected for her visit.
+
+Her father did not notice her.
+
+“If Mrs. Baxter should ever propose to me,” he went on thoughtfully, “I
+shouldn’t refuse. I don’t think I should have the--”
+
+“The chance?” said his daughter.
+
+“I was going to say the fortitude. But this,” he went on, “was an
+elderly cousin, who expressed a wish to come and be my housekeeper.
+Perhaps matrimony was not intended. Mathilde, my dear, how does one
+tell nowadays whether one is being proposed to or not?”
+
+In this poignant and unexpected crisis Mathilde turned slowly and
+painfully crimson. How _did_ one tell? It was a question which at the
+moment was anything but clear to her.
+
+“I should always assume it in doubtful cases, sir,” said Wayne, very
+distinctly. He and Mathilde did not even glance at each other.
+
+“It wasn’t your proposal that you came to announce to us, though, was
+it, Papa?” said Adelaide.
+
+“No,” answered Mr. Lanley. “The fact is, I’ve been arrested.”
+
+“Again?”
+
+“Yes; most unjustly, most unjustly.” His brows contracted, and then
+relaxed at a happy memory. “It’s the long, low build of the car. It
+looks so powerful that the police won’t give you a chance. It was
+nosing through the park--”
+
+“At about thirty miles an hour,” said Farron.
+
+“Well, not a bit over thirty-five. A lovely morning, no one in sight,
+I may have let her out a little. All of a sudden one of these mounted
+fellows jumped out from the bushes along the bridle-path. They’re a
+fine-looking lot, Vincent.”
+
+Farron asked who the judge was, and, Mr. Lanley named him--named him
+slightly wrong, and Farron corrected him.
+
+“I’ll get you off,” he said.
+
+Adelaide looked up at her husband admiringly. This was the aspect of
+him that she loved best. It seemed to her like magic what Vincent could
+do. Her father, she thought, took it very calmly. What would have
+happened to him if she had not brought Farron into the family to rescue
+and protect? The visiting boy, she noticed, was properly impressed. She
+saw him give Farron quite a dog-like look as he took his departure.
+To Mathilde he only bowed. No arrangements had been made for a future
+meeting. Mathilde tried to convey to him in a prolonged look that if he
+would wait only five minutes all would be well, that her grandfather
+never paid long visits; but the door closed behind him. She became
+immediately overwhelmed by the fear, which had an element of desire in
+it, too, that her family would fall to discussing him, would question
+her as to how long she had known him, and why she liked him, and what
+they talked about, and whether she had been expecting a visit, sitting
+there in her best dress. Then slowly she took in the fact that they
+were going to talk about nothing but Mr. Lanley’s arrest. She marveled
+at the obtuseness of older people--to have stood at the red-hot center
+of youth and love and not even to know it! She drew her shoulders
+together, feeling very lonely and strong. As they talked, she allowed
+her eyes to rest first on one speaker and then on the other, as if she
+were following each word of the discussion. As a matter of fact she was
+rehearsing with an inner voice the tone of Wayne’s voice when he had
+said that he loved her.
+
+Then suddenly she decided that she would be much happier alone in
+her own room. She rose, patted her grandfather on the shoulder, and
+prepared to escape. He, not wishing to be interrupted at the moment,
+patted her hand in return.
+
+“Hello!” he exclaimed. “Hands are cold, my dear.”
+
+She caught Farron’s cool, black eyes, and surprised herself by
+answering:
+
+“Yes; but, then, they always are.” This was quite untrue, but every one
+was perfectly satisfied with it.
+
+As she left the room Mr. Lanley was saying:
+
+“Yes, I don’t want to go to Blackwell’s Island. Lovely spot, of course.
+My grandfather used to tell me he remembered it when the Blackwell
+family still lived there. But I shouldn’t care to wear stripes--except
+for the pleasure of telling Alberta about it. It would give her a
+year’s occupation, her suffering over my disgrace, wouldn’t it,
+Adelaide?”
+
+“She’d scold me,” said Adelaide, looking beautifully martyred. Then
+turning to her husband, she asked. “Will it be very difficult, Vincent,
+getting papa off?” She wanted it to be difficult, she wanted him to
+give her material out of which she could form a picture of him as a
+savior; but he only shook his head and said:
+
+“That young man is in love with Mathilde.”
+
+“O Vin! Those children?”
+
+Mr. Lanley pricked up his ears like a terrier.
+
+“In love?” he exclaimed. “And who is he? Not one of the East Sussex
+Waynes, I hope. Vulgar people. They always were; began life as
+auctioneers in my father’s time. Is he one of those, Adelaide?”
+
+“I have no idea who he is, if any one,” said Adelaide. “I never saw or
+heard of him before this afternoon.”
+
+“And may I ask,” said her father, “if you intend to let your daughter
+become engaged to a young man of whom you know nothing whatsoever?”
+
+Adelaide looked extremely languid, one of her methods of showing
+annoyance.
+
+“Really, Papa,” she said, “the fact that he has come once to pay
+an afternoon visit to Mathilde does not, it seems to me, make an
+engagement inevitable. My child is not absolutely repellent, you know,
+and a good many young men come to the house.” Then suddenly remembering
+that her oracle had already spoken on this subject, she asked more
+humbly, “What was it made you say he was in love, Vin?”
+
+“Just an impression,” said Farron.
+
+Mr. Lanley had been thinking it over.
+
+“It was not the custom in my day,” he began, and then remembering that
+this was one of his sister Alberta’s favorite openings, he changed the
+form of his sentence. “I never allowed you to see stray young men--”
+
+His daughter interrupted him.
+
+“But I always saw them, Papa. I used to let them come early in the
+afternoon before you came in.”
+
+In his heart Mr. Lanley doubted that this had been a regular custom,
+but he knew it would be unwise to argue the point; so he started fresh.
+
+“When a young man is attentive to a girl like Mathilde--”
+
+“But he isn’t,” said Adelaide. “At least not what I should have called
+attentive when I was a girl.”
+
+“Your experience was not long, my dear. You were married at Mathilde’s
+age.”
+
+“You may be sure of one thing, Papa, that I don’t desire an early
+marriage for my daughter.”
+
+“Very likely,” returned her father, getting up, and buttoning the last
+button of his coat; “but you may have noticed that we can’t always get
+just what we most desire for our children.”
+
+When he had gone, Vincent looked at his wife and smiled, but smiled
+without approval. She twisted her shoulders.
+
+“Oh, I suppose so,” she said; “but I do so hate to be scolded about the
+way I bring up Mathilde.”
+
+“Or about anything else, my dear.”
+
+“I don’t hate to be scolded by you,” she returned. “In fact, I
+sometimes get a sort of servile enjoyment from it. Besides,” she went
+on, “as a matter of fact, I bring Mathilde up particularly well, quite
+unlike these wild young women I see everywhere else. She tells me
+everything, and I have perfectly the power of making her hate any one I
+disapprove of. But you’ll try and find out something about this young
+man, won’t you, Vin?”
+
+“We’ll have a full report on him to-morrow. Do you know what his first
+name is?”
+
+“At the moment I don’t recall his last. Oh, yes--Wayne. I’ll ask
+Mathilde when we go up-stairs.”
+
+From her own bedroom door she called up.
+
+“Mathilde, what is the name of your young friend?”
+
+There was a little pause before Mathilde answered that she was sorry,
+but she didn’t know.
+
+Mrs. Farron turned to her husband and made a little gesture to indicate
+that this ignorance on the girl’s part did not bear out his theory;
+but she saw that he did not admit it, that he clung still to his
+impression. “And Vincent’s impressions--” she said to herself as she
+went in to dress.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Mr. Lanley was ruffled as he left his daughter’s drawing-room.
+
+“As if I had wanted her to marry at eighteen,” he said to himself; and
+he took his hat crossly from Pringle and set it hard on his head at
+the slight angle which he preferred. Then reflecting that Pringle was
+not in any way involved, he unbent slightly, and said something that
+sounded like:
+
+“Haryer, Pringle?”
+
+Pringle, despite his stalwart masculine appearance, had in speaking a
+surprisingly high, squeaky voice.
+
+“I keep my health, thank you, sir,” he said. “Anna has been somewhat
+ailing.” Anna was his wife, to whom he usually referred as “Mrs.
+Pringle”; but he made an exception in speaking to Mr. Lanley, for she
+had once been the Lanleys’ kitchen-maid. “Your car, sir?”
+
+No, Mr. Lanley was walking--walking, indeed, more quickly than usual
+under the stimulus of annoyance.
+
+Nothing had ever happened that made him suffer as he had suffered
+through his daughter’s divorce. Divorce was one of the modern ideas
+which he had imagined he had accepted. As a lawyer he had expressed
+himself as willing always to take the lady’s side; but in the cases
+which he actually took he liked to believe that the wife was perfect
+and the husband inexcusable. He could not comfort himself with any such
+belief in his daughter’s case.
+
+Adelaide’s conduct had been, as far as he could see, irreproachable;
+but, then, so had Severance’s. This was what had made the gossip,
+almost the scandal, of the thing. Even his sister Alberta had whispered
+to him that if Severance had been unfaithful to Adelaide--But poor
+Severance had not been unfaithful; he had not even become indifferent.
+He loved his wife, he said, as much as on the day he married her. He
+was extremely unhappy. Mr. Lanley grew to dread the visits of his huge,
+blond son-in-law, who used actually to sob in the library, and ask
+for explanations of something which Mr. Lanley had never been able to
+understand.
+
+And how obstinate Adelaide had been! She, who had been such a docile
+girl, and then for many years so completely under the thumb of her
+splendid-looking husband, had suddenly become utterly intractable. She
+would listen to no reason and brook no delay. She had been willing
+enough to explain; she had explained repeatedly, but the trouble was he
+could not understand the explanation. She did not love her husband any
+more, she said. Mr. Lanley pointed out to her that this was no legal
+grounds for a divorce.
+
+“Yes, but I look down upon him,” she went on.
+
+“On poor Joe?” her father had asked innocently, and had then discovered
+that this was the wrong thing to say. She had burst out, “Poor Joe!
+poor Joe!” That was the way every one considered him. Was it her fault
+if he excited pity and contempt instead of love and respect? Her love,
+she intimated, had been of a peculiarly eternal sort; Severance himself
+was to blame for its extinction. Mr. Lanley discovered that in some way
+she considered the intemperance of Severance’s habits to be involved.
+But this was absurd. It was true that for a year or two Severance
+had taken to drinking rather more than was wise; but, Mr. Lanley had
+thought at the time, the poor young man had not needed any artificial
+stimulant in the days when Adelaide had fully and constantly admired
+him. He had seen Severance come home several times not exactly drunk,
+but rather more boyishly boastful and hilarious than usual. Even Mr.
+Lanley, a naturally temperate man, had not found Joe repellent in the
+circumstances. Afterward he had been thankful for this weakness: it
+gave him the only foundation on which he could build a case not for the
+courts, of course, but for the world. Unfortunately, however, Severance
+had pulled up before there was any question of divorce.
+
+That was another confusing fact. Adelaide had managed him so
+beautifully. Her father had not known her wonderful powers until he saw
+the skill and patience with which she had dealt with Joe Severance’s
+drinking. Joe himself was eager to own that he owed his cure entirely
+to her. Mr. Lanley had been proud of her; she had turned out, he
+thought, just what a woman ought to be; and then, on top of it, she had
+come to him one day and announced that she would never live with Joe
+again.
+
+“But why not?” he had asked.
+
+“Because I don’t love him,” she had said.
+
+Then Mr. Lanley knew how little his acceptance of the idea of divorce
+in general had reconciled him to the idea of the divorce of his own
+daughter--a Lanley--Mrs. Adelaide Lanley, Mrs. Adelaide Severance. His
+sense of fitness was shocked, though he pleaded with her first on the
+ground of duty, and then under the threat of scandal. With her beauty
+and Severance’s popularity, for from his college days he had been
+extremely popular with men, the divorce excited uncommon interest.
+Severance’s unconcealed grief, a rather large circle of devoted friends
+in whom he confided, and the fact that Adelaide had to go to Nevada to
+get her divorce, led most people to believe that she had simply found
+some one she liked better. Mr. Lanley would have believed it himself,
+but he couldn’t. Farron had not appeared until she had been divorced
+for several years.
+
+Lanley still cherished an affection for Severance, who had very soon
+married again, a local belle in the Massachusetts manufacturing town
+where he now lived. She was said to resemble Adelaide.
+
+No, Mr. Lanley could not see that he had had anything to reproach
+himself with in regard to his daughter’s first marriage. They had been
+young, of course; all the better. He had known the Severances for
+years; and Joe was handsome, hard working, had rowed on his crew, and
+every one spoke well of him. Certainly they had been in love--more in
+love than he liked to see two people, at least when one of them was
+his own daughter. He had suggested their waiting a year or two, but no
+one had backed him up. The Severances had been eager for the marriage,
+naturally. Mr. Lanley could still see the young couple as they turned
+from the altar, young, beautiful, and confident.
+
+He had missed his daughter terribly, not only her physical presence in
+the house, but the exercise of his influence over her, which in old
+times had been perhaps a trifle autocratic. He had hated being told
+what Joe thought and said; yet he could hardly object to her docility.
+That was the way he had brought her up. He did not reckon pliancy in
+a woman as a weakness; or if he had had any temptation to do so, it
+had vanished in the period when Joe Severance had taken to drink. In
+that crisis Adelaide had been anything but weak. Every one had been so
+grateful to her,--he and Joe and the Severances,--and then immediately
+afterward the crash came.
+
+Women! Mr. Lanley shook his head, still moving briskly northward with
+that quick jaunty walk of his. And this second marriage--what about
+that? They seemed happy. Farron was a fine fellow, but not, it seemed
+to him, so attractive to a woman as Severance. Could he hold a woman
+like Adelaide? He wasn’t a man to stand any nonsense, though, and Mr.
+Lanley nodded; then, as it were, withdrew the nod on remembering that
+poor Joe had not wanted to stand any nonsense either. What in similar
+circumstances could Farron do? Adelaide always resented his asking how
+things were going, but how could he help being anxious? How could any
+one rest content on a hillside who had once been blown up by a volcano?
+
+He might not have been any more content if he had stayed to dinner at
+his son-in-law’s, as he had been asked to do. The Farrons were alone.
+Mathilde was going to a dinner, with a dance after. She came into the
+dining-room to say good night and to promise to be home early, not to
+stay and dance. She was not allowed two parties on successive nights,
+not because her health was anything but robust, but rather because her
+mother considered her too young for such vulgar excess.
+
+When she had gone, Farron observed:
+
+“That child has a will of iron.”
+
+“Vincent!” said his wife. “She does everything I suggest to her.”
+
+“Her will just now is to please you in everything. Wait until she
+rebels.”
+
+“But women don’t rebel against the people they love. I don’t have to
+tell you that, do I? I never have to manœuver the child, never have to
+coax or charm her to do what I want.”
+
+He smiled at her across the table.
+
+“You have great faith in those methods, haven’t you?”
+
+“They work, Vin.”
+
+He nodded as if no one knew that better than he.
+
+Soon after dinner he went up-stairs to write some letters. She followed
+him about ten o’clock. She came and leaned one hand on his shoulder and
+one on his desk.
+
+“Still working?” she said. She had been aware of no desire to see what
+he was writing, but she was instantly aware that his blotting-paper had
+fallen across the sheet, that the sheet was not a piece of note-paper,
+but one of a large pad on which he had been apparently making notes.
+
+Her diamond bracelet had slipped down her wrist and lay upon the
+blotting-paper; he slowly and carefully pushed it up her slim, round
+arm until it once more clung in place.
+
+“I’ve nearly finished,” he said; and to her ears there was some under
+sound of pain or of constraint in his tone.
+
+A little later he strolled, still dressed, into her room. She was
+already in bed, and he came and sat on the foot of the bed, with one
+foot tucked under him and his arms folded.
+
+Her mind during the interval had been exclusively occupied with the
+position of that piece of blotting-paper. Could it be there was some
+other woman whose ghost-like presence she was just beginning to feel
+haunting their relation? The impersonality of Vincent’s manner was an
+armor against such attacks, but this armor, as Adelaide knew, was more
+apparent than real. If one could get beyond that, one was at the very
+heart of the man. If some fortuitous circumstance had brought a sudden
+accidental intimacy between him and another woman--What woman loving
+strength and power could resist the sight of Vincent in action, Vincent
+as she saw him?
+
+Yet with a good capacity for believing the worst of her
+fellow-creatures, Adelaide did not really believe in the other woman.
+That, she knew, would bring a change in the fundamentals of her
+relationship with her husband. This was only a barrier that left the
+relation itself untouched.
+
+Before very long she began to think the situation was all in her own
+imagination. He was so amused, so eager to talk. Silent as he was apt
+to be with the rest of the world, with her he sometimes showed a love
+of gossip that enchanted her. And now it seemed to her that he was
+leading her on from subject to subject through a childish dislike to
+going to bed. They were actually giggling over Mr. Lanley’s adventure
+when a motor-brake squeaked in the silence of the night, a motor-door
+slammed. For the first time Adelaide remembered her daughter. It
+was after twelve o’clock. A knock came at her door. She wrapped her
+swan’s-down garment about her and went to the door.
+
+“O Mama, have you been worried?” the girl asked. She was standing in
+the narrow corridor, with her arms full of shining favors; there could
+be no question whatever that she had stayed for the dance. “Are you
+angry? Have I been keeping you awake?”
+
+“I thought you would have been home an hour ago.”
+
+“I know. I want to tell you about it. Mama, how lovely you look in that
+blue thing! Won’t you come up-stairs with me while I undress?”
+
+Adelaide shook her head.
+
+“Not to-night,” she answered.
+
+“You are angry with me,” the girl went on. “But if you will come, I
+will explain. I have something to tell you, Mama.”
+
+Mrs. Farron’s heart stood still. The phrase could mean only one thing.
+She went up-stairs with her daughter, sent the maid away, and herself
+began to undo the soft, pink silk.
+
+“It needs an extra hook,” she murmured. “I told her it did.”
+
+Mathilde craned her neck over her shoulder, as if she had ever been
+able to see the middle of her back.
+
+“But it doesn’t show, does it?” she asked.
+
+“It perfectly well might.”
+
+Mathilde stepped out of her dress, and flung it over a chair. In her
+short petticoat, with her ankles showing and her arms bare, she looked
+like a very young girl, and when she put up her hands and took the pins
+out of her hair, so that it fell over her shoulders, she might have
+been a child.
+
+The silence began to grow awkward. Mathilde put on her dressing-gown;
+it was perfectly straight, and made her look like a little white
+column. A glass of milk and some biscuits were waiting for her. She
+pushed a chair near her fire for her mother, and herself remained
+standing, with her glass of milk in her hand.
+
+“Mama,” she said suddenly, “I suppose I’m what you’d call engaged.”
+
+“O Mathilde! not to that boy who was here to-day?”
+
+“Why not to him?”
+
+“I know nothing about him.”
+
+“I don’t know very much myself. Yes, it’s Pete Wayne. Pierson his name
+is, but every one calls him Pete. How strange it was that I did not
+even know his first name when you asked me!”
+
+A single ray pierced Mrs. Farron’s depression: Vincent had known,
+Vincent’s infallibility was confirmed. She did not know what to say.
+She sat looking sadly, obliquely at the floor like a person who has
+been aggrieved. She was wondering whether she should be to her daughter
+a comrade or a ruler, a confederate or a policeman. Of course in all
+probability the thing would be better stopped. But could this be
+accomplished by immediate action, or could she invite confidences and
+yet commit herself to nothing?
+
+She raised her eyes.
+
+“I do not approve of youthful marriages,” she said.
+
+“O Mama! And you were only eighteen yourself.”
+
+“That is why.”
+
+Mathilde was frightened not only by the intense bitterness of her
+mother’s tone, but also by the obvious fact that she was face to face
+with the explanation of the separation of her parents. She had been
+only nine years old at the time. She had loved her father, had found
+him a better playfellow than her mother, had wept bitterly at parting
+with him, and had missed him. And then gradually her mother, who had
+before seemed like a beautiful, but remote, princess, had begun to make
+of her an intimate and grown-up friend, to consult her and read with
+her and arrange happinesses in her life, to win, to, if the truth must
+be told, reconquer her. Perhaps even Adelaide would not have succeeded
+so easily in effacing Severance’s image had not he himself so quickly
+remarried. Mathilde went several times to stay with the new household
+after Adelaide in secret, tearful conference with her father had been
+forced to consent.
+
+To Mathilde these visits had been an unacknowledged torture. She never
+knew quite what to mention and what to leave untouched. There was
+always a constraint between the three of them. Her father, when alone
+with her, would question her, with strange, eager pauses, as to how
+her mother looked. Her mother’s successor, whom she could not really
+like, would question her more searchingly, more embarrassingly, with
+an ill-concealed note of jealousy in every word. Even at twelve years
+Mathilde was shocked by the strain of hatred in her father’s new wife,
+who seemed to reproach her for fashion and fineness and fastidiousness,
+qualities of which the girl was utterly unaware. She could have loved
+her little half-brother when he appeared upon the scene, but Mrs.
+Severance did not encourage the bond, and gradually Mathilde’s visits
+to her father ceased.
+
+As a child she had been curious about the reasons for the parting, but
+as she grew older it had seemed mere loyalty to accept the fact without
+asking why; she had perhaps not wanted to know why. But now, she saw,
+she was to hear.
+
+“Mathilde, do you still love your father?”
+
+“I think I do, Mama. I feel very sorry for him.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“I don’t know why. I dare say he is happy.”
+
+“I dare say he is, poor Joe.” Adelaide paused. “Well, my dear, that
+was the reason of our parting. One can pity a son or a brother, but
+not a husband. Weakness kills love. A woman cannot be the leader, the
+guide, and keep any romance. O Mathilde, I never want you to feel the
+humiliation of finding yourself stronger than the man you love. That is
+why I left your father, and my justification is his present happiness.
+This inferior little person he has married, she does as well. Any one
+would have done as well.”
+
+Mathilde was puzzled by her mother’s evident conviction that the
+explanation was complete. She asked after a moment:
+
+“But what was it that made you think at first that you did love him,
+Mama?”
+
+“Just what makes you think you love this boy--youth, flattery, desire
+to love. He was magnificently handsome, your father. I saw him admired
+by other men, apparently a master; I was too young to judge, my dear.
+You shan’t be allowed to make that mistake; you shall have time to
+consider.”
+
+Mathilde smiled.
+
+“I don’t want time,” she said.
+
+“I did not know I did.”
+
+“I don’t think I feel about love as you do,” said the girl, slowly.
+
+“Every woman does.”
+
+Mathilde shook her head.
+
+“It’s just Pete as he is that I love. I don’t care which of us leads.”
+
+“But you will.”
+
+The girl had not yet reached a point where she could describe the very
+essence of her passion; she had to let this go. After a moment she said:
+
+“I see now why you chose Mr. Farron.”
+
+“You mean you have never seen before?”
+
+“Not so clearly.”
+
+Mrs. Farron bit her lips. To have missed understanding this seemed a
+sufficient proof of immaturity. She rose.
+
+“Well, my darling,” she said in a tone of extreme reasonableness, “we
+shall decide nothing to-night. I know nothing against Mr. Wayne. He may
+be just the right person. We must see more of him. Do you know anything
+about his family?”
+
+Mathilde shook her head. “He lives alone with his mother. His father is
+dead. She’s very good and interested in drunkards.”
+
+“In _drunkards_?” Mrs. Farron just shut her eyes a second.
+
+“She has a mission that reforms them.”
+
+“Is that his profession, too?”
+
+“Oh, no. He’s in Wall Street--quite a good firm. O Mama, don’t sigh
+like that! We know we can’t be married at once. We are reasonable. You
+think not, because this has all happened so suddenly; but great things
+do happen suddenly. We love each other. That’s all I wanted to tell
+you.”
+
+“Love!” Adelaide looked at the little person before her, tried to
+recall the fading image of the young man, and then thought of the
+dominating figure in her own life. “My dear, you have no idea what love
+is.”
+
+She took no notice of the queer, steady look the girl gave her in
+return. She went down-stairs. She had been gone more than an hour, and
+she knew that Vincent would have been long since asleep. He had, and
+prided himself on having, a great capacity for sleep. She tiptoed past
+his door, stole into her own room, and then, glancing in the direction
+of his, was startled to see that a light was burning. She went in; he
+was reading, and once again, as his eyes turned toward her, she thought
+she saw the same tragic appeal that she had felt that afternoon in his
+kiss. Trembling, she threw herself down beside him, clasping him to her.
+
+“O Vincent! oh, my dear!” she whispered, and began to cry. He did not
+ask her why she was crying; she wished that he would; his silence
+admitted that he knew of some adequate reason.
+
+“I feel that there is something wrong,” she sobbed, “something terribly
+wrong.”
+
+“Nothing could go wrong between you and me, my darling,” he answered.
+His tone comforted, his touch was a comfort. Perhaps she was a coward,
+she said to herself, but she questioned him no further.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Wayne was not so prompt as Mathilde in making the announcement of their
+engagement. He and his mother breakfasted together rather hastily, for
+she was going to court that morning to testify in favor of one of her
+backsliding inebriates, and Wayne had not found the moment to introduce
+his own affairs.
+
+That afternoon he came home earlier than usual; it was not five o’clock.
+He passed Dr. Parret’s flat on the first floor--Dr. Lily MacComb Parret.
+She was a great friend of his, and he felt a decided temptation to go in
+and tell her the news first; but reflecting that no one ought to hear it
+before his mother, he went on up-stairs. He lived on the fifth floor.
+
+He opened the door of the flat and went into the sitting-room. It was
+empty. He lighted the gas, which flared up, squeaking like a bagpipe. The
+room was square and crowded. Shelves ran all the way round it, tightly
+filled with books. In the center was a large writing-table, littered with
+papers, and on each side of the fireplace stood two worn, but
+comfortable, arm-chairs, each with a reading-lamp at its side. There was
+nothing beautiful in the furniture, and yet the room had its own charm.
+The house was a corner house and had once been a single dwelling. The
+shape of the room, its woodwork, its doors, its flat, white marble
+mantelpiece, belonged to an era of simple taste and good workmanship; but
+the greatest charm of the room was the view from the windows, of which it
+had four, two that looked east and two south, and gave a glimpse of the
+East River and its bridges.
+
+Wayne was not sorry his mother was out. He had begun to dread the
+announcement he had to make. At first he had thought only of her keen
+interest in his affairs, but later he had come to consider what this
+particular piece of news would mean to her. Say what you will, he
+thought, to tell your mother of your engagement is a little like casting
+off an old love.
+
+Ever since he could remember, he and his mother had lived in the
+happiest comradeship. His father, a promising young doctor, had died
+within a few years of his marriage. Pete had been brought up by his
+mother, but he had very little remembrance of any process of molding. It
+seemed to him as if they had lived in a sort of partnership since he had
+been able to walk and talk. It had been as natural for him to spend his
+hours after school in stamping and sealing her large correspondence as it
+had been for her to pinch and arrange for years so as to send him to the
+university from which his father had been graduated. She would have been
+glad, he knew, if he had decided to follow his father in the study of
+medicine, but he recoiled from so long a period of dependence; he liked
+to think that he brought to his financial reports something of a
+scientific inheritance.
+
+She had, he thought, every virtue that a mother could have, and she
+combined them with a gaiety of spirit that made her take her virtues as
+if they were the most delightful amusements. It was of this gaiety that
+he had first thought until Mathilde had pointed out to him that there was
+tragedy in the situation. “What will your mother do without you?” the
+girl kept saying. There was indeed nothing in his mother’s life that
+could fill the vacancy he would leave. She had few intimate
+relationships. For all her devotion to her drunkards, he was the only
+personal happiness in her life.
+
+He went into the kitchen in search of her. This was evidently one of
+their servant’s uncounted hours. While he was making himself some tea he
+heard his mother’s key in the door. He called to her, and she appeared.
+
+“Why my hat, Mother dear?” he asked gently as he kissed her.
+
+Mrs. Wayne smiled absently, and put up her hand to the soft felt hat she
+was wearing.
+
+“I just went out to post some letters,” she said, as if this were a
+complete explanation; then she removed a mackintosh that she happened to
+have on, though the day was fine. She was then seen to be wearing a dark
+skirt and a neat plain shirt that was open at the throat. Though no
+longer young, she somehow suggested a boy--a boy rather overtrained; she
+was far more boyish than Wayne. She had a certain queer beauty, too;
+not beauty of Adelaide’s type, of structure and coloring and elegance,
+but beauty of expression. Life itself had written some fine lines of
+humor and resolve upon her face, and her blue-gray eyes seemed actually
+to flare with hope and intention. Her hair was of that light-brown shade
+in which plentiful gray made little change of shade; it was wound in a
+knot at the back of her head and gave her trouble. She was always
+pushing it up and repinning it into place, as if it were too heavy for
+her small head.
+
+“I wonder if there’s anything to eat in the house,” her son said.
+
+“I wonder.” They moved together toward the ice-box.
+
+“Mother,” said Pete, “that piece of pie has been in the ice-box at least
+three days. Let’s throw it away.”
+
+She took the saucer thoughtfully.
+
+“I like it so much,” she said.
+
+“Then why don’t you eat it?”
+
+“It’s not good for me.” She let Wayne take the saucer. “What do you
+know?” she asked.
+
+She had adopted slang as she adopted most labor-saving devices.
+
+“Well, I do know something new,” said Wayne. He sat down on the kitchen
+table and poured out his tea. “New as the garden of Eden. I’m in love.”
+
+“O Pete!” his mother cried, and the purest, most conventional maternal
+agony was in the tone. For an instant, crushed and terrified, she looked
+at him; and then something gay and impish appeared in her eyes, and she
+asked with a grin:
+
+“Is it some one perfectly awful?”
+
+“I’m afraid you’ll think so. She’s a sheltered, young, luxurious child,
+with birth, breeding, and money, everything you hate most.”
+
+“O Pete!” she said again, but this time with a sort of sad resignation.
+Then shaking her head as if to say that she wasn’t, after all, as narrow
+as he thought, she hitched her chair nearer the table and said eagerly,
+“Well, tell me all about it.”
+
+Wayne looked down at his mother as she sat opposite him, with her elbows
+on the table, as keen as a child and as lively as a cricket. He asked
+himself if he had not drifted into a needlessly sentimental state of mind
+about her. He even asked himself, as he had done once or twice before in
+his life, whether her love for him implied the slightest dependence upon
+his society. Wasn’t it perfectly possible that his going would free her
+life, would make it easier instead of harder? Every man, he knew, felt
+the element of freedom beneath the despair of breaking even the tenderest
+of ties. Some women, he supposed, might feel the same way about their
+love-affairs. But could they feel the same about their maternal
+relations? Could it be that his mother, that pure, heroic,
+self-sacrificing soul, was now thinking more about her liberty than her
+loss? Had not their relation always been peculiarly free? he found
+himself thinking reproachfully. Once, he remembered, when he had been
+working unusually hard he had welcomed her absence at one of her
+conferences on inebriety. Never before had he imagined that she could
+feel anything but regret at his absences. “Everybody is just alike,” he
+found himself rather bitterly thinking.
+
+“What do you want to know about it?” he said aloud.
+
+“Why, everything,” she returned.
+
+“I met her,” he said, “two evenings ago at a dance. I never expected to
+fall in love at a dance.”
+
+“Isn’t it funny? No one ever really expects to fall in love at all, and
+everybody does.”
+
+He glanced at her. He had been prepared to explain to her about love; and
+now it occurred to him for the first time that she knew all about it. He
+decided to ask her the great question which had been occupying his mind
+as a lover of a scientific habit of thought.
+
+“Mother,” he said, “how much dependence is to be placed on love--one’s
+own, I mean?”
+
+“Goodness, Pete! What a question to ask!”
+
+“Well, you might take a chance and tell me what you think. I have no
+doubts. My whole nature goes out to this girl; but I can’t help knowing
+that if we go on feeling like this till we die, we shall be the
+exception. Love’s a miracle. How much can one trust to it?”
+
+The moment he had spoken he knew that he was asking a great deal. It was
+torture to his mother to express an opinion on an abstract question. She
+did not lack decision of conduct. She could resolve in an instant to send
+a drunkard to an institution or take a trip round the world; but on a
+matter of philosophy of life it was as difficult to get her to commit
+herself as if she had been upon the witness-stand. Yet it was just in
+this realm that he particularly valued her opinion.
+
+“Oh,” she said at last, “I don’t believe that it’s possible to play safe
+in love. It’s a risk, but it’s one of those risks you haven’t much choice
+about taking. Life and death are like that, too. I don’t think it pays to
+be always thinking about avoiding risks. Nothing, you know,” she added,
+as if she were letting him in to rather a horrid little secret, “is
+really safe.” And evidently glad to change the subject, she went on,
+“What will her family say?”
+
+“I can’t think they will be pleased.”
+
+“I suppose not. Who are they?”
+
+Wayne explained the family connections, but woke no associations in his
+mother’s mind until he mentioned the name of Farron. Then he was
+astonished at the violence of her interest. She sprang to her feet; her
+eyes lighted up.
+
+“Why,” she cried, “that’s the man, that’s the company, that Marty Burke
+works for! O Pete, don’t you think you could get Mr. Farron to use his
+influence over Marty about Anita?”
+
+“Dear mother, do you think you can get him to use his influence over Mrs.
+Farron for me?”
+
+Marty Burke was the leader of the district and was reckoned a bad man.
+He and Mrs. Wayne had been waging a bitter war for some time over a
+young inebriate who had seduced a girl of the neighborhood. Mrs. Wayne
+was sternly trying to prosecute the inebriate; Burke was determined to
+protect him, first, by smirching the girl’s name, and, next, by
+getting the girl’s family to consent to a marriage, a solution that
+Mrs. Wayne considered most undesirable in view of the character of the
+prospective husband.
+
+Pete felt her interest sweep away from his affairs, and it had not
+returned when the telephone rang. He came back from answering it to tell
+his mother that Mr. Lanley, the grandfather of his love, was asking if
+she would see him for a few minutes that afternoon or evening. A visit
+was arranged for nine o’clock.
+
+“What’s he like?” asked Mrs. Wayne, wrinkling her nose and looking
+very impish.
+
+“He seemed like a nice old boy; hasn’t had a new idea, I should say,
+since 1880. And, Mother dear, you’re going to dress, aren’t you?”
+
+She resented the implication.
+
+“I shall be wonderful,” she answered with emphasis. “And while he’s here,
+I think you might go down and tell this news to Lily, yourself. Oh, I
+don’t say she’s in love with you--”
+
+“Lily,” said Pete, “is leading far too exciting a life to be in love
+with any one.”
+
+Punctually at nine, Mr. Lanley rang the bell of the flat. He had paused a
+few minutes before doing so, not wishing to weaken the effect of his
+mission by arriving out of breath. Adelaide had come to see him just
+before lunch. She pretended to minimize the importance of her news, but
+he knew she did so to evade reproach for the culpable irresponsibility of
+her attitude toward the young man’s first visit.
+
+“And do you know anything more about him than you did yesterday?” he
+asked.
+
+She did. It appeared that Vincent had telephoned her from down town just
+before she came out.
+
+“Tiresome young man,” she said, twisting her shoulders. “It seems there’s
+nothing against him. His father was a doctor, his mother comes of decent
+people and is a respected reformer, the young man works for an ambitious
+new firm of brokers, who speak highly of him and give him a salary of
+$5000 a year.”
+
+“The whole thing must be put a stop to,” said Mr. Lanley.
+
+“Of course, of course,” said his daughter. “But how? I can’t forbid him
+the house because he’s just an average young man.”
+
+“I don’t see why not, or at least on the ground that he’s not the husband
+you would choose for her.”
+
+“I think the best way will be to let him come to the house,”--she spoke
+with a sort of imperishable sweetness,--“but to turn Mathilde gradually
+against him.”
+
+“But how can you turn her against him?”
+
+Adelaide looked very wistful.
+
+“You don’t trust me,” she moaned.
+
+“I only ask you how it can be done.”
+
+“Oh, there are ways. I made her perfectly hate one of them because he
+always said, ‘if you know what I mean.’ ‘It’s a very fine day, Mrs.
+Farron, if you know what I mean.’ This young man must have some horrid
+trick like that, only I haven’t studied him yet. Give me time.”
+
+“It’s risky.”
+
+Adelaide shook her head.
+
+“Not really,” she said. “These young fancies go as quickly as they come.
+Do you remember the time you took me to West Point? I had a passion for
+the adjutant. I forgot him in a week.”
+
+“You were only fifteen.”
+
+“Mathilde is immature for her age.”
+
+It was agreed between them, however, that Mr. Lanley, without authority,
+should go and look the situation over. He had been trying to get the
+Waynes’ telephone since one o’clock. He had been told at intervals of
+fifteen minutes by a resolutely cheerful central that their number did
+not answer. Mr. Lanley hated people who did not answer their telephone.
+Nor was he agreeably impressed by the four flights of stairs, or by the
+appearance of the servant who answered his ring.
+
+“Won’t do, won’t do,” he kept repeating in his own mind.
+
+He was shown into the sitting-room. It was in shadow, for only a shaded
+reading-lamp was lighted, and his first impression was of four windows;
+they appeared like four square panels of dark blue, patterned with
+stars. Then a figure rose to meet him--a figure in blue draperies, with
+heavy braids wound around the head, and a low, resonant voice said, “I
+am Mrs. Wayne.”
+
+As soon as he could he walked to the windows and looked out to the river
+and the long, lighted curves of the bridges, and beyond to Long Island,
+to just the ground where the Battle of Long Island had been fought--a
+battle in which an ancestor of his had particularly distinguished
+himself. He said something polite about the view.
+
+“Let us sit here where we can look out,” she said, and sank down on a
+low sofa drawn under the windows. As she did so she came within the
+circle of light from the lamp. She sat with her head leaned back against
+the window-frame, and he saw the fine line of her jaw, the hollows in her
+cheek, the delicate modeling about her brows, not obscured by much
+eyebrow, and her long, stretched throat. She was not quite maternal
+enough to look like a Madonna, but she did look like a saint, he thought.
+
+He knelt with one knee on the couch and peered out.
+
+“Dear me,” he said, “I fancy I used to skate as a boy on a pond just
+about where that factory is now.”
+
+He found she knew very little about the history of New York. She had
+been brought up abroad, she said; her father had been a consul in
+France. It was a subject which he liked to expound. He loved his native
+city, which he with his own eyes had seen once as hardly more than a
+village. He and his ancestors--and Mr. Lanley’s sense of identification
+with his ancestors was almost Chinese--had watched and had a little
+shaped the growth.
+
+“I suppose you had Dutch ancestry, then,” she said, trying to take
+an interest.
+
+“Dutch.” Mr. Lanley shut his eyes, resolving, since he had no idea what
+her own descent might be, that he would not explain to her the superior
+attitude of the English settlers of the eighteenth century toward their
+Dutch predecessors. However, perhaps he did not entirely conceal his
+feeling, for he said: “No, I have no Dutch blood--not a drop. Very good
+people in their way, industrious--peasants.” He hurried on to the great
+fire of 1835. “Swept between Wall Street and Coenties Slip,” he said,
+with a splendid gesture, and then discovered that she had never heard of
+“Quenches Slip,” or worse, she had pronounced it as it was spelled. He
+gently set her right there. His father had often told him that he had
+seen with his own eyes a note of hand which had been blown, during the
+course of the conflagration, as far as Flatbush. And the second fire of
+1845. His father had been a man then, married, a prominent citizen, old
+enough, as Mr. Lanley said, with a faint smile, to have lost heavily. He
+could himself remember the New York of the Civil War, the bitter family
+quarrels, the forced resignations from clubs, the duels, the draft riots.
+
+But, oddly enough, when it came to contemporary New York, it was Mrs.
+Wayne who turned out to be most at home. Had he ever walked across the
+Blackwell’s Island Bridge? (This was in the days before it bore the
+elevated trains.) No, he had driven. Ah, she said, that was wholly
+different. Above, where one walked, there was nothing to shut out the
+view of the river. Just to show that he was not a feeble old antiquarian,
+he suggested their taking a walk there at once. She held out her trailing
+garments and thin, blue slippers. And then she went on:
+
+“There’s another beautiful place I don’t believe you know, for all you’re
+such an old New-Yorker--a pier at the foot of East Eighty-something
+Street, where you can almost touch great seagoing vessels as they pass.”
+
+“Well, there at least we can go,” said Mr. Lanley, and he stood up. “I
+have a car here, but it’s open. Is it too cold? Have you a fur coat? I’ll
+send back to the house for an extra one.” He paused, brisk as he was; the
+thought of those four flights a second time dismayed him.
+
+The servant had gone out, and Pete was still absent, presumably breaking
+the news of his engagement to Dr. Parret.
+
+Mrs. Wayne had an idea. She went to a window on the south side of the
+room, opened it, and looked out. If he had good lungs, she told him, he
+could make his man hear.
+
+Mr. Lanley did not visibly recoil. He leaned out and shouted. The
+chauffeur looked up, made a motion to jump out, fearing that his employer
+was being murdered in these unfamiliar surroundings; then he caught the
+order to go home for an extra coat.
+
+Lanley drew his shoulder back into the room and shut the window; as he
+did so he saw a trace of something impish in the smile of his hostess.
+
+“Why do you smile?” he asked quickly.
+
+She did not make the mistake of trying to arrest her smile; she let
+it broaden.
+
+“I don’t suppose you have ever done such a thing before.”
+
+“Now, that does annoy me.”
+
+“Calling down five stories?”
+
+“No; your thinking I minded.”
+
+“Well, I did think so.”
+
+“You were mistaken, utterly mistaken.”
+
+“I’m glad. If you mind doing such things, you give so much time to
+arranging not to do them.”
+
+Mr. Lanley was silent. He was deciding that he should rearrange some of
+the details of his life. Not that he contemplated giving all his orders
+from the fifth story, but he saw he had always devoted too much attention
+to preventing unimportant catastrophes.
+
+Under her direction he was presently driving north; then he turned
+sharply east down a little hill, and came out on a low, flat pier. He put
+out the motor’s lights. They were only a few feet above the water, which
+was as black as liquid jet, with flat silver and gold patches on it from
+white and yellow lights. Opposite to them the lighthouse at the north end
+of Blackwell’s Island glowed like a hot coal. Then a great steamer
+obscured it.
+
+“Isn’t this nice?” Mrs. Wayne asked, and he saw that she wanted her
+discovery praised. He never lost the impression that she enjoyed
+being praised.
+
+Such a spot, within sight of half a dozen historic sites, was a
+temptation to Mr. Lanley, and he would have unresistingly yielded to it
+if Mrs. Wayne had not said:
+
+“But we haven’t said a word yet about our children.”
+
+“True,” answered Mr. Lanley. His heart sank. It is not easy, he thought,
+to explain to a person for whom you have just conceived a liking that her
+son had aspired above his station. He tapped his long, middle finger on
+the steering-wheel, just as at directors’ meetings he tapped the table
+before he spoke, and began, “In a society somewhat artificially formed as
+ours is, Mrs. Wayne, it has always been my experience that--” Do what he
+would, it kept turning into a speech, and the essence of the speech was
+that while democracy did very well for men, a strictly aristocratic
+system was the only thing possible for girls--one’s own girls, of
+course. In the dim light he could see that she had pushed all her hair
+back from her brows. She was trying to follow him exactly, so exactly
+that she confused him a little. He became more general. “In many ways,”
+he concluded, “the advantages of character and experience are with the
+lower classes.” He had not meant to use the word, but when it slipped
+out, he did not regret it.
+
+“In all ways,” she answered.
+
+He was not sure he had heard.
+
+“All the advantages?” he said.
+
+“All the advantages of character.”
+
+He had to ask her to explain. One reason, perhaps, why Mrs. Wayne
+habitually avoided a direct question was that, when once started, her
+candor had no bounds. Now she began to speak. She spoke more eagerly and
+more fluently than he, and it took him several minutes to see that quite
+unconsciously she was making him a strange, distorted complement to his
+speech, that in her mouth such words as “the leisure classes, your
+sheltered girls,” were terms of the deepest reproach. He must understand,
+she said, that as she did not know Miss Severance, there was nothing
+personal, nothing at all personal, in her feeling,--she was as careful
+not to hurt his feelings as he had tried to be not to hurt hers,--but she
+did own to a prejudice--at least Pete told her it was a prejudice--
+
+Against what, in Heaven’s name, Lanley at first wondered; and then it
+came to him.
+
+“Oh, you have a prejudice against divorce?” he said.
+
+Mrs. Wayne looked at him reproachfully.
+
+“Oh, no,” she answered. “How could you think that? But what has divorce
+to do with it? Your granddaughter hasn’t been divorced.”
+
+A sound of disgust at the mere suggestion escaped him, and he said
+coldly:
+
+“My daughter divorced her first husband.”
+
+“Oh, I did not know.”
+
+“Against what, then, is this unconquerable prejudice of yours?”
+
+“Against the daughters of the leisure class.”
+
+He was still quite at sea.
+
+“You dislike them?”
+
+“I fear them.”
+
+If she had said that she considered roses a menace, he could not have
+been more puzzled. He repeated her words aloud, as if he hoped that
+they might have some meaning for him if he heard his own lips
+pronouncing them:
+
+“You fear them.”
+
+“Yes,” she went on, now interested only in expressing her belief, “I fear
+their ignorance and idleness and irresponsibility and self-indulgence,
+and, all the more because it is so delicate and attractive and
+unconscious; and their belief that the world owes them luxury and
+happiness without their lifting a finger. I fear their cowardice and lack
+of character--”
+
+“Cowardice!” he cried, catching at the first word he could. “My dear Mrs.
+Wayne, the aristocrats in the French Revolution, the British officer--”
+
+“Oh, yes, they know how to die,” she answered; “but do they know how to
+live when the horrible, sordid little strain of every-day life begins to
+make demands upon them, their futile education, the moral feebleness that
+comes with perfect safety! I know something can be made of such girls,
+but I don’t want my son sacrificed in the process.”
+
+There was a long, dark silence; then Mr. Lanley said with a particularly
+careful and exact enunciation:
+
+“I think, my dear madam, that you cannot have known very many of the
+young women you are describing. It may be that there are some like
+that--daughters of our mushroom finance; but I can assure you that the
+children of ladies and gentlemen are not at all as you seem to imagine.”
+
+It was characteristic of Mrs. Wayne that, still absorbed by her own
+convictions, she did not notice the insult of hearing ladies and
+gentlemen described to her as if they were beings wholly alien to her
+experience; but the tone of his speech startled her, and she woke, like a
+person coming out of a trance, to all the harm she had done.
+
+“I may be old-fashioned--” he began and then threw the phrase from him;
+it was thus that Alberta, his sister, began her most offensive
+pronouncements. “It has always appeared to me that we shelter our more
+favored women as we shelter our planted trees, so that they may attain a
+stronger maturity.”
+
+“But do they, are they--are sheltered women the strongest in a crisis?”
+
+Fiend in human shape, he thought, she was making him question his
+bringing up of Adelaide. He would not bear that. His foot stole out to
+the self-starter.
+
+For the few minutes that remained of the interview she tried to undo her
+work, but the injury was too deep. His life was too near its end for
+criticism to be anything but destructive; having no time to collect new
+treasure, he simply could not listen to her suggestion that those he
+most valued were imitation. He hated her for holding such opinion. Her
+soft tones, her eager concessions, her flattering sentences, could now
+make no impression upon a man whom half an hour before they would have
+completely won.
+
+He bade her a cold good night, hardly more than bent his head, the
+chauffeur took the heavy coat from her, and the car had wheeled away
+before she was well inside her own doorway.
+
+Pete’s brown head was visible over the banisters.
+
+“Hello, Mother!” he said. “Did the old boy kidnap you?”
+
+Mrs. Wayne came up slowly, stumbling over her long, blue draperies in her
+weariness and depression.
+
+“Oh, Pete, my darling,” she said, “I think I’ve spoiled everything.”
+
+His heart stood still. He knew better than most people that his mother
+could either make or mar.
+
+“They won’t hear of it?”
+
+She nodded distractedly.
+
+“I do make such a mess of things sometimes!”
+
+He put his arm about her.
+
+“So you do, Mother,” he said; “but then think how magnificently you
+sometimes pull them out again.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Mr. Lanley had not reported the result of his interview immediately. He
+told himself that it was too late; but it was only a quarter before
+eleven when he was back safe in his own library, feeling somehow not so
+safe as usual. He felt attacked, insulted; and yet he also felt vivified
+and encouraged. He felt as he might have felt if some one, unbidden, had
+cut a vista on the Lanley estates, first outraged in his sense of
+property, but afterward delighted with the widened view and the fresher
+breeze. It was awkward, though, that he didn’t want Adelaide to go into
+details as to his visit; he did not think that the expedition to the pier
+could be given the judicial, grandfatherly tone that he wanted to give.
+So he did not communicate at all with his daughter that night.
+
+The next morning about nine, however, when she was sitting up in bed,
+with her tray on her knees, and on her feet a white satin coverlet sown
+as thickly with bright little flowers as the Milky Way with stars, her
+last words to Vincent, who was standing by the fire, with his newspaper
+folded in his hands, ready to go down-town, were interrupted, as they
+nearly always were, by the burr of the telephone.
+
+She took it up from the table by her bed, and as she did so she fixed her
+eyes on her husband and looked steadily at him all the time that central
+was making the connection; she was trying to answer that unsolved problem
+as to whether or not a mist hung between them. Then she got her
+connection.
+
+“Yes, Papa; it is Adelaide.” “Yes?” “Did she appear like a lady?” “A
+lady?” “You don’t know what I mean by that? Why, Papa!” “Well, did she
+appear respectable?” “How cross you are to me!” “I’m glad to hear it. You
+did not sound cheerful.”
+
+She hung up the receiver and turned to Vincent, making eyes of surprise.
+
+“Really, papa is too strange. Why should he be cross to me because he has
+had an unsatisfactory interview with the Wayne boy’s mother? I never
+wanted him to go, anyhow, Vin. I wanted to send _you_.”
+
+“It would probably be better for you to go yourself.”
+
+He left the room as if he had said nothing remarkable. But it was
+remarkable, in Adelaide’s experience, that he should avoid any
+responsibility, and even more so that he should shift it to her
+shoulders. For an instant she faced the possibility, the most terrible of
+any that had occurred to her, that the balance was changing between them;
+that she, so willing to be led, was to be forced to guide. She had seen
+it happen so often between married couples--the weight of character begin
+on one side of the scale, and then slowly the beam would shift. Once it
+had happened to her. Was it to happen again? No, she told herself; never
+with Farron. He would command or die, lead her or leave her.
+
+Mathilde knocked at her door, as she did every morning as soon as her
+stepfather had gone down town. She had had an earlier account of Mr.
+Lanley’s interview. It had read:
+
+  DEAREST GIRL:
+
+  The great discussion did not go very well, apparently. The opinion
+  prevails at the moment that no engagement can be allowed to exist
+  between us. I feel as if they were all meeting to discuss whether or
+  not the sun is to rise to-morrow morning. You and I, my love, have
+  special information that it will.
+
+After this it needed no courage to go down and hear her mother’s account
+of the interview. Adelaide was still in bed, but one long, pointed
+fingertip, pressed continuously upon the dangling bell, a summons that
+had long since lost its poignancy for the temperamental Lucie, indicated
+that she was about to get up.
+
+“My dear,” she said in answer to Mathilde’s question, “your grandfather’s
+principal interest seems to be to tell me nothing at all, and he has been
+wonderfully successful. I can get nothing from him, so I’m going myself.”
+
+The girl’s heart sank at hearing this. Her mother saw things clearly and
+definitely, and had a talent for expressing her impressions in
+unforgetable words. Mathilde could still remember with a pang certain
+books, poems, pictures, and even people whose charms her mother had
+destroyed in one poisonous phrase. Adelaide was too careful of her
+personal dignity to indulge in mimicry, but she had a way of catching and
+repeating the exact phrasing of some foolish sentence that was almost
+better--or worse--than mimicry. Mathilde remembered a governess, a kind
+and patient person of whom Adelaide had greatly wearied, who had a habit
+of beginning many observations, “It may strike you as strange, but I am
+the sort of person who--” Mathilde was present at luncheon one day when
+Adelaide was repeating one of these sentences. “It may strike you as
+strange, but I like to feel myself in good health.” Mathilde resented the
+laughter that followed, and sprang to her governess’s defense, yet
+sickeningly soon she came to see the innocent egotism that directed the
+choice of the phrase.
+
+She felt as if she could not bear this process to be turned against
+Pete’s mother, not because it would alter the respectful love she was
+prepared to offer this unknown figure, but because it might very slightly
+alter her attitude toward her own mother. That was one of the
+characteristics of this great emotion: all her old beliefs had to be
+revised to accord with new discoveries.
+
+This was what lay behind the shrinking of her soul as she watched her
+mother dress for the visit to Mrs. Wayne. For the first time in her life
+Mathilde wished that her mother was not so elaborate. Hitherto she had
+always gloried in Adelaide’s elegance as a part of her beauty; but now,
+as she watched the ritual of ribbons and laces and perfumes and jewels,
+she felt vaguely that there was in it all a covert insult to Pete’s
+mother, who, she knew, would not be a bit like that.
+
+“How young you are, Mama!” she exclaimed as, the whole long process
+complete, Adelaide stood holding out her hand for her gloves, like a
+little girl ready for a party.
+
+Her mother smiled.
+
+“It’s well I am,” she said, “if you go on trying to get yourself involved
+with young men who live up four flights of stairs. I have always avoided
+even dressmakers who lived above the second story,” she added wistfully.
+
+The wistful tone was repeated when her car stopped at the Wayne door and
+she stepped out.
+
+“Are you sure this is the number, Andrews?” she asked. She and the
+chauffeur looked slowly up at the house and up and down the street. They
+were at one in their feeling about it. Then Adelaide gave a very gentle
+little sigh and started the ascent.
+
+The flat did not look as well by day. Though the eastern sun poured in
+cheerfully, it revealed worn places on the backs of the arm-chairs and
+one fearful calamity with an ink-bottle that Pete had once had on the
+rug. Even Mrs. Wayne, who sprang up from behind her writing-table, had
+not the saint-like mystery that her blue draperies had given her the
+evening before.
+
+Though slim, and in excellent condition for thirty-nine, Adelaide could
+not conceal that four flights were an exertion. Her fine nostrils were
+dilated and her breath not perfectly under control as she said:
+
+“How delightful this is!” a statement that was no more untrue than to say
+good-morning on a rainy day.
+
+Most women in Mrs. Wayne’s situation would at the moment have been
+acutely aware of the ink-spot. That was one of Adelaide’s assets, on
+which she perhaps unconsciously counted, that her mere appearance made
+nine people out of ten aware of their own physical imperfections. But
+Mrs. Wayne was aware of nothing but Adelaide’s great beauty as she sank
+into one of the armchairs with hardly a hint of exhaustion.
+
+“Your son is a very charming person, Mrs. Wayne,” she said.
+
+Mrs. Wayne was standing by the mantelpiece, looking boyish and friendly;
+but now she suddenly grew grave, as if something serious had been said.
+
+“Pete has something more unusual than charm,” she said.
+
+“But what could be more unusual?” cried Adelaide, who wanted to add, “The
+only question is, does your wretched son possess it?” But she didn’t; she
+asked instead, with a tone of disarming sweetness, “Shall we be perfectly
+candid with each other?”
+
+A quick gleam came into Mrs. Wayne’s eyes. “Not much,” she seemed to say.
+She had learned to distrust nothing so much as her own candor, and her
+interview with Mr. Lanley had put her specially on her guard.
+
+“I hope you will be candid, Mrs. Farron,” she said aloud, and for her
+this was the depth of dissimulation.
+
+“Well, then,” said Adelaide, “you and I are in about the same position,
+aren’t we? We are both willing that our children should marry, and we
+have no objection to offer to their choice except our own ignorance. We
+both want time to judge. But how can we get time, Mrs. Wayne? If we do
+not take definite action _against_ an engagement, we are giving our
+consent to it. I want a little reasonable delay, but we can get delay
+only by refusing to hear of an engagement. Do you see what I mean? Will
+you help me by pretending to be a very stern parent, just so that these
+young people may have a few months to think it over without being too
+definitely committed?”
+
+Mrs. Wayne shrank back. She liked neither diplomacy nor coercion.
+
+“But I have really no control over Pete,” she said.
+
+“Surely, if he isn’t in a position to support a wife--”
+
+“He is, if she would live as he does.”
+
+Such an idea had never crossed Mrs. Farron’s mind. She looked round her
+wonderingly, and said without a trace of wilful insolence in her tone:
+
+“Live here, you mean?”
+
+“Yes, or somewhere like it.”
+
+Mrs. Farron looked down, and smoothed the delicate dark fur of her muff.
+She hardly knew how to begin at the very beginning like this. She did not
+want to hurt any one’s feelings. How could she tell this childlike,
+optimistic creature that to put Mathilde to living in surroundings like
+these would be like exposing a naked baby on a mountaintop? It wasn’t
+love of luxury, at least not if luxury meant physical self-indulgence.
+She could imagine suffering privations very happily in a Venetian palace
+or on a tropical island. It was an esthetic, not a moral, problem; it was
+a question of that profound and essential thing in the life of any woman
+who was a woman--her charm. She wished to tell Mrs. Wayne that her son
+wouldn’t really like it, that he would hate to see Mathilde going out in
+overshoes; that the background that she, Adelaide, had so expertly
+provided for her child was part of the very attraction that made him want
+to take her out of it. There was no use in saying that most poor mortals
+were forced to get on without this magic atmosphere. They had never been
+goddesses; they did not know what they were going without. But her child,
+who had been, as it were, born a fairy, would miss tragically the
+delicate beauty of her every-day life, would fade under the ugly monotony
+of poverty.
+
+But how could she say this to Mrs. Wayne, in her flat-heeled shoes and
+simple, boyish shirt and that twelfth-century saint’s profile, of which
+so much might have been made by a clever woman?
+
+At last she began, still smoothing her muff:
+
+“Mrs. Wayne, I have brought up my daughter very simply. I don’t at all
+approve of the extravagances of these modern girls, with their own motors
+and their own bills. Still, she has had a certain background. We must
+admit that marriage with your son on his income alone would mean a
+decrease in her material comforts.”
+
+Mrs. Wayne laughed.
+
+“More than you know, probably.”
+
+This was candid, and Adelaide pressed on.
+
+“Well is it wise or kind to make such a demand on a young creature when
+we know marriage is difficult at the best?” she asked.
+
+Mrs. Wayne hesitated.
+
+“You see, I have never seen your daughter, and I don’t know what her
+feeling for Pete may be.”
+
+“I’ll answer both questions. She has a pleasant, romantic sentiment for
+Mr. Wayne--you know how one feels to one’s first lover. She is a sweet,
+kind, unformed little girl, not heroic. But think of your own spirited
+son. Do you want this persistent, cruel responsibility for him?”
+
+The question was an oratorical one, and Adelaide was astonished to find
+that Mrs. Wayne was answering it.
+
+“Oh, yes,” she said; “I want responsibility for Pete. It’s exactly what
+he needs.”
+
+Adelaide stared at her in horror; she seemed the most unnatural mother
+in the world. She herself would fight to protect her daughter from the
+passive wear and tear of poverty; but she would have died to keep a son,
+if she had had one, from being driven into the active warfare of the
+support of a family.
+
+In the pause that followed there was a ring at the bell, an argument with
+the servant, something that sounded like a scuffle, and then a young man
+strolled into the room. He was tall and beautifully dressed,--at least
+that was the first impression,--though, as a matter of fact, the clothes
+were of the cheapest ready-made variety. But nothing could look cheap or
+ill made on those splendid muscles. He wore a silk shirt, a flower in his
+buttonhole, a gray tie in which was a pearl as big as a pea, long
+patent-leather shoes with elaborate buff-colored tops; he carried a thin
+stick and a pair of new gloves in one hand, but the most conspicuous
+object in his dress was a brand-new, gray felt hat, with a rather wide
+brim, which he wore at an angle greater than Mr. Lanley attempted even at
+his jauntiest. His face was long and rather dark, and his eyes were a
+bright gray blue, under dark brows. He was scowling.
+
+He strode into the middle of the room, and stood there, with his feet
+wide apart and his elbows slightly swaying. His hat was still on.
+
+“Your servant said you couldn’t see me,” he said, with his back teeth set
+together, a method of enunciation that seemed to be habitual.
+
+“Didn’t want to would be truer, Marty,” answered Mrs. Wayne, with the
+utmost good temper. “Still, as long as you’re here, what do you want?”
+
+Marty Burke didn’t answer at once. He stood looking at Mrs. Wayne under
+his lowering brows; he had stopped swinging his elbows, and was now very
+slightly twitching his cane, as an evilly disposed cat will twitch the
+end of its tail.
+
+Mrs. Farron watched him almost breathlessly. She was a little frightened,
+but the sensation was pleasurable. He was, she knew, the finest specimen
+of the human animal that she had ever seen.
+
+“What do I want?” he said at length in a deep, rich voice, shot here and
+there with strange nasal tones, and here and there with the remains of a
+brogue. “Well, I want that you should stop persecuting those poor kids.”
+
+“I persecuting them? Don’t be absurd, Marty,” answered Mrs. Wayne.
+
+“Persecuting them; what else?” retorted Marty, fiercely. “What else is
+it? They wanting to get married, and you determined to send the boy up
+the river.”
+
+“I don’t think we’ll go over that again. I have a lady here on business.”
+
+“Oh, please don’t mind me,” said Mrs. Farron, settling back, and
+wriggling her hands contentedly into her muff. She rather expected the
+frivolous courage of her tone to draw the ire of Burke’s glance upon her,
+but it did not.
+
+“Cruel is what I call it,” he went on. “She wants it, and he wants it,
+and her family wants it, and only you and the judge that you put up to
+opposing--”
+
+“Her family do not want it. Her brother--”
+
+“Her brother agrees with me. I was talking to him yesterday.”
+
+“Oh, that’s why he has a black eye, is it?” said Mrs. Wayne.
+
+“Black eyes or blue,” said Marty, with a horizontal gesture of his
+hands, “her brother wants to see her married.”
+
+“Well, I don’t,” replied Mrs. Wayne, “at least not to this boy. I will
+never give my consent to putting a child of her age in the power of a
+degenerate little drunkard like that.”
+
+Mrs. Farron listened with all her ears. She did not think herself a
+prude, and only a moment before she had been accusing Mrs. Wayne of
+ignorance of the world; but never in all her life had she heard such
+words as were now freely exchanged between Burke and his hostess on the
+subject of the degree of consent that the girl in question had given to
+the advances of Burke’s protégé. She would have been as embarrassed as a
+girl if either of the disputants had been in the least aware of her
+presence. Once, she thought, Mrs. Wayne, for the sake of good manners,
+was on the point of turning to her and explaining the whole situation;
+but fortunately the exigencies of the dispute swept her on too fast.
+Adelaide was shocked, physically rather than morally, by the nakedness of
+their talk; but she did not want them to stop. She was fascinated by the
+spectacle of Marty Burke in action. She recognized at once that he was a
+dangerous man, not dangerous to female virtue, like all the other men to
+whom she had heard the term applied, but actually dangerous to life and
+property. She was not in the least afraid of him, but she knew he was a
+real danger. She enjoyed the knowledge. In most ways she was a woman
+timid in the face of physical danger, but she had never imagined being
+afraid of another human being. That much, perhaps, her sheltered training
+had done for her. “If she goes on irritating him like this he may murder
+us both,” she thought. What she really meant was that he might murder
+Mrs. Wayne, but that, when he came to her and began to twist her neck,
+she would just say, “My dear man, don’t be silly!” and he would stop.
+
+In the meantime Burke was not so angry as he was affecting to be. Like
+most leaders of men, he had a strong dramatic instinct, and he had just
+led Mrs. Wayne to the climax of her just violence when his manner
+suddenly completely changed, and he said with the utmost good temper:
+
+“And what do you think of my get-up, Mrs. Wayne? It’s a new suit I have
+on, and a boutonniere.” The change was so sudden that no one answered,
+and he went on, “It’s clothes almost fit for a wedding that I’m wearing.”
+
+Mrs. Wayne understood him in a flash. She sprang to her feet.
+
+“Marty Burke,” she cried, “you don’t mean to say you’ve got those two
+children married!”
+
+“Not fifteen minutes ago, and I standing up with the groom.” He smiled a
+smile of the wildest, most piercing sweetness--a smile so free and
+intense that it seemed impossible to connect it with anything but the
+consciousness of a pure heart. Mrs. Farron had never seen such a smile.
+“I thought I’d just drop around and give you the news,” he said, and now
+for the first time took off his hat, displaying his crisp, black hair and
+round, pugnacious head. “Good morning, ladies.” He bowed, and for an
+instant his glance rested on Mrs. Farron with an admiration too frank to
+be exactly offensive. He put his hat on his head, turned away, and made
+his exit, whistling.
+
+He left behind him one person at least who had thoroughly enjoyed his
+triumph. To do her justice, however, Mrs. Farron was ashamed of her
+sympathy, and she said gently to Mrs. Wayne:
+
+“You think this marriage a very bad thing.”
+
+Mrs. Wayne pushed all her hair away from her temples.
+
+“Oh, yes,” she said, “it’s a bad thing for the girl; but the worst is
+having Marty Burke put anything over. The district is absolutely under
+his thumb. I do wish, Mrs. Farron, you would get your husband to put the
+fear of God into him.”
+
+“My husband?”
+
+“Yes; he works for your husband. He has charge of the loading and
+unloading of the trucks. He’s proud of his job, and it gives him power
+over the laborers. He wouldn’t want to lose his place. If your husband
+would send for him and say--” Mrs. Wayne hastily outlined the things Mr.
+Farron might say.
+
+“He works for Vincent,” Adelaide repeated. It seemed to her an absolutely
+stupendous coincidence, and her imagination pictured the clash between
+them--the effort of Vincent to put the fear of God into this man. Would
+he be able to? Which one would win? Never before had she doubted the
+superior power of her husband; now she did. “I think it would be hard to
+put the fear of God into that young man,” she said aloud.
+
+“I do wish Mr. Farron would try.”
+
+“Try,” thought Adelaide, “and fail?” Could she stand that? Was her
+whole relation to Vincent about to be put to the test? What weapons had
+he against Marty Burke? And if he had none, how stripped he would
+appear in her eyes!
+
+“Won’t you ask him, Mrs. Farron?”
+
+Adelaide recoiled. She did not want to be the one to throw her glove
+among the lions.
+
+“I don’t think I understand well enough what it is you want. Why don’t
+you ask him yourself?” She hesitated, knowing that no opportunity for
+this would offer unless she herself arranged it. “Why don’t you come and
+dine with us to-night, and,” she added more slowly, “bring your son?”
+
+She had made the bait very attractive, and Mrs. Wayne did not refuse.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+As she drove home, Adelaide’s whole being was stirred by the prospect of
+that conflict between Burke and her husband, and it was not until she saw
+Mathilde, pale with an hour of waiting, that she recalled the real object
+of her recent visit. Not, of course, that Adelaide was more interested in
+Marty Burke than in her daughter’s future, but a titanic struggle fired
+her imagination more than a pitiful little romance. She felt a pang of
+self-reproach when she saw that Mr. Lanley had come to share the child’s
+vigil, that he seemed to be suffering under an anxiety almost as keen as
+Mathilde’s.
+
+They did not have to question her; she threw out her hands, casting her
+muff from her as she did so.
+
+“Oh,” she said, “I’m a weak, soft-hearted creature! I’ve asked them both
+to dine tonight.”
+
+Mathilde flung herself into her mother’s arms.
+
+“O Mama, how marvelous you are!” she exclaimed.
+
+Over her daughter’s shoulder Adelaide noted her father’s expression, a
+stiffening of the mouth and a brightening of the eyes.
+
+“Your grandfather disapproves of me, Mathilde,” she said.
+
+“He couldn’t be so unkind,” returned the girl.
+
+“After all,” said Mr. Lanley, trying to induce a slight scowl, “if we are
+not going to consent to an engagement--”
+
+“But you are,” said Mathilde.
+
+“We are not,” said her mother; “but there is no reason why we should
+not meet and talk it over like sensible creatures--talk it over
+here”--Adelaide looked lovingly around her own subdued room--“instead
+of five stories up. For really--” She stopped, running her eyebrows
+together at the recollection.
+
+“But the flat is rather--rather comfortable when you get there,” said Mr.
+Lanley, suddenly becoming embarrassed over his choice of an adjective.
+
+Adelaide looked at him sharply.
+
+“Dear Papa,” she asked, “since when have you become an admirer of
+painted shelves and dirty rugs? And I don’t doubt,” she added very
+gently, “that for the same money they could have found something quite
+tolerable in the country.”
+
+“Perhaps they don’t want to live in the country,” said Mr. Lanley, rather
+sharply: “I’m sure there is nothing that you’d hate more, Adelaide.”
+
+She opened her dark eyes.
+
+“But I don’t have to choose between squalor here or--”
+
+“Squalor!” said Mr. Lanley. “Don’t be ridiculous!”
+
+Mathilde broke in gently at this point:
+
+“I think you must have liked Mrs. Wayne, Mama, to ask her to dine.”
+
+Adelaide saw an opportunity to exercise one of her important talents.
+
+“Yes,” she said. “She has a certain naïve friendliness. Of course I don’t
+advocate, after fifty, dressing like an Eton boy; I always think an
+elderly face above a turned-down collar--”
+
+“Mama,” broke in Mathilde, quietly, “would you mind not talking of Mrs.
+Wayne like that? You know, she’s Pete’s mother.”
+
+Adelaide was really surprised.
+
+“Why, my love,” she answered, “I haven’t said half the things I might
+say. I rather thought I was sparing your feelings. After all, when you
+see her, you will admit that she _does_ dress like an Eton boy.”
+
+“She didn’t when I saw her,” said Mr. Lanley.
+
+Adelaide turned to her father.
+
+“Papa, I leave it to you. Did I say anything that should have wounded
+anybody’s susceptibilities?”
+
+Mr. Lanley hesitated.
+
+“It was the tone Mathilde did not like, I think.”
+
+Adelaide raised her shoulders and looked beautifully hurt.
+
+“My tone?” she wailed.
+
+“It hurt me,” said Mathilde, laying her little hand on her heart.
+
+Mr. Lanley smiled at her, and then, springing up, kissed her tenderly on
+the forehead. He said it was time for him to be going on.
+
+“You’ll come to dinner to-night, Papa?”
+
+Rather hastily, Mr. Lanley said no, he couldn’t; he had an engagement.
+But his daughter did not let him get to the door.
+
+“What are you going to do to-night, Papa?” she asked, firmly.
+
+“There is a governor’s meeting--”
+
+“Two in a week, Papa?”
+
+Suddenly Mr. Lanley dropped all pretense of not coming, and said he would
+be there at eight.
+
+During the rest of the day Mathilde’s heart never wholly regained its
+normal beat. Not only was she to see Pete again, and see him under the
+gaze of her united family, but she was to see this mother of his, whom he
+loved and admired so much. She pictured her as white-haired, benignant,
+brooding, the essential mother, with all her own mother’s grace and charm
+left out, yet with these qualities not ill replaced by others which
+Mathilde sometimes dimly apprehended were lacking in her own beautiful
+parent. She looked at herself in the glass. “My son’s wife,” was the
+phrase in her mind.
+
+On her way up-stairs to dress for dinner she tried to confide her
+anxieties to her mother.
+
+“Mama,” she said, “if you had a son, how would you feel toward the girl
+he wanted to marry?”
+
+“Oh, I should think her a cat, of course,” Adelaide answered; and
+added an instant later, “and I should probably be able to make him
+think so, too.”
+
+Mathilde sighed and went on up-stairs. Here she decided on an act of some
+insubordination. She would wear her best dress that evening, the dress
+which her mother considered too old for her. She did not want Pete’s
+mother to think he had chosen a perfect baby.
+
+Mr. Lanley, too, was a trifle nervous during the afternoon. He tried to
+say to himself that it was because the future of his darling little
+Mathilde was about to be settled. He shook his head, indicating that to
+settle the future of the young was a risky business; and then in a burst
+of self-knowledge he suddenly admitted that what was really making him
+nervous was the incident of the pier. If Mrs. Wayne referred to it, and
+of course there was no possible reason why she should not refer to it,
+Adelaide would never let him hear the last of it. It would be natural for
+Adelaide to think it queer that he hadn’t told her about it. And the
+reason he hadn’t told was perfectly clear: it was on that infernal pier
+that he had formed such an adverse opinion of Mrs. Wayne. But of course
+he did not wish to prejudice Adelaide; he wanted to leave her free to
+form her own opinions, and he was glad, excessively glad, that she had
+formed so favorable a one as to ask the woman to dinner. There was no
+question about his being glad; he surprised his servant by whistling as
+he put on his white waistcoat, and fastened the buckle rather more snugly
+than usual. Self-knowledge for the moment was not on hand.
+
+He arrived at exactly the hour at which he always arrived, five minutes
+after eight, a moment not too early to embarrass the hostess and not too
+late to endanger the dinner.
+
+No one was in the drawing-room but Mathilde and Farron. Adelaide, for one
+who had been almost perfectly brought up, did sometimes commit the fault
+of allowing her guests to wait for her.
+
+“’Lo, my dear,” said Mr. Lanley, kissing Mathilde. “What’s that you have
+on? Never saw it before. Not so becoming as the dress you were wearing
+the last time I was here.”
+
+Mathilde felt that it would be almost easier to die immediately, and was
+revived only when she heard Farron saying:
+
+“Oh, don’t you like this? I was just thinking I had never seen Mathilde
+looking so well, in her rather more mature and subtle vein.”
+
+It was just as she wished to appear, but she glanced at her stepfather,
+disturbed by her constant suspicion that he read her heart more clearly
+than any one else, more clearly than she liked.
+
+“How shockingly late they are!” said Adelaide, suddenly appearing in
+the utmost splendor. She moved about, kissing her father and arranging
+the chairs. “Do you know, Vin, why it is that Pringle likes to make the
+room look as if it were arranged for a funeral? Why do you suppose they
+don’t come?”
+
+“Any one who arrives after Adelaide is apt to be in wrong,” observed
+her husband.
+
+“Well, I think it’s awfully incompetent always to be waiting for other
+people,” she returned, just laying her hand an instant on his shoulder to
+indicate that he alone was privileged to make fun of her.
+
+“That perhaps is what the Waynes think,” he answered.
+
+Mathilde’s heart sank a little at this. She knew her mother did not like
+to be kept waiting for dinner.
+
+“When I was a young man--” began Mr. Lanley.
+
+“It was the custom,” interrupted Adelaide in exactly the same tone, “for
+a hostess to be in her drawing-room at least five minutes before the hour
+set for the arrival of the guests.”
+
+“Adelaide,” her father pleaded, “I don’t talk like that; at least
+not often.”
+
+“You would, though, if you didn’t have me to correct you,” she retorted.
+“There’s the bell at last; but it always takes people like that forever
+to get their wraps off.”
+
+“It’s only ten minutes past eight,” said Farron, and Mathilde blessed
+him with a look.
+
+Mrs. Wayne came quickly into the room, so fast that her dress floated
+behind her; she was in black and very grand. No one would have supposed
+that she had murmured to Pete just before the drawing-room door was
+opened, “I hope they haven’t run in any old relations on us.”
+
+“I’m afraid I’m late,” she began.
+
+“She always is,” Pete murmured to Mathilde as he took her hand and quite
+openly squeezed it, and then, before Adelaide had time for the rather
+casual introduction she had planned, he himself put the hand he was
+holding into his mother’s. “This is my girl, Mother,” he said. They
+smiled at each other. Mathilde tried to say something. Mrs. Wayne stooped
+and kissed her. Mr. Lanley was obviously affected. Adelaide wasn’t going
+to have any scene like that.
+
+“Late?” she said, as if not an instant had passed since Mrs. Wayne’s
+entrance. “Oh, no, you’re not late; exactly on time, I think. I’m only
+just down myself. Isn’t that true, Vincent?”
+
+Vincent was studying Mrs. Wayne, and withdrew his eyes slowly. But
+Adelaide’s object was accomplished: no public betrothal had taken place.
+
+Pringle announced dinner. Mr. Lanley, rather to his own surprise, found
+that he was insisting on giving Mrs. Wayne his arm; he was not so angry
+at her as he had supposed. He did not think her offensive or unfeminine
+or half baked or socialistic or any of the things he had been saying to
+himself at lengthening intervals for the last twenty-four hours.
+
+Pete saw an opportunity, and tucked Mathilde’s hand within his own arm,
+nipping it closely to his heart.
+
+The very instant they were at table Adelaide looked down the alley
+between the candles, for the low, golden dish of hot-house fruit did not
+obstruct her view of Vincent, and said:
+
+“Why have you never told me about Marty Burke?”
+
+“Who’s he?” asked Mr. Lanley, quickly, for he had been trying to start a
+little conversational hare of his own, just to keep the conversation away
+from the water-front.
+
+“He’s a splendid young super-tough in my employ,” said Vincent. “What do
+you know about him, Adelaide?”
+
+The guarded surprise in his tone stimulated her.
+
+“Oh, I know all about him--as much, that is, as one ever can of a
+stupendous natural phenomenon.”
+
+“Where did you hear of him?”
+
+“Hear of him? I’ve seen him. I saw him this morning at Mrs. Wayne’s. He
+just dropped in while I was there and, metaphorically speaking, dragged
+us about by the hair of our heads.”
+
+“Some women, I believe, confess to enjoying that sensation,”
+Vincent observed.
+
+“Yes, it’s exciting,” answered his wife.
+
+“It’s an easy excitement to attain.”
+
+“Oh, one wants it done in good style.”
+
+Something so stimulating that it was almost hostile flashed through the
+interchange.
+
+Mathilde murmured to Pete:
+
+“Who are they talking about?”
+
+“A mixture of Alcibiades and _Bill Sykes_,” said Adelaide, catching the
+low tone, as she always did.
+
+“He’s the district leader and a very bad influence,” said Mrs. Wayne.
+
+“He’s a champion middle-weight boxer,” said Pete.
+
+“He’s the head of my stevedores,” said Farron.
+
+“O Mr. Farron,” Mrs. Wayne exclaimed, “I do wish you would use your
+influence over him.”
+
+“My influence? It consists of paying him eighty-five dollars a month and
+giving him a box of cigars at Christmas.”
+
+“Don’t you think you could tone him down?” pleaded Mrs. Wayne. “He does
+so much harm.”
+
+“But I don’t want him toned down. His value to me is his being just as he
+is. He’s a myth, a hero, a power on the water-front, and I employ him.”
+
+“You employ him, but do you control him?” asked Adelaide, languidly, and
+yet with a certain emphasis.
+
+Her husband glanced at her.
+
+“What is it you want, Adelaide?” he said.
+
+She gave a little laugh.
+
+“Oh, I want nothing. It’s Mrs. Wayne who wants you to do
+something--rather difficult, too, I should imagine.”
+
+He turned gravely to their guest.
+
+“What is it you want, Mrs. Wayne?”
+
+Mrs. Wayne considered an instant, and as she was about to find words for
+her request her son spoke:
+
+“She’ll tell you after dinner.”
+
+“Pete, I wasn’t going to tell the story,” his mother put in protestingly.
+“You really do me injustice at times.”
+
+Adelaide, remembering the conversation of the morning, wondered whether
+he did. She felt grateful to him for wishing to spare Mathilde the
+hearing of such a story, and she turned to him with a caressing
+graciousness in which she was extremely at her ease. Mathilde,
+recognizing that her mother was pleased, though not being very clear why,
+could not resist joining in their conversation; and Mrs. Wayne was thus
+given an opportunity of murmuring the unfortunate Anita’s story into
+Vincent’s ear.
+
+Adelaide, holding Pete with a flattering gaze, seeming to drink in every
+word he was saying, heard Mrs. Wayne finish and heard Vincent say:
+
+“And you think you can get it annulled if only Burke doesn’t interfere?”
+
+“Yes, if he doesn’t get hold of the boy and tell him that his dignity as
+a man is involved.”
+
+Adelaide withdrew her gaze from Pete and fixed it on Vincent. Was he
+going to accept that challenge? She wanted him to, and yet she thought he
+would be defeated, and she did not want him to be defeated. She waited
+almost breathless.
+
+“Well, I’ll see what I can do,” he said. This was an acceptance.
+This from Vincent meant that the matter, as far as he was concerned,
+was settled.
+
+“You two plotters!” exclaimed Adelaide. “For my part, I’m on Marty
+Burke’s side. I hate to see wild creatures in cages.”
+
+“Dangerous to side with wild beasts,” observed Vincent.
+
+“Why?”
+
+“They get the worst of it in the long run.”
+
+Adelaide dropped her eyes. It was exactly the right answer. For a moment
+she felt his complete supremacy. Then another thought shot through her
+mind: it was exactly the right answer if he could make it good.
+
+In the meantime Mr. Lanley began to grow dissatisfied with the prolonged
+role of spectator. He preferred danger to oblivion; and turning to Mrs.
+Wayne, he said, with his politest smile:
+
+“How are the bridges?”
+
+“Oh, dear,” she answered, “I must have been terribly tactless--to make
+you so angry.”
+
+Mr. Lanley drew himself up.
+
+“I was not angry,” he said.
+
+She looked at him with a sort of gentle wonder.
+
+“You gave me the impression of being.”
+
+The very temperateness of the reply made him see that he had been
+inaccurate.
+
+“Of course I was angry,” he said. “What I mean is that I don’t understand
+why I was.”
+
+Meantime, on the opposite side of the table, Mathilde and Pete were
+equally immersed, murmuring sentences of the profoundest meaning behind
+faces which they felt were mask-like.
+
+Farron looked down the table at his wife. Why, he wondered, did she want
+to tease him to-night, of all nights in his life?
+
+When they came out of the dining-room Pete said to Mathilde with the
+utmost clearness:
+
+“And what was that magazine you spoke of?”
+
+She had spoken of no magazine, but she caught the idea, the clever,
+rather wicked idea. He made her work her mind almost too fast sometimes,
+but she enjoyed it.
+
+“Wasn’t it this?” she asked, with a beating heart.
+
+They sat down on the sofa and bent their heads over it with student-like
+absorption.
+
+“I haven’t any idea what it is,” she whispered.
+
+“Oh, well, I suppose there’s something or other in it.”
+
+“I think your mother is perfectly wonderful--wonderful.”
+
+“I love you so.”
+
+The older people took a little longer to settle down. Mr. Lanley stood on
+the hearth-rug, with a cigar in his mouth and his head thrown very far
+back. Adelaide sank into a chair, looking, as she often did, as if she
+had just been brilliantly well posed for a photograph. Farron was
+silent. Mrs. Wayne sat, as she had a bad habit of doing, on one foot. The
+two groups were sufficiently separated for distinct conversations.
+
+“Is this a conference?” asked Farron.
+
+Mrs. Wayne made it so by her reply.
+
+“The whole question is, Are they really in love? At least, that’s my
+view.”
+
+“In love!” Adelaide twisted her shoulders. “What can they know of it for
+another ten years? You must have some character, some knowledge to fall
+in love. And these babes--”
+
+“No,” said Mr. Lanley, stoutly; “you’re all wrong, Adelaide. It’s first
+love that matters--_Romeo_ and _Juliet_, you know. Afterward we all get
+hardened and world-worn and cynical and material.” He stopped short in
+his eloquence at the thought that Mrs. Wayne was quite obviously not
+hardened or world-worn or cynical or material. “By Jove!” he thought to
+himself, “that’s it. The woman’s spirit is as fresh as a girl’s.” He had
+by this time utterly forgotten what he had meant to say.
+
+Adelaide turned to her husband.
+
+“Do you think they are in love, Vin?”
+
+Vincent looked at her for a second, and then he nodded two or
+three times.
+
+Though no one at once recognized the fact, the engagement was settled at
+that moment.
+
+It seemed obvious that Mr. Lanley should take the Waynes home in his car.
+Mrs. Wayne, who had prepared for walking with overshoes and with pins for
+her trailing skirt, did not seem too enthusiastic at the suggestion. She
+stood a moment on the step and looked at the sky, where Orion, like a
+banner, was hung across the easterly opening of the side street.
+
+“It’s a lovely night,” she said.
+
+It was Pete who drew her into the car. Her reluctance deprived Mr.
+Lanley of the delight of bestowing a benefit, but gave him a faint sense
+of capture.
+
+In the drawing-room Mathilde was looking from one to the other of her
+natural guardians, like a well-trained puppy who wants to be fed. She
+wanted Pete praised. Instead, Adelaide said:
+
+“Really, papa is growing too secretive! Do you know, Vin, he and Mrs.
+Wayne quarreled like mad last evening, and he never told me a word
+about it!”
+
+“How do you know?”
+
+“Oh, I heard them trying to smooth it out at dinner.”
+
+“O Mama,” wailed Mathilde, between admiration and complaint, “you hear
+everything!”
+
+“Certainly, I do,” Adelaide returned lightly. “Yes, and I heard you, too,
+and understood everything that you meant.”
+
+Vincent couldn’t help smiling at his stepdaughter’s horrified look.
+
+“What a brute you are, Adelaide!” he said.
+
+“Oh, my dear, you’re much worse,” she retorted. “You don’t have to
+overhear. You just read the human heart by some black magic of your own.
+That’s really more cruel than my gross methods.”
+
+“Well, Mathilde,” said Farron, “as a reader of the human heart, I want to
+tell you that I approve of the young man. He has a fine, delicate touch
+on life, which, I am inclined to think, goes only with a good deal of
+strength.”
+
+Mathilde blinked her eyes. Gratitude and delight had brought
+tears to them.
+
+“He thinks you’re wonderful, Mr. Farron,” she answered a little huskily.
+
+“Better and better,” answered Vincent, and he held out his hand for a
+letter that Pringle was bringing to him on a tray.
+
+“What’s that?” asked Adelaide. One of the first things she had impressed
+on Joe Severance was that he must never inquire about her mail; but she
+always asked Farron about his.
+
+He seemed to be thinking and didn’t answer her.
+
+Mathilde, now simply insatiable, pressed nearer to him and asked:
+
+“And what do you think of Mrs. Wayne?”
+
+He raised his eyes from the envelope, and answered with a certain
+absence of tone:
+
+“I thought she was an elderly wood-nymph.”
+
+Adelaide glanced over his shoulder, and, seeing that the letter had a
+printed address in the corner, lost interest.
+
+“You may shut the house, Pringle,” she said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+Pringle, the last servant up, was soon heard discreetly drawing bolts and
+turning out electric lights. Mathilde went straight up-stairs without
+even an attempt at drawing her mother into an evening gossip. She was
+aware of being tired after two nights rendered almost sleepless by her
+awareness of joy. She went to her room and shut the door. Her bed was
+piled high with extra covers, soft, light blankets and a down coverlet
+covered with pink silk. She took a certain hygienic pride in the extent
+to which she always opened her bedroom windows even when, as at present,
+the night was bitterly cold. In the morning she ran, huddling on her
+dressing-gown, into a heated bathroom, and when she emerged from this,
+the maid had always lighted her fire, and laid her breakfast-tray close
+to the blaze. To-night, when she went to open her window, she noticed
+that the houses opposite had lost courage and showed only cracks. She
+stood a second looking up at the stars, twinkling with tiny blue rays
+through the clear air. By turning her head to the west she could look
+down on the park, with its surface of bare, blurred tree-branches pierced
+by rows of lights. The familiar sight suddenly seemed to her almost
+intolerably beautiful. “Oh, I love him so much!” she said to herself, and
+her lips actually whispered the words, “so much! so much!”
+
+She threw the window high as a reproof of those shivers across the way,
+and, jumping into bed, hastily sandwiched her small body between the warm
+bedclothes. She was almost instantly asleep.
+
+Overhead the faint, but heavy, footfall of Pringle ceased. The house was
+silent; the city had become so. An occasional Madison Avenue car could be
+heard ringing along the cold rails, or rhythmically bounding down hill on
+a flat wheel. Once some distance away came the long, continuous complaint
+of the siren of a fire-engine and the bells and gongs of its comrades;
+and then a young man went past, whistling with the purest accuracy of
+time and tune the air to which he had just been dancing.
+
+At half-past five the kitchen-maid, a young Swede who feared not God,
+neither regarded man, but lived in absolute subjection to the cook, to
+whom, unknown to any one else, she every morning carried up breakfast,
+was stealing down with a candle in her hand. Her senses were alert, for a
+friend of hers had been strangled by burglars in similar circumstances,
+and she had never overcome her own terror of the cold, dark house in
+these early hours of a winter morning.
+
+She went down not the back stairs, for Mr. Pringle objected that she woke
+him as she passed, whereas the carpet on the front stairs was so thick
+that there wasn’t the least chance of waking the family. As she passed
+Mrs. Farron’s room she was surprised to see a fine crack of light coming
+from under it. She paused, wondering if she was going to be caught, and
+if she had better run back and take to the back stairs despite Pringle’s
+well-earned rest; and as she hesitated she heard a sob, then
+another--wild, hysterical sobs. The girl looked startled and then went
+on, shaking her head. What people like that had to cry about beat her.
+But she was glad, because she knew such a splendid bit of news would
+soften the heart of the cook when she took up her breakfast.
+
+By five o’clock it seemed to Adelaide that a whole eternity had passed
+and that another was ahead of her, that this night would never end.
+
+When they went up-stairs, while she was brushing her hair--her hair
+rewarded brushing, for it was fine and long and took a polish like
+bronze--she had wandered into Vincent’s room to discuss with him the
+question of her father’s secretiveness about Mrs. Wayne. It was not, she
+explained, standing in front of his fire, that she suspected anything,
+but that it was so unfriendly: it deprived one of so much legitimate
+amusement if one’s own family practised that kind of reserve. Her just
+anger kept her from observing Farron very closely. As she talked she laid
+her brush on the mantelpiece, and as she did so she knocked down the
+letter that had come for him just before they went up-stairs. She
+stooped, and picked it up without attention, and stood holding it; she
+gesticulated a little with it as she repeated, for her own amusement
+rather than for Vincent’s, phrases she had caught at dinner.
+
+The horror to Farron of seeing her standing there chattering, with that
+death-dealing letter in her hand, suddenly and illogically broke down his
+resolution of silence. It was cruel, and though he might have denied
+himself her help, he could not endure cruelty.
+
+“Adelaide,” he said in a tone that drove every other sensation
+away--“Adelaide, that letter. No, don’t read it.” He took it from her
+and laid it on his dressing-table. “My dear love, it has very bad
+news in it.”
+
+“There _has_ been something, then?”
+
+“Yes. I have been worried about my health for some time. This letter
+tells me the worst is true. Well, my dear, we did not enter matrimony
+with the idea that either of us was immortal.”
+
+But that was his last effort to be superior to the crisis, to pretend
+that the bitterness of death was any less to him than to any other human
+creature, to conceal that he needed help, all the help that he could get.
+
+And Adelaide gave him help. Artificial as she often was in daily
+contact, in a moment like this she was splendidly, almost primitively
+real. She did not conceal her own passionate despair, her conviction that
+her life couldn’t go on without his; she did not curb her desire to know
+every detail on which his opinion and his doctor’s had been founded; she
+clung to him and wept, refusing to let him discuss business arrangements,
+in which for some reason he seemed to find a certain respite; and yet
+with it all, she gave him strength, the sense that he had an indissoluble
+and loyal companion in the losing fight that lay before him.
+
+Once she was aware of thinking: “Oh, why did he tell me to-night? Things
+are so terrible by night,” but it was only a second before she put such a
+thought away from her. What had these nights been to him? The night when
+she had found his light burning so late, and other nights when he had
+probably denied himself the consolation of reading for fear of rousing
+her suspicions. She did not attempt to pity or advise him, she did not
+treat him as a mixture of child and idiot, as affection so often treats
+illness. She simply gave him her love.
+
+Toward morning he fell asleep in her arms, and then she stole back to
+her own room. There everything was unchanged, the light still burning,
+her satin slippers stepping on each other just as she had left them. She
+looked at herself in the glass; she did not look so very different. A
+headache had often ravaged her appearance more.
+
+She had always thought herself a coward, she feared death with a terrible
+repugnance; but now she found, to her surprise, that she would have
+light-heartedly changed places with her husband. She had much more
+courage to die than to watch him die--to watch Vincent die, to see him
+day by day grow weak and pitiful. That was what was intolerable. If he
+would only die now, to-night, or if she could! It was at this moment that
+the kitchen maid had heard her sobbing.
+
+Because there was nothing else to do, she got into bed, and lay there
+staring at the electric light, which she had forgotten to put out. Toward
+seven she got up and gave orders that Mr. Farron was not to be disturbed,
+that the house was to be kept quiet. Strange, she thought, that he could
+sleep like an exhausted child, while she, awake, was a mass of pain. Her
+heart ached, her eyes burned, her very body felt sore. She arranged for
+his sleep, but she wanted him to wake up; she begrudged every moment of
+his absence. Alas! she thought, how long would she continue to do so?
+
+Yet with her suffering came a wonderful ease, an ability to deal with the
+details of life. When at eight o’clock her maid came in and, pulling the
+curtains, exclaimed with Gallic candor, “Oh, comme madame a mauvaise mine
+ce matin!” she smiled at her with unusual gentleness. Later, when
+Mathilde came down at her accustomed hour, and lying across the foot of
+her mother’s bed, began to read her scraps of the morning paper, Adelaide
+felt a rush of tenderness for the child, who was so unaware of the
+hideous bargain life really was. Surprising as it was, she found she
+could talk more easily than usual and with a more undivided attention,
+though everything they said was trivial enough.
+
+Then suddenly her heart stood still, for the door opened, and Vincent, in
+his dressing-gown, came in. He had evidently had his bath, for his hair
+was wet and shiny. Thank God! he showed no signs of defeat!
+
+“Oh,” cried Mathilde, jumping up, “I thought Mr. Farron had gone
+down-town ages ago.”
+
+“He overslept,” said Adelaide.
+
+“I had an excellent night,” he answered, and she knew he looked at her to
+discover that she had not.
+
+“I’ll go,” said Mathilde; but with unusual sharpness they both turned to
+her and said simultaneously, “No, no; stay.” They knew no better than she
+did why they were so eager to keep her.
+
+“Are you going down-town, Vin?” Adelaide asked, and her voice shook a
+little on the question; she was so eager that he should not institute any
+change in his routine so soon.
+
+“Of course,” he answered.
+
+They looked at each other, yet their look said nothing in particular.
+Presently he said:
+
+“I wonder if I might have breakfast in here. I’ll go and shave if you’ll
+order it; and don’t let Mathilde go. I have something to say to her.”
+
+When he was gone, Mathilde went and stood at the window, looking out, and
+tying knots in the window-shade’s cord. It was a trick Adelaide had
+always objected to, and she was quite surprised to hear herself saying
+now, just as usual:
+
+“Mathilde, don’t tie knots in that cord.”
+
+Mathilde threw it from her as one whose mind was engaged on higher
+things.
+
+“You know,” she observed, “I believe I’m only just beginning to
+appreciate Mr. Farron. He’s so wise. I see what you meant about his being
+strong, and he’s so clever. He knows just what you’re thinking all the
+time. Isn’t it nice that he likes Pete? Did he say anything more about
+him after you went up-stairs? I mean, he really does like him, doesn’t
+he? He doesn’t say that just to please me?”
+
+Presently Vincent came back fully dressed and sat down to his breakfast.
+Oddly enough, there was a spirit of real gaiety in the air.
+
+“What was it you were going to say to me?” Mathilde asked greedily.
+Farron looked at her blankly. Adelaide knew that he had quite forgotten
+the phrase, but he concealed the fact by not allowing the least
+illumination of his expression as he remembered.
+
+“Oh, yes,” he said. “I wish to correct myself. I told you that Mrs.
+Wayne was an elderly wood-nymph; but I was wrong. Of course the truth is
+that she’s a very young witch.”
+
+Mathilde laughed, but not whole-heartedly. She had already identified
+herself so much with the Waynes that she could not take them quite in
+this tone of impersonality.
+
+Farron threw down his napkin, stood up, pulled down his waistcoat.
+
+“I must be off,” he said. He went and kissed his wife. Both had to nerve
+themselves for that.
+
+She held his arm in both her hands, feeling it solid, real, and as
+hard as iron.
+
+“You’ll be up-town early?”
+
+“I’ve a busy day.”
+
+“By four?”
+
+“I’ll telephone.” She loved him for refusing to yield to her just at this
+moment of all moments. Some men, she thought, would have hidden their own
+self-pity under the excuse of the necessity of being kind to her.
+
+She was to lunch out with a few critical contemporaries. She was
+horrified when she looked at herself by morning light. Her skin had an
+ivory hue, and there were many fine wrinkles about her eyes. She began to
+repair these damages with the utmost frankness, talking meantime to
+Mathilde and the maid. She swept her whole face with a white lotion,
+rouged lightly, but to her very eyelids, touched a red pencil to her
+lips, all with discretion. The result was satisfactory. The improvement
+in her appearance made her feel braver. She couldn’t have faced these
+people--she did not know whether to think of them as intimate enemies or
+hostile friends--if she had been looking anything but her best.
+
+But they were just what she needed; they would be hard and amusing and
+keep her at some tension. She thought rather crossly that she could not
+sit through a meal at home and listen to Mathilde rambling on about love
+and Mr. Farron.
+
+She was inexcusably late, and they had sat down to luncheon--three men
+and two women--by the time she arrived. They had all been, or had wanted
+to go, to an auction sale of _objets d’art_ that had taken place the
+night before. They were discussing it, praising their own purchases, and
+decrying the value of everybody else’s when Adelaide came in.
+
+“Oh, Adelaide,” said her hostess, “we were just wondering what you paid
+originally for your tapestry.”
+
+“The one in the hall?”
+
+“No, the one with the Turk in it.”
+
+“I haven’t an idea,--” Adelaide was distinctly languid,--“I got it from
+my grandfather.”
+
+“Wouldn’t you know she’d say that?” exclaimed one of the women. “Not that
+I deny it’s true; only, you know, Adelaide, whenever you do want to throw
+a veil over one of your pieces, you always call on the prestige of your
+ancestors.”
+
+Adelaide raised her eyebrows.
+
+“Really,” she answered, “there isn’t anything so very conspicuous about
+having had a grandfather.”
+
+“No,” her hostess echoed, “even I, so well and favorably known for my
+vulgarity--even _I_ had a grandfather.”
+
+“But he wasn’t a connoisseur in tapestries, Minnie darling.”
+
+“No, but he was in pigs, the dear vulgarian.”
+
+“True vulgarity,” said one of the men, “vulgarity in the best sense, I
+mean, should betray no consciousness of its own existence. Only thus can
+it be really great.”
+
+“Oh, Minnie’s vulgarity is just artificial, assumed because she found it
+worked so well.”
+
+“Surely you accord her some natural talent along those lines.”
+
+“I suspect her secret mind is refined.”
+
+“Oh, that’s not fair. Vulgar is as vulgar does.”
+
+Adelaide stood up, pushing back her chair. She found them utterly
+intolerable. Besides, as they talked she had suddenly seen clearly that
+she must herself speak to Vincent’s doctor without an instant’s delay. “I
+have to telephone, Minnie,” she said, and swept out of the room. She
+never returned.
+
+“Not one of the perfect lady’s golden days, I should say,” said one of
+the men, raising his eyebrows. “I wonder what’s gone wrong?”
+
+“Can Vincent have been straying from the straight and narrow?”
+
+“Something wrong. I could tell by her looks.”
+
+“Ah, my dear, I’m afraid her looks is what’s wrong.”
+
+Adelaide meantime was in her motor on her way to the doctor’s office. He
+had given up his sacred lunch-hour in response to her imperious demand
+and to his own intense pity for her sorrow.
+
+He did not know her, but he had had her pointed out to him, and though
+he recognized the unreason of such an attitude, he was aware that her
+great beauty dramatized her suffering, so that his pity for her was
+uncommonly alive.
+
+He was a young man, with a finely cut face and a blond complexion. His
+pity was visible, quivering a little under his mask of impassivity.
+Adelaide’s first thought on seeing him was, “Good Heavens! another man to
+be emotionally calmed before I can get at the truth!” She had to be
+tactful, to let him see that she was not going to make a scene. She knew
+that he felt it himself, but she was not grateful to him. What business
+had he to feel it? His feeling was an added burden, and she felt that she
+had enough to carry.
+
+He did not make the mistake, however, of expressing his sympathy
+verbally. His answers were as cold and clear as she could wish. She
+questioned him on the chances of an operation. He could not reduce his
+judgment to a mathematical one; he was inclined to advocate an operation
+on psychological grounds, he said.
+
+“It keeps up the patient’s courage to know something is being done.” He
+added, “That will be your work, Mrs. Farron, to keep his courage up.”
+
+Most women like to know they had their part to play, but Adelaide shook
+her head quickly.
+
+“I would so much rather go through it myself!” she cried.
+
+“Naturally, naturally,” he agreed, without getting the full passion
+of her cry.
+
+She stood up.
+
+“Oh,” she said, “if it could only be kill or cure!”
+
+He glanced at her.
+
+“We have hardly reached that point yet,” he answered.
+
+She went away dissatisfied. He had answered every question, he had even
+encouraged her to hope a little more than her interpretation of what
+Vincent said had allowed her; but as she drove away she knew he had
+failed her. For she had gone to him in order to have Vincent presented to
+her as a hero, as a man who had looked upon the face of death without a
+quiver. Instead, he had been presented to her as a patient, just one of
+the long procession that passed through that office. The doctor had said
+nothing to contradict the heroic picture, but he had said nothing to
+contribute to it. And surely, if Farron had stood out in his calmness and
+courage above all other men, the doctor would have mentioned it, couldn’t
+have helped doing so; he certainly would not have spent so much time in
+telling her how she was to guard and encourage him. To the doctor he was
+only a patient, a pitiful human being, a victim of mortality. Was that
+what he was going to become in her eyes, too?
+
+At four she drove down-town to his office. He came out with another man;
+they stood a moment on the steps talking and smiling. Then he drew his
+friend to the car window and introduced him to Adelaide. The man took
+off his hat.
+
+“I was just telling your husband, Mrs. Farron, that I’ve been looking at
+offices in this building. By the spring he and I will be neighbors.”
+
+Adelaide just shut her eyes, and did not open them again until Vincent
+had got in beside her and she felt his arm about her shoulder.
+
+“My poor darling!” he said. “What you need is to go home and get some
+sleep.” It was said in his old, cherishing tone, and she, leaning back,
+with her head against the point of his shoulder, felt that, black as it
+was, life for the first time since the night before had assumed its
+normal aspect again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+The morning after their drive up-town Vincent told his wife that all
+his arrangements were made to go to the hospital that night, and to be
+operated upon the next day. She reproached him for having made his
+decision without consulting her, but she loved him for his proud
+independence.
+
+Somehow this second day under the shadow of death was less terrible than
+the first. Vincent stayed up-town, and was very natural and very busy. He
+saw a few people,--men who owed him money, his lawyer, his partner,--but
+most of the time he and Adelaide sat together in his study, as they had
+sat on many other holidays. He insisted on going alone to the hospital,
+although she was to be in the building during the operation.
+
+Mathilde had been told, and inexperienced in disaster, she had felt
+convinced that the outcome couldn’t be fatal, yet despite her conviction
+that people did not really die, she was aware of a shyness and
+awkwardness in the tragic situation.
+
+Mr. Lanley had been told, and his attitude was just the opposite. To
+him it seemed absolutely certain that Farron would die,--every one
+did,--but he had for some time been aware of a growing hardness on his
+part toward the death of other people, as if he were thus preparing
+himself for his own.
+
+“Poor Vincent!” he said to himself. “Hard luck at his age, when an old
+man like me is left.” But this was not quite honest. In his heart he
+felt there was nothing unnatural in Vincent’s being taken or in his
+being left.
+
+As usual in a crisis, Adelaide’s behavior was perfect. She contrived to
+make her husband feel every instant the depth, the strength, the passion
+of her love for him without allowing it to add to the weight he was
+already carrying. Alone together, he and she had flashes of real gaiety,
+sometimes not very far from tears.
+
+To Mathilde the brisk naturalness of her mother’s manner was a source of
+comfort. All the day the girl suffered from a sense of strangeness and
+isolation, and a fear of doing or saying something unsuitable--something
+either too special or too every-day. She longed to evince sympathy for
+Mr. Farron, but was afraid that, if she did, it would be like intimating
+that he was as good as dead. She was caught between the negative danger
+of seeming indifferent and the positive one of being tactless.
+
+As soon as Vincent had left the house, Adelaide’s thought turned to her
+daughter. He had gone about six o’clock. He and she had been sitting by
+his study fire when Pringle announced that the motor was waiting. Vincent
+got up quietly, and so did she. They stood with their arms about each
+other, as if they meant never to forget the sense of that contact; and
+then without any protest they went down-stairs together.
+
+In the hall he had shaken hands with Mr. Lanley and had kissed Mathilde,
+who, do what she would, couldn’t help choking a little. All this time
+Adelaide stood on the stairs, very erect, with one hand on the stair-rail
+and one on the wall, not only her eyes, but her whole face, radiating an
+uplifted peace. So angelic and majestic did she seem that Mathilde,
+looking up at her, would hardly have been surprised if she had floated
+out into space from her vantage-ground on the staircase.
+
+Then Farron lit a last cigar, gave a quick, steady glance at his wife,
+and went out. The front door ended the incident as sharply as a shot
+would have done.
+
+It was then that Mathilde expected to see her mother break down. Under
+all her sympathy there was a faint human curiosity as to how people
+contrived to live through such crises. If Pete were on the brink of
+death, she thought that she would go mad: but, then, she and Pete were
+not a middle-aged married couple; they were young, and new to love.
+
+They all went into the drawing-room, Adelaide the calmest of the three.
+
+“I wonder,” she said, “if you two would mind dining a little earlier than
+usual. I might sleep if I could get to bed early, and I must be at the
+hospital before eight.”
+
+Mr. Lanley agreed a little more quickly than it was his habit to speak.
+
+“O Mama, I think you’re so marvelous!” said Mathilde, and touched at her
+own words, she burst into tears. Her mother put her arm about her, and
+Mr. Lanley patted her shoulder--his sovereign care.
+
+“There, there, my dear,” he murmured, “you must not cry. You know Vincent
+has a very good chance, a very good chance.”
+
+The assumption that he hadn’t was just the one Mathilde did not want to
+appear to make. Her mother saw this and said gently:
+
+“She’s overstrained, that’s all.”
+
+The girl wiped her eyes.
+
+“I’m ashamed, when you are so calm and wonderful.”
+
+“I’m not wonderful,” said her mother. “I have no wish to cry. I’m beyond
+it. Other people’s trouble often makes us behave more emotionally than
+our own. If it were your Pete, I should be in tears.” She smiled, and
+looked across the girl’s head at Mr. Lanley. “She would like to see him,
+Papa. Telephone Pete Wayne, will you, and ask him to come and see her
+this evening? You’ll be here, won’t you?”
+
+Mr. Lanley nodded without cordiality; he did not approve of encouraging
+the affair unnecessarily.
+
+“How kind you are, Mama!” exclaimed Mathilde, almost inaudibly. It was
+just what she wanted, just what she had been wanting all day, to see her
+own man, to assure herself, since death was seen to be hot on the trail
+of all mortals, that he and she were not wasting their brief time in
+separation.
+
+“We might take a turn in the motor,” said Mr. Lanley, thinking that Mrs.
+Wayne might enjoy that.
+
+“It would do you both good.”
+
+“And leave you alone, Mama?”
+
+“It’s what I really want, dear.”
+
+The plan did not fulfil itself quite as Mr. Lanley had imagined. Mrs.
+Wayne was out at some sort of meeting. They waited a moment for Pete.
+Mathilde fixed her eyes on the lighted doorway, and said to herself that
+in a few seconds the thing of all others that she desired would
+happen--he would come through it. And almost at once he did, looking
+particularly young and alive; so that, as he jumped in beside her on the
+back seat, both her hands went out and caught his arm and clung to him.
+Her realization of mortality had been so acute that she felt as if he had
+been restored to her from the dead. She told him the horrors of the day.
+Particularly, she wanted to share with him her gratitude for her mother’s
+almost magic kindness.
+
+“I wanted you so much, Pete,” she whispered; “but I thought it would be
+heartless even to suggest my having wishes at such a time. And then for
+her to think of it herself--”
+
+“It means they are not really going to oppose our marriage.”
+
+They talked about their marriage and the twenty or thirty years of joy
+which they might reasonably hope to snatch from life.
+
+“Think of it,” he said--“twenty or thirty years, longer than either of us
+have lived.”
+
+“If I could have five years, even one year, with you, I think I could
+bear to die; but not now, Pete.”
+
+In the meantime Mr. Lanley, alone on the front seat, for he had left
+his chauffeur at home, was driving north along the Hudson and saying
+to himself:
+
+“Sixty-four. Well, I may be able to knock out ten or twelve pretty
+satisfactory years. On the other hand, might die to-morrow; hope I
+don’t, though. As long as I can drive a car and everything goes well
+with Adelaide and this child, I’d be content to live my full time--and a
+little bit more. Not many men are healthier than I am. Poor Vincent! A
+good deal more to live for than I have, most people would say; but I
+don’t know that he enjoys it any more than I do.” Turning his head a
+little, he shouted over his shoulder to Pete, “Sorry your mother
+couldn’t come.”
+
+Mathilde made a hasty effort to withdraw her hands; but Wayne, more
+practical, understanding better the limits put upon a driver, held
+them tightly as he answered in a civil tone: “Yes, she would have
+enjoyed this.”
+
+“She must come some other time,” shouted Mr. Lanley, and reflected that
+it was not always necessary to bring the young people with you.
+
+“You know, he could not possibly have turned enough to see,” Pete
+whispered reprovingly to Mathilde.
+
+“I suppose not; and yet it seemed so queer to be talking to my
+grandfather with--”
+
+“You must try and adapt yourself to your environment,” he returned, and
+put his arm about her.
+
+The cold of the last few days had given place to a thaw. The melting ice
+in the river was streaked in strange curves, and the bare trees along the
+straight heights of the Palisades were blurred by a faint bluish mist,
+out of which white lights and yellow ones peered like eyes.
+
+“Doesn’t it seem cruel to be so happy when Mama and poor Mr. Farron--”
+Mathilde began.
+
+“It’s the only lesson to learn,” he answered--“to be happy while we are
+young and together.”
+
+About ten o’clock Mr. Lanley left her at home, and she tiptoed up-stairs
+and hardly dared to draw breath as she undressed for fear she might wake
+her unhappy mother on the floor below her.
+
+She had resolved to wake early, to breakfast with her mother, to ask to
+be allowed to accompany her to the hospital; but it was nine o’clock when
+she was awakened by her maid’s coming in with her breakfast and the
+announcement not only that Mrs. Farron had been gone for more than an
+hour, but that there had already been good news from the hospital.
+
+“Il paraît que monsieur est très fort,” she said, with that absolute
+neutrality of accent that sounds in Anglo-Saxon ears almost like a
+complaint.
+
+Adelaide had been in no need of companionship. She was perfectly able
+to go through her day. It seemed as if her soul, with a soul’s
+capacity for suffering, had suddenly withdrawn from her body, had
+retreated into some unknown fortress, and left in its place a hard,
+trivial, practical intelligence which tossed off plan after plan for
+the future detail of life. As she drove from her house to the hospital
+she arranged how she would apportion the household in case of a
+prolonged illness, where she would put the nurses. Nor was she less
+clear as to what should be done in case of Vincent’s death. The whole
+thing unrolled before her like a panorama.
+
+At the hospital, after a little delay, she was guided to Vincent’s own
+room, recently deserted. A nurse came to tell her that all was going
+well; Mr. Farron had had a good night, and was taking the anesthetic
+nicely. Adelaide found the young woman’s manner offensively encouraging,
+and received the news with an insolent reserve.
+
+“That girl is too wildly, spiritually bright,” she said to herself. But
+no manner would have pleased her.
+
+Left alone, she sat down in a rocking-chair near the window. Vincent’s
+bag stood in the corner, his brushes were on the dressing-table, his tie
+hung on the electric light. Immortal trifles, she thought, that might be
+in existence for years.
+
+She began poignantly to regret that she had not insisted on seeing him
+again that morning. She had thought only of what was easiest for him. She
+ought to have thought of herself, of what would make it possible for her
+to go on living without him. If she could have seen him again, he might
+have given her some precept, some master word, by which she could have
+guided her life. She would have welcomed something imprisoning and safe.
+It was cruel of him, she thought, to toss her out like this, rudderless
+and alone. She wondered what he would have given her as a commandment,
+and remembered suddenly the apocryphal last words which Vincent was fond
+of attributing to George Washington, “Never trust a nigger with a gun.”
+She found herself smiling over them. Vincent was more likely to have
+quoted the apparition’s advice to Macbeth: “Be bloody, bold, and
+resolute.” That would have been his motto for himself, but not for her.
+What was the principle by which he infallibly guided her?
+
+How could he have left her so spiritually unprovided for? She felt
+imposed upon, deserted. The busily planning little mind that had suddenly
+taken possession of her could not help her in the larger aspects of her
+existence. It would be much simpler, she thought, to die than to attempt
+life again without Vincent.
+
+She went to the window and looked out at the roofs of neighboring
+houses, a disordered conglomeration of water-tanks and skylights and
+chimney-pots. Then nearer, almost under her feet, she looked into a
+courtyard of the hospital and saw a pale, emaciated man in a wheel-chair.
+She drew back as if it were something indecent. Would Vincent ever become
+like that? she thought. If so, she would rather he died now under the
+anesthetic.
+
+A little while later the nurse came in, and said almost sternly that Dr.
+Crew had sent her to tell Mrs. Farron that the conditions seemed
+extremely favorable, and that all immediate danger was over.
+
+“You mean,” said Adelaide, fiercely, “that Mr. Farron will live?”
+
+“I certainly inferred that to be the doctor’s meaning,” answered the
+nurse. “But here is the assistant, Dr. Withers.”
+
+Dr. Withers, bringing with him an intolerable smell of disinfectants and
+chloroform, hurried in, with his hair mussed from the haste with which he
+had removed his operating-garments. He had small, bright, brown eyes,
+with little lines about them that seemed to suggest humor, but actually
+indicated that he buoyed up his life not by exaltation of himself, but by
+half-laughing depreciation of every one else.
+
+“I thought you’d be glad to know, Mrs. Farron,” he said, “that any danger
+that may have existed is now over. Your husband--”
+
+“That _may_ have existed,” cried Adelaide. “Do you mean to say there
+hasn’t been any real danger?”
+
+The young doctor’s eyes twinkled.
+
+“An operation even in the best hands is always a danger,” he replied.
+
+“But you mean there was no other?” Adelaide asked, aware of a growing
+coldness about her hands and feet.
+
+Withers looked as just as Aristides.
+
+“It was probably wise to operate,” he said. “Your husband ought to be up
+and about in three weeks.”
+
+Everything grew black and rotatory before Adelaide’s eyes, and she sank
+slowly forward into the young doctor’s arms.
+
+As he laid her on the bed, he glanced whimsically at the nurse and
+shook his head.
+
+But she made no response, an omission which may not have meant loyalty to
+Dr. Crew so much as unwillingness to support Dr. Withers.
+
+Adelaide returned to consciousness only in time to be hurried away to
+make room for Vincent. His long, limp figure was carried past her in the
+corridor. She was told that in a few hours she might see him. But she
+wasn’t, as a matter of fact, very eager to see him. The knowledge that he
+was to live, the lifting of the weight of dread, was enough. The maternal
+strain did not mingle with her love for him; she saw no possible reward,
+no increased sense of possession, in his illness. On the contrary, she
+wanted him to stride back in one day from death to his old powerful,
+dominating self.
+
+She grew to hate the hospital routine, the fixed hours, the regulated
+food. “These rules, these hovering women,” she exclaimed, “these
+trays--they make me think of the nursery.” But what she really hated was
+Vincent’s submission to it all. In her heart she would have been glad to
+see him breaking the rules, defying the doctors, and bullying his nurses.
+
+Before long a strong, silent antagonism grew up between her and the
+bright-eyed, cheerful nurse, Miss Gregory. It irritated Adelaide to gain
+access to her husband through other people’s consent; it irritated her to
+see the girl’s understanding of the case, and her competent arrangements
+for her patient’s comfort. If Vincent had showed any disposition to
+revolt, Adelaide would have pleaded with him to submit; but as it was,
+she watched his docility with a scornful eye.
+
+“That girl rules you with a rod of iron,” she said one day. But even then
+Vincent did not rouse himself.
+
+“She knows her business,” he said admiringly.
+
+To any other invalid Adelaide could have been a soothing visitor, could
+have adapted the quick turns of her mind to the relaxed attention of
+the sick; but, honestly enough, there seemed to her an impertinence,
+almost an insult, in treating Vincent in such a way. The result was
+that her visits were exhausting, and she knew it. And yet, she said to
+herself, he was ill, not insane; how could she conceal from him the
+happenings of every day? Vincent would be the last person to be
+grateful to her for that.
+
+She saw him one day grow pale; his eyes began to close. She had made up
+her mind to leave him when Miss Gregory came in, and with a quicker eye
+and a more active habit of mind, said at once:
+
+“I think Mr. Farron has had enough excitement for one day.”
+
+Adelaide smiled up at the girl almost insolently.
+
+“Is a visit from a wife an excitement?” she asked. Miss Gregory was
+perfectly grave.
+
+“The greatest,” she said.
+
+Adelaide yielded to her own irritation.
+
+“Well,” she said, “I shan’t stay much longer.”
+
+“It would be better if you went now, I think, Mrs. Farron.”
+
+Adelaide looked at Vincent. It was silly of him, she thought, to pretend
+he didn’t hear. She bent over him.
+
+“Your nurse is driving me away from you, dearest,” she murmured.
+
+He opened his eyes and took her hand.
+
+“Come back to-morrow early--as early as you can,” he said.
+
+She never remembered his siding against her before, and she swept out
+into the hallway, saying to herself that it was childish to be annoyed at
+the whims of an invalid.
+
+Miss Gregory had followed her.
+
+“Mrs. Farron,” she said, “do you mind my suggesting that for the present
+it would be better not to talk to Mr. Farron about anything that might
+worry him, even trifles?”
+
+Adelaide laughed.
+
+“You know very little of Mr. Farron,” she said, “if you think he worries
+over trifles.”
+
+“Any one worries over trifles when he is in a nervous state.”
+
+Adelaide passed by without answering, passed by as if she had not heard.
+The suggestion of Vincent nervously worrying over trifles was one of the
+most repellent pictures that had ever been presented to her imagination.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+The firm for which Wayne worked was young and small--Benson & Honaton.
+They made a specialty of circularization in connection with the bond
+issues in which they were interested, and Wayne had charge of their
+“literature,” as they described it. He often felt, after he had finished
+a report, that his work deserved the title. A certain number of people in
+Wall Street disapproved of the firm’s methods. Sometimes Pete thought
+this was because, for a young firm, they had succeeded too quickly to
+please the more deliberate; but sometimes in darker moments he thought
+there might be some justice in the idea.
+
+During the weeks that Farron was in the hospital Pete, despite his
+constant availability to Mathilde, had been at work on his report on a
+coal property in Pennsylvania. He was extremely pleased with the
+thoroughness with which he had done the job. His report was not
+favorable. The day after it was finished, a little after three, he
+received word that the firm wanted to see him. He was always annoyed with
+himself that these messages caused his heart to beat a trifle faster. He
+couldn’t help associating them with former hours with his head-master or
+in the dean’s office. Only he had respected his head-master and even the
+dean, whereas he was not at all sure he respected Mr. Benson and he was
+quite sure he did not respect Mr. Honaton.
+
+He rose slowly from his desk, exchanging with the office boy who brought
+the message a long, severe look, under which something very comic lurked,
+though neither knew what.
+
+“And don’t miss J.B.’s socks,” said the boy.
+
+Mr. Honaton--J.B.--was considered in his office a very beautiful dresser,
+as indeed in some ways he was. He was a tall young man, built like a
+greyhound, with a small, pointed head, a long waist, and a very long
+throat, from which, however, the strongest, loudest voice could issue
+when he so desired. This was his priceless asset. He was the board
+member, and generally admitted to be an excellent broker. It always
+seemed to Pete that he was a broker exactly as a beaver is a
+dam-builder, because nature had adapted him to that task. But outside of
+this one instinctive capacity he had no sense whatsoever. He rarely
+appeared in the office. He was met at the Broad Street entrance of the
+exchange at one minute to ten by a boy with the morning’s orders, and
+sometimes he came in for a few minutes after the closing; but usually by
+three-fifteen he had disappeared from financial circles, and was
+understood to be relaxing in the higher social spheres to which he
+belonged. So when Pete, entering Mr. Benson’s private office, saw Honaton
+leaning against the window-frame, with his hat-brim held against his
+thigh exactly like a fashion-plate, he knew that something of importance
+must be pending.
+
+Benson, the senior member, was a very different person. He looked like a
+fat, white, pugnacious cat. His hair, which had turned white early, had a
+tendency to grow in a bang; his arms were short--so short that when he
+put his hands on the arms of his swing-chair he hardly bent his elbows.
+He had them there now as Pete entered, and was swinging through short
+arcs in rather a nervous rhythm. He was of Irish parentage, and was
+understood to have political influence.
+
+“Wayne,” said Benson, “how would you like to go to China?”
+
+And Honaton repeated portentously, “China,” as if Benson might have made
+a mistake in the name of the country if he had not been at his elbow to
+correct him.
+
+Wayne laughed.
+
+“Well,” he said, “I have nothing against China.”
+
+Benson outlined the situation quickly. The firm had acquired property in
+China not entirely through their own choice, and they wanted a thorough,
+clear report on it; they knew of no one--_no one_, Benson emphasized--who
+could do that as impartially and as well as Wayne. They would pay him a
+good sum and his expenses. It would take him a year, perhaps a year and a
+half. They named the figure. It was one that made marriage possible. They
+talked of the situation and the property and the demand for copper until
+Honaton began to look at his watch, a flat platinum watch, perfectly
+plain, you might have thought, until you caught a glimpse of a narrow
+line of brilliants along its almost imperceptible rim. His usual working
+day was over in half an hour.
+
+“And when I come back, Mr. Benson?” said Wayne.
+
+“Your place will be open for you here.”
+
+There was a pause.
+
+“Well, what do you say?” said Honaton.
+
+“I feel very grateful for the offer,” said Pete, “but of course I can’t
+give you an answer now.”
+
+“Why not, why not?” returned Honaton, who felt that he had given up half
+an hour for nothing if the thing couldn’t be settled on the spot; and
+even Benson, Wayne noticed, began to glower.
+
+“You could probably give us as good an answer to-day as to-morrow,”
+he said.
+
+Nothing roused Pete’s spirit like feeling a tremor in his own soul, and
+so he now answered with great firmness:
+
+“I cannot give you an answer to-day _or_ to-morrow.”
+
+“It’s all off, then, all off,” said Honaton, moving to the door.
+
+“When do the Chinese boats sail, Mr. Honaton?” said Pete, with the
+innocence of manner that an employee should use when putting his superior
+in a hole.
+
+“I don’t see what difference that makes to you, Wayne, if you’re not
+taking them,” said Honaton, as if he were triumphantly concealing the
+fact that he didn’t know.
+
+“Don’t feel you have to wait, Jack, if you’re in a hurry,” said his
+partner, and when the other had slid out of the office Benson turned to
+Wayne and went on: “You wouldn’t have to go until a week from Saturday.
+You would have to get off then, and we should have to know in time to
+find some one else in case you don’t care for it.”
+
+Pete asked for three days, and presently left the office.
+
+He had a friend, one of his mother’s reformed drunkards, who as janitor
+lived on the top floor of a tall building. He and his wife offered Wayne
+the hospitality of their balcony, and now and then, in moments like this,
+he availed himself of it. Not, indeed, that there had ever been a moment
+quite like this; for he knew that he was facing the most important
+decision he had ever been forced to make.
+
+In the elevator he met the janitor’s cat Susan going home after an
+afternoon visit to the restaurant on the sixteenth floor. The elevator
+boy loved to tell how she never made a mistake in the floor.
+
+“Do you think she’d get off at the fifteenth or the seventeenth? Not she.
+Sometimes she puts her nose out and smells at the other floors, but she
+won’t get off until I stop at the right one. Sometimes she has to ride up
+and down three or four times before any one wants the sixteenth. Eh,
+Susan?” he added in caressing tones; but Susan was watching the floors
+flash past and paid no attention until, arrived at the top, she and Pete
+stepped off together.
+
+It was a cool, clear day, for the wind was from the north, but on the
+southern balcony the sun was warm. Pete sat down in the kitchen-chair
+set for him, tilted back, and looked out over the Statue of Liberty,
+which stood like a stunted baby, to the blue Narrows. He saw one
+thing clearly, and that was that he would not go if Mathilde would not
+go with him.
+
+He envied people who could make up their minds by thinking. At least
+sometimes he envied them and sometimes he thought they lied. He could
+only think _about_ a subject and wait for the unknown gods to bring him a
+decision. And this is what he now did, with his eyes fixed on the towers
+and tanks and tenements, on the pale winter sky, and, when he got up and
+leaned his elbows on the parapet, on the crowds that looked like a flood
+of purple insects in the streets.
+
+He thought of Mathilde’s youth and his own untried capacities for
+success, of poverty and children, of the probable opposition of
+Mathilde’s family and of a strange, sinister, disintegrating power he
+felt or suspected in Mrs. Farron. He felt that it was a terrible risk to
+ask a young girl to take and that it was almost an insult to be afraid to
+ask her to take it. That was what his mother had always said about these
+cherished, protected creatures: they were not prepared to meet any strain
+in life. He knew he would not have hesitated to ask a girl differently
+brought up. Ought he to ask Mathilde or ought he not even to hesitate
+about asking her? In his own future he had confidence. He had an unusual
+power of getting his facts together so that they meant something. In a
+small way his work was recognized. A report of his had some weight. He
+felt certain that if on his return he wanted another position he could
+get it unless he made a terrible fiasco in China. Should he consult any
+one? He knew beforehand what they would all think about it. Mr. Lanley
+would think that it was sheer impertinence to want to marry his
+granddaughter on less than fifteen thousand dollars a year; Mrs. Farron
+would think that there were lots of equally agreeable young men in the
+world who would not take a girl to China; and his mother, whom he could
+not help considering the wisest of the three, would think that Mathilde
+lacked discipline and strength of will for such an adventure. And on this
+he found he made up his mind. “After all,” he said to himself as he put
+the chair back against the wall, “everything else would be failure, and
+this may be success.”
+
+It was the afternoon that Farron was brought back from the hospital, and
+he and Mathilde were sure of having the drawing-room to themselves. He
+told her the situation slowly and with a great deal of detail,
+chronologically, introducing the Chinese trip at the very end. But she
+did not at once understand.
+
+“O Pete, you would not go away from me!” she said. “I could not
+face that.”
+
+“Couldn’t you? Remember that everything you say is going to be used
+against you.”
+
+“Would you be willing to go, Pete?”
+
+“Only if you will go with me.”
+
+“Oh!” she clasped her hands to her breast, shrinking back to look at
+him. So that was what he had meant, this stranger whom she had known for
+such a short time. As she looked she half expected that he would smile,
+and say it was all a joke; but his eyes were steadily and seriously
+fixed on hers. It was very queer, she thought. Their meeting, their
+first kiss, their engagement, had all seemed so inevitable, so natural,
+there had not been a hint of doubt or decision about it; but now all of
+a sudden she found herself faced by a situation in which it was
+impossible to say yes or no.
+
+“It would be wonderful, of course,” she said, after a minute, but her
+tone showed she was not considering it as a possibility.
+
+Wayne’s heart sank; he saw that he had thought it possible that he would
+not allow her to go, but that he had never seriously faced the chance of
+her refusing.
+
+“Mathilde,” he said, “it’s far and sudden, and we shall be poor, and I
+can’t promise that I shall succeed more than other fellows; and yet
+against all that--”
+
+She looked at him.
+
+“You don’t think I care for those things? I don’t care if you succeed or
+fail, or live all your life in Siam.”
+
+“What is it, then?”
+
+“Pete, it’s my mother. She would never consent.”
+
+Wayne was aware of this, but, then, as he pointed out to Mathilde with
+great care, Mrs. Farron could not bear for her daughter the pain of
+separation.
+
+“Separation!” cried the girl, “But you just said you would not go if
+I did not.”
+
+“If you put your mother before me, mayn’t I put my profession
+before you?”
+
+“My dear, don’t speak in that tone.”
+
+“Why, Mathilde,” he said, and he sprang up and stood looking down at her
+from a little distance, “this is the real test. We have thought we loved
+each other--”
+
+“Thought!” she interrupted.
+
+“But to get engaged with no immediate prospect of marriage, with all
+our families and friends grouped about, that doesn’t mean such a
+lot, does it?”
+
+“It does to me,” she answered almost proudly.
+
+“Now, one of us has to sacrifice something. I want to go on this
+expedition. I want to succeed. That may be egotism or legitimate
+ambition. I don’t know, but I want to go. I think I mean to go. Ought
+I to give it up because you are afraid of your mother?”
+
+“It’s love, not fear, Pete.”
+
+“You love me, too, you say.”
+
+“I feel an obligation to her.”
+
+“And, good Heavens! do you feel none to me?”
+
+“No, no. I love you too much to feel an obligation to you.”
+
+“But you love your mother _and_ feel an obligation to her. Why, Mathilde,
+that feeling of obligation _is_ love--love in its most serious form.
+That’s what you don’t feel for me. That’s why you won’t go.”
+
+“I haven’t said I wouldn’t go.”
+
+“You never even thought of going.”
+
+“I have, I do. But how can I help hesitating? You must know I want to
+go.”
+
+“I see very little sign of it,” he murmured. The interview had not gone
+as he intended. He had not meant, he never imagined, that he would
+attempt to urge and coerce her; but her very detachment seemed to set a
+fire burning within him.
+
+“I think,” he said with an effort to sound friendly, “that I had better
+go and let you think this over by yourself.”
+
+He was actually moving to the door when she sprang up and put her arms
+about him.
+
+“Weren’t you even going to kiss me, Pete?”
+
+He stooped, and touched her cheek with his lips.
+
+“Do you call that a kiss?”
+
+“O Mathilde, do you think any kiss will change the facts?” he answered,
+and was gone.
+
+As soon as he had left her the desire for tears left her, too. She felt
+calm and more herself, more an isolated, independent human being than
+ever before in her life. She thought of all the things she ought to have
+said to Pete. The reason why she felt no obligation to him was that she
+was one with him. She was prepared to sacrifice him exactly as she was,
+or ought to be, willing to sacrifice herself; whereas her mother--it
+seemed as if her mother’s power surrounded her in every direction, as
+solid as the ancients believed the dome of heaven.
+
+Pringle appeared in the doorway in his eternal hunt for the tea-things.
+
+“May I take the tray, miss?” he said.
+
+She nodded, hardly glancing at the untouched tea-table. Pringle, as he
+bent over it, observed that it was nice to have Mr. Farron back.
+Mathilde remembered that she, too, had once been interested in her
+stepfather’s return.
+
+“Where’s my mother, Pringle?”
+
+“Mrs. Farron’s in her room, I think, miss, and Mr. Lanley’s with her.”
+
+Lanley had stopped as usual to ask after his son-in-law. He found his
+daughter writing letters in her room. He thought her looking cross, but
+in deference to her recent anxieties he called it, even in his own mind,
+overstrained.
+
+“Vincent is doing very well, I believe,” she answered in response to his
+question. “He ought to be. He is in charge of two lovely young creatures
+hardly Mathilde’s age who have already taken complete control of the
+household.”
+
+“You’ve seen him, of course.”
+
+“For a few minutes; they allow me a few minutes. They communicate by
+secret signals when they think I have stayed long enough.”
+
+Mr. Lanley never knew how to treat this mood of his daughter’s, which
+seemed to him as unreasonable as if it were emotional, and yet as cold as
+if it were logic itself. He changed the subject and said boldly:
+
+“Mrs. Baxter is coming to-morrow.”
+
+Adelaide’s eyes faintly flashed.
+
+“Oh, wouldn’t you know it!” she murmured. “Just at the most inconvenient
+time--inconvenient for me, I mean. Really, lovers are the only people you
+can depend on. I wish I had a lover.”
+
+“Adelaide,” said her father with some sternness, “even in fun you should
+not say such a thing. If Mathilde heard you--”
+
+“Mathilde is the person who made me see it. Her boy is here all the
+time, trying to think of something to please her. And who have I?
+Vincent has his nurses; and you have your old upholstered lady. I can’t
+help wishing I had a lover. They are the only people who, as the Wayne
+boy would say, ‘stick around.’ But don’t worry, Papa, I have a loyal
+nature.” She was interrupted by a knock at the door, and a nurse--the
+same who had been too encouraging to please her at the hospital--put in
+her head and said brightly:
+
+“You may see Mr. Farron now, Mrs. Farron.”
+
+Adelaide turned to her father and made a little bow.
+
+“See how I am favored,” she said, and left him.
+
+Nothing of this mood was apparent when she entered her husband’s room,
+though she noticed that the arrangement of the furniture had been
+changed, and, what she disliked even more, that they had brushed his hair
+in a new way. This, with his pallor and thinness, made him look strange
+to her. She bent over, and laid her cheek to his almost motionless lips.
+
+“Well, dear,” she said, “have you seen the church-warden part they have
+given your hair?”
+
+He shook his head impatiently, and she saw she had made the mistake of
+trying to give the tone to an interview in which she was not the leading
+character.
+
+“Who has the room above mine, Adelaide?” he asked.
+
+“My maid.”
+
+“Ask her not to practice the fox-trot, will you?”
+
+“O Vincent, she is never there.”
+
+“My mistake,” he answered, and shut his eyes.
+
+She repented at once.
+
+“Of course I’ll tell her. I’m sorry that you were disturbed.” But she
+was thinking only of his tone. He was not an irritable man, and he had
+never used such a tone to her before. All pleasure in the interview was
+over. She was actually glad when one of the nurses came in and began to
+move about the room in a manner that suggested dismissal.
+
+“Of course I’m not angry,” she said to herself. “He’s so weak one must
+humor him like a child.”
+
+She derived some satisfaction, however, from the idea of sending for her
+maid Lucie and making her uncomfortable; but on her way she met Mathilde
+in the hall.
+
+“May I speak to you, Mama?” she said.
+
+Mrs. Farron laughed.
+
+“May you speak to me?” she said. “Why, yes; you may have the unusual
+privilege. What is it?”
+
+Mathilde followed her mother into the bedroom and shut the door.
+
+“Pete has just been here. He has been offered a position in China.”
+
+“In China?” said Mrs. Farron. This was the first piece of luck that had
+come to her in a long time, but she did not betray the least pleasure. “I
+hope it is a good one.”
+
+“Yes, he thinks it good. He sails in two weeks.”
+
+“In two weeks?” And this time she could not prevent her eye lighting a
+little. She thought how nicely that small complication had settled
+itself, and how clever she had been to have the mother to dinner and
+behave as if she were friendly. She did not notice that her daughter was
+trembling; she couldn’t, of course, be expected to know that the girl’s
+hands were like ice, and that she had waited several seconds to steady
+her voice sufficiently to pronounce the fatal sentence:
+
+“He wants me to go with him, Mama.”
+
+She watched her mother in an agony for the effect of these words.
+Mrs. Farron had suddenly detected a new burn in the hearth-rug. She
+bent over it.
+
+“This wood does snap so!” she murmured.
+
+The rug was a beautiful old Persian carpet of roses and urns.
+
+“Did you understand what I said, Mama?”
+
+“Yes, dear; that Mr. Wayne was going to China in two weeks and wanted you
+to go, too. Was it just a _politesse_, or does he actually imagine that
+you could?”
+
+“He thinks I can.”
+
+Mrs. Farron laughed good-temperedly.
+
+“Did you go and see about having your pink silk shortened?” she said.
+
+Mathilde stared at her mother, and in the momentary silence Lucie came in
+and asked what madame wanted for the evening, and Adelaide in her fluent
+French began explaining that what she really desired most was that Lucie
+should not make so much noise in her room that monsieur could not sleep.
+In the midst of it she stopped and turned to her daughter.
+
+“Won’t you be late for dinner, darling?” she said.
+
+Mathilde thought it very possible, and went away to get dressed. She went
+into her own room and shut the door sharply behind her.
+
+All the time she was dressing she tried to rehearse her case--that it
+was her life, her love, her chance; but all the time she had a sickening
+sense that a lifted eye-brow of her mother’s would make it sound childish
+and absurd even in her own ears. She had counted on a long evening, but
+when she went down-stairs she found three or four friends of her mother’s
+were to dine and go to the theater. The dinner was amusing, the talk,
+though avowedly hampered by the presence of Mathilde, was witty and
+unexpected enough; but Mathilde was not amused by it, for she
+particularly dreaded her mother in such a mood of ruthless gaiety. At the
+theater they were extremely critical, and though they missed almost the
+whole first act, appeared, in the entr’acte, to feel no hesitation in
+condemning it. They spoke of French and Italian actors by name, laughed
+heartily over the playwright’s conception of social usages, and made
+Mathilde feel as if her own unacknowledged enjoyment of the play was the
+guiltiest of secrets.
+
+As they drove home, she was again alone with her mother, and she said at
+once the sentence she had determined on:
+
+“I don’t think you understood, Mama, how seriously I meant what I said
+this afternoon.”
+
+Mrs. Farron was bending her long-waisted figure forward to get a good
+look at a picture which, small, lonely, and brightly lighted, hung in a
+picture-dealer’s window. It was a picture of an empty room. Hot summer
+sunlight filtered through the lowered Venetian blinds, and fell in bands
+on the golden wood of the floor. Outside the air was burned and dusty,
+but inside the room all was clear, cool, and pure.
+
+“How perfect his things are,” murmured Mrs. Farron to herself, and then
+added to her daughter: “Yes, my dear, I did take in what you said. You
+really think you are in love with this Wayne boy, don’t you? It’s
+immensely to your credit, darling,” she went on, her tone taking on a
+flattering sweetness, “to care so much about any one who has such funny,
+stubby little hands--most unattractive hands,” she added almost dreamily.
+
+There was a long pause during which an extraordinary thing happened to
+Mathilde. She found that it didn’t make the very slightest difference to
+her what her mother thought of Pete or his hands, that it would never
+make any difference to her again. It was as if her will had suddenly
+been born, and the first act of that will was to decide to go with the
+man she loved. How could she have doubted for an instant? It was so
+simple, and no opposition would or could mean anything to her. She was
+not in the least angry; on the contrary, she felt extremely pitiful, as
+if she were saying good-by to some one who did not know she was going
+away, as if in a sense she had now parted from her mother forever. Tears
+came into her eyes.
+
+“Ah, Mama!” she said like a sigh.
+
+Mrs. Farron felt she had been cruel, but without regretting it; for that,
+she thought, was often a parent’s duty.
+
+“I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Mathilde. The boy is a nice enough
+little person, but really I could not let you set off for China at a
+minute’s notice with any broker’s clerk who happened to fall in love with
+your golden hair. When you have a little more experience you will
+discriminate between the men you like to have love you and the men there
+is the smallest chance of your loving. I assure you, if little Wayne were
+not in love with you, you would think him a perfectly commonplace boy. If
+one of your friends were engaged to him, you would be the first to say
+that you wondered what it was she saw in him. That isn’t the way one
+wants people to feel about one’s husband, is it? And as to going to China
+with him, you know that’s impossible, don’t you?”
+
+“It would be impossible to let him go without me.”
+
+“Really, Mathilde!” said Mrs. Farron, gently, as if she, so willing to
+play fair, were being put off with fantasies. “I don’t understand you,”
+she added.
+
+“No, Mama; you don’t.”
+
+The motor stopped at the door, and they went in silence to Mrs. Farron’s
+room, where for a bitter hour they talked, neither yielding an inch. At
+last Adelaide sent the girl to bed. Mathilde was aware of profound
+physical exhaustion, and yet underneath there was a high knowledge of
+something unbreakable within her.
+
+Left alone, Adelaide turned instinctively toward her husband’s door.
+There were her strength and vision. Then she remembered, and drew back;
+but presently, hearing a stir there, she knocked very softly. A nurse
+appeared on the instant.
+
+“Oh, _please_, Mrs. Farron! Mr. Farron has just got to sleep.”
+
+Adelaide stood alone in the middle of the floor. Once again, she thought,
+in a crisis of her life she had no one to depend on but herself. She
+lifted her shoulders. No one was to blame, but there the fact was. They
+urged you to cling and be guided, but when the pinch came, you had to act
+for yourself. She had learned her lesson now. Henceforward she took her
+own life over into her own hands.
+
+She reviewed her past dependences. Her youth, with its dependence on her
+father, particularly in matters of dress. She recalled her early
+photographs with a shudder. Had she really dressed so badly or was it
+only the change of fashion? And then her dependence on Joe Severance.
+What could be more ridiculous than for a woman of her intelligence to
+allow herself to be guided in everything by a man like Joe, who had
+nothing himself but a certain shrewd masculinity? And now Vincent. She
+was still under the spell of his superiority, but perhaps she would come
+to judge him too. She had learned much from him. Perhaps she had learned
+all he had to teach her. Her face looked as if it were carved out of some
+smooth white stone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+After she had gone up-stairs, Mathilde went down again to telephone Pete
+that she had made her decision. She went boldly snapping electric
+switches, for her going was a sort of assertion of her right to
+independent action. She would have hesitated even less if she had known
+how welcome her news was, how he had suffered since their parting.
+
+On going home from his interview with her, he found his mother dressing
+to dine with Mr. Lanley, a party arranged before the unexpected arrival
+of Mrs. Baxter. The only part of dressing that delayed Mrs. Wayne was her
+hair, which was so long that the brushing of it took time. In this
+process she was engaged when her son, in response to her answer, came
+into her room.
+
+“How is Mr. Farron?” she asked at once, and he, rather touched at the
+genuineness of her interest, answered her in detail before her next
+exclamation betrayed that it was entirely for the employer of Marty
+Burke that she was solicitous. “Isn’t it too bad he was taken ill just
+now?” she said.
+
+The bitterness and doubt from which Wayne was suffering were not emotions
+that disposed him to confidence. He did not want to tell his mother what
+he was going through, for the obvious and perhaps unworthy reason that it
+was just what she would have expected him to go through. At the same time
+a real deceit was involved in concealing it, and so, tipping his chair
+back against her wall, he said:
+
+“The firm has asked me to go to China for them.”
+
+His mother turned, her whole face lit up with interest.
+
+“To China! How interesting!” she said. “China is a wonderful country. How
+I should like to go to China!”
+
+“Come along. I don’t start for two weeks.”
+
+She shook her head.
+
+“No, if you go, I’ll make a trip to that hypnotic clinic of Dr.
+Platerbridge’s; and if I can learn the trick, I will open one here.”
+
+The idea crossed Wayne’s mind that perhaps he had not the power of
+inspiring affection.
+
+“You don’t miss people a bit, do you, Mother?” he said.
+
+“Yes, Pete, I do; only there is so much to be done. What does Mathilde
+say to you going off like this? How long will you be gone?”
+
+“More than a year.”
+
+“Pete, how awful for her!”
+
+“There is nothing to prevent her going with me.”
+
+“You couldn’t take that child to China.”
+
+“You may be glad to know that she is cordially of your opinion.”
+
+The feeling behind his tone at last attracted his mother’s full
+attention.
+
+“But, my dear boy,” she said gently, “she has never been anywhere in her
+life without a maid. She probably doesn’t know how to do her hair or mend
+her clothes or anything practical.”
+
+“Mother dear, you are not so awfully practical yourself,” he answered;
+“but you would have gone.”
+
+Mrs. Wayne looked impish.
+
+“I always loved that sort of thing,” she said; and then, becoming more
+maternal, she added, “and that doesn’t mean it would be sensible because
+I’d do it.”
+
+“Well,”--Wayne stood up preparatory to leaving the room,--“I mean to take
+her if she’ll go.”
+
+His mother, who had now finished winding her braid very neatly around her
+head, sank into a chair.
+
+“Oh, dear!” she said, “I almost wish I weren’t dining with Mr. Lanley.
+He’ll think it’s all my fault.”
+
+“I doubt if he knows about it.”
+
+Mrs. Wayne’s eyes twinkled.
+
+“May I tell him? I should like to see his face.”
+
+“Tell him I am going, if you like. Don’t say I want to take her with me.”
+
+Her face fell.
+
+“That wouldn’t be much fun,” she answered, “because I suppose the truth
+is they won’t be sorry to have you out of the way.”
+
+“I suppose not,” he said, and shut the door behind him. He could not
+truthfully say that his mother had been much of a comfort. He had
+suddenly thought that he would go down to the first floor and get Lily
+Parret to go to the theater with him. He and she had the warm friendship
+for each other of two handsome, healthy young people of opposite sexes
+who might have everything to give each other except time. She was
+perhaps ten years older than he, extremely handsome, with dimples and
+dark red hair and blue eyes. She had a large practice among the poor,
+and might have made a conspicuous success of her profession if it had
+not been for her intense and too widely diffused interest. She wanted to
+strike a blow at every abuse that came to her attention, and as, in the
+course of her work, a great many turned up, she was always striking
+blows and never following them up. She went through life in a series of
+springs, each one in a different direction; but the motion of her
+attack was as splendid as that of a tiger. Often she was successful, and
+always she enjoyed herself.
+
+When she answered Pete’s ring, and he looked up at her magnificent
+height, her dimples appeared in welcome. She really was glad to see him.
+
+“Come out and dine with me, Lily, and go to the theater.”
+
+“Come to a meeting at Cooper Union on capital punishment. I’m going to
+speak, and I’m going to be very good.”
+
+“No, Lily; I want to explain to you what a pitiable sex you belong to.
+You have no character, no will--”
+
+She shook her head, laughing.
+
+“You are a personal lot, you young men,” she said. “You change your mind
+about women every day, according to how one of them treats you.”
+
+“They don’t amount to a row of pins, Lily.”
+
+“Certainly some men select that kind, Pete.”
+
+“O Lily,” he answered, “don’t talk to me like that! I want some one to
+tell me I’m perfect, and, strangely enough, no one will.”
+
+“I will,” she answered, with beaming good nature, “and I pretty near
+think so, too. But I can’t dine with you, Pete. Wouldn’t you like to go
+to my meeting?”
+
+“I should perfectly hate to,” he answered, and went off crossly, to
+dine at his college’s local club. Here he found an old friend, who most
+fortunately said something derogatory of the firm of Benson & Honaton.
+The opinion coincided with certain phases of Wayne’s own views, but he
+contradicted it, held it up to ridicule, and ended by quoting incidents
+in the history of his friend’s own firm which, as he said, were
+probably among the crookedest things that had ever been put over in
+Wall Street. Lily would not have distracted his mind more completely.
+He felt almost cheerful when he went home about ten o’clock. His mother
+was still out, and there was no letter from Mathilde. He had been
+counting on finding one.
+
+Before long his mother came in. She was looking very fine. She had on a
+new gray dress that she had had made for her by a fallen woman from an
+asylum, but which had turned out better than such ventures of Mrs.
+Wayne’s usually did.
+
+She had supposed she and Mr. Lanley were to dine alone, an idea which
+had not struck her as revolutionary. Accustomed to strange meals in
+strange company--a bowl of milk with a prison chaplain at a dairy
+lunch-room, or even, on one occasion, a supper in an Owl Lunch Wagon with
+a wavering drunkard,--she had thought that a quiet, perfect dinner with
+Mr. Lanley sounded pleasant enough. But she was not sorry to find it had
+been enlarged. She liked to meet new people. She was extremely
+optimistic, and always hoped that they would prove either spiritually
+rewarding, or practically useful to some of her projects. When she saw
+Mrs. Baxter, with her jetty hair, jeweled collar, and eyes a trifle too
+saurian for perfect beauty, she at once saw a subscription to the
+working-girl’s club. The fourth person Mr. Wilsey, Lanley’s lawyer, she
+knew well by reputation. She wondered if she could make him see that his
+position on the eight-hour law was absolutely anti-social.
+
+Mr. Lanley enjoyed a small triumph when she entered. He had been so
+discreet in his description of her to Mrs. Baxter, he had been so careful
+not to hint that she was an illuminating personality who had suddenly
+come into his life, that he knew he had left his old friend with the
+general impression that Mrs. Wayne was merely the mother of an
+undesirable suitor of Mathilde’s who spent most of her life in the
+company of drunkards. So when she came in, a little late as usual, in her
+long, soft, gray dress, with a pink rose at her girdle, looking far more
+feminine than Mrs. Baxter, about whom Adelaide’s offensive adjective
+“upholstered” still clung, he felt the full effect of her appearance. He
+even enjoyed the obviously suspicious glance which Mrs. Baxter
+immediately afterward turned upon him.
+
+At dinner things began well. They talked about people and events of which
+Mrs. Wayne knew nothing, but her interest and good temper made her not an
+outsider, but an audience. Anecdotes which even Mr. Lanley might have
+felt were trivial gossip became, through her attention to them, incidents
+of the highest human interest. Such an uncritical interest was perhaps
+too stimulating.
+
+He expected nothing dangerous when, during the game course, Mrs. Baxter
+turned to him and asked how Mathilde had enjoyed what she referred to as
+“her first winter.”
+
+Mr. Lanley liked to talk about Mathilde. He described, with a little
+natural exaggeration, how much she had enjoyed herself and how popular
+she had been.
+
+“I hope she hasn’t been bitten by any of those modern notions,” said
+Mrs. Baxter.
+
+Mr. Wilsey broke in.
+
+“Oh, these modern, restless young women!” he said. “They don’t seem able
+to find their natural contentment in their own homes. My daughter came to
+me the other day with a wonderful scheme of working all day long with
+charity organizations. I said to her, ‘My dear, charity begins at home.’
+My wife, Mrs. Baxter, is an old-fashioned housekeeper. She gives out all
+supplies used in my house; she knows where the servants are at every
+minute of the day, and we have nine. She--”
+
+“Oh, how is dear Mrs. Wilsey?” said Mrs. Baxter, perhaps not eager for
+the full list of her activities.
+
+“Well, at present she is in a sanatorium,” replied her husband, “from
+overwork, just plain overwork.”
+
+Mr. Lanley, catching Mrs. Wayne’s twinkling eye, could only pray that
+she would not point out that a sojourn in a sanatorium was not
+complete contentment in the home; but before she had a chance, Mrs.
+Baxter had gone on.
+
+“That’s so like the modern girl--anything but her obvious duty. She’ll
+help any one but her mother and work anywhere but in the home. We’ve had
+a very painful case at home lately. One of our most charming young girls
+has suddenly developed an absolutely morbid curiosity about the things
+that take place in the women’s courts. Why, as her poor father said to
+me, ‘Mrs. Baxter, old as I am, I hear things in those courts so shocking
+I have hard work forgetting them; and yet Imogen wants me to let her go
+into those courts day after day--’”
+
+“Oh, that’s abnormal, almost perverted,” said Mr. Wilsey, judicially.
+“The women’s courts are places where no--” he hesitated a bare instant,
+and Mrs. Wayne asked:
+
+“No woman should go?”
+
+“No girl should go.”
+
+“Yet many of the girls who come there are under sixteen.”
+
+Mr. Wilsey hid a slight annoyance under a manner peculiarly bland.
+
+“Ah, dear lady,” he said, “you must forgive my saying that that remark is
+a trifle irrelevant.”
+
+“Is it?” she asked, meaning him to answer her; but he only looked
+benevolently at her, and turned to listen to Mrs. Baxter, who was saying:
+
+“Yes, everywhere we look nowadays we see women rushing into things they
+don’t understand, and of course we all know what women are--”
+
+“What are they?” asked Mrs. Wayne, and Lanley’s heart sank.
+
+“Oh, emotional and inaccurate and untrustworthy and spiteful.”
+
+“Mrs. Baxter, I’m sure you’re not like that.”
+
+“My dear Madam!” exclaimed Wilsey.
+
+“But isn’t that logical?” Mrs. Wayne pursued. “If all women are so, and
+she’s a woman?”
+
+“Ah, logic, dear lady,” said Wilsey, holding up a finger--“logic, you
+know, has never been the specialty of your sex.”
+
+“Of course it’s logic,” said Lanley, crossly. “If you say all Americans
+are liars, Wilsey, and you’re an American, the logical inference is that
+you think yourself a liar. But Mrs. Baxter doesn’t mean that she thinks
+all women are inferior--”
+
+“I must say I prefer men,” she answered almost coquettishly.
+
+“If all women were like you, Mrs. Baxter, I’d believe in giving them the
+vote,” said Wilsey.
+
+“Please don’t,” she answered. “I don’t want it.”
+
+“Ah, the clever ones don’t.”
+
+“I never pretended to be clever.”
+
+“Perhaps not; but I’d trust your intuition where I would pay no attention
+to a clever person.”
+
+Lanley laughed.
+
+“I think you’d better express that a little differently, Wilsey,” he
+said; but his legal adviser did not notice him.
+
+“My daughter came to me the other day,” he went on to Mrs. Baxter, “and
+said, ‘Father, don’t you think women ought to have the vote some day?’
+and I said, ‘Yes, my dear, just as soon as men have the babies.’”
+
+“There’s no answer to that,” said Mrs. Baxter.
+
+“I fancy not,” said Wilsey. “I think I put the essence of it in that
+sentence.”
+
+“If ever women get into power in this country, I shall live abroad.”
+
+“O Mrs. Baxter,” said Mrs. Wayne, “really you don’t understand women--”
+
+“I don’t? Why, Mrs. Wayne, I am a woman.”
+
+“All human beings are spiteful and inaccurate and all those things you
+said; but that isn’t _all_ they are. The women I see, the wives of my
+poor drunkards are so wonderful, so patient. They are mothers and
+wage-earners and sick nurses, too; they’re not the sort of women you
+describe. Perhaps,” she added, with one of her fatal impulses toward
+concession, “perhaps your friends are untrustworthy and spiteful, as
+you say--”
+
+Mrs. Baxter drew herself up. “My friends, Mrs. Wayne,” she said--“my
+friends, I think, will compare favorably even with the wives of your
+drunkards.”
+
+Mr. Lanley rose to his feet.
+
+“Shall we go up-stairs?” he said. Mr. Wilsey offered Mrs. Baxter his
+arm. “An admirable answer that of yours,” he murmured as he led her from
+the room, “admirable snub to her perfectly unwarranted attack on you and
+your friends.”
+
+“Of course you realize that she doesn’t know any of the people I know,”
+said Mrs. Baxter. “Why should she begin to abuse them?”
+
+Mr. Wilsey laughed, and shook his finger.
+
+“Just because she doesn’t know them. That, I’m afraid, is the rub. That’s
+what I usually find lies behind the socialism of socialists--the sense of
+being excluded. This poor lady has evidently very little _usage du
+monde_. It is her pitiful little protest, dear Madam, against your charm,
+your background, your grand manner.”
+
+They sank upon an ample sofa near the fire, and though the other end of
+the large room was chilly, Lanley and Mrs. Wayne moved thither with a
+common impulse.
+
+Mrs. Wayne turned almost tearfully to Lanley.
+
+“I’m so sorry I’ve spoiled your party,” she said.
+
+“You’ve done much worse than that,” he returned gravely.
+
+“O Mr. Lanley,” she wailed, “what have I done?”
+
+“You’ve spoiled a friendship.”
+
+“Between you and me?”
+
+He shook his head.
+
+“Between them and me. I never heard people talk such nonsense, and yet
+I’ve been hearing people talk like that all my life, and have never taken
+it in. Mrs. Wayne, I want you to tell me something frankly--”
+
+“Oh, I’m so terrible when I’m frank,” she said.
+
+“Do I talk like that?”
+
+She looked at him and looked away again.
+
+“Good God! you think I do!”
+
+“No, you don’t talk like that often, but I think you feel that way a
+good deal.”
+
+“I don’t want to,” he answered. “I’m sixty-four, but I don’t ever want to
+talk like Wilsey. Won’t you stop me whenever I do?”
+
+Mrs. Wayne sighed.
+
+“It will make you angry.”
+
+“And if it does?”
+
+“I hate to make people angry. I was distressed that evening on the pier.”
+
+He looked up, startled.
+
+“I suppose I talked like Wilsey that night?”
+
+“You said you might be old-fashioned but--”
+
+“Don’t, please, tell me what I said, Mrs. Wayne.” He went on more
+seriously: “I’ve got to an age when I can’t expect great happiness from
+life--just a continuance of fairly satisfactory outside conditions; but
+since I’ve known you, I’ve felt a lightening, a brightening, an
+intensifying of my own inner life that I believe comes as near happiness
+as anything I’ve ever felt, and I don’t want to lose it on account of a
+reactionary old couple like that on the sofa over there.”
+
+He dreaded being left alone with the reactionary old couple when
+presently Mrs. Wayne, very well pleased with her evening, took her
+departure. He assisted her into her taxi, and as he came upstairs with a
+buoyant step, he wished it were not ridiculous at his age to feel so
+light-hearted.
+
+He saw that his absence had given his guests an instant of freer
+criticism, for they were tucking away smiles as he entered.
+
+“A very unusual type, is she not, our friend, Mrs. Wayne?” said Wilsey.
+
+“A little bit of a reformer, I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Baxter.
+
+“Don’t be too hard on her,” answered Lanley.
+
+“Oh, very charming, very charming,” put in Wilsey, feeling, perhaps, that
+Mrs. Baxter had been severe; “but the poor lady’s mind is evidently
+seething with a good many undigested ideas.”
+
+“You should have pointed out the flaws in her reasoning, Wilsey,”
+said his host.
+
+“Argue with a woman, Lanley!” Mr. Wilsey held up his hand in protest.
+“No, no, I never argue with a woman. They take it so personally.”
+
+“I think we had an example of that this evening,” said Mrs. Baxter.
+
+“Yes, indeed,” the lawyer went on. “See how the dear lady missed the
+point, and became so illogical and excited under our little discussion.”
+
+“Funny,” said Lanley. “I got just the opposite impression.”
+
+“Opposite?”
+
+“I thought it was you who missed the point, Wilsey.”
+
+He saw how deeply he had betrayed himself as the others exchanged a
+startled glance. It was Mrs. Baxter who thought of the correct reply.
+
+“_Were_ there any points?” she asked.
+
+Wilsey shook his finger.
+
+“Ah, don’t be cruel!” he said, and held out his hand to say good night;
+but Lanley was smoking, with his head tilted up and his eyes on the
+ceiling. What he was thinking was, “It isn’t good for an old man to get
+as angry as I am.”
+
+“Good night, Lanley; a delightful evening.”
+
+Mr. Lanley’s chin came down.
+
+“Oh, good night, Wilsey; glad you found it so.”
+
+When he was gone, Mrs. Baxter observed that he was a most agreeable
+companion.
+
+“So witty, so amiable, and, for a leader at the bar, he has an
+extraordinarily light touch.”
+
+Mr. Lanley had resumed his position on the hearth-rug and his
+contemplation of the ceiling.
+
+“Wilsey’s not a leader at the bar,” he said, with open crossness.
+
+He showed no disposition to sit and chat over the events of the evening.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Early the next morning, in Mrs. Baxter’s parlance,--that is to say, some
+little time before the sun had reached the meridian,--she was ringing
+Adelaide’s door-bell, while she minutely observed the curtains, the
+door-mat, the ivy plants in the vestibule, and the brightness of the
+brass knobs on the railing. In this she had a double motive: what was
+evil she would criticize, what was good she would copy.
+
+Adelaide was sitting with her husband when her visitor’s name was brought
+up. Since she had discovered that she was to be nothing but a sort of
+super-nurse to him, she found herself expert at rendering such service.
+She had brought in his favorite flowers, chosen a book for his bedside,
+and now sat gossiping beside him, not bringing him, as she said to
+herself, any of her real troubles; that would not be good for him. How
+extraordinarily easy it was to conceal, she thought. She heard her own
+tones, as gay and intimate as ever, as satisfactory to Vincent; and yet
+all the time her mind was working apart on her anxieties about
+Mathilde--anxieties with which, of course, one couldn’t bother a poor
+sick creature. She smoothed his pillow with the utmost tenderness.
+
+“Oh, Pringle,” she said, in answer to his announcement that Mrs. Baxter
+was down-stairs, “you haven’t let her in?”
+
+“She’s in the drawing-room, Madam.” And Pringle added as a clear
+indication of what he considered her duty, “She came in Mr. Lanley’s
+motor.”
+
+“Of course she did. Well, say I’ll be down,” and as Pringle went away
+with this encouraging intelligence, Adelaide sank even farther back in
+her chair and looked at her husband. “What I am called upon to sacrifice
+to other people’s love affairs! The Waynes and Mrs. Baxter--I never have
+time for my own friends. I don’t mind Mrs. Baxter when you’re well, and I
+can have a dinner; I ask all the stupid people together to whom I owe
+parties, and she is so pleased with them, and thinks they represent the
+most brilliant New York circle; but to have to go down and actually talk
+to her, isn’t that hard, Vin?”
+
+“Hard on me,” said Farron.
+
+“Oh, I shall come back--exhausted.”
+
+“By what you have given out?”
+
+“No, but by her intense intimacy. You have no idea how well she knows me.
+It’s Adelaide this and Adelaide that and ‘the last time you stayed with
+me in Baltimore.’ You know, Vin, I never stayed with her but once, and
+that only because she found me in the hotel and kidnapped me.
+However,”--Adelaide stood up with determination,--“one good thing is, I
+have begun to have an effect on my father. He does not like her any more.
+He was distinctly bored at the prospect of her visit this time. He did
+not resent it at all when I called her an upholstered old lady. I really
+think,” she added, with modest justice, “that I am rather good at
+poisoning people’s minds against their undesirable friends.” She paused,
+debating how long it would take her to separate Mathilde from the Wayne
+boy; and recalling that this was no topic for an invalid, she smiled at
+him and went down-stairs.
+
+“My dear Adelaide!” said Mrs. Baxter, enveloping her in a powdery
+caress.
+
+“How wonderfully you’re looking, Mrs. Baxter,” said Adelaide, choosing
+her adverb with intention.
+
+“Now tell me, dear,” said Mrs. Baxter, with a wave of a gloved hand,
+“what are those Italian embroideries?”
+
+“Those?” Adelaide lifted her eyebrows. “Ah, you’re in fun! A collector
+like you! Surely you know what those are.”
+
+“No,” answered Mrs. Baxter, firmly, though she wished she had selected
+something else to comment on.
+
+“Oh, they are the Villanelli embroideries,” said Adelaide, carelessly,
+very much as if she had said they were the Raphael cartoons, so that Mrs.
+Baxter was forced to reply in an awestruck tone:
+
+“You don’t tell me! Are they, really?”
+
+Adelaide nodded brightly. She had not actually made up the name. It
+was that of an obscure little palace where she had bought the
+hangings, and if Mrs. Baxter had had the courage to acknowledge
+ignorance, Adelaide would have told the truth. As it was, she
+recognized that by methods such as this she could retain absolute
+control over people like Mrs. Baxter.
+
+The lady from Baltimore decided on a more general scope.
+
+“Ah, your room!” she said. “Do you know whose it always reminds me
+of--that lovely salon of Madame de Liantour’s?”
+
+“What, of poor little Henrietta’s!” cried Adelaide, and she laid her hand
+appealingly for an instant on Mrs. Baxter’s knee. “That’s a cruel thing
+to say. All her good things, you know, were sold years ago. Everything
+she has is a reproduction. Am I really like her?”
+
+Getting out of this as best she could on a vague statement about
+atmosphere and sunshine and charm, Mrs. Baxter took refuge in inquiries
+about Vincent’s health, “your charming child,” and “your dear father.”
+
+“You know more about my dear father than I do,” returned Adelaide,
+sweetly. It was Mrs. Baxter’s cue.
+
+“I did not feel last evening that I knew anything about him at all. He
+is in a new phase, almost a new personality. Tell me, who is this
+Mrs. Wayne?”
+
+“Mrs. Wayne?” Mrs. Baxter must have felt herself revenged by the complete
+surprise of Adelaide’s tone.
+
+“Yes, she dined at the house last evening. Apparently it was to have been
+a tête-à-tête dinner, but my arrival changed it to a _partie carrée_.”
+She talked on about Wilsey and the conversation of the evening, but it
+made little difference what she said, for her full idea had reached
+Adelaide from the start, and had gathered to itself in an instant a
+hundred confirmatory memories. Like a picture, she saw before her Mrs.
+Wayne’s sitting-room, with the ink-spots on the rug. Who would not wish
+to exchange that for Mr. Lanley’s series of fresh, beautiful rooms?
+Suddenly she gave her attention back to Mrs. Baxter, who was saying:
+
+“I assure you, when we were alone I was prepared for a formal
+announcement.”
+
+It was not safe to be the bearer of ill tidings to Adelaide.
+
+“An announcement?” she said wonderingly. “Oh, no, Mrs. Baxter, my father
+will never marry again. There have always been rumors, and you can’t
+imagine how he and I have laughed over them together.”
+
+As the indisputable subject of such rumors in past times, Mrs. Baxter
+fitted a little arrow in her bow.
+
+“In the past,” she said, “women of suitable age have not perhaps been
+willing to consider the question, but this lady seems to me
+distinctly willing.”
+
+“More than willingness on the lady’s part has been needed,” answered
+Adelaide, and then Pringle’s ample form appeared in the doorway. “There’s
+a man from the office here, Madam, asking to see Mr. Farron.”
+
+“Mr. Farron can see no one.” A sudden light flashed upon her. “What is
+his name, Pringle?”
+
+“Burke, Madam.”
+
+“Oh, let him come in.” Adelaide turned to Mrs. Baxter. “I will show
+you,” she said, “one of the finest sights you ever saw.” The next
+instant Marty was in the room. Not so gorgeous as in his
+wedding-attire, he was still an exceedingly fine young animal. He was
+not so magnificently defiant as before, but he scowled at his
+unaccustomed surroundings under his dark brows.
+
+“It’s Mr. Farron I wanted to see,” he said, a soft roll to his r’s. At
+Mrs. Wayne’s Adelaide had suffered from being out of her own
+surroundings, but here she was on her own field, and she meant to make
+Burke feel it. She was leaning with her elbow on the back of the sofa,
+and now she slipped her bright rings down her slim fingers and shook them
+back again as she looked up at Burke and spoke to him as she would have
+done to a servant.
+
+“Mr. Farron cannot see you.”
+
+Cleverer people than Burke had struggled vainly against the poison of
+inferiority which this tone instilled into their minds.
+
+“That’s what they keep telling me down-town. I never knew him sick
+before.”
+
+“No?”
+
+“It wouldn’t take five minutes.”
+
+“Mr. Farron is too weak to see you.”
+
+Marty made a strange grating sound in his throat, and Adelaide asked
+like a queen bending from the throne:
+
+“What seems to be the matter, Burke?”
+
+“Why,”--Burke turned upon her the flare of his light, fierce eyes,--“they
+have it on me on the dock that as soon as he comes back he means to
+bounce me.”
+
+“To bounce you,” repeated Adelaide, and she almost smiled as she thought
+of that poor exhausted figure up-stairs.
+
+“I don’t care if he does or not,” Marty went on. “I’m not so damned stuck
+on the job. There’s others.”
+
+“There are maidens in Scotland more lovely by far,” murmured Adelaide.
+
+Again he scowled, feeling the approach of something hostile to him.
+
+“What’s that?” he asked, surmising that she was insulting him.
+
+“I said I supposed you could get a better job if you tried.”
+
+He did not like this tone either.
+
+“Well, whether I could or not,” he said, “this is no way. I’m losing my
+hold of my men.”
+
+“Oh, I can’t imagine your doing that, Burke.”
+
+He turned on her to see if she were really daring to laugh at him, and
+met an eye as steady as his own.
+
+“I guess I’m wasting my time here,” he said, and something intimated that
+some one would pay for that expenditure.
+
+“Shall I take a message to Mr. Farron for you?” said Adelaide.
+
+He nodded.
+
+“Yes. Tell him that if I’m to go, I’ll go to-day.”
+
+“I see.” She rose slowly, as if in response to a vague, amusing caprice.
+“Just that. If you go, you’ll go to-day.”
+
+For the first time Burke, regaining his self-confidence, saw that she was
+not an enemy, but an appreciative spectator, and his face broke up in a
+smile, queer, crooked, wrinkled, but brilliant.
+
+“I guess you’ll get it about right,” he said, and no compliment had ever
+pleased Adelaide half so much.
+
+“I think so,” she confidently answered, and then at the door she
+turned. “Oh, Mrs. Baxter,” she said, “this is Marty Burke, a very
+important person.”
+
+Importance, especially Adelaide Farron’s idea of importance, was a
+category for which Mrs. Baxter had the highest esteem, so almost against
+her will she looked at Burke, and found him looking her over with such a
+shrewd eye that she looked away, and then looked back again to find that
+his gaze was still upon her. He had made his living since he was a child
+by his faculty for sizing people up, and at his first glimpse of Mrs.
+Baxter’s shifting glance he had sized her up; so that now, when she
+remarked with an amiability at once ponderous and shaky that it was a
+very fine day, he replied in exactly the same tone, “It is that,” and
+began to walk about the room looking at the pictures. Presently a low,
+but sweet, whistle broke from his lips. He made her feel uncommonly
+uncomfortable, so uncomfortable that she was driven to conversation.
+
+“Are you fond of pictures, Burke?” she asked. He just looked at her over
+his shoulder without answering. She began to wish that Adelaide would
+come back.
+
+Adelaide had found her husband still accessible. He received in silence
+the announcement that Burke was down-stairs. She told the message
+without bias.
+
+“He says that they have it on him on the dock that he is to be bounced.
+He asked me to say this to you: that if he is to go, he’ll go to-day.”
+
+“What was his manner?”
+
+Adelaide could not resist a note of enjoyment entering into her tone as
+she replied:
+
+“Insolent in the extreme.”
+
+She was leaning against the wall at the foot of his bed, and though she
+was not looking at him, she felt his eyes on her.
+
+“Adelaide,” he said, “you should not have brought me that message.”
+
+“You mean it is bad for your health to be worried, dearest?” she asked
+in a tone so soft that only an expert in tones could have detected
+something not at all soft beneath it. She glanced at her husband under
+her lashes. Wasn’t he any more an expert in her tones?
+
+“I mean,” he answered, “that you should have told him to go to the
+devil.”
+
+“Oh, I leave that to you, Vin.” She laughed, and added after a second’s
+pause, “I was only a messenger.”
+
+“Tell him I shall be down-town next week.”
+
+“Oh, Vin, no; not next week.”
+
+“Tell him next week.”
+
+“I can’t do that.”
+
+“I thought you were only a messenger.”
+
+“Your doctor would not hear of it. It would be madness.”
+
+Farron leaned over and touched his bell. The nurse was instantly in
+the room, looking at Vincent, Adelaide thought, as a water-dog looks
+at its master when it perceives that a stick is about to be thrown
+into the pond.
+
+“Miss Gregory,” said Vincent, “there’s a young man from my office
+down-stairs. Will you tell him that I can’t see him to-day, but that I
+shall be down-town next week, and I’ll see him then?”
+
+Miss Gregory was almost at the door before Adelaide stopped her.
+
+“You must know that Mr. Farron cannot get down-town next week.”
+
+“Has the doctor said not?”
+
+Adelaide shook her head impatiently.
+
+“I don’t suppose any one has been so insane as to ask him,” she answered.
+
+Miss Gregory smiled temperately.
+
+“Oh, next week is a long time off,” she said, and left the room. Adelaide
+turned to her husband.
+
+“Do you enjoy being humored?” she asked.
+
+Farron had closed his eyes, and now opened them.
+
+“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I didn’t hear.”
+
+“She knows quite well that you can’t go down-town next week. She takes
+your message just to humor you.”
+
+“She’s an excellent nurse,” said Farron.
+
+“For babies,” Adelaide felt like answering, but she didn’t. She said
+instead, “Anyhow, Burke will never accept that as an answer.” She was
+surprised to hear something almost boastful in her own tone.
+
+“Oh, I think he will.”
+
+She waited breathlessly for some sound from down-stairs or even for the
+flurried reëntrance of Miss Gregory. There was a short silence, and
+then came the sound of the shutting of the front door. Marty had
+actually gone.
+
+Vincent did not even open his eyes when Miss Gregory returned; he did not
+exert himself to ask how his message had been received. Adelaide waited
+an instant, and then went back to Mrs. Baxter with a strange sense of
+having sustained a small personal defeat.
+
+Mrs. Baxter was so thoroughly ruffled that she was prepared to attack
+even the sacrosanct Adelaide. But she was not given the chance.
+
+“Well, how did Marty treat you?” said Adelaide.
+
+Mrs. Baxter sniffed.
+
+“We had not very much in common,” she returned.
+
+“No; Marty’s a very real person.” There was a pause. “What became of him?
+Did he go?”
+
+“Yes, your husband’s trained nurse gave him a message, and he went away.”
+
+“Quietly?” The note of disappointment was so plain that Mrs. Baxter asked
+in answer:
+
+“What would you have wanted him to do?”
+
+Adelaide laughed.
+
+“I suppose it would have been too much to expect that he would drag you
+and Miss Gregory about by your hair,” she said, “but I own I should have
+liked some little demonstration. But perhaps,” she added more brightly,
+“he has gone back to wreck the docks.”
+
+At this moment Mathilde entered the room in her hat and furs, and
+distracted the conversation from Burke. Adelaide, who was fond of
+enunciating the belief that you could tell when people were in love by
+the frequency with which they wore their best clothes, noticed now how
+wonderfully lovely Mathilde was looking; but she noticed it quite
+unsuspiciously, for she was thinking, “My child is really a beauty.”
+
+“You remember Mrs. Baxter, my dear.”
+
+Mathilde did not remember her in the least, though she smiled
+sufficiently. To her Mrs. Baxter seemed just one of many dressy old
+ladies who drifted across the horizon only too often. If any one had told
+her that her grandfather had ever been supposed to be in danger of
+succumbing to charms such as these, she would have thought the notion an
+ugly example of grown-up pessimism.
+
+Mrs. Baxter held her hand and patted it.
+
+“Where does she get that lovely golden hair?” she asked. “Not from you,
+does she?”
+
+“She gets it from her father,” answered Adelaide, and her expression
+added, “you dreadful old goose.”
+
+In the pause Mathilde made her escape unquestioned. She knew even before
+a last pathetic glance that her mother was unutterably wearied with her
+visitor. In other circumstances she would have stayed to effect a
+rescue, but at present she was engaged in a deed of some recklessness on
+her own account. She was going to meet Pete Wayne secretly at the
+Metropolitan Museum.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+In all her life Mathilde had never felt so conspicuous as she did going
+up the long flight of stairs at the Fifth Avenue entrance of the museum.
+It seemed to her that people, those walking past in the sunshine on the
+sidewalk, and the strangers in town seeing the sights from the top of the
+green busses, were saying to one another as they looked at her, “There
+goes a New York girl to meet her lover in one of the more ancient of the
+Egyptian rooms.”
+
+She started as she heard the voice of the guard, though he was saying
+nothing but “Check your umbrella” to a man behind her. She sped across
+the marble floor of the great tapestry hall as a little, furry wild
+animal darts across an open space in the woods. She was thinking that she
+could not bear it if Pete were not there. How could she wait many minutes
+under the eyes of the guards, who must know better than any one else that
+no flesh-and-blood girl took any real interest in Egyptian antiquities?
+The round, unambitious dial at the entrance, like an enlarged
+kitchen-clock, had pointed to the exact hour set for the meeting. She
+ought not to expect that Pete, getting away from the office in business
+hours, could be as punctual as an eager, idle creature like herself.
+
+She had made up her mind so clearly that when she entered the night-blue
+room there would be nothing but tombs and mummies that when she saw Pete
+standing with his overcoat over his arm, in the blue-serge clothes she
+particularly liked, she felt as much surprised as if their meeting were
+accidental.
+
+She tried to draw a long breath.
+
+“I shall never get used to it,” she said. “If we had been married a
+thousand years, I should always feel just like this when I see you.”
+
+“Oh, no, you won’t,” he answered. “I hope the very next time we meet you
+will say, quite in a wife’s orthodox tone: ‘My dear, I’ve been waiting
+twenty minutes. Not that I mind at all; only I was afraid I must have
+misunderstood you.’”
+
+“You hope? Oh, I hope we shall never be like that.”
+
+“Really? Why, I enjoy the idea. I shall enjoy saying to total strangers,
+‘Ah, gentlemen, if my wife were ever on time--’ It makes me feel so
+indissolubly united to you.”
+
+“I like it best as we are now.”
+
+“We might try different methods alternate years: one year we could be
+domestic, and the next, detached, and so on.”
+
+By this time they had discovered that they were leaning on a mummy-case,
+and Mathilde drew back with an exclamation. “Poor thing!” she said. “I
+suppose she once had a lover, too.”
+
+“And very likely met him in the room of Chinese antiquities in the Temple
+Museum,” said Pete, and then, changing his tone, he added: “But come
+along. I want to show you a few little things which I have selected to
+furnish our home. I think you’ll like them.”
+
+Pete was always inventing games like this, and calling on her to enter in
+without the slightest warning. One of them was about a fancy ball he was
+giving in the main hall of the Pennsylvania Station. But this new idea,
+to treat the whole museum as a sort of super-department store, made her
+laugh in a faint, dependent way that she knew Pete liked. She believed
+that such forms of play were peculiar to themselves, so she guarded them
+as the deepest kind of secret; for she thought, if her mother ever found
+out about them, she would at once conclude that the whole relation was
+childish. To all other lovers Mathilde attributed a uniform seriousness.
+
+It took them a long time to choose their house-furnishings: there was a
+piece of black-and-gold lacquer; a set of painted panels; a Persian rug,
+swept by the tails of two haughty peacocks; some cloud-gray Chinese
+porcelains; a set of Du Barry vases; a crystal-and-enamel box, designed
+probably for some sacred purpose, but contributed by Pete as an excellent
+receptacle for chocolates at her bedside. “The Boy with the Sword” for
+the dining-room, Ver Meer’s “Women at the Window,” the small Bonnington,
+and then, since Mathilde wanted the portrait of Mrs. Fitzherbert, and
+Wayne felt a faint weariness with the English school, a compromise was
+effected by the selection of Constable’s landscape of a bridge. Wayne
+kept constantly repeating that he was exactly like Warren Hastings,
+astonished at his own moderation. They had hardly begun, indeed, before
+Mathilde felt herself overcome by that peculiar exhaustion that overtakes
+even the robust in museums.
+
+Wayne guided her to a little sofa in a room of gold and jade.
+
+“How beautifully you know your way about here!” she said. “I suppose
+you’ve brought lots of girls here before me.”
+
+“A glorious army,” said Pete, “the matron and the maid. You ought to see
+my mother in a museum. She’s lost before she gets well inside the
+turnstile.”
+
+But Mathilde was thinking.
+
+“How strange it is,” she observed, “that I never should have thought
+before about your caring for any one else. Pete, did you ever ask any one
+else to marry you?”
+
+Wayne nodded.
+
+“Yes; when I was in college. I asked a girl to marry me. She was having
+rather a rotten time.”
+
+“Were you in love with her?”
+
+He shook his head, and in the silence shuffling and staccato footsteps
+were heard, announcing the approach of a youthful art class and their
+teacher. “Jade,” said the voice of the lady, “one of the hardest of known
+substances, has yet been beautifully worked from time immemorial--”
+
+More pairs of eyes in that art class were fixed on the obviously guilty
+couple in the corner than on the beautiful cloudy objects in the cases,
+and it was not until they had all followed their guide to the armor-room,
+and had grouped themselves about the casque of Joan of Arc, that Wayne
+went on as if no interruption had occurred:
+
+“If you want to know whether I have ever experienced anything like my
+feeling for you since the first moment I saw you, I never have and never
+shall, and thereto I plight thee my troth.”
+
+Mathilde turned her full face toward him, shedding gratitude and
+affection as a lamp sheds light before she answered:
+
+“You were terribly unkind to me yesterday.”
+
+“I know. I’m sorry.”
+
+“I shall never forget the way you kissed me, as if I were a rather
+repulsive piece of wood.”
+
+Pete craned his neck, and met the suspicious eye of a guard.
+
+“I don’t think anything can be done about it at the moment,” he said;
+and added in explanation, “You see, I felt as if you had suddenly
+deserted me.”
+
+“Pete, I couldn’t ever desert you--unless I committed suicide.”
+
+Presently he stood up, declaring that this was not the fitting place for
+arranging the details of their marriage.
+
+“Come to one of the smaller picture galleries,” he said, “and as we go
+I’ll show you a portrait of my mother.”
+
+“Your mother? I did not know she had had a portrait done. By whom?”
+
+“A fellow called Bellini. He thought he was doing the Madonna.”
+
+When they reached the picture, a figure was already before it. Mr.
+Lanley was sitting, with his arms folded and his feet stretched out far
+before him, his head bent, but his eyes raised and fixed on the picture.
+They saw him first, and had two or three seconds to take in the profound
+contemplation of his mood. Then he slowly raised his eyes and
+encountered theirs.
+
+There is surely nothing compromising in an elderly gentleman spending a
+contemplative morning alone at the Metropolitan Museum. It might well be
+his daily custom; but the knowledge that it was not, the consciousness of
+the rarity of the mood that had brought him there, oppressed Mr. Lanley
+almost like a crime. He felt caught, outraged, ashamed as he saw them.
+“That’s the age which has a right to it,” he said to himself. And then as
+if in a mirror he saw an expression of embarrassment on their faces, and
+was reminded that their meeting must have been illicit, too. He stood up
+and looked at them sternly.
+
+“Up-town at this hour, Wayne?” he said.
+
+“Grandfather, I never knew you came here much,” said Mathilde.
+
+“It’s near me, you know,” he answered weakly, so weakly that he felt
+impelled to give an explanation. “Sometimes, my dear,” he said, “you will
+find that even the most welcome guest rather fills the house.”
+
+“You need not worry about yours,” returned Mathilde. “I left her
+with Mama.”
+
+Mr. Lanley felt that his brief moment of peace was indeed over. He could
+imagine the impressions that Mrs. Baxter was perhaps at that very moment
+sharing with Adelaide. He longed to question his granddaughter, but did
+not know how to put it.
+
+“How was your mother looking?” he finally decided upon.
+
+“Dreary,” answered Mathilde, with a laugh.
+
+“Does this picture remind you of any one?” asked Wayne, suddenly.
+
+Mr. Lanley looked at him as if he hadn’t heard, and frowned.
+
+“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.
+
+“Don’t you think there’s a look of my mother about it?”
+
+“No,” said Mr. Lanley, rather loudly, and then added, “Well, I see what
+you mean, though I shouldn’t--” He stopped and turning to them with some
+sternness, he asked them how they accounted for their presence in the
+museum at such an hour and alone.
+
+There was nothing to do but to tell him the truth. And when Wayne had
+finished, Mathilde was surprised at her grandfather’s question. She
+thought he would ask what her mother thought of it. If they had been
+alone, she would have told him that Adelaide thought Wayne a commonplace
+young man with stubby hands; but as it was, she had resolved to put her
+mother’s opposition on a more dignified plane. Only Mr. Lanley did not
+ask the question of her. It was to Wayne he was speaking, when he said:
+
+“What does your mother think of it?”
+
+“Oh, my mother,” answered Pete. “Well, she thinks that if she were a girl
+she’d like to go to China.”
+
+Mr. Lanley looked up, and they both smiled with the most perfect
+understanding.
+
+“She would,” said the older man, and then he became intensely serious.
+“It’s quite out of the question,” he said.
+
+“O Grandfather,” Mathilde exclaimed, clasping her hands about his
+arm, “don’t talk like that! It wouldn’t be possible for me to let him
+go without me. O Grandfather, can’t you remember what it was like to
+be in love?”
+
+A complete silence followed this little speech--a silence that went on
+and on and seemed to be stronger than human power. Perhaps for the first
+time in his life Lanley felt hostile toward the girl beside him. “Oh,
+dear,” Mathilde was thinking, “I suppose I’ve made him remember my
+grandmother and his youth!” “Can love be remembered,” Pete was saying to
+himself, “or is it like a perfume that can be recognized, but not
+recalled?”
+
+Lanley turned at last to Wayne.
+
+“It’s out of the question,” he said, “that you should take this child to
+China at two weeks’ notice. You must see that.”
+
+“I see perfectly that many people will think it so. But you must see that
+to us it is the inevitable thing to do.”
+
+“If every one else agreed, I should oppose it.”
+
+“O Grandfather!” wailed Mathilde. “And you were our great hope--you and
+Mrs. Wayne!”
+
+“In a matter like this I shall stand by your mother, Mathilde,” he said,
+and Mathilde imagined he meant as opposed to herself. But he was making
+an even greater renunciation.
+
+Adelaide was surprised and not pleased when Mathilde came home late for
+lunch, bringing the Wayne boy with her. It was not that she had expected
+her one little phrase about Wayne’s hands to change her daughter’s love
+into repugnance,--that sentence had been only the first drop in a
+distillation that would do its poisonous work gradually,--but she had
+supposed that Mathilde would be too sensitive to expose Pete to further
+criticism. Indeed, there seemed something obtuse, if not actually
+indelicate, in being willing to create a situation in which every one
+was bound to suffer. Obtuseness was not a defect with which Adelaide had
+much patience.
+
+Mathilde saw at once that her mother was going to be what in the family
+slang was called “grand.” The grandeur consisted in a polite inattention;
+it went with a soft voice and immobile expression. In this mood Adelaide
+answered you about three seconds later than you expected, and though she
+answered you accurately, it was as if she had forced her mind back from a
+more congenial ether. She seemed to be wrapped in an agreeable cloud
+until you gave her some opening, and then she came out of her cloud like
+a flash of lightning.
+
+Wayne, who had lived his life so far with a woman who did not believe in
+the use of force in human relations, viewed these symptoms of coercion
+with the utmost indifference; but Mathilde had not so far freed herself
+as to ignore them. She was not afraid, but easy conversation under the
+menace was beyond her. She couldn’t think of anything to say.
+
+Adelaide was accustomed by these methods to drive the inexperienced--and
+she considered Pete pitifully inexperienced in social fine points--into a
+state of conversational unrest in which they would finally ask
+recklessly, “Have you been to the theater lately?” and she would question
+gently, “The theater?” as much as to say, “I’ve heard that word
+somewhere before,” until the conscientious conversationalist, rushing
+from futility to futility, would be finally engulfed in some yawning
+banality and sink out of sight forever.
+
+But Wayne resisted this temptation, or, rather, he did not feel it. He
+had the courage to be unafraid of silences, and he ate his luncheon and
+thought about the pictures he had been seeing, and at last began to talk
+to Mathilde about them, while Adelaide made it clear that she was not
+listening, until she caught a phrase that drove her grandeur away.
+
+“Near where we met my grandfather?” Mathilde asked.
+
+By this time Adelaide had gathered that the two had been in the museum,
+and the knowledge annoyed her not only as a mother, but as an
+aristocrat. Without being clear about it, she regarded the love of
+beauty--artificial beauty, that is--as a class distinction. It seemed to
+her possible enough that the masses should love mountains and moonlight
+and the sea and sunsets; but it struck her as unfitting that any one but
+the people she knew, and only a few of them, should really care for
+porcelains and pictures. As she held herself aloof from the conversation
+she was annoyed at noticing that Wayne was showing a more
+discriminating taste than her own carefully nurtured child. But all such
+considerations were driven away by the mention of her father, for Mr.
+Lanley had been in her mind ever since Mrs. Baxter had taken her
+unimpeded departure just before luncheon.
+
+“Your grandfather?” she said, coming out of the clouds. “Was he in the
+Metropolitan?”
+
+“Yes,” said Mathilde, thankful to be directly addressed. “Wasn’t it
+queer? Pete was taking me to see a picture that looks exactly like Mrs.
+Wayne, only Mrs. Wayne hasn’t such a round face, and there in front of it
+was grandpapa.”
+
+Adelaide rose very slowly from table, lunch being fortunately over. She
+felt as if she could have borne almost anything but this--the idea of her
+father vaporing before a picture of the Madonna. Phrases came into her
+head: silly old man, the time has come to protect him against himself;
+the Wayne family must be suppressed.
+
+Her silence in the drawing-room was of a more concentrated sort, and when
+she had taken her coffee and cigarette she said to Mathilde:
+
+“My dear, I promised to go back to Vincent at this time. Will you go
+instead? I want to have a word with Mr. Wayne.”
+
+Adelaide had never entered any contest in her life, whether it was a
+dispute with a dressmaker or a quarrel with her husband, without
+remembering the comfortable fact that she was a beauty. With men she did
+not neglect the advantage that being a woman gave her, and with the
+particular man now before her she had, she knew, a third line of defense;
+she was the mother of his love, and she thought she detected in him a
+special weakness for mothers. But it would have been better if he had
+respected women and mothers less, for he thought so highly of them that
+he believed they ought to play fair.
+
+Sitting in a very low chair, she looked up at him.
+
+“Mathilde has been telling me something about a plan of yours to take her
+to China with you. We could not consent to that, you know.”
+
+“I’m sorry,” said Pete. The tone was pleasant. That was the trouble;
+it was too pleasant a tone for a man relinquishing a cherished hope.
+It sounded almost as if he regretted the inevitable disappointment of
+the family.
+
+Adelaide tried a new attack.
+
+“Your mother--have you consulted her?”
+
+“Yes, I’ve told her our plans.”
+
+“And she approves?”
+
+Wayne might choose to betray his mother in the full irresponsibility of
+her attitude to so sympathetic a listener as Mr. Lanley, but he had no
+intention of giving Mrs. Farron such a weapon. At the same time he did
+not intend to be untruthful. His answer was this:
+
+“My mother,” he said, “is not like most women of her age. She
+believes in love.”
+
+“In all love, quite indiscriminately?”
+
+He hesitated an instant.
+
+“I put it wrong,” he answered. “I meant that she believes in the
+importance of real love.”
+
+“And has she a spell by which she tells real love?”
+
+“She believes mine to be real.”
+
+“Oh, yours! Very likely. Perhaps it’s maternal vanity on my part, Mr.
+Wayne, but I must own I can imagine a man’s contriving to love my
+daughter, so gentle, so intelligent, and so extraordinarily lovely to
+look at. I was not thinking of your feelings, but of hers.”
+
+“You can see no reason why she should love me?”
+
+Adelaide moved her shoulders about.
+
+“Well, I want it explained, that’s all, from your own point of view. I
+see my daughter as an unusual person, ignorant of life, to whom it seems
+to me all things are possible. And I see you, a very nice young man. But
+what else? I ask to be told why you fulfil all possibilities. Don’t
+misunderstand me. I am not mercenary. Mathilde will have plenty of money
+of her own some day. I don’t want a millionaire. I want a _person_.”
+
+“Of course, if you ask me why Mathilde should love me--”
+
+“Don’t be untruthful, Mr. Wayne. I thought better of you. If you should
+come back from China next year to find her engaged to some one else, you
+could tell a great many reasons why he was not good enough for her. Now
+tell me some of the reasons why you are. And please don’t include
+because you love her so much, for almost any one would do that.”
+
+Pete fought down his panic, reminding himself that no man living could
+hear such words without terror. His egotism, never colossal, stood
+feebly between him and Mrs. Farron’s estimate of him. He seemed to sink
+back into the general human species. If he had felt inclined to detail
+his own qualities, he could not have thought of one. There was a long
+silence, while Adelaide sat with a look of docile teachableness upon her
+expectant face.
+
+At last Wayne stood up.
+
+“It’s no use, Mrs. Farron,” he said. “That question of yours can’t be
+answered. I believe she loves me. It’s my bet against yours.”
+
+“I won’t gamble with my child’s future,” she returned. “I did with my
+own. Sit down again, Mr. Wayne. You have heard, I suppose, that I have
+been married twice?”
+
+“Yes.” He sat down again reluctantly.
+
+“I was Mathilde’s age--a little older. I was more in love than she. And
+if he had been asked the question I just asked you, he could have
+answered it. He could have said: ‘I have been a leader in a group in
+which I was, an athlete, an oarsman, and the most superb physical
+specimen of my race’--brought up, too, he might have added, in the same
+traditions that I had had. Well, that wasn’t enough, Mr. Wayne, and that
+was a good deal. If my father had only made me wait, only given me time
+to see that my choice was the choice of ignorance, that the man I thought
+a hero was, oh, the most pitifully commonplace clay--Mathilde shan’t make
+my mistake.”
+
+Wayne’s eyes lit up.
+
+“But that’s it,” he said. “She wouldn’t make your mistake. She’d choose
+right. That’s what I ought to have said. You spoke of Mathilde’s spirit.
+She has a feeling for the right thing. Some people have, and some people
+are bound to choose wrong.”
+
+Adelaide laid her hand on her breast.
+
+“You mean me?” she asked, too much interested to be angry.
+
+He was too absorbed in his own interests to give his full
+attention to hers.
+
+“Yes,” he answered. “I mean your principles of choice weren’t right
+ones--leaders of men, you know, and all that. It never works out.
+Leaders of men are the ones who always cry on their wives’ shoulders, and
+the martinets at home are imposed on by every one else.” He gave out this
+dictum in passing: “But don’t trouble about your responsibility in this,
+Mrs. Farron. It’s out of your hands. It’s our chance, and Mathilde and I
+mean to take it. I don’t want to give you a warning, exactly, but--it’s
+going to go through.”
+
+She looked at him with large, terrified eyes. She was repeating, ‘they
+cry on their wives’ shoulders,’ or, he might have said, ‘on the
+shoulders of their trained nurses.’ She knew that he was talking to her,
+saying something. She couldn’t listen to it. And then he was gone. She
+was glad he was.
+
+She sat quite still, with her hands lying idly, softly in her lap. It was
+possible that what he said was true. Perhaps all these people who made
+such a show of strength to the world were those who sucked double
+strength by sapping the vitality of a life’s companion. It had been true
+of Joe Severance. She had heard him praised for the courage with which
+he went forth against temptation, but she had known that it was her
+strength he was using. She looked up, to see her daughter, pale and
+eager, standing before her.
+
+“O Mama, was it very terrible?”
+
+“What, dear?”
+
+“Did Pete tell you of our plan?”
+
+Adelaide wished she could have listened to those last sentences of his;
+but they were gone completely.
+
+She put up her hand and patted the unutterably soft cheek before her.
+
+“He told me something about putting through your absurd idea of an
+immediate marriage,” she said.
+
+“We don’t want to do it in a sneaky way, Mama.”
+
+“I know. You want to have your own way and to have every one approve of
+you, too. Is that it?”
+
+Mathilde’s lips trembled.
+
+“O Mama,” she cried, “you are so different from what you used to be!”
+
+Adelaide nodded.
+
+“One changes,” she said. “One’s life changes.” She had meant this
+sentence to end the interview, but when she saw the girl still standing
+before her, she said to herself that it made little difference that she
+hadn’t heard the plans of the Wayne boy, since Mathilde, her own
+tractable daughter, was still within her power. She moved into the corner
+of the sofa. “Sit down, dear,” she said, and when Mathilde had obeyed
+with an almost imperceptible shrinking in her attitude, Adelaide went on,
+with a sort of serious ease of manner:
+
+“I’ve never been a particularly flattering mother, have I? Never thought
+you were perfect just because you were mine? Well, I hope you’ll pay the
+more attention to what I have to say. You are remarkable. You are going
+to be one of the most attractive women that ever was. Years ago old Count
+Bartiani--do you remember him, at Lucerne?”
+
+“The one who used scent and used to look so long at me?”
+
+“Yes, he was old and rather horrid, but he knew what he was talking
+about. He said then you would be the most attractive woman in Europe. I
+heard the same thing from all my friends, and it’s true. You have
+something rare and perfect--”
+
+These were great words. Mathilde, accustomed all her life to receive
+information from her mother, received this; and for the first time felt
+the egotism of her beauty awake, a sense of her own importance the more
+vivid because she had always been humble-minded. She did not look at her
+mother; she sat up very straight and stared as if at new fields before
+her, while a faint smile flickered at the corners of her mouth--a smile
+of an awakening sense of power.
+
+“What you have,” Adelaide went on, “ought to bring great happiness,
+great position, great love; and how can I let you throw yourself away
+at eighteen on a commonplace boy with a glib tongue and a high opinion
+of himself? Don’t tell me that it will make you happy. That would be
+the worst of all, if you turned out to be so limited that you were
+satisfied,--that would be a living death. O my darling, I give you my
+word that if you will give up this idea, ten years from now, when you
+see this boy, still glib, still vain, and perhaps a little fat, you
+will actually shudder when you think how near he came to cutting you
+off from the wonderful, full life that you were entitled to.” And then,
+as if she could not hope to better this, Adelaide sprang up, and left
+the girl alone.
+
+Mathilde rose, too, and looked at herself in the glass. She was stirred,
+she was changed, she was awakened, but awakened to something her mother
+had not counted on. Almost too gentle, too humble, too reasonable, as she
+had always been, the drop of egotism which her mother had succeeded in
+instilling into her nature served to solidify her will, to inspire her
+with a needed power of aggression.
+
+She nodded once at her image in the mirror.
+
+“Well,” she said, “it’s my life, and I’m willing to take the
+consequences.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+When Mathilde emerged from the subway into the sunlight of City Hall
+Park, Pete was nowhere to be seen. She had spent several minutes
+wandering in the subterranean labyrinth which threatened to bring her to
+Brooklyn Bridge and nowhere else, so she was a little late for her
+appointment; and yet Pete was not there. He had promised to be waiting
+for her. This was a more important occasion than the meeting in the
+museum and more terrifying, too.
+
+Their plans were simple. They were going to get their marriage license,
+they were going to be married immediately, they were then going to inform
+their respective families, and start two days later for San Francisco.
+
+Mathilde stared furtively about her. A policeman strolled past, striking
+terror to a guilty heart; a gentleman of evidently unbroken leisure
+regarded her with a benevolent eye completely ringed by red. Crowds were
+surging in and out of the newspaper offices and the Municipal Building
+and the post office, but stare where she would, she couldn’t find Pete.
+
+She had ten minutes to think of horrors before she saw him rushing across
+the park toward her, and she had the idea of saying to him those words
+which he himself had selected as typically wifely, “Not that I mind at
+all, but I was afraid I must have misunderstood you.” But she did not get
+very far in her mild little joke, for it was evident at once that
+something had happened.
+
+“My dear love,” he said, “it’s no go. We can’t sail, we can’t be married.
+I think I’m out of a job.”
+
+As they stood there, her pretty clothes, the bright sun shining on her
+golden hair and dark furs and polished shoes, her beauty, but, above all,
+their complete absorption in each other, made them conspicuous. They were
+utterly oblivious.
+
+Pete told her exactly what had happened. Some months before he had been
+sent to make a report on a coal property in Pennsylvania. He had made it
+under the assumption that the firm was thinking of underwriting its
+bonds. He had been mistaken. As owners Honaton & Benson had already
+acquired the majority of interest in it. His report,--she remembered his
+report, for he had told her about it the first day he came to see
+her,--had been favorable except for one important fact. There was in that
+district a car shortage which for at least a year would hamper the
+marketing of the supply. That had been the point of the whole thing. He
+had advised against taking the property over until this defect could be
+remedied or allowed for. They had accepted the report.
+
+Well, late in the afternoon of the preceding day he had gone to the
+office to say good-by to the firm. He could not help being touched by the
+friendliness of both men’s manner. Honaton gave him a silver
+traveling-flask, plain except for an offensive cat’s-eye set in the top.
+Benson, more humane and practical, gave him a check.
+
+“I think I’ve cleared up everything before I leave,” Wayne said, trying
+to be conscientious in return for their kindness, “except one thing.
+I’ve never corrected the proof of my report on the Southerland coal
+property.”
+
+For a second there was something strange in the air. The partners
+exchanged the merest flicker of a look, which Wayne, as far as he thought
+of it at all, supposed to be a recognition on their part of his
+carefulness in thinking of such a detail.
+
+“You need not give that another thought,” said Benson. “We are not
+thinking of publishing that report at present. And when we do, I have
+your manuscript. I’ll go over the proof myself.”
+
+Relieved to be spared another task, Wayne shook hands with his employers
+and withdrew. Outside he met David.
+
+“Say,” said David, “I am sorry you’re leaving us; but, gee!” he added,
+his face twisting with joy, “ain’t the firm glad to have you go!”
+
+It had long been Wayne’s habit to pay strict attention to the
+impressions of David.
+
+“Why do you think they are glad?” he asked.
+
+“Oh, they’re glad all right,” said David. “I heard the old man say
+yesterday, ‘And by next Saturday he will be at sea.’ It was as if
+he was going to get a Christmas present.” And David went on about
+other business.
+
+Once put on the right track, it was not difficult to get the idea. He
+went to the firm’s printer, but found they had had no orders for printing
+his report. The next morning, instead of spending his time with his own
+last arrangements, he began hunting up other printing offices, and
+finally found what he was looking for. His report was already in print,
+with one paragraph left out--that one which related to the shortage of
+cars. His name was signed to it, with a little preamble by the firm,
+urging the investment on the favorable notice of their customers, and
+spoke in high terms of the accuracy of his estimates.
+
+To say that Pete did not once contemplate continuing his arrangements as
+if nothing had happened would not be true. All he had to do was to go.
+The thing was dishonest, clearly enough, but it was not his action. His
+original report would always be proof of his own integrity, and on his
+return he could sever his connection with the firm on some other pretext.
+On the other hand, to break his connection with Honaton & Benson, to
+force the suppression of the report unless given in full, to give up his
+trip, to confess that immediate marriage was impossible, that he himself
+was out of a job, that the whole basis of his good fortune was a fraud
+that he had been too stupid to discover--all this seemed to him more than
+man could be asked to do.
+
+But that was what he decided must be done. From the printer’s he
+telephoned to the Farrons, but found that Miss Severance was out. He knew
+she must have already started for their appointment in the City Hall
+Park. He had made up his mind, and yet when he saw her, so confident of
+the next step, waiting for him, he very nearly yielded to a sudden
+temptation to make her his wife, to be sure of that, whatever else might
+have to be altered.
+
+He had known she wouldn’t reproach him, but he was deeply grateful to her
+for being so unaware that there was any grounds for reproach. She
+understood the courage his renunciation had required. That seemed to be
+what she cared for most.
+
+At length he said to her:
+
+“Now I must go and get this off my chest with the firm. Go home, and I’ll
+come as soon as ever I can.”
+
+But here she shook her head.
+
+“I couldn’t go home,” she answered. “It might all come out before you
+arrived, and I could not listen to things that”--she avoided naming her
+mother--“that will be said about you, Pete. Isn’t there somewhere I can
+wait while you have your interview?”
+
+There was the outer office of Honaton & Benson. He let her go with him,
+and turned her over to the care of David, who found her a corner out of
+the way, and left her only once. That was to say to a friend of his in
+the cage: “When you go out, cast your eye over Pete’s girl. Somewhat of a
+peacherino.”
+
+In the meantime Wayne went into Benson’s office. There wasn’t a flicker
+of alarm on the senior partner’s face on seeing him.
+
+“Hullo, Pete!” he said, “I thought you’d be packing your bags.”
+
+“I’m not packing anything,” said Wayne. “I’ve come to tell you I can’t go
+to China for you. Mr. Benson.”
+
+“Oh, come, come,” said the other, very paternally, “we can’t let you off
+like that. This is business, my dear boy. It would cost us money, after
+having made all our arrangements, if you changed your mind.”
+
+“So I understand.”
+
+“What do you mean?”
+
+“I mean just what you think I mean, Mr. Benson.”
+
+Wayne would have said that he could never forget the presence under any
+circumstances of his future wife, waiting, probably nervously, in the
+outer office; but he did. The interest of the next hour drove out
+everything else. Honaton was sent for from the exchange, a lawsuit was
+threatened, a bribe--he couldn’t mistake it--offered. He was told he
+might find it difficult to find another position if he left their firm
+under such conditions.
+
+“On the contrary,” said Pete, firmly, “from what I have heard, I believe
+it will improve my standing.”
+
+That he came off well in the struggle was due not so much to his
+ability, but to the fact that he now had nothing to lose or gain from the
+situation. As soon as Benson grasped this fact he began a masterly
+retreat. Wayne noticed the difference between the partners: Honaton, the
+less able of the two, wanted to save the situation, but before everything
+else wanted to leave in Wayne’s mind the sense that he had made a fool of
+himself. Benson, more practical, would have been glad to put Pete in jail
+if he could; but as he couldn’t do that, his interest was in nothing but
+saving the situation. The only way to do this was to give up all idea of
+publishing any report. He did this by assuming that Wayne had simply
+changed his mind or had at least utterly failed to convey his meaning in
+his written words. He made this point of view very plausible by quoting
+the more laudatory of Wayne’s sentences; and when Pete explained that the
+whole point of his report was in the sentence that had been omitted,
+Benson leaned back, chuckling, and biting off the end of his cigar.
+
+“Oh, you college men!” he said. “I’m afraid I’m not up to your
+subtleties. When you said it was the richest vein and favorably situated,
+I supposed that was what you meant. If you meant just the opposite, well,
+let it go. Honaton & Benson certainly don’t want to get out a report
+contrary to fact.”
+
+“That’s what he has accused us of,” said Honaton.
+
+“Oh, no, no,” said Benson; “don’t be too literal, Jack. In the heat of
+argument we all say things we don’t mean. Pete here doesn’t like to have
+his lovely English all messed up by a practical dub like me. I doubt if
+he wants to sever his connection with this firm.”
+
+Honaton yielded.
+
+“Oh,” he said, “I’m willing enough he should stay, if--”
+
+“Well, I’m not,” said Pete, and put an end to the conversation by walking
+out of the room. He found David explaining the filing system to Mathilde,
+and she, hanging on his every word, partly on account of his native
+charm, partly on account of her own interest in anything neat, but most
+because she imagined the knowledge might some day make her a more
+serviceable wife to Pete.
+
+Pete dreaded the coming interview with Mrs. Farron more than that with
+the firm--more, indeed, than he had ever dreaded anything. He and
+Mathilde reached the house about a quarter before one, and Adelaide was
+not in. This was fortunate, for while they waited they discovered a
+difference of intention. Mathilde saw no reason for mentioning the fact
+that they had actually been on the point of taking out their marriage
+license. She thought it was enough to tell her mother that the trip had
+been abandoned and that Pete had given up his job. Pete contemplated
+nothing less than the whole truth.
+
+“You can’t tell people half a story,” he said. “It never works.”
+
+Mathilde really quailed.
+
+“It will be terrible to tell mama that,” she groaned. “She thinks
+failure is worse than crime.”
+
+“And she’s dead right,” said Pete.
+
+When Adelaide came in she had Mr. Lanley with her. She had seen him
+walking down Fifth Avenue with his hat at quite an outrageous angle, and
+she had ordered the motor to stop, and had beckoned him to her. It was
+two days since her interview with Mrs. Baxter, and she had had no good
+opportunity of speaking to him. The suspicion that he was avoiding her
+nerved her hand; but there was no hint of discipline in her smile, and
+she knew as well as if he had said it that he was thinking as he came to
+the side of the car how handsome and how creditable a daughter she was.
+“Come to lunch with me,” she said; “or must you go home to your guest?”
+
+“No, I was going to the club. She’s lunching with a mysterious relation
+near Columbia University.”
+
+“Don’t you know who it is? Tell him home.”
+
+“Home, Andrews. No, she never says.”
+
+“Don’t put your stick against the glass, there’s an angel. I’ll tell you
+who it is. An elder sister who supported and educated her, of whom she’s
+ashamed now.”
+
+“How do you know? It wouldn’t break the glass.”
+
+“No; but I hate the noise. I don’t know; I just made it up because it’s
+so likely.”
+
+“She always speaks so affectionately of you.”
+
+“She’s a coward; that’s the only difference. She hates me just as much.”
+
+“Well, you’ve never been nice to her, Adelaide.”
+
+“I should think not.”
+
+“She’s not as bad as you think,” said Mr. Lanley, who believed in
+old-fashioned loyalty.
+
+“I can’t bear her,” said Adelaide.
+
+“Why not?” As far as his feelings went, this seemed a perfectly safe
+question; but it wasn’t.
+
+“Because she tries so hard to make you ridiculous. Oh, not intentionally;
+but she talks of you as if you were a _Don Juan_ of twenty-five. You
+ought to be flattered, Papa dear, at having jealous scenes made about you
+when you are--what is it?--sixty-five.”
+
+“Four,” said Mr. Lanley.
+
+“Yes; such a morning as I had! Not a minute with poor Vincent because you
+had had Mrs. Wayne to dine. I’m not complaining, but I don’t like my
+father represented as a sort of comic-paper old man, you poor
+dear,”--and she laid her long, gloved hand on his knee,--“who have always
+been so conspicuously dignified.”
+
+“If I have,” said her father, “I don’t know that anything she says can
+change it.”
+
+“No, of course; only it was horrible to me to hear her describing you in
+the grip of a boyish passion. But don’t let’s talk of it. I hear,” she
+said, as if she were changing the subject, “that you have taken to going
+to the Metropolitan Museum at odd moments.”
+
+He felt utterly stripped, and said without hope:
+
+“Yes; I’m a trustee, you know.”
+
+Adelaide just glanced at him.
+
+“You always have been, I think.” They drove home in silence.
+
+One reason why she was determined to have her father come home was that
+it was the first time that Vincent was to take luncheon downstairs, and
+when Adelaide had a part to play she liked to have an audience. She was
+even glad to find Wayne in the drawing-room, though she did wonder to
+herself if the little creature had entirely given up earning his living.
+It was a very different occasion from Pete’s last luncheon there; every
+one was as pleasant as possible. As soon as the meal was over, Adelaide
+put her hand on her husband’s shoulder.
+
+“You’re going to lie down at once, Vin.”
+
+He rose obediently, but Wayne interposed. It seemed to him that it would
+be possible to tell his story to Farron.
+
+“Oh, can’t Mr. Farron stay a few minutes?” he said. “I want so much to
+speak to you and him together about--”
+
+Adelaide cut him short.
+
+“No, he can’t. It’s more important that he should get strong than
+anything else is. You can talk to me all you like when I come down.
+Come, Vin.”
+
+When they were up-stairs, and she was tucking him up on his sofa, he
+asked gently:
+
+“What did that boy want?”
+
+Adelaide made a little face.
+
+“Nothing of any importance,” she said.
+
+Things had indeed changed between them if he would accept such an answer
+as that. She thought his indifference like the studied oblivion of the
+debtor who says, “Don’t I owe you something?” and is content with the
+most non-committal reply. He lay back and smiled at her. His expression
+was not easy to read.
+
+She went down-stairs, where conversation had not prospered. Mr. Lanley
+was smoking, with his cigar drooping from a corner of his mouth. He felt
+very unhappy. Mathilde was frightened. Wayne had recast his opening
+sentence a dozen times. He kept saying to himself that he wanted it to be
+perfectly simple, but not infantile, and each phrase he thought of in
+conformity with his one rule sounded like the opening lines of the stage
+child’s speech.
+
+In the crisis of Adelaide’s being actually back again in the room he
+found himself saying:
+
+“Mrs. Farron, I think you ought to know exactly what has been happening.”
+
+“Don’t I?” she asked.
+
+“No. You know that I was going to San Francisco the day after
+to-morrow--”
+
+“Oh dear,” said Adelaide, regretfully, “is it given up?”
+
+He told her rather slowly the whole story. The most terrible moment was,
+as he had expected, when he explained that they had met, he and Mathilde,
+to apply for their marriage license. Adelaide turned, and looked full at
+her daughter.
+
+“You were going to treat me like that?” Mathilde burst into tears. She
+had long been on the brink of them, and now they came more from nerves
+than from a sense of the justice of her mother’s complaint. But the sound
+of them upset Wayne hopelessly. He couldn’t go on for a minute, and Mr.
+Lanley rose to his feet.
+
+“Good Lord! good Lord!” he said, “that was dishonorable! Can’t you see
+that that is dishonorable, to marry her on the sly when we trusted her to
+go about with you--”
+
+“O Papa, never mind about the dishonorableness,” said Adelaide. “The
+point is”--and she looked at Wayne--“that they were building their
+elopement on something that turned out to be a fraud. That doesn’t make
+one think very highly of your judgment, Mr. Wayne.”
+
+“I made a mistake, Mrs. Farron.”
+
+“It was a bad moment to make one. You have worked three years with this
+firm and never suspected anything wrong?”
+
+“Yes, sometimes I have--”
+
+Adelaide’s eyebrows went up.
+
+“Oh, you have suspected. You had reason to think the whole thing might be
+dishonest, but you were willing to run away with Mathilde and let her get
+inextricably committed before you found out--”
+
+“That’s irresponsible, sir,” said Lanley. “I don’t suppose you
+understood what you were doing, but it was utterly irresponsible.”
+
+“I think,” said Adelaide, “that it finally answers the question as to
+whether or not you are too young to be married.”
+
+“Mama, I will marry Pete,” said Mathilde, trying to make a voice broken
+with sobs sound firm and resolute.
+
+“Mr. Wayne at the moment has no means whatsoever, as I understand it,”
+said Adelaide.
+
+“I don’t care whether he has or not,” said Mathilde.
+
+Adelaide laughed. The laugh rather shocked Mr. Lanley. He tried to
+explain.
+
+“I feel sorry for you, but you can’t imagine how painful it is to us to
+think that Mathilde came so near to being mixed up with a crooked deal
+like that--Mathilde, of all people. You ought to see that for yourself.”
+
+“I see it, thank you,” said Pete.
+
+“Really, Mr. Wayne, I don’t think that’s quite the tone to take,” put
+in Adelaide.
+
+“I don’t think it is,” said Wayne.
+
+Mathilde, making one last grasp at self-control, said:
+
+“They wouldn’t be so horrid to you, Pete, if they understood--” But the
+muscles of her throat contracted, and she never got any further.
+
+“I suppose I shall be thought a very cruel parent,” said Adelaide, almost
+airily, “but this sort of thing can’t go on, really, you know.”
+
+“No, it really can’t,” said Mr. Lanley. “We feel you have abused our
+confidence.”
+
+“No, I don’t reproach Mr. Wayne along those lines,” said Adelaide. “He
+owes me nothing. I had not supposed Mathilde would deceive me, but we
+won’t discuss that now. It isn’t anything against Mr. Wayne to say he has
+made a mistake. Five years from now, I’m sure, he would not put himself,
+or let himself be put, in such an extremely humiliating position. And I
+don’t say that if he came back five years from now with some financial
+standing I should be any more opposed to him than to any one else. Only
+in the meantime there can be no engagement.” Adelaide looked very
+reasonable. “You must see that.”
+
+“You mean I’m not to see him?”
+
+“Of course not.”
+
+“I must see him,” said Mathilde.
+
+Lanley looked at Wayne.
+
+“This is an opportunity for you to rehabilitate yourself. You ought to be
+man enough to promise you won’t see her until you are in a position to
+ask her to be your wife.”
+
+“I have asked her that already, you know,” returned Wayne with an attempt
+at a smile.
+
+“Pete, you wouldn’t desert me?” said Mathilde.
+
+“If Mr. Wayne had any pride, my dear, he would not wish to come to a
+house where he was unwelcome,” said her mother.
+
+“I’m afraid I haven’t any of that sort of pride at all, Mrs. Farron.”
+
+Adelaide made a little gesture, as much as to say, with her traditions,
+she really did not know how to deal with people who hadn’t.
+
+“Mathilde,”--Wayne spoke very gently,--“don’t you think you could
+stop crying?”
+
+“I’m trying all the time, Pete. You won’t go away, no matter what
+they say?”
+
+“Of course not.”
+
+“It seems to be a question between what I think best for my daughter as
+opposed to what you think best--for yourself,” observed Adelaide.
+
+“Nobody wants to turn you out of the house, you know,” said Mr. Lanley in
+a conciliatory tone, “but the engagement is at an end.”
+
+“If you do turn him out, I’ll go with him,” said Mathilde, and she took
+his hand and held it in a tight, moist clasp.
+
+They looked so young and so distressed as they stood there hand in hand
+that Lanley found himself relenting.
+
+“We don’t say that your marriage will never be possible,” he said. “We
+are asking you to wait--consent to a separation of six months.”
+
+“Six months!” wailed Mathilde.
+
+“With your whole life before you?” her grandfather returned wistfully.
+
+“I’m afraid I am asking a little more than that, Papa,” said Adelaide. “I
+have never been enthusiastic about this engagement, but while I was
+watching and trying to be coöperative, it seems Mr. Wayne intended to run
+off with my daughter. I know Mathilde is young and easily influenced, but
+I don’t think, I don’t really think,”--Adelaide made it evident that she
+was being just,--“that any other of all the young men who come to the
+house would have tried to do that, and none of them would have got
+themselves into this difficulty. I mean,”--she looked up at Wayne,--“I
+think almost any of them would have had a little better business judgment
+than you have shown.”
+
+“Mama,” put in her daughter, “can’t you see how honest it was of Pete not
+to go, anyhow?”
+
+Adelaide smiled ironically.
+
+“No; I can’t think that an unusually high standard, dear.”
+
+This seemed to represent the final outrage to Mathilde. She turned.
+
+“O Pete, wouldn’t your mother take me in?” she asked.
+
+And as if to answer the question, Pringle opened the door and announced
+Mrs. Wayne.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+In all the short, but crowded, time since Lanley had first known Mrs.
+Wayne he had never been otherwise than glad to see her, but now his heart
+sank. It seemed to him that an abyss was about to open between them, and
+that all their differences of spirit, stimulating enough while they
+remained in the abstract, were about to be cast into concrete form.
+
+Mathilde and Pete were so glad to see her that they said nothing, but
+looked at her beamingly. Whatever Adelaide’s feelings may have been,
+she greeted her guest with a positive courtesy, and she was the only
+one who did.
+
+Mrs. Wayne nodded to her son, smiled more formally at Mr. Lanley, and
+then her eyes falling upon Mathilde, she realized that she had intruded
+on some sort of conference. She had a natural dread of such meetings, at
+which it seemed to her that the only thing which she must not do was the
+only thing that she knew how to do, namely, to speak her mind. So she at
+once decided to withdraw.
+
+“Your man insisted on my coming in, Mrs. Farron,” she said. “I came to
+ask about Mr. Farron; but I see you are in the midst of a family
+discussion, and so I won’t--”
+
+Everybody separately cried out to her to stay as she began to retreat to
+the door, and no one more firmly than Adelaide, who thought it as
+careless as Mr. Lanley thought it creditable that a mother would be
+willing to go away and leave the discussion of her son’s life to others.
+Adelaide saw an opportunity of killing two birds.
+
+“You are just the person for whom I have been longing, Mrs. Wayne,” she
+said. “Now you have come, we can settle the whole question.”
+
+“And just what is the question?” asked Mrs. Wayne. She sat down,
+looking distressed and rather guilty. She knew they were going to ask
+her what she knew about all the things that had been going on, and a
+hasty examination of her consciousness showed her that she knew
+everything, though she had avoided Pete’s full confidence. She knew
+simply by knowing that any two young people who loved each other would
+rather marry than separate for a year. But she was aware that this
+deduction, so inevitable to her, was exactly the one which would be
+denied by the others. So she sat, with a nervously pleasant smile on
+her usually untroubled face, and waited for Adelaide to speak. She did
+not have long to wait.
+
+“You did not know, I am sure, Mrs. Wayne, that your son intended to run
+away with my daughter?”
+
+All four of them stared at her, making her feel more and more guilty; and
+at last Lanley, unable to bear it, asked:
+
+“Did you know that, Mrs. Wayne?”
+
+“Oh, dear!” said Mrs. Wayne. “Yes. I knew it was possible; so did you.
+Pete didn’t tell me about it, though.”
+
+“But I did tell Mrs. Farron,” said Pete.
+
+Adelaide protested at once.
+
+“You told me?” Then she remembered that a cloud had obscured the end of
+their last interview, but she did not withdraw her protest.
+
+“You know, Mrs. Farron, you have a bad habit of not listening to what is
+said to you,” Wayne answered firmly.
+
+This sort of impersonal criticism was to Adelaide the greatest
+impertinence, and she showed her annoyance.
+
+“In spite of the disabilities of age, Mr. Wayne,” she said, “I find I
+usually can get a simple idea if clearly presented.”
+
+“Why, how absurd that is, Wayne!” put in Mr. Lanley. “You don’t mean to
+say that you told Mrs. Farron you were going to elope with her daughter,
+and she didn’t take in what you said?”
+
+“And yet that is just what took place.”
+
+Adelaide glanced at her father, as much as to say, “You see what kind of
+young man it is,” and then went on:
+
+“One fact at least I have learned only this minute--that is that the
+finances for this romantic trip were to be furnished by a dishonorable
+firm from which your son has been dismissed; or, no, resigned, isn’t it?”
+
+The human interest attached to losing a job brought mother and son
+together on the instant.
+
+“O Pete, you’ve left the firm!”
+
+He nodded.
+
+“O my poor boy!”
+
+He made a gesture, indicating that this was not the time to discuss the
+economic situation, and Adelaide went smoothly on:
+
+“And now, Mrs. Wayne, the point is this. I am considered harsh because I
+insist that a young man without an income who has just come near to
+running off with my child on money that was almost a bribe is not a
+person in whom I have unlimited confidence. I ask--it seems a tolerably
+mild request--that they do not see each other for six months.”
+
+“I cannot agree to that,” said Wayne decidedly.
+
+“Really, Mr. Wayne, do you feel yourself in a position to agree or
+disagree? We have never consented to your engagement. We have never
+thought the marriage a suitable one, have we, Papa?”
+
+“No,” said Mr. Lanley in a tone strangely dead.
+
+“Why is it not suitable?” asked Mrs. Wayne, as if she really hoped that
+an agreement might be reached by rational discussion.
+
+“Why?” said Adelaide, and smiled. “Dear Mrs. Wayne, these things are
+rather difficult to explain. Wouldn’t it be easier for all of us if you
+would just accept the statement that we think so without trying to decide
+whether we are right or wrong?”
+
+“I’m afraid it must be discussed,” answered Mrs. Wayne.
+
+Adelaide leaned back, still with her faint smile, as if defying, though
+very politely, any one to discuss it with _her_.
+
+It was inevitable that Mrs. Wayne should turn to Mr. Lanley.
+
+“You, too, think it unsuitable?”
+
+He bowed gravely.
+
+“You dislike my son?”
+
+“Quite the contrary.”
+
+“Then you must be able to tell me the reason.”
+
+“I will try,” he said. He felt like a soldier called upon to defend a
+lost cause. It was his cause, he couldn’t desert it. His daughter and
+his granddaughter needed his protection; but he knew he was giving up
+something that he valued more than his life as he began to speak. “We
+feel the difference in background,” he said, “of early traditions, of
+judging life from the same point of view. Such differences can be
+overcome by time and money--” He stopped, for she was looking at him with
+the same wondering interest, devoid of anger, with which he had seen her
+study Wilsey. “I express myself badly,” he murmured.
+
+Mrs. Wayne rose to her feet.
+
+“The trouble isn’t with your expression,” she said.
+
+“You mean that what I am trying to express is wrong?”
+
+“It seems so to me.”
+
+“What is wrong about it?”
+
+She seemed to think over the possibilities for an instant, and then she
+shook her head.
+
+“I don’t think I could make you understand,” she answered. She said it
+very gently, but it was cruel, and he turned white under the pain,
+suffering all the more that she was so entirely without malice. She
+turned to her son. “I’m going, Pete. Don’t you think you might as well
+come, too?”
+
+Mathilde sprang up and caught Mrs. Wayne’s hand.
+
+“Oh, don’t go!” she cried. “Don’t take him away! You know they are trying
+to separate us. Oh, Mrs. Wayne, won’t you take me in? Can’t I stay with
+you while we are waiting?”
+
+At this every one focused their eyes on Mrs. Wayne. Pete felt sorry for
+his mother, knowing how she hated to make a sudden decision, knowing how
+she hated to do anything disagreeable to those about her; but he never
+for an instant doubted what her decision would be. Therefore he could
+hardly believe his eyes when he saw her shaking her head.
+
+“I couldn’t do that, my dear.”
+
+“Mother!”
+
+“Of course you couldn’t,” said Mr. Lanley, blowing his nose immediately
+after under the tremendous emotion of finding that she was not an enemy,
+after all. Adelaide smiled to herself. She was thinking, “You could and
+would, if I hadn’t put in that sting about his failures.”
+
+“Why can’t you, Mother?” asked Pete.
+
+“We’ll talk that over at home.”
+
+“My dear boy,” said Mr. Lanley, kindly, “no one over thirty would have
+to ask why.”
+
+“No parent likes to assist at the kidnapping of another parent’s child,”
+said Adelaide.
+
+“Good Heavens! my mother has kidnapped so many children in her day!”
+
+“From the wrong sort of home, I suppose,” said Lanley, in explanation, to
+no one, perhaps, so much as to himself.
+
+“Am I to infer that she thinks mine the right sort? How delightful!”
+said Adelaide.
+
+“Mrs. Wayne, is it because I’m richer than Pete that you won’t take me
+in?” asked Mathilde, visions of bestowing her wealth in charity flitting
+across her mind.
+
+The other nodded. Wayne stared.
+
+“Mother,” he said, “you don’t mean to say you are letting yourself be
+influenced by a taunt like that of Mrs. Farron’s, which she didn’t even
+believe herself?”
+
+Mrs. Wayne was shocked.
+
+“Oh, no; not that, Pete. It isn’t that at all. But when a girl has been
+brought up--”
+
+Wayne saw it all in an instant.
+
+“Oh, yes, I see. We’ll talk of that later.”
+
+But Adelaide had seen, too.
+
+“No; do go on, Mrs. Wayne. You don’t approve of the way my daughter has
+been brought up.”
+
+“I don’t think she has been brought up to be a poor man’s wife.”
+
+“No. I own I did not have that particular destiny in mind.”
+
+“And when I heard you assuming just now that every one was always
+concerned about money, and when I realized that the girl must have been
+brought up in that atmosphere and belief--”
+
+“I see. You thought she was not quite the right wife for your son?”
+
+“But I would try so hard,” said Mathilde. “I would learn; I--”
+
+“Mathilde,” interrupted her mother, “when a lady tells you you are not
+good enough for her son, you must not protest.”
+
+“Come, come, Adelaide, there is no use in being disagreeable,” said
+Mr. Lanley.
+
+“Disagreeable!” returned his daughter. “Mrs. Wayne and I are entirely
+agreed. She thinks her son too good for my daughter, and I think my
+daughter too good for her son. Really, there seems nothing more to be
+said. Good-by, Mr. Wayne.” She held out her long, white hand to him. Mrs.
+Wayne was trying to make her position clearer to Mathilde, but Pete
+thought this an undesirable moment for such an attempt.
+
+Partly as an assertion of his rights, partly because she looked so young
+and helpless, he stooped and kissed her.
+
+“I’ll come and see you about half-past ten tomorrow morning,” he said
+very clearly, so that every one could hear. Adelaide looked blank; she
+was thinking that on Pringle she could absolutely depend. Wayne saw his
+mother and Lanley bow to each other, and the next moment he had contrived
+to get her out of the house.
+
+Mathilde rushed away to her own room, and Adelaide and her father were
+left alone. She turned to him with one of her rare caresses.
+
+“Dear Papa,” she said, “what a comfort you are to me! What should I do
+without you? You’ll never desert me, will you?” And she put her head on
+his shoulder. He patted her with an absent-minded rhythm, and then he
+said, as if he were answering some secret train of thought:
+
+“I don’t see what else I could have done.”
+
+“You couldn’t have done anything else,” replied his daughter, still
+nestling against him. “But Mrs. Baxter had frightened me with her account
+of your sentimental admiration for Mrs. Wayne, and I thought you might
+want to make yourself agreeable to her at the expense of my poor child.”
+
+She felt his shoulder heave with a longer breath.
+
+“I can’t imagine putting anything before Mathilde’s happiness,” he said,
+and after a pause he added: “I really must go home. Mrs. Baxter will
+think me a neglectful host.”
+
+“Don’t you want to bring her to dine here to-night? I’ll try and get
+some one to meet her. Let me see. She thinks Mr. Wilsey--”
+
+“Oh, I can’t stand Wilsey,” answered her father, crossly.
+
+“Well, I’ll think of some one to sacrifice on the altar of your
+friendship. I certainly don’t want to dine alone with Mathilde. And, by
+the way, Papa, I haven’t mentioned any of this to Vincent.”
+
+He thought it was admirable of her to bear her anxieties alone so as to
+spare her sick husband.
+
+“Poor girl!” he said. “You’ve had a lot of trouble lately.”
+
+In the meantime Wayne and his mother walked slowly home.
+
+“I suppose you’re furious at me, Pete,” she said.
+
+“Not a bit,” he answered. “For a moment, when I saw what you were going
+to say, I was terrified. But no amount of tact would have made Mrs.
+Farron feel differently, and I think they might as well know what we
+really think and feel. I was only sorry if it hurt Mathilde.”
+
+“Oh dear, it’s so hard to be truthful!” exclaimed his mother. He
+laughed, for he wished she sometimes found it harder; and she went on:
+
+“Poor little Mathilde! You know I wouldn’t hurt her if I could help it.
+It’s not her fault. But what a terrible system it is, and how money does
+blind people! They can’t see you at all as you are, and yet if you had
+fifty thousand dollars a year, they’d be more aware of your good points
+than I am. They can’t see that you have resolution and charm and a sense
+of honor. They don’t see the person, they just see the lack of income.”
+
+Pete smiled.
+
+“A person is all Mrs. Farron says she asks for her daughter.”
+
+“She does not know a person when she sees one.”
+
+“She knew one when she married Farron.”
+
+Mrs. Wayne sniffed.
+
+“Perhaps he married her,” she replied.
+
+Her son thought this likely, but he did not answer, for she had given him
+an idea--to see Farron. Farron would at least understand the situation.
+His mother approved of the suggestion.
+
+“Of course he’s not Mathilde’s father.”
+
+“He’s not a snob.”
+
+They had reached the house, and Pete was fishing in his pocket for his
+keys.
+
+“Do you think Mr. Lanley is a snob?” he asked.
+
+As usual Mrs. Wayne evaded the direct answer.
+
+“I got an unfavorable impression of him this afternoon.”
+
+“For failing to see that I was a king among men?”
+
+“For backing up every stupid thing his daughter said.”
+
+“Loyalty is a fine quality.”
+
+“Justice is better,” answered his mother.
+
+“Oh, well, he’s old,” said Wayne, dismissing the whole subject.
+
+They walked up their four flights in silence, and then Wayne remembered
+to ask something that had been in his mind several times.
+
+“By the way, Mother, how did you happen to come to the Farrons at all?”
+
+She laughed rather self-consciously.
+
+“I hoped perhaps Mr. Farron might be well enough to see me a moment
+about Marty. The truth is, Pete, Mr. Farron is the real person in that
+whole family.”
+
+That evening he wrote Farron a note, asking him to see him the next
+morning at half-past ten about “this trouble of which, of course,
+Mrs. Farron has told you.” He added a request that he would tell
+Pringle of his intention in case he could give the interview, because
+Mrs. Farron had been quite frank in saying that she would give orders
+not to let him in.
+
+Farron received this note with his breakfast. Adelaide was not there. He
+had had no hint from her of any crisis. He had not come down to dinner
+the evening before to meet Mrs. Baxter and the useful people asked to
+entertain her, but he had seen Mathilde’s tear-stained face, and in a few
+minutes with his father-in-law had encountered one or two evident
+evasions. Only Adelaide had been unfathomable.
+
+After he had read the letter and thought over the situation, he sent for
+Pringle, and gave orders that when Mr. Wayne came he would see him.
+
+Pringle did not exactly make an objection, but stated a fact when he
+replied that Mrs. Farron had given orders that Mr. Wayne was not to be
+allowed to see Miss Severance.
+
+“Exactly,” said Farron. “Show him here.” Here was his own study.
+
+As it happened, Adelaide was sitting with him, making very good invalid’s
+talk, when Pringle announced, “Mr. Wayne.”
+
+“Pringle, I told you--” Adelaide began, but her husband cut her short.
+
+“He has an appointment with me, Adelaide.”
+
+“You don’t understand, Vin. You mustn’t see him.”
+
+Wayne was by this time in the room.
+
+“But I wish to see him, my dear Adelaide, and,” Farron added, “I wish to
+see him alone.”
+
+“No,” she answered, with a good deal of excitement; “that you cannot.
+This is my affair, Vincent--the affair of my child.”
+
+He looked at her for a second, and then opening the door into his
+bedroom, he said to Wayne:
+
+“Will you come in here?” The door was closed behind the two men.
+
+Wayne was not a coward, although he had dreaded his interview with
+Adelaide; it was his very respect for Farron that kept him from feeling
+even nervous.
+
+“Perhaps I ought not to have asked you to see me,” he began.
+
+“I’m very glad to see you,” answered Farron. “Sit down, and tell me the
+story as you see it from the beginning.”
+
+It was a comfort to tell the story at last to an expert. Wayne, who had
+been trying for twenty-four hours to explain what underwriting meant,
+what were the responsibilities of brokers in such matters, what was the
+function of such a report as his, felt as if he had suddenly groped his
+way out of a fog as he talked, with hardly an interruption but a nod or a
+lightening eye from Farron. He spoke of Benson. “I know the man,” said
+Farron; of Honaton, “He was in my office once.” Wayne told how Mathilde,
+and then he himself, had tried to inform Mrs. Farron of the definiteness
+of their plans to be married.
+
+“How long has this been going on?” Farron asked.
+
+“At least ten days.”
+
+Farron nodded. Then Wayne told of the discovery of the proof at the
+printer’s and his hurried meeting in the park to tell Mathilde. Here
+Farron stopped him suddenly.
+
+“What was it kept you from going through with it just the same?”
+
+“You’re the first person who has asked me that,” answered Pete.
+
+“Perhaps you did not even think of such a thing?”
+
+“No one could help thinking of it who saw her there--”
+
+“And you didn’t do it?”
+
+“It wasn’t consideration for her family that held me back.”
+
+“What was it?”
+
+Pete found a moral scruple was a difficult motive to avow.
+
+“It was Mathilde herself. That would not have been treating her as
+an equal.”
+
+“You intend always to treat her as an equal?”
+
+Wayne was ashamed to find how difficult it was to answer truthfully. The
+tone of the question gave him no clue to the speaker’s own thoughts.
+
+“Yes, I do,” he said; and then blurted out hastily, “Don’t you believe in
+treating a woman as an equal?”
+
+“I believe in treating her exactly as she wants to be treated.”
+
+“But every one wants to be treated as an equal, if they’re any good.”
+Farron smiled, showing those blue-white teeth for an instant, and Wayne,
+feeling he was not quite doing himself justice, added, “I call that just
+ordinary respect, you know, and I could not love any one I didn’t
+respect. Could you?”
+
+The question was, or Farron chose to consider it, a purely rhetorical
+one.
+
+“I suppose,” he observed, “that they are to be counted the most fortunate
+who love and respect at the same time.”
+
+“Of course,” said Wayne.
+
+Farron nodded.
+
+“And yet perhaps they miss a good deal.”
+
+“I don’t know _what_ they miss,” answered Wayne, to whom the sentiment
+was as shocking as anything not understood can be.
+
+“No; I’m sure you don’t,” answered his future stepfather-in-law. “Go on
+with your story.”
+
+Wayne went on, but not as rapidly as he had expected. Farron kept him a
+long time on the interview of the afternoon before, and particularly on
+Mrs. Farron’s part, just the point Wayne did not want to discuss for fear
+of betraying the bitterness he felt toward her. But again and again
+Farron made him quote her words wherever he could remember them; and
+then, as if this had not been clear enough, he asked:
+
+“You think my wife has definitely made up her mind against the marriage?”
+
+“Irrevocably.”
+
+“Irrevocably?” Farron questioned more as if it were the sound of the word
+than the meaning that he was doubting.
+
+“Ah, you’ve been rather out of it lately, sir,” said Wayne. “You haven’t
+followed, perhaps, all that’s been going on.”
+
+“Perhaps not.”
+
+Wayne felt he must be candid.
+
+“If it is your idea that your wife’s opposition could be changed, I’m
+afraid I must tell you, Mr. Farron--” He paused, meeting a quick, sudden
+look; then Farron turned his head, and stared, with folded arms, out of
+the window. Wayne had plenty of time to wonder what he was going to say.
+What he did say was surprising.
+
+“I think you are an honest man, and I should be glad to have you working
+for me. I could make you one of my secretaries, with a salary of six
+thousand dollars.”
+
+In the shock Pete heard himself saying the first thing that came
+into his head:
+
+“That’s a large salary, sir.”
+
+“Some people would say large enough to marry on.”
+
+Wayne drew back.
+
+“Don’t you think you ought to consult Mrs. Farron before you offer it to
+me?” he asked hesitatingly.
+
+“Don’t carry honesty too far. No, I don’t consult my wife about my
+office appointments.”
+
+“It isn’t honesty; but I couldn’t stand having you change your
+mind when--”
+
+“When my wife tells me to? I promise you not to do that.”
+
+Wayne found that the interview was over, although he had not been able to
+express his gratitude.
+
+“I know what you are feeling,” said Farron. “Good-by.”
+
+“I can’t understand why you are doing it, Mr. Farron; but--”
+
+“It needn’t matter to you. Good-by.”
+
+With a sensation that in another instant he might be out of the house,
+Wayne metaphorically caught at the door-post.
+
+“I must see Mathilde before I go,” he said.
+
+Farron shook his head.
+
+“No, not to-day.”
+
+“She’s terribly afraid I am going to be moved by insults to desert her,”
+Wayne urged.
+
+“I’ll see she understands. I’ll send for you in a day or two; then it
+will be all right.” They shook hands. He was glad Farron showed him out
+through the corridor and not through the study, where, he knew, Mrs.
+Farron was still waiting like a fine, sleek cat at a rat-hole.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+During this interview Adelaide sat in her husband’s study and waited. She
+looked back upon that other period of suspense--the hour when she had
+waited at the hospital during his operation--as a time of comparative
+peace. She had been able then, she remembered, to sit still, to pursue,
+if not a train of thought, at least a set of connected images; but now
+her whole spirit seemed to be seething with a sort of poison that made
+her muscles jerk and start and her mind dart and faint. Then she had
+foreseen loss through the fate common to humanity; now she foresaw it
+through the action of her own tyrannical contempt for anything that
+seemed to her weak.
+
+She had never rebelled against coercion from Vincent. She had even loved
+it, but she had loved it when he had seemed to her a superior being;
+coercion from one who only yesterday had been under the dominion of
+nerves and nurses was intolerable to her. She was at heart a courtier,
+would do menial service to a king, and refuse common civility to an
+inferior. She knew how St. Christopher had felt at seeing his satanic
+captain tremble at the sign of the cross; and though, unlike the saint,
+she had no intention of setting out to discover the stronger lord, she
+knew that he might now any day appear.
+
+From any one not an acknowledged superior that shut door was an insult to
+be avenged, and she sat and waited for the moment to arrive when she
+would most adequately avenge it. There was still something terrifying in
+the idea of going out to do battle with Vincent. Hitherto in their
+quarrels he had always been the aggressor, had always startled her out of
+an innocent calm by an accusation or complaint. But this, as she said to
+herself, was not a quarrel, but a readjustment, of which probably he was
+still unaware. She hoped he was. She hoped he would come in with his
+accustomed manner and say civilly, “Forgive me for shutting the door; but
+my reason was--”
+
+And she would answer, “Really, I don’t think we need trouble about your
+reasons, Vincent.” She knew just the tone she would use, just the
+expression of a smile suppressed. Then his quick eyes would fasten
+themselves on her face, and perhaps at the first glance would read the
+story of his defeat. She knew her own glance would not waver.
+
+At the end of half an hour she heard the low tones of conversation change
+to the brisk notes of leave-taking. Her heart began to beat with fear,
+but not the kind of fear that makes people run away; rather the kind that
+makes them abdicate all reason and fan their emotions into a sort of
+inspiring flame.
+
+She heard the door open into the corridor, but even then Vincent did not
+immediately come. Miss Gregory had been waiting to say good-by to him. As
+a case he was finished. Adelaide heard her clear voice say gaily:
+
+“Well, I’m off, Mr. Vincent.”
+
+They went back into the room and shut the door. Adelaide clenched her
+hands; these delays were hard to bear.
+
+It was not a long delay, though in that next room a very human bond
+was about to be broken. Possibly if Vincent had done exactly what
+his impulses prompted, he would have taken Miss Gregory in his arms
+and kissed her. But instead he said quietly, for his manner had not
+much range:
+
+“I shall miss you.”
+
+“It’s time I went.”
+
+“To some case more interestingly dangerous?”
+
+“Your case was dangerous enough for me,” said the girl; and then for fear
+he might miss her meaning, “I never met any one like you, Mr. Farron.”
+
+“I’ve never been taken care of as you took care of me.”
+
+“I wish”--she looked straight up at him--“I could take care of you
+altogether.”
+
+“That,” he answered, “would end in my taking care of you.”
+
+“And your hands are pretty full as it is?”
+
+He nodded, and she went away without even shaking hands. She omitted her
+farewells to any other member of the family except Pringle, who, Farron
+heard, was congratulating her on her consideration for servants as he put
+her into her taxi.
+
+Then he opened the door of his study, went to the chair he had risen
+from, and took up the paper at the paragraph at which he had dropped it.
+Adelaide’s eyes followed him like search-lights.
+
+“May I ask,” she said with her edged voice, “if you have been disposing
+of my child’s future in there without consulting me?”
+
+If their places had been reversed, Adelaide would have raised her
+eyebrows and repeated, “Your child’s future?” but Farron was more direct.
+
+“I have been engaging Wayne as a secretary,” he said, and, turning to the
+financial page, glanced down the quotations.
+
+“Then you must dismiss him again.”
+
+“He will be a useful man to me,” said Farron, as if she had not spoken.
+“I have needed some one whom I could depend on--”
+
+“Vincent, it is absurd for you to pretend you don’t know he wanted to
+marry Mathilde.”
+
+He did not raise his eyes.
+
+“Yes,” he said; “I remember you and I had some talk about it before my
+operation.”
+
+“Since then circumstances have arisen of which you know nothing--things
+I did not tell you.”
+
+“Do you think that was wise?”
+
+With a sense that a rapid and resistless current was carrying them both
+to destruction she saw for the first time that he was as angry as she.
+
+“I do not like your tone,” she said.
+
+“What’s the matter with it?”
+
+“It isn’t polite; it isn’t friendly.”
+
+“Why should it be?”
+
+“Why? What a question! Love--”
+
+“I doubt if it is any longer a question of love between you and me.”
+
+These words, which so exactly embodied her own idea, came to her as a
+shock, a brutal blow from him.
+
+“Vincent!” she cried protestingly.
+
+“I don’t know what it is that has your attention now, what private
+anxieties that I am not privileged to share--”
+
+“You have been ill.”
+
+“But not imbecile. Do you suppose I’ve missed one tone of your voice, or
+haven’t understood what has been going on in your mind? Have you lived
+with me five years and think me a forgiving man--”
+
+“May I ask what you have to forgive?”
+
+“Do you suppose a pat to my pillow or an occasional kind word takes the
+place to me of what our relation used to be?”
+
+“You speak as if our relation was over.”
+
+“Have you been imagining I was going to come whining to you for a return
+of your love and respect? What nonsense! Love makes love, and
+indifference makes indifference.”
+
+“You expect me to say I am indifferent to you?”
+
+“I care very little what you say. I judge your conduct.”
+
+She had an unerring instinct for what would wound him. If she had
+answered with conviction, “Yes, I am indifferent to you,” there would
+have been enough temper and exaggeration in it for him to discount the
+whole statement. But to say, “No, I still love you, Vincent,” in a tone
+that conceded the very utmost that she could,--namely, that she still
+loved him for the old, rather pitiful association,--that would be to
+inflict the most painful wound possible. And so that was what she said.
+She was prepared to have him take it up and cry: “You still love me? Do
+you mean as you love your Aunt Alberta?” and she, still trying to be
+just, would answer: “Oh, more than Aunt Alberta. Only, of course--”
+
+The trouble was he did not make the right answer. When she said, “No, I
+still love you, Vincent,” he answered:
+
+“I cannot say the same.”
+
+It was one of those replies that change the face of the world. It drove
+every other idea out of her head. She stared at him for an instant.
+
+“Nobody,” she answered, “need tell me such a thing as that twice.” It
+was a fine phrase to cover a retreat; she left him and went to her own
+room. It no more occurred to her to ask whether he meant what he said
+than if she had been struck in the head she would have inquired if the
+blow was real.
+
+She did not come down to lunch. Vincent and Mathilde ate alone. Mathilde,
+as she told Pete, had begun to understand her stepfather, but she had not
+progressed so far as to see in his silence anything but an
+unapproachable sternness. It never crossed her mind that this middle-aged
+man, who seemed to control his life so completely, was suffering far more
+than she, and she was suffering a good deal.
+
+Pete had promised to come that morning, and she hadn’t seen him yet. She
+supposed he had come, and that, though she had been on the lookout for
+him, she had missed him. She felt as if they were never going to see each
+other again. When she found she was to be alone at luncheon with Farron,
+she thought of appealing to him, but was restrained by two
+considerations. She was a kind person, and her mother had repeatedly
+impressed upon her how badly at present Mr. Farron supported any anxiety.
+More important than this, however, was her belief that he would never
+work at cross-purposes with his wife. What were she and Pete to do? she
+thought. Mrs. Wayne would not take her in, her mother would not let Pete
+come to the house, and they had no money.
+
+Both cups of soup left the table almost untasted.
+
+“I’m sorry Mama has one of her headaches,” said Mathilde.
+
+“Yes,” said Farron. “You’d better take some of that chicken, Mathilde.
+It’s very good.”
+
+She did not notice that the piece he had taken on his own plate was
+untouched.
+
+“I’m not hungry,” she answered.
+
+“Anything wrong?”
+
+She could not lie, and so she looked at him and smiled and answered:
+
+“Nothing, as Mama would say, to trouble an invalid with.”
+
+She did not have a great success. In fact, his brows showed a slight
+disposition to contract, and after a moment of silence he said:
+
+“Does your mother say that?”
+
+“She’s always trying to protect you nowadays, Mr. Farron.”
+
+“I saw your friend Pete Wayne this morning.”
+
+“You saw--” Surprise, excitement, alarm flooded her face with crimson.
+“Oh, why did _you_ see him?”
+
+“I saw him by appointment. He asked me to tell you--only, I’m afraid,
+other things put it out of my head--that he has accepted a job I
+offered him.”
+
+“O Mr. Farron, what kind of job?”
+
+“Well, the kind of job that would enable two self-denying young people to
+marry, I think.”
+
+Not knowing how clearly all that she felt was written on her face
+Mathilde tried to put it all into words.
+
+“How wonderful! how kind! But my mother--”
+
+“I will arrange it with your mother.”
+
+“Have you known all along? Oh, why did you do this wonderful thing?”
+
+“Because--perhaps you won’t agree with me--I have taken rather a fancy to
+this young man. And I had other reasons.”
+
+Mathilde took her stepfather’s hand as it lay upon the table.
+
+“I’ve only just begun to understand you, Mr. Farron. To understand,
+I mean, what Mama means when she says you are the strongest, wisest
+person--”
+
+He pretended to smile.
+
+“When did your mother say that?”
+
+“Oh, ages ago.” She stopped, aware of a faint motion to withdraw on the
+part of the hand she held. “I suppose you want to go to her.”
+
+“No. The sort of headache she has is better left alone, I think, though
+you might stop as you go up.”
+
+“I will. When do you think I can see Pete?”
+
+“I’d wait a day or two; but you might telephone him at once, if you like,
+and say--or do you know what to say?”
+
+She laughed.
+
+“It used to frighten me when you made fun of me like that; but now--It
+must be simply delirious to be able to make people as happy as you’ve
+just made us.”
+
+He smiled at her word.
+
+“Other people’s happiness is not exactly delirious,” he said.
+
+She was moving in the direction of the nearest telephone, but she said
+over her shoulder:
+
+“Oh, well, I think you did pretty well for yourself when you chose Mama.”
+
+She left him sipping his black coffee; he took every drop of that.
+
+When he had finished he did not go back to his study, but to the
+drawing-room, where he sat down in a large chair by the fire. He lit a
+cigar. It was a quiet hour in the house, and he might have been supposed
+to be a man entirely at peace.
+
+Mr. Lanley, coming in about an hour later, certainly imagined he was
+rousing an invalid from a refreshing rest. He tried to retreat, but found
+Vincent’s black eyes were on him.
+
+“I’m sorry to disturb you,” he said. “Just wanted to see Adelaide.”
+
+“Adelaide has a headache.”
+
+Life was taking so many wrong turnings that Mr. Lanley had grown
+apprehensive. He suddenly remembered how many headaches Adelaide had had
+just before he knew of her troubles with Severance.
+
+“A headache?” he said nervously.
+
+“Nothing serious.” Vincent looked more closely at his father-in-law. “You
+yourself don’t look just the thing, sir.”
+
+Mr. Lanley sat down more limply than was his custom.
+
+“I’m getting to an age,” he said, “when I can’t stand scenes. We had
+something of a scene here yesterday afternoon. God bless my soul! though,
+I believe Adelaide told me not to mention it to you.”
+
+“Adelaide is very considerate,” replied her husband. His extreme
+susceptibility to sorrow made Mr. Lanley notice a tone which ordinarily
+would have escaped him, and he looked up so sharply that Farron was
+forced to add quickly: “But you haven’t made a break. I know about what
+took place.”
+
+The egotism of suffering, the distorted vision of a sleepless night, made
+Mr. Lanley blurt out suddenly:
+
+“I want to ask you, Vincent, do you think I could have done anything
+different?”
+
+Now, none of the accounts which Farron had received had made any mention
+of Mr. Lanley’s part in the proceedings at all, and so he paused a
+moment, and in that pause Mr. Lanley went on:
+
+“It’s a difficult position--before a boy’s mother. There isn’t anything
+against him, of course. One’s reasons for not wanting the marriage do
+sound a little snobbish when one says them--right out. In fact, I suppose
+they are snobbish. Do you find it hard to get away from early prejudices,
+Vincent? I do. I think Adelaide is quite right; and yet the boy is a nice
+boy. What do you think of him?”
+
+“I have taken him into my office.”
+
+Mr. Lanley was startled by a courage so far beyond his own.
+
+“But,” he asked, “did you consult Adelaide?”
+
+Farron shook his head.
+
+“But, Vincent, was that quite loyal?”
+
+A change in Farron’s expression made Mr. Lanley turn his head, and he saw
+that Adelaide had come into the room. Her appearance bore out the legend
+of her headache: she looked like a garden after an early frost. But
+perhaps the most terrifying thing about her aspect was her complete
+indifference to it. A recollection suddenly came to Mr. Lanley of a
+railway accident that he and Adelaide had been in. He had seen her
+stepping toward him through the debris, buttoning her gloves. She was far
+beyond such considerations now.
+
+She had come to put her very life to the test. There was one hope, there
+was one way in which Vincent could rehabilitate himself, and that was by
+showing himself victor in the hardest of all struggles, the personal
+struggle with her. That would be hard, because she would make it so, if
+she perished in the attempt.
+
+The crisis came in the first meeting of their eyes. If his glance had
+said: “My poor dear, you’re tired. Rest. All will be well,” his cause
+would have been lost. But his glance said nothing, only studied her
+coolly, and she began to speak.
+
+“Oh, Papa, Vincent does not consider such minor points as loyalty to me.”
+Her voice and manner left Mr. Lanley in no doubt that if he stayed an
+instant he would witness a domestic quarrel. The idea shocked him
+unspeakably. That these two reserved and dignified people should quarrel
+at all was bad enough, but that they should have reached a point where
+they were indifferent to the presence of a third person was terrible. He
+got himself out of the room without ceremony, but not before he saw
+Vincent rise and heard the first words of his sentence:
+
+“And what right have you to speak of loyalty?” Here, fortunately,
+Lanley shut the door behind him, for Vincent’s next words would have
+shocked him still more: “A prostitute would have stuck better to a man
+when he was ill.”
+
+But Adelaide was now in good fighting trim. She laughed out loud.
+
+“Really, Vincent,” she said, “your language! You must make your complaint
+against me a little more definite.”
+
+“Not much; and give you a chance to get up a little rational explanation.
+Besides, we neither of us need explanations. We know what has been
+happening.”
+
+“You mean you really doubt my feeling for you? No, Vincent, I still
+love you,” and her voice had a flute-like quality which, though it was
+without a trace of conviction, very few people who had ever heard it
+had resisted.
+
+“I am aware of that,” said Vincent quietly.
+
+She looked beautifully dazed.
+
+“Yet this morning you spoke--as if--”
+
+“But what is love such as yours worth? A man must be on the crest of the
+wave to keep it; otherwise it changes automatically into contempt. I
+don’t care about it, Adelaide. I can’t use it in a life like mine.”
+
+She looked at him, and a dreamlike state began to come over her. She
+simply couldn’t believe in the state of mind of those sick-room days; she
+could never really, she thought, have been less passionately admiring
+than she was at that minute, yet the half-recollection confused her and
+kept her silent.
+
+“Perhaps it’s vanity on my part,” he said, “but contempt like yours is
+something I could never forgive.”
+
+“You would forgive me anything if you loved me.” Her tone was noble
+and sincere.
+
+“Perhaps.”
+
+“You mean you don’t?”
+
+“Adelaide, there are times when a person chooses between loving and
+being loved.”
+
+The sentence made her feel sick with fear, but she asked:
+
+“Tell me just what you mean.”
+
+“Perhaps I could keep on loving you if I shut my eyes to the kind of
+person you are; but if I did that, I could not hold you an instant.”
+
+She stared at him as fascinated as a bird by a snake. This, it seemed to
+her, was the truth, the final summing up of their relation. She had lost
+him, and yet she was eternally his.
+
+As she looked at him she became aware that he was growing slowly pale. He
+was standing, and he put his hand out to the mantelpiece to steady
+himself. She thought he was going to faint.
+
+“Vincent,” she said, “let me help you to the sofa.”
+
+She wanted now to see him falter, to feel his hand on her shoulder,
+anything for a closer touch with him. For half a minute, perhaps, they
+remained motionless, and then the color began to come back into his face.
+
+He smiled bitterly.
+
+“They tell me you are such a good sick nurse, Mrs. Farron,” he said, “so
+considerate to the weak. But I don’t need your help, thank you.”
+
+She covered her face with her hands. He seemed to her stronger and more
+cruel than anything she had imagined. In a minute he left her alone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+Farron cared, perhaps, no more for appearances than Adelaide did, but
+his habitual manner was much better adapted to concealment. In him the
+fluctuations between the deepest depression and the highest elation were
+accompanied by such slight variations of look and tone that they escaped
+almost every one but Adelaide herself. He came down to dinner that
+evening, and while Adelaide sat in silence, with her elbows on the table
+and her long fingers clasping and unclasping themselves in a sort of
+rhythmic desperation, conversation went on pleasantly enough between
+Mathilde and Vincent. This was facilitated by the fact that Mathilde had
+now transferred to Vincent the flattering affection which she used to
+give to her grandfather. She agreed with, wondered at, and drank in
+every word.
+
+Naturally, Mathilde attributed her mother’s distress to the crisis in her
+own love-affairs. She had had no word with her as to Wayne’s new
+position, and it came to her in a flash that it would be daring, but
+wise, to take the matter up in the presence of her stepfather. So, as
+soon as they were in the drawing-room, and Farron had opened the evening
+paper, and his wife, with a wild decision, had opened a book, Mathilde
+ruthlessly interrupted them both, recalling them from what appeared to be
+the depths of absorptions in their respective pages by saying:
+
+“Mr. Farron, did you tell Mama what you had done about Pete?”
+
+Farron raised his eyes and said:
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“And what did she say?”
+
+“What is there for me to say?” answered Adelaide in the terrible, crisp
+voice that Mathilde hated.
+
+There was a pause. To Mathilde it seemed extraordinary the way older
+people sometimes stalled and shifted about perfectly obvious issues; but,
+wishing to be patient, she explained:
+
+“Don’t you see it makes some difference in our situation?”
+
+“The greatest, I should think,” said Adelaide, and just hinted that she
+might go back to her book at any instant.
+
+“But don’t you think--” Mathilde began again, when Farron interrupted her
+almost sharply.
+
+“Mathilde,” he said, “there’s a well-known business axiom, not to try to
+get things on paper too early.”
+
+She bent her head a trifle on one side in the way a puppy will when an
+unusual strain is being put upon its faculties. It seemed to her curious,
+but she saw she was being advised to drop the subject. Suddenly Adelaide
+sprang to her feet and said she was going to bed.
+
+“I hope your headache will be better, Mama,” Mathilde hazarded; but
+Adelaide went without answering. Mathilde looked at Mr. Farron.
+
+“You haven’t learned to wait,” he said.
+
+“It’s so hard to wait when you are on bad terms with people you love!”
+
+She was surprised that he smiled--a smile that conveyed more pain than
+amusement.
+
+“It is hard,” he said.
+
+This closed the evening. The next morning Vincent went down-town. He
+went about half-past ten. Adelaide, breakfasting in her room and dressing
+at her leisure, did not appear until after eleven, and then discovered
+for the first time that her husband had gone. She was angry at Mathilde,
+who had breakfasted with him, at Pringle, for not telling her what was
+happening.
+
+“You shouldn’t have let him go, Mathilde,” she said. “You are old enough
+to have some judgment in such matters. He is not strong enough. He almost
+fainted yesterday.”
+
+“But, Mama,” protested the girl, “I could not stop Mr. Farron. I don’t
+think even you could have if he’d made up his mind.”
+
+“Tell Pringle to order the motor at once,” was her mother’s answer.
+
+Her distraction at her husband’s imprudence touched Mathilde so that she
+forgot everything else between them.
+
+“O Mama,” she said, “I’m so sorry you’re worried! I’m sorry I’m one of
+your worries; but don’t you see I love Pete just as you do Mr. Farron?”
+
+“God help you, then!” said Adelaide, quickly, and went to her room to
+put on with a haste none the less meticulous her small velvet hat, her
+veil, her spotless, pale gloves, her muff, and warm coat.
+
+She drove to Vincent’s office. It was not really care for his health that
+drove her, but the restlessness of despair; she had reached a point where
+she was more wretched away from him than with him.
+
+The office was high in a gigantic building. Every one knew her by sight,
+the giant at the door and the men in the elevators. Once in the office
+itself, a junior partner hurried to her side.
+
+“So glad to see Vincent back again,” he said, proud of the fact that he
+called his present partner and late employer by his first name. “You want
+to see him?” There was a short hesitation. “He left word not to be
+disturbed--”
+
+“Who is there?” Adelaide asked.
+
+“Dr. Parret.”
+
+“He’s not been taken ill?”
+
+He tried to reassure her, but Adelaide, without waiting or listening,
+moved at once to Vincent’s door and opened it. As she did so she heard
+him laughing and then she saw that he was laughing at the words of the
+handsomest woman she had ever seen. A great many people had this first
+impression of Lily Parret. Lily was standing on the opposite side of the
+table from him, leaning with both palms flat on the polished wood,
+telling him some continued narrative that made her blue eyes shine and
+her dimples deepen.
+
+Adelaide was not temperamentally jealous. She did not, like Vincent, hate
+and fear any person or thing or idea that drew his attention away; on the
+contrary, she wanted him to give his full attention to anything that
+would make for his power and success. She was not jealous, but it did
+cross her mind that she was looking now at her successor.
+
+They stopped laughing as she entered, and Vincent said:
+
+“Thank you, Dr. Parret, you have given me just what I wanted.”
+
+“Marty would just as lief as not stick a knife in me if he knew,” said
+Lily, not as if she were afraid, but as if this was one of the normal
+risks of her profession. She turned to Adelaide, “O Mrs. Farron, I’ve
+heard of you from Pete Wayne. Isn’t he perfectly delightful? But, then,
+he ought to be with such a mother.”
+
+Adelaide had a very useful smile, which could maintain a long, but
+somewhat meaningless, brilliance. She employed it now, and it lasted
+until Lily had gone.
+
+“That’s a very remarkable girl,” said Farron, remembrances of smiles
+still on his lips.
+
+“Does she think every one perfect?”
+
+“Almost every one; that’s how she keeps going at such a rate.”
+
+“How long have you known her?”
+
+“About ten minutes. Pete got her here. She knew something about Marty
+that I needed.” He spoke as if he was really interested in the business
+before him; he did not betray by so much as a glance the recognition that
+they were alone, though she was calling his attention to the fact by
+every line of her figure and expression of her face. She saw his hand
+move on his desk. Was it coming to hers? He rang a bell. “Is Burke in the
+outer office? Send him in.”
+
+Adelaide’s heart began to beat as Marty, in his working-clothes,
+entered. He was more suppressed and more sulky than she had yet seen him.
+
+“I’ve been trying to see you, Mr. Farron,” he began; but Vincent cut in:
+
+“One moment, Burke. I have something to say to you. That bout you said
+you had with O’Hallohan--”
+
+“Well, what of it?” answered Marty, suddenly raising his voice.
+
+“He knocked you out.”
+
+“Who says so?” roared Burke.
+
+“He knocked you out,” repeated Vincent.
+
+“Who says so?” Burke roared again, and somehow there was less confidence
+in the same volume of sound.
+
+“Well, not O’Hallohan; He stayed bought. But I have it straight. No, I’m
+not trying to draw you out on a guess. I don’t play that kind of game. If
+I tell you I know it for a fact, I do.”
+
+“Well, and what of it?” said Marty.
+
+“Just this. I wouldn’t dismiss a man for getting knocked out by a
+bigger man--”
+
+“He ain’t bigger.”
+
+“By a better fighter, then; but I doubt whether or not I want a
+foreman who has to resort to that kind of thing--to buying off the man
+who licked--”
+
+“I didn’t _buy_ him off,” said Burke, as if he knew the distinction, even
+in his own mind, was a fine one.
+
+“Oh, yes, you did,” answered Farron. And getting up, with his hands in
+his pockets, he added, “I’m afraid your usefulness to me is over, Burke.”
+
+“The hell it is!”
+
+“My wife is here, Marty,” said Farron, very pleasantly. “But this story
+isn’t the only thing I have against you. My friend Mrs. Wayne tells me
+you are exerting a bad influence over a fellow whose marriage she wants
+to get annulled.”
+
+“Oh, let ’em get it annulled!” shouted Marty on a high and rising key.
+“What do I care? I’ll do anything to oblige if I’m asked right; but when
+Mrs. Wayne and that gang come around bullying me, I won’t do a thing for
+them. But, if you ask me to, Mr. Farron, why, I’m glad to oblige you.”
+
+“Thank you, Marty,” returned his employer, cordially. “If you arrange
+that for me, I must own it would make me feel differently. I tell
+you,” he added, as one who suggests an honorable compromise, “you get
+that settled up, you get that marriage annulled--that is, if you think
+you can--”
+
+“Sure I can,” Burke replied, swaying his body about from the waist up, as
+if to indicate the ease with which it could be accomplished.
+
+“Well, when that’s done, come back, and we’ll talk over the other matter.
+Perhaps, after all--well, we’ll talk it over.”
+
+Burke walked to the door with his usual conquering step, but there
+turned.
+
+“Say,” he said, “that story about the fight--” He looked at Adelaide.
+“Ladies don’t always understand these matters. Tell her, will you, that
+it’s done in some first-class fights?”
+
+“I’ll explain,” answered Vincent.
+
+“And there ain’t any use in the story’s getting about,” Burke added.
+
+“It won’t,” said Vincent. On which assurance Marty went away and left the
+husband and wife alone.
+
+Adelaide got up and went to the window and looked out toward the
+Palisades. Marty Burke had been a symbol that enabled her to recall some
+of her former attitudes of mind. She remembered that dinner where she had
+pitted him against her husband. She felt deeply humiliated in her own
+sight and in Vincent’s, for she was now ready to believe that he had read
+her mind from the beginning. It seemed to her as if she had been mad, and
+in that madness had thrown away the only thing in the world she would
+ever value. The thought of acknowledging her fault was not repugnant to
+her; she had no special objection to groveling, but she knew it would do
+no good. Vincent, though not ungenerous, saw clearly; and he had summed
+up the situation in that terrible phrase about choosing between loving
+and being loved. “I suppose I shouldn’t respect him much if he did
+forgive me,” she thought; and suddenly she felt his arms about her; he
+snatched her to him, turned her face to his, calling her by strange,
+unpremeditated terms of endearment. Beyond these, no words at all were
+exchanged between them; they were undesired. Adelaide did not know
+whether it were servile or superb to care little about knowing his
+opinion and intentions in regard to her. All that she cared about was
+that in her eyes he was once more supreme and that his arms were about
+her. Words, she knew, would have been her enemies, and she did not make
+use of them.
+
+When they went out, they passed Wayne in the outer office.
+
+“Come to dinner to-night, Pete,” said Farron, and added, turning to his
+wife, “That’s all right, isn’t it, Adelaide?”
+
+She indicated that it was perfect, like everything he did.
+
+Wayne looked at his future mother-in-law in surprise. His pride had been
+unforgetably stung by some of her sentences, but he could have forgiven
+those more easily than the easy smile with which she now nodded at her
+husband’s invitation, as if a pleasant intention on her part could wipe
+out everything that had gone before. That, it seemed to him, was the very
+essence of insolence.
+
+Appreciating that some sort of doubt was disturbing him, Adelaide said
+most graciously:
+
+“Yes, you really must come, Mr. Wayne.”
+
+At this moment Farron’s own stenographer, Chandler, approached him with
+an unsigned letter in his hand.
+
+Chandler took the routine of the office more seriously than Farron did,
+and acquired thereby a certain power over his employer. He had something
+of the attitude of a child’s nurse, who, knowing that her charge has
+almost passed beyond her care, recognizes that she has no authority
+except that bestowed by devotion.
+
+“I think you meant to sign this letter, Mr. Farron,” he said, just as a
+nurse might say before strangers, “You weren’t going to the party
+without washing your hands?”
+
+“Oh.” Farron fished in his waistcoat for his pen, and while he was
+writing, and Chandler just keeping an eye on him to see that it was done
+right, Adelaide said:
+
+“And how is Mrs. Chandler?”
+
+Chandler’s face lit up as he received the letter back.
+
+“Oh, much better, thank you, Mrs. Farron--out of all danger.”
+
+Wayne saw, what Chandler did not, that Adelaide had never even heard of
+Mrs. Chandler’s ill health; but she murmured as she turned away:
+
+“I’m so glad. You must have been very anxious.”
+
+When they were gone, Wayne and Chandler were left a minute alone.
+
+“What a personality!” Chandler exclaimed. “Imagine her remembering my
+troubles, when you think what she has had to worry about! A remarkable
+couple, Mr. Wayne. I have been up to the house a number of times since
+Mr. Farron’s illness, and she is always there, so brave, so attentive. A
+queenly woman, and,” he added, as if the two did not always go together,
+“a good wife.”
+
+Wayne could think of no answer to this eulogy, and as they stood in
+silence the office door opened and Mr. Lanley came in. He nodded to each
+of the two, and moved to Vincent’s room.
+
+“Mr. Farron has just gone,” said Chandler, firmly. He could not bear to
+have people running in and out of Farron’s room.
+
+“Gone?” said Lanley, as if it were somebody’s fault.
+
+“Mrs. Farron came down for him in the motor. He appeared to stand his
+first day very well.”
+
+Mr. Lanley glanced quickly from one to the other. This did not sound as
+if any final break had occurred between the Farrons, yet on this subject
+he could hardly question his son-in-law’s secretaries. He made one
+further effort.
+
+“I suppose Mr. Farron thought he was good for a whole day’s work.”
+
+Chandler smiled.
+
+“Mr. Farron, like all wise men, sir, does what his wife tells him.” And
+then, as he loved his own work far more than conversation, Chandler
+hurried back to his desk.
+
+“I understand,” said Lanley to Wayne, “that you are here regularly now.”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Like your work?” Lanley was obviously delaying, hoping that some
+information would turn up unexpectedly.
+
+“Very much.”
+
+“Humph! What does your mother think about it?”
+
+“About my new job?” Wayne smiled. “You know those aren’t the kind of
+facts--jobs and salaries--that my mother scrutinizes very closely.”
+
+Lanley stared at him with brows slightly contracted.
+
+“What does she scrutinize?” he asked.
+
+“Oh, motives--spiritual things.”
+
+“I see.” Mr. Lanley couldn’t go a step further, couldn’t take this young
+man into his confidence an inch further. He stuck his stick into his
+overcoat-pocket so that it stood upright, and wheeled sharply.
+
+“Good-by,” he said, and added at the door, “I suppose you think this
+makes a difference in your prospects.”
+
+“Mrs. Farron has asked me to come to dinner to-night.”
+
+Lanley wheeled back again.
+
+“What?” he said.
+
+“Yes, she almost urged me, though I didn’t need urging.”
+
+Lanley didn’t answer, but presently went out in silence. He was
+experiencing the extreme loneliness that follows being more royalist
+than the king.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+On Mondays and Thursdays, the only days Mr. Lanley went down-town, he
+expected to have the corner table at the restaurant where he always
+lunched and where, on leaving Farron’s office, he went. He had barely
+finished ordering luncheon--oyster stew, cold tongue, salad, and a
+bottle of Rhine wine--when, looking up, he saw Wilsey was approaching
+him, beaming.
+
+“Haryer, Wilsey?” he said, without cordiality.
+
+Wilsey, it fortunately appeared, had already had his midday meal, and had
+only a moment or two to give to sociability.
+
+“Haven’t seen you since that delightful evening,” he murmured. “I hope
+Mrs. Baxter got my card.” He mentioned his card as if it had been a gift,
+not munificent, but not negligible, either.
+
+“Suppose she got it if you left it,” said Mr. Lanley, who had heard her
+comment on it. “My man’s pretty good at that sort of thing.”
+
+“Ah, how rare they are getting!” said Wilsey, with a sigh--“good
+servants. Upon my word, Lanley, I’m almost ready to go.”
+
+“Because you can’t get good servants?” said his friend, who was drumming
+on the table and looking blankly about.
+
+“Because all the old order is passing, all the standards and backgrounds
+that I value. I don’t think I’m a snob--”
+
+“Of course you’re a snob, Wilsey.”
+
+Mr. Wilsey smiled temperately.
+
+“What do you mean by the word?”
+
+It was a question about which Lanley had been thinking, and he answered:
+
+“I mean a person who values himself for qualities that have no moral,
+financial, or intellectual value whatsoever. You, for instance, Wilsey,
+value yourself not because you are a pretty good lawyer, but because your
+great-grandfather signed the Declaration.”
+
+A shade of slight embarrassment crossed the lawyer’s face.
+
+“I own,” he said, “that I value birth, but so do you, Lanley. You attach
+importance to being a New York Lanley.”
+
+“I do,” answered Lanley; “but I have sense enough to be ashamed of doing
+so. You’re proud of being proud of your old Signer.”
+
+“As a matter of fact,” Mr. Wilsey remarked slowly, “Josiah Wilsey did not
+sign the Declaration.”
+
+“What!” cried Lanley. “You’ve always told me he did.”
+
+Wilsey shook his head gently, as one who went about correcting errors.
+
+“No. What I said was that I feel no moral doubt he would have signed it
+if an attack of illness--”
+
+Lanley gave a short roar.
+
+“That’s just like _you_, Wilsey. You wouldn’t have signed it, either. You
+would have said that while in cordial sympathy with the ideas set forth,
+you would not care to put your name to a document that might give pain to
+a monarch who, though not as liberal as some of us could wish, was yet--”
+
+“As a matter of fact,” Wilsey began again even more coldly, “I should
+have signed--”
+
+“Oh, you think so now. A hundred years from now you’d sign a petition for
+the eight-hour law.”
+
+“Never!” said Wilsey, raising his hand. “I should never put my name to a
+document--” He stopped at another roar from his friend, and never took
+the sentence up again, but indicated with a gesture that only legal minds
+were worth arguing with on points of this sort.
+
+When he had gone, Lanley dipped the spoon in his oyster stew with not a
+little pleasure. Nothing, apparently, could have raised his spirits more
+than the knowledge that old Josiah Wilsey had not signed the Declaration.
+He actually chuckled a little. “So like Wilsey himself,” he thought. “No
+moral courage; calls it conservatism.” Then his joy abated. Just so, he
+thought, must he himself appear to Mrs. Wayne. Yet his self-respect
+insisted that his case was different. Loyalty had been responsible not
+for his conservatism, but for the pig-headedness with which he had acted
+upon it. He would have asked nothing better than to profess himself
+open-minded to Mrs. Wayne’s views, only he could not desert Adelaide in
+the moment of her struggle for beliefs in which he himself had brought
+her up. And now she had deserted him. He alone was left to flaunt a
+banner the motto of which he didn’t wholly believe, while Adelaide, at a
+word from Vincent, had gone over to the other side. And no one knew what
+his loyalty had cost him. Long ago, in his first year at college, he had
+flunked the examination of the professor whom he reverenced above all
+others. No one had cared, no one had long remembered, except Lanley
+himself, and he had remembered because some one had told him what the
+professor said on reading his paper. It was nothing but, “I had supposed
+Lanley was intelligent.” Never again had he had that professor’s
+attention for a single instant. This, it seemed to him, was about to
+happen to him again, now when it was too late in his life to do anything
+but despair.
+
+He called the waiter, paid his bill and tip,--he was an extremely liberal
+tipper; “it’s expected of us,” he used to say, meaning that it was
+expected of people like the New York Lanleys,--and went away.
+
+In old times he had been an inventor of many clever tricks for getting
+up-town by unpopular elevated trains and horse-cars that avoided the
+crowd, but the subway was a great leveler, and he knew no magic except to
+take a local in rush hours. At three o’clock, however, even this was not
+necessary. He took an express, and got off at the Grand Central, turned
+up Park Avenue, and then east. He had just found out that he was going to
+visit Mrs. Wayne.
+
+He read the names in the vestibule, never doubting that Dr. Parret was
+a masculine practitioner, and hesitated at the name of Wayne. He
+thought he ought to ring the bell, but he wanted to go straight up.
+Some one had left the front door unlatched. He pushed it open and began
+the steep ascent.
+
+She came to the door of the flat herself. She had a funny little gray
+shawl about her shoulders and a pen in her hand. She tried to make her
+voice sound very cordial as she greeted him, but he thought he caught
+something that sounded as if, while perfectly well disposed to him, she
+couldn’t for the life of her imagine why he had come.
+
+“Come in,” she said, “though I’m afraid it’s a little cold in here. Our
+janitor--”
+
+“Let me light your fire for you,” he answered, and extracting a
+parlor-match from his pocket,--safety-matches were his bugbear,--he
+stooped, and put the flame to the fire. As he did so he understood
+that it was not the mere forgetfulness of a servant that had left it
+unlighted, but probably a deliberate economy, and he rose crimson
+and unhappy.
+
+It took him some time to recover, and during the entire time she sat in
+her gray shawl, looking very amiable, but plainly unable to think of
+anything to say.
+
+“I saw your son in Farron’s office to-day.”
+
+“Mr. Farron has been so kind, so wonderfully kind!”
+
+Only a guilty conscience could have found reproach in this statement, and
+Lanley said:
+
+“And I hear he is dining at my daughter’s this evening.”
+
+Mrs. Wayne had had a telephone message to that effect.
+
+“I wondered, if you were alone--” Lanley hesitated. He had of course been
+going to ask her to come and dine with him, but a better inspiration came
+to him. “I wondered if you would ask me to dine with you.”
+
+“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Mrs. Wayne, “but I can’t. I have a boy coming.
+He’s studying for the ministry, the most interesting person. He had not
+been sober for three years when I took hold of him, and now he hasn’t
+touched a drop for two.”
+
+He sighed. She said she was sorry, but he could see plainly enough that
+any reformed, or even more any unreformed, drunkard would always far
+surpass him in ability to command her interest. He did not belong to a
+generation that cleared things up with words; he would have thought it
+impertinent, almost ungentlemanly, to probe her attitude of mind about
+the scene at Adelaide’s; and he would have considered himself unmanly to
+make any plea to her on the ground of his own suffering. One simply
+supported such things as best one could; it was expected of one, like
+tipping waiters. He had neither the vocabulary nor the habit of mind that
+made an impersonal exposition of an emotional difficulty possible; but
+even had he possessed these powers he would have retained his tradition
+against using them. Perhaps, if she had been his sister or his wife, he
+might have admitted that he had had a hard day or that every one had
+moments of depression; but that was not the way to talk in a lady’s
+drawing-room. In the silence he saw her eyes steal longingly to her
+writing-table, deeply and hopelessly littered with papers and open books.
+
+“I’m afraid I’m detaining you,” he said. The visit had been a failure.
+
+“Oh, not at all,” she replied, and then added in a tone of more
+sincerity: “I do have the most terrible time with my check-book. And,”
+she added, as one confessing to an absurdly romantic ideal, “I was trying
+to balance it.”
+
+“You should not be troubled with such things,” said Mr. Lanley, thinking
+how long it was since any one but a secretary had balanced his books.
+
+Pete, it appeared, usually did attend to his mother’s checks, but of
+late she had not liked to bother him, and that was just the moment the
+bank had chosen to notify her that she had overdrawn. “I don’t see how I
+can be,” she said, too hopeless to deny it.
+
+“If you would allow me,” said Mr. Lanley. “I am an excellent bookkeeper.”
+
+“Oh, I shouldn’t like to trouble you,” said Mrs. Wayne, but she made it
+clear she would like it above everything; so Lanley put on his
+spectacles, drew up his chair, and squared his elbows to the job.
+
+“It hasn’t been balanced since--dear me! not since October,” he said.
+
+“I know; but I draw such small checks.”
+
+“But you draw a good many.”
+
+She had risen, and was standing before the fire, with her hands behind
+her back. Her shawl had slipped off, and she looked, in her short
+walking-skirt, rather like a school-girl being reprimanded for a poor
+exercise. She felt so when, looking up at her over his spectacles, he
+observed severely:
+
+“You really must be more careful about carrying forward. Twice you have
+carried forward an amount from two pages back instead of--”
+
+“That’s always the way,” she interrupted. “Whenever people look at my
+check-book they take so long scolding me about the way I do it that
+there’s no time left for putting it right.”
+
+“I won’t say another word,” returned Lanley; “only it would really
+help you--”
+
+“I don’t want any one to do it who says my sevens are like fours,” she
+went on. Lanley compressed his lips slightly, but contented himself by
+merely lengthening the tail of a seven. He said nothing more, but every
+time he found an error he gave a little shake of his head that went
+through her like a knife.
+
+The task was a long one. The light of the winter afternoon faded, and she
+lit the lamps before he finished. At first he had tried not to be aware
+of revelations that the book made; but as he went on and he found he was
+obliged now and then to question her about payments and receipts, he saw
+that she was so utterly without any sense of privacy in the matter that
+his own decreased.
+
+He had never thought of her as being particularly poor, not at least in
+the sense of worrying over every bill, but now when he saw the small
+margin between the amounts paid in and the amounts paid out, when he
+noticed how large a proportion of what she had she spent in free gifts
+and not in living expenses, he found himself facing something he could
+not tolerate. He put his pen down carefully in the crease of the book,
+and rose to his feet.
+
+“Mrs. Wayne,” he said, “I must tell you something.”
+
+“You’re going to say, after all, that my sevens are like fours.”
+
+“I’m going to say something worse--more inexcusable. I’m going to tell
+you how much I want you to honor me by becoming my wife.”
+
+She pronounced only one syllable. She said, “_Oh_!” as crowds say it when
+a rocket goes off.
+
+“I suppose you think it ridiculous in a man of my age to speak of love,
+but it’s not ridiculous, by Heaven! It’s tragic. I shouldn’t have
+presumed, though, to mention the subject to you, only it is intolerable
+to me to think of your lacking anything when I have so much. I can’t
+explain why this knowledge gave me courage. I know that you care nothing
+for luxuries and money, less than any one I know; but the fact that you
+haven’t everything that you ought to have makes me suffer so much that I
+hope you will at least listen to me.”
+
+“But you know it doesn’t make me suffer a bit,” said Mrs. Wayne.
+
+“To know you at all has been such a happiness that I am shocked at my own
+presumption in asking for your companionship for the rest of my life, and
+if in addition to that I could take care of you, share with you--”
+
+No one ever presented a proposition to Mrs. Wayne without finding her
+willing to consider it, an open-mindedness that often led her into the
+consideration of absurdities. And now the sacred cupidity of the
+reformer did for an instant leap up within her. All the distressed
+persons, all the tottering causes in which she was interested, seemed to
+parade before her eyes. Then, too, the childish streak in her character
+made her remember how amusing it would be to be Adelaide Farron’s
+mother-in-law, and Pete’s grandmother by marriage. Nor was she at all
+indifferent to the flattery of the offer or the touching reserves of her
+suitor’s nature.
+
+“I should think you would be so lonely!” he said gently.
+
+She nodded.
+
+“I am often. I miss not having any one to talk to over the little things
+that”--she laughed--“I probably wouldn’t talk over if I had some one.
+But even with Pete I am lonely. I want to be first with some one again.”
+
+“You will always be first with me.”
+
+“Even if I don’t marry you?”
+
+“Whatever you do.”
+
+Like the veriest coquette, she instantly decided to take all and give
+nothing--to take his interest, his devotion, his loyalty, all of the
+first degree, and give him in return a divided interest, a loyalty too
+much infected by humor to be complete, and a devotion in which several
+causes and Pete took precedence. She did not do this in ignorance. On the
+contrary, she knew just how it would be; that he would wait and she be
+late, that he would adjust himself and she remain unchanged, that he
+would give and give and she would never remember that it would be kind
+some day to ask. Yet it did not seem to her an unfair bargain, and
+perhaps she was right.
+
+“I couldn’t marry you,” she said. “I couldn’t change. All your pretty
+things and the way you live--it would be like a cage to me. I like my
+life the way it is; but yours--”
+
+“Do you think I would ask Wilsey to dinner every night or try to mold you
+to be like Mrs. Baxter?”
+
+She laughed.
+
+“You’d have a hard time. I never could have married again. I’d make you a
+poor wife, but I’m a wonderful friend.”
+
+“Your friendship would be more happiness than I had any right to hope
+for,” and then he added in a less satisfied tone: “But friendship is so
+uncertain. You don’t make any announcements to your friends or vows to
+each other, unless you’re at an age when you cut your initials in the
+bark of a tree. That’s what I’d like to do. I suppose you think I’m an
+old fool.”
+
+“Two of us,” said Mrs. Wayne, and wiped her eyes. She cried easily, and
+had never felt the least shame about it.
+
+It was a strange compact--strange at least for her, considering that only
+a few hours before she had thought of him as a friendly, but
+narrow-minded, old stranger. Something weak and malleable in her nature
+made her enter lightly into the compact, although all the time she knew
+that something more deeply serious and responsible would never allow her
+to break it. A faint regret for even an atom of lost freedom, a vein of
+caution and candor, made her say:
+
+“I’m so afraid you’ll find me unsatisfactory. Every one has, even Pete.”
+
+“I think I shall ask less than any one,” he returned.
+
+The answer pleased her strangely.
+
+Presently a ring came at the bell--a telegram. The expected guest was
+detained at the seminary. Lanley watched with agonized attention. She
+appeared to be delighted.
+
+“Now you’ll stay to dine,” she said. “I can’t remember what there is
+for dinner.”
+
+“Now, that’s not friendly at the start,” said he, “to think I
+care so much.”
+
+“Well, you’re not like a theological student.”
+
+“A good deal better, probably,” answered Lanley, with a gruffness that
+only partly hid his happiness. There was no real cloud in his sky. If
+Mrs. Wayne had accepted his offer of marriage, by this time he would have
+begun to think of the horror of telling Adelaide and Mathilde and his own
+servants. Now he thought of nothing but the agreeable evening before him,
+one of many.
+
+When Pete came in to dress, Lanley was just in the act of drawing the
+last neat double lines for his balance. He had been delayed by the fact
+that Mrs. Wayne had been talking to him almost continuously since his
+return to figuring. She was in high spirits, for even saints are
+stimulated by a respectful adoration.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+Recognizing the neat back of Mr. Lanley’s gray head, Pete’s first idea
+was that he must have come to induce Mrs. Wayne to conspire with him
+against the marriage; but he abandoned this notion on seeing his
+occupation.
+
+“Hullo, Mr. Lanley,” he said, stooping to kiss his mother with the casual
+affection of the domesticated male. “You have my job.”
+
+“It is a great pleasure to be of any service,” said Mr. Lanley.
+
+“It was in a terrible state, it seems, Pete,” said his mother.
+
+“She makes her fours just like sevens, doesn’t she?” observed Pete.
+
+“I did not notice the similarity,” replied Mr. Lanley. He glanced at Mrs.
+Wayne, however, and enjoyed his denial almost as much as he had enjoyed
+the discovery that the Wilsey ancestor had not been a Signer. He felt
+that somehow, owing to his late-nineteenth-century tact, the breach
+between him and Pete had been healed.
+
+“Mr. Lanley is going to stay and dine with me,” said Mrs. Wayne.
+
+Pete looked a little grave, but his next sentence explained the cause of
+his anxiety.
+
+“Wouldn’t you like me to go out and get something to eat, Mother?”
+
+“No, no,” answered his mother, firmly. “This time there really is
+something in the house quite good. I don’t remember what it is.”
+
+And then Pete, who felt he had done his duty, went off to dress. Soon,
+however, his voice called from an adjoining room.
+
+“Hasn’t that woman sent back any of my collars, Mother dear?”
+
+“O Pete, her daughter got out of the reformatory only yesterday,” Mrs.
+Wayne replied. Lanley saw that the Wayne housekeeping was immensely
+complicated by crime. “I believe I am the only person in your employ not
+a criminal,” he said, closing the books. “These balance now.”
+
+“Have I anything left?”
+
+“Only about a hundred and fifty.”
+
+She brightened at this.
+
+“Oh, come,” she said, “that’s not so bad. I couldn’t have been so
+terribly overdrawn, after all.”
+
+“You ought not to overdraw at all,” said Mr. Lanley, severely. “It’s not
+fair to the bank.”
+
+“Well, I never mean to,” she replied, as if no one could ask more
+than that.
+
+Presently she left him to go and dress for dinner. He felt
+extraordinarily at home, left alone like this among her belongings. He
+wandered about looking at the photographs--photographs of Pete as a
+child, a photograph of an old white house with wisteria-vines on it; a
+picture of her looking very much as she did now, with Pete as a little
+boy, in a sailor suit, leaning against her; and then a little photograph
+of her as a girl not much older than Mathilde, he thought--a girl who
+looked a little frightened and awkward, as girls so often looked, and yet
+to whom the French photographer--for it was taken in the Place de la
+Madeleine--had somehow contrived to give a Parisian air. He had never
+thought of her in Paris. He took the picture up; it was dated May, 1884.
+He thought back carefully. Yes, he had been in Paris himself that spring,
+a man of thirty-three or so, feeling as old almost as he did to-day, a
+widower with his little girl. If only they might have met then, he and
+that serious, starry-eyed girl in the photograph!
+
+Hearing Pete coming, he set the photograph back in its place, and,
+sitting down, picked up the first paper within reach.
+
+“Good night, sir,” said Pete from the doorway.
+
+“Good night, my dear boy. Good luck!” They shook hands.
+
+“Funny old duck,” Pete thought as he went down-stairs whistling,
+“sitting there so contentedly reading ‘The Harvard Lampoon.’ Wonder what
+he thinks of it.”
+
+He did not wonder long, though, for more interesting subjects of
+consideration were at hand. What reception would he meet at the Farrons?
+What arrangements would be made, what assumptions permitted? But even
+more immediate than this was the problem how could he contrive to greet
+Mrs. Farron? He was shocked to find how little he had been able to
+forgive her. There was something devilish, he thought, in the way she had
+contrived to shake his self-confidence at the moment of all others when
+he had needed it. He could never forget a certain contemptuous curve in
+her fine, clear profile or the smooth delight of her tone at some of her
+own cruelties. Some day he would have it out with her when the right
+moment came. Before he reached the house he had had time to sketch a
+number of scenes in which she, caught extraordinarily red-handed, was
+forced to listen to his exposition of the evil of such methods as hers.
+He would say to her, “I remember that you once said to me, Mrs.
+Farron--” Anger cut short his vision as a cloud of her phrases came back
+to him, like stinging bees.
+
+He had hoped for a minute alone with Mathilde, but as Pringle opened the
+drawing-room door for him he heard the sound of laughter, and seeing that
+even Mrs. Farron herself was down, he exclaimed quickly:
+
+“What, am I late?”
+
+Every one laughed all the more at this.
+
+“That’s just what Mr. Farron said you would say at finding that Mama was
+dressed in time,” exclaimed Mathilde, casting an admiring glance at her
+stepfather.
+
+“You’d suppose I’d never been in time for dinner before,” remarked
+Adelaide, giving Wayne her long hand.
+
+“But isn’t it wonderful, Pete,” put in Mathilde, “how Mr. Farron is
+always right?”
+
+“Oh, I hope he isn’t,” said Adelaide; “for what do you think he has just
+been telling me--that you’d always hate me, Pete, as long as you lived.
+You see,” she went on, the little knot coming in her eyebrows, “I’ve been
+telling him all the things I said to you yesterday. They did sound rather
+awful, and I think I’ve forgotten some of the worst.”
+
+“_I_ haven’t,” said Pete.
+
+“I remember I told you you were no one.”
+
+“You said I was a perfectly nice young man.”
+
+“And that you had no business judgment.”
+
+“And that I was mixing Mathilde up with a fraud.”
+
+“And that I couldn’t see any particular reason why she cared about you.”
+
+“That you only asked that your son-in-law should be a person.”
+
+“I am afraid I said something about not coming to a house where you
+weren’t welcome.”
+
+“I know you said something about a bribe.”
+
+At this Adelaide laughed out loud.
+
+“I believe I did,” she said. “What things one does say sometimes! There’s
+dinner.” She rose, and tucked her hand under his arm. “Will you take me
+in to dinner, Pete, or do you think I’m too despicable to be fed?”
+
+The truth was that they were all four in such high spirits that they
+could no more help playing together than four colts could help playing in
+a grass field. Besides, Vincent had taunted Adelaide with her inability
+ever to make it up with Wayne. She left no trick unturned.
+
+“I don’t know,” she went on as they sat down at table, “that a marriage
+is quite legal unless you hate your mother-in-law. I ought to give you
+some opportunity to go home and say to Mrs. Wayne, ‘But I’m afraid I
+shall never be able to get on with Mrs. Farron.’”
+
+“Oh, he’s said that already,” remarked Vincent.
+
+“Many a time,” said Pete.
+
+Mathilde glanced a little fearfully at her mother. The talk seemed to her
+amusing, but dangerous.
+
+“Well, then, shall we have a feud, Pete?” said Adelaide in a
+glass-of-wine-with-you-sir tone. “A good feud in a family can be made
+very amusing.”
+
+“It would be all right for us, of course,” said Pete, “but it would be
+rather hard on Mathilde.”
+
+“Mathilde is a better fighter than either of you,” put in Vincent.
+“Adelaide has no continuity of purpose, and you, Pete, are wretchedly
+kind-hearted; but Mathilde would go into it to the death.”
+
+“Oh, I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Farron,” exclaimed Mathilde,
+tremendously flattered, and hoping he would go on. “I don’t like
+to fight.”
+
+“Neither did Stonewall Jackson, I believe, until they fixed bayonets.”
+
+Mathilde, dropping her eyes, saw Pete’s hand lying on the table. It was
+stubby, and she loved it the better for being so; it was firm and boyish
+and exactly like Pete. Looking up, she caught her mother’s eye, and they
+both remembered. For an instant indecision flickered in Adelaide’s look,
+but she lacked the complete courage to add that to the list--to tell any
+human being that she had said his hands were stubby; and so her eyes fell
+before her daughter’s.
+
+As dinner went on the adjustment between the four became more nearly
+perfect; the gaiety, directed by Adelaide, lost all sting. But even as
+she talked to Pete she was only dimly aware of his existence. Her
+audience was her husband. She was playing for his praise and admiration,
+and before soup was over she knew she had it; she knew better than words
+could tell her that he thought her the most desirable woman in the world.
+Fortified by that knowledge, the pacification of a cross boy seemed to
+Adelaide an inconsiderable task.
+
+By the time they rose from table it was accomplished. As they went into
+the drawing-room Adelaide was thinking that young men were really rather
+geese, but, then, one wouldn’t have them different if one could.
+
+Vincent was thinking how completely attaching a nature like hers would
+always be to him, since when she yielded her will to his she did it with
+such complete generosity.
+
+Mathilde was saying to herself:
+
+“Of course I knew Pete’s charm would win Mama at last, but even I did not
+suppose he could do it the very first evening.”
+
+And Pete was thinking:
+
+“A former beauty thinks she can put anything over, and in a way she can.
+I feel rather friendly toward her.”
+
+The Farrons had decided while they were dressing that after dinner they
+would retire to Vincent’s study and give the lovers a few minutes to
+themselves.
+
+Left alone, Pete and Mathilde stood looking seriously at each other, and
+then at the room which only a few weeks before had witnessed their first
+prolonged talk.
+
+“I never saw your mother look a quarter as beautiful as she does this
+evening,” said Wayne.
+
+“Isn’t she marvelous, the way she can make up for everything when she
+wants?” Mathilde answered with enthusiasm.
+
+Pete shook his head.
+
+“She can never make up for one thing.”
+
+“O Pete!”
+
+“She can never give me back my first instinctive, egotistical, divine
+conviction that there was every reason why you should love me. I shall
+always hear her voice saying, ‘But why should Mathilde love you?’ And I
+shall never know a good answer.”
+
+“What,” cried Mathilde, “don’t you know the answer to that! I do. Mama
+doesn’t, of course. Mama loves people for reasons outside themselves: she
+loves me because I’m her child, and Grandpapa because he’s her father,
+and Mr. Farron because she thinks he’s strong. If she didn’t think him
+strong, I’m not sure she’d love him. But _I_ love _you_ for being just as
+you are, because you are my choice. Whatever you do or say, that can’t be
+changed--”
+
+The door opened, and Pringle entered with a tray in his hand, and his
+eyes began darting about in search of empty coffee-cups. Mathilde and
+Pete were aware of a common feeling of guilt, not that they were
+concealing the cups, though there was something of that accusation in
+Pringle’s expression, but because the pause between them was so obvious.
+So Mathilde said suddenly:
+
+“Pringle, Mr. Wayne and I are engaged to be married.”
+
+“Indeed, Miss?” said Pringle, with a smile; and so seldom was this
+phenomenon seen to take place that Wayne noted for the first time that
+Pringle’s teeth were false. “I’m delighted to hear it; and you, too, sir.
+This is a bad world to go through alone.”
+
+“Do you approve of marriage, Pringle?” said Wayne.
+
+The cups, revealing themselves one by one, were secured as Pringle
+answered:
+
+“In my class of life, sir, we don’t give much time to considering what we
+approve of and disapprove of. But young people are all alike when they’re
+first engaged, always wondering how it is going to turn out, and hoping
+the other party won’t know that they’re wondering. But when you get old,
+and you look back on all the mistakes and the disadvantages and the
+sacrifices, you’ll find that you won’t be able to imagine that you could
+have gone through it with any other person--in spite of her faults,” he
+added almost to himself.
+
+When he was gone, Pete and Mathilde turned and kissed each other.
+
+“When we get old--” they murmured.
+
+They really believed that it could never happen to them.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11325 ***
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+<body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11325 ***</div>
+
+
+<h1>THE HAPPIEST TIME OF THEIR LIVES</h1>
+
+<p class="center big p2">BY ALICE DUER MILLER</p>
+
+<p class="center">Author of “Come Out of the Kitchen,” “Ladies Must Live,” “Wings in the
+Night,” etc.</p>
+
+<p class="center p2">1918</p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="center big">TO CLARENCE DAY, JR.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="blockquot">... and then he added in a less satisfied tone: “But friendship is so
+uncertain. You don’t make any announcement to your friends or vows to
+each other, unless you’re at an age when you cut your initials in the
+bark of a tree. That’s what I’d like to do.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="center xbig">THE HAPPIEST TIME OF THEIR LIVES</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="tb">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Little Miss Severance sat with her hands as cold as ice. The stage
+of her coming adventure was beautifully set—the conventional stage
+for the adventure of a young girl, her mother’s drawing-room. Her
+mother had the art of setting stages. The room was not large,—a New
+York brownstone front in the upper Sixties even though altered as to
+entrance, and allowed to sprawl backward over yards not originally
+intended for its use, is not a palace,—but it was a room and not a
+corridor; you had the comfortable sense of four walls about you when
+its one small door was once shut. It was filled, perhaps a little too
+much filled, with objects which seemed to have nothing in common except
+beauty; but propinquity, propinquity of older date than the house in
+which they now were, had given them harmony. Nothing in the room was
+modern except some uncommonly comfortable sofas and chairs, and the
+pink and yellow roses that stood about in Chinese bowls.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Severance herself was hardly aware of the charm of the room. On
+the third floor she had her own room, which she liked much better.
+There was a great deal of bright chintz in it, and maple furniture of
+a late colonial date, inherited from her mother’s family, the Lanleys,
+and discarded by her mother, who described the taste of that time as
+“pure, but provincial.” Crystal and ivories and carved wood and Italian
+embroideries did not please Miss Severance half so well as the austere
+lines of those work-tables and high-boys.</p>
+
+<p>It was after five, almost half-past, and he had said “about five.” Miss
+Severance, impatient to begin the delicious experience of anticipation,
+had allowed herself to be ready at a quarter before the hour. Not that
+she had been entirely without some form of anticipation since she woke
+up; not, perhaps, since she had parted from him under the windy awning
+the night before. They had held up a long line of restless motors as
+she stood huddled in her fur-trimmed cloak, and he stamped and jigged
+to keep warm, bareheaded, in his thin pumps and shining shirt-front,
+with his shoulders drawn up and his hands in his pockets, while they
+almost awkwardly arranged this meeting for the next day.</p>
+
+<p>Several times during the preceding evening she had thought he was going
+to say something of the kind, for they had danced together a great
+deal; but they had always danced in silence. At the time, with his
+arm about her, silence had seemed enough; but in separation there is
+something wonderfully solid and comforting in the memory of a spoken
+word; it is like a coin in the pocket. And after Miss Severance had
+bidden him good night at the long glass door of the paneled ball-room
+without his saying anything of a future meeting, she had gone up-stairs
+with a heavy heart to find her maid and her wrap. She knew as soon
+as she reached the dressing-room that she had actually hurried her
+departure for the sake of the parting; for the hope, as their time
+together grew short, of having some certainty to look forward to. But
+he had said nothing, and she had been ashamed to find that she was
+waiting, leaving her hand in his too long; so that at last she snatched
+it away, and was gone up-stairs in an instant, fearing he might have
+guessed what was going on in her mind.</p>
+
+<p>She had thought it just an accident that he was in the hall when she
+came down again, and he hadn’t much choice, she said to herself, about
+helping her into her motor. Then at the very last moment he had asked
+if he mightn’t come and see her the next afternoon. Miss Severance, who
+was usually sensitive to inconveniencing other people, had not cared at
+all about the motor behind hers that was tooting its horn or for the
+elderly lady in feathers and diamonds who was waiting to get into it.
+She had cared only about arranging the hour and impressing the address
+upon him. He had given her back the pleasure of her whole evening like
+a parting gift.</p>
+
+<p>As she drove home she couldn’t bring herself to doubt, though she tried
+to be rational about the whole experience, that it had meant as much
+to him as it had to her, perhaps more. Her lips curved a little at the
+thought, and she glanced quickly at her maid to see if the smile had
+been visible in the glare of the tall, double lamps of Fifth Avenue.</p>
+
+<p>To say she had not slept would be untrue, but she had slept close
+to the surface of consciousness, as if a bright light were shining
+somewhere near, and she had waked with the definite knowledge that this
+light was the certainty of seeing him that very day. The morning had
+gone very well; she had even forgotten once or twice for a few seconds,
+and then remembered with a start of joy that was almost painful:
+but, after lunch, time had begun to drag like the last day of a long
+sea-voyage.</p>
+
+<p>About three she had gone out with her mother in the motor, with the
+understanding that she was to be left at home at four; her mother was
+going on to tea with an elderly relation. Fifth Avenue had seemed
+unusually crowded even for Fifth Avenue, and the girl had fretted
+and wondered at the perversity of the police, who held them up just
+at the moment most promising for slipping through; and why Andrews,
+the chauffeur, could not see that he would do better by going to
+Madison Avenue. She did not speak these thoughts aloud, for she had
+not told her mother, not from any natural love of concealment, but
+because any announcement of her plans for the afternoon would have
+made them seem less certain of fulfilment. Perhaps, too, she had felt
+an unacknowledged fear of certain of her mother’s phrases that could
+delicately puncture delight.</p>
+
+<p>She had been dropped at the house by ten minutes after four, and
+exactly at a quarter before five she had been in the drawing-room, in
+her favorite dress, with her best slippers, her hands cold, but her
+heart warm with the knowledge that he would soon be there.</p>
+
+<p>Only after forty-five minutes of waiting did that faith begin to grow
+dim. She was too inexperienced in such matters to know that this was
+the inevitable consequence of being ready too early. She had had time
+to run through the whole cycle of certainty, eagerness, doubt, and she
+was now rapidly approaching despair. He was not coming. Perhaps he
+had never meant to come. Possibly he had merely yielded to a polite
+impulse; possibly her manner had betrayed her wishes so plainly that a
+clever, older person, two or three years out of college, had only too
+clearly read her in the moment when she had detained his hand at the
+door of the ball-room.</p>
+
+<p>There was a ring at the bell. Her heart stood perfectly still, and then
+began beating with a terrible force, as if it gathered itself into
+a hard, weighty lump again and again. Several minutes went by, too
+long for a man to give to taking off his coat. At last she got up and
+cautiously opened the door; a servant was carrying a striped cardboard
+box to her mother’s room. Miss Severance went back and sat down. She
+took a long breath; her heart returned to its normal movement.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, for some unexplained reason, the fact that the door-bell had rung
+once made it more possible that it would ring again, and she began to
+feel a slight return of confidence.</p>
+
+<p>A servant opened the door, and in the instant before she turned her
+head she had time to debate the possibility of a visitor having come in
+without ringing while the messenger with the striped box was going out.
+But, no; Pringle was alone.</p>
+
+<p>Pringle had been with the family since her mother was a girl, but, like
+many red-haired men, he retained an appearance of youth. He wanted to
+know if he should take away the tea.</p>
+
+<p>She knew perfectly why he asked. He liked to have the tea-things put
+away before he had his own supper and began his arrangements for the
+family dinner. She felt that the crisis had come.</p>
+
+<p>If she said yes, she knew that her visitor would come just as tea had
+disappeared. If she said no, she would sit there alone, waiting for
+another half-hour, and when she finally did ring and tell Pringle he
+could take away the tea-things, he would look wise and reproachful.
+Nevertheless, she did say no, and Pringle with admirable self-control,
+withdrew.</p>
+
+<p>The afternoon seemed very quiet. Miss Severance became aware of all
+sorts of bells that she had never heard before—other door-bells,
+telephone-bells in the adjacent houses, loud, hideous bells on motor
+delivery-wagons, but not her own front door-bell.</p>
+
+<p>Her heart felt like lead. Things would never be the same now. Probably
+there was some explanation of his not coming, but it could never be
+really atoned for. The wild romance and confidence in this first visit
+could never be regained.</p>
+
+<p>And then there was a loud, quick ring at the bell, and at once he was
+in the room, breathing rapidly, as if he had run up-stairs or even from
+the corner. She could do nothing but stare at him. She had tried in
+the last ten minutes to remember what he looked like, and now she was
+astonished to find how exactly he looked as she remembered him.</p>
+
+<p>To her horror, the change between her late despair and her present
+joy was so extreme that she wanted to cry. The best she knew how to
+do was to pucker her face into a smile and to offer him those chilly
+finger-tips.</p>
+
+<p>He hardly took them, but said, as if announcing a black, but
+incontrovertible, fact:</p>
+
+<p>“You’re not a bit glad to see me.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes, I am,” she returned, with an attempt at an easy social
+manner. “Will you have some tea?”</p>
+
+<p>“But why aren’t you glad?”</p>
+
+<p>Miss Severance clasped her hands on the edge of the tea-tray and looked
+down. She pressed her palms together; she set her teeth, but the
+muscles in her throat went on contracting; and the heroic struggle was
+lost.</p>
+
+<p>“I thought you weren’t coming,” she said, and making no further effort
+to conceal the fact that her eyes were full of tears she looked
+straight up at him.</p>
+
+<p>He sat down beside her on the small, low sofa and put his hand on hers.</p>
+
+<p>“But I was perfectly certain to come,” he said very gently, “because,
+you see, I think I love you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Do you think I love you?” she asked, seeking information.</p>
+
+<p>“I can’t tell,” he answered. “Your being sorry I did not come doesn’t
+prove anything. We’ll see. You’re so wonderfully young, my dear!”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t think eighteen is so young. My mother was married before she
+was twenty.”</p>
+
+<p>He sat silent for a few seconds, and she felt his hand shut more firmly
+on hers. Then he got up, and, pulling a chair to the opposite side of
+the table, said briskly:</p>
+
+<p>“And now give me some tea. I haven’t had any lunch.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, why not?” She blew her nose, tucked away her handkerchief, and
+began her operations on the tea-tray.</p>
+
+<p>“I work very hard,” he returned. “You don’t know what at, do you? I’m a
+statistician.”</p>
+
+<p>“What’s that?”</p>
+
+<p>“I make reports on properties, on financial ventures, for the firm
+I’m with, Benson &amp; Honaton. They’re brokers. When they are asked to
+underwrite a scheme—”</p>
+
+<p>“Underwrite? I never heard that word.”</p>
+
+<p>The boy laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“You’ll hear it a good many times if our acquaintance continues.” Then
+more gravely, but quite parenthetically, he added: “If a firm puts up
+money for a business, they want to know all about it, of course. I tell
+them. I’ve just been doing a report this afternoon, a wonder; it’s what
+made me late. Shall I tell you about it?”</p>
+
+<p>She nodded with the same eagerness with which ten years before she
+might have answered an inquiry as to whether he should tell her a
+fairy-story.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, it was on a coal-mine in Pennsylvania. I’m afraid my report is
+going to be a disappointment to the firm. The mine’s good, a sound,
+rich vein, and the labor conditions aren’t bad; but there’s one fatal
+defect—a car shortage on the only railroad that reaches it. They can’t
+make a penny on their old mine until that’s met, and that can’t be
+straightened out for a year, anyhow; and so I shall report against it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Car shortage,” said Miss Severance. “I never should have thought of
+that. I think you must be wonderful.”</p>
+
+<p>He laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“I wish the firm thought so,” he said. “In a way they do; they pay
+attention to what I say, but they give me an awfully small salary. In
+fact,” he added briskly, “I have almost no money at all.” There was
+a pause, and he went on, “I suppose you know that when I was sitting
+beside you just now I wanted most terribly to kiss you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, no!”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, no? Oh, yes. I wanted to, but I didn’t. Don’t worry. I won’t for a
+long time, perhaps never.”</p>
+
+<p>“Never?” said Miss Severance, and she smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“I said <i>perhaps</i> never. You can’t tell. Life turns up some awfully
+queer tricks now and then. Last night, for example. I walked into that
+ballroom thinking of nothing, and there you were—all the rest of the
+room like a sort of shrine for you. I said to a man I was with, ‘I
+want to meet the girl who looks like cream in a gold saucer,’ and he
+introduced us. What could be stranger than that? Not, as a matter of
+fact, that I ever thought love at first sight impossible, as so many
+people do.”</p>
+
+<p>“But if you don’t know the very first thing about a person—” Miss
+Severance began, but he interrupted:</p>
+
+<p>“You have to begin some time. Every pair of lovers have to have a first
+meeting, and those who fall in love at once are just that much further
+ahead.” He smiled. “I don’t even know your first name.”</p>
+
+<p>It seemed miraculous good fortune to have a first name.</p>
+
+<p>“Mathilde.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mathilde,” he repeated in a lower tone, and his eyes shone
+extraordinarily.</p>
+
+<p>Both of them took some time to recover from the intensity of this
+moment. She wanted to ask him his, but foreseeing that she would
+immediately be required to use it, and feeling unequal to such an
+adventure, she decided it would be wiser to wait. It was he who
+presently went on:</p>
+
+<p>“Isn’t it strange to know so little about each other? I rather like
+it. It’s so mad—like opening a chest of buried treasure. You don’t
+know what’s going to be in it, but you know it’s certain to be rare and
+desirable. What do you do, Mathilde? Live here with your father and
+mother?”</p>
+
+<p>She sat looking at him. The truth was that she found everything he said
+so unexpected and thrilling that now and then she lost all sense of
+being expected to answer.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes,” she said, suddenly remembering. “I live here with my mother
+and stepfather. My mother has married again. She is Mrs. Vincent
+Farron.”</p>
+
+<p>“Didn’t I tell you life played strange tricks?” he exclaimed. He sprang
+up, and took a position on the hearth-rug. “I know all about him.
+I once reported on the Electric Equipment Company. That’s the same
+Farron, isn’t it? I believe that that company is the most efficient for
+its size in this country, in the world, perhaps. And Farron is your
+stepfather! He must be a wonder.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I think he is.”</p>
+
+<p>“You don’t like him?”</p>
+
+<p>“I like him very much. I don’t <i>love</i> him.”</p>
+
+<p>“The poor devil!”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t believe he wants people to love him. It would bore him. No,
+that’s not quite just. He’s kind, wonderfully kind, but he has no
+little pleasantnesses. He says things in a very quiet way that make you
+feel he’s laughing at you, though he never does laugh. He said to me
+this morning at breakfast, ‘Well, Mathilde, was it a marvelous party?’
+That made me feel as if I used the word ‘marvelous’ all the time, not
+a bit as if he really wanted to know whether I had enjoyed myself last
+night.”</p>
+
+<p>“And did you?”</p>
+
+<p>She gave him a rapid smile and went on:</p>
+
+<p>“Now, my grandfather, my mother’s father—his name is Lanley—(Mr.
+Lanley evidently was not in active business, for it was plain that
+Wayne, searching his memory, found nothing)—my grandfather often
+scolds me terribly for my English,—says I talk like a barmaid,
+although I tell him he ought not to know how barmaids talk,—but
+he never makes me feel small. Sometimes Mr. Farron repeats, weeks
+afterward, something I’ve said, word for word, the way I said it. It
+makes it sound so foolish. I’d rather he said straight out that he
+thought I was a goose.”</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps you wouldn’t if he did.”</p>
+
+<p>“I like people to be human. Mr. Farron’s not human.”</p>
+
+<p>“Doesn’t your mother think so?”</p>
+
+<p>“Mama thinks he’s perfect.”</p>
+
+<p>“How long have they been married?”</p>
+
+<p>“Ages! Five years!”</p>
+
+<p>“And they’re just as much in love?”</p>
+
+<p>Miss Severance looked at him.</p>
+
+<p>“In love?” she said. “At their age?” He laughed at her, and she added:
+“I don’t mean they are not fond of each other, but Mr. Farron must be
+forty-five. What I mean by love—” she hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t stop.”</p>
+
+<p>But she did stop, for her quick ears told her that some one was coming,
+and, Pringle opening the door, Mrs. Farron came in.</p>
+
+<p>She was a very beautiful person. In her hat and veil, lit by the
+friendly light of her own drawing-room, she seemed so young as to be
+actually girlish, except that she was too stately and finished for
+such a word. Mathilde did not inherit her blondness from her mother.
+Mrs. Farron’s hair was a dark brown, with a shade of red in it where
+it curved behind her ears. She had the white skin that often goes with
+such hair, and a high, delicate color in her cheeks. Her eyebrows were
+fine and excessively dark—penciled, many people thought.</p>
+
+<p>“Mama, this is Mr. Wayne,” said Mathilde. Here was another tremendous
+moment crowding upon her—the introduction of her beautiful mother to
+this new friend, but even more, the introduction to her mother of this
+wonderful new friend, whose flavor of romance and interest no one,
+she supposed, could miss. Yet Mrs. Farron seemed to be taking it all
+very calmly, greeting him, taking his chair as being a trifle more
+comfortable than the others, trying to cover the doubt in her own mind
+whether she ought to recognize him as an old acquaintance. Was he new
+or one of the ones she had seen a dozen times before?</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing exactly artificial in Mrs. Farron’s manner, but, like
+a great singer who has learned perfect enunciation even in the most
+trivial sentences of every-day matters, she, as a great beauty, had
+learned the perfection of self-presentation, which probably did not
+wholly desert her even in the dentist’s chair.</p>
+
+<p>She drew off her long, pale, spotless gloves.</p>
+
+<p>“No tea, my dear,” she said. “I’ve just had it,” she added to Wayne,
+“with an old aunt of mine. Aunt Alberta,” she threw over her shoulder
+to Mathilde. “I am very unfortunate, Mr. Wayne; this town is full
+of my relations, tucked away in forgotten oases, and I’m their only
+connection with the vulgar, modern world. My aunt’s favorite excitement
+is disapproving of me. She was particularly trying to-day.” Mrs. Farron
+seemed to debate whether or not it would be tiresome to go thoroughly
+into the problem of Aunt Alberta, and to decide that it would; for she
+said, with an abrupt change, “Were you at this party last night that
+Mathilde enjoyed so much?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” said Wayne. “Why weren’t you?”</p>
+
+<p>“I wasn’t asked. It isn’t the fashion to ask mothers and daughters to
+the same parties any more. We dance so much better than they do.” She
+leaned over, and rang the little enamel bell that dangled at the arm of
+her daughter’s sofa. “You can’t imagine, Mr. Wayne, how much better I
+dance than Mathilde.”</p>
+
+<p>“I hope it needn’t be left to the imagination.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I’m not sure. That was the subject of Aunt Alberta’s talk this
+afternoon—my still dancing. She says she put on caps at thirty-five.”
+Mrs. Farron ran her eyebrows whimsically together and looked up at her
+daughter’s visitor.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde was immensely grateful to her mother for taking so much
+trouble to be charming; only now she rather spoiled it by interrupting
+Wayne in the midst of a sentence, as if she had never been as much
+interested as she had seemed. Pringle had appeared in answer to her
+ring, and she asked him sharply:</p>
+
+<p>“Is Mr. Farron in?”</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Farron’s in his room, Madam.”</p>
+
+<p>At this she appeared to give her attention wholly back to Wayne, but
+Mathilde knew that she was really busy composing an escape. She seemed
+to settle back, to encourage her visitor to talk indefinitely; but when
+the moment came for her to answer, she rose to her feet in the midst of
+her sentence, and, still talking, wandered to the door and disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>As the door shut firmly behind her Wayne said, as if there had been no
+interruption:</p>
+
+<p>“It was love you were speaking of, you know.”</p>
+
+<p>“But don’t you think my mother is marvelous?” she asked, not content to
+take up even the absorbing topic until this other matter had received
+due attention.</p>
+
+<p>“I should say so! But one isn’t, of course, overwhelmed to find that
+your mother is beautiful.”</p>
+
+<p>“And she’s so good!” Mathilde went on. “She’s always thinking of things
+to do for me and my grandfather and Mr. Farron and all these old, old
+relations. She went away just now only because she knows that as soon
+as Mr. Farron comes in he asks for her. She’s perfect to every one.”</p>
+
+<p>He came and sat down beside her again.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s going to be much easier for her daughter,” he said: “you have to
+be perfect only to one person. Now, what was it you were going to say
+about love?”</p>
+
+<p>Again they looked at each other; again Miss Severance had the sensation
+of drowning, of being submerged in some strange elixir.</p>
+
+<p>She was rescued by Pringle’s opening the door and announcing:</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Lanley.”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose I must go,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“No, no,” she returned a little wildly, and added, as if this were the
+reason why she opposed his departure. “This is my grandfather. You must
+see him.”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne sat down again, in the chair on the other side of the tea-table.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Mathilde had been wrong in telling Wayne that her mother had gone
+upstairs in obedience to an impulse of kindness. She had gone to
+quiet a small, gnawing anxiety that had been with her all the day,
+a haunting, elusive, persistent impression that something was wrong
+between her and her husband.</p>
+
+<p>All the day, as she had gone about from one thing to another, her mind
+had been diligently seeking in some event of the outside world an
+explanation of a slight obscuration of his spirit; but her heart, more
+egotistical, had stoutly insisted that the cause must lie in her. Did
+he love her less? Was she losing her charm for him? Were five years the
+limit of a human relation like theirs? Was she to watch the dying down
+of his flame, and try to shelter and fan it back to life as she had
+seen so many other women do?</p>
+
+<p>Or was the trouble only that she had done something to wound his aloof
+and sensitive spirit, seldom aloof to her? Their intimate life had
+never been a calm one. Farron’s interests were concentrated, and his
+temperament was jealous. A woman couldn’t, as Adelaide sometimes had
+occasion to say to herself, keep men from making love to her; she did
+not always want to. Farron could be relentless, and she was not without
+a certain contemptuous obstinacy. Yet such conflicts as these she had
+learned not to dread, but sometimes deliberately to precipitate, for
+they ended always in a deeper sense of unity, and, on her part, in a
+fresh sense of his supremacy.</p>
+
+<p>If he had been like most of the men she knew, she would have assumed
+that something had gone wrong in business. With her first husband she
+had always been able to read in his face as he entered the house the
+full history of his business day. Sometimes she had felt that there was
+something insulting in the promptness of her inquiry, “Has anything
+gone wrong, Joe?” But Severance had never appeared to feel the insult;
+only as time went on, had grown more and more ready, as her interest
+became more and more lackadaisical, to pour out the troubles and,
+much more rarely, the joys of his day. One of the things she secretly
+admired most about Farron was his independence of her in such matters.
+No half-contemptuous question would elicit confidence from him, so that
+she had come to think it a great honor if by any chance he did drop
+her a hint as to the mood that his day’s work had occasioned. But for
+the most part he was unaffected by such matters. Newspaper attacks and
+business successes did not seem to reach the area where he suffered or
+rejoiced. They were to be dealt with or ignored, but they could neither
+shadow or elate him.</p>
+
+<p>So that not only egotism, but experience, bade her look to her own
+conduct for some explanation of the chilly little mist that had been
+between them for twenty-four hours.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as the drawing-room door closed behind her she ran up-stairs
+like a girl. There was no light in his study, and she went on into
+his bedroom. He was lying on the sofa; he had taken off his coat, and
+his arms were clasped under his head; he was smoking a long cigar. To
+find him idle was unusual. His was not a contemplative nature; a trade
+journal or a detective novel were the customary solace of odd moments
+like this.</p>
+
+<p>He did not move as she entered, but he turned his eyes slowly and
+seriously upon her. His eyes were black. He was a very dark man, with
+a smooth, brown skin and thick, fine hair, which clung closely to his
+broad, rather massive head. He was clean shaven, so that, as Adelaide
+loved to remember a friend of his had once suggested, his business
+competitors might take note of the stern lines of his mouth and chin.</p>
+
+<p>She came in quickly, and shut the door behind her, and then dropping on
+her knees beside him, she laid her head against his heart. He put out
+his hand, touched her face, and said:</p>
+
+<p>“Take off this veil.”</p>
+
+<p>The taking off of Adelaide’s veil was not a process to be accomplished
+ill-advisedly or lightly. Lucie, her maid, had put it on, with much
+gathering together and looking into the glass over her mistress’s
+shoulder, and it was held in place with shining pins and hair-pins. She
+lifted her head, sank back upon her heels, and raised her arms to the
+offending cobweb of black meshes, while her husband went on in a tone
+not absolutely denuded of reproach:</p>
+
+<p>“You’ve been in some time.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,”—she stuck the first pin into the upholstery of the sofa,—“but
+Pringle told me Mathilde had a visitor, and I thought it was my duty to
+stop and be a little parental.”</p>
+
+<p>“A young man?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. I forget his name—just like all these young men nowadays, alert
+and a little too much at his ease, but amusing in his way. He said,
+among other things—”</p>
+
+<p>But Farron, it appeared, was not exclusively interested in the words
+of Mathilde’s visitor; for at this instant, perceiving that his wife
+had disengaged herself from her veil, he sat up, caught her to him, and
+pressed his lips to hers.</p>
+
+<p>“O Adelaide!” he said, and it seemed to her he spoke with a sort of
+agony.</p>
+
+<p>She held him away from her.</p>
+
+<p>“Vincent, what is it?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>“What is what?”</p>
+
+<p>“Is anything wrong?”</p>
+
+<p>“Between us?”</p>
+
+<p>Oh, she knew that method of his, to lead her on to make definite
+statements about impressions of which nothing definite could be
+accurately said.</p>
+
+<p>“No, I won’t be pinned down,” she said; “but I feel it, the way a
+rheumatic feels it, when the wind goes into the east.”</p>
+
+<p>He continued to look at her gravely; she thought he was going to speak
+when a knock came at the door. It was Pringle announcing the visit of
+Mr. Lanley.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide rose slowly to her feet, and, walking to her husband’s
+dressing-table, repinned her hat, and caught up the little stray locks
+which grew in deep, sharp points at the back of her head.</p>
+
+<p>“You’ll come down, too?” she said.</p>
+
+<p>Farron was looking about for his coat, and as he put it on he observed
+dryly:</p>
+
+<p>“The young man is seeing all the family.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, he won’t mind,” she answered. “He probably hasn’t the slightest
+wish to see Mathilde alone. They both struck me as sorry when I left
+them; they were running down. You can’t imagine, Vin, how little
+romance there is among all these young people.”</p>
+
+<p>“They leave it to us,” he answered. This was exactly in his accustomed
+manner, and as they went down-stairs together her heart felt lighter,
+though the long, black, shiny pin stuck harmlessly into the upholstery
+of the sofa was like a mile-stone, for afterward she remembered that
+her questions had gone unanswered.</p>
+
+<p>Wayne was still in the drawing-room, and Mathilde, who loved her
+grandfather, was making a gentle fuss over him, a process which
+consisted largely in saying: “O Grandfather! Oh, you didn’t! O
+<i>Grandfather</i>!”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley, though a small man and now over sixty, had a distinct
+presence. He wore excellent gray clothes of the same shade as his hair,
+and out of this neutrality of tint his bright, brown eyes sparkled
+piercingly.</p>
+
+<p>He had begun life with the assumption that to be a New York Lanley was
+in itself enough, a comfortable creed in which many of his relations
+had obscurely lived and died. But before he was graduated from Columbia
+College he began to doubt whether the profession of being an aristocrat
+in a democracy was a man’s job. At no time in his life did he deny
+the value of birth and breeding; but he came to regard them as a
+responsibility solemn and often irritating to those who did not possess
+them, though he was no longer content with the current views of his
+family that they were a sufficient attainment in themselves.</p>
+
+<p>He was graduated from college in 1873, and after a summer at the family
+place on the Hudson, hot, fertile, and inaccessible, which his sister
+Alberta was at that time occupying, he had arranged a trip round the
+world. September of that year brought the great panic, and swept away
+many larger and solider fortunes than the Lanleys’. Mr. Lanley decided
+that he must go to work, though he abandoned his traditions no further
+than to study law. His ancestors, like many of the aristocrats of the
+early days, had allowed their opinions of fashion to influence too much
+their selection of real estate. All through the late seventies, while
+his brothers and sisters were clinging sentimentally to brownstone
+fronts in Stuyvesant Square or red-brick facades in Great Jones Street,
+Mr. Lanley himself, unaffected by recollections of Uncle Joel’s
+death or grandma’s marriage, had been parting with his share in such
+properties, and investing along the east side of the park.</p>
+
+<p>By the time he was forty he was once more a fairly rich man. He
+had left the practice of law to become the president of the Peter
+Stuyvesant Trust Company, for which he had been counsel. After fifteen
+years he had retired from this, too, and had become, what he insisted
+nature had always intended him to be, a gentleman of leisure. He
+retained a directorship in the trust company, was a trustee of his
+university, and was a thorny and inquiring member of many charitable
+boards.</p>
+
+<p>He prided himself on having emancipated himself from the ideas of
+his own generation. It bored him to listen to his cousins lamenting
+the vulgarities of modern life, the lack of elegance in present-day
+English, or to hear them explain as they borrowed money from him the
+sort of thing a gentleman could or could not do for a living. But on
+the subject of what a lady might do he still held fixed and unalterable
+notions; nor did he ever find it tiresome to hear his own daughter
+expound the axioms of this subject with a finality he had taught her
+in her youth. Having freed himself from fine-gentlemanism, he had
+quite unconsciously fallen the more easily a prey to fine-ladyism; all
+his conservatism had gone into that, as a man, forced to give up his
+garden, might cherish one lovely potted plant.</p>
+
+<p>At a time when private schools were beginning to flourish once more he
+had been careful to educate Adelaide entirely at home with governesses.
+Every summer he took her abroad, and showed her, and talked with
+her about, books, pictures, and buildings; he inoculated her with
+such fundamentals as that a lady never wears imitation lace on her
+underclothes, and the past of the verb to “eat” is pronounced to rhyme
+with “bet.” She spoke French and German fluently, and could read
+Italian. He considered her a perfectly educated woman. She knew nothing
+of business, political economy, politics, or science. He himself had
+never been deeply interested in American politics, though very familiar
+with the lives of English statesmen. He was a great reader of memoirs
+and of the novels of Disraeli and Trollope. Of late he had taken to
+motoring.</p>
+
+<p>He kissed his daughter and nodded—a real New York nod—to his
+son-in-law.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve come to tell you, Adelaide,” he began.</p>
+
+<p>“Such a thing!” murmured Mathilde, shaking her golden head above the
+cup of tea she was making for him, making in just the way he liked; for
+she was a little person who remembered people’s tastes.</p>
+
+<p>“I thought you’d rather hear it than read it in the papers.”</p>
+
+<p>“Goodness, Papa, you talk as if you had been getting married!”</p>
+
+<p>“No.” Mr. Lanley hesitated, and looked up at her brightly. “No; but I
+think I did have a proposal the other day.”</p>
+
+<p>“From Mrs. Baxter?” asked Adelaide. This was almost war. Mrs. Baxter
+was a regal and possessive widow from Baltimore whose long and regular
+visits to Mr. Lanley had once occasioned his family some alarm, though
+time had now given them a certain institutional safety.</p>
+
+<p>Her father was not flurried by the reference.</p>
+
+<p>“No,” he said; “though she writes me, I’m glad to say, that she is
+coming soon.”</p>
+
+<p>“You don’t tell me!” said Adelaide. The cream of the winter season was
+usually the time Mrs. Baxter selected for her visit.</p>
+
+<p>Her father did not notice her.</p>
+
+<p>“If Mrs. Baxter should ever propose to me,” he went on thoughtfully, “I
+shouldn’t refuse. I don’t think I should have the—”</p>
+
+<p>“The chance?” said his daughter.</p>
+
+<p>“I was going to say the fortitude. But this,” he went on, “was an
+elderly cousin, who expressed a wish to come and be my housekeeper.
+Perhaps matrimony was not intended. Mathilde, my dear, how does one
+tell nowadays whether one is being proposed to or not?”</p>
+
+<p>In this poignant and unexpected crisis Mathilde turned slowly and
+painfully crimson. How <i>did</i> one tell? It was a question which at the
+moment was anything but clear to her.</p>
+
+<p>“I should always assume it in doubtful cases, sir,” said Wayne, very
+distinctly. He and Mathilde did not even glance at each other.</p>
+
+<p>“It wasn’t your proposal that you came to announce to us, though, was
+it, Papa?” said Adelaide.</p>
+
+<p>“No,” answered Mr. Lanley. “The fact is, I’ve been arrested.”</p>
+
+<p>“Again?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; most unjustly, most unjustly.” His brows contracted, and then
+relaxed at a happy memory. “It’s the long, low build of the car. It
+looks so powerful that the police won’t give you a chance. It was
+nosing through the park—”</p>
+
+<p>“At about thirty miles an hour,” said Farron.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, not a bit over thirty-five. A lovely morning, no one in sight,
+I may have let her out a little. All of a sudden one of these mounted
+fellows jumped out from the bushes along the bridle-path. They’re a
+fine-looking lot, Vincent.”</p>
+
+<p>Farron asked who the judge was, and, Mr. Lanley named him—named him
+slightly wrong, and Farron corrected him.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll get you off,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide looked up at her husband admiringly. This was the aspect of
+him that she loved best. It seemed to her like magic what Vincent could
+do. Her father, she thought, took it very calmly. What would have
+happened to him if she had not brought Farron into the family to rescue
+and protect? The visiting boy, she noticed, was properly impressed. She
+saw him give Farron quite a dog-like look as he took his departure.
+To Mathilde he only bowed. No arrangements had been made for a future
+meeting. Mathilde tried to convey to him in a prolonged look that if he
+would wait only five minutes all would be well, that her grandfather
+never paid long visits; but the door closed behind him. She became
+immediately overwhelmed by the fear, which had an element of desire in
+it, too, that her family would fall to discussing him, would question
+her as to how long she had known him, and why she liked him, and what
+they talked about, and whether she had been expecting a visit, sitting
+there in her best dress. Then slowly she took in the fact that they
+were going to talk about nothing but Mr. Lanley’s arrest. She marveled
+at the obtuseness of older people—to have stood at the red-hot center
+of youth and love and not even to know it! She drew her shoulders
+together, feeling very lonely and strong. As they talked, she allowed
+her eyes to rest first on one speaker and then on the other, as if she
+were following each word of the discussion. As a matter of fact she was
+rehearsing with an inner voice the tone of Wayne’s voice when he had
+said that he loved her.</p>
+
+<p>Then suddenly she decided that she would be much happier alone in
+her own room. She rose, patted her grandfather on the shoulder, and
+prepared to escape. He, not wishing to be interrupted at the moment,
+patted her hand in return.</p>
+
+<p>“Hello!” he exclaimed. “Hands are cold, my dear.”</p>
+
+<p>She caught Farron’s cool, black eyes, and surprised herself by
+answering:</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; but, then, they always are.” This was quite untrue, but every one
+was perfectly satisfied with it.</p>
+
+<p>As she left the room Mr. Lanley was saying:</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I don’t want to go to Blackwell’s Island. Lovely spot, of course.
+My grandfather used to tell me he remembered it when the Blackwell
+family still lived there. But I shouldn’t care to wear stripes—except
+for the pleasure of telling Alberta about it. It would give her a
+year’s occupation, her suffering over my disgrace, wouldn’t it,
+Adelaide?”</p>
+
+<p>“She’d scold me,” said Adelaide, looking beautifully martyred. Then
+turning to her husband, she asked. “Will it be very difficult, Vincent,
+getting papa off?” She wanted it to be difficult, she wanted him to
+give her material out of which she could form a picture of him as a
+savior; but he only shook his head and said:</p>
+
+<p>“That young man is in love with Mathilde.”</p>
+
+<p>“O Vin! Those children?”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley pricked up his ears like a terrier.</p>
+
+<p>“In love?” he exclaimed. “And who is he? Not one of the East Sussex
+Waynes, I hope. Vulgar people. They always were; began life as
+auctioneers in my father’s time. Is he one of those, Adelaide?”</p>
+
+<p>“I have no idea who he is, if any one,” said Adelaide. “I never saw or
+heard of him before this afternoon.”</p>
+
+<p>“And may I ask,” said her father, “if you intend to let your daughter
+become engaged to a young man of whom you know nothing whatsoever?”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide looked extremely languid, one of her methods of showing
+annoyance.</p>
+
+<p>“Really, Papa,” she said, “the fact that he has come once to pay
+an afternoon visit to Mathilde does not, it seems to me, make an
+engagement inevitable. My child is not absolutely repellent, you know,
+and a good many young men come to the house.” Then suddenly remembering
+that her oracle had already spoken on this subject, she asked more
+humbly, “What was it made you say he was in love, Vin?”</p>
+
+<p>“Just an impression,” said Farron.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley had been thinking it over.</p>
+
+<p>“It was not the custom in my day,” he began, and then remembering that
+this was one of his sister Alberta’s favorite openings, he changed the
+form of his sentence. “I never allowed you to see stray young men—”</p>
+
+<p>His daughter interrupted him.</p>
+
+<p>“But I always saw them, Papa. I used to let them come early in the
+afternoon before you came in.”</p>
+
+<p>In his heart Mr. Lanley doubted that this had been a regular custom,
+but he knew it would be unwise to argue the point; so he started fresh.</p>
+
+<p>“When a young man is attentive to a girl like Mathilde—”</p>
+
+<p>“But he isn’t,” said Adelaide. “At least not what I should have called
+attentive when I was a girl.”</p>
+
+<p>“Your experience was not long, my dear. You were married at Mathilde’s
+age.”</p>
+
+<p>“You may be sure of one thing, Papa, that I don’t desire an early
+marriage for my daughter.”</p>
+
+<p>“Very likely,” returned her father, getting up, and buttoning the last
+button of his coat; “but you may have noticed that we can’t always get
+just what we most desire for our children.”</p>
+
+<p>When he had gone, Vincent looked at his wife and smiled, but smiled
+without approval. She twisted her shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I suppose so,” she said; “but I do so hate to be scolded about the
+way I bring up Mathilde.”</p>
+
+<p>“Or about anything else, my dear.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t hate to be scolded by you,” she returned. “In fact, I
+sometimes get a sort of servile enjoyment from it. Besides,” she went
+on, “as a matter of fact, I bring Mathilde up particularly well, quite
+unlike these wild young women I see everywhere else. She tells me
+everything, and I have perfectly the power of making her hate any one I
+disapprove of. But you’ll try and find out something about this young
+man, won’t you, Vin?”</p>
+
+<p>“We’ll have a full report on him to-morrow. Do you know what his first
+name is?”</p>
+
+<p>“At the moment I don’t recall his last. Oh, yes—Wayne. I’ll ask
+Mathilde when we go up-stairs.”</p>
+
+<p>From her own bedroom door she called up.</p>
+
+<p>“Mathilde, what is the name of your young friend?”</p>
+
+<p>There was a little pause before Mathilde answered that she was sorry,
+but she didn’t know.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Farron turned to her husband and made a little gesture to indicate
+that this ignorance on the girl’s part did not bear out his theory;
+but she saw that he did not admit it, that he clung still to his
+impression. “And Vincent’s impressions—” she said to herself as she
+went in to dress.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley was ruffled as he left his daughter’s drawing-room.</p>
+
+<p>“As if I had wanted her to marry at eighteen,” he said to himself; and
+he took his hat crossly from Pringle and set it hard on his head at
+the slight angle which he preferred. Then reflecting that Pringle was
+not in any way involved, he unbent slightly, and said something that
+sounded like:</p>
+
+<p>“Haryer, Pringle?”</p>
+
+<p>Pringle, despite his stalwart masculine appearance, had in speaking a
+surprisingly high, squeaky voice.</p>
+
+<p>“I keep my health, thank you, sir,” he said. “Anna has been somewhat
+ailing.” Anna was his wife, to whom he usually referred as “Mrs.
+Pringle”; but he made an exception in speaking to Mr. Lanley, for she
+had once been the Lanleys’ kitchen-maid. “Your car, sir?”</p>
+
+<p>No, Mr. Lanley was walking—walking, indeed, more quickly than usual
+under the stimulus of annoyance.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing had ever happened that made him suffer as he had suffered
+through his daughter’s divorce. Divorce was one of the modern ideas
+which he had imagined he had accepted. As a lawyer he had expressed
+himself as willing always to take the lady’s side; but in the cases
+which he actually took he liked to believe that the wife was perfect
+and the husband inexcusable. He could not comfort himself with any such
+belief in his daughter’s case.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide’s conduct had been, as far as he could see, irreproachable;
+but, then, so had Severance’s. This was what had made the gossip,
+almost the scandal, of the thing. Even his sister Alberta had whispered
+to him that if Severance had been unfaithful to Adelaide—But poor
+Severance had not been unfaithful; he had not even become indifferent.
+He loved his wife, he said, as much as on the day he married her. He
+was extremely unhappy. Mr. Lanley grew to dread the visits of his huge,
+blond son-in-law, who used actually to sob in the library, and ask
+for explanations of something which Mr. Lanley had never been able to
+understand.</p>
+
+<p>And how obstinate Adelaide had been! She, who had been such a docile
+girl, and then for many years so completely under the thumb of her
+splendid-looking husband, had suddenly become utterly intractable. She
+would listen to no reason and brook no delay. She had been willing
+enough to explain; she had explained repeatedly, but the trouble was he
+could not understand the explanation. She did not love her husband any
+more, she said. Mr. Lanley pointed out to her that this was no legal
+grounds for a divorce.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, but I look down upon him,” she went on.</p>
+
+<p>“On poor Joe?” her father had asked innocently, and had then discovered
+that this was the wrong thing to say. She had burst out, “Poor Joe!
+poor Joe!” That was the way every one considered him. Was it her fault
+if he excited pity and contempt instead of love and respect? Her love,
+she intimated, had been of a peculiarly eternal sort; Severance himself
+was to blame for its extinction. Mr. Lanley discovered that in some way
+she considered the intemperance of Severance’s habits to be involved.
+But this was absurd. It was true that for a year or two Severance
+had taken to drinking rather more than was wise; but, Mr. Lanley had
+thought at the time, the poor young man had not needed any artificial
+stimulant in the days when Adelaide had fully and constantly admired
+him. He had seen Severance come home several times not exactly drunk,
+but rather more boyishly boastful and hilarious than usual. Even Mr.
+Lanley, a naturally temperate man, had not found Joe repellent in the
+circumstances. Afterward he had been thankful for this weakness: it
+gave him the only foundation on which he could build a case not for the
+courts, of course, but for the world. Unfortunately, however, Severance
+had pulled up before there was any question of divorce.</p>
+
+<p>That was another confusing fact. Adelaide had managed him so
+beautifully. Her father had not known her wonderful powers until he saw
+the skill and patience with which she had dealt with Joe Severance’s
+drinking. Joe himself was eager to own that he owed his cure entirely
+to her. Mr. Lanley had been proud of her; she had turned out, he
+thought, just what a woman ought to be; and then, on top of it, she had
+come to him one day and announced that she would never live with Joe
+again.</p>
+
+<p>“But why not?” he had asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Because I don’t love him,” she had said.</p>
+
+<p>Then Mr. Lanley knew how little his acceptance of the idea of divorce
+in general had reconciled him to the idea of the divorce of his own
+daughter—a Lanley—Mrs. Adelaide Lanley, Mrs. Adelaide Severance. His
+sense of fitness was shocked, though he pleaded with her first on the
+ground of duty, and then under the threat of scandal. With her beauty
+and Severance’s popularity, for from his college days he had been
+extremely popular with men, the divorce excited uncommon interest.
+Severance’s unconcealed grief, a rather large circle of devoted friends
+in whom he confided, and the fact that Adelaide had to go to Nevada to
+get her divorce, led most people to believe that she had simply found
+some one she liked better. Mr. Lanley would have believed it himself,
+but he couldn’t. Farron had not appeared until she had been divorced
+for several years.</p>
+
+<p>Lanley still cherished an affection for Severance, who had very soon
+married again, a local belle in the Massachusetts manufacturing town
+where he now lived. She was said to resemble Adelaide.</p>
+
+<p>No, Mr. Lanley could not see that he had had anything to reproach
+himself with in regard to his daughter’s first marriage. They had been
+young, of course; all the better. He had known the Severances for
+years; and Joe was handsome, hard working, had rowed on his crew, and
+every one spoke well of him. Certainly they had been in love—more in
+love than he liked to see two people, at least when one of them was
+his own daughter. He had suggested their waiting a year or two, but no
+one had backed him up. The Severances had been eager for the marriage,
+naturally. Mr. Lanley could still see the young couple as they turned
+from the altar, young, beautiful, and confident.</p>
+
+<p>He had missed his daughter terribly, not only her physical presence in
+the house, but the exercise of his influence over her, which in old
+times had been perhaps a trifle autocratic. He had hated being told
+what Joe thought and said; yet he could hardly object to her docility.
+That was the way he had brought her up. He did not reckon pliancy in
+a woman as a weakness; or if he had had any temptation to do so, it
+had vanished in the period when Joe Severance had taken to drink. In
+that crisis Adelaide had been anything but weak. Every one had been so
+grateful to her,—he and Joe and the Severances,—and then immediately
+afterward the crash came.</p>
+
+<p>Women! Mr. Lanley shook his head, still moving briskly northward with
+that quick jaunty walk of his. And this second marriage—what about
+that? They seemed happy. Farron was a fine fellow, but not, it seemed
+to him, so attractive to a woman as Severance. Could he hold a woman
+like Adelaide? He wasn’t a man to stand any nonsense, though, and Mr.
+Lanley nodded; then, as it were, withdrew the nod on remembering that
+poor Joe had not wanted to stand any nonsense either. What in similar
+circumstances could Farron do? Adelaide always resented his asking how
+things were going, but how could he help being anxious? How could any
+one rest content on a hillside who had once been blown up by a volcano?</p>
+
+<p>He might not have been any more content if he had stayed to dinner at
+his son-in-law’s, as he had been asked to do. The Farrons were alone.
+Mathilde was going to a dinner, with a dance after. She came into the
+dining-room to say good night and to promise to be home early, not to
+stay and dance. She was not allowed two parties on successive nights,
+not because her health was anything but robust, but rather because her
+mother considered her too young for such vulgar excess.</p>
+
+<p>When she had gone, Farron observed:</p>
+
+<p>“That child has a will of iron.”</p>
+
+<p>“Vincent!” said his wife. “She does everything I suggest to her.”</p>
+
+<p>“Her will just now is to please you in everything. Wait until she
+rebels.”</p>
+
+<p>“But women don’t rebel against the people they love. I don’t have to
+tell you that, do I? I never have to manœuver the child, never have to
+coax or charm her to do what I want.”</p>
+
+<p>He smiled at her across the table.</p>
+
+<p>“You have great faith in those methods, haven’t you?”</p>
+
+<p>“They work, Vin.”</p>
+
+<p>He nodded as if no one knew that better than he.</p>
+
+<p>Soon after dinner he went up-stairs to write some letters. She followed
+him about ten o’clock. She came and leaned one hand on his shoulder and
+one on his desk.</p>
+
+<p>“Still working?” she said. She had been aware of no desire to see what
+he was writing, but she was instantly aware that his blotting-paper had
+fallen across the sheet, that the sheet was not a piece of note-paper,
+but one of a large pad on which he had been apparently making notes.</p>
+
+<p>Her diamond bracelet had slipped down her wrist and lay upon the
+blotting-paper; he slowly and carefully pushed it up her slim, round
+arm until it once more clung in place.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve nearly finished,” he said; and to her ears there was some under
+sound of pain or of constraint in his tone.</p>
+
+<p>A little later he strolled, still dressed, into her room. She was
+already in bed, and he came and sat on the foot of the bed, with one
+foot tucked under him and his arms folded.</p>
+
+<p>Her mind during the interval had been exclusively occupied with the
+position of that piece of blotting-paper. Could it be there was some
+other woman whose ghost-like presence she was just beginning to feel
+haunting their relation? The impersonality of Vincent’s manner was an
+armor against such attacks, but this armor, as Adelaide knew, was more
+apparent than real. If one could get beyond that, one was at the very
+heart of the man. If some fortuitous circumstance had brought a sudden
+accidental intimacy between him and another woman—What woman loving
+strength and power could resist the sight of Vincent in action, Vincent
+as she saw him?</p>
+
+<p>Yet with a good capacity for believing the worst of her
+fellow-creatures, Adelaide did not really believe in the other woman.
+That, she knew, would bring a change in the fundamentals of her
+relationship with her husband. This was only a barrier that left the
+relation itself untouched.</p>
+
+<p>Before very long she began to think the situation was all in her own
+imagination. He was so amused, so eager to talk. Silent as he was apt
+to be with the rest of the world, with her he sometimes showed a love
+of gossip that enchanted her. And now it seemed to her that he was
+leading her on from subject to subject through a childish dislike to
+going to bed. They were actually giggling over Mr. Lanley’s adventure
+when a motor-brake squeaked in the silence of the night, a motor-door
+slammed. For the first time Adelaide remembered her daughter. It
+was after twelve o’clock. A knock came at her door. She wrapped her
+swan’s-down garment about her and went to the door.</p>
+
+<p>“O Mama, have you been worried?” the girl asked. She was standing in
+the narrow corridor, with her arms full of shining favors; there could
+be no question whatever that she had stayed for the dance. “Are you
+angry? Have I been keeping you awake?”</p>
+
+<p>“I thought you would have been home an hour ago.”</p>
+
+<p>“I know. I want to tell you about it. Mama, how lovely you look in that
+blue thing! Won’t you come up-stairs with me while I undress?”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>“Not to-night,” she answered.</p>
+
+<p>“You are angry with me,” the girl went on. “But if you will come, I
+will explain. I have something to tell you, Mama.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Farron’s heart stood still. The phrase could mean only one thing.
+She went up-stairs with her daughter, sent the maid away, and herself
+began to undo the soft, pink silk.</p>
+
+<p>“It needs an extra hook,” she murmured. “I told her it did.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde craned her neck over her shoulder, as if she had ever been
+able to see the middle of her back.</p>
+
+<p>“But it doesn’t show, does it?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>“It perfectly well might.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde stepped out of her dress, and flung it over a chair. In her
+short petticoat, with her ankles showing and her arms bare, she looked
+like a very young girl, and when she put up her hands and took the pins
+out of her hair, so that it fell over her shoulders, she might have
+been a child.</p>
+
+<p>The silence began to grow awkward. Mathilde put on her dressing-gown;
+it was perfectly straight, and made her look like a little white
+column. A glass of milk and some biscuits were waiting for her. She
+pushed a chair near her fire for her mother, and herself remained
+standing, with her glass of milk in her hand.</p>
+
+<p>“Mama,” she said suddenly, “I suppose I’m what you’d call engaged.”</p>
+
+<p>“O Mathilde! not to that boy who was here to-day?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why not to him?”</p>
+
+<p>“I know nothing about him.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know very much myself. Yes, it’s Pete Wayne. Pierson his name
+is, but every one calls him Pete. How strange it was that I did not
+even know his first name when you asked me!”</p>
+
+<p>A single ray pierced Mrs. Farron’s depression: Vincent had known,
+Vincent’s infallibility was confirmed. She did not know what to say.
+She sat looking sadly, obliquely at the floor like a person who has
+been aggrieved. She was wondering whether she should be to her daughter
+a comrade or a ruler, a confederate or a policeman. Of course in all
+probability the thing would be better stopped. But could this be
+accomplished by immediate action, or could she invite confidences and
+yet commit herself to nothing?</p>
+
+<p>She raised her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“I do not approve of youthful marriages,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“O Mama! And you were only eighteen yourself.”</p>
+
+<p>“That is why.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde was frightened not only by the intense bitterness of her
+mother’s tone, but also by the obvious fact that she was face to face
+with the explanation of the separation of her parents. She had been
+only nine years old at the time. She had loved her father, had found
+him a better playfellow than her mother, had wept bitterly at parting
+with him, and had missed him. And then gradually her mother, who had
+before seemed like a beautiful, but remote, princess, had begun to make
+of her an intimate and grown-up friend, to consult her and read with
+her and arrange happinesses in her life, to win, to, if the truth must
+be told, reconquer her. Perhaps even Adelaide would not have succeeded
+so easily in effacing Severance’s image had not he himself so quickly
+remarried. Mathilde went several times to stay with the new household
+after Adelaide in secret, tearful conference with her father had been
+forced to consent.</p>
+
+<p>To Mathilde these visits had been an unacknowledged torture. She never
+knew quite what to mention and what to leave untouched. There was
+always a constraint between the three of them. Her father, when alone
+with her, would question her, with strange, eager pauses, as to how
+her mother looked. Her mother’s successor, whom she could not really
+like, would question her more searchingly, more embarrassingly, with
+an ill-concealed note of jealousy in every word. Even at twelve years
+Mathilde was shocked by the strain of hatred in her father’s new wife,
+who seemed to reproach her for fashion and fineness and fastidiousness,
+qualities of which the girl was utterly unaware. She could have loved
+her little half-brother when he appeared upon the scene, but Mrs.
+Severance did not encourage the bond, and gradually Mathilde’s visits
+to her father ceased.</p>
+
+<p>As a child she had been curious about the reasons for the parting, but
+as she grew older it had seemed mere loyalty to accept the fact without
+asking why; she had perhaps not wanted to know why. But now, she saw,
+she was to hear.</p>
+
+<p>“Mathilde, do you still love your father?”</p>
+
+<p>“I think I do, Mama. I feel very sorry for him.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why?”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know why. I dare say he is happy.”</p>
+
+<p>“I dare say he is, poor Joe.” Adelaide paused. “Well, my dear, that
+was the reason of our parting. One can pity a son or a brother, but
+not a husband. Weakness kills love. A woman cannot be the leader, the
+guide, and keep any romance. O Mathilde, I never want you to feel the
+humiliation of finding yourself stronger than the man you love. That is
+why I left your father, and my justification is his present happiness.
+This inferior little person he has married, she does as well. Any one
+would have done as well.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde was puzzled by her mother’s evident conviction that the
+explanation was complete. She asked after a moment:</p>
+
+<p>“But what was it that made you think at first that you did love him,
+Mama?”</p>
+
+<p>“Just what makes you think you love this boy—youth, flattery, desire
+to love. He was magnificently handsome, your father. I saw him admired
+by other men, apparently a master; I was too young to judge, my dear.
+You shan’t be allowed to make that mistake; you shall have time to
+consider.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t want time,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“I did not know I did.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t think I feel about love as you do,” said the girl, slowly.</p>
+
+<p>“Every woman does.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s just Pete as he is that I love. I don’t care which of us leads.”</p>
+
+<p>“But you will.”</p>
+
+<p>The girl had not yet reached a point where she could describe the very
+essence of her passion; she had to let this go. After a moment she said:</p>
+
+<p>“I see now why you chose Mr. Farron.”</p>
+
+<p>“You mean you have never seen before?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not so clearly.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Farron bit her lips. To have missed understanding this seemed a
+sufficient proof of immaturity. She rose.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, my darling,” she said in a tone of extreme reasonableness, “we
+shall decide nothing to-night. I know nothing against Mr. Wayne. He may
+be just the right person. We must see more of him. Do you know anything
+about his family?”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde shook her head. “He lives alone with his mother. His father is
+dead. She’s very good and interested in drunkards.”</p>
+
+<p>“In <i>drunkards</i>?” Mrs. Farron just shut her eyes a second.</p>
+
+<p>“She has a mission that reforms them.”</p>
+
+<p>“Is that his profession, too?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, no. He’s in Wall Street—quite a good firm. O Mama, don’t sigh
+like that! We know we can’t be married at once. We are reasonable. You
+think not, because this has all happened so suddenly; but great things
+do happen suddenly. We love each other. That’s all I wanted to tell
+you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Love!” Adelaide looked at the little person before her, tried to
+recall the fading image of the young man, and then thought of the
+dominating figure in her own life. “My dear, you have no idea what love
+is.”</p>
+
+<p>She took no notice of the queer, steady look the girl gave her in
+return. She went down-stairs. She had been gone more than an hour, and
+she knew that Vincent would have been long since asleep. He had, and
+prided himself on having, a great capacity for sleep. She tiptoed past
+his door, stole into her own room, and then, glancing in the direction
+of his, was startled to see that a light was burning. She went in; he
+was reading, and once again, as his eyes turned toward her, she thought
+she saw the same tragic appeal that she had felt that afternoon in his
+kiss. Trembling, she threw herself down beside him, clasping him to her.</p>
+
+<p>“O Vincent! oh, my dear!” she whispered, and began to cry. He did not
+ask her why she was crying; she wished that he would; his silence
+admitted that he knew of some adequate reason.</p>
+
+<p>“I feel that there is something wrong,” she sobbed, “something terribly
+wrong.”</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing could go wrong between you and me, my darling,” he answered.
+His tone comforted, his touch was a comfort. Perhaps she was a coward,
+she said to herself, but she questioned him no further.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Wayne was not so prompt as Mathilde in making the announcement of their
+engagement. He and his mother breakfasted together rather hastily, for
+she was going to court that morning to testify in favor of one of her
+backsliding inebriates, and Wayne had not found the moment to introduce
+his own affairs.</p>
+
+<p>That afternoon he came home earlier than usual; it was not five o’clock.
+He passed Dr. Parret’s flat on the first floor—Dr. Lily MacComb Parret.
+She was a great friend of his, and he felt a decided temptation to go in
+and tell her the news first; but reflecting that no one ought to hear it
+before his mother, he went on up-stairs. He lived on the fifth floor.</p>
+
+<p>He opened the door of the flat and went into the sitting-room. It was
+empty. He lighted the gas, which flared up, squeaking like a bagpipe. The
+room was square and crowded. Shelves ran all the way round it, tightly
+filled with books. In the center was a large writing-table, littered with
+papers, and on each side of the fireplace stood two worn, but
+comfortable, arm-chairs, each with a reading-lamp at its side. There was
+nothing beautiful in the furniture, and yet the room had its own charm.
+The house was a corner house and had once been a single dwelling. The
+shape of the room, its woodwork, its doors, its flat, white marble
+mantelpiece, belonged to an era of simple taste and good workmanship; but
+the greatest charm of the room was the view from the windows, of which it
+had four, two that looked east and two south, and gave a glimpse of the
+East River and its bridges.</p>
+
+<p>Wayne was not sorry his mother was out. He had begun to dread the
+announcement he had to make. At first he had thought only of her keen
+interest in his affairs, but later he had come to consider what this
+particular piece of news would mean to her. Say what you will, he
+thought, to tell your mother of your engagement is a little like casting
+off an old love.</p>
+
+<p>Ever since he could remember, he and his mother had lived in the
+happiest comradeship. His father, a promising young doctor, had died
+within a few years of his marriage. Pete had been brought up by his
+mother, but he had very little remembrance of any process of molding. It
+seemed to him as if they had lived in a sort of partnership since he had
+been able to walk and talk. It had been as natural for him to spend his
+hours after school in stamping and sealing her large correspondence as it
+had been for her to pinch and arrange for years so as to send him to the
+university from which his father had been graduated. She would have been
+glad, he knew, if he had decided to follow his father in the study of
+medicine, but he recoiled from so long a period of dependence; he liked
+to think that he brought to his financial reports something of a
+scientific inheritance.</p>
+
+<p>She had, he thought, every virtue that a mother could have, and she
+combined them with a gaiety of spirit that made her take her virtues as
+if they were the most delightful amusements. It was of this gaiety that
+he had first thought until Mathilde had pointed out to him that there was
+tragedy in the situation. “What will your mother do without you?” the
+girl kept saying. There was indeed nothing in his mother’s life that
+could fill the vacancy he would leave. She had few intimate
+relationships. For all her devotion to her drunkards, he was the only
+personal happiness in her life.</p>
+
+<p>He went into the kitchen in search of her. This was evidently one of
+their servant’s uncounted hours. While he was making himself some tea he
+heard his mother’s key in the door. He called to her, and she appeared.</p>
+
+<p>“Why my hat, Mother dear?” he asked gently as he kissed her.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne smiled absently, and put up her hand to the soft felt hat she
+was wearing.</p>
+
+<p>“I just went out to post some letters,” she said, as if this were a
+complete explanation; then she removed a mackintosh that she happened to
+have on, though the day was fine. She was then seen to be wearing a dark
+skirt and a neat plain shirt that was open at the throat. Though no
+longer young, she somehow suggested a boy—a boy rather overtrained; she
+was far more boyish than Wayne. She had a certain queer beauty, too;
+not beauty of Adelaide’s type, of structure and coloring and elegance,
+but beauty of expression. Life itself had written some fine lines of
+humor and resolve upon her face, and her blue-gray eyes seemed actually
+to flare with hope and intention. Her hair was of that light-brown shade
+in which plentiful gray made little change of shade; it was wound in a
+knot at the back of her head and gave her trouble. She was always
+pushing it up and repinning it into place, as if it were too heavy for
+her small head.</p>
+
+<p>“I wonder if there’s anything to eat in the house,” her son said.</p>
+
+<p>“I wonder.” They moved together toward the ice-box.</p>
+
+<p>“Mother,” said Pete, “that piece of pie has been in the ice-box at least
+three days. Let’s throw it away.”</p>
+
+<p>She took the saucer thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>“I like it so much,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“Then why don’t you eat it?”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s not good for me.” She let Wayne take the saucer. “What do you
+know?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>She had adopted slang as she adopted most labor-saving devices.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I do know something new,” said Wayne. He sat down on the kitchen
+table and poured out his tea. “New as the garden of Eden. I’m in love.”</p>
+
+<p>“O Pete!” his mother cried, and the purest, most conventional maternal
+agony was in the tone. For an instant, crushed and terrified, she looked
+at him; and then something gay and impish appeared in her eyes, and she
+asked with a grin:</p>
+
+<p>“Is it some one perfectly awful?”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m afraid you’ll think so. She’s a sheltered, young, luxurious child,
+with birth, breeding, and money, everything you hate most.”</p>
+
+<p>“O Pete!” she said again, but this time with a sort of sad resignation.
+Then shaking her head as if to say that she wasn’t, after all, as narrow
+as he thought, she hitched her chair nearer the table and said eagerly,
+“Well, tell me all about it.”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne looked down at his mother as she sat opposite him, with her elbows
+on the table, as keen as a child and as lively as a cricket. He asked
+himself if he had not drifted into a needlessly sentimental state of mind
+about her. He even asked himself, as he had done once or twice before in
+his life, whether her love for him implied the slightest dependence upon
+his society. Wasn’t it perfectly possible that his going would free her
+life, would make it easier instead of harder? Every man, he knew, felt
+the element of freedom beneath the despair of breaking even the tenderest
+of ties. Some women, he supposed, might feel the same way about their
+love-affairs. But could they feel the same about their maternal
+relations? Could it be that his mother, that pure, heroic,
+self-sacrificing soul, was now thinking more about her liberty than her
+loss? Had not their relation always been peculiarly free? he found
+himself thinking reproachfully. Once, he remembered, when he had been
+working unusually hard he had welcomed her absence at one of her
+conferences on inebriety. Never before had he imagined that she could
+feel anything but regret at his absences. “Everybody is just alike,” he
+found himself rather bitterly thinking.</p>
+
+<p>“What do you want to know about it?” he said aloud.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, everything,” she returned.</p>
+
+<p>“I met her,” he said, “two evenings ago at a dance. I never expected to
+fall in love at a dance.”</p>
+
+<p>“Isn’t it funny? No one ever really expects to fall in love at all, and
+everybody does.”</p>
+
+<p>He glanced at her. He had been prepared to explain to her about love; and
+now it occurred to him for the first time that she knew all about it. He
+decided to ask her the great question which had been occupying his mind
+as a lover of a scientific habit of thought.</p>
+
+<p>“Mother,” he said, “how much dependence is to be placed on love—one’s
+own, I mean?”</p>
+
+<p>“Goodness, Pete! What a question to ask!”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, you might take a chance and tell me what you think. I have no
+doubts. My whole nature goes out to this girl; but I can’t help knowing
+that if we go on feeling like this till we die, we shall be the
+exception. Love’s a miracle. How much can one trust to it?”</p>
+
+<p>The moment he had spoken he knew that he was asking a great deal. It was
+torture to his mother to express an opinion on an abstract question. She
+did not lack decision of conduct. She could resolve in an instant to send
+a drunkard to an institution or take a trip round the world; but on a
+matter of philosophy of life it was as difficult to get her to commit
+herself as if she had been upon the witness-stand. Yet it was just in
+this realm that he particularly valued her opinion.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” she said at last, “I don’t believe that it’s possible to play safe
+in love. It’s a risk, but it’s one of those risks you haven’t much choice
+about taking. Life and death are like that, too. I don’t think it pays to
+be always thinking about avoiding risks. Nothing, you know,” she added,
+as if she were letting him in to rather a horrid little secret, “is
+really safe.” And evidently glad to change the subject, she went on,
+“What will her family say?”</p>
+
+<p>“I can’t think they will be pleased.”</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose not. Who are they?”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne explained the family connections, but woke no associations in his
+mother’s mind until he mentioned the name of Farron. Then he was
+astonished at the violence of her interest. She sprang to her feet; her
+eyes lighted up.</p>
+
+<p>“Why,” she cried, “that’s the man, that’s the company, that Marty Burke
+works for! O Pete, don’t you think you could get Mr. Farron to use his
+influence over Marty about Anita?”</p>
+
+<p>“Dear mother, do you think you can get him to use his influence over Mrs.
+Farron for me?”</p>
+
+<p>Marty Burke was the leader of the district and was reckoned a bad man.
+He and Mrs. Wayne had been waging a bitter war for some time over a
+young inebriate who had seduced a girl of the neighborhood. Mrs. Wayne
+was sternly trying to prosecute the inebriate; Burke was determined to
+protect him, first, by smirching the girl’s name, and, next, by
+getting the girl’s family to consent to a marriage, a solution that
+Mrs. Wayne considered most undesirable in view of the character of the
+prospective husband.</p>
+
+<p>Pete felt her interest sweep away from his affairs, and it had not
+returned when the telephone rang. He came back from answering it to tell
+his mother that Mr. Lanley, the grandfather of his love, was asking if
+she would see him for a few minutes that afternoon or evening. A visit
+was arranged for nine o’clock.</p>
+
+<p>“What’s he like?” asked Mrs. Wayne, wrinkling her nose and looking
+very impish.</p>
+
+<p>“He seemed like a nice old boy; hasn’t had a new idea, I should say,
+since 1880. And, Mother dear, you’re going to dress, aren’t you?”</p>
+
+<p>She resented the implication.</p>
+
+<p>“I shall be wonderful,” she answered with emphasis. “And while he’s here,
+I think you might go down and tell this news to Lily, yourself. Oh, I
+don’t say she’s in love with you—”</p>
+
+<p>“Lily,” said Pete, “is leading far too exciting a life to be in love
+with any one.”</p>
+
+<p>Punctually at nine, Mr. Lanley rang the bell of the flat. He had paused a
+few minutes before doing so, not wishing to weaken the effect of his
+mission by arriving out of breath. Adelaide had come to see him just
+before lunch. She pretended to minimize the importance of her news, but
+he knew she did so to evade reproach for the culpable irresponsibility of
+her attitude toward the young man’s first visit.</p>
+
+<p>“And do you know anything more about him than you did yesterday?” he
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>She did. It appeared that Vincent had telephoned her from down town just
+before she came out.</p>
+
+<p>“Tiresome young man,” she said, twisting her shoulders. “It seems there’s
+nothing against him. His father was a doctor, his mother comes of decent
+people and is a respected reformer, the young man works for an ambitious
+new firm of brokers, who speak highly of him and give him a salary of
+$5000 a year.”</p>
+
+<p>“The whole thing must be put a stop to,” said Mr. Lanley.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course, of course,” said his daughter. “But how? I can’t forbid him
+the house because he’s just an average young man.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t see why not, or at least on the ground that he’s not the husband
+you would choose for her.”</p>
+
+<p>“I think the best way will be to let him come to the house,”—she spoke
+with a sort of imperishable sweetness,—“but to turn Mathilde gradually
+against him.”</p>
+
+<p>“But how can you turn her against him?”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide looked very wistful.</p>
+
+<p>“You don’t trust me,” she moaned.</p>
+
+<p>“I only ask you how it can be done.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, there are ways. I made her perfectly hate one of them because he
+always said, ‘if you know what I mean.’ ‘It’s a very fine day, Mrs.
+Farron, if you know what I mean.’ This young man must have some horrid
+trick like that, only I haven’t studied him yet. Give me time.”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s risky.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>“Not really,” she said. “These young fancies go as quickly as they come.
+Do you remember the time you took me to West Point? I had a passion for
+the adjutant. I forgot him in a week.”</p>
+
+<p>“You were only fifteen.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mathilde is immature for her age.”</p>
+
+<p>It was agreed between them, however, that Mr. Lanley, without authority,
+should go and look the situation over. He had been trying to get the
+Waynes’ telephone since one o’clock. He had been told at intervals of
+fifteen minutes by a resolutely cheerful central that their number did
+not answer. Mr. Lanley hated people who did not answer their telephone.
+Nor was he agreeably impressed by the four flights of stairs, or by the
+appearance of the servant who answered his ring.</p>
+
+<p>“Won’t do, won’t do,” he kept repeating in his own mind.</p>
+
+<p>He was shown into the sitting-room. It was in shadow, for only a shaded
+reading-lamp was lighted, and his first impression was of four windows;
+they appeared like four square panels of dark blue, patterned with
+stars. Then a figure rose to meet him—a figure in blue draperies, with
+heavy braids wound around the head, and a low, resonant voice said, “I
+am Mrs. Wayne.”</p>
+
+<p>As soon as he could he walked to the windows and looked out to the river
+and the long, lighted curves of the bridges, and beyond to Long Island,
+to just the ground where the Battle of Long Island had been fought—a
+battle in which an ancestor of his had particularly distinguished
+himself. He said something polite about the view.</p>
+
+<p>“Let us sit here where we can look out,” she said, and sank down on a
+low sofa drawn under the windows. As she did so she came within the
+circle of light from the lamp. She sat with her head leaned back against
+the window-frame, and he saw the fine line of her jaw, the hollows in her
+cheek, the delicate modeling about her brows, not obscured by much
+eyebrow, and her long, stretched throat. She was not quite maternal
+enough to look like a Madonna, but she did look like a saint, he thought.</p>
+
+<p>He knelt with one knee on the couch and peered out.</p>
+
+<p>“Dear me,” he said, “I fancy I used to skate as a boy on a pond just
+about where that factory is now.”</p>
+
+<p>He found she knew very little about the history of New York. She had
+been brought up abroad, she said; her father had been a consul in
+France. It was a subject which he liked to expound. He loved his native
+city, which he with his own eyes had seen once as hardly more than a
+village. He and his ancestors—and Mr. Lanley’s sense of identification
+with his ancestors was almost Chinese—had watched and had a little
+shaped the growth.</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose you had Dutch ancestry, then,” she said, trying to take
+an interest.</p>
+
+<p>“Dutch.” Mr. Lanley shut his eyes, resolving, since he had no idea what
+her own descent might be, that he would not explain to her the superior
+attitude of the English settlers of the eighteenth century toward their
+Dutch predecessors. However, perhaps he did not entirely conceal his
+feeling, for he said: “No, I have no Dutch blood—not a drop. Very good
+people in their way, industrious—peasants.” He hurried on to the great
+fire of 1835. “Swept between Wall Street and Coenties Slip,” he said,
+with a splendid gesture, and then discovered that she had never heard of
+“Quenches Slip,” or worse, she had pronounced it as it was spelled. He
+gently set her right there. His father had often told him that he had
+seen with his own eyes a note of hand which had been blown, during the
+course of the conflagration, as far as Flatbush. And the second fire of
+1845. His father had been a man then, married, a prominent citizen, old
+enough, as Mr. Lanley said, with a faint smile, to have lost heavily. He
+could himself remember the New York of the Civil War, the bitter family
+quarrels, the forced resignations from clubs, the duels, the draft riots.</p>
+
+<p>But, oddly enough, when it came to contemporary New York, it was Mrs.
+Wayne who turned out to be most at home. Had he ever walked across the
+Blackwell’s Island Bridge? (This was in the days before it bore the
+elevated trains.) No, he had driven. Ah, she said, that was wholly
+different. Above, where one walked, there was nothing to shut out the
+view of the river. Just to show that he was not a feeble old antiquarian,
+he suggested their taking a walk there at once. She held out her trailing
+garments and thin, blue slippers. And then she went on:</p>
+
+<p>“There’s another beautiful place I don’t believe you know, for all you’re
+such an old New-Yorker—a pier at the foot of East Eighty-something
+Street, where you can almost touch great seagoing vessels as they pass.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, there at least we can go,” said Mr. Lanley, and he stood up. “I
+have a car here, but it’s open. Is it too cold? Have you a fur coat? I’ll
+send back to the house for an extra one.” He paused, brisk as he was; the
+thought of those four flights a second time dismayed him.</p>
+
+<p>The servant had gone out, and Pete was still absent, presumably breaking
+the news of his engagement to Dr. Parret.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne had an idea. She went to a window on the south side of the
+room, opened it, and looked out. If he had good lungs, she told him, he
+could make his man hear.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley did not visibly recoil. He leaned out and shouted. The
+chauffeur looked up, made a motion to jump out, fearing that his employer
+was being murdered in these unfamiliar surroundings; then he caught the
+order to go home for an extra coat.</p>
+
+<p>Lanley drew his shoulder back into the room and shut the window; as he
+did so he saw a trace of something impish in the smile of his hostess.</p>
+
+<p>“Why do you smile?” he asked quickly.</p>
+
+<p>She did not make the mistake of trying to arrest her smile; she let
+it broaden.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t suppose you have ever done such a thing before.”</p>
+
+<p>“Now, that does annoy me.”</p>
+
+<p>“Calling down five stories?”</p>
+
+<p>“No; your thinking I minded.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I did think so.”</p>
+
+<p>“You were mistaken, utterly mistaken.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m glad. If you mind doing such things, you give so much time to
+arranging not to do them.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley was silent. He was deciding that he should rearrange some of
+the details of his life. Not that he contemplated giving all his orders
+from the fifth story, but he saw he had always devoted too much attention
+to preventing unimportant catastrophes.</p>
+
+<p>Under her direction he was presently driving north; then he turned
+sharply east down a little hill, and came out on a low, flat pier. He put
+out the motor’s lights. They were only a few feet above the water, which
+was as black as liquid jet, with flat silver and gold patches on it from
+white and yellow lights. Opposite to them the lighthouse at the north end
+of Blackwell’s Island glowed like a hot coal. Then a great steamer
+obscured it.</p>
+
+<p>“Isn’t this nice?” Mrs. Wayne asked, and he saw that she wanted her
+discovery praised. He never lost the impression that she enjoyed
+being praised.</p>
+
+<p>Such a spot, within sight of half a dozen historic sites, was a
+temptation to Mr. Lanley, and he would have unresistingly yielded to it
+if Mrs. Wayne had not said:</p>
+
+<p>“But we haven’t said a word yet about our children.”</p>
+
+<p>“True,” answered Mr. Lanley. His heart sank. It is not easy, he thought,
+to explain to a person for whom you have just conceived a liking that her
+son had aspired above his station. He tapped his long, middle finger on
+the steering-wheel, just as at directors’ meetings he tapped the table
+before he spoke, and began, “In a society somewhat artificially formed as
+ours is, Mrs. Wayne, it has always been my experience that—” Do what he
+would, it kept turning into a speech, and the essence of the speech was
+that while democracy did very well for men, a strictly aristocratic
+system was the only thing possible for girls—one’s own girls, of
+course. In the dim light he could see that she had pushed all her hair
+back from her brows. She was trying to follow him exactly, so exactly
+that she confused him a little. He became more general. “In many ways,”
+he concluded, “the advantages of character and experience are with the
+lower classes.” He had not meant to use the word, but when it slipped
+out, he did not regret it.</p>
+
+<p>“In all ways,” she answered.</p>
+
+<p>He was not sure he had heard.</p>
+
+<p>“All the advantages?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“All the advantages of character.”</p>
+
+<p>He had to ask her to explain. One reason, perhaps, why Mrs. Wayne
+habitually avoided a direct question was that, when once started, her
+candor had no bounds. Now she began to speak. She spoke more eagerly and
+more fluently than he, and it took him several minutes to see that quite
+unconsciously she was making him a strange, distorted complement to his
+speech, that in her mouth such words as “the leisure classes, your
+sheltered girls,” were terms of the deepest reproach. He must understand,
+she said, that as she did not know Miss Severance, there was nothing
+personal, nothing at all personal, in her feeling,—she was as careful
+not to hurt his feelings as he had tried to be not to hurt hers,—but she
+did own to a prejudice—at least Pete told her it was a prejudice—</p>
+
+<p>Against what, in Heaven’s name, Lanley at first wondered; and then it
+came to him.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, you have a prejudice against divorce?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne looked at him reproachfully.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, no,” she answered. “How could you think that? But what has divorce
+to do with it? Your granddaughter hasn’t been divorced.”</p>
+
+<p>A sound of disgust at the mere suggestion escaped him, and he said
+coldly:</p>
+
+<p>“My daughter divorced her first husband.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I did not know.”</p>
+
+<p>“Against what, then, is this unconquerable prejudice of yours?”</p>
+
+<p>“Against the daughters of the leisure class.”</p>
+
+<p>He was still quite at sea.</p>
+
+<p>“You dislike them?”</p>
+
+<p>“I fear them.”</p>
+
+<p>If she had said that she considered roses a menace, he could not have
+been more puzzled. He repeated her words aloud, as if he hoped that
+they might have some meaning for him if he heard his own lips
+pronouncing them:</p>
+
+<p>“You fear them.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” she went on, now interested only in expressing her belief, “I fear
+their ignorance and idleness and irresponsibility and self-indulgence,
+and, all the more because it is so delicate and attractive and
+unconscious; and their belief that the world owes them luxury and
+happiness without their lifting a finger. I fear their cowardice and lack
+of character—”</p>
+
+<p>“Cowardice!” he cried, catching at the first word he could. “My dear Mrs.
+Wayne, the aristocrats in the French Revolution, the British officer—”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes, they know how to die,” she answered; “but do they know how to
+live when the horrible, sordid little strain of every-day life begins to
+make demands upon them, their futile education, the moral feebleness that
+comes with perfect safety! I know something can be made of such girls,
+but I don’t want my son sacrificed in the process.”</p>
+
+<p>There was a long, dark silence; then Mr. Lanley said with a particularly
+careful and exact enunciation:</p>
+
+<p>“I think, my dear madam, that you cannot have known very many of the
+young women you are describing. It may be that there are some like
+that—daughters of our mushroom finance; but I can assure you that the
+children of ladies and gentlemen are not at all as you seem to imagine.”</p>
+
+<p>It was characteristic of Mrs. Wayne that, still absorbed by her own
+convictions, she did not notice the insult of hearing ladies and
+gentlemen described to her as if they were beings wholly alien to her
+experience; but the tone of his speech startled her, and she woke, like a
+person coming out of a trance, to all the harm she had done.</p>
+
+<p>“I may be old-fashioned—” he began and then threw the phrase from him;
+it was thus that Alberta, his sister, began her most offensive
+pronouncements. “It has always appeared to me that we shelter our more
+favored women as we shelter our planted trees, so that they may attain a
+stronger maturity.”</p>
+
+<p>“But do they, are they—are sheltered women the strongest in a crisis?”</p>
+
+<p>Fiend in human shape, he thought, she was making him question his
+bringing up of Adelaide. He would not bear that. His foot stole out to
+the self-starter.</p>
+
+<p>For the few minutes that remained of the interview she tried to undo her
+work, but the injury was too deep. His life was too near its end for
+criticism to be anything but destructive; having no time to collect new
+treasure, he simply could not listen to her suggestion that those he
+most valued were imitation. He hated her for holding such opinion. Her
+soft tones, her eager concessions, her flattering sentences, could now
+make no impression upon a man whom half an hour before they would have
+completely won.</p>
+
+<p>He bade her a cold good night, hardly more than bent his head, the
+chauffeur took the heavy coat from her, and the car had wheeled away
+before she was well inside her own doorway.</p>
+
+<p>Pete’s brown head was visible over the banisters.</p>
+
+<p>“Hello, Mother!” he said. “Did the old boy kidnap you?”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne came up slowly, stumbling over her long, blue draperies in her
+weariness and depression.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Pete, my darling,” she said, “I think I’ve spoiled everything.”</p>
+
+<p>His heart stood still. He knew better than most people that his mother
+could either make or mar.</p>
+
+<p>“They won’t hear of it?”</p>
+
+<p>She nodded distractedly.</p>
+
+<p>“I do make such a mess of things sometimes!”</p>
+
+<p>He put his arm about her.</p>
+
+<p>“So you do, Mother,” he said; “but then think how magnificently you
+sometimes pull them out again.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley had not reported the result of his interview immediately. He
+told himself that it was too late; but it was only a quarter before
+eleven when he was back safe in his own library, feeling somehow not so
+safe as usual. He felt attacked, insulted; and yet he also felt vivified
+and encouraged. He felt as he might have felt if some one, unbidden, had
+cut a vista on the Lanley estates, first outraged in his sense of
+property, but afterward delighted with the widened view and the fresher
+breeze. It was awkward, though, that he didn’t want Adelaide to go into
+details as to his visit; he did not think that the expedition to the pier
+could be given the judicial, grandfatherly tone that he wanted to give.
+So he did not communicate at all with his daughter that night.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning about nine, however, when she was sitting up in bed,
+with her tray on her knees, and on her feet a white satin coverlet sown
+as thickly with bright little flowers as the Milky Way with stars, her
+last words to Vincent, who was standing by the fire, with his newspaper
+folded in his hands, ready to go down-town, were interrupted, as they
+nearly always were, by the burr of the telephone.</p>
+
+<p>She took it up from the table by her bed, and as she did so she fixed her
+eyes on her husband and looked steadily at him all the time that central
+was making the connection; she was trying to answer that unsolved problem
+as to whether or not a mist hung between them. Then she got her
+connection.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Papa; it is Adelaide.” “Yes?” “Did she appear like a lady?” “A
+lady?” “You don’t know what I mean by that? Why, Papa!” “Well, did she
+appear respectable?” “How cross you are to me!” “I’m glad to hear it. You
+did not sound cheerful.”</p>
+
+<p>She hung up the receiver and turned to Vincent, making eyes of surprise.</p>
+
+<p>“Really, papa is too strange. Why should he be cross to me because he has
+had an unsatisfactory interview with the Wayne boy’s mother? I never
+wanted him to go, anyhow, Vin. I wanted to send <i>you</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>“It would probably be better for you to go yourself.”</p>
+
+<p>He left the room as if he had said nothing remarkable. But it was
+remarkable, in Adelaide’s experience, that he should avoid any
+responsibility, and even more so that he should shift it to her
+shoulders. For an instant she faced the possibility, the most terrible of
+any that had occurred to her, that the balance was changing between them;
+that she, so willing to be led, was to be forced to guide. She had seen
+it happen so often between married couples—the weight of character begin
+on one side of the scale, and then slowly the beam would shift. Once it
+had happened to her. Was it to happen again? No, she told herself; never
+with Farron. He would command or die, lead her or leave her.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde knocked at her door, as she did every morning as soon as her
+stepfather had gone down town. She had had an earlier account of Mr.
+Lanley’s interview. It had read:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">Dearest Girl:</span></p>
+
+<p>The great discussion did not go very well, apparently. The opinion prevails at the moment 
+that no engagement can be allowed to exist
+between us. I feel as if they were all meeting to discuss whether or
+not the sun is to rise to-morrow morning. You and I, my love, have
+special information that it will.</p></div>
+
+<p>After this it needed no courage to go down and hear her mother’s account
+of the interview. Adelaide was still in bed, but one long, pointed
+fingertip, pressed continuously upon the dangling bell, a summons that
+had long since lost its poignancy for the temperamental Lucie, indicated
+that she was about to get up.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear,” she said in answer to Mathilde’s question, “your grandfather’s
+principal interest seems to be to tell me nothing at all, and he has been
+wonderfully successful. I can get nothing from him, so I’m going myself.”</p>
+
+<p>The girl’s heart sank at hearing this. Her mother saw things clearly and
+definitely, and had a talent for expressing her impressions in
+unforgetable words. Mathilde could still remember with a pang certain
+books, poems, pictures, and even people whose charms her mother had
+destroyed in one poisonous phrase. Adelaide was too careful of her
+personal dignity to indulge in mimicry, but she had a way of catching and
+repeating the exact phrasing of some foolish sentence that was almost
+better—or worse—than mimicry. Mathilde remembered a governess, a kind
+and patient person of whom Adelaide had greatly wearied, who had a habit
+of beginning many observations, “It may strike you as strange, but I am
+the sort of person who—” Mathilde was present at luncheon one day when
+Adelaide was repeating one of these sentences. “It may strike you as
+strange, but I like to feel myself in good health.” Mathilde resented the
+laughter that followed, and sprang to her governess’s defense, yet
+sickeningly soon she came to see the innocent egotism that directed the
+choice of the phrase.</p>
+
+<p>She felt as if she could not bear this process to be turned against
+Pete’s mother, not because it would alter the respectful love she was
+prepared to offer this unknown figure, but because it might very slightly
+alter her attitude toward her own mother. That was one of the
+characteristics of this great emotion: all her old beliefs had to be
+revised to accord with new discoveries.</p>
+
+<p>This was what lay behind the shrinking of her soul as she watched her
+mother dress for the visit to Mrs. Wayne. For the first time in her life
+Mathilde wished that her mother was not so elaborate. Hitherto she had
+always gloried in Adelaide’s elegance as a part of her beauty; but now,
+as she watched the ritual of ribbons and laces and perfumes and jewels,
+she felt vaguely that there was in it all a covert insult to Pete’s
+mother, who, she knew, would not be a bit like that.</p>
+
+<p>“How young you are, Mama!” she exclaimed as, the whole long process
+complete, Adelaide stood holding out her hand for her gloves, like a
+little girl ready for a party.</p>
+
+<p>Her mother smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s well I am,” she said, “if you go on trying to get yourself involved
+with young men who live up four flights of stairs. I have always avoided
+even dressmakers who lived above the second story,” she added wistfully.</p>
+
+<p>The wistful tone was repeated when her car stopped at the Wayne door and
+she stepped out.</p>
+
+<p>“Are you sure this is the number, Andrews?” she asked. She and the
+chauffeur looked slowly up at the house and up and down the street. They
+were at one in their feeling about it. Then Adelaide gave a very gentle
+little sigh and started the ascent.</p>
+
+<p>The flat did not look as well by day. Though the eastern sun poured in
+cheerfully, it revealed worn places on the backs of the arm-chairs and
+one fearful calamity with an ink-bottle that Pete had once had on the
+rug. Even Mrs. Wayne, who sprang up from behind her writing-table, had
+not the saint-like mystery that her blue draperies had given her the
+evening before.</p>
+
+<p>Though slim, and in excellent condition for thirty-nine, Adelaide could
+not conceal that four flights were an exertion. Her fine nostrils were
+dilated and her breath not perfectly under control as she said:</p>
+
+<p>“How delightful this is!” a statement that was no more untrue than to say
+good-morning on a rainy day.</p>
+
+<p>Most women in Mrs. Wayne’s situation would at the moment have been
+acutely aware of the ink-spot. That was one of Adelaide’s assets, on
+which she perhaps unconsciously counted, that her mere appearance made
+nine people out of ten aware of their own physical imperfections. But
+Mrs. Wayne was aware of nothing but Adelaide’s great beauty as she sank
+into one of the armchairs with hardly a hint of exhaustion.</p>
+
+<p>“Your son is a very charming person, Mrs. Wayne,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne was standing by the mantelpiece, looking boyish and friendly;
+but now she suddenly grew grave, as if something serious had been said.</p>
+
+<p>“Pete has something more unusual than charm,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“But what could be more unusual?” cried Adelaide, who wanted to add, “The
+only question is, does your wretched son possess it?” But she didn’t; she
+asked instead, with a tone of disarming sweetness, “Shall we be perfectly
+candid with each other?”</p>
+
+<p>A quick gleam came into Mrs. Wayne’s eyes. “Not much,” she seemed to say.
+She had learned to distrust nothing so much as her own candor, and her
+interview with Mr. Lanley had put her specially on her guard.</p>
+
+<p>“I hope you will be candid, Mrs. Farron,” she said aloud, and for her
+this was the depth of dissimulation.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then,” said Adelaide, “you and I are in about the same position,
+aren’t we? We are both willing that our children should marry, and we
+have no objection to offer to their choice except our own ignorance. We
+both want time to judge. But how can we get time, Mrs. Wayne? If we do
+not take definite action <i>against</i> an engagement, we are giving our
+consent to it. I want a little reasonable delay, but we can get delay
+only by refusing to hear of an engagement. Do you see what I mean? Will
+you help me by pretending to be a very stern parent, just so that these
+young people may have a few months to think it over without being too
+definitely committed?”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne shrank back. She liked neither diplomacy nor coercion.</p>
+
+<p>“But I have really no control over Pete,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“Surely, if he isn’t in a position to support a wife—”</p>
+
+<p>“He is, if she would live as he does.”</p>
+
+<p>Such an idea had never crossed Mrs. Farron’s mind. She looked round her
+wonderingly, and said without a trace of wilful insolence in her tone:</p>
+
+<p>“Live here, you mean?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, or somewhere like it.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Farron looked down, and smoothed the delicate dark fur of her muff.
+She hardly knew how to begin at the very beginning like this. She did not
+want to hurt any one’s feelings. How could she tell this childlike,
+optimistic creature that to put Mathilde to living in surroundings like
+these would be like exposing a naked baby on a mountaintop? It wasn’t
+love of luxury, at least not if luxury meant physical self-indulgence.
+She could imagine suffering privations very happily in a Venetian palace
+or on a tropical island. It was an esthetic, not a moral, problem; it was
+a question of that profound and essential thing in the life of any woman
+who was a woman—her charm. She wished to tell Mrs. Wayne that her son
+wouldn’t really like it, that he would hate to see Mathilde going out in
+overshoes; that the background that she, Adelaide, had so expertly
+provided for her child was part of the very attraction that made him want
+to take her out of it. There was no use in saying that most poor mortals
+were forced to get on without this magic atmosphere. They had never been
+goddesses; they did not know what they were going without. But her child,
+who had been, as it were, born a fairy, would miss tragically the
+delicate beauty of her every-day life, would fade under the ugly monotony
+of poverty.</p>
+
+<p>But how could she say this to Mrs. Wayne, in her flat-heeled shoes and
+simple, boyish shirt and that twelfth-century saint’s profile, of which
+so much might have been made by a clever woman?</p>
+
+<p>At last she began, still smoothing her muff:</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Wayne, I have brought up my daughter very simply. I don’t at all
+approve of the extravagances of these modern girls, with their own motors
+and their own bills. Still, she has had a certain background. We must
+admit that marriage with your son on his income alone would mean a
+decrease in her material comforts.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“More than you know, probably.”</p>
+
+<p>This was candid, and Adelaide pressed on.</p>
+
+<p>“Well is it wise or kind to make such a demand on a young creature when
+we know marriage is difficult at the best?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>“You see, I have never seen your daughter, and I don’t know what her
+feeling for Pete may be.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll answer both questions. She has a pleasant, romantic sentiment for
+Mr. Wayne—you know how one feels to one’s first lover. She is a sweet,
+kind, unformed little girl, not heroic. But think of your own spirited
+son. Do you want this persistent, cruel responsibility for him?”</p>
+
+<p>The question was an oratorical one, and Adelaide was astonished to find
+that Mrs. Wayne was answering it.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes,” she said; “I want responsibility for Pete. It’s exactly what
+he needs.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide stared at her in horror; she seemed the most unnatural mother
+in the world. She herself would fight to protect her daughter from the
+passive wear and tear of poverty; but she would have died to keep a son,
+if she had had one, from being driven into the active warfare of the
+support of a family.</p>
+
+<p>In the pause that followed there was a ring at the bell, an argument with
+the servant, something that sounded like a scuffle, and then a young man
+strolled into the room. He was tall and beautifully dressed,—at least
+that was the first impression,—though, as a matter of fact, the clothes
+were of the cheapest ready-made variety. But nothing could look cheap or
+ill made on those splendid muscles. He wore a silk shirt, a flower in his
+buttonhole, a gray tie in which was a pearl as big as a pea, long
+patent-leather shoes with elaborate buff-colored tops; he carried a thin
+stick and a pair of new gloves in one hand, but the most conspicuous
+object in his dress was a brand-new, gray felt hat, with a rather wide
+brim, which he wore at an angle greater than Mr. Lanley attempted even at
+his jauntiest. His face was long and rather dark, and his eyes were a
+bright gray blue, under dark brows. He was scowling.</p>
+
+<p>He strode into the middle of the room, and stood there, with his feet
+wide apart and his elbows slightly swaying. His hat was still on.</p>
+
+<p>“Your servant said you couldn’t see me,” he said, with his back teeth set
+together, a method of enunciation that seemed to be habitual.</p>
+
+<p>“Didn’t want to would be truer, Marty,” answered Mrs. Wayne, with the
+utmost good temper. “Still, as long as you’re here, what do you want?”</p>
+
+<p>Marty Burke didn’t answer at once. He stood looking at Mrs. Wayne under
+his lowering brows; he had stopped swinging his elbows, and was now very
+slightly twitching his cane, as an evilly disposed cat will twitch the
+end of its tail.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Farron watched him almost breathlessly. She was a little frightened,
+but the sensation was pleasurable. He was, she knew, the finest specimen
+of the human animal that she had ever seen.</p>
+
+<p>“What do I want?” he said at length in a deep, rich voice, shot here and
+there with strange nasal tones, and here and there with the remains of a
+brogue. “Well, I want that you should stop persecuting those poor kids.”</p>
+
+<p>“I persecuting them? Don’t be absurd, Marty,” answered Mrs. Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>“Persecuting them; what else?” retorted Marty, fiercely. “What else is
+it? They wanting to get married, and you determined to send the boy up
+the river.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t think we’ll go over that again. I have a lady here on business.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, please don’t mind me,” said Mrs. Farron, settling back, and
+wriggling her hands contentedly into her muff. She rather expected the
+frivolous courage of her tone to draw the ire of Burke’s glance upon her,
+but it did not.</p>
+
+<p>“Cruel is what I call it,” he went on. “She wants it, and he wants it,
+and her family wants it, and only you and the judge that you put up to
+opposing—”</p>
+
+<p>“Her family do not want it. Her brother—”</p>
+
+<p>“Her brother agrees with me. I was talking to him yesterday.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, that’s why he has a black eye, is it?” said Mrs. Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>“Black eyes or blue,” said Marty, with a horizontal gesture of his
+hands, “her brother wants to see her married.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I don’t,” replied Mrs. Wayne, “at least not to this boy. I will
+never give my consent to putting a child of her age in the power of a
+degenerate little drunkard like that.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Farron listened with all her ears. She did not think herself a
+prude, and only a moment before she had been accusing Mrs. Wayne of
+ignorance of the world; but never in all her life had she heard such
+words as were now freely exchanged between Burke and his hostess on the
+subject of the degree of consent that the girl in question had given to
+the advances of Burke’s protégé. She would have been as embarrassed as a
+girl if either of the disputants had been in the least aware of her
+presence. Once, she thought, Mrs. Wayne, for the sake of good manners,
+was on the point of turning to her and explaining the whole situation;
+but fortunately the exigencies of the dispute swept her on too fast.
+Adelaide was shocked, physically rather than morally, by the nakedness of
+their talk; but she did not want them to stop. She was fascinated by the
+spectacle of Marty Burke in action. She recognized at once that he was a
+dangerous man, not dangerous to female virtue, like all the other men to
+whom she had heard the term applied, but actually dangerous to life and
+property. She was not in the least afraid of him, but she knew he was a
+real danger. She enjoyed the knowledge. In most ways she was a woman
+timid in the face of physical danger, but she had never imagined being
+afraid of another human being. That much, perhaps, her sheltered training
+had done for her. “If she goes on irritating him like this he may murder
+us both,” she thought. What she really meant was that he might murder
+Mrs. Wayne, but that, when he came to her and began to twist her neck,
+she would just say, “My dear man, don’t be silly!” and he would stop.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime Burke was not so angry as he was affecting to be. Like
+most leaders of men, he had a strong dramatic instinct, and he had just
+led Mrs. Wayne to the climax of her just violence when his manner
+suddenly completely changed, and he said with the utmost good temper:</p>
+
+<p>“And what do you think of my get-up, Mrs. Wayne? It’s a new suit I have
+on, and a boutonniere.” The change was so sudden that no one answered,
+and he went on, “It’s clothes almost fit for a wedding that I’m wearing.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne understood him in a flash. She sprang to her feet.</p>
+
+<p>“Marty Burke,” she cried, “you don’t mean to say you’ve got those two
+children married!”</p>
+
+<p>“Not fifteen minutes ago, and I standing up with the groom.” He smiled a
+smile of the wildest, most piercing sweetness—a smile so free and
+intense that it seemed impossible to connect it with anything but the
+consciousness of a pure heart. Mrs. Farron had never seen such a smile.
+“I thought I’d just drop around and give you the news,” he said, and now
+for the first time took off his hat, displaying his crisp, black hair and
+round, pugnacious head. “Good morning, ladies.” He bowed, and for an
+instant his glance rested on Mrs. Farron with an admiration too frank to
+be exactly offensive. He put his hat on his head, turned away, and made
+his exit, whistling.</p>
+
+<p>He left behind him one person at least who had thoroughly enjoyed his
+triumph. To do her justice, however, Mrs. Farron was ashamed of her
+sympathy, and she said gently to Mrs. Wayne:</p>
+
+<p>“You think this marriage a very bad thing.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne pushed all her hair away from her temples.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes,” she said, “it’s a bad thing for the girl; but the worst is
+having Marty Burke put anything over. The district is absolutely under
+his thumb. I do wish, Mrs. Farron, you would get your husband to put the
+fear of God into him.”</p>
+
+<p>“My husband?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; he works for your husband. He has charge of the loading and
+unloading of the trucks. He’s proud of his job, and it gives him power
+over the laborers. He wouldn’t want to lose his place. If your husband
+would send for him and say—” Mrs. Wayne hastily outlined the things Mr.
+Farron might say.</p>
+
+<p>“He works for Vincent,” Adelaide repeated. It seemed to her an absolutely
+stupendous coincidence, and her imagination pictured the clash between
+them—the effort of Vincent to put the fear of God into this man. Would
+he be able to? Which one would win? Never before had she doubted the
+superior power of her husband; now she did. “I think it would be hard to
+put the fear of God into that young man,” she said aloud.</p>
+
+<p>“I do wish Mr. Farron would try.”</p>
+
+<p>“Try,” thought Adelaide, “and fail?” Could she stand that? Was her
+whole relation to Vincent about to be put to the test? What weapons had
+he against Marty Burke? And if he had none, how stripped he would
+appear in her eyes!</p>
+
+<p>“Won’t you ask him, Mrs. Farron?”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide recoiled. She did not want to be the one to throw her glove
+among the lions.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t think I understand well enough what it is you want. Why don’t
+you ask him yourself?” She hesitated, knowing that no opportunity for
+this would offer unless she herself arranged it. “Why don’t you come and
+dine with us to-night, and,” she added more slowly, “bring your son?”</p>
+
+<p>She had made the bait very attractive, and Mrs. Wayne did not refuse.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>As she drove home, Adelaide’s whole being was stirred by the prospect of
+that conflict between Burke and her husband, and it was not until she saw
+Mathilde, pale with an hour of waiting, that she recalled the real object
+of her recent visit. Not, of course, that Adelaide was more interested in
+Marty Burke than in her daughter’s future, but a titanic struggle fired
+her imagination more than a pitiful little romance. She felt a pang of
+self-reproach when she saw that Mr. Lanley had come to share the child’s
+vigil, that he seemed to be suffering under an anxiety almost as keen as
+Mathilde’s.</p>
+
+<p>They did not have to question her; she threw out her hands, casting her
+muff from her as she did so.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” she said, “I’m a weak, soft-hearted creature! I’ve asked them both
+to dine tonight.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde flung herself into her mother’s arms.</p>
+
+<p>“O Mama, how marvelous you are!” she exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>Over her daughter’s shoulder Adelaide noted her father’s expression, a
+stiffening of the mouth and a brightening of the eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Your grandfather disapproves of me, Mathilde,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“He couldn’t be so unkind,” returned the girl.</p>
+
+<p>“After all,” said Mr. Lanley, trying to induce a slight scowl, “if we are
+not going to consent to an engagement—”</p>
+
+<p>“But you are,” said Mathilde.</p>
+
+<p>“We are not,” said her mother; “but there is no reason why we should
+not meet and talk it over like sensible creatures—talk it over
+here”—Adelaide looked lovingly around her own subdued room—“instead
+of five stories up. For really—” She stopped, running her eyebrows
+together at the recollection.</p>
+
+<p>“But the flat is rather—rather comfortable when you get there,” said Mr.
+Lanley, suddenly becoming embarrassed over his choice of an adjective.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide looked at him sharply.</p>
+
+<p>“Dear Papa,” she asked, “since when have you become an admirer of
+painted shelves and dirty rugs? And I don’t doubt,” she added very
+gently, “that for the same money they could have found something quite
+tolerable in the country.”</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps they don’t want to live in the country,” said Mr. Lanley, rather
+sharply: “I’m sure there is nothing that you’d hate more, Adelaide.”</p>
+
+<p>She opened her dark eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“But I don’t have to choose between squalor here or—”</p>
+
+<p>“Squalor!” said Mr. Lanley. “Don’t be ridiculous!”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde broke in gently at this point:</p>
+
+<p>“I think you must have liked Mrs. Wayne, Mama, to ask her to dine.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide saw an opportunity to exercise one of her important talents.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” she said. “She has a certain naïve friendliness. Of course I don’t
+advocate, after fifty, dressing like an Eton boy; I always think an
+elderly face above a turned-down collar—”</p>
+
+<p>“Mama,” broke in Mathilde, quietly, “would you mind not talking of Mrs.
+Wayne like that? You know, she’s Pete’s mother.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide was really surprised.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, my love,” she answered, “I haven’t said half the things I might
+say. I rather thought I was sparing your feelings. After all, when you
+see her, you will admit that she <i>does</i> dress like an Eton boy.”</p>
+
+<p>“She didn’t when I saw her,” said Mr. Lanley.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide turned to her father.</p>
+
+<p>“Papa, I leave it to you. Did I say anything that should have wounded
+anybody’s susceptibilities?”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>“It was the tone Mathilde did not like, I think.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide raised her shoulders and looked beautifully hurt.</p>
+
+<p>“My tone?” she wailed.</p>
+
+<p>“It hurt me,” said Mathilde, laying her little hand on her heart.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley smiled at her, and then, springing up, kissed her tenderly on
+the forehead. He said it was time for him to be going on.</p>
+
+<p>“You’ll come to dinner to-night, Papa?”</p>
+
+<p>Rather hastily, Mr. Lanley said no, he couldn’t; he had an engagement.
+But his daughter did not let him get to the door.</p>
+
+<p>“What are you going to do to-night, Papa?” she asked, firmly.</p>
+
+<p>“There is a governor’s meeting—”</p>
+
+<p>“Two in a week, Papa?”</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly Mr. Lanley dropped all pretense of not coming, and said he would
+be there at eight.</p>
+
+<p>During the rest of the day Mathilde’s heart never wholly regained its
+normal beat. Not only was she to see Pete again, and see him under the
+gaze of her united family, but she was to see this mother of his, whom he
+loved and admired so much. She pictured her as white-haired, benignant,
+brooding, the essential mother, with all her own mother’s grace and charm
+left out, yet with these qualities not ill replaced by others which
+Mathilde sometimes dimly apprehended were lacking in her own beautiful
+parent. She looked at herself in the glass. “My son’s wife,” was the
+phrase in her mind.</p>
+
+<p>On her way up-stairs to dress for dinner she tried to confide her
+anxieties to her mother.</p>
+
+<p>“Mama,” she said, “if you had a son, how would you feel toward the girl
+he wanted to marry?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I should think her a cat, of course,” Adelaide answered; and
+added an instant later, “and I should probably be able to make him
+think so, too.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde sighed and went on up-stairs. Here she decided on an act of some
+insubordination. She would wear her best dress that evening, the dress
+which her mother considered too old for her. She did not want Pete’s
+mother to think he had chosen a perfect baby.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley, too, was a trifle nervous during the afternoon. He tried to
+say to himself that it was because the future of his darling little
+Mathilde was about to be settled. He shook his head, indicating that to
+settle the future of the young was a risky business; and then in a burst
+of self-knowledge he suddenly admitted that what was really making him
+nervous was the incident of the pier. If Mrs. Wayne referred to it, and
+of course there was no possible reason why she should not refer to it,
+Adelaide would never let him hear the last of it. It would be natural for
+Adelaide to think it queer that he hadn’t told her about it. And the
+reason he hadn’t told was perfectly clear: it was on that infernal pier
+that he had formed such an adverse opinion of Mrs. Wayne. But of course
+he did not wish to prejudice Adelaide; he wanted to leave her free to
+form her own opinions, and he was glad, excessively glad, that she had
+formed so favorable a one as to ask the woman to dinner. There was no
+question about his being glad; he surprised his servant by whistling as
+he put on his white waistcoat, and fastened the buckle rather more snugly
+than usual. Self-knowledge for the moment was not on hand.</p>
+
+<p>He arrived at exactly the hour at which he always arrived, five minutes
+after eight, a moment not too early to embarrass the hostess and not too
+late to endanger the dinner.</p>
+
+<p>No one was in the drawing-room but Mathilde and Farron. Adelaide, for one
+who had been almost perfectly brought up, did sometimes commit the fault
+of allowing her guests to wait for her.</p>
+
+<p>“’Lo, my dear,” said Mr. Lanley, kissing Mathilde. “What’s that you have
+on? Never saw it before. Not so becoming as the dress you were wearing
+the last time I was here.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde felt that it would be almost easier to die immediately, and was
+revived only when she heard Farron saying:</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, don’t you like this? I was just thinking I had never seen Mathilde
+looking so well, in her rather more mature and subtle vein.”</p>
+
+<p>It was just as she wished to appear, but she glanced at her stepfather,
+disturbed by her constant suspicion that he read her heart more clearly
+than any one else, more clearly than she liked.</p>
+
+<p>“How shockingly late they are!” said Adelaide, suddenly appearing in
+the utmost splendor. She moved about, kissing her father and arranging
+the chairs. “Do you know, Vin, why it is that Pringle likes to make the
+room look as if it were arranged for a funeral? Why do you suppose they
+don’t come?”</p>
+
+<p>“Any one who arrives after Adelaide is apt to be in wrong,” observed
+her husband.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I think it’s awfully incompetent always to be waiting for other
+people,” she returned, just laying her hand an instant on his shoulder to
+indicate that he alone was privileged to make fun of her.</p>
+
+<p>“That perhaps is what the Waynes think,” he answered.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde’s heart sank a little at this. She knew her mother did not like
+to be kept waiting for dinner.</p>
+
+<p>“When I was a young man—” began Mr. Lanley.</p>
+
+<p>“It was the custom,” interrupted Adelaide in exactly the same tone, “for
+a hostess to be in her drawing-room at least five minutes before the hour
+set for the arrival of the guests.”</p>
+
+<p>“Adelaide,” her father pleaded, “I don’t talk like that; at least
+not often.”</p>
+
+<p>“You would, though, if you didn’t have me to correct you,” she retorted.
+“There’s the bell at last; but it always takes people like that forever
+to get their wraps off.”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s only ten minutes past eight,” said Farron, and Mathilde blessed
+him with a look.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne came quickly into the room, so fast that her dress floated
+behind her; she was in black and very grand. No one would have supposed
+that she had murmured to Pete just before the drawing-room door was
+opened, “I hope they haven’t run in any old relations on us.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m afraid I’m late,” she began.</p>
+
+<p>“She always is,” Pete murmured to Mathilde as he took her hand and quite
+openly squeezed it, and then, before Adelaide had time for the rather
+casual introduction she had planned, he himself put the hand he was
+holding into his mother’s. “This is my girl, Mother,” he said. They
+smiled at each other. Mathilde tried to say something. Mrs. Wayne stooped
+and kissed her. Mr. Lanley was obviously affected. Adelaide wasn’t going
+to have any scene like that.</p>
+
+<p>“Late?” she said, as if not an instant had passed since Mrs. Wayne’s
+entrance. “Oh, no, you’re not late; exactly on time, I think. I’m only
+just down myself. Isn’t that true, Vincent?”</p>
+
+<p>Vincent was studying Mrs. Wayne, and withdrew his eyes slowly. But
+Adelaide’s object was accomplished: no public betrothal had taken place.</p>
+
+<p>Pringle announced dinner. Mr. Lanley, rather to his own surprise, found
+that he was insisting on giving Mrs. Wayne his arm; he was not so angry
+at her as he had supposed. He did not think her offensive or unfeminine
+or half baked or socialistic or any of the things he had been saying to
+himself at lengthening intervals for the last twenty-four hours.</p>
+
+<p>Pete saw an opportunity, and tucked Mathilde’s hand within his own arm,
+nipping it closely to his heart.</p>
+
+<p>The very instant they were at table Adelaide looked down the alley
+between the candles, for the low, golden dish of hot-house fruit did not
+obstruct her view of Vincent, and said:</p>
+
+<p>“Why have you never told me about Marty Burke?”</p>
+
+<p>“Who’s he?” asked Mr. Lanley, quickly, for he had been trying to start a
+little conversational hare of his own, just to keep the conversation away
+from the water-front.</p>
+
+<p>“He’s a splendid young super-tough in my employ,” said Vincent. “What do
+you know about him, Adelaide?”</p>
+
+<p>The guarded surprise in his tone stimulated her.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I know all about him—as much, that is, as one ever can of a
+stupendous natural phenomenon.”</p>
+
+<p>“Where did you hear of him?”</p>
+
+<p>“Hear of him? I’ve seen him. I saw him this morning at Mrs. Wayne’s. He
+just dropped in while I was there and, metaphorically speaking, dragged
+us about by the hair of our heads.”</p>
+
+<p>“Some women, I believe, confess to enjoying that sensation,”
+Vincent observed.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, it’s exciting,” answered his wife.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s an easy excitement to attain.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, one wants it done in good style.”</p>
+
+<p>Something so stimulating that it was almost hostile flashed through the
+interchange.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde murmured to Pete:</p>
+
+<p>“Who are they talking about?”</p>
+
+<p>“A mixture of Alcibiades and <i>Bill Sykes</i>,” said Adelaide, catching the
+low tone, as she always did.</p>
+
+<p>“He’s the district leader and a very bad influence,” said Mrs. Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>“He’s a champion middle-weight boxer,” said Pete.</p>
+
+<p>“He’s the head of my stevedores,” said Farron.</p>
+
+<p>“O Mr. Farron,” Mrs. Wayne exclaimed, “I do wish you would use your
+influence over him.”</p>
+
+<p>“My influence? It consists of paying him eighty-five dollars a month and
+giving him a box of cigars at Christmas.”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t you think you could tone him down?” pleaded Mrs. Wayne. “He does
+so much harm.”</p>
+
+<p>“But I don’t want him toned down. His value to me is his being just as he
+is. He’s a myth, a hero, a power on the water-front, and I employ him.”</p>
+
+<p>“You employ him, but do you control him?” asked Adelaide, languidly, and
+yet with a certain emphasis.</p>
+
+<p>Her husband glanced at her.</p>
+
+<p>“What is it you want, Adelaide?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>She gave a little laugh.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I want nothing. It’s Mrs. Wayne who wants you to do
+something—rather difficult, too, I should imagine.”</p>
+
+<p>He turned gravely to their guest.</p>
+
+<p>“What is it you want, Mrs. Wayne?”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne considered an instant, and as she was about to find words for
+her request her son spoke:</p>
+
+<p>“She’ll tell you after dinner.”</p>
+
+<p>“Pete, I wasn’t going to tell the story,” his mother put in protestingly.
+“You really do me injustice at times.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide, remembering the conversation of the morning, wondered whether
+he did. She felt grateful to him for wishing to spare Mathilde the
+hearing of such a story, and she turned to him with a caressing
+graciousness in which she was extremely at her ease. Mathilde,
+recognizing that her mother was pleased, though not being very clear why,
+could not resist joining in their conversation; and Mrs. Wayne was thus
+given an opportunity of murmuring the unfortunate Anita’s story into
+Vincent’s ear.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide, holding Pete with a flattering gaze, seeming to drink in every
+word he was saying, heard Mrs. Wayne finish and heard Vincent say:</p>
+
+<p>“And you think you can get it annulled if only Burke doesn’t interfere?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, if he doesn’t get hold of the boy and tell him that his dignity as
+a man is involved.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide withdrew her gaze from Pete and fixed it on Vincent. Was he
+going to accept that challenge? She wanted him to, and yet she thought he
+would be defeated, and she did not want him to be defeated. She waited
+almost breathless.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I’ll see what I can do,” he said. This was an acceptance.
+This from Vincent meant that the matter, as far as he was concerned,
+was settled.</p>
+
+<p>“You two plotters!” exclaimed Adelaide. “For my part, I’m on Marty
+Burke’s side. I hate to see wild creatures in cages.”</p>
+
+<p>“Dangerous to side with wild beasts,” observed Vincent.</p>
+
+<p>“Why?”</p>
+
+<p>“They get the worst of it in the long run.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide dropped her eyes. It was exactly the right answer. For a moment
+she felt his complete supremacy. Then another thought shot through her
+mind: it was exactly the right answer if he could make it good.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime Mr. Lanley began to grow dissatisfied with the prolonged
+role of spectator. He preferred danger to oblivion; and turning to Mrs.
+Wayne, he said, with his politest smile:</p>
+
+<p>“How are the bridges?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, dear,” she answered, “I must have been terribly tactless—to make
+you so angry.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley drew himself up.</p>
+
+<p>“I was not angry,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him with a sort of gentle wonder.</p>
+
+<p>“You gave me the impression of being.”</p>
+
+<p>The very temperateness of the reply made him see that he had been
+inaccurate.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course I was angry,” he said. “What I mean is that I don’t understand
+why I was.”</p>
+
+<p>Meantime, on the opposite side of the table, Mathilde and Pete were
+equally immersed, murmuring sentences of the profoundest meaning behind
+faces which they felt were mask-like.</p>
+
+<p>Farron looked down the table at his wife. Why, he wondered, did she want
+to tease him to-night, of all nights in his life?</p>
+
+<p>When they came out of the dining-room Pete said to Mathilde with the
+utmost clearness:</p>
+
+<p>“And what was that magazine you spoke of?”</p>
+
+<p>She had spoken of no magazine, but she caught the idea, the clever,
+rather wicked idea. He made her work her mind almost too fast sometimes,
+but she enjoyed it.</p>
+
+<p>“Wasn’t it this?” she asked, with a beating heart.</p>
+
+<p>They sat down on the sofa and bent their heads over it with student-like
+absorption.</p>
+
+<p>“I haven’t any idea what it is,” she whispered.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, well, I suppose there’s something or other in it.”</p>
+
+<p>“I think your mother is perfectly wonderful—wonderful.”</p>
+
+<p>“I love you so.”</p>
+
+<p>The older people took a little longer to settle down. Mr. Lanley stood on
+the hearth-rug, with a cigar in his mouth and his head thrown very far
+back. Adelaide sank into a chair, looking, as she often did, as if she
+had just been brilliantly well posed for a photograph. Farron was
+silent. Mrs. Wayne sat, as she had a bad habit of doing, on one foot. The
+two groups were sufficiently separated for distinct conversations.</p>
+
+<p>“Is this a conference?” asked Farron.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne made it so by her reply.</p>
+
+<p>“The whole question is, Are they really in love? At least, that’s my
+view.”</p>
+
+<p>“In love!” Adelaide twisted her shoulders. “What can they know of it for
+another ten years? You must have some character, some knowledge to fall
+in love. And these babes—”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” said Mr. Lanley, stoutly; “you’re all wrong, Adelaide. It’s first
+love that matters—<i>Romeo</i> and <i>Juliet</i>, you know. Afterward we all get
+hardened and world-worn and cynical and material.” He stopped short in
+his eloquence at the thought that Mrs. Wayne was quite obviously not
+hardened or world-worn or cynical or material. “By Jove!” he thought to
+himself, “that’s it. The woman’s spirit is as fresh as a girl’s.” He had
+by this time utterly forgotten what he had meant to say.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide turned to her husband.</p>
+
+<p>“Do you think they are in love, Vin?”</p>
+
+<p>Vincent looked at her for a second, and then he nodded two or
+three times.</p>
+
+<p>Though no one at once recognized the fact, the engagement was settled at
+that moment.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed obvious that Mr. Lanley should take the Waynes home in his car.
+Mrs. Wayne, who had prepared for walking with overshoes and with pins for
+her trailing skirt, did not seem too enthusiastic at the suggestion. She
+stood a moment on the step and looked at the sky, where Orion, like a
+banner, was hung across the easterly opening of the side street.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s a lovely night,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>It was Pete who drew her into the car. Her reluctance deprived Mr.
+Lanley of the delight of bestowing a benefit, but gave him a faint sense
+of capture.</p>
+
+<p>In the drawing-room Mathilde was looking from one to the other of her
+natural guardians, like a well-trained puppy who wants to be fed. She
+wanted Pete praised. Instead, Adelaide said:</p>
+
+<p>“Really, papa is growing too secretive! Do you know, Vin, he and Mrs.
+Wayne quarreled like mad last evening, and he never told me a word
+about it!”</p>
+
+<p>“How do you know?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I heard them trying to smooth it out at dinner.”</p>
+
+<p>“O Mama,” wailed Mathilde, between admiration and complaint, “you hear
+everything!”</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly, I do,” Adelaide returned lightly. “Yes, and I heard you, too,
+and understood everything that you meant.”</p>
+
+<p>Vincent couldn’t help smiling at his stepdaughter’s horrified look.</p>
+
+<p>“What a brute you are, Adelaide!” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, my dear, you’re much worse,” she retorted. “You don’t have to
+overhear. You just read the human heart by some black magic of your own.
+That’s really more cruel than my gross methods.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, Mathilde,” said Farron, “as a reader of the human heart, I want to
+tell you that I approve of the young man. He has a fine, delicate touch
+on life, which, I am inclined to think, goes only with a good deal of
+strength.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde blinked her eyes. Gratitude and delight had brought
+tears to them.</p>
+
+<p>“He thinks you’re wonderful, Mr. Farron,” she answered a little huskily.</p>
+
+<p>“Better and better,” answered Vincent, and he held out his hand for a
+letter that Pringle was bringing to him on a tray.</p>
+
+<p>“What’s that?” asked Adelaide. One of the first things she had impressed
+on Joe Severance was that he must never inquire about her mail; but she
+always asked Farron about his.</p>
+
+<p>He seemed to be thinking and didn’t answer her.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde, now simply insatiable, pressed nearer to him and asked:</p>
+
+<p>“And what do you think of Mrs. Wayne?”</p>
+
+<p>He raised his eyes from the envelope, and answered with a certain
+absence of tone:</p>
+
+<p>“I thought she was an elderly wood-nymph.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide glanced over his shoulder, and, seeing that the letter had a
+printed address in the corner, lost interest.</p>
+
+<p>“You may shut the house, Pringle,” she said.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Pringle, the last servant up, was soon heard discreetly drawing bolts and
+turning out electric lights. Mathilde went straight up-stairs without
+even an attempt at drawing her mother into an evening gossip. She was
+aware of being tired after two nights rendered almost sleepless by her
+awareness of joy. She went to her room and shut the door. Her bed was
+piled high with extra covers, soft, light blankets and a down coverlet
+covered with pink silk. She took a certain hygienic pride in the extent
+to which she always opened her bedroom windows even when, as at present,
+the night was bitterly cold. In the morning she ran, huddling on her
+dressing-gown, into a heated bathroom, and when she emerged from this,
+the maid had always lighted her fire, and laid her breakfast-tray close
+to the blaze. To-night, when she went to open her window, she noticed
+that the houses opposite had lost courage and showed only cracks. She
+stood a second looking up at the stars, twinkling with tiny blue rays
+through the clear air. By turning her head to the west she could look
+down on the park, with its surface of bare, blurred tree-branches pierced
+by rows of lights. The familiar sight suddenly seemed to her almost
+intolerably beautiful. “Oh, I love him so much!” she said to herself, and
+her lips actually whispered the words, “so much! so much!”</p>
+
+<p>She threw the window high as a reproof of those shivers across the way,
+and, jumping into bed, hastily sandwiched her small body between the warm
+bedclothes. She was almost instantly asleep.</p>
+
+<p>Overhead the faint, but heavy, footfall of Pringle ceased. The house was
+silent; the city had become so. An occasional Madison Avenue car could be
+heard ringing along the cold rails, or rhythmically bounding down hill on
+a flat wheel. Once some distance away came the long, continuous complaint
+of the siren of a fire-engine and the bells and gongs of its comrades;
+and then a young man went past, whistling with the purest accuracy of
+time and tune the air to which he had just been dancing.</p>
+
+<p>At half-past five the kitchen-maid, a young Swede who feared not God,
+neither regarded man, but lived in absolute subjection to the cook, to
+whom, unknown to any one else, she every morning carried up breakfast,
+was stealing down with a candle in her hand. Her senses were alert, for a
+friend of hers had been strangled by burglars in similar circumstances,
+and she had never overcome her own terror of the cold, dark house in
+these early hours of a winter morning.</p>
+
+<p>She went down not the back stairs, for Mr. Pringle objected that she woke
+him as she passed, whereas the carpet on the front stairs was so thick
+that there wasn’t the least chance of waking the family. As she passed
+Mrs. Farron’s room she was surprised to see a fine crack of light coming
+from under it. She paused, wondering if she was going to be caught, and
+if she had better run back and take to the back stairs despite Pringle’s
+well-earned rest; and as she hesitated she heard a sob, then
+another—wild, hysterical sobs. The girl looked startled and then went
+on, shaking her head. What people like that had to cry about beat her.
+But she was glad, because she knew such a splendid bit of news would
+soften the heart of the cook when she took up her breakfast.</p>
+
+<p>By five o’clock it seemed to Adelaide that a whole eternity had passed
+and that another was ahead of her, that this night would never end.</p>
+
+<p>When they went up-stairs, while she was brushing her hair—her hair
+rewarded brushing, for it was fine and long and took a polish like
+bronze—she had wandered into Vincent’s room to discuss with him the
+question of her father’s secretiveness about Mrs. Wayne. It was not, she
+explained, standing in front of his fire, that she suspected anything,
+but that it was so unfriendly: it deprived one of so much legitimate
+amusement if one’s own family practised that kind of reserve. Her just
+anger kept her from observing Farron very closely. As she talked she laid
+her brush on the mantelpiece, and as she did so she knocked down the
+letter that had come for him just before they went up-stairs. She
+stooped, and picked it up without attention, and stood holding it; she
+gesticulated a little with it as she repeated, for her own amusement
+rather than for Vincent’s, phrases she had caught at dinner.</p>
+
+<p>The horror to Farron of seeing her standing there chattering, with that
+death-dealing letter in her hand, suddenly and illogically broke down his
+resolution of silence. It was cruel, and though he might have denied
+himself her help, he could not endure cruelty.</p>
+
+<p>“Adelaide,” he said in a tone that drove every other sensation
+away—“Adelaide, that letter. No, don’t read it.” He took it from her
+and laid it on his dressing-table. “My dear love, it has very bad
+news in it.”</p>
+
+<p>“There <i>has</i> been something, then?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. I have been worried about my health for some time. This letter
+tells me the worst is true. Well, my dear, we did not enter matrimony
+with the idea that either of us was immortal.”</p>
+
+<p>But that was his last effort to be superior to the crisis, to pretend
+that the bitterness of death was any less to him than to any other human
+creature, to conceal that he needed help, all the help that he could get.</p>
+
+<p>And Adelaide gave him help. Artificial as she often was in daily
+contact, in a moment like this she was splendidly, almost primitively
+real. She did not conceal her own passionate despair, her conviction that
+her life couldn’t go on without his; she did not curb her desire to know
+every detail on which his opinion and his doctor’s had been founded; she
+clung to him and wept, refusing to let him discuss business arrangements,
+in which for some reason he seemed to find a certain respite; and yet
+with it all, she gave him strength, the sense that he had an indissoluble
+and loyal companion in the losing fight that lay before him.</p>
+
+<p>Once she was aware of thinking: “Oh, why did he tell me to-night? Things
+are so terrible by night,” but it was only a second before she put such a
+thought away from her. What had these nights been to him? The night when
+she had found his light burning so late, and other nights when he had
+probably denied himself the consolation of reading for fear of rousing
+her suspicions. She did not attempt to pity or advise him, she did not
+treat him as a mixture of child and idiot, as affection so often treats
+illness. She simply gave him her love.</p>
+
+<p>Toward morning he fell asleep in her arms, and then she stole back to
+her own room. There everything was unchanged, the light still burning,
+her satin slippers stepping on each other just as she had left them. She
+looked at herself in the glass; she did not look so very different. A
+headache had often ravaged her appearance more.</p>
+
+<p>She had always thought herself a coward, she feared death with a terrible
+repugnance; but now she found, to her surprise, that she would have
+light-heartedly changed places with her husband. She had much more
+courage to die than to watch him die—to watch Vincent die, to see him
+day by day grow weak and pitiful. That was what was intolerable. If he
+would only die now, to-night, or if she could! It was at this moment that
+the kitchen maid had heard her sobbing.</p>
+
+<p>Because there was nothing else to do, she got into bed, and lay there
+staring at the electric light, which she had forgotten to put out. Toward
+seven she got up and gave orders that Mr. Farron was not to be disturbed,
+that the house was to be kept quiet. Strange, she thought, that he could
+sleep like an exhausted child, while she, awake, was a mass of pain. Her
+heart ached, her eyes burned, her very body felt sore. She arranged for
+his sleep, but she wanted him to wake up; she begrudged every moment of
+his absence. Alas! she thought, how long would she continue to do so?</p>
+
+<p>Yet with her suffering came a wonderful ease, an ability to deal with the
+details of life. When at eight o’clock her maid came in and, pulling the
+curtains, exclaimed with Gallic candor, “Oh, comme madame a mauvaise mine
+ce matin!” she smiled at her with unusual gentleness. Later, when
+Mathilde came down at her accustomed hour, and lying across the foot of
+her mother’s bed, began to read her scraps of the morning paper, Adelaide
+felt a rush of tenderness for the child, who was so unaware of the
+hideous bargain life really was. Surprising as it was, she found she
+could talk more easily than usual and with a more undivided attention,
+though everything they said was trivial enough.</p>
+
+<p>Then suddenly her heart stood still, for the door opened, and Vincent, in
+his dressing-gown, came in. He had evidently had his bath, for his hair
+was wet and shiny. Thank God! he showed no signs of defeat!</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” cried Mathilde, jumping up, “I thought Mr. Farron had gone
+down-town ages ago.”</p>
+
+<p>“He overslept,” said Adelaide.</p>
+
+<p>“I had an excellent night,” he answered, and she knew he looked at her to
+discover that she had not.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll go,” said Mathilde; but with unusual sharpness they both turned to
+her and said simultaneously, “No, no; stay.” They knew no better than she
+did why they were so eager to keep her.</p>
+
+<p>“Are you going down-town, Vin?” Adelaide asked, and her voice shook a
+little on the question; she was so eager that he should not institute any
+change in his routine so soon.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course,” he answered.</p>
+
+<p>They looked at each other, yet their look said nothing in particular.
+Presently he said:</p>
+
+<p>“I wonder if I might have breakfast in here. I’ll go and shave if you’ll
+order it; and don’t let Mathilde go. I have something to say to her.”</p>
+
+<p>When he was gone, Mathilde went and stood at the window, looking out, and
+tying knots in the window-shade’s cord. It was a trick Adelaide had
+always objected to, and she was quite surprised to hear herself saying
+now, just as usual:</p>
+
+<p>“Mathilde, don’t tie knots in that cord.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde threw it from her as one whose mind was engaged on higher
+things.</p>
+
+<p>“You know,” she observed, “I believe I’m only just beginning to
+appreciate Mr. Farron. He’s so wise. I see what you meant about his being
+strong, and he’s so clever. He knows just what you’re thinking all the
+time. Isn’t it nice that he likes Pete? Did he say anything more about
+him after you went up-stairs? I mean, he really does like him, doesn’t
+he? He doesn’t say that just to please me?”</p>
+
+<p>Presently Vincent came back fully dressed and sat down to his breakfast.
+Oddly enough, there was a spirit of real gaiety in the air.</p>
+
+<p>“What was it you were going to say to me?” Mathilde asked greedily.
+Farron looked at her blankly. Adelaide knew that he had quite forgotten
+the phrase, but he concealed the fact by not allowing the least
+illumination of his expression as he remembered.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes,” he said. “I wish to correct myself. I told you that Mrs.
+Wayne was an elderly wood-nymph; but I was wrong. Of course the truth is
+that she’s a very young witch.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde laughed, but not whole-heartedly. She had already identified
+herself so much with the Waynes that she could not take them quite in
+this tone of impersonality.</p>
+
+<p>Farron threw down his napkin, stood up, pulled down his waistcoat.</p>
+
+<p>“I must be off,” he said. He went and kissed his wife. Both had to nerve
+themselves for that.</p>
+
+<p>She held his arm in both her hands, feeling it solid, real, and as
+hard as iron.</p>
+
+<p>“You’ll be up-town early?”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve a busy day.”</p>
+
+<p>“By four?”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll telephone.” She loved him for refusing to yield to her just at this
+moment of all moments. Some men, she thought, would have hidden their own
+self-pity under the excuse of the necessity of being kind to her.</p>
+
+<p>She was to lunch out with a few critical contemporaries. She was
+horrified when she looked at herself by morning light. Her skin had an
+ivory hue, and there were many fine wrinkles about her eyes. She began to
+repair these damages with the utmost frankness, talking meantime to
+Mathilde and the maid. She swept her whole face with a white lotion,
+rouged lightly, but to her very eyelids, touched a red pencil to her
+lips, all with discretion. The result was satisfactory. The improvement
+in her appearance made her feel braver. She couldn’t have faced these
+people—she did not know whether to think of them as intimate enemies or
+hostile friends—if she had been looking anything but her best.</p>
+
+<p>But they were just what she needed; they would be hard and amusing and
+keep her at some tension. She thought rather crossly that she could not
+sit through a meal at home and listen to Mathilde rambling on about love
+and Mr. Farron.</p>
+
+<p>She was inexcusably late, and they had sat down to luncheon—three men
+and two women—by the time she arrived. They had all been, or had wanted
+to go, to an auction sale of <i>objets d’art</i> that had taken place the
+night before. They were discussing it, praising their own purchases, and
+decrying the value of everybody else’s when Adelaide came in.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Adelaide,” said her hostess, “we were just wondering what you paid
+originally for your tapestry.”</p>
+
+<p>“The one in the hall?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, the one with the Turk in it.”</p>
+
+<p>“I haven’t an idea,—” Adelaide was distinctly languid,—“I got it from
+my grandfather.”</p>
+
+<p>“Wouldn’t you know she’d say that?” exclaimed one of the women. “Not that
+I deny it’s true; only, you know, Adelaide, whenever you do want to throw
+a veil over one of your pieces, you always call on the prestige of your
+ancestors.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide raised her eyebrows.</p>
+
+<p>“Really,” she answered, “there isn’t anything so very conspicuous about
+having had a grandfather.”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” her hostess echoed, “even I, so well and favorably known for my
+vulgarity—even <i>I</i> had a grandfather.”</p>
+
+<p>“But he wasn’t a connoisseur in tapestries, Minnie darling.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, but he was in pigs, the dear vulgarian.”</p>
+
+<p>“True vulgarity,” said one of the men, “vulgarity in the best sense, I
+mean, should betray no consciousness of its own existence. Only thus can
+it be really great.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Minnie’s vulgarity is just artificial, assumed because she found it
+worked so well.”</p>
+
+<p>“Surely you accord her some natural talent along those lines.”</p>
+
+<p>“I suspect her secret mind is refined.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, that’s not fair. Vulgar is as vulgar does.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide stood up, pushing back her chair. She found them utterly
+intolerable. Besides, as they talked she had suddenly seen clearly that
+she must herself speak to Vincent’s doctor without an instant’s delay. “I
+have to telephone, Minnie,” she said, and swept out of the room. She
+never returned.</p>
+
+<p>“Not one of the perfect lady’s golden days, I should say,” said one of
+the men, raising his eyebrows. “I wonder what’s gone wrong?”</p>
+
+<p>“Can Vincent have been straying from the straight and narrow?”</p>
+
+<p>“Something wrong. I could tell by her looks.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, my dear, I’m afraid her looks is what’s wrong.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide meantime was in her motor on her way to the doctor’s office. He
+had given up his sacred lunch-hour in response to her imperious demand
+and to his own intense pity for her sorrow.</p>
+
+<p>He did not know her, but he had had her pointed out to him, and though
+he recognized the unreason of such an attitude, he was aware that her
+great beauty dramatized her suffering, so that his pity for her was
+uncommonly alive.</p>
+
+<p>He was a young man, with a finely cut face and a blond complexion. His
+pity was visible, quivering a little under his mask of impassivity.
+Adelaide’s first thought on seeing him was, “Good Heavens! another man to
+be emotionally calmed before I can get at the truth!” She had to be
+tactful, to let him see that she was not going to make a scene. She knew
+that he felt it himself, but she was not grateful to him. What business
+had he to feel it? His feeling was an added burden, and she felt that she
+had enough to carry.</p>
+
+<p>He did not make the mistake, however, of expressing his sympathy
+verbally. His answers were as cold and clear as she could wish. She
+questioned him on the chances of an operation. He could not reduce his
+judgment to a mathematical one; he was inclined to advocate an operation
+on psychological grounds, he said.</p>
+
+<p>“It keeps up the patient’s courage to know something is being done.” He
+added, “That will be your work, Mrs. Farron, to keep his courage up.”</p>
+
+<p>Most women like to know they had their part to play, but Adelaide shook
+her head quickly.</p>
+
+<p>“I would so much rather go through it myself!” she cried.</p>
+
+<p>“Naturally, naturally,” he agreed, without getting the full passion
+of her cry.</p>
+
+<p>She stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” she said, “if it could only be kill or cure!”</p>
+
+<p>He glanced at her.</p>
+
+<p>“We have hardly reached that point yet,” he answered.</p>
+
+<p>She went away dissatisfied. He had answered every question, he had even
+encouraged her to hope a little more than her interpretation of what
+Vincent said had allowed her; but as she drove away she knew he had
+failed her. For she had gone to him in order to have Vincent presented to
+her as a hero, as a man who had looked upon the face of death without a
+quiver. Instead, he had been presented to her as a patient, just one of
+the long procession that passed through that office. The doctor had said
+nothing to contradict the heroic picture, but he had said nothing to
+contribute to it. And surely, if Farron had stood out in his calmness and
+courage above all other men, the doctor would have mentioned it, couldn’t
+have helped doing so; he certainly would not have spent so much time in
+telling her how she was to guard and encourage him. To the doctor he was
+only a patient, a pitiful human being, a victim of mortality. Was that
+what he was going to become in her eyes, too?</p>
+
+<p>At four she drove down-town to his office. He came out with another man;
+they stood a moment on the steps talking and smiling. Then he drew his
+friend to the car window and introduced him to Adelaide. The man took
+off his hat.</p>
+
+<p>“I was just telling your husband, Mrs. Farron, that I’ve been looking at
+offices in this building. By the spring he and I will be neighbors.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide just shut her eyes, and did not open them again until Vincent
+had got in beside her and she felt his arm about her shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>“My poor darling!” he said. “What you need is to go home and get some
+sleep.” It was said in his old, cherishing tone, and she, leaning back,
+with her head against the point of his shoulder, felt that, black as it
+was, life for the first time since the night before had assumed its
+normal aspect again.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>The morning after their drive up-town Vincent told his wife that all
+his arrangements were made to go to the hospital that night, and to be
+operated upon the next day. She reproached him for having made his
+decision without consulting her, but she loved him for his proud
+independence.</p>
+
+<p>Somehow this second day under the shadow of death was less terrible than
+the first. Vincent stayed up-town, and was very natural and very busy. He
+saw a few people,—men who owed him money, his lawyer, his partner,—but
+most of the time he and Adelaide sat together in his study, as they had
+sat on many other holidays. He insisted on going alone to the hospital,
+although she was to be in the building during the operation.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde had been told, and inexperienced in disaster, she had felt
+convinced that the outcome couldn’t be fatal, yet despite her conviction
+that people did not really die, she was aware of a shyness and
+awkwardness in the tragic situation.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley had been told, and his attitude was just the opposite. To
+him it seemed absolutely certain that Farron would die,—every one
+did,—but he had for some time been aware of a growing hardness on his
+part toward the death of other people, as if he were thus preparing
+himself for his own.</p>
+
+<p>“Poor Vincent!” he said to himself. “Hard luck at his age, when an old
+man like me is left.” But this was not quite honest. In his heart he
+felt there was nothing unnatural in Vincent’s being taken or in his
+being left.</p>
+
+<p>As usual in a crisis, Adelaide’s behavior was perfect. She contrived to
+make her husband feel every instant the depth, the strength, the passion
+of her love for him without allowing it to add to the weight he was
+already carrying. Alone together, he and she had flashes of real gaiety,
+sometimes not very far from tears.</p>
+
+<p>To Mathilde the brisk naturalness of her mother’s manner was a source of
+comfort. All the day the girl suffered from a sense of strangeness and
+isolation, and a fear of doing or saying something unsuitable—something
+either too special or too every-day. She longed to evince sympathy for
+Mr. Farron, but was afraid that, if she did, it would be like intimating
+that he was as good as dead. She was caught between the negative danger
+of seeming indifferent and the positive one of being tactless.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as Vincent had left the house, Adelaide’s thought turned to her
+daughter. He had gone about six o’clock. He and she had been sitting by
+his study fire when Pringle announced that the motor was waiting. Vincent
+got up quietly, and so did she. They stood with their arms about each
+other, as if they meant never to forget the sense of that contact; and
+then without any protest they went down-stairs together.</p>
+
+<p>In the hall he had shaken hands with Mr. Lanley and had kissed Mathilde,
+who, do what she would, couldn’t help choking a little. All this time
+Adelaide stood on the stairs, very erect, with one hand on the stair-rail
+and one on the wall, not only her eyes, but her whole face, radiating an
+uplifted peace. So angelic and majestic did she seem that Mathilde,
+looking up at her, would hardly have been surprised if she had floated
+out into space from her vantage-ground on the staircase.</p>
+
+<p>Then Farron lit a last cigar, gave a quick, steady glance at his wife,
+and went out. The front door ended the incident as sharply as a shot
+would have done.</p>
+
+<p>It was then that Mathilde expected to see her mother break down. Under
+all her sympathy there was a faint human curiosity as to how people
+contrived to live through such crises. If Pete were on the brink of
+death, she thought that she would go mad: but, then, she and Pete were
+not a middle-aged married couple; they were young, and new to love.</p>
+
+<p>They all went into the drawing-room, Adelaide the calmest of the three.</p>
+
+<p>“I wonder,” she said, “if you two would mind dining a little earlier than
+usual. I might sleep if I could get to bed early, and I must be at the
+hospital before eight.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley agreed a little more quickly than it was his habit to speak.</p>
+
+<p>“O Mama, I think you’re so marvelous!” said Mathilde, and touched at her
+own words, she burst into tears. Her mother put her arm about her, and
+Mr. Lanley patted her shoulder—his sovereign care.</p>
+
+<p>“There, there, my dear,” he murmured, “you must not cry. You know Vincent
+has a very good chance, a very good chance.”</p>
+
+<p>The assumption that he hadn’t was just the one Mathilde did not want to
+appear to make. Her mother saw this and said gently:</p>
+
+<p>“She’s overstrained, that’s all.”</p>
+
+<p>The girl wiped her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m ashamed, when you are so calm and wonderful.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m not wonderful,” said her mother. “I have no wish to cry. I’m beyond
+it. Other people’s trouble often makes us behave more emotionally than
+our own. If it were your Pete, I should be in tears.” She smiled, and
+looked across the girl’s head at Mr. Lanley. “She would like to see him,
+Papa. Telephone Pete Wayne, will you, and ask him to come and see her
+this evening? You’ll be here, won’t you?”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley nodded without cordiality; he did not approve of encouraging
+the affair unnecessarily.</p>
+
+<p>“How kind you are, Mama!” exclaimed Mathilde, almost inaudibly. It was
+just what she wanted, just what she had been wanting all day, to see her
+own man, to assure herself, since death was seen to be hot on the trail
+of all mortals, that he and she were not wasting their brief time in
+separation.</p>
+
+<p>“We might take a turn in the motor,” said Mr. Lanley, thinking that Mrs.
+Wayne might enjoy that.</p>
+
+<p>“It would do you both good.”</p>
+
+<p>“And leave you alone, Mama?”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s what I really want, dear.”</p>
+
+<p>The plan did not fulfil itself quite as Mr. Lanley had imagined. Mrs.
+Wayne was out at some sort of meeting. They waited a moment for Pete.
+Mathilde fixed her eyes on the lighted doorway, and said to herself that
+in a few seconds the thing of all others that she desired would
+happen—he would come through it. And almost at once he did, looking
+particularly young and alive; so that, as he jumped in beside her on the
+back seat, both her hands went out and caught his arm and clung to him.
+Her realization of mortality had been so acute that she felt as if he had
+been restored to her from the dead. She told him the horrors of the day.
+Particularly, she wanted to share with him her gratitude for her mother’s
+almost magic kindness.</p>
+
+<p>“I wanted you so much, Pete,” she whispered; “but I thought it would be
+heartless even to suggest my having wishes at such a time. And then for
+her to think of it herself—”</p>
+
+<p>“It means they are not really going to oppose our marriage.”</p>
+
+<p>They talked about their marriage and the twenty or thirty years of joy
+which they might reasonably hope to snatch from life.</p>
+
+<p>“Think of it,” he said—“twenty or thirty years, longer than either of us
+have lived.”</p>
+
+<p>“If I could have five years, even one year, with you, I think I could
+bear to die; but not now, Pete.”</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime Mr. Lanley, alone on the front seat, for he had left
+his chauffeur at home, was driving north along the Hudson and saying
+to himself:</p>
+
+<p>“Sixty-four. Well, I may be able to knock out ten or twelve pretty
+satisfactory years. On the other hand, might die to-morrow; hope I
+don’t, though. As long as I can drive a car and everything goes well
+with Adelaide and this child, I’d be content to live my full time—and a
+little bit more. Not many men are healthier than I am. Poor Vincent! A
+good deal more to live for than I have, most people would say; but I
+don’t know that he enjoys it any more than I do.” Turning his head a
+little, he shouted over his shoulder to Pete, “Sorry your mother
+couldn’t come.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde made a hasty effort to withdraw her hands; but Wayne, more
+practical, understanding better the limits put upon a driver, held
+them tightly as he answered in a civil tone: “Yes, she would have
+enjoyed this.”</p>
+
+<p>“She must come some other time,” shouted Mr. Lanley, and reflected that
+it was not always necessary to bring the young people with you.</p>
+
+<p>“You know, he could not possibly have turned enough to see,” Pete
+whispered reprovingly to Mathilde.</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose not; and yet it seemed so queer to be talking to my
+grandfather with—”</p>
+
+<p>“You must try and adapt yourself to your environment,” he returned, and
+put his arm about her.</p>
+
+<p>The cold of the last few days had given place to a thaw. The melting ice
+in the river was streaked in strange curves, and the bare trees along the
+straight heights of the Palisades were blurred by a faint bluish mist,
+out of which white lights and yellow ones peered like eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Doesn’t it seem cruel to be so happy when Mama and poor Mr. Farron—”
+Mathilde began.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s the only lesson to learn,” he answered—“to be happy while we are
+young and together.”</p>
+
+<p>About ten o’clock Mr. Lanley left her at home, and she tiptoed up-stairs
+and hardly dared to draw breath as she undressed for fear she might wake
+her unhappy mother on the floor below her.</p>
+
+<p>She had resolved to wake early, to breakfast with her mother, to ask to
+be allowed to accompany her to the hospital; but it was nine o’clock when
+she was awakened by her maid’s coming in with her breakfast and the
+announcement not only that Mrs. Farron had been gone for more than an
+hour, but that there had already been good news from the hospital.</p>
+
+<p>“Il paraît que monsieur est très fort,” she said, with that absolute
+neutrality of accent that sounds in Anglo-Saxon ears almost like a
+complaint.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide had been in no need of companionship. She was perfectly able
+to go through her day. It seemed as if her soul, with a soul’s
+capacity for suffering, had suddenly withdrawn from her body, had
+retreated into some unknown fortress, and left in its place a hard,
+trivial, practical intelligence which tossed off plan after plan for
+the future detail of life. As she drove from her house to the hospital
+she arranged how she would apportion the household in case of a
+prolonged illness, where she would put the nurses. Nor was she less
+clear as to what should be done in case of Vincent’s death. The whole
+thing unrolled before her like a panorama.</p>
+
+<p>At the hospital, after a little delay, she was guided to Vincent’s own
+room, recently deserted. A nurse came to tell her that all was going
+well; Mr. Farron had had a good night, and was taking the anesthetic
+nicely. Adelaide found the young woman’s manner offensively encouraging,
+and received the news with an insolent reserve.</p>
+
+<p>“That girl is too wildly, spiritually bright,” she said to herself. But
+no manner would have pleased her.</p>
+
+<p>Left alone, she sat down in a rocking-chair near the window. Vincent’s
+bag stood in the corner, his brushes were on the dressing-table, his tie
+hung on the electric light. Immortal trifles, she thought, that might be
+in existence for years.</p>
+
+<p>She began poignantly to regret that she had not insisted on seeing him
+again that morning. She had thought only of what was easiest for him. She
+ought to have thought of herself, of what would make it possible for her
+to go on living without him. If she could have seen him again, he might
+have given her some precept, some master word, by which she could have
+guided her life. She would have welcomed something imprisoning and safe.
+It was cruel of him, she thought, to toss her out like this, rudderless
+and alone. She wondered what he would have given her as a commandment,
+and remembered suddenly the apocryphal last words which Vincent was fond
+of attributing to George Washington, “Never trust a nigger with a gun.”
+She found herself smiling over them. Vincent was more likely to have
+quoted the apparition’s advice to Macbeth: “Be bloody, bold, and
+resolute.” That would have been his motto for himself, but not for her.
+What was the principle by which he infallibly guided her?</p>
+
+<p>How could he have left her so spiritually unprovided for? She felt
+imposed upon, deserted. The busily planning little mind that had suddenly
+taken possession of her could not help her in the larger aspects of her
+existence. It would be much simpler, she thought, to die than to attempt
+life again without Vincent.</p>
+
+<p>She went to the window and looked out at the roofs of neighboring
+houses, a disordered conglomeration of water-tanks and skylights and
+chimney-pots. Then nearer, almost under her feet, she looked into a
+courtyard of the hospital and saw a pale, emaciated man in a wheel-chair.
+She drew back as if it were something indecent. Would Vincent ever become
+like that? she thought. If so, she would rather he died now under the
+anesthetic.</p>
+
+<p>A little while later the nurse came in, and said almost sternly that Dr.
+Crew had sent her to tell Mrs. Farron that the conditions seemed
+extremely favorable, and that all immediate danger was over.</p>
+
+<p>“You mean,” said Adelaide, fiercely, “that Mr. Farron will live?”</p>
+
+<p>“I certainly inferred that to be the doctor’s meaning,” answered the
+nurse. “But here is the assistant, Dr. Withers.”</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Withers, bringing with him an intolerable smell of disinfectants and
+chloroform, hurried in, with his hair mussed from the haste with which he
+had removed his operating-garments. He had small, bright, brown eyes,
+with little lines about them that seemed to suggest humor, but actually
+indicated that he buoyed up his life not by exaltation of himself, but by
+half-laughing depreciation of every one else.</p>
+
+<p>“I thought you’d be glad to know, Mrs. Farron,” he said, “that any danger
+that may have existed is now over. Your husband—”</p>
+
+<p>“That <i>may</i> have existed,” cried Adelaide. “Do you mean to say there
+hasn’t been any real danger?”</p>
+
+<p>The young doctor’s eyes twinkled.</p>
+
+<p>“An operation even in the best hands is always a danger,” he replied.</p>
+
+<p>“But you mean there was no other?” Adelaide asked, aware of a growing
+coldness about her hands and feet.</p>
+
+<p>Withers looked as just as Aristides.</p>
+
+<p>“It was probably wise to operate,” he said. “Your husband ought to be up
+and about in three weeks.”</p>
+
+<p>Everything grew black and rotatory before Adelaide’s eyes, and she sank
+slowly forward into the young doctor’s arms.</p>
+
+<p>As he laid her on the bed, he glanced whimsically at the nurse and
+shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>But she made no response, an omission which may not have meant loyalty to
+Dr. Crew so much as unwillingness to support Dr. Withers.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide returned to consciousness only in time to be hurried away to
+make room for Vincent. His long, limp figure was carried past her in the
+corridor. She was told that in a few hours she might see him. But she
+wasn’t, as a matter of fact, very eager to see him. The knowledge that he
+was to live, the lifting of the weight of dread, was enough. The maternal
+strain did not mingle with her love for him; she saw no possible reward,
+no increased sense of possession, in his illness. On the contrary, she
+wanted him to stride back in one day from death to his old powerful,
+dominating self.</p>
+
+<p>She grew to hate the hospital routine, the fixed hours, the regulated
+food. “These rules, these hovering women,” she exclaimed, “these
+trays—they make me think of the nursery.” But what she really hated was
+Vincent’s submission to it all. In her heart she would have been glad to
+see him breaking the rules, defying the doctors, and bullying his nurses.</p>
+
+<p>Before long a strong, silent antagonism grew up between her and the
+bright-eyed, cheerful nurse, Miss Gregory. It irritated Adelaide to gain
+access to her husband through other people’s consent; it irritated her to
+see the girl’s understanding of the case, and her competent arrangements
+for her patient’s comfort. If Vincent had showed any disposition to
+revolt, Adelaide would have pleaded with him to submit; but as it was,
+she watched his docility with a scornful eye.</p>
+
+<p>“That girl rules you with a rod of iron,” she said one day. But even then
+Vincent did not rouse himself.</p>
+
+<p>“She knows her business,” he said admiringly.</p>
+
+<p>To any other invalid Adelaide could have been a soothing visitor, could
+have adapted the quick turns of her mind to the relaxed attention of
+the sick; but, honestly enough, there seemed to her an impertinence,
+almost an insult, in treating Vincent in such a way. The result was
+that her visits were exhausting, and she knew it. And yet, she said to
+herself, he was ill, not insane; how could she conceal from him the
+happenings of every day? Vincent would be the last person to be
+grateful to her for that.</p>
+
+<p>She saw him one day grow pale; his eyes began to close. She had made up
+her mind to leave him when Miss Gregory came in, and with a quicker eye
+and a more active habit of mind, said at once:</p>
+
+<p>“I think Mr. Farron has had enough excitement for one day.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide smiled up at the girl almost insolently.</p>
+
+<p>“Is a visit from a wife an excitement?” she asked. Miss Gregory was
+perfectly grave.</p>
+
+<p>“The greatest,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide yielded to her own irritation.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” she said, “I shan’t stay much longer.”</p>
+
+<p>“It would be better if you went now, I think, Mrs. Farron.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide looked at Vincent. It was silly of him, she thought, to pretend
+he didn’t hear. She bent over him.</p>
+
+<p>“Your nurse is driving me away from you, dearest,” she murmured.</p>
+
+<p>He opened his eyes and took her hand.</p>
+
+<p>“Come back to-morrow early—as early as you can,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>She never remembered his siding against her before, and she swept out
+into the hallway, saying to herself that it was childish to be annoyed at
+the whims of an invalid.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Gregory had followed her.</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Farron,” she said, “do you mind my suggesting that for the present
+it would be better not to talk to Mr. Farron about anything that might
+worry him, even trifles?”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“You know very little of Mr. Farron,” she said, “if you think he worries
+over trifles.”</p>
+
+<p>“Any one worries over trifles when he is in a nervous state.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide passed by without answering, passed by as if she had not heard.
+The suggestion of Vincent nervously worrying over trifles was one of the
+most repellent pictures that had ever been presented to her imagination.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>The firm for which Wayne worked was young and small—Benson &amp; Honaton.
+They made a specialty of circularization in connection with the bond
+issues in which they were interested, and Wayne had charge of their
+“literature,” as they described it. He often felt, after he had finished
+a report, that his work deserved the title. A certain number of people in
+Wall Street disapproved of the firm’s methods. Sometimes Pete thought
+this was because, for a young firm, they had succeeded too quickly to
+please the more deliberate; but sometimes in darker moments he thought
+there might be some justice in the idea.</p>
+
+<p>During the weeks that Farron was in the hospital Pete, despite his
+constant availability to Mathilde, had been at work on his report on a
+coal property in Pennsylvania. He was extremely pleased with the
+thoroughness with which he had done the job. His report was not
+favorable. The day after it was finished, a little after three, he
+received word that the firm wanted to see him. He was always annoyed with
+himself that these messages caused his heart to beat a trifle faster. He
+couldn’t help associating them with former hours with his head-master or
+in the dean’s office. Only he had respected his head-master and even the
+dean, whereas he was not at all sure he respected Mr. Benson and he was
+quite sure he did not respect Mr. Honaton.</p>
+
+<p>He rose slowly from his desk, exchanging with the office boy who brought
+the message a long, severe look, under which something very comic lurked,
+though neither knew what.</p>
+
+<p>“And don’t miss J.B.’s socks,” said the boy.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Honaton—J.B.—was considered in his office a very beautiful dresser,
+as indeed in some ways he was. He was a tall young man, built like a
+greyhound, with a small, pointed head, a long waist, and a very long
+throat, from which, however, the strongest, loudest voice could issue
+when he so desired. This was his priceless asset. He was the board
+member, and generally admitted to be an excellent broker. It always
+seemed to Pete that he was a broker exactly as a beaver is a
+dam-builder, because nature had adapted him to that task. But outside of
+this one instinctive capacity he had no sense whatsoever. He rarely
+appeared in the office. He was met at the Broad Street entrance of the
+exchange at one minute to ten by a boy with the morning’s orders, and
+sometimes he came in for a few minutes after the closing; but usually by
+three-fifteen he had disappeared from financial circles, and was
+understood to be relaxing in the higher social spheres to which he
+belonged. So when Pete, entering Mr. Benson’s private office, saw Honaton
+leaning against the window-frame, with his hat-brim held against his
+thigh exactly like a fashion-plate, he knew that something of importance
+must be pending.</p>
+
+<p>Benson, the senior member, was a very different person. He looked like a
+fat, white, pugnacious cat. His hair, which had turned white early, had a
+tendency to grow in a bang; his arms were short—so short that when he
+put his hands on the arms of his swing-chair he hardly bent his elbows.
+He had them there now as Pete entered, and was swinging through short
+arcs in rather a nervous rhythm. He was of Irish parentage, and was
+understood to have political influence.</p>
+
+<p>“Wayne,” said Benson, “how would you like to go to China?”</p>
+
+<p>And Honaton repeated portentously, “China,” as if Benson might have made
+a mistake in the name of the country if he had not been at his elbow to
+correct him.</p>
+
+<p>Wayne laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” he said, “I have nothing against China.”</p>
+
+<p>Benson outlined the situation quickly. The firm had acquired property in
+China not entirely through their own choice, and they wanted a thorough,
+clear report on it; they knew of no one—<i>no one</i>, Benson emphasized—who
+could do that as impartially and as well as Wayne. They would pay him a
+good sum and his expenses. It would take him a year, perhaps a year and a
+half. They named the figure. It was one that made marriage possible. They
+talked of the situation and the property and the demand for copper until
+Honaton began to look at his watch, a flat platinum watch, perfectly
+plain, you might have thought, until you caught a glimpse of a narrow
+line of brilliants along its almost imperceptible rim. His usual working
+day was over in half an hour.</p>
+
+<p>“And when I come back, Mr. Benson?” said Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>“Your place will be open for you here.”</p>
+
+<p>There was a pause.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, what do you say?” said Honaton.</p>
+
+<p>“I feel very grateful for the offer,” said Pete, “but of course I can’t
+give you an answer now.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why not, why not?” returned Honaton, who felt that he had given up half
+an hour for nothing if the thing couldn’t be settled on the spot; and
+even Benson, Wayne noticed, began to glower.</p>
+
+<p>“You could probably give us as good an answer to-day as to-morrow,”
+he said.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing roused Pete’s spirit like feeling a tremor in his own soul, and
+so he now answered with great firmness:</p>
+
+<p>“I cannot give you an answer to-day <i>or</i> to-morrow.”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s all off, then, all off,” said Honaton, moving to the door.</p>
+
+<p>“When do the Chinese boats sail, Mr. Honaton?” said Pete, with the
+innocence of manner that an employee should use when putting his superior
+in a hole.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t see what difference that makes to you, Wayne, if you’re not
+taking them,” said Honaton, as if he were triumphantly concealing the
+fact that he didn’t know.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t feel you have to wait, Jack, if you’re in a hurry,” said his
+partner, and when the other had slid out of the office Benson turned to
+Wayne and went on: “You wouldn’t have to go until a week from Saturday.
+You would have to get off then, and we should have to know in time to
+find some one else in case you don’t care for it.”</p>
+
+<p>Pete asked for three days, and presently left the office.</p>
+
+<p>He had a friend, one of his mother’s reformed drunkards, who as janitor
+lived on the top floor of a tall building. He and his wife offered Wayne
+the hospitality of their balcony, and now and then, in moments like this,
+he availed himself of it. Not, indeed, that there had ever been a moment
+quite like this; for he knew that he was facing the most important
+decision he had ever been forced to make.</p>
+
+<p>In the elevator he met the janitor’s cat Susan going home after an
+afternoon visit to the restaurant on the sixteenth floor. The elevator
+boy loved to tell how she never made a mistake in the floor.</p>
+
+<p>“Do you think she’d get off at the fifteenth or the seventeenth? Not she.
+Sometimes she puts her nose out and smells at the other floors, but she
+won’t get off until I stop at the right one. Sometimes she has to ride up
+and down three or four times before any one wants the sixteenth. Eh,
+Susan?” he added in caressing tones; but Susan was watching the floors
+flash past and paid no attention until, arrived at the top, she and Pete
+stepped off together.</p>
+
+<p>It was a cool, clear day, for the wind was from the north, but on the
+southern balcony the sun was warm. Pete sat down in the kitchen-chair
+set for him, tilted back, and looked out over the Statue of Liberty,
+which stood like a stunted baby, to the blue Narrows. He saw one
+thing clearly, and that was that he would not go if Mathilde would not
+go with him.</p>
+
+<p>He envied people who could make up their minds by thinking. At least
+sometimes he envied them and sometimes he thought they lied. He could
+only think <i>about</i> a subject and wait for the unknown gods to bring him a
+decision. And this is what he now did, with his eyes fixed on the towers
+and tanks and tenements, on the pale winter sky, and, when he got up and
+leaned his elbows on the parapet, on the crowds that looked like a flood
+of purple insects in the streets.</p>
+
+<p>He thought of Mathilde’s youth and his own untried capacities for
+success, of poverty and children, of the probable opposition of
+Mathilde’s family and of a strange, sinister, disintegrating power he
+felt or suspected in Mrs. Farron. He felt that it was a terrible risk to
+ask a young girl to take and that it was almost an insult to be afraid to
+ask her to take it. That was what his mother had always said about these
+cherished, protected creatures: they were not prepared to meet any strain
+in life. He knew he would not have hesitated to ask a girl differently
+brought up. Ought he to ask Mathilde or ought he not even to hesitate
+about asking her? In his own future he had confidence. He had an unusual
+power of getting his facts together so that they meant something. In a
+small way his work was recognized. A report of his had some weight. He
+felt certain that if on his return he wanted another position he could
+get it unless he made a terrible fiasco in China. Should he consult any
+one? He knew beforehand what they would all think about it. Mr. Lanley
+would think that it was sheer impertinence to want to marry his
+granddaughter on less than fifteen thousand dollars a year; Mrs. Farron
+would think that there were lots of equally agreeable young men in the
+world who would not take a girl to China; and his mother, whom he could
+not help considering the wisest of the three, would think that Mathilde
+lacked discipline and strength of will for such an adventure. And on this
+he found he made up his mind. “After all,” he said to himself as he put
+the chair back against the wall, “everything else would be failure, and
+this may be success.”</p>
+
+<p>It was the afternoon that Farron was brought back from the hospital, and
+he and Mathilde were sure of having the drawing-room to themselves. He
+told her the situation slowly and with a great deal of detail,
+chronologically, introducing the Chinese trip at the very end. But she
+did not at once understand.</p>
+
+<p>“O Pete, you would not go away from me!” she said. “I could not
+face that.”</p>
+
+<p>“Couldn’t you? Remember that everything you say is going to be used
+against you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Would you be willing to go, Pete?”</p>
+
+<p>“Only if you will go with me.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh!” she clasped her hands to her breast, shrinking back to look at
+him. So that was what he had meant, this stranger whom she had known for
+such a short time. As she looked she half expected that he would smile,
+and say it was all a joke; but his eyes were steadily and seriously
+fixed on hers. It was very queer, she thought. Their meeting, their
+first kiss, their engagement, had all seemed so inevitable, so natural,
+there had not been a hint of doubt or decision about it; but now all of
+a sudden she found herself faced by a situation in which it was
+impossible to say yes or no.</p>
+
+<p>“It would be wonderful, of course,” she said, after a minute, but her
+tone showed she was not considering it as a possibility.</p>
+
+<p>Wayne’s heart sank; he saw that he had thought it possible that he would
+not allow her to go, but that he had never seriously faced the chance of
+her refusing.</p>
+
+<p>“Mathilde,” he said, “it’s far and sudden, and we shall be poor, and I
+can’t promise that I shall succeed more than other fellows; and yet
+against all that—”</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him.</p>
+
+<p>“You don’t think I care for those things? I don’t care if you succeed or
+fail, or live all your life in Siam.”</p>
+
+<p>“What is it, then?”</p>
+
+<p>“Pete, it’s my mother. She would never consent.”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne was aware of this, but, then, as he pointed out to Mathilde with
+great care, Mrs. Farron could not bear for her daughter the pain of
+separation.</p>
+
+<p>“Separation!” cried the girl, “But you just said you would not go if
+I did not.”</p>
+
+<p>“If you put your mother before me, mayn’t I put my profession
+before you?”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear, don’t speak in that tone.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, Mathilde,” he said, and he sprang up and stood looking down at her
+from a little distance, “this is the real test. We have thought we loved
+each other—”</p>
+
+<p>“Thought!” she interrupted.</p>
+
+<p>“But to get engaged with no immediate prospect of marriage, with all
+our families and friends grouped about, that doesn’t mean such a
+lot, does it?”</p>
+
+<p>“It does to me,” she answered almost proudly.</p>
+
+<p>“Now, one of us has to sacrifice something. I want to go on this
+expedition. I want to succeed. That may be egotism or legitimate
+ambition. I don’t know, but I want to go. I think I mean to go. Ought
+I to give it up because you are afraid of your mother?”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s love, not fear, Pete.”</p>
+
+<p>“You love me, too, you say.”</p>
+
+<p>“I feel an obligation to her.”</p>
+
+<p>“And, good Heavens! do you feel none to me?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, no. I love you too much to feel an obligation to you.”</p>
+
+<p>“But you love your mother <i>and</i> feel an obligation to her. Why, Mathilde,
+that feeling of obligation <i>is</i> love—love in its most serious form.
+That’s what you don’t feel for me. That’s why you won’t go.”</p>
+
+<p>“I haven’t said I wouldn’t go.”</p>
+
+<p>“You never even thought of going.”</p>
+
+<p>“I have, I do. But how can I help hesitating? You must know I want to
+go.”</p>
+
+<p>“I see very little sign of it,” he murmured. The interview had not gone
+as he intended. He had not meant, he never imagined, that he would
+attempt to urge and coerce her; but her very detachment seemed to set a
+fire burning within him.</p>
+
+<p>“I think,” he said with an effort to sound friendly, “that I had better
+go and let you think this over by yourself.”</p>
+
+<p>He was actually moving to the door when she sprang up and put her arms
+about him.</p>
+
+<p>“Weren’t you even going to kiss me, Pete?”</p>
+
+<p>He stooped, and touched her cheek with his lips.</p>
+
+<p>“Do you call that a kiss?”</p>
+
+<p>“O Mathilde, do you think any kiss will change the facts?” he answered,
+and was gone.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as he had left her the desire for tears left her, too. She felt
+calm and more herself, more an isolated, independent human being than
+ever before in her life. She thought of all the things she ought to have
+said to Pete. The reason why she felt no obligation to him was that she
+was one with him. She was prepared to sacrifice him exactly as she was,
+or ought to be, willing to sacrifice herself; whereas her mother—it
+seemed as if her mother’s power surrounded her in every direction, as
+solid as the ancients believed the dome of heaven.</p>
+
+<p>Pringle appeared in the doorway in his eternal hunt for the tea-things.</p>
+
+<p>“May I take the tray, miss?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>She nodded, hardly glancing at the untouched tea-table. Pringle, as he
+bent over it, observed that it was nice to have Mr. Farron back.
+Mathilde remembered that she, too, had once been interested in her
+stepfather’s return.</p>
+
+<p>“Where’s my mother, Pringle?”</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Farron’s in her room, I think, miss, and Mr. Lanley’s with her.”</p>
+
+<p>Lanley had stopped as usual to ask after his son-in-law. He found his
+daughter writing letters in her room. He thought her looking cross, but
+in deference to her recent anxieties he called it, even in his own mind,
+overstrained.</p>
+
+<p>“Vincent is doing very well, I believe,” she answered in response to his
+question. “He ought to be. He is in charge of two lovely young creatures
+hardly Mathilde’s age who have already taken complete control of the
+household.”</p>
+
+<p>“You’ve seen him, of course.”</p>
+
+<p>“For a few minutes; they allow me a few minutes. They communicate by
+secret signals when they think I have stayed long enough.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley never knew how to treat this mood of his daughter’s, which
+seemed to him as unreasonable as if it were emotional, and yet as cold as
+if it were logic itself. He changed the subject and said boldly:</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Baxter is coming to-morrow.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide’s eyes faintly flashed.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, wouldn’t you know it!” she murmured. “Just at the most inconvenient
+time—inconvenient for me, I mean. Really, lovers are the only people you
+can depend on. I wish I had a lover.”</p>
+
+<p>“Adelaide,” said her father with some sternness, “even in fun you should
+not say such a thing. If Mathilde heard you—”</p>
+
+<p>“Mathilde is the person who made me see it. Her boy is here all the
+time, trying to think of something to please her. And who have I?
+Vincent has his nurses; and you have your old upholstered lady. I can’t
+help wishing I had a lover. They are the only people who, as the Wayne
+boy would say, ‘stick around.’ But don’t worry, Papa, I have a loyal
+nature.” She was interrupted by a knock at the door, and a nurse—the
+same who had been too encouraging to please her at the hospital—put in
+her head and said brightly:</p>
+
+<p>“You may see Mr. Farron now, Mrs. Farron.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide turned to her father and made a little bow.</p>
+
+<p>“See how I am favored,” she said, and left him.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing of this mood was apparent when she entered her husband’s room,
+though she noticed that the arrangement of the furniture had been
+changed, and, what she disliked even more, that they had brushed his hair
+in a new way. This, with his pallor and thinness, made him look strange
+to her. She bent over, and laid her cheek to his almost motionless lips.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, dear,” she said, “have you seen the church-warden part they have
+given your hair?”</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head impatiently, and she saw she had made the mistake of
+trying to give the tone to an interview in which she was not the leading
+character.</p>
+
+<p>“Who has the room above mine, Adelaide?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“My maid.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ask her not to practice the fox-trot, will you?”</p>
+
+<p>“O Vincent, she is never there.”</p>
+
+<p>“My mistake,” he answered, and shut his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>She repented at once.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course I’ll tell her. I’m sorry that you were disturbed.” But she
+was thinking only of his tone. He was not an irritable man, and he had
+never used such a tone to her before. All pleasure in the interview was
+over. She was actually glad when one of the nurses came in and began to
+move about the room in a manner that suggested dismissal.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course I’m not angry,” she said to herself. “He’s so weak one must
+humor him like a child.”</p>
+
+<p>She derived some satisfaction, however, from the idea of sending for her
+maid Lucie and making her uncomfortable; but on her way she met Mathilde
+in the hall.</p>
+
+<p>“May I speak to you, Mama?” she said.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Farron laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“May you speak to me?” she said. “Why, yes; you may have the unusual
+privilege. What is it?”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde followed her mother into the bedroom and shut the door.</p>
+
+<p>“Pete has just been here. He has been offered a position in China.”</p>
+
+<p>“In China?” said Mrs. Farron. This was the first piece of luck that had
+come to her in a long time, but she did not betray the least pleasure. “I
+hope it is a good one.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, he thinks it good. He sails in two weeks.”</p>
+
+<p>“In two weeks?” And this time she could not prevent her eye lighting a
+little. She thought how nicely that small complication had settled
+itself, and how clever she had been to have the mother to dinner and
+behave as if she were friendly. She did not notice that her daughter was
+trembling; she couldn’t, of course, be expected to know that the girl’s
+hands were like ice, and that she had waited several seconds to steady
+her voice sufficiently to pronounce the fatal sentence:</p>
+
+<p>“He wants me to go with him, Mama.”</p>
+
+<p>She watched her mother in an agony for the effect of these words.
+Mrs. Farron had suddenly detected a new burn in the hearth-rug. She
+bent over it.</p>
+
+<p>“This wood does snap so!” she murmured.</p>
+
+<p>The rug was a beautiful old Persian carpet of roses and urns.</p>
+
+<p>“Did you understand what I said, Mama?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, dear; that Mr. Wayne was going to China in two weeks and wanted you
+to go, too. Was it just a <i>politesse</i>, or does he actually imagine that
+you could?”</p>
+
+<p>“He thinks I can.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Farron laughed good-temperedly.</p>
+
+<p>“Did you go and see about having your pink silk shortened?” she said.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde stared at her mother, and in the momentary silence Lucie came in
+and asked what madame wanted for the evening, and Adelaide in her fluent
+French began explaining that what she really desired most was that Lucie
+should not make so much noise in her room that monsieur could not sleep.
+In the midst of it she stopped and turned to her daughter.</p>
+
+<p>“Won’t you be late for dinner, darling?” she said.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde thought it very possible, and went away to get dressed. She went
+into her own room and shut the door sharply behind her.</p>
+
+<p>All the time she was dressing she tried to rehearse her case—that it
+was her life, her love, her chance; but all the time she had a sickening
+sense that a lifted eye-brow of her mother’s would make it sound childish
+and absurd even in her own ears. She had counted on a long evening, but
+when she went down-stairs she found three or four friends of her mother’s
+were to dine and go to the theater. The dinner was amusing, the talk,
+though avowedly hampered by the presence of Mathilde, was witty and
+unexpected enough; but Mathilde was not amused by it, for she
+particularly dreaded her mother in such a mood of ruthless gaiety. At the
+theater they were extremely critical, and though they missed almost the
+whole first act, appeared, in the entr’acte, to feel no hesitation in
+condemning it. They spoke of French and Italian actors by name, laughed
+heartily over the playwright’s conception of social usages, and made
+Mathilde feel as if her own unacknowledged enjoyment of the play was the
+guiltiest of secrets.</p>
+
+<p>As they drove home, she was again alone with her mother, and she said at
+once the sentence she had determined on:</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t think you understood, Mama, how seriously I meant what I said
+this afternoon.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Farron was bending her long-waisted figure forward to get a good
+look at a picture which, small, lonely, and brightly lighted, hung in a
+picture-dealer’s window. It was a picture of an empty room. Hot summer
+sunlight filtered through the lowered Venetian blinds, and fell in bands
+on the golden wood of the floor. Outside the air was burned and dusty,
+but inside the room all was clear, cool, and pure.</p>
+
+<p>“How perfect his things are,” murmured Mrs. Farron to herself, and then
+added to her daughter: “Yes, my dear, I did take in what you said. You
+really think you are in love with this Wayne boy, don’t you? It’s
+immensely to your credit, darling,” she went on, her tone taking on a
+flattering sweetness, “to care so much about any one who has such funny,
+stubby little hands—most unattractive hands,” she added almost dreamily.</p>
+
+<p>There was a long pause during which an extraordinary thing happened to
+Mathilde. She found that it didn’t make the very slightest difference to
+her what her mother thought of Pete or his hands, that it would never
+make any difference to her again. It was as if her will had suddenly
+been born, and the first act of that will was to decide to go with the
+man she loved. How could she have doubted for an instant? It was so
+simple, and no opposition would or could mean anything to her. She was
+not in the least angry; on the contrary, she felt extremely pitiful, as
+if she were saying good-by to some one who did not know she was going
+away, as if in a sense she had now parted from her mother forever. Tears
+came into her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, Mama!” she said like a sigh.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Farron felt she had been cruel, but without regretting it; for that,
+she thought, was often a parent’s duty.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Mathilde. The boy is a nice enough
+little person, but really I could not let you set off for China at a
+minute’s notice with any broker’s clerk who happened to fall in love with
+your golden hair. When you have a little more experience you will
+discriminate between the men you like to have love you and the men there
+is the smallest chance of your loving. I assure you, if little Wayne were
+not in love with you, you would think him a perfectly commonplace boy. If
+one of your friends were engaged to him, you would be the first to say
+that you wondered what it was she saw in him. That isn’t the way one
+wants people to feel about one’s husband, is it? And as to going to China
+with him, you know that’s impossible, don’t you?”</p>
+
+<p>“It would be impossible to let him go without me.”</p>
+
+<p>“Really, Mathilde!” said Mrs. Farron, gently, as if she, so willing to
+play fair, were being put off with fantasies. “I don’t understand you,”
+she added.</p>
+
+<p>“No, Mama; you don’t.”</p>
+
+<p>The motor stopped at the door, and they went in silence to Mrs. Farron’s
+room, where for a bitter hour they talked, neither yielding an inch. At
+last Adelaide sent the girl to bed. Mathilde was aware of profound
+physical exhaustion, and yet underneath there was a high knowledge of
+something unbreakable within her.</p>
+
+<p>Left alone, Adelaide turned instinctively toward her husband’s door.
+There were her strength and vision. Then she remembered, and drew back;
+but presently, hearing a stir there, she knocked very softly. A nurse
+appeared on the instant.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, <i>please</i>, Mrs. Farron! Mr. Farron has just got to sleep.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide stood alone in the middle of the floor. Once again, she thought,
+in a crisis of her life she had no one to depend on but herself. She
+lifted her shoulders. No one was to blame, but there the fact was. They
+urged you to cling and be guided, but when the pinch came, you had to act
+for yourself. She had learned her lesson now. Henceforward she took her
+own life over into her own hands.</p>
+
+<p>She reviewed her past dependences. Her youth, with its dependence on her
+father, particularly in matters of dress. She recalled her early
+photographs with a shudder. Had she really dressed so badly or was it
+only the change of fashion? And then her dependence on Joe Severance.
+What could be more ridiculous than for a woman of her intelligence to
+allow herself to be guided in everything by a man like Joe, who had
+nothing himself but a certain shrewd masculinity? And now Vincent. She
+was still under the spell of his superiority, but perhaps she would come
+to judge him too. She had learned much from him. Perhaps she had learned
+all he had to teach her. Her face looked as if it were carved out of some
+smooth white stone.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_X">CHAPTER X</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>After she had gone up-stairs, Mathilde went down again to telephone Pete
+that she had made her decision. She went boldly snapping electric
+switches, for her going was a sort of assertion of her right to
+independent action. She would have hesitated even less if she had known
+how welcome her news was, how he had suffered since their parting.</p>
+
+<p>On going home from his interview with her, he found his mother dressing
+to dine with Mr. Lanley, a party arranged before the unexpected arrival
+of Mrs. Baxter. The only part of dressing that delayed Mrs. Wayne was her
+hair, which was so long that the brushing of it took time. In this
+process she was engaged when her son, in response to her answer, came
+into her room.</p>
+
+<p>“How is Mr. Farron?” she asked at once, and he, rather touched at the
+genuineness of her interest, answered her in detail before her next
+exclamation betrayed that it was entirely for the employer of Marty
+Burke that she was solicitous. “Isn’t it too bad he was taken ill just
+now?” she said.</p>
+
+<p>The bitterness and doubt from which Wayne was suffering were not emotions
+that disposed him to confidence. He did not want to tell his mother what
+he was going through, for the obvious and perhaps unworthy reason that it
+was just what she would have expected him to go through. At the same time
+a real deceit was involved in concealing it, and so, tipping his chair
+back against her wall, he said:</p>
+
+<p>“The firm has asked me to go to China for them.”</p>
+
+<p>His mother turned, her whole face lit up with interest.</p>
+
+<p>“To China! How interesting!” she said. “China is a wonderful country. How
+I should like to go to China!”</p>
+
+<p>“Come along. I don’t start for two weeks.”</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>“No, if you go, I’ll make a trip to that hypnotic clinic of Dr.
+Platerbridge’s; and if I can learn the trick, I will open one here.”</p>
+
+<p>The idea crossed Wayne’s mind that perhaps he had not the power of
+inspiring affection.</p>
+
+<p>“You don’t miss people a bit, do you, Mother?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Pete, I do; only there is so much to be done. What does Mathilde
+say to you going off like this? How long will you be gone?”</p>
+
+<p>“More than a year.”</p>
+
+<p>“Pete, how awful for her!”</p>
+
+<p>“There is nothing to prevent her going with me.”</p>
+
+<p>“You couldn’t take that child to China.”</p>
+
+<p>“You may be glad to know that she is cordially of your opinion.”</p>
+
+<p>The feeling behind his tone at last attracted his mother’s full
+attention.</p>
+
+<p>“But, my dear boy,” she said gently, “she has never been anywhere in her
+life without a maid. She probably doesn’t know how to do her hair or mend
+her clothes or anything practical.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mother dear, you are not so awfully practical yourself,” he answered;
+“but you would have gone.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne looked impish.</p>
+
+<p>“I always loved that sort of thing,” she said; and then, becoming more
+maternal, she added, “and that doesn’t mean it would be sensible because
+I’d do it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,”—Wayne stood up preparatory to leaving the room,—“I mean to take
+her if she’ll go.”</p>
+
+<p>His mother, who had now finished winding her braid very neatly around her
+head, sank into a chair.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, dear!” she said, “I almost wish I weren’t dining with Mr. Lanley.
+He’ll think it’s all my fault.”</p>
+
+<p>“I doubt if he knows about it.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne’s eyes twinkled.</p>
+
+<p>“May I tell him? I should like to see his face.”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell him I am going, if you like. Don’t say I want to take her with me.”</p>
+
+<p>Her face fell.</p>
+
+<p>“That wouldn’t be much fun,” she answered, “because I suppose the truth
+is they won’t be sorry to have you out of the way.”</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose not,” he said, and shut the door behind him. He could not
+truthfully say that his mother had been much of a comfort. He had
+suddenly thought that he would go down to the first floor and get Lily
+Parret to go to the theater with him. He and she had the warm friendship
+for each other of two handsome, healthy young people of opposite sexes
+who might have everything to give each other except time. She was
+perhaps ten years older than he, extremely handsome, with dimples and
+dark red hair and blue eyes. She had a large practice among the poor,
+and might have made a conspicuous success of her profession if it had
+not been for her intense and too widely diffused interest. She wanted to
+strike a blow at every abuse that came to her attention, and as, in the
+course of her work, a great many turned up, she was always striking
+blows and never following them up. She went through life in a series of
+springs, each one in a different direction; but the motion of her
+attack was as splendid as that of a tiger. Often she was successful, and
+always she enjoyed herself.</p>
+
+<p>When she answered Pete’s ring, and he looked up at her magnificent
+height, her dimples appeared in welcome. She really was glad to see him.</p>
+
+<p>“Come out and dine with me, Lily, and go to the theater.”</p>
+
+<p>“Come to a meeting at Cooper Union on capital punishment. I’m going to
+speak, and I’m going to be very good.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, Lily; I want to explain to you what a pitiable sex you belong to.
+You have no character, no will—”</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head, laughing.</p>
+
+<p>“You are a personal lot, you young men,” she said. “You change your mind
+about women every day, according to how one of them treats you.”</p>
+
+<p>“They don’t amount to a row of pins, Lily.”</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly some men select that kind, Pete.”</p>
+
+<p>“O Lily,” he answered, “don’t talk to me like that! I want some one to
+tell me I’m perfect, and, strangely enough, no one will.”</p>
+
+<p>“I will,” she answered, with beaming good nature, “and I pretty near
+think so, too. But I can’t dine with you, Pete. Wouldn’t you like to go
+to my meeting?”</p>
+
+<p>“I should perfectly hate to,” he answered, and went off crossly, to
+dine at his college’s local club. Here he found an old friend, who most
+fortunately said something derogatory of the firm of Benson &amp; Honaton.
+The opinion coincided with certain phases of Wayne’s own views, but he
+contradicted it, held it up to ridicule, and ended by quoting incidents
+in the history of his friend’s own firm which, as he said, were
+probably among the crookedest things that had ever been put over in
+Wall Street. Lily would not have distracted his mind more completely.
+He felt almost cheerful when he went home about ten o’clock. His mother
+was still out, and there was no letter from Mathilde. He had been
+counting on finding one.</p>
+
+<p>Before long his mother came in. She was looking very fine. She had on a
+new gray dress that she had had made for her by a fallen woman from an
+asylum, but which had turned out better than such ventures of Mrs.
+Wayne’s usually did.</p>
+
+<p>She had supposed she and Mr. Lanley were to dine alone, an idea which
+had not struck her as revolutionary. Accustomed to strange meals in
+strange company—a bowl of milk with a prison chaplain at a dairy
+lunch-room, or even, on one occasion, a supper in an Owl Lunch Wagon with
+a wavering drunkard,—she had thought that a quiet, perfect dinner with
+Mr. Lanley sounded pleasant enough. But she was not sorry to find it had
+been enlarged. She liked to meet new people. She was extremely
+optimistic, and always hoped that they would prove either spiritually
+rewarding, or practically useful to some of her projects. When she saw
+Mrs. Baxter, with her jetty hair, jeweled collar, and eyes a trifle too
+saurian for perfect beauty, she at once saw a subscription to the
+working-girl’s club. The fourth person Mr. Wilsey, Lanley’s lawyer, she
+knew well by reputation. She wondered if she could make him see that his
+position on the eight-hour law was absolutely anti-social.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley enjoyed a small triumph when she entered. He had been so
+discreet in his description of her to Mrs. Baxter, he had been so careful
+not to hint that she was an illuminating personality who had suddenly
+come into his life, that he knew he had left his old friend with the
+general impression that Mrs. Wayne was merely the mother of an
+undesirable suitor of Mathilde’s who spent most of her life in the
+company of drunkards. So when she came in, a little late as usual, in her
+long, soft, gray dress, with a pink rose at her girdle, looking far more
+feminine than Mrs. Baxter, about whom Adelaide’s offensive adjective
+“upholstered” still clung, he felt the full effect of her appearance. He
+even enjoyed the obviously suspicious glance which Mrs. Baxter
+immediately afterward turned upon him.</p>
+
+<p>At dinner things began well. They talked about people and events of which
+Mrs. Wayne knew nothing, but her interest and good temper made her not an
+outsider, but an audience. Anecdotes which even Mr. Lanley might have
+felt were trivial gossip became, through her attention to them, incidents
+of the highest human interest. Such an uncritical interest was perhaps
+too stimulating.</p>
+
+<p>He expected nothing dangerous when, during the game course, Mrs. Baxter
+turned to him and asked how Mathilde had enjoyed what she referred to as
+“her first winter.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley liked to talk about Mathilde. He described, with a little
+natural exaggeration, how much she had enjoyed herself and how popular
+she had been.</p>
+
+<p>“I hope she hasn’t been bitten by any of those modern notions,” said
+Mrs. Baxter.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Wilsey broke in.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, these modern, restless young women!” he said. “They don’t seem able
+to find their natural contentment in their own homes. My daughter came to
+me the other day with a wonderful scheme of working all day long with
+charity organizations. I said to her, ‘My dear, charity begins at home.’
+My wife, Mrs. Baxter, is an old-fashioned housekeeper. She gives out all
+supplies used in my house; she knows where the servants are at every
+minute of the day, and we have nine. She—”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, how is dear Mrs. Wilsey?” said Mrs. Baxter, perhaps not eager for
+the full list of her activities.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, at present she is in a sanatorium,” replied her husband, “from
+overwork, just plain overwork.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley, catching Mrs. Wayne’s twinkling eye, could only pray that
+she would not point out that a sojourn in a sanatorium was not
+complete contentment in the home; but before she had a chance, Mrs.
+Baxter had gone on.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s so like the modern girl—anything but her obvious duty. She’ll
+help any one but her mother and work anywhere but in the home. We’ve had
+a very painful case at home lately. One of our most charming young girls
+has suddenly developed an absolutely morbid curiosity about the things
+that take place in the women’s courts. Why, as her poor father said to
+me, ‘Mrs. Baxter, old as I am, I hear things in those courts so shocking
+I have hard work forgetting them; and yet Imogen wants me to let her go
+into those courts day after day—’”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, that’s abnormal, almost perverted,” said Mr. Wilsey, judicially.
+“The women’s courts are places where no—” he hesitated a bare instant,
+and Mrs. Wayne asked:</p>
+
+<p>“No woman should go?”</p>
+
+<p>“No girl should go.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yet many of the girls who come there are under sixteen.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Wilsey hid a slight annoyance under a manner peculiarly bland.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, dear lady,” he said, “you must forgive my saying that that remark is
+a trifle irrelevant.”</p>
+
+<p>“Is it?” she asked, meaning him to answer her; but he only looked
+benevolently at her, and turned to listen to Mrs. Baxter, who was saying:</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, everywhere we look nowadays we see women rushing into things they
+don’t understand, and of course we all know what women are—”</p>
+
+<p>“What are they?” asked Mrs. Wayne, and Lanley’s heart sank.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, emotional and inaccurate and untrustworthy and spiteful.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Baxter, I’m sure you’re not like that.”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear Madam!” exclaimed Wilsey.</p>
+
+<p>“But isn’t that logical?” Mrs. Wayne pursued. “If all women are so, and
+she’s a woman?”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, logic, dear lady,” said Wilsey, holding up a finger—“logic, you
+know, has never been the specialty of your sex.”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course it’s logic,” said Lanley, crossly. “If you say all Americans
+are liars, Wilsey, and you’re an American, the logical inference is that
+you think yourself a liar. But Mrs. Baxter doesn’t mean that she thinks
+all women are inferior—”</p>
+
+<p>“I must say I prefer men,” she answered almost coquettishly.</p>
+
+<p>“If all women were like you, Mrs. Baxter, I’d believe in giving them the
+vote,” said Wilsey.</p>
+
+<p>“Please don’t,” she answered. “I don’t want it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, the clever ones don’t.”</p>
+
+<p>“I never pretended to be clever.”</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps not; but I’d trust your intuition where I would pay no attention
+to a clever person.”</p>
+
+<p>Lanley laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“I think you’d better express that a little differently, Wilsey,” he
+said; but his legal adviser did not notice him.</p>
+
+<p>“My daughter came to me the other day,” he went on to Mrs. Baxter, “and
+said, ‘Father, don’t you think women ought to have the vote some day?’
+and I said, ‘Yes, my dear, just as soon as men have the babies.’”</p>
+
+<p>“There’s no answer to that,” said Mrs. Baxter.</p>
+
+<p>“I fancy not,” said Wilsey. “I think I put the essence of it in that
+sentence.”</p>
+
+<p>“If ever women get into power in this country, I shall live abroad.”</p>
+
+<p>“O Mrs. Baxter,” said Mrs. Wayne, “really you don’t understand women—”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t? Why, Mrs. Wayne, I am a woman.”</p>
+
+<p>“All human beings are spiteful and inaccurate and all those things you
+said; but that isn’t <i>all</i> they are. The women I see, the wives of my
+poor drunkards are so wonderful, so patient. They are mothers and
+wage-earners and sick nurses, too; they’re not the sort of women you
+describe. Perhaps,” she added, with one of her fatal impulses toward
+concession, “perhaps your friends are untrustworthy and spiteful, as
+you say—”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Baxter drew herself up. “My friends, Mrs. Wayne,” she said—“my
+friends, I think, will compare favorably even with the wives of your
+drunkards.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley rose to his feet.</p>
+
+<p>“Shall we go up-stairs?” he said. Mr. Wilsey offered Mrs. Baxter his
+arm. “An admirable answer that of yours,” he murmured as he led her from
+the room, “admirable snub to her perfectly unwarranted attack on you and
+your friends.”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course you realize that she doesn’t know any of the people I know,”
+said Mrs. Baxter. “Why should she begin to abuse them?”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Wilsey laughed, and shook his finger.</p>
+
+<p>“Just because she doesn’t know them. That, I’m afraid, is the rub. That’s
+what I usually find lies behind the socialism of socialists—the sense of
+being excluded. This poor lady has evidently very little <i>usage du
+monde</i>. It is her pitiful little protest, dear Madam, against your charm,
+your background, your grand manner.”</p>
+
+<p>They sank upon an ample sofa near the fire, and though the other end of
+the large room was chilly, Lanley and Mrs. Wayne moved thither with a
+common impulse.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne turned almost tearfully to Lanley.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m so sorry I’ve spoiled your party,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“You’ve done much worse than that,” he returned gravely.</p>
+
+<p>“O Mr. Lanley,” she wailed, “what have I done?”</p>
+
+<p>“You’ve spoiled a friendship.”</p>
+
+<p>“Between you and me?”</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“Between them and me. I never heard people talk such nonsense, and yet
+I’ve been hearing people talk like that all my life, and have never taken
+it in. Mrs. Wayne, I want you to tell me something frankly—”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I’m so terrible when I’m frank,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“Do I talk like that?”</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him and looked away again.</p>
+
+<p>“Good God! you think I do!”</p>
+
+<p>“No, you don’t talk like that often, but I think you feel that way a
+good deal.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t want to,” he answered. “I’m sixty-four, but I don’t ever want to
+talk like Wilsey. Won’t you stop me whenever I do?”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne sighed.</p>
+
+<p>“It will make you angry.”</p>
+
+<p>“And if it does?”</p>
+
+<p>“I hate to make people angry. I was distressed that evening on the pier.”</p>
+
+<p>He looked up, startled.</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose I talked like Wilsey that night?”</p>
+
+<p>“You said you might be old-fashioned but—”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t, please, tell me what I said, Mrs. Wayne.” He went on more
+seriously: “I’ve got to an age when I can’t expect great happiness from
+life—just a continuance of fairly satisfactory outside conditions; but
+since I’ve known you, I’ve felt a lightening, a brightening, an
+intensifying of my own inner life that I believe comes as near happiness
+as anything I’ve ever felt, and I don’t want to lose it on account of a
+reactionary old couple like that on the sofa over there.”</p>
+
+<p>He dreaded being left alone with the reactionary old couple when
+presently Mrs. Wayne, very well pleased with her evening, took her
+departure. He assisted her into her taxi, and as he came upstairs with a
+buoyant step, he wished it were not ridiculous at his age to feel so
+light-hearted.</p>
+
+<p>He saw that his absence had given his guests an instant of freer
+criticism, for they were tucking away smiles as he entered.</p>
+
+<p>“A very unusual type, is she not, our friend, Mrs. Wayne?” said Wilsey.</p>
+
+<p>“A little bit of a reformer, I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Baxter.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t be too hard on her,” answered Lanley.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, very charming, very charming,” put in Wilsey, feeling, perhaps, that
+Mrs. Baxter had been severe; “but the poor lady’s mind is evidently
+seething with a good many undigested ideas.”</p>
+
+<p>“You should have pointed out the flaws in her reasoning, Wilsey,”
+said his host.</p>
+
+<p>“Argue with a woman, Lanley!” Mr. Wilsey held up his hand in protest.
+“No, no, I never argue with a woman. They take it so personally.”</p>
+
+<p>“I think we had an example of that this evening,” said Mrs. Baxter.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, indeed,” the lawyer went on. “See how the dear lady missed the
+point, and became so illogical and excited under our little discussion.”</p>
+
+<p>“Funny,” said Lanley. “I got just the opposite impression.”</p>
+
+<p>“Opposite?”</p>
+
+<p>“I thought it was you who missed the point, Wilsey.”</p>
+
+<p>He saw how deeply he had betrayed himself as the others exchanged a
+startled glance. It was Mrs. Baxter who thought of the correct reply.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Were</i> there any points?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>Wilsey shook his finger.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, don’t be cruel!” he said, and held out his hand to say good night;
+but Lanley was smoking, with his head tilted up and his eyes on the
+ceiling. What he was thinking was, “It isn’t good for an old man to get
+as angry as I am.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good night, Lanley; a delightful evening.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley’s chin came down.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, good night, Wilsey; glad you found it so.”</p>
+
+<p>When he was gone, Mrs. Baxter observed that he was a most agreeable
+companion.</p>
+
+<p>“So witty, so amiable, and, for a leader at the bar, he has an
+extraordinarily light touch.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley had resumed his position on the hearth-rug and his
+contemplation of the ceiling.</p>
+
+<p>“Wilsey’s not a leader at the bar,” he said, with open crossness.</p>
+
+<p>He showed no disposition to sit and chat over the events of the evening.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER XI</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Early the next morning, in Mrs. Baxter’s parlance,—that is to say, some
+little time before the sun had reached the meridian,—she was ringing
+Adelaide’s door-bell, while she minutely observed the curtains, the
+door-mat, the ivy plants in the vestibule, and the brightness of the
+brass knobs on the railing. In this she had a double motive: what was
+evil she would criticize, what was good she would copy.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide was sitting with her husband when her visitor’s name was brought
+up. Since she had discovered that she was to be nothing but a sort of
+super-nurse to him, she found herself expert at rendering such service.
+She had brought in his favorite flowers, chosen a book for his bedside,
+and now sat gossiping beside him, not bringing him, as she said to
+herself, any of her real troubles; that would not be good for him. How
+extraordinarily easy it was to conceal, she thought. She heard her own
+tones, as gay and intimate as ever, as satisfactory to Vincent; and yet
+all the time her mind was working apart on her anxieties about
+Mathilde—anxieties with which, of course, one couldn’t bother a poor
+sick creature. She smoothed his pillow with the utmost tenderness.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Pringle,” she said, in answer to his announcement that Mrs. Baxter
+was down-stairs, “you haven’t let her in?”</p>
+
+<p>“She’s in the drawing-room, Madam.” And Pringle added as a clear
+indication of what he considered her duty, “She came in Mr. Lanley’s
+motor.”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course she did. Well, say I’ll be down,” and as Pringle went away
+with this encouraging intelligence, Adelaide sank even farther back in
+her chair and looked at her husband. “What I am called upon to sacrifice
+to other people’s love affairs! The Waynes and Mrs. Baxter—I never have
+time for my own friends. I don’t mind Mrs. Baxter when you’re well, and I
+can have a dinner; I ask all the stupid people together to whom I owe
+parties, and she is so pleased with them, and thinks they represent the
+most brilliant New York circle; but to have to go down and actually talk
+to her, isn’t that hard, Vin?”</p>
+
+<p>“Hard on me,” said Farron.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I shall come back—exhausted.”</p>
+
+<p>“By what you have given out?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, but by her intense intimacy. You have no idea how well she knows me.
+It’s Adelaide this and Adelaide that and ‘the last time you stayed with
+me in Baltimore.’ You know, Vin, I never stayed with her but once, and
+that only because she found me in the hotel and kidnapped me.
+However,”—Adelaide stood up with determination,—“one good thing is, I
+have begun to have an effect on my father. He does not like her any more.
+He was distinctly bored at the prospect of her visit this time. He did
+not resent it at all when I called her an upholstered old lady. I really
+think,” she added, with modest justice, “that I am rather good at
+poisoning people’s minds against their undesirable friends.” She paused,
+debating how long it would take her to separate Mathilde from the Wayne
+boy; and recalling that this was no topic for an invalid, she smiled at
+him and went down-stairs.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear Adelaide!” said Mrs. Baxter, enveloping her in a powdery
+caress.</p>
+
+<p>“How wonderfully you’re looking, Mrs. Baxter,” said Adelaide, choosing
+her adverb with intention.</p>
+
+<p>“Now tell me, dear,” said Mrs. Baxter, with a wave of a gloved hand,
+“what are those Italian embroideries?”</p>
+
+<p>“Those?” Adelaide lifted her eyebrows. “Ah, you’re in fun! A collector
+like you! Surely you know what those are.”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” answered Mrs. Baxter, firmly, though she wished she had selected
+something else to comment on.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, they are the Villanelli embroideries,” said Adelaide, carelessly,
+very much as if she had said they were the Raphael cartoons, so that Mrs.
+Baxter was forced to reply in an awestruck tone:</p>
+
+<p>“You don’t tell me! Are they, really?”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide nodded brightly. She had not actually made up the name. It
+was that of an obscure little palace where she had bought the
+hangings, and if Mrs. Baxter had had the courage to acknowledge
+ignorance, Adelaide would have told the truth. As it was, she
+recognized that by methods such as this she could retain absolute
+control over people like Mrs. Baxter.</p>
+
+<p>The lady from Baltimore decided on a more general scope.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, your room!” she said. “Do you know whose it always reminds me
+of—that lovely salon of Madame de Liantour’s?”</p>
+
+<p>“What, of poor little Henrietta’s!” cried Adelaide, and she laid her hand
+appealingly for an instant on Mrs. Baxter’s knee. “That’s a cruel thing
+to say. All her good things, you know, were sold years ago. Everything
+she has is a reproduction. Am I really like her?”</p>
+
+<p>Getting out of this as best she could on a vague statement about
+atmosphere and sunshine and charm, Mrs. Baxter took refuge in inquiries
+about Vincent’s health, “your charming child,” and “your dear father.”</p>
+
+<p>“You know more about my dear father than I do,” returned Adelaide,
+sweetly. It was Mrs. Baxter’s cue.</p>
+
+<p>“I did not feel last evening that I knew anything about him at all. He
+is in a new phase, almost a new personality. Tell me, who is this
+Mrs. Wayne?”</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Wayne?” Mrs. Baxter must have felt herself revenged by the complete
+surprise of Adelaide’s tone.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, she dined at the house last evening. Apparently it was to have been
+a tête-à-tête dinner, but my arrival changed it to a <i>partie carrée</i>.”
+She talked on about Wilsey and the conversation of the evening, but it
+made little difference what she said, for her full idea had reached
+Adelaide from the start, and had gathered to itself in an instant a
+hundred confirmatory memories. Like a picture, she saw before her Mrs.
+Wayne’s sitting-room, with the ink-spots on the rug. Who would not wish
+to exchange that for Mr. Lanley’s series of fresh, beautiful rooms?
+Suddenly she gave her attention back to Mrs. Baxter, who was saying:</p>
+
+<p>“I assure you, when we were alone I was prepared for a formal
+announcement.”</p>
+
+<p>It was not safe to be the bearer of ill tidings to Adelaide.</p>
+
+<p>“An announcement?” she said wonderingly. “Oh, no, Mrs. Baxter, my father
+will never marry again. There have always been rumors, and you can’t
+imagine how he and I have laughed over them together.”</p>
+
+<p>As the indisputable subject of such rumors in past times, Mrs. Baxter
+fitted a little arrow in her bow.</p>
+
+<p>“In the past,” she said, “women of suitable age have not perhaps been
+willing to consider the question, but this lady seems to me
+distinctly willing.”</p>
+
+<p>“More than willingness on the lady’s part has been needed,” answered
+Adelaide, and then Pringle’s ample form appeared in the doorway. “There’s
+a man from the office here, Madam, asking to see Mr. Farron.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Farron can see no one.” A sudden light flashed upon her. “What is
+his name, Pringle?”</p>
+
+<p>“Burke, Madam.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, let him come in.” Adelaide turned to Mrs. Baxter. “I will show
+you,” she said, “one of the finest sights you ever saw.” The next
+instant Marty was in the room. Not so gorgeous as in his
+wedding-attire, he was still an exceedingly fine young animal. He was
+not so magnificently defiant as before, but he scowled at his
+unaccustomed surroundings under his dark brows.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s Mr. Farron I wanted to see,” he said, a soft roll to his r’s. At
+Mrs. Wayne’s Adelaide had suffered from being out of her own
+surroundings, but here she was on her own field, and she meant to make
+Burke feel it. She was leaning with her elbow on the back of the sofa,
+and now she slipped her bright rings down her slim fingers and shook them
+back again as she looked up at Burke and spoke to him as she would have
+done to a servant.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Farron cannot see you.”</p>
+
+<p>Cleverer people than Burke had struggled vainly against the poison of
+inferiority which this tone instilled into their minds.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s what they keep telling me down-town. I never knew him sick
+before.”</p>
+
+<p>“No?”</p>
+
+<p>“It wouldn’t take five minutes.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Farron is too weak to see you.”</p>
+
+<p>Marty made a strange grating sound in his throat, and Adelaide asked
+like a queen bending from the throne:</p>
+
+<p>“What seems to be the matter, Burke?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why,”—Burke turned upon her the flare of his light, fierce eyes,—“they
+have it on me on the dock that as soon as he comes back he means to
+bounce me.”</p>
+
+<p>“To bounce you,” repeated Adelaide, and she almost smiled as she thought
+of that poor exhausted figure up-stairs.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t care if he does or not,” Marty went on. “I’m not so damned stuck
+on the job. There’s others.”</p>
+
+<p>“There are maidens in Scotland more lovely by far,” murmured Adelaide.</p>
+
+<p>Again he scowled, feeling the approach of something hostile to him.</p>
+
+<p>“What’s that?” he asked, surmising that she was insulting him.</p>
+
+<p>“I said I supposed you could get a better job if you tried.”</p>
+
+<p>He did not like this tone either.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, whether I could or not,” he said, “this is no way. I’m losing my
+hold of my men.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I can’t imagine your doing that, Burke.”</p>
+
+<p>He turned on her to see if she were really daring to laugh at him, and
+met an eye as steady as his own.</p>
+
+<p>“I guess I’m wasting my time here,” he said, and something intimated that
+some one would pay for that expenditure.</p>
+
+<p>“Shall I take a message to Mr. Farron for you?” said Adelaide.</p>
+
+<p>He nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. Tell him that if I’m to go, I’ll go to-day.”</p>
+
+<p>“I see.” She rose slowly, as if in response to a vague, amusing caprice.
+“Just that. If you go, you’ll go to-day.”</p>
+
+<p>For the first time Burke, regaining his self-confidence, saw that she was
+not an enemy, but an appreciative spectator, and his face broke up in a
+smile, queer, crooked, wrinkled, but brilliant.</p>
+
+<p>“I guess you’ll get it about right,” he said, and no compliment had ever
+pleased Adelaide half so much.</p>
+
+<p>“I think so,” she confidently answered, and then at the door she
+turned. “Oh, Mrs. Baxter,” she said, “this is Marty Burke, a very
+important person.”</p>
+
+<p>Importance, especially Adelaide Farron’s idea of importance, was a
+category for which Mrs. Baxter had the highest esteem, so almost against
+her will she looked at Burke, and found him looking her over with such a
+shrewd eye that she looked away, and then looked back again to find that
+his gaze was still upon her. He had made his living since he was a child
+by his faculty for sizing people up, and at his first glimpse of Mrs.
+Baxter’s shifting glance he had sized her up; so that now, when she
+remarked with an amiability at once ponderous and shaky that it was a
+very fine day, he replied in exactly the same tone, “It is that,” and
+began to walk about the room looking at the pictures. Presently a low,
+but sweet, whistle broke from his lips. He made her feel uncommonly
+uncomfortable, so uncomfortable that she was driven to conversation.</p>
+
+<p>“Are you fond of pictures, Burke?” she asked. He just looked at her over
+his shoulder without answering. She began to wish that Adelaide would
+come back.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide had found her husband still accessible. He received in silence
+the announcement that Burke was down-stairs. She told the message
+without bias.</p>
+
+<p>“He says that they have it on him on the dock that he is to be bounced.
+He asked me to say this to you: that if he is to go, he’ll go to-day.”</p>
+
+<p>“What was his manner?”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide could not resist a note of enjoyment entering into her tone as
+she replied:</p>
+
+<p>“Insolent in the extreme.”</p>
+
+<p>She was leaning against the wall at the foot of his bed, and though she
+was not looking at him, she felt his eyes on her.</p>
+
+<p>“Adelaide,” he said, “you should not have brought me that message.”</p>
+
+<p>“You mean it is bad for your health to be worried, dearest?” she asked
+in a tone so soft that only an expert in tones could have detected
+something not at all soft beneath it. She glanced at her husband under
+her lashes. Wasn’t he any more an expert in her tones?</p>
+
+<p>“I mean,” he answered, “that you should have told him to go to the
+devil.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I leave that to you, Vin.” She laughed, and added after a second’s
+pause, “I was only a messenger.”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell him I shall be down-town next week.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Vin, no; not next week.”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell him next week.”</p>
+
+<p>“I can’t do that.”</p>
+
+<p>“I thought you were only a messenger.”</p>
+
+<p>“Your doctor would not hear of it. It would be madness.”</p>
+
+<p>Farron leaned over and touched his bell. The nurse was instantly in
+the room, looking at Vincent, Adelaide thought, as a water-dog looks
+at its master when it perceives that a stick is about to be thrown
+into the pond.</p>
+
+<p>“Miss Gregory,” said Vincent, “there’s a young man from my office
+down-stairs. Will you tell him that I can’t see him to-day, but that I
+shall be down-town next week, and I’ll see him then?”</p>
+
+<p>Miss Gregory was almost at the door before Adelaide stopped her.</p>
+
+<p>“You must know that Mr. Farron cannot get down-town next week.”</p>
+
+<p>“Has the doctor said not?”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide shook her head impatiently.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t suppose any one has been so insane as to ask him,” she answered.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Gregory smiled temperately.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, next week is a long time off,” she said, and left the room. Adelaide
+turned to her husband.</p>
+
+<p>“Do you enjoy being humored?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>Farron had closed his eyes, and now opened them.</p>
+
+<p>“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I didn’t hear.”</p>
+
+<p>“She knows quite well that you can’t go down-town next week. She takes
+your message just to humor you.”</p>
+
+<p>“She’s an excellent nurse,” said Farron.</p>
+
+<p>“For babies,” Adelaide felt like answering, but she didn’t. She said
+instead, “Anyhow, Burke will never accept that as an answer.” She was
+surprised to hear something almost boastful in her own tone.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I think he will.”</p>
+
+<p>She waited breathlessly for some sound from down-stairs or even for the
+flurried reëntrance of Miss Gregory. There was a short silence, and
+then came the sound of the shutting of the front door. Marty had
+actually gone.</p>
+
+<p>Vincent did not even open his eyes when Miss Gregory returned; he did not
+exert himself to ask how his message had been received. Adelaide waited
+an instant, and then went back to Mrs. Baxter with a strange sense of
+having sustained a small personal defeat.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Baxter was so thoroughly ruffled that she was prepared to attack
+even the sacrosanct Adelaide. But she was not given the chance.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, how did Marty treat you?” said Adelaide.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Baxter sniffed.</p>
+
+<p>“We had not very much in common,” she returned.</p>
+
+<p>“No; Marty’s a very real person.” There was a pause. “What became of him?
+Did he go?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, your husband’s trained nurse gave him a message, and he went away.”</p>
+
+<p>“Quietly?” The note of disappointment was so plain that Mrs. Baxter asked
+in answer:</p>
+
+<p>“What would you have wanted him to do?”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose it would have been too much to expect that he would drag you
+and Miss Gregory about by your hair,” she said, “but I own I should have
+liked some little demonstration. But perhaps,” she added more brightly,
+“he has gone back to wreck the docks.”</p>
+
+<p>At this moment Mathilde entered the room in her hat and furs, and
+distracted the conversation from Burke. Adelaide, who was fond of
+enunciating the belief that you could tell when people were in love by
+the frequency with which they wore their best clothes, noticed now how
+wonderfully lovely Mathilde was looking; but she noticed it quite
+unsuspiciously, for she was thinking, “My child is really a beauty.”</p>
+
+<p>“You remember Mrs. Baxter, my dear.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde did not remember her in the least, though she smiled
+sufficiently. To her Mrs. Baxter seemed just one of many dressy old
+ladies who drifted across the horizon only too often. If any one had told
+her that her grandfather had ever been supposed to be in danger of
+succumbing to charms such as these, she would have thought the notion an
+ugly example of grown-up pessimism.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Baxter held her hand and patted it.</p>
+
+<p>“Where does she get that lovely golden hair?” she asked. “Not from you,
+does she?”</p>
+
+<p>“She gets it from her father,” answered Adelaide, and her expression
+added, “you dreadful old goose.”</p>
+
+<p>In the pause Mathilde made her escape unquestioned. She knew even before
+a last pathetic glance that her mother was unutterably wearied with her
+visitor. In other circumstances she would have stayed to effect a
+rescue, but at present she was engaged in a deed of some recklessness on
+her own account. She was going to meet Pete Wayne secretly at the
+Metropolitan Museum.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XII">CHAPTER XII</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>In all her life Mathilde had never felt so conspicuous as she did going
+up the long flight of stairs at the Fifth Avenue entrance of the museum.
+It seemed to her that people, those walking past in the sunshine on the
+sidewalk, and the strangers in town seeing the sights from the top of the
+green busses, were saying to one another as they looked at her, “There
+goes a New York girl to meet her lover in one of the more ancient of the
+Egyptian rooms.”</p>
+
+<p>She started as she heard the voice of the guard, though he was saying
+nothing but “Check your umbrella” to a man behind her. She sped across
+the marble floor of the great tapestry hall as a little, furry wild
+animal darts across an open space in the woods. She was thinking that she
+could not bear it if Pete were not there. How could she wait many minutes
+under the eyes of the guards, who must know better than any one else that
+no flesh-and-blood girl took any real interest in Egyptian antiquities?
+The round, unambitious dial at the entrance, like an enlarged
+kitchen-clock, had pointed to the exact hour set for the meeting. She
+ought not to expect that Pete, getting away from the office in business
+hours, could be as punctual as an eager, idle creature like herself.</p>
+
+<p>She had made up her mind so clearly that when she entered the night-blue
+room there would be nothing but tombs and mummies that when she saw Pete
+standing with his overcoat over his arm, in the blue-serge clothes she
+particularly liked, she felt as much surprised as if their meeting were
+accidental.</p>
+
+<p>She tried to draw a long breath.</p>
+
+<p>“I shall never get used to it,” she said. “If we had been married a
+thousand years, I should always feel just like this when I see you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, no, you won’t,” he answered. “I hope the very next time we meet you
+will say, quite in a wife’s orthodox tone: ‘My dear, I’ve been waiting
+twenty minutes. Not that I mind at all; only I was afraid I must have
+misunderstood you.’”</p>
+
+<p>“You hope? Oh, I hope we shall never be like that.”</p>
+
+<p>“Really? Why, I enjoy the idea. I shall enjoy saying to total strangers,
+‘Ah, gentlemen, if my wife were ever on time—’ It makes me feel so
+indissolubly united to you.”</p>
+
+<p>“I like it best as we are now.”</p>
+
+<p>“We might try different methods alternate years: one year we could be
+domestic, and the next, detached, and so on.”</p>
+
+<p>By this time they had discovered that they were leaning on a mummy-case,
+and Mathilde drew back with an exclamation. “Poor thing!” she said. “I
+suppose she once had a lover, too.”</p>
+
+<p>“And very likely met him in the room of Chinese antiquities in the Temple
+Museum,” said Pete, and then, changing his tone, he added: “But come
+along. I want to show you a few little things which I have selected to
+furnish our home. I think you’ll like them.”</p>
+
+<p>Pete was always inventing games like this, and calling on her to enter in
+without the slightest warning. One of them was about a fancy ball he was
+giving in the main hall of the Pennsylvania Station. But this new idea,
+to treat the whole museum as a sort of super-department store, made her
+laugh in a faint, dependent way that she knew Pete liked. She believed
+that such forms of play were peculiar to themselves, so she guarded them
+as the deepest kind of secret; for she thought, if her mother ever found
+out about them, she would at once conclude that the whole relation was
+childish. To all other lovers Mathilde attributed a uniform seriousness.</p>
+
+<p>It took them a long time to choose their house-furnishings: there was a
+piece of black-and-gold lacquer; a set of painted panels; a Persian rug,
+swept by the tails of two haughty peacocks; some cloud-gray Chinese
+porcelains; a set of Du Barry vases; a crystal-and-enamel box, designed
+probably for some sacred purpose, but contributed by Pete as an excellent
+receptacle for chocolates at her bedside. “The Boy with the Sword” for
+the dining-room, Ver Meer’s “Women at the Window,” the small Bonnington,
+and then, since Mathilde wanted the portrait of Mrs. Fitzherbert, and
+Wayne felt a faint weariness with the English school, a compromise was
+effected by the selection of Constable’s landscape of a bridge. Wayne
+kept constantly repeating that he was exactly like Warren Hastings,
+astonished at his own moderation. They had hardly begun, indeed, before
+Mathilde felt herself overcome by that peculiar exhaustion that overtakes
+even the robust in museums.</p>
+
+<p>Wayne guided her to a little sofa in a room of gold and jade.</p>
+
+<p>“How beautifully you know your way about here!” she said. “I suppose
+you’ve brought lots of girls here before me.”</p>
+
+<p>“A glorious army,” said Pete, “the matron and the maid. You ought to see
+my mother in a museum. She’s lost before she gets well inside the
+turnstile.”</p>
+
+<p>But Mathilde was thinking.</p>
+
+<p>“How strange it is,” she observed, “that I never should have thought
+before about your caring for any one else. Pete, did you ever ask any one
+else to marry you?”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; when I was in college. I asked a girl to marry me. She was having
+rather a rotten time.”</p>
+
+<p>“Were you in love with her?”</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head, and in the silence shuffling and staccato footsteps
+were heard, announcing the approach of a youthful art class and their
+teacher. “Jade,” said the voice of the lady, “one of the hardest of known
+substances, has yet been beautifully worked from time immemorial—”</p>
+
+<p>More pairs of eyes in that art class were fixed on the obviously guilty
+couple in the corner than on the beautiful cloudy objects in the cases,
+and it was not until they had all followed their guide to the armor-room,
+and had grouped themselves about the casque of Joan of Arc, that Wayne
+went on as if no interruption had occurred:</p>
+
+<p>“If you want to know whether I have ever experienced anything like my
+feeling for you since the first moment I saw you, I never have and never
+shall, and thereto I plight thee my troth.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde turned her full face toward him, shedding gratitude and
+affection as a lamp sheds light before she answered:</p>
+
+<p>“You were terribly unkind to me yesterday.”</p>
+
+<p>“I know. I’m sorry.”</p>
+
+<p>“I shall never forget the way you kissed me, as if I were a rather
+repulsive piece of wood.”</p>
+
+<p>Pete craned his neck, and met the suspicious eye of a guard.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t think anything can be done about it at the moment,” he said;
+and added in explanation, “You see, I felt as if you had suddenly
+deserted me.”</p>
+
+<p>“Pete, I couldn’t ever desert you—unless I committed suicide.”</p>
+
+<p>Presently he stood up, declaring that this was not the fitting place for
+arranging the details of their marriage.</p>
+
+<p>“Come to one of the smaller picture galleries,” he said, “and as we go
+I’ll show you a portrait of my mother.”</p>
+
+<p>“Your mother? I did not know she had had a portrait done. By whom?”</p>
+
+<p>“A fellow called Bellini. He thought he was doing the Madonna.”</p>
+
+<p>When they reached the picture, a figure was already before it. Mr.
+Lanley was sitting, with his arms folded and his feet stretched out far
+before him, his head bent, but his eyes raised and fixed on the picture.
+They saw him first, and had two or three seconds to take in the profound
+contemplation of his mood. Then he slowly raised his eyes and
+encountered theirs.</p>
+
+<p>There is surely nothing compromising in an elderly gentleman spending a
+contemplative morning alone at the Metropolitan Museum. It might well be
+his daily custom; but the knowledge that it was not, the consciousness of
+the rarity of the mood that had brought him there, oppressed Mr. Lanley
+almost like a crime. He felt caught, outraged, ashamed as he saw them.
+“That’s the age which has a right to it,” he said to himself. And then as
+if in a mirror he saw an expression of embarrassment on their faces, and
+was reminded that their meeting must have been illicit, too. He stood up
+and looked at them sternly.</p>
+
+<p>“Up-town at this hour, Wayne?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Grandfather, I never knew you came here much,” said Mathilde.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s near me, you know,” he answered weakly, so weakly that he felt
+impelled to give an explanation. “Sometimes, my dear,” he said, “you will
+find that even the most welcome guest rather fills the house.”</p>
+
+<p>“You need not worry about yours,” returned Mathilde. “I left her
+with Mama.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley felt that his brief moment of peace was indeed over. He could
+imagine the impressions that Mrs. Baxter was perhaps at that very moment
+sharing with Adelaide. He longed to question his granddaughter, but did
+not know how to put it.</p>
+
+<p>“How was your mother looking?” he finally decided upon.</p>
+
+<p>“Dreary,” answered Mathilde, with a laugh.</p>
+
+<p>“Does this picture remind you of any one?” asked Wayne, suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley looked at him as if he hadn’t heard, and frowned.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t you think there’s a look of my mother about it?”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” said Mr. Lanley, rather loudly, and then added, “Well, I see what
+you mean, though I shouldn’t—” He stopped and turning to them with some
+sternness, he asked them how they accounted for their presence in the
+museum at such an hour and alone.</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing to do but to tell him the truth. And when Wayne had
+finished, Mathilde was surprised at her grandfather’s question. She
+thought he would ask what her mother thought of it. If they had been
+alone, she would have told him that Adelaide thought Wayne a commonplace
+young man with stubby hands; but as it was, she had resolved to put her
+mother’s opposition on a more dignified plane. Only Mr. Lanley did not
+ask the question of her. It was to Wayne he was speaking, when he said:</p>
+
+<p>“What does your mother think of it?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, my mother,” answered Pete. “Well, she thinks that if she were a girl
+she’d like to go to China.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley looked up, and they both smiled with the most perfect
+understanding.</p>
+
+<p>“She would,” said the older man, and then he became intensely serious.
+“It’s quite out of the question,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“O Grandfather,” Mathilde exclaimed, clasping her hands about his
+arm, “don’t talk like that! It wouldn’t be possible for me to let him
+go without me. O Grandfather, can’t you remember what it was like to
+be in love?”</p>
+
+<p>A complete silence followed this little speech—a silence that went on
+and on and seemed to be stronger than human power. Perhaps for the first
+time in his life Lanley felt hostile toward the girl beside him. “Oh,
+dear,” Mathilde was thinking, “I suppose I’ve made him remember my
+grandmother and his youth!” “Can love be remembered,” Pete was saying to
+himself, “or is it like a perfume that can be recognized, but not
+recalled?”</p>
+
+<p>Lanley turned at last to Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s out of the question,” he said, “that you should take this child to
+China at two weeks’ notice. You must see that.”</p>
+
+<p>“I see perfectly that many people will think it so. But you must see that
+to us it is the inevitable thing to do.”</p>
+
+<p>“If every one else agreed, I should oppose it.”</p>
+
+<p>“O Grandfather!” wailed Mathilde. “And you were our great hope—you and
+Mrs. Wayne!”</p>
+
+<p>“In a matter like this I shall stand by your mother, Mathilde,” he said,
+and Mathilde imagined he meant as opposed to herself. But he was making
+an even greater renunciation.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide was surprised and not pleased when Mathilde came home late for
+lunch, bringing the Wayne boy with her. It was not that she had expected
+her one little phrase about Wayne’s hands to change her daughter’s love
+into repugnance,—that sentence had been only the first drop in a
+distillation that would do its poisonous work gradually,—but she had
+supposed that Mathilde would be too sensitive to expose Pete to further
+criticism. Indeed, there seemed something obtuse, if not actually
+indelicate, in being willing to create a situation in which every one
+was bound to suffer. Obtuseness was not a defect with which Adelaide had
+much patience.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde saw at once that her mother was going to be what in the family
+slang was called “grand.” The grandeur consisted in a polite inattention;
+it went with a soft voice and immobile expression. In this mood Adelaide
+answered you about three seconds later than you expected, and though she
+answered you accurately, it was as if she had forced her mind back from a
+more congenial ether. She seemed to be wrapped in an agreeable cloud
+until you gave her some opening, and then she came out of her cloud like
+a flash of lightning.</p>
+
+<p>Wayne, who had lived his life so far with a woman who did not believe in
+the use of force in human relations, viewed these symptoms of coercion
+with the utmost indifference; but Mathilde had not so far freed herself
+as to ignore them. She was not afraid, but easy conversation under the
+menace was beyond her. She couldn’t think of anything to say.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide was accustomed by these methods to drive the inexperienced—and
+she considered Pete pitifully inexperienced in social fine points—into a
+state of conversational unrest in which they would finally ask
+recklessly, “Have you been to the theater lately?” and she would question
+gently, “The theater?” as much as to say, “I’ve heard that word
+somewhere before,” until the conscientious conversationalist, rushing
+from futility to futility, would be finally engulfed in some yawning
+banality and sink out of sight forever.</p>
+
+<p>But Wayne resisted this temptation, or, rather, he did not feel it. He
+had the courage to be unafraid of silences, and he ate his luncheon and
+thought about the pictures he had been seeing, and at last began to talk
+to Mathilde about them, while Adelaide made it clear that she was not
+listening, until she caught a phrase that drove her grandeur away.</p>
+
+<p>“Near where we met my grandfather?” Mathilde asked.</p>
+
+<p>By this time Adelaide had gathered that the two had been in the museum,
+and the knowledge annoyed her not only as a mother, but as an
+aristocrat. Without being clear about it, she regarded the love of
+beauty—artificial beauty, that is—as a class distinction. It seemed to
+her possible enough that the masses should love mountains and moonlight
+and the sea and sunsets; but it struck her as unfitting that any one but
+the people she knew, and only a few of them, should really care for
+porcelains and pictures. As she held herself aloof from the conversation
+she was annoyed at noticing that Wayne was showing a more
+discriminating taste than her own carefully nurtured child. But all such
+considerations were driven away by the mention of her father, for Mr.
+Lanley had been in her mind ever since Mrs. Baxter had taken her
+unimpeded departure just before luncheon.</p>
+
+<p>“Your grandfather?” she said, coming out of the clouds. “Was he in the
+Metropolitan?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” said Mathilde, thankful to be directly addressed. “Wasn’t it
+queer? Pete was taking me to see a picture that looks exactly like Mrs.
+Wayne, only Mrs. Wayne hasn’t such a round face, and there in front of it
+was grandpapa.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide rose very slowly from table, lunch being fortunately over. She
+felt as if she could have borne almost anything but this—the idea of her
+father vaporing before a picture of the Madonna. Phrases came into her
+head: silly old man, the time has come to protect him against himself;
+the Wayne family must be suppressed.</p>
+
+<p>Her silence in the drawing-room was of a more concentrated sort, and when
+she had taken her coffee and cigarette she said to Mathilde:</p>
+
+<p>“My dear, I promised to go back to Vincent at this time. Will you go
+instead? I want to have a word with Mr. Wayne.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide had never entered any contest in her life, whether it was a
+dispute with a dressmaker or a quarrel with her husband, without
+remembering the comfortable fact that she was a beauty. With men she did
+not neglect the advantage that being a woman gave her, and with the
+particular man now before her she had, she knew, a third line of defense;
+she was the mother of his love, and she thought she detected in him a
+special weakness for mothers. But it would have been better if he had
+respected women and mothers less, for he thought so highly of them that
+he believed they ought to play fair.</p>
+
+<p>Sitting in a very low chair, she looked up at him.</p>
+
+<p>“Mathilde has been telling me something about a plan of yours to take her
+to China with you. We could not consent to that, you know.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m sorry,” said Pete. The tone was pleasant. That was the trouble;
+it was too pleasant a tone for a man relinquishing a cherished hope.
+It sounded almost as if he regretted the inevitable disappointment of
+the family.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide tried a new attack.</p>
+
+<p>“Your mother—have you consulted her?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I’ve told her our plans.”</p>
+
+<p>“And she approves?”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne might choose to betray his mother in the full irresponsibility of
+her attitude to so sympathetic a listener as Mr. Lanley, but he had no
+intention of giving Mrs. Farron such a weapon. At the same time he did
+not intend to be untruthful. His answer was this:</p>
+
+<p>“My mother,” he said, “is not like most women of her age. She
+believes in love.”</p>
+
+<p>“In all love, quite indiscriminately?”</p>
+
+<p>He hesitated an instant.</p>
+
+<p>“I put it wrong,” he answered. “I meant that she believes in the
+importance of real love.”</p>
+
+<p>“And has she a spell by which she tells real love?”</p>
+
+<p>“She believes mine to be real.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yours! Very likely. Perhaps it’s maternal vanity on my part, Mr.
+Wayne, but I must own I can imagine a man’s contriving to love my
+daughter, so gentle, so intelligent, and so extraordinarily lovely to
+look at. I was not thinking of your feelings, but of hers.”</p>
+
+<p>“You can see no reason why she should love me?”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide moved her shoulders about.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I want it explained, that’s all, from your own point of view. I
+see my daughter as an unusual person, ignorant of life, to whom it seems
+to me all things are possible. And I see you, a very nice young man. But
+what else? I ask to be told why you fulfil all possibilities. Don’t
+misunderstand me. I am not mercenary. Mathilde will have plenty of money
+of her own some day. I don’t want a millionaire. I want a <i>person</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course, if you ask me why Mathilde should love me—”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t be untruthful, Mr. Wayne. I thought better of you. If you should
+come back from China next year to find her engaged to some one else, you
+could tell a great many reasons why he was not good enough for her. Now
+tell me some of the reasons why you are. And please don’t include
+because you love her so much, for almost any one would do that.”</p>
+
+<p>Pete fought down his panic, reminding himself that no man living could
+hear such words without terror. His egotism, never colossal, stood
+feebly between him and Mrs. Farron’s estimate of him. He seemed to sink
+back into the general human species. If he had felt inclined to detail
+his own qualities, he could not have thought of one. There was a long
+silence, while Adelaide sat with a look of docile teachableness upon her
+expectant face.</p>
+
+<p>At last Wayne stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s no use, Mrs. Farron,” he said. “That question of yours can’t be
+answered. I believe she loves me. It’s my bet against yours.”</p>
+
+<p>“I won’t gamble with my child’s future,” she returned. “I did with my
+own. Sit down again, Mr. Wayne. You have heard, I suppose, that I have
+been married twice?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes.” He sat down again reluctantly.</p>
+
+<p>“I was Mathilde’s age—a little older. I was more in love than she. And
+if he had been asked the question I just asked you, he could have
+answered it. He could have said: ‘I have been a leader in a group in
+which I was, an athlete, an oarsman, and the most superb physical
+specimen of my race’—brought up, too, he might have added, in the same
+traditions that I had had. Well, that wasn’t enough, Mr. Wayne, and that
+was a good deal. If my father had only made me wait, only given me time
+to see that my choice was the choice of ignorance, that the man I thought
+a hero was, oh, the most pitifully commonplace clay—Mathilde shan’t make
+my mistake.”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne’s eyes lit up.</p>
+
+<p>“But that’s it,” he said. “She wouldn’t make your mistake. She’d choose
+right. That’s what I ought to have said. You spoke of Mathilde’s spirit.
+She has a feeling for the right thing. Some people have, and some people
+are bound to choose wrong.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide laid her hand on her breast.</p>
+
+<p>“You mean me?” she asked, too much interested to be angry.</p>
+
+<p>He was too absorbed in his own interests to give his full
+attention to hers.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” he answered. “I mean your principles of choice weren’t right
+ones—leaders of men, you know, and all that. It never works out.
+Leaders of men are the ones who always cry on their wives’ shoulders, and
+the martinets at home are imposed on by every one else.” He gave out this
+dictum in passing: “But don’t trouble about your responsibility in this,
+Mrs. Farron. It’s out of your hands. It’s our chance, and Mathilde and I
+mean to take it. I don’t want to give you a warning, exactly, but—it’s
+going to go through.”</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him with large, terrified eyes. She was repeating, ‘they
+cry on their wives’ shoulders,’ or, he might have said, ‘on the
+shoulders of their trained nurses.’ She knew that he was talking to her,
+saying something. She couldn’t listen to it. And then he was gone. She
+was glad he was.</p>
+
+<p>She sat quite still, with her hands lying idly, softly in her lap. It was
+possible that what he said was true. Perhaps all these people who made
+such a show of strength to the world were those who sucked double
+strength by sapping the vitality of a life’s companion. It had been true
+of Joe Severance. She had heard him praised for the courage with which
+he went forth against temptation, but she had known that it was her
+strength he was using. She looked up, to see her daughter, pale and
+eager, standing before her.</p>
+
+<p>“O Mama, was it very terrible?”</p>
+
+<p>“What, dear?”</p>
+
+<p>“Did Pete tell you of our plan?”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide wished she could have listened to those last sentences of his;
+but they were gone completely.</p>
+
+<p>She put up her hand and patted the unutterably soft cheek before her.</p>
+
+<p>“He told me something about putting through your absurd idea of an
+immediate marriage,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“We don’t want to do it in a sneaky way, Mama.”</p>
+
+<p>“I know. You want to have your own way and to have every one approve of
+you, too. Is that it?”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde’s lips trembled.</p>
+
+<p>“O Mama,” she cried, “you are so different from what you used to be!”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“One changes,” she said. “One’s life changes.” She had meant this
+sentence to end the interview, but when she saw the girl still standing
+before her, she said to herself that it made little difference that she
+hadn’t heard the plans of the Wayne boy, since Mathilde, her own
+tractable daughter, was still within her power. She moved into the corner
+of the sofa. “Sit down, dear,” she said, and when Mathilde had obeyed
+with an almost imperceptible shrinking in her attitude, Adelaide went on,
+with a sort of serious ease of manner:</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve never been a particularly flattering mother, have I? Never thought
+you were perfect just because you were mine? Well, I hope you’ll pay the
+more attention to what I have to say. You are remarkable. You are going
+to be one of the most attractive women that ever was. Years ago old Count
+Bartiani—do you remember him, at Lucerne?”</p>
+
+<p>“The one who used scent and used to look so long at me?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, he was old and rather horrid, but he knew what he was talking
+about. He said then you would be the most attractive woman in Europe. I
+heard the same thing from all my friends, and it’s true. You have
+something rare and perfect—”</p>
+
+<p>These were great words. Mathilde, accustomed all her life to receive
+information from her mother, received this; and for the first time felt
+the egotism of her beauty awake, a sense of her own importance the more
+vivid because she had always been humble-minded. She did not look at her
+mother; she sat up very straight and stared as if at new fields before
+her, while a faint smile flickered at the corners of her mouth—a smile
+of an awakening sense of power.</p>
+
+<p>“What you have,” Adelaide went on, “ought to bring great happiness,
+great position, great love; and how can I let you throw yourself away
+at eighteen on a commonplace boy with a glib tongue and a high opinion
+of himself? Don’t tell me that it will make you happy. That would be
+the worst of all, if you turned out to be so limited that you were
+satisfied,—that would be a living death. O my darling, I give you my
+word that if you will give up this idea, ten years from now, when you
+see this boy, still glib, still vain, and perhaps a little fat, you
+will actually shudder when you think how near he came to cutting you
+off from the wonderful, full life that you were entitled to.” And then,
+as if she could not hope to better this, Adelaide sprang up, and left
+the girl alone.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde rose, too, and looked at herself in the glass. She was stirred,
+she was changed, she was awakened, but awakened to something her mother
+had not counted on. Almost too gentle, too humble, too reasonable, as she
+had always been, the drop of egotism which her mother had succeeded in
+instilling into her nature served to solidify her will, to inspire her
+with a needed power of aggression.</p>
+
+<p>She nodded once at her image in the mirror.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” she said, “it’s my life, and I’m willing to take the
+consequences.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XIII">CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>When Mathilde emerged from the subway into the sunlight of City Hall
+Park, Pete was nowhere to be seen. She had spent several minutes
+wandering in the subterranean labyrinth which threatened to bring her to
+Brooklyn Bridge and nowhere else, so she was a little late for her
+appointment; and yet Pete was not there. He had promised to be waiting
+for her. This was a more important occasion than the meeting in the
+museum and more terrifying, too.</p>
+
+<p>Their plans were simple. They were going to get their marriage license,
+they were going to be married immediately, they were then going to inform
+their respective families, and start two days later for San Francisco.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde stared furtively about her. A policeman strolled past, striking
+terror to a guilty heart; a gentleman of evidently unbroken leisure
+regarded her with a benevolent eye completely ringed by red. Crowds were
+surging in and out of the newspaper offices and the Municipal Building
+and the post office, but stare where she would, she couldn’t find Pete.</p>
+
+<p>She had ten minutes to think of horrors before she saw him rushing across
+the park toward her, and she had the idea of saying to him those words
+which he himself had selected as typically wifely, “Not that I mind at
+all, but I was afraid I must have misunderstood you.” But she did not get
+very far in her mild little joke, for it was evident at once that
+something had happened.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear love,” he said, “it’s no go. We can’t sail, we can’t be married.
+I think I’m out of a job.”</p>
+
+<p>As they stood there, her pretty clothes, the bright sun shining on her
+golden hair and dark furs and polished shoes, her beauty, but, above all,
+their complete absorption in each other, made them conspicuous. They were
+utterly oblivious.</p>
+
+<p>Pete told her exactly what had happened. Some months before he had been
+sent to make a report on a coal property in Pennsylvania. He had made it
+under the assumption that the firm was thinking of underwriting its
+bonds. He had been mistaken. As owners Honaton &amp; Benson had already
+acquired the majority of interest in it. His report,—she remembered his
+report, for he had told her about it the first day he came to see
+her,—had been favorable except for one important fact. There was in that
+district a car shortage which for at least a year would hamper the
+marketing of the supply. That had been the point of the whole thing. He
+had advised against taking the property over until this defect could be
+remedied or allowed for. They had accepted the report.</p>
+
+<p>Well, late in the afternoon of the preceding day he had gone to the
+office to say good-by to the firm. He could not help being touched by the
+friendliness of both men’s manner. Honaton gave him a silver
+traveling-flask, plain except for an offensive cat’s-eye set in the top.
+Benson, more humane and practical, gave him a check.</p>
+
+<p>“I think I’ve cleared up everything before I leave,” Wayne said, trying
+to be conscientious in return for their kindness, “except one thing.
+I’ve never corrected the proof of my report on the Southerland coal
+property.”</p>
+
+<p>For a second there was something strange in the air. The partners
+exchanged the merest flicker of a look, which Wayne, as far as he thought
+of it at all, supposed to be a recognition on their part of his
+carefulness in thinking of such a detail.</p>
+
+<p>“You need not give that another thought,” said Benson. “We are not
+thinking of publishing that report at present. And when we do, I have
+your manuscript. I’ll go over the proof myself.”</p>
+
+<p>Relieved to be spared another task, Wayne shook hands with his employers
+and withdrew. Outside he met David.</p>
+
+<p>“Say,” said David, “I am sorry you’re leaving us; but, gee!” he added,
+his face twisting with joy, “ain’t the firm glad to have you go!”</p>
+
+<p>It had long been Wayne’s habit to pay strict attention to the
+impressions of David.</p>
+
+<p>“Why do you think they are glad?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, they’re glad all right,” said David. “I heard the old man say
+yesterday, ‘And by next Saturday he will be at sea.’ It was as if
+he was going to get a Christmas present.” And David went on about
+other business.</p>
+
+<p>Once put on the right track, it was not difficult to get the idea. He
+went to the firm’s printer, but found they had had no orders for printing
+his report. The next morning, instead of spending his time with his own
+last arrangements, he began hunting up other printing offices, and
+finally found what he was looking for. His report was already in print,
+with one paragraph left out—that one which related to the shortage of
+cars. His name was signed to it, with a little preamble by the firm,
+urging the investment on the favorable notice of their customers, and
+spoke in high terms of the accuracy of his estimates.</p>
+
+<p>To say that Pete did not once contemplate continuing his arrangements as
+if nothing had happened would not be true. All he had to do was to go.
+The thing was dishonest, clearly enough, but it was not his action. His
+original report would always be proof of his own integrity, and on his
+return he could sever his connection with the firm on some other pretext.
+On the other hand, to break his connection with Honaton &amp; Benson, to
+force the suppression of the report unless given in full, to give up his
+trip, to confess that immediate marriage was impossible, that he himself
+was out of a job, that the whole basis of his good fortune was a fraud
+that he had been too stupid to discover—all this seemed to him more than
+man could be asked to do.</p>
+
+<p>But that was what he decided must be done. From the printer’s he
+telephoned to the Farrons, but found that Miss Severance was out. He knew
+she must have already started for their appointment in the City Hall
+Park. He had made up his mind, and yet when he saw her, so confident of
+the next step, waiting for him, he very nearly yielded to a sudden
+temptation to make her his wife, to be sure of that, whatever else might
+have to be altered.</p>
+
+<p>He had known she wouldn’t reproach him, but he was deeply grateful to her
+for being so unaware that there was any grounds for reproach. She
+understood the courage his renunciation had required. That seemed to be
+what she cared for most.</p>
+
+<p>At length he said to her:</p>
+
+<p>“Now I must go and get this off my chest with the firm. Go home, and I’ll
+come as soon as ever I can.”</p>
+
+<p>But here she shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>“I couldn’t go home,” she answered. “It might all come out before you
+arrived, and I could not listen to things that”—she avoided naming her
+mother—“that will be said about you, Pete. Isn’t there somewhere I can
+wait while you have your interview?”</p>
+
+<p>There was the outer office of Honaton &amp; Benson. He let her go with him,
+and turned her over to the care of David, who found her a corner out of
+the way, and left her only once. That was to say to a friend of his in
+the cage: “When you go out, cast your eye over Pete’s girl. Somewhat of a
+peacherino.”</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime Wayne went into Benson’s office. There wasn’t a flicker
+of alarm on the senior partner’s face on seeing him.</p>
+
+<p>“Hullo, Pete!” he said, “I thought you’d be packing your bags.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m not packing anything,” said Wayne. “I’ve come to tell you I can’t go
+to China for you. Mr. Benson.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, come, come,” said the other, very paternally, “we can’t let you off
+like that. This is business, my dear boy. It would cost us money, after
+having made all our arrangements, if you changed your mind.”</p>
+
+<p>“So I understand.”</p>
+
+<p>“What do you mean?”</p>
+
+<p>“I mean just what you think I mean, Mr. Benson.”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne would have said that he could never forget the presence under any
+circumstances of his future wife, waiting, probably nervously, in the
+outer office; but he did. The interest of the next hour drove out
+everything else. Honaton was sent for from the exchange, a lawsuit was
+threatened, a bribe—he couldn’t mistake it—offered. He was told he
+might find it difficult to find another position if he left their firm
+under such conditions.</p>
+
+<p>“On the contrary,” said Pete, firmly, “from what I have heard, I believe
+it will improve my standing.”</p>
+
+<p>That he came off well in the struggle was due not so much to his
+ability, but to the fact that he now had nothing to lose or gain from the
+situation. As soon as Benson grasped this fact he began a masterly
+retreat. Wayne noticed the difference between the partners: Honaton, the
+less able of the two, wanted to save the situation, but before everything
+else wanted to leave in Wayne’s mind the sense that he had made a fool of
+himself. Benson, more practical, would have been glad to put Pete in jail
+if he could; but as he couldn’t do that, his interest was in nothing but
+saving the situation. The only way to do this was to give up all idea of
+publishing any report. He did this by assuming that Wayne had simply
+changed his mind or had at least utterly failed to convey his meaning in
+his written words. He made this point of view very plausible by quoting
+the more laudatory of Wayne’s sentences; and when Pete explained that the
+whole point of his report was in the sentence that had been omitted,
+Benson leaned back, chuckling, and biting off the end of his cigar.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, you college men!” he said. “I’m afraid I’m not up to your
+subtleties. When you said it was the richest vein and favorably situated,
+I supposed that was what you meant. If you meant just the opposite, well,
+let it go. Honaton &amp; Benson certainly don’t want to get out a report
+contrary to fact.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s what he has accused us of,” said Honaton.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, no, no,” said Benson; “don’t be too literal, Jack. In the heat of
+argument we all say things we don’t mean. Pete here doesn’t like to have
+his lovely English all messed up by a practical dub like me. I doubt if
+he wants to sever his connection with this firm.”</p>
+
+<p>Honaton yielded.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” he said, “I’m willing enough he should stay, if—”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I’m not,” said Pete, and put an end to the conversation by walking
+out of the room. He found David explaining the filing system to Mathilde,
+and she, hanging on his every word, partly on account of his native
+charm, partly on account of her own interest in anything neat, but most
+because she imagined the knowledge might some day make her a more
+serviceable wife to Pete.</p>
+
+<p>Pete dreaded the coming interview with Mrs. Farron more than that with
+the firm—more, indeed, than he had ever dreaded anything. He and
+Mathilde reached the house about a quarter before one, and Adelaide was
+not in. This was fortunate, for while they waited they discovered a
+difference of intention. Mathilde saw no reason for mentioning the fact
+that they had actually been on the point of taking out their marriage
+license. She thought it was enough to tell her mother that the trip had
+been abandoned and that Pete had given up his job. Pete contemplated
+nothing less than the whole truth.</p>
+
+<p>“You can’t tell people half a story,” he said. “It never works.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde really quailed.</p>
+
+<p>“It will be terrible to tell mama that,” she groaned. “She thinks
+failure is worse than crime.”</p>
+
+<p>“And she’s dead right,” said Pete.</p>
+
+<p>When Adelaide came in she had Mr. Lanley with her. She had seen him
+walking down Fifth Avenue with his hat at quite an outrageous angle, and
+she had ordered the motor to stop, and had beckoned him to her. It was
+two days since her interview with Mrs. Baxter, and she had had no good
+opportunity of speaking to him. The suspicion that he was avoiding her
+nerved her hand; but there was no hint of discipline in her smile, and
+she knew as well as if he had said it that he was thinking as he came to
+the side of the car how handsome and how creditable a daughter she was.
+“Come to lunch with me,” she said; “or must you go home to your guest?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, I was going to the club. She’s lunching with a mysterious relation
+near Columbia University.”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t you know who it is? Tell him home.”</p>
+
+<p>“Home, Andrews. No, she never says.”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t put your stick against the glass, there’s an angel. I’ll tell you
+who it is. An elder sister who supported and educated her, of whom she’s
+ashamed now.”</p>
+
+<p>“How do you know? It wouldn’t break the glass.”</p>
+
+<p>“No; but I hate the noise. I don’t know; I just made it up because it’s
+so likely.”</p>
+
+<p>“She always speaks so affectionately of you.”</p>
+
+<p>“She’s a coward; that’s the only difference. She hates me just as much.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, you’ve never been nice to her, Adelaide.”</p>
+
+<p>“I should think not.”</p>
+
+<p>“She’s not as bad as you think,” said Mr. Lanley, who believed in
+old-fashioned loyalty.</p>
+
+<p>“I can’t bear her,” said Adelaide.</p>
+
+<p>“Why not?” As far as his feelings went, this seemed a perfectly safe
+question; but it wasn’t.</p>
+
+<p>“Because she tries so hard to make you ridiculous. Oh, not intentionally;
+but she talks of you as if you were a <i>Don Juan</i> of twenty-five. You
+ought to be flattered, Papa dear, at having jealous scenes made about you
+when you are—what is it?—sixty-five.”</p>
+
+<p>“Four,” said Mr. Lanley.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; such a morning as I had! Not a minute with poor Vincent because you
+had had Mrs. Wayne to dine. I’m not complaining, but I don’t like my
+father represented as a sort of comic-paper old man, you poor
+dear,”—and she laid her long, gloved hand on his knee,—“who have always
+been so conspicuously dignified.”</p>
+
+<p>“If I have,” said her father, “I don’t know that anything she says can
+change it.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, of course; only it was horrible to me to hear her describing you in
+the grip of a boyish passion. But don’t let’s talk of it. I hear,” she
+said, as if she were changing the subject, “that you have taken to going
+to the Metropolitan Museum at odd moments.”</p>
+
+<p>He felt utterly stripped, and said without hope:</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; I’m a trustee, you know.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide just glanced at him.</p>
+
+<p>“You always have been, I think.” They drove home in silence.</p>
+
+<p>One reason why she was determined to have her father come home was that
+it was the first time that Vincent was to take luncheon downstairs, and
+when Adelaide had a part to play she liked to have an audience. She was
+even glad to find Wayne in the drawing-room, though she did wonder to
+herself if the little creature had entirely given up earning his living.
+It was a very different occasion from Pete’s last luncheon there; every
+one was as pleasant as possible. As soon as the meal was over, Adelaide
+put her hand on her husband’s shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>“You’re going to lie down at once, Vin.”</p>
+
+<p>He rose obediently, but Wayne interposed. It seemed to him that it would
+be possible to tell his story to Farron.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, can’t Mr. Farron stay a few minutes?” he said. “I want so much to
+speak to you and him together about—”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide cut him short.</p>
+
+<p>“No, he can’t. It’s more important that he should get strong than
+anything else is. You can talk to me all you like when I come down.
+Come, Vin.”</p>
+
+<p>When they were up-stairs, and she was tucking him up on his sofa, he
+asked gently:</p>
+
+<p>“What did that boy want?”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide made a little face.</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing of any importance,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>Things had indeed changed between them if he would accept such an answer
+as that. She thought his indifference like the studied oblivion of the
+debtor who says, “Don’t I owe you something?” and is content with the
+most non-committal reply. He lay back and smiled at her. His expression
+was not easy to read.</p>
+
+<p>She went down-stairs, where conversation had not prospered. Mr. Lanley
+was smoking, with his cigar drooping from a corner of his mouth. He felt
+very unhappy. Mathilde was frightened. Wayne had recast his opening
+sentence a dozen times. He kept saying to himself that he wanted it to be
+perfectly simple, but not infantile, and each phrase he thought of in
+conformity with his one rule sounded like the opening lines of the stage
+child’s speech.</p>
+
+<p>In the crisis of Adelaide’s being actually back again in the room he
+found himself saying:</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Farron, I think you ought to know exactly what has been happening.”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t I?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>“No. You know that I was going to San Francisco the day after
+to-morrow—”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh dear,” said Adelaide, regretfully, “is it given up?”</p>
+
+<p>He told her rather slowly the whole story. The most terrible moment was,
+as he had expected, when he explained that they had met, he and Mathilde,
+to apply for their marriage license. Adelaide turned, and looked full at
+her daughter.</p>
+
+<p>“You were going to treat me like that?” Mathilde burst into tears. She
+had long been on the brink of them, and now they came more from nerves
+than from a sense of the justice of her mother’s complaint. But the sound
+of them upset Wayne hopelessly. He couldn’t go on for a minute, and Mr.
+Lanley rose to his feet.</p>
+
+<p>“Good Lord! good Lord!” he said, “that was dishonorable! Can’t you see
+that that is dishonorable, to marry her on the sly when we trusted her to
+go about with you—”</p>
+
+<p>“O Papa, never mind about the dishonorableness,” said Adelaide. “The
+point is”—and she looked at Wayne—“that they were building their
+elopement on something that turned out to be a fraud. That doesn’t make
+one think very highly of your judgment, Mr. Wayne.”</p>
+
+<p>“I made a mistake, Mrs. Farron.”</p>
+
+<p>“It was a bad moment to make one. You have worked three years with this
+firm and never suspected anything wrong?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, sometimes I have—”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide’s eyebrows went up.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, you have suspected. You had reason to think the whole thing might be
+dishonest, but you were willing to run away with Mathilde and let her get
+inextricably committed before you found out—”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s irresponsible, sir,” said Lanley. “I don’t suppose you
+understood what you were doing, but it was utterly irresponsible.”</p>
+
+<p>“I think,” said Adelaide, “that it finally answers the question as to
+whether or not you are too young to be married.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mama, I will marry Pete,” said Mathilde, trying to make a voice broken
+with sobs sound firm and resolute.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Wayne at the moment has no means whatsoever, as I understand it,”
+said Adelaide.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t care whether he has or not,” said Mathilde.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide laughed. The laugh rather shocked Mr. Lanley. He tried to
+explain.</p>
+
+<p>“I feel sorry for you, but you can’t imagine how painful it is to us to
+think that Mathilde came so near to being mixed up with a crooked deal
+like that—Mathilde, of all people. You ought to see that for yourself.”</p>
+
+<p>“I see it, thank you,” said Pete.</p>
+
+<p>“Really, Mr. Wayne, I don’t think that’s quite the tone to take,” put
+in Adelaide.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t think it is,” said Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde, making one last grasp at self-control, said:</p>
+
+<p>“They wouldn’t be so horrid to you, Pete, if they understood—” But the
+muscles of her throat contracted, and she never got any further.</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose I shall be thought a very cruel parent,” said Adelaide, almost
+airily, “but this sort of thing can’t go on, really, you know.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, it really can’t,” said Mr. Lanley. “We feel you have abused our
+confidence.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, I don’t reproach Mr. Wayne along those lines,” said Adelaide. “He
+owes me nothing. I had not supposed Mathilde would deceive me, but we
+won’t discuss that now. It isn’t anything against Mr. Wayne to say he has
+made a mistake. Five years from now, I’m sure, he would not put himself,
+or let himself be put, in such an extremely humiliating position. And I
+don’t say that if he came back five years from now with some financial
+standing I should be any more opposed to him than to any one else. Only
+in the meantime there can be no engagement.” Adelaide looked very
+reasonable. “You must see that.”</p>
+
+<p>“You mean I’m not to see him?”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course not.”</p>
+
+<p>“I must see him,” said Mathilde.</p>
+
+<p>Lanley looked at Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>“This is an opportunity for you to rehabilitate yourself. You ought to be
+man enough to promise you won’t see her until you are in a position to
+ask her to be your wife.”</p>
+
+<p>“I have asked her that already, you know,” returned Wayne with an attempt
+at a smile.</p>
+
+<p>“Pete, you wouldn’t desert me?” said Mathilde.</p>
+
+<p>“If Mr. Wayne had any pride, my dear, he would not wish to come to a
+house where he was unwelcome,” said her mother.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m afraid I haven’t any of that sort of pride at all, Mrs. Farron.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide made a little gesture, as much as to say, with her traditions,
+she really did not know how to deal with people who hadn’t.</p>
+
+<p>“Mathilde,”—Wayne spoke very gently,—“don’t you think you could
+stop crying?”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m trying all the time, Pete. You won’t go away, no matter what
+they say?”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course not.”</p>
+
+<p>“It seems to be a question between what I think best for my daughter as
+opposed to what you think best—for yourself,” observed Adelaide.</p>
+
+<p>“Nobody wants to turn you out of the house, you know,” said Mr. Lanley in
+a conciliatory tone, “but the engagement is at an end.”</p>
+
+<p>“If you do turn him out, I’ll go with him,” said Mathilde, and she took
+his hand and held it in a tight, moist clasp.</p>
+
+<p>They looked so young and so distressed as they stood there hand in hand
+that Lanley found himself relenting.</p>
+
+<p>“We don’t say that your marriage will never be possible,” he said. “We
+are asking you to wait—consent to a separation of six months.”</p>
+
+<p>“Six months!” wailed Mathilde.</p>
+
+<p>“With your whole life before you?” her grandfather returned wistfully.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m afraid I am asking a little more than that, Papa,” said Adelaide. “I
+have never been enthusiastic about this engagement, but while I was
+watching and trying to be coöperative, it seems Mr. Wayne intended to run
+off with my daughter. I know Mathilde is young and easily influenced, but
+I don’t think, I don’t really think,”—Adelaide made it evident that she
+was being just,—“that any other of all the young men who come to the
+house would have tried to do that, and none of them would have got
+themselves into this difficulty. I mean,”—she looked up at Wayne,—“I
+think almost any of them would have had a little better business judgment
+than you have shown.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mama,” put in her daughter, “can’t you see how honest it was of Pete not
+to go, anyhow?”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide smiled ironically.</p>
+
+<p>“No; I can’t think that an unusually high standard, dear.”</p>
+
+<p>This seemed to represent the final outrage to Mathilde. She turned.</p>
+
+<p>“O Pete, wouldn’t your mother take me in?” she asked.</p>
+
+<p>And as if to answer the question, Pringle opened the door and announced
+Mrs. Wayne.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XIV">CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>In all the short, but crowded, time since Lanley had first known Mrs.
+Wayne he had never been otherwise than glad to see her, but now his heart
+sank. It seemed to him that an abyss was about to open between them, and
+that all their differences of spirit, stimulating enough while they
+remained in the abstract, were about to be cast into concrete form.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde and Pete were so glad to see her that they said nothing, but
+looked at her beamingly. Whatever Adelaide’s feelings may have been,
+she greeted her guest with a positive courtesy, and she was the only
+one who did.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne nodded to her son, smiled more formally at Mr. Lanley, and
+then her eyes falling upon Mathilde, she realized that she had intruded
+on some sort of conference. She had a natural dread of such meetings, at
+which it seemed to her that the only thing which she must not do was the
+only thing that she knew how to do, namely, to speak her mind. So she at
+once decided to withdraw.</p>
+
+<p>“Your man insisted on my coming in, Mrs. Farron,” she said. “I came to
+ask about Mr. Farron; but I see you are in the midst of a family
+discussion, and so I won’t—”</p>
+
+<p>Everybody separately cried out to her to stay as she began to retreat to
+the door, and no one more firmly than Adelaide, who thought it as
+careless as Mr. Lanley thought it creditable that a mother would be
+willing to go away and leave the discussion of her son’s life to others.
+Adelaide saw an opportunity of killing two birds.</p>
+
+<p>“You are just the person for whom I have been longing, Mrs. Wayne,” she
+said. “Now you have come, we can settle the whole question.”</p>
+
+<p>“And just what is the question?” asked Mrs. Wayne. She sat down,
+looking distressed and rather guilty. She knew they were going to ask
+her what she knew about all the things that had been going on, and a
+hasty examination of her consciousness showed her that she knew
+everything, though she had avoided Pete’s full confidence. She knew
+simply by knowing that any two young people who loved each other would
+rather marry than separate for a year. But she was aware that this
+deduction, so inevitable to her, was exactly the one which would be
+denied by the others. So she sat, with a nervously pleasant smile on
+her usually untroubled face, and waited for Adelaide to speak. She did
+not have long to wait.</p>
+
+<p>“You did not know, I am sure, Mrs. Wayne, that your son intended to run
+away with my daughter?”</p>
+
+<p>All four of them stared at her, making her feel more and more guilty; and
+at last Lanley, unable to bear it, asked:</p>
+
+<p>“Did you know that, Mrs. Wayne?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, dear!” said Mrs. Wayne. “Yes. I knew it was possible; so did you.
+Pete didn’t tell me about it, though.”</p>
+
+<p>“But I did tell Mrs. Farron,” said Pete.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide protested at once.</p>
+
+<p>“You told me?” Then she remembered that a cloud had obscured the end of
+their last interview, but she did not withdraw her protest.</p>
+
+<p>“You know, Mrs. Farron, you have a bad habit of not listening to what is
+said to you,” Wayne answered firmly.</p>
+
+<p>This sort of impersonal criticism was to Adelaide the greatest
+impertinence, and she showed her annoyance.</p>
+
+<p>“In spite of the disabilities of age, Mr. Wayne,” she said, “I find I
+usually can get a simple idea if clearly presented.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, how absurd that is, Wayne!” put in Mr. Lanley. “You don’t mean to
+say that you told Mrs. Farron you were going to elope with her daughter,
+and she didn’t take in what you said?”</p>
+
+<p>“And yet that is just what took place.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide glanced at her father, as much as to say, “You see what kind of
+young man it is,” and then went on:</p>
+
+<p>“One fact at least I have learned only this minute—that is that the
+finances for this romantic trip were to be furnished by a dishonorable
+firm from which your son has been dismissed; or, no, resigned, isn’t it?”</p>
+
+<p>The human interest attached to losing a job brought mother and son
+together on the instant.</p>
+
+<p>“O Pete, you’ve left the firm!”</p>
+
+<p>He nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“O my poor boy!”</p>
+
+<p>He made a gesture, indicating that this was not the time to discuss the
+economic situation, and Adelaide went smoothly on:</p>
+
+<p>“And now, Mrs. Wayne, the point is this. I am considered harsh because I
+insist that a young man without an income who has just come near to
+running off with my child on money that was almost a bribe is not a
+person in whom I have unlimited confidence. I ask—it seems a tolerably
+mild request—that they do not see each other for six months.”</p>
+
+<p>“I cannot agree to that,” said Wayne decidedly.</p>
+
+<p>“Really, Mr. Wayne, do you feel yourself in a position to agree or
+disagree? We have never consented to your engagement. We have never
+thought the marriage a suitable one, have we, Papa?”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” said Mr. Lanley in a tone strangely dead.</p>
+
+<p>“Why is it not suitable?” asked Mrs. Wayne, as if she really hoped that
+an agreement might be reached by rational discussion.</p>
+
+<p>“Why?” said Adelaide, and smiled. “Dear Mrs. Wayne, these things are
+rather difficult to explain. Wouldn’t it be easier for all of us if you
+would just accept the statement that we think so without trying to decide
+whether we are right or wrong?”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m afraid it must be discussed,” answered Mrs. Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide leaned back, still with her faint smile, as if defying, though
+very politely, any one to discuss it with <i>her</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It was inevitable that Mrs. Wayne should turn to Mr. Lanley.</p>
+
+<p>“You, too, think it unsuitable?”</p>
+
+<p>He bowed gravely.</p>
+
+<p>“You dislike my son?”</p>
+
+<p>“Quite the contrary.”</p>
+
+<p>“Then you must be able to tell me the reason.”</p>
+
+<p>“I will try,” he said. He felt like a soldier called upon to defend a
+lost cause. It was his cause, he couldn’t desert it. His daughter and
+his granddaughter needed his protection; but he knew he was giving up
+something that he valued more than his life as he began to speak. “We
+feel the difference in background,” he said, “of early traditions, of
+judging life from the same point of view. Such differences can be
+overcome by time and money—” He stopped, for she was looking at him with
+the same wondering interest, devoid of anger, with which he had seen her
+study Wilsey. “I express myself badly,” he murmured.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne rose to her feet.</p>
+
+<p>“The trouble isn’t with your expression,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“You mean that what I am trying to express is wrong?”</p>
+
+<p>“It seems so to me.”</p>
+
+<p>“What is wrong about it?”</p>
+
+<p>She seemed to think over the possibilities for an instant, and then she
+shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t think I could make you understand,” she answered. She said it
+very gently, but it was cruel, and he turned white under the pain,
+suffering all the more that she was so entirely without malice. She
+turned to her son. “I’m going, Pete. Don’t you think you might as well
+come, too?”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde sprang up and caught Mrs. Wayne’s hand.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, don’t go!” she cried. “Don’t take him away! You know they are trying
+to separate us. Oh, Mrs. Wayne, won’t you take me in? Can’t I stay with
+you while we are waiting?”</p>
+
+<p>At this every one focused their eyes on Mrs. Wayne. Pete felt sorry for
+his mother, knowing how she hated to make a sudden decision, knowing how
+she hated to do anything disagreeable to those about her; but he never
+for an instant doubted what her decision would be. Therefore he could
+hardly believe his eyes when he saw her shaking her head.</p>
+
+<p>“I couldn’t do that, my dear.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mother!”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course you couldn’t,” said Mr. Lanley, blowing his nose immediately
+after under the tremendous emotion of finding that she was not an enemy,
+after all. Adelaide smiled to herself. She was thinking, “You could and
+would, if I hadn’t put in that sting about his failures.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why can’t you, Mother?” asked Pete.</p>
+
+<p>“We’ll talk that over at home.”</p>
+
+<p>“My dear boy,” said Mr. Lanley, kindly, “no one over thirty would have
+to ask why.”</p>
+
+<p>“No parent likes to assist at the kidnapping of another parent’s child,”
+said Adelaide.</p>
+
+<p>“Good Heavens! my mother has kidnapped so many children in her day!”</p>
+
+<p>“From the wrong sort of home, I suppose,” said Lanley, in explanation, to
+no one, perhaps, so much as to himself.</p>
+
+<p>“Am I to infer that she thinks mine the right sort? How delightful!”
+said Adelaide.</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Wayne, is it because I’m richer than Pete that you won’t take me
+in?” asked Mathilde, visions of bestowing her wealth in charity flitting
+across her mind.</p>
+
+<p>The other nodded. Wayne stared.</p>
+
+<p>“Mother,” he said, “you don’t mean to say you are letting yourself be
+influenced by a taunt like that of Mrs. Farron’s, which she didn’t even
+believe herself?”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne was shocked.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, no; not that, Pete. It isn’t that at all. But when a girl has been
+brought up—”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne saw it all in an instant.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes, I see. We’ll talk of that later.”</p>
+
+<p>But Adelaide had seen, too.</p>
+
+<p>“No; do go on, Mrs. Wayne. You don’t approve of the way my daughter has
+been brought up.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t think she has been brought up to be a poor man’s wife.”</p>
+
+<p>“No. I own I did not have that particular destiny in mind.”</p>
+
+<p>“And when I heard you assuming just now that every one was always
+concerned about money, and when I realized that the girl must have been
+brought up in that atmosphere and belief—”</p>
+
+<p>“I see. You thought she was not quite the right wife for your son?”</p>
+
+<p>“But I would try so hard,” said Mathilde. “I would learn; I—”</p>
+
+<p>“Mathilde,” interrupted her mother, “when a lady tells you you are not
+good enough for her son, you must not protest.”</p>
+
+<p>“Come, come, Adelaide, there is no use in being disagreeable,” said
+Mr. Lanley.</p>
+
+<p>“Disagreeable!” returned his daughter. “Mrs. Wayne and I are entirely
+agreed. She thinks her son too good for my daughter, and I think my
+daughter too good for her son. Really, there seems nothing more to be
+said. Good-by, Mr. Wayne.” She held out her long, white hand to him. Mrs.
+Wayne was trying to make her position clearer to Mathilde, but Pete
+thought this an undesirable moment for such an attempt.</p>
+
+<p>Partly as an assertion of his rights, partly because she looked so young
+and helpless, he stooped and kissed her.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll come and see you about half-past ten tomorrow morning,” he said
+very clearly, so that every one could hear. Adelaide looked blank; she
+was thinking that on Pringle she could absolutely depend. Wayne saw his
+mother and Lanley bow to each other, and the next moment he had contrived
+to get her out of the house.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde rushed away to her own room, and Adelaide and her father were
+left alone. She turned to him with one of her rare caresses.</p>
+
+<p>“Dear Papa,” she said, “what a comfort you are to me! What should I do
+without you? You’ll never desert me, will you?” And she put her head on
+his shoulder. He patted her with an absent-minded rhythm, and then he
+said, as if he were answering some secret train of thought:</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t see what else I could have done.”</p>
+
+<p>“You couldn’t have done anything else,” replied his daughter, still
+nestling against him. “But Mrs. Baxter had frightened me with her account
+of your sentimental admiration for Mrs. Wayne, and I thought you might
+want to make yourself agreeable to her at the expense of my poor child.”</p>
+
+<p>She felt his shoulder heave with a longer breath.</p>
+
+<p>“I can’t imagine putting anything before Mathilde’s happiness,” he said,
+and after a pause he added: “I really must go home. Mrs. Baxter will
+think me a neglectful host.”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t you want to bring her to dine here to-night? I’ll try and get
+some one to meet her. Let me see. She thinks Mr. Wilsey—”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I can’t stand Wilsey,” answered her father, crossly.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I’ll think of some one to sacrifice on the altar of your
+friendship. I certainly don’t want to dine alone with Mathilde. And, by
+the way, Papa, I haven’t mentioned any of this to Vincent.”</p>
+
+<p>He thought it was admirable of her to bear her anxieties alone so as to
+spare her sick husband.</p>
+
+<p>“Poor girl!” he said. “You’ve had a lot of trouble lately.”</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime Wayne and his mother walked slowly home.</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose you’re furious at me, Pete,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“Not a bit,” he answered. “For a moment, when I saw what you were going
+to say, I was terrified. But no amount of tact would have made Mrs.
+Farron feel differently, and I think they might as well know what we
+really think and feel. I was only sorry if it hurt Mathilde.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh dear, it’s so hard to be truthful!” exclaimed his mother. He
+laughed, for he wished she sometimes found it harder; and she went on:</p>
+
+<p>“Poor little Mathilde! You know I wouldn’t hurt her if I could help it.
+It’s not her fault. But what a terrible system it is, and how money does
+blind people! They can’t see you at all as you are, and yet if you had
+fifty thousand dollars a year, they’d be more aware of your good points
+than I am. They can’t see that you have resolution and charm and a sense
+of honor. They don’t see the person, they just see the lack of income.”</p>
+
+<p>Pete smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“A person is all Mrs. Farron says she asks for her daughter.”</p>
+
+<p>“She does not know a person when she sees one.”</p>
+
+<p>“She knew one when she married Farron.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne sniffed.</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps he married her,” she replied.</p>
+
+<p>Her son thought this likely, but he did not answer, for she had given him
+an idea—to see Farron. Farron would at least understand the situation.
+His mother approved of the suggestion.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course he’s not Mathilde’s father.”</p>
+
+<p>“He’s not a snob.”</p>
+
+<p>They had reached the house, and Pete was fishing in his pocket for his
+keys.</p>
+
+<p>“Do you think Mr. Lanley is a snob?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>As usual Mrs. Wayne evaded the direct answer.</p>
+
+<p>“I got an unfavorable impression of him this afternoon.”</p>
+
+<p>“For failing to see that I was a king among men?”</p>
+
+<p>“For backing up every stupid thing his daughter said.”</p>
+
+<p>“Loyalty is a fine quality.”</p>
+
+<p>“Justice is better,” answered his mother.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, well, he’s old,” said Wayne, dismissing the whole subject.</p>
+
+<p>They walked up their four flights in silence, and then Wayne remembered
+to ask something that had been in his mind several times.</p>
+
+<p>“By the way, Mother, how did you happen to come to the Farrons at all?”</p>
+
+<p>She laughed rather self-consciously.</p>
+
+<p>“I hoped perhaps Mr. Farron might be well enough to see me a moment
+about Marty. The truth is, Pete, Mr. Farron is the real person in that
+whole family.”</p>
+
+<p>That evening he wrote Farron a note, asking him to see him the next
+morning at half-past ten about “this trouble of which, of course,
+Mrs. Farron has told you.” He added a request that he would tell
+Pringle of his intention in case he could give the interview, because
+Mrs. Farron had been quite frank in saying that she would give orders
+not to let him in.</p>
+
+<p>Farron received this note with his breakfast. Adelaide was not there. He
+had had no hint from her of any crisis. He had not come down to dinner
+the evening before to meet Mrs. Baxter and the useful people asked to
+entertain her, but he had seen Mathilde’s tear-stained face, and in a few
+minutes with his father-in-law had encountered one or two evident
+evasions. Only Adelaide had been unfathomable.</p>
+
+<p>After he had read the letter and thought over the situation, he sent for
+Pringle, and gave orders that when Mr. Wayne came he would see him.</p>
+
+<p>Pringle did not exactly make an objection, but stated a fact when he
+replied that Mrs. Farron had given orders that Mr. Wayne was not to be
+allowed to see Miss Severance.</p>
+
+<p>“Exactly,” said Farron. “Show him here.” Here was his own study.</p>
+
+<p>As it happened, Adelaide was sitting with him, making very good invalid’s
+talk, when Pringle announced, “Mr. Wayne.”</p>
+
+<p>“Pringle, I told you—” Adelaide began, but her husband cut her short.</p>
+
+<p>“He has an appointment with me, Adelaide.”</p>
+
+<p>“You don’t understand, Vin. You mustn’t see him.”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne was by this time in the room.</p>
+
+<p>“But I wish to see him, my dear Adelaide, and,” Farron added, “I wish to
+see him alone.”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” she answered, with a good deal of excitement; “that you cannot.
+This is my affair, Vincent—the affair of my child.”</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her for a second, and then opening the door into his
+bedroom, he said to Wayne:</p>
+
+<p>“Will you come in here?” The door was closed behind the two men.</p>
+
+<p>Wayne was not a coward, although he had dreaded his interview with
+Adelaide; it was his very respect for Farron that kept him from feeling
+even nervous.</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps I ought not to have asked you to see me,” he began.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m very glad to see you,” answered Farron. “Sit down, and tell me the
+story as you see it from the beginning.”</p>
+
+<p>It was a comfort to tell the story at last to an expert. Wayne, who had
+been trying for twenty-four hours to explain what underwriting meant,
+what were the responsibilities of brokers in such matters, what was the
+function of such a report as his, felt as if he had suddenly groped his
+way out of a fog as he talked, with hardly an interruption but a nod or a
+lightening eye from Farron. He spoke of Benson. “I know the man,” said
+Farron; of Honaton, “He was in my office once.” Wayne told how Mathilde,
+and then he himself, had tried to inform Mrs. Farron of the definiteness
+of their plans to be married.</p>
+
+<p>“How long has this been going on?” Farron asked.</p>
+
+<p>“At least ten days.”</p>
+
+<p>Farron nodded. Then Wayne told of the discovery of the proof at the
+printer’s and his hurried meeting in the park to tell Mathilde. Here
+Farron stopped him suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>“What was it kept you from going through with it just the same?”</p>
+
+<p>“You’re the first person who has asked me that,” answered Pete.</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps you did not even think of such a thing?”</p>
+
+<p>“No one could help thinking of it who saw her there—”</p>
+
+<p>“And you didn’t do it?”</p>
+
+<p>“It wasn’t consideration for her family that held me back.”</p>
+
+<p>“What was it?”</p>
+
+<p>Pete found a moral scruple was a difficult motive to avow.</p>
+
+<p>“It was Mathilde herself. That would not have been treating her as
+an equal.”</p>
+
+<p>“You intend always to treat her as an equal?”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne was ashamed to find how difficult it was to answer truthfully. The
+tone of the question gave him no clue to the speaker’s own thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I do,” he said; and then blurted out hastily, “Don’t you believe in
+treating a woman as an equal?”</p>
+
+<p>“I believe in treating her exactly as she wants to be treated.”</p>
+
+<p>“But every one wants to be treated as an equal, if they’re any good.”
+Farron smiled, showing those blue-white teeth for an instant, and Wayne,
+feeling he was not quite doing himself justice, added, “I call that just
+ordinary respect, you know, and I could not love any one I didn’t
+respect. Could you?”</p>
+
+<p>The question was, or Farron chose to consider it, a purely rhetorical
+one.</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose,” he observed, “that they are to be counted the most fortunate
+who love and respect at the same time.”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course,” said Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>Farron nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“And yet perhaps they miss a good deal.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know <i>what</i> they miss,” answered Wayne, to whom the sentiment
+was as shocking as anything not understood can be.</p>
+
+<p>“No; I’m sure you don’t,” answered his future stepfather-in-law. “Go on
+with your story.”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne went on, but not as rapidly as he had expected. Farron kept him a
+long time on the interview of the afternoon before, and particularly on
+Mrs. Farron’s part, just the point Wayne did not want to discuss for fear
+of betraying the bitterness he felt toward her. But again and again
+Farron made him quote her words wherever he could remember them; and
+then, as if this had not been clear enough, he asked:</p>
+
+<p>“You think my wife has definitely made up her mind against the marriage?”</p>
+
+<p>“Irrevocably.”</p>
+
+<p>“Irrevocably?” Farron questioned more as if it were the sound of the word
+than the meaning that he was doubting.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, you’ve been rather out of it lately, sir,” said Wayne. “You haven’t
+followed, perhaps, all that’s been going on.”</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps not.”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne felt he must be candid.</p>
+
+<p>“If it is your idea that your wife’s opposition could be changed, I’m
+afraid I must tell you, Mr. Farron—” He paused, meeting a quick, sudden
+look; then Farron turned his head, and stared, with folded arms, out of
+the window. Wayne had plenty of time to wonder what he was going to say.
+What he did say was surprising.</p>
+
+<p>“I think you are an honest man, and I should be glad to have you working
+for me. I could make you one of my secretaries, with a salary of six
+thousand dollars.”</p>
+
+<p>In the shock Pete heard himself saying the first thing that came
+into his head:</p>
+
+<p>“That’s a large salary, sir.”</p>
+
+<p>“Some people would say large enough to marry on.”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne drew back.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t you think you ought to consult Mrs. Farron before you offer it to
+me?” he asked hesitatingly.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t carry honesty too far. No, I don’t consult my wife about my
+office appointments.”</p>
+
+<p>“It isn’t honesty; but I couldn’t stand having you change your
+mind when—”</p>
+
+<p>“When my wife tells me to? I promise you not to do that.”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne found that the interview was over, although he had not been able to
+express his gratitude.</p>
+
+<p>“I know what you are feeling,” said Farron. “Good-by.”</p>
+
+<p>“I can’t understand why you are doing it, Mr. Farron; but—”</p>
+
+<p>“It needn’t matter to you. Good-by.”</p>
+
+<p>With a sensation that in another instant he might be out of the house,
+Wayne metaphorically caught at the door-post.</p>
+
+<p>“I must see Mathilde before I go,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>Farron shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“No, not to-day.”</p>
+
+<p>“She’s terribly afraid I am going to be moved by insults to desert her,”
+Wayne urged.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll see she understands. I’ll send for you in a day or two; then it
+will be all right.” They shook hands. He was glad Farron showed him out
+through the corridor and not through the study, where, he knew, Mrs.
+Farron was still waiting like a fine, sleek cat at a rat-hole.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XV">CHAPTER XV</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>During this interview Adelaide sat in her husband’s study and waited. She
+looked back upon that other period of suspense—the hour when she had
+waited at the hospital during his operation—as a time of comparative
+peace. She had been able then, she remembered, to sit still, to pursue,
+if not a train of thought, at least a set of connected images; but now
+her whole spirit seemed to be seething with a sort of poison that made
+her muscles jerk and start and her mind dart and faint. Then she had
+foreseen loss through the fate common to humanity; now she foresaw it
+through the action of her own tyrannical contempt for anything that
+seemed to her weak.</p>
+
+<p>She had never rebelled against coercion from Vincent. She had even loved
+it, but she had loved it when he had seemed to her a superior being;
+coercion from one who only yesterday had been under the dominion of
+nerves and nurses was intolerable to her. She was at heart a courtier,
+would do menial service to a king, and refuse common civility to an
+inferior. She knew how St. Christopher had felt at seeing his satanic
+captain tremble at the sign of the cross; and though, unlike the saint,
+she had no intention of setting out to discover the stronger lord, she
+knew that he might now any day appear.</p>
+
+<p>From any one not an acknowledged superior that shut door was an insult to
+be avenged, and she sat and waited for the moment to arrive when she
+would most adequately avenge it. There was still something terrifying in
+the idea of going out to do battle with Vincent. Hitherto in their
+quarrels he had always been the aggressor, had always startled her out of
+an innocent calm by an accusation or complaint. But this, as she said to
+herself, was not a quarrel, but a readjustment, of which probably he was
+still unaware. She hoped he was. She hoped he would come in with his
+accustomed manner and say civilly, “Forgive me for shutting the door; but
+my reason was—”</p>
+
+<p>And she would answer, “Really, I don’t think we need trouble about your
+reasons, Vincent.” She knew just the tone she would use, just the
+expression of a smile suppressed. Then his quick eyes would fasten
+themselves on her face, and perhaps at the first glance would read the
+story of his defeat. She knew her own glance would not waver.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of half an hour she heard the low tones of conversation change
+to the brisk notes of leave-taking. Her heart began to beat with fear,
+but not the kind of fear that makes people run away; rather the kind that
+makes them abdicate all reason and fan their emotions into a sort of
+inspiring flame.</p>
+
+<p>She heard the door open into the corridor, but even then Vincent did not
+immediately come. Miss Gregory had been waiting to say good-by to him. As
+a case he was finished. Adelaide heard her clear voice say gaily:</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I’m off, Mr. Vincent.”</p>
+
+<p>They went back into the room and shut the door. Adelaide clenched her
+hands; these delays were hard to bear.</p>
+
+<p>It was not a long delay, though in that next room a very human bond
+was about to be broken. Possibly if Vincent had done exactly what
+his impulses prompted, he would have taken Miss Gregory in his arms
+and kissed her. But instead he said quietly, for his manner had not
+much range:</p>
+
+<p>“I shall miss you.”</p>
+
+<p>“It’s time I went.”</p>
+
+<p>“To some case more interestingly dangerous?”</p>
+
+<p>“Your case was dangerous enough for me,” said the girl; and then for fear
+he might miss her meaning, “I never met any one like you, Mr. Farron.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve never been taken care of as you took care of me.”</p>
+
+<p>“I wish”—she looked straight up at him—“I could take care of you
+altogether.”</p>
+
+<p>“That,” he answered, “would end in my taking care of you.”</p>
+
+<p>“And your hands are pretty full as it is?”</p>
+
+<p>He nodded, and she went away without even shaking hands. She omitted her
+farewells to any other member of the family except Pringle, who, Farron
+heard, was congratulating her on her consideration for servants as he put
+her into her taxi.</p>
+
+<p>Then he opened the door of his study, went to the chair he had risen
+from, and took up the paper at the paragraph at which he had dropped it.
+Adelaide’s eyes followed him like search-lights.</p>
+
+<p>“May I ask,” she said with her edged voice, “if you have been disposing
+of my child’s future in there without consulting me?”</p>
+
+<p>If their places had been reversed, Adelaide would have raised her
+eyebrows and repeated, “Your child’s future?” but Farron was more direct.</p>
+
+<p>“I have been engaging Wayne as a secretary,” he said, and, turning to the
+financial page, glanced down the quotations.</p>
+
+<p>“Then you must dismiss him again.”</p>
+
+<p>“He will be a useful man to me,” said Farron, as if she had not spoken.
+“I have needed some one whom I could depend on—”</p>
+
+<p>“Vincent, it is absurd for you to pretend you don’t know he wanted to
+marry Mathilde.”</p>
+
+<p>He did not raise his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” he said; “I remember you and I had some talk about it before my
+operation.”</p>
+
+<p>“Since then circumstances have arisen of which you know nothing—things
+I did not tell you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Do you think that was wise?”</p>
+
+<p>With a sense that a rapid and resistless current was carrying them both
+to destruction she saw for the first time that he was as angry as she.</p>
+
+<p>“I do not like your tone,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>“What’s the matter with it?”</p>
+
+<p>“It isn’t polite; it isn’t friendly.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why should it be?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why? What a question! Love—”</p>
+
+<p>“I doubt if it is any longer a question of love between you and me.”</p>
+
+<p>These words, which so exactly embodied her own idea, came to her as a
+shock, a brutal blow from him.</p>
+
+<p>“Vincent!” she cried protestingly.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know what it is that has your attention now, what private
+anxieties that I am not privileged to share—”</p>
+
+<p>“You have been ill.”</p>
+
+<p>“But not imbecile. Do you suppose I’ve missed one tone of your voice, or
+haven’t understood what has been going on in your mind? Have you lived
+with me five years and think me a forgiving man—”</p>
+
+<p>“May I ask what you have to forgive?”</p>
+
+<p>“Do you suppose a pat to my pillow or an occasional kind word takes the
+place to me of what our relation used to be?”</p>
+
+<p>“You speak as if our relation was over.”</p>
+
+<p>“Have you been imagining I was going to come whining to you for a return
+of your love and respect? What nonsense! Love makes love, and
+indifference makes indifference.”</p>
+
+<p>“You expect me to say I am indifferent to you?”</p>
+
+<p>“I care very little what you say. I judge your conduct.”</p>
+
+<p>She had an unerring instinct for what would wound him. If she had
+answered with conviction, “Yes, I am indifferent to you,” there would
+have been enough temper and exaggeration in it for him to discount the
+whole statement. But to say, “No, I still love you, Vincent,” in a tone
+that conceded the very utmost that she could,—namely, that she still
+loved him for the old, rather pitiful association,—that would be to
+inflict the most painful wound possible. And so that was what she said.
+She was prepared to have him take it up and cry: “You still love me? Do
+you mean as you love your Aunt Alberta?” and she, still trying to be
+just, would answer: “Oh, more than Aunt Alberta. Only, of course—”</p>
+
+<p>The trouble was he did not make the right answer. When she said, “No, I
+still love you, Vincent,” he answered:</p>
+
+<p>“I cannot say the same.”</p>
+
+<p>It was one of those replies that change the face of the world. It drove
+every other idea out of her head. She stared at him for an instant.</p>
+
+<p>“Nobody,” she answered, “need tell me such a thing as that twice.” It
+was a fine phrase to cover a retreat; she left him and went to her own
+room. It no more occurred to her to ask whether he meant what he said
+than if she had been struck in the head she would have inquired if the
+blow was real.</p>
+
+<p>She did not come down to lunch. Vincent and Mathilde ate alone. Mathilde,
+as she told Pete, had begun to understand her stepfather, but she had not
+progressed so far as to see in his silence anything but an
+unapproachable sternness. It never crossed her mind that this middle-aged
+man, who seemed to control his life so completely, was suffering far more
+than she, and she was suffering a good deal.</p>
+
+<p>Pete had promised to come that morning, and she hadn’t seen him yet. She
+supposed he had come, and that, though she had been on the lookout for
+him, she had missed him. She felt as if they were never going to see each
+other again. When she found she was to be alone at luncheon with Farron,
+she thought of appealing to him, but was restrained by two
+considerations. She was a kind person, and her mother had repeatedly
+impressed upon her how badly at present Mr. Farron supported any anxiety.
+More important than this, however, was her belief that he would never
+work at cross-purposes with his wife. What were she and Pete to do? she
+thought. Mrs. Wayne would not take her in, her mother would not let Pete
+come to the house, and they had no money.</p>
+
+<p>Both cups of soup left the table almost untasted.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m sorry Mama has one of her headaches,” said Mathilde.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” said Farron. “You’d better take some of that chicken, Mathilde.
+It’s very good.”</p>
+
+<p>She did not notice that the piece he had taken on his own plate was
+untouched.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m not hungry,” she answered.</p>
+
+<p>“Anything wrong?”</p>
+
+<p>She could not lie, and so she looked at him and smiled and answered:</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing, as Mama would say, to trouble an invalid with.”</p>
+
+<p>She did not have a great success. In fact, his brows showed a slight
+disposition to contract, and after a moment of silence he said:</p>
+
+<p>“Does your mother say that?”</p>
+
+<p>“She’s always trying to protect you nowadays, Mr. Farron.”</p>
+
+<p>“I saw your friend Pete Wayne this morning.”</p>
+
+<p>“You saw—” Surprise, excitement, alarm flooded her face with crimson.
+“Oh, why did <i>you</i> see him?”</p>
+
+<p>“I saw him by appointment. He asked me to tell you—only, I’m afraid,
+other things put it out of my head—that he has accepted a job I
+offered him.”</p>
+
+<p>“O Mr. Farron, what kind of job?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, the kind of job that would enable two self-denying young people to
+marry, I think.”</p>
+
+<p>Not knowing how clearly all that she felt was written on her face
+Mathilde tried to put it all into words.</p>
+
+<p>“How wonderful! how kind! But my mother—”</p>
+
+<p>“I will arrange it with your mother.”</p>
+
+<p>“Have you known all along? Oh, why did you do this wonderful thing?”</p>
+
+<p>“Because—perhaps you won’t agree with me—I have taken rather a fancy to
+this young man. And I had other reasons.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde took her stepfather’s hand as it lay upon the table.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve only just begun to understand you, Mr. Farron. To understand,
+I mean, what Mama means when she says you are the strongest, wisest
+person—”</p>
+
+<p>He pretended to smile.</p>
+
+<p>“When did your mother say that?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, ages ago.” She stopped, aware of a faint motion to withdraw on the
+part of the hand she held. “I suppose you want to go to her.”</p>
+
+<p>“No. The sort of headache she has is better left alone, I think, though
+you might stop as you go up.”</p>
+
+<p>“I will. When do you think I can see Pete?”</p>
+
+<p>“I’d wait a day or two; but you might telephone him at once, if you like,
+and say—or do you know what to say?”</p>
+
+<p>She laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“It used to frighten me when you made fun of me like that; but now—It
+must be simply delirious to be able to make people as happy as you’ve
+just made us.”</p>
+
+<p>He smiled at her word.</p>
+
+<p>“Other people’s happiness is not exactly delirious,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>She was moving in the direction of the nearest telephone, but she said
+over her shoulder:</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, well, I think you did pretty well for yourself when you chose Mama.”</p>
+
+<p>She left him sipping his black coffee; he took every drop of that.</p>
+
+<p>When he had finished he did not go back to his study, but to the
+drawing-room, where he sat down in a large chair by the fire. He lit a
+cigar. It was a quiet hour in the house, and he might have been supposed
+to be a man entirely at peace.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley, coming in about an hour later, certainly imagined he was
+rousing an invalid from a refreshing rest. He tried to retreat, but found
+Vincent’s black eyes were on him.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m sorry to disturb you,” he said. “Just wanted to see Adelaide.”</p>
+
+<p>“Adelaide has a headache.”</p>
+
+<p>Life was taking so many wrong turnings that Mr. Lanley had grown
+apprehensive. He suddenly remembered how many headaches Adelaide had had
+just before he knew of her troubles with Severance.</p>
+
+<p>“A headache?” he said nervously.</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing serious.” Vincent looked more closely at his father-in-law. “You
+yourself don’t look just the thing, sir.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley sat down more limply than was his custom.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m getting to an age,” he said, “when I can’t stand scenes. We had
+something of a scene here yesterday afternoon. God bless my soul! though,
+I believe Adelaide told me not to mention it to you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Adelaide is very considerate,” replied her husband. His extreme
+susceptibility to sorrow made Mr. Lanley notice a tone which ordinarily
+would have escaped him, and he looked up so sharply that Farron was
+forced to add quickly: “But you haven’t made a break. I know about what
+took place.”</p>
+
+<p>The egotism of suffering, the distorted vision of a sleepless night, made
+Mr. Lanley blurt out suddenly:</p>
+
+<p>“I want to ask you, Vincent, do you think I could have done anything
+different?”</p>
+
+<p>Now, none of the accounts which Farron had received had made any mention
+of Mr. Lanley’s part in the proceedings at all, and so he paused a
+moment, and in that pause Mr. Lanley went on:</p>
+
+<p>“It’s a difficult position—before a boy’s mother. There isn’t anything
+against him, of course. One’s reasons for not wanting the marriage do
+sound a little snobbish when one says them—right out. In fact, I suppose
+they are snobbish. Do you find it hard to get away from early prejudices,
+Vincent? I do. I think Adelaide is quite right; and yet the boy is a nice
+boy. What do you think of him?”</p>
+
+<p>“I have taken him into my office.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley was startled by a courage so far beyond his own.</p>
+
+<p>“But,” he asked, “did you consult Adelaide?”</p>
+
+<p>Farron shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“But, Vincent, was that quite loyal?”</p>
+
+<p>A change in Farron’s expression made Mr. Lanley turn his head, and he saw
+that Adelaide had come into the room. Her appearance bore out the legend
+of her headache: she looked like a garden after an early frost. But
+perhaps the most terrifying thing about her aspect was her complete
+indifference to it. A recollection suddenly came to Mr. Lanley of a
+railway accident that he and Adelaide had been in. He had seen her
+stepping toward him through the debris, buttoning her gloves. She was far
+beyond such considerations now.</p>
+
+<p>She had come to put her very life to the test. There was one hope, there
+was one way in which Vincent could rehabilitate himself, and that was by
+showing himself victor in the hardest of all struggles, the personal
+struggle with her. That would be hard, because she would make it so, if
+she perished in the attempt.</p>
+
+<p>The crisis came in the first meeting of their eyes. If his glance had
+said: “My poor dear, you’re tired. Rest. All will be well,” his cause
+would have been lost. But his glance said nothing, only studied her
+coolly, and she began to speak.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Papa, Vincent does not consider such minor points as loyalty to me.”
+Her voice and manner left Mr. Lanley in no doubt that if he stayed an
+instant he would witness a domestic quarrel. The idea shocked him
+unspeakably. That these two reserved and dignified people should quarrel
+at all was bad enough, but that they should have reached a point where
+they were indifferent to the presence of a third person was terrible. He
+got himself out of the room without ceremony, but not before he saw
+Vincent rise and heard the first words of his sentence:</p>
+
+<p>“And what right have you to speak of loyalty?” Here, fortunately,
+Lanley shut the door behind him, for Vincent’s next words would have
+shocked him still more: “A prostitute would have stuck better to a man
+when he was ill.”</p>
+
+<p>But Adelaide was now in good fighting trim. She laughed out loud.</p>
+
+<p>“Really, Vincent,” she said, “your language! You must make your complaint
+against me a little more definite.”</p>
+
+<p>“Not much; and give you a chance to get up a little rational explanation.
+Besides, we neither of us need explanations. We know what has been
+happening.”</p>
+
+<p>“You mean you really doubt my feeling for you? No, Vincent, I still
+love you,” and her voice had a flute-like quality which, though it was
+without a trace of conviction, very few people who had ever heard it
+had resisted.</p>
+
+<p>“I am aware of that,” said Vincent quietly.</p>
+
+<p>She looked beautifully dazed.</p>
+
+<p>“Yet this morning you spoke—as if—”</p>
+
+<p>“But what is love such as yours worth? A man must be on the crest of the
+wave to keep it; otherwise it changes automatically into contempt. I
+don’t care about it, Adelaide. I can’t use it in a life like mine.”</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him, and a dreamlike state began to come over her. She
+simply couldn’t believe in the state of mind of those sick-room days; she
+could never really, she thought, have been less passionately admiring
+than she was at that minute, yet the half-recollection confused her and
+kept her silent.</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps it’s vanity on my part,” he said, “but contempt like yours is
+something I could never forgive.”</p>
+
+<p>“You would forgive me anything if you loved me.” Her tone was noble
+and sincere.</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps.”</p>
+
+<p>“You mean you don’t?”</p>
+
+<p>“Adelaide, there are times when a person chooses between loving and
+being loved.”</p>
+
+<p>The sentence made her feel sick with fear, but she asked:</p>
+
+<p>“Tell me just what you mean.”</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps I could keep on loving you if I shut my eyes to the kind of
+person you are; but if I did that, I could not hold you an instant.”</p>
+
+<p>She stared at him as fascinated as a bird by a snake. This, it seemed to
+her, was the truth, the final summing up of their relation. She had lost
+him, and yet she was eternally his.</p>
+
+<p>As she looked at him she became aware that he was growing slowly pale. He
+was standing, and he put his hand out to the mantelpiece to steady
+himself. She thought he was going to faint.</p>
+
+<p>“Vincent,” she said, “let me help you to the sofa.”</p>
+
+<p>She wanted now to see him falter, to feel his hand on her shoulder,
+anything for a closer touch with him. For half a minute, perhaps, they
+remained motionless, and then the color began to come back into his face.</p>
+
+<p>He smiled bitterly.</p>
+
+<p>“They tell me you are such a good sick nurse, Mrs. Farron,” he said, “so
+considerate to the weak. But I don’t need your help, thank you.”</p>
+
+<p>She covered her face with her hands. He seemed to her stronger and more
+cruel than anything she had imagined. In a minute he left her alone.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XVI">CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Farron cared, perhaps, no more for appearances than Adelaide did, but
+his habitual manner was much better adapted to concealment. In him the
+fluctuations between the deepest depression and the highest elation were
+accompanied by such slight variations of look and tone that they escaped
+almost every one but Adelaide herself. He came down to dinner that
+evening, and while Adelaide sat in silence, with her elbows on the table
+and her long fingers clasping and unclasping themselves in a sort of
+rhythmic desperation, conversation went on pleasantly enough between
+Mathilde and Vincent. This was facilitated by the fact that Mathilde had
+now transferred to Vincent the flattering affection which she used to
+give to her grandfather. She agreed with, wondered at, and drank in
+every word.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally, Mathilde attributed her mother’s distress to the crisis in her
+own love-affairs. She had had no word with her as to Wayne’s new
+position, and it came to her in a flash that it would be daring, but
+wise, to take the matter up in the presence of her stepfather. So, as
+soon as they were in the drawing-room, and Farron had opened the evening
+paper, and his wife, with a wild decision, had opened a book, Mathilde
+ruthlessly interrupted them both, recalling them from what appeared to be
+the depths of absorptions in their respective pages by saying:</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Farron, did you tell Mama what you had done about Pete?”</p>
+
+<p>Farron raised his eyes and said:</p>
+
+<p>“Yes.”</p>
+
+<p>“And what did she say?”</p>
+
+<p>“What is there for me to say?” answered Adelaide in the terrible, crisp
+voice that Mathilde hated.</p>
+
+<p>There was a pause. To Mathilde it seemed extraordinary the way older
+people sometimes stalled and shifted about perfectly obvious issues; but,
+wishing to be patient, she explained:</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t you see it makes some difference in our situation?”</p>
+
+<p>“The greatest, I should think,” said Adelaide, and just hinted that she
+might go back to her book at any instant.</p>
+
+<p>“But don’t you think—” Mathilde began again, when Farron interrupted her
+almost sharply.</p>
+
+<p>“Mathilde,” he said, “there’s a well-known business axiom, not to try to
+get things on paper too early.”</p>
+
+<p>She bent her head a trifle on one side in the way a puppy will when an
+unusual strain is being put upon its faculties. It seemed to her curious,
+but she saw she was being advised to drop the subject. Suddenly Adelaide
+sprang to her feet and said she was going to bed.</p>
+
+<p>“I hope your headache will be better, Mama,” Mathilde hazarded; but
+Adelaide went without answering. Mathilde looked at Mr. Farron.</p>
+
+<p>“You haven’t learned to wait,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s so hard to wait when you are on bad terms with people you love!”</p>
+
+<p>She was surprised that he smiled—a smile that conveyed more pain than
+amusement.</p>
+
+<p>“It is hard,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>This closed the evening. The next morning Vincent went down-town. He
+went about half-past ten. Adelaide, breakfasting in her room and dressing
+at her leisure, did not appear until after eleven, and then discovered
+for the first time that her husband had gone. She was angry at Mathilde,
+who had breakfasted with him, at Pringle, for not telling her what was
+happening.</p>
+
+<p>“You shouldn’t have let him go, Mathilde,” she said. “You are old enough
+to have some judgment in such matters. He is not strong enough. He almost
+fainted yesterday.”</p>
+
+<p>“But, Mama,” protested the girl, “I could not stop Mr. Farron. I don’t
+think even you could have if he’d made up his mind.”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell Pringle to order the motor at once,” was her mother’s answer.</p>
+
+<p>Her distraction at her husband’s imprudence touched Mathilde so that she
+forgot everything else between them.</p>
+
+<p>“O Mama,” she said, “I’m so sorry you’re worried! I’m sorry I’m one of
+your worries; but don’t you see I love Pete just as you do Mr. Farron?”</p>
+
+<p>“God help you, then!” said Adelaide, quickly, and went to her room to
+put on with a haste none the less meticulous her small velvet hat, her
+veil, her spotless, pale gloves, her muff, and warm coat.</p>
+
+<p>She drove to Vincent’s office. It was not really care for his health that
+drove her, but the restlessness of despair; she had reached a point where
+she was more wretched away from him than with him.</p>
+
+<p>The office was high in a gigantic building. Every one knew her by sight,
+the giant at the door and the men in the elevators. Once in the office
+itself, a junior partner hurried to her side.</p>
+
+<p>“So glad to see Vincent back again,” he said, proud of the fact that he
+called his present partner and late employer by his first name. “You want
+to see him?” There was a short hesitation. “He left word not to be
+disturbed—”</p>
+
+<p>“Who is there?” Adelaide asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Dr. Parret.”</p>
+
+<p>“He’s not been taken ill?”</p>
+
+<p>He tried to reassure her, but Adelaide, without waiting or listening,
+moved at once to Vincent’s door and opened it. As she did so she heard
+him laughing and then she saw that he was laughing at the words of the
+handsomest woman she had ever seen. A great many people had this first
+impression of Lily Parret. Lily was standing on the opposite side of the
+table from him, leaning with both palms flat on the polished wood,
+telling him some continued narrative that made her blue eyes shine and
+her dimples deepen.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide was not temperamentally jealous. She did not, like Vincent, hate
+and fear any person or thing or idea that drew his attention away; on the
+contrary, she wanted him to give his full attention to anything that
+would make for his power and success. She was not jealous, but it did
+cross her mind that she was looking now at her successor.</p>
+
+<p>They stopped laughing as she entered, and Vincent said:</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you, Dr. Parret, you have given me just what I wanted.”</p>
+
+<p>“Marty would just as lief as not stick a knife in me if he knew,” said
+Lily, not as if she were afraid, but as if this was one of the normal
+risks of her profession. She turned to Adelaide, “O Mrs. Farron, I’ve
+heard of you from Pete Wayne. Isn’t he perfectly delightful? But, then,
+he ought to be with such a mother.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide had a very useful smile, which could maintain a long, but
+somewhat meaningless, brilliance. She employed it now, and it lasted
+until Lily had gone.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s a very remarkable girl,” said Farron, remembrances of smiles
+still on his lips.</p>
+
+<p>“Does she think every one perfect?”</p>
+
+<p>“Almost every one; that’s how she keeps going at such a rate.”</p>
+
+<p>“How long have you known her?”</p>
+
+<p>“About ten minutes. Pete got her here. She knew something about Marty
+that I needed.” He spoke as if he was really interested in the business
+before him; he did not betray by so much as a glance the recognition that
+they were alone, though she was calling his attention to the fact by
+every line of her figure and expression of her face. She saw his hand
+move on his desk. Was it coming to hers? He rang a bell. “Is Burke in the
+outer office? Send him in.”</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide’s heart began to beat as Marty, in his working-clothes,
+entered. He was more suppressed and more sulky than she had yet seen him.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve been trying to see you, Mr. Farron,” he began; but Vincent cut in:</p>
+
+<p>“One moment, Burke. I have something to say to you. That bout you said
+you had with O’Hallohan—”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, what of it?” answered Marty, suddenly raising his voice.</p>
+
+<p>“He knocked you out.”</p>
+
+<p>“Who says so?” roared Burke.</p>
+
+<p>“He knocked you out,” repeated Vincent.</p>
+
+<p>“Who says so?” Burke roared again, and somehow there was less confidence
+in the same volume of sound.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, not O’Hallohan; He stayed bought. But I have it straight. No, I’m
+not trying to draw you out on a guess. I don’t play that kind of game. If
+I tell you I know it for a fact, I do.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, and what of it?” said Marty.</p>
+
+<p>“Just this. I wouldn’t dismiss a man for getting knocked out by a
+bigger man—”</p>
+
+<p>“He ain’t bigger.”</p>
+
+<p>“By a better fighter, then; but I doubt whether or not I want a
+foreman who has to resort to that kind of thing—to buying off the man
+who licked—”</p>
+
+<p>“I didn’t <i>buy</i> him off,” said Burke, as if he knew the distinction, even
+in his own mind, was a fine one.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes, you did,” answered Farron. And getting up, with his hands in
+his pockets, he added, “I’m afraid your usefulness to me is over, Burke.”</p>
+
+<p>“The hell it is!”</p>
+
+<p>“My wife is here, Marty,” said Farron, very pleasantly. “But this story
+isn’t the only thing I have against you. My friend Mrs. Wayne tells me
+you are exerting a bad influence over a fellow whose marriage she wants
+to get annulled.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, let ’em get it annulled!” shouted Marty on a high and rising key.
+“What do I care? I’ll do anything to oblige if I’m asked right; but when
+Mrs. Wayne and that gang come around bullying me, I won’t do a thing for
+them. But, if you ask me to, Mr. Farron, why, I’m glad to oblige you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you, Marty,” returned his employer, cordially. “If you arrange
+that for me, I must own it would make me feel differently. I tell
+you,” he added, as one who suggests an honorable compromise, “you get
+that settled up, you get that marriage annulled—that is, if you think
+you can—”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure I can,” Burke replied, swaying his body about from the waist up, as
+if to indicate the ease with which it could be accomplished.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, when that’s done, come back, and we’ll talk over the other matter.
+Perhaps, after all—well, we’ll talk it over.”</p>
+
+<p>Burke walked to the door with his usual conquering step, but there
+turned.</p>
+
+<p>“Say,” he said, “that story about the fight—” He looked at Adelaide.
+“Ladies don’t always understand these matters. Tell her, will you, that
+it’s done in some first-class fights?”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll explain,” answered Vincent.</p>
+
+<p>“And there ain’t any use in the story’s getting about,” Burke added.</p>
+
+<p>“It won’t,” said Vincent. On which assurance Marty went away and left the
+husband and wife alone.</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide got up and went to the window and looked out toward the
+Palisades. Marty Burke had been a symbol that enabled her to recall some
+of her former attitudes of mind. She remembered that dinner where she had
+pitted him against her husband. She felt deeply humiliated in her own
+sight and in Vincent’s, for she was now ready to believe that he had read
+her mind from the beginning. It seemed to her as if she had been mad, and
+in that madness had thrown away the only thing in the world she would
+ever value. The thought of acknowledging her fault was not repugnant to
+her; she had no special objection to groveling, but she knew it would do
+no good. Vincent, though not ungenerous, saw clearly; and he had summed
+up the situation in that terrible phrase about choosing between loving
+and being loved. “I suppose I shouldn’t respect him much if he did
+forgive me,” she thought; and suddenly she felt his arms about her; he
+snatched her to him, turned her face to his, calling her by strange,
+unpremeditated terms of endearment. Beyond these, no words at all were
+exchanged between them; they were undesired. Adelaide did not know
+whether it were servile or superb to care little about knowing his
+opinion and intentions in regard to her. All that she cared about was
+that in her eyes he was once more supreme and that his arms were about
+her. Words, she knew, would have been her enemies, and she did not make
+use of them.</p>
+
+<p>When they went out, they passed Wayne in the outer office.</p>
+
+<p>“Come to dinner to-night, Pete,” said Farron, and added, turning to his
+wife, “That’s all right, isn’t it, Adelaide?”</p>
+
+<p>She indicated that it was perfect, like everything he did.</p>
+
+<p>Wayne looked at his future mother-in-law in surprise. His pride had been
+unforgetably stung by some of her sentences, but he could have forgiven
+those more easily than the easy smile with which she now nodded at her
+husband’s invitation, as if a pleasant intention on her part could wipe
+out everything that had gone before. That, it seemed to him, was the very
+essence of insolence.</p>
+
+<p>Appreciating that some sort of doubt was disturbing him, Adelaide said
+most graciously:</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, you really must come, Mr. Wayne.”</p>
+
+<p>At this moment Farron’s own stenographer, Chandler, approached him with
+an unsigned letter in his hand.</p>
+
+<p>Chandler took the routine of the office more seriously than Farron did,
+and acquired thereby a certain power over his employer. He had something
+of the attitude of a child’s nurse, who, knowing that her charge has
+almost passed beyond her care, recognizes that she has no authority
+except that bestowed by devotion.</p>
+
+<p>“I think you meant to sign this letter, Mr. Farron,” he said, just as a
+nurse might say before strangers, “You weren’t going to the party
+without washing your hands?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh.” Farron fished in his waistcoat for his pen, and while he was
+writing, and Chandler just keeping an eye on him to see that it was done
+right, Adelaide said:</p>
+
+<p>“And how is Mrs. Chandler?”</p>
+
+<p>Chandler’s face lit up as he received the letter back.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, much better, thank you, Mrs. Farron—out of all danger.”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne saw, what Chandler did not, that Adelaide had never even heard of
+Mrs. Chandler’s ill health; but she murmured as she turned away:</p>
+
+<p>“I’m so glad. You must have been very anxious.”</p>
+
+<p>When they were gone, Wayne and Chandler were left a minute alone.</p>
+
+<p>“What a personality!” Chandler exclaimed. “Imagine her remembering my
+troubles, when you think what she has had to worry about! A remarkable
+couple, Mr. Wayne. I have been up to the house a number of times since
+Mr. Farron’s illness, and she is always there, so brave, so attentive. A
+queenly woman, and,” he added, as if the two did not always go together,
+“a good wife.”</p>
+
+<p>Wayne could think of no answer to this eulogy, and as they stood in
+silence the office door opened and Mr. Lanley came in. He nodded to each
+of the two, and moved to Vincent’s room.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Farron has just gone,” said Chandler, firmly. He could not bear to
+have people running in and out of Farron’s room.</p>
+
+<p>“Gone?” said Lanley, as if it were somebody’s fault.</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Farron came down for him in the motor. He appeared to stand his
+first day very well.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lanley glanced quickly from one to the other. This did not sound as
+if any final break had occurred between the Farrons, yet on this subject
+he could hardly question his son-in-law’s secretaries. He made one
+further effort.</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose Mr. Farron thought he was good for a whole day’s work.”</p>
+
+<p>Chandler smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Farron, like all wise men, sir, does what his wife tells him.” And
+then, as he loved his own work far more than conversation, Chandler
+hurried back to his desk.</p>
+
+<p>“I understand,” said Lanley to Wayne, “that you are here regularly now.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes.”</p>
+
+<p>“Like your work?” Lanley was obviously delaying, hoping that some
+information would turn up unexpectedly.</p>
+
+<p>“Very much.”</p>
+
+<p>“Humph! What does your mother think about it?”</p>
+
+<p>“About my new job?” Wayne smiled. “You know those aren’t the kind of
+facts—jobs and salaries—that my mother scrutinizes very closely.”</p>
+
+<p>Lanley stared at him with brows slightly contracted.</p>
+
+<p>“What does she scrutinize?” he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, motives—spiritual things.”</p>
+
+<p>“I see.” Mr. Lanley couldn’t go a step further, couldn’t take this young
+man into his confidence an inch further. He stuck his stick into his
+overcoat-pocket so that it stood upright, and wheeled sharply.</p>
+
+<p>“Good-by,” he said, and added at the door, “I suppose you think this
+makes a difference in your prospects.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Farron has asked me to come to dinner to-night.”</p>
+
+<p>Lanley wheeled back again.</p>
+
+<p>“What?” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, she almost urged me, though I didn’t need urging.”</p>
+
+<p>Lanley didn’t answer, but presently went out in silence. He was
+experiencing the extreme loneliness that follows being more royalist
+than the king.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XVII">CHAPTER XVII</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>On Mondays and Thursdays, the only days Mr. Lanley went down-town, he
+expected to have the corner table at the restaurant where he always
+lunched and where, on leaving Farron’s office, he went. He had barely
+finished ordering luncheon—oyster stew, cold tongue, salad, and a
+bottle of Rhine wine—when, looking up, he saw Wilsey was approaching
+him, beaming.</p>
+
+<p>“Haryer, Wilsey?” he said, without cordiality.</p>
+
+<p>Wilsey, it fortunately appeared, had already had his midday meal, and had
+only a moment or two to give to sociability.</p>
+
+<p>“Haven’t seen you since that delightful evening,” he murmured. “I hope
+Mrs. Baxter got my card.” He mentioned his card as if it had been a gift,
+not munificent, but not negligible, either.</p>
+
+<p>“Suppose she got it if you left it,” said Mr. Lanley, who had heard her
+comment on it. “My man’s pretty good at that sort of thing.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, how rare they are getting!” said Wilsey, with a sigh—“good
+servants. Upon my word, Lanley, I’m almost ready to go.”</p>
+
+<p>“Because you can’t get good servants?” said his friend, who was drumming
+on the table and looking blankly about.</p>
+
+<p>“Because all the old order is passing, all the standards and backgrounds
+that I value. I don’t think I’m a snob—”</p>
+
+<p>“Of course you’re a snob, Wilsey.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Wilsey smiled temperately.</p>
+
+<p>“What do you mean by the word?”</p>
+
+<p>It was a question about which Lanley had been thinking, and he answered:</p>
+
+<p>“I mean a person who values himself for qualities that have no moral,
+financial, or intellectual value whatsoever. You, for instance, Wilsey,
+value yourself not because you are a pretty good lawyer, but because your
+great-grandfather signed the Declaration.”</p>
+
+<p>A shade of slight embarrassment crossed the lawyer’s face.</p>
+
+<p>“I own,” he said, “that I value birth, but so do you, Lanley. You attach
+importance to being a New York Lanley.”</p>
+
+<p>“I do,” answered Lanley; “but I have sense enough to be ashamed of doing
+so. You’re proud of being proud of your old Signer.”</p>
+
+<p>“As a matter of fact,” Mr. Wilsey remarked slowly, “Josiah Wilsey did not
+sign the Declaration.”</p>
+
+<p>“What!” cried Lanley. “You’ve always told me he did.”</p>
+
+<p>Wilsey shook his head gently, as one who went about correcting errors.</p>
+
+<p>“No. What I said was that I feel no moral doubt he would have signed it
+if an attack of illness—”</p>
+
+<p>Lanley gave a short roar.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s just like <i>you</i>, Wilsey. You wouldn’t have signed it, either. You
+would have said that while in cordial sympathy with the ideas set forth,
+you would not care to put your name to a document that might give pain to
+a monarch who, though not as liberal as some of us could wish, was yet—”</p>
+
+<p>“As a matter of fact,” Wilsey began again even more coldly, “I should
+have signed—”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, you think so now. A hundred years from now you’d sign a petition for
+the eight-hour law.”</p>
+
+<p>“Never!” said Wilsey, raising his hand. “I should never put my name to a
+document—” He stopped at another roar from his friend, and never took
+the sentence up again, but indicated with a gesture that only legal minds
+were worth arguing with on points of this sort.</p>
+
+<p>When he had gone, Lanley dipped the spoon in his oyster stew with not a
+little pleasure. Nothing, apparently, could have raised his spirits more
+than the knowledge that old Josiah Wilsey had not signed the Declaration.
+He actually chuckled a little. “So like Wilsey himself,” he thought. “No
+moral courage; calls it conservatism.” Then his joy abated. Just so, he
+thought, must he himself appear to Mrs. Wayne. Yet his self-respect
+insisted that his case was different. Loyalty had been responsible not
+for his conservatism, but for the pig-headedness with which he had acted
+upon it. He would have asked nothing better than to profess himself
+open-minded to Mrs. Wayne’s views, only he could not desert Adelaide in
+the moment of her struggle for beliefs in which he himself had brought
+her up. And now she had deserted him. He alone was left to flaunt a
+banner the motto of which he didn’t wholly believe, while Adelaide, at a
+word from Vincent, had gone over to the other side. And no one knew what
+his loyalty had cost him. Long ago, in his first year at college, he had
+flunked the examination of the professor whom he reverenced above all
+others. No one had cared, no one had long remembered, except Lanley
+himself, and he had remembered because some one had told him what the
+professor said on reading his paper. It was nothing but, “I had supposed
+Lanley was intelligent.” Never again had he had that professor’s
+attention for a single instant. This, it seemed to him, was about to
+happen to him again, now when it was too late in his life to do anything
+but despair.</p>
+
+<p>He called the waiter, paid his bill and tip,—he was an extremely liberal
+tipper; “it’s expected of us,” he used to say, meaning that it was
+expected of people like the New York Lanleys,—and went away.</p>
+
+<p>In old times he had been an inventor of many clever tricks for getting
+up-town by unpopular elevated trains and horse-cars that avoided the
+crowd, but the subway was a great leveler, and he knew no magic except to
+take a local in rush hours. At three o’clock, however, even this was not
+necessary. He took an express, and got off at the Grand Central, turned
+up Park Avenue, and then east. He had just found out that he was going to
+visit Mrs. Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>He read the names in the vestibule, never doubting that Dr. Parret was
+a masculine practitioner, and hesitated at the name of Wayne. He
+thought he ought to ring the bell, but he wanted to go straight up.
+Some one had left the front door unlatched. He pushed it open and began
+the steep ascent.</p>
+
+<p>She came to the door of the flat herself. She had a funny little gray
+shawl about her shoulders and a pen in her hand. She tried to make her
+voice sound very cordial as she greeted him, but he thought he caught
+something that sounded as if, while perfectly well disposed to him, she
+couldn’t for the life of her imagine why he had come.</p>
+
+<p>“Come in,” she said, “though I’m afraid it’s a little cold in here. Our
+janitor—”</p>
+
+<p>“Let me light your fire for you,” he answered, and extracting a
+parlor-match from his pocket,—safety-matches were his bugbear,—he
+stooped, and put the flame to the fire. As he did so he understood
+that it was not the mere forgetfulness of a servant that had left it
+unlighted, but probably a deliberate economy, and he rose crimson
+and unhappy.</p>
+
+<p>It took him some time to recover, and during the entire time she sat in
+her gray shawl, looking very amiable, but plainly unable to think of
+anything to say.</p>
+
+<p>“I saw your son in Farron’s office to-day.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Farron has been so kind, so wonderfully kind!”</p>
+
+<p>Only a guilty conscience could have found reproach in this statement, and
+Lanley said:</p>
+
+<p>“And I hear he is dining at my daughter’s this evening.”</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wayne had had a telephone message to that effect.</p>
+
+<p>“I wondered, if you were alone—” Lanley hesitated. He had of course been
+going to ask her to come and dine with him, but a better inspiration came
+to him. “I wondered if you would ask me to dine with you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Mrs. Wayne, “but I can’t. I have a boy coming.
+He’s studying for the ministry, the most interesting person. He had not
+been sober for three years when I took hold of him, and now he hasn’t
+touched a drop for two.”</p>
+
+<p>He sighed. She said she was sorry, but he could see plainly enough that
+any reformed, or even more any unreformed, drunkard would always far
+surpass him in ability to command her interest. He did not belong to a
+generation that cleared things up with words; he would have thought it
+impertinent, almost ungentlemanly, to probe her attitude of mind about
+the scene at Adelaide’s; and he would have considered himself unmanly to
+make any plea to her on the ground of his own suffering. One simply
+supported such things as best one could; it was expected of one, like
+tipping waiters. He had neither the vocabulary nor the habit of mind that
+made an impersonal exposition of an emotional difficulty possible; but
+even had he possessed these powers he would have retained his tradition
+against using them. Perhaps, if she had been his sister or his wife, he
+might have admitted that he had had a hard day or that every one had
+moments of depression; but that was not the way to talk in a lady’s
+drawing-room. In the silence he saw her eyes steal longingly to her
+writing-table, deeply and hopelessly littered with papers and open books.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m afraid I’m detaining you,” he said. The visit had been a failure.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, not at all,” she replied, and then added in a tone of more
+sincerity: “I do have the most terrible time with my check-book. And,”
+she added, as one confessing to an absurdly romantic ideal, “I was trying
+to balance it.”</p>
+
+<p>“You should not be troubled with such things,” said Mr. Lanley, thinking
+how long it was since any one but a secretary had balanced his books.</p>
+
+<p>Pete, it appeared, usually did attend to his mother’s checks, but of
+late she had not liked to bother him, and that was just the moment the
+bank had chosen to notify her that she had overdrawn. “I don’t see how I
+can be,” she said, too hopeless to deny it.</p>
+
+<p>“If you would allow me,” said Mr. Lanley. “I am an excellent bookkeeper.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I shouldn’t like to trouble you,” said Mrs. Wayne, but she made it
+clear she would like it above everything; so Lanley put on his
+spectacles, drew up his chair, and squared his elbows to the job.</p>
+
+<p>“It hasn’t been balanced since—dear me! not since October,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“I know; but I draw such small checks.”</p>
+
+<p>“But you draw a good many.”</p>
+
+<p>She had risen, and was standing before the fire, with her hands behind
+her back. Her shawl had slipped off, and she looked, in her short
+walking-skirt, rather like a school-girl being reprimanded for a poor
+exercise. She felt so when, looking up at her over his spectacles, he
+observed severely:</p>
+
+<p>“You really must be more careful about carrying forward. Twice you have
+carried forward an amount from two pages back instead of—”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s always the way,” she interrupted. “Whenever people look at my
+check-book they take so long scolding me about the way I do it that
+there’s no time left for putting it right.”</p>
+
+<p>“I won’t say another word,” returned Lanley; “only it would really
+help you—”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t want any one to do it who says my sevens are like fours,” she
+went on. Lanley compressed his lips slightly, but contented himself by
+merely lengthening the tail of a seven. He said nothing more, but every
+time he found an error he gave a little shake of his head that went
+through her like a knife.</p>
+
+<p>The task was a long one. The light of the winter afternoon faded, and she
+lit the lamps before he finished. At first he had tried not to be aware
+of revelations that the book made; but as he went on and he found he was
+obliged now and then to question her about payments and receipts, he saw
+that she was so utterly without any sense of privacy in the matter that
+his own decreased.</p>
+
+<p>He had never thought of her as being particularly poor, not at least in
+the sense of worrying over every bill, but now when he saw the small
+margin between the amounts paid in and the amounts paid out, when he
+noticed how large a proportion of what she had she spent in free gifts
+and not in living expenses, he found himself facing something he could
+not tolerate. He put his pen down carefully in the crease of the book,
+and rose to his feet.</p>
+
+<p>“Mrs. Wayne,” he said, “I must tell you something.”</p>
+
+<p>“You’re going to say, after all, that my sevens are like fours.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m going to say something worse—more inexcusable. I’m going to tell
+you how much I want you to honor me by becoming my wife.”</p>
+
+<p>She pronounced only one syllable. She said, “<i>Oh</i>!” as crowds say it when
+a rocket goes off.</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose you think it ridiculous in a man of my age to speak of love,
+but it’s not ridiculous, by Heaven! It’s tragic. I shouldn’t have
+presumed, though, to mention the subject to you, only it is intolerable
+to me to think of your lacking anything when I have so much. I can’t
+explain why this knowledge gave me courage. I know that you care nothing
+for luxuries and money, less than any one I know; but the fact that you
+haven’t everything that you ought to have makes me suffer so much that I
+hope you will at least listen to me.”</p>
+
+<p>“But you know it doesn’t make me suffer a bit,” said Mrs. Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>“To know you at all has been such a happiness that I am shocked at my own
+presumption in asking for your companionship for the rest of my life, and
+if in addition to that I could take care of you, share with you—”</p>
+
+<p>No one ever presented a proposition to Mrs. Wayne without finding her
+willing to consider it, an open-mindedness that often led her into the
+consideration of absurdities. And now the sacred cupidity of the
+reformer did for an instant leap up within her. All the distressed
+persons, all the tottering causes in which she was interested, seemed to
+parade before her eyes. Then, too, the childish streak in her character
+made her remember how amusing it would be to be Adelaide Farron’s
+mother-in-law, and Pete’s grandmother by marriage. Nor was she at all
+indifferent to the flattery of the offer or the touching reserves of her
+suitor’s nature.</p>
+
+<p>“I should think you would be so lonely!” he said gently.</p>
+
+<p>She nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“I am often. I miss not having any one to talk to over the little things
+that”—she laughed—“I probably wouldn’t talk over if I had some one.
+But even with Pete I am lonely. I want to be first with some one again.”</p>
+
+<p>“You will always be first with me.”</p>
+
+<p>“Even if I don’t marry you?”</p>
+
+<p>“Whatever you do.”</p>
+
+<p>Like the veriest coquette, she instantly decided to take all and give
+nothing—to take his interest, his devotion, his loyalty, all of the
+first degree, and give him in return a divided interest, a loyalty too
+much infected by humor to be complete, and a devotion in which several
+causes and Pete took precedence. She did not do this in ignorance. On the
+contrary, she knew just how it would be; that he would wait and she be
+late, that he would adjust himself and she remain unchanged, that he
+would give and give and she would never remember that it would be kind
+some day to ask. Yet it did not seem to her an unfair bargain, and
+perhaps she was right.</p>
+
+<p>“I couldn’t marry you,” she said. “I couldn’t change. All your pretty
+things and the way you live—it would be like a cage to me. I like my
+life the way it is; but yours—”</p>
+
+<p>“Do you think I would ask Wilsey to dinner every night or try to mold you
+to be like Mrs. Baxter?”</p>
+
+<p>She laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“You’d have a hard time. I never could have married again. I’d make you a
+poor wife, but I’m a wonderful friend.”</p>
+
+<p>“Your friendship would be more happiness than I had any right to hope
+for,” and then he added in a less satisfied tone: “But friendship is so
+uncertain. You don’t make any announcements to your friends or vows to
+each other, unless you’re at an age when you cut your initials in the
+bark of a tree. That’s what I’d like to do. I suppose you think I’m an
+old fool.”</p>
+
+<p>“Two of us,” said Mrs. Wayne, and wiped her eyes. She cried easily, and
+had never felt the least shame about it.</p>
+
+<p>It was a strange compact—strange at least for her, considering that only
+a few hours before she had thought of him as a friendly, but
+narrow-minded, old stranger. Something weak and malleable in her nature
+made her enter lightly into the compact, although all the time she knew
+that something more deeply serious and responsible would never allow her
+to break it. A faint regret for even an atom of lost freedom, a vein of
+caution and candor, made her say:</p>
+
+<p>“I’m so afraid you’ll find me unsatisfactory. Every one has, even Pete.”</p>
+
+<p>“I think I shall ask less than any one,” he returned.</p>
+
+<p>The answer pleased her strangely.</p>
+
+<p>Presently a ring came at the bell—a telegram. The expected guest was
+detained at the seminary. Lanley watched with agonized attention. She
+appeared to be delighted.</p>
+
+<p>“Now you’ll stay to dine,” she said. “I can’t remember what there is
+for dinner.”</p>
+
+<p>“Now, that’s not friendly at the start,” said he, “to think I
+care so much.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, you’re not like a theological student.”</p>
+
+<p>“A good deal better, probably,” answered Lanley, with a gruffness that
+only partly hid his happiness. There was no real cloud in his sky. If
+Mrs. Wayne had accepted his offer of marriage, by this time he would have
+begun to think of the horror of telling Adelaide and Mathilde and his own
+servants. Now he thought of nothing but the agreeable evening before him,
+one of many.</p>
+
+<p>When Pete came in to dress, Lanley was just in the act of drawing the
+last neat double lines for his balance. He had been delayed by the fact
+that Mrs. Wayne had been talking to him almost continuously since his
+return to figuring. She was in high spirits, for even saints are
+stimulated by a respectful adoration.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XVIII">CHAPTER XVIII</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>Recognizing the neat back of Mr. Lanley’s gray head, Pete’s first idea
+was that he must have come to induce Mrs. Wayne to conspire with him
+against the marriage; but he abandoned this notion on seeing his
+occupation.</p>
+
+<p>“Hullo, Mr. Lanley,” he said, stooping to kiss his mother with the casual
+affection of the domesticated male. “You have my job.”</p>
+
+<p>“It is a great pleasure to be of any service,” said Mr. Lanley.</p>
+
+<p>“It was in a terrible state, it seems, Pete,” said his mother.</p>
+
+<p>“She makes her fours just like sevens, doesn’t she?” observed Pete.</p>
+
+<p>“I did not notice the similarity,” replied Mr. Lanley. He glanced at Mrs.
+Wayne, however, and enjoyed his denial almost as much as he had enjoyed
+the discovery that the Wilsey ancestor had not been a Signer. He felt
+that somehow, owing to his late-nineteenth-century tact, the breach
+between him and Pete had been healed.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Lanley is going to stay and dine with me,” said Mrs. Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>Pete looked a little grave, but his next sentence explained the cause of
+his anxiety.</p>
+
+<p>“Wouldn’t you like me to go out and get something to eat, Mother?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, no,” answered his mother, firmly. “This time there really is
+something in the house quite good. I don’t remember what it is.”</p>
+
+<p>And then Pete, who felt he had done his duty, went off to dress. Soon,
+however, his voice called from an adjoining room.</p>
+
+<p>“Hasn’t that woman sent back any of my collars, Mother dear?”</p>
+
+<p>“O Pete, her daughter got out of the reformatory only yesterday,” Mrs.
+Wayne replied. Lanley saw that the Wayne housekeeping was immensely
+complicated by crime. “I believe I am the only person in your employ not
+a criminal,” he said, closing the books. “These balance now.”</p>
+
+<p>“Have I anything left?”</p>
+
+<p>“Only about a hundred and fifty.”</p>
+
+<p>She brightened at this.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, come,” she said, “that’s not so bad. I couldn’t have been so
+terribly overdrawn, after all.”</p>
+
+<p>“You ought not to overdraw at all,” said Mr. Lanley, severely. “It’s not
+fair to the bank.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I never mean to,” she replied, as if no one could ask more
+than that.</p>
+
+<p>Presently she left him to go and dress for dinner. He felt
+extraordinarily at home, left alone like this among her belongings. He
+wandered about looking at the photographs—photographs of Pete as a
+child, a photograph of an old white house with wisteria-vines on it; a
+picture of her looking very much as she did now, with Pete as a little
+boy, in a sailor suit, leaning against her; and then a little photograph
+of her as a girl not much older than Mathilde, he thought—a girl who
+looked a little frightened and awkward, as girls so often looked, and yet
+to whom the French photographer—for it was taken in the Place de la
+Madeleine—had somehow contrived to give a Parisian air. He had never
+thought of her in Paris. He took the picture up; it was dated May, 1884.
+He thought back carefully. Yes, he had been in Paris himself that spring,
+a man of thirty-three or so, feeling as old almost as he did to-day, a
+widower with his little girl. If only they might have met then, he and
+that serious, starry-eyed girl in the photograph!</p>
+
+<p>Hearing Pete coming, he set the photograph back in its place, and,
+sitting down, picked up the first paper within reach.</p>
+
+<p>“Good night, sir,” said Pete from the doorway.</p>
+
+<p>“Good night, my dear boy. Good luck!” They shook hands.</p>
+
+<p>“Funny old duck,” Pete thought as he went down-stairs whistling,
+“sitting there so contentedly reading ‘The Harvard Lampoon.’ Wonder what
+he thinks of it.”</p>
+
+<p>He did not wonder long, though, for more interesting subjects of
+consideration were at hand. What reception would he meet at the Farrons?
+What arrangements would be made, what assumptions permitted? But even
+more immediate than this was the problem how could he contrive to greet
+Mrs. Farron? He was shocked to find how little he had been able to
+forgive her. There was something devilish, he thought, in the way she had
+contrived to shake his self-confidence at the moment of all others when
+he had needed it. He could never forget a certain contemptuous curve in
+her fine, clear profile or the smooth delight of her tone at some of her
+own cruelties. Some day he would have it out with her when the right
+moment came. Before he reached the house he had had time to sketch a
+number of scenes in which she, caught extraordinarily red-handed, was
+forced to listen to his exposition of the evil of such methods as hers.
+He would say to her, “I remember that you once said to me, Mrs.
+Farron—” Anger cut short his vision as a cloud of her phrases came back
+to him, like stinging bees.</p>
+
+<p>He had hoped for a minute alone with Mathilde, but as Pringle opened the
+drawing-room door for him he heard the sound of laughter, and seeing that
+even Mrs. Farron herself was down, he exclaimed quickly:</p>
+
+<p>“What, am I late?”</p>
+
+<p>Every one laughed all the more at this.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s just what Mr. Farron said you would say at finding that Mama was
+dressed in time,” exclaimed Mathilde, casting an admiring glance at her
+stepfather.</p>
+
+<p>“You’d suppose I’d never been in time for dinner before,” remarked
+Adelaide, giving Wayne her long hand.</p>
+
+<p>“But isn’t it wonderful, Pete,” put in Mathilde, “how Mr. Farron is
+always right?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I hope he isn’t,” said Adelaide; “for what do you think he has just
+been telling me—that you’d always hate me, Pete, as long as you lived.
+You see,” she went on, the little knot coming in her eyebrows, “I’ve been
+telling him all the things I said to you yesterday. They did sound rather
+awful, and I think I’ve forgotten some of the worst.”</p>
+
+<p>“<i>I</i> haven’t,” said Pete.</p>
+
+<p>“I remember I told you you were no one.”</p>
+
+<p>“You said I was a perfectly nice young man.”</p>
+
+<p>“And that you had no business judgment.”</p>
+
+<p>“And that I was mixing Mathilde up with a fraud.”</p>
+
+<p>“And that I couldn’t see any particular reason why she cared about you.”</p>
+
+<p>“That you only asked that your son-in-law should be a person.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am afraid I said something about not coming to a house where you
+weren’t welcome.”</p>
+
+<p>“I know you said something about a bribe.”</p>
+
+<p>At this Adelaide laughed out loud.</p>
+
+<p>“I believe I did,” she said. “What things one does say sometimes! There’s
+dinner.” She rose, and tucked her hand under his arm. “Will you take me
+in to dinner, Pete, or do you think I’m too despicable to be fed?”</p>
+
+<p>The truth was that they were all four in such high spirits that they
+could no more help playing together than four colts could help playing in
+a grass field. Besides, Vincent had taunted Adelaide with her inability
+ever to make it up with Wayne. She left no trick unturned.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know,” she went on as they sat down at table, “that a marriage
+is quite legal unless you hate your mother-in-law. I ought to give you
+some opportunity to go home and say to Mrs. Wayne, ‘But I’m afraid I
+shall never be able to get on with Mrs. Farron.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, he’s said that already,” remarked Vincent.</p>
+
+<p>“Many a time,” said Pete.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde glanced a little fearfully at her mother. The talk seemed to her
+amusing, but dangerous.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then, shall we have a feud, Pete?” said Adelaide in a
+glass-of-wine-with-you-sir tone. “A good feud in a family can be made
+very amusing.”</p>
+
+<p>“It would be all right for us, of course,” said Pete, “but it would be
+rather hard on Mathilde.”</p>
+
+<p>“Mathilde is a better fighter than either of you,” put in Vincent.
+“Adelaide has no continuity of purpose, and you, Pete, are wretchedly
+kind-hearted; but Mathilde would go into it to the death.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Farron,” exclaimed Mathilde,
+tremendously flattered, and hoping he would go on. “I don’t like
+to fight.”</p>
+
+<p>“Neither did Stonewall Jackson, I believe, until they fixed bayonets.”</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde, dropping her eyes, saw Pete’s hand lying on the table. It was
+stubby, and she loved it the better for being so; it was firm and boyish
+and exactly like Pete. Looking up, she caught her mother’s eye, and they
+both remembered. For an instant indecision flickered in Adelaide’s look,
+but she lacked the complete courage to add that to the list—to tell any
+human being that she had said his hands were stubby; and so her eyes fell
+before her daughter’s.</p>
+
+<p>As dinner went on the adjustment between the four became more nearly
+perfect; the gaiety, directed by Adelaide, lost all sting. But even as
+she talked to Pete she was only dimly aware of his existence. Her
+audience was her husband. She was playing for his praise and admiration,
+and before soup was over she knew she had it; she knew better than words
+could tell her that he thought her the most desirable woman in the world.
+Fortified by that knowledge, the pacification of a cross boy seemed to
+Adelaide an inconsiderable task.</p>
+
+<p>By the time they rose from table it was accomplished. As they went into
+the drawing-room Adelaide was thinking that young men were really rather
+geese, but, then, one wouldn’t have them different if one could.</p>
+
+<p>Vincent was thinking how completely attaching a nature like hers would
+always be to him, since when she yielded her will to his she did it with
+such complete generosity.</p>
+
+<p>Mathilde was saying to herself:</p>
+
+<p>“Of course I knew Pete’s charm would win Mama at last, but even I did not
+suppose he could do it the very first evening.”</p>
+
+<p>And Pete was thinking:</p>
+
+<p>“A former beauty thinks she can put anything over, and in a way she can.
+I feel rather friendly toward her.”</p>
+
+<p>The Farrons had decided while they were dressing that after dinner they
+would retire to Vincent’s study and give the lovers a few minutes to
+themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Left alone, Pete and Mathilde stood looking seriously at each other, and
+then at the room which only a few weeks before had witnessed their first
+prolonged talk.</p>
+
+<p>“I never saw your mother look a quarter as beautiful as she does this
+evening,” said Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>“Isn’t she marvelous, the way she can make up for everything when she
+wants?” Mathilde answered with enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p>Pete shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>“She can never make up for one thing.”</p>
+
+<p>“O Pete!”</p>
+
+<p>“She can never give me back my first instinctive, egotistical, divine
+conviction that there was every reason why you should love me. I shall
+always hear her voice saying, ‘But why should Mathilde love you?’ And I
+shall never know a good answer.”</p>
+
+<p>“What,” cried Mathilde, “don’t you know the answer to that! I do. Mama
+doesn’t, of course. Mama loves people for reasons outside themselves: she
+loves me because I’m her child, and Grandpapa because he’s her father,
+and Mr. Farron because she thinks he’s strong. If she didn’t think him
+strong, I’m not sure she’d love him. But <i>I</i> love <i>you</i> for being just as
+you are, because you are my choice. Whatever you do or say, that can’t be
+changed—”</p>
+
+<p>The door opened, and Pringle entered with a tray in his hand, and his
+eyes began darting about in search of empty coffee-cups. Mathilde and
+Pete were aware of a common feeling of guilt, not that they were
+concealing the cups, though there was something of that accusation in
+Pringle’s expression, but because the pause between them was so obvious.
+So Mathilde said suddenly:</p>
+
+<p>“Pringle, Mr. Wayne and I are engaged to be married.”</p>
+
+<p>“Indeed, Miss?” said Pringle, with a smile; and so seldom was this
+phenomenon seen to take place that Wayne noted for the first time that
+Pringle’s teeth were false. “I’m delighted to hear it; and you, too, sir.
+This is a bad world to go through alone.”</p>
+
+<p>“Do you approve of marriage, Pringle?” said Wayne.</p>
+
+<p>The cups, revealing themselves one by one, were secured as Pringle
+answered:</p>
+
+<p>“In my class of life, sir, we don’t give much time to considering what we
+approve of and disapprove of. But young people are all alike when they’re
+first engaged, always wondering how it is going to turn out, and hoping
+the other party won’t know that they’re wondering. But when you get old,
+and you look back on all the mistakes and the disadvantages and the
+sacrifices, you’ll find that you won’t be able to imagine that you could
+have gone through it with any other person—in spite of her faults,” he
+added almost to himself.</p>
+
+<p>When he was gone, Pete and Mathilde turned and kissed each other.</p>
+
+<p>“When we get old—” they murmured.</p>
+
+<p>They really believed that it could never happen to them.
+</p>
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11325 ***</div>
+</body>
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Happiest Time of Their Lives , by Alice
+Duer Miller
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Happiest Time of Their Lives 
+
+Author: Alice Duer Miller
+
+Release Date: February 26, 2004  [eBook #11325]
+[Date last updated: October 6, 2004]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HAPPIEST TIME OF THEIR LIVES
+***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Mary Meehan and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team. Produced from page
+images provided by the Million Book Project.
+
+
+
+THE HAPPIEST TIME OF THEIR LIVES
+
+BY ALICE DUER MILLER
+
+Author of "Come Out of the Kitchen," "Ladies Must Live," "Wings in the
+Nights," etc.
+
+1918
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TO CLARENCE DAY, JR.
+
+
+"... and then he added in a less satisfied tone: "But friendship is so
+uncertain. You don't make any announcement to your friends or vows to
+each other, unless you're at an age when you cut your initials in the
+bark of a tree. That's what I'd like to do."
+
+
+
+
+THE HAPPIEST TIME OF THEIR LIVES
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Little Miss Severance sat with her hands as cold as ice. The stage of her
+coming adventure was beautifully set--the conventional stage for the
+adventure of a young girl, her mother's drawing-room. Her mother had the
+art of setting stages. The room was not large,--a New York brownstone
+front in the upper Sixties even though altered as to entrance, and
+allowed to sprawl backward over yards not originally intended for its
+use, is not a palace,--but it was a room and not a corridor; you had the
+comfortable sense of four walls about you when its one small door was
+once shut. It was filled, perhaps a little too much filled, with objects
+which seemed to have nothing in common except beauty; but propinquity,
+propinquity of older date than the house in which they now were, had
+given them harmony. Nothing in the room was modern except some uncommonly
+comfortable sofas and chairs, and the pink and yellow roses that stood
+about in Chinese bowls.
+
+Miss Severance herself was hardly aware of the charm of the room. On the
+third floor she had her own room, which she liked much better. There was
+a great deal of bright chintz in it, and maple furniture of a late
+colonial date, inherited from her mother's family, the Lanleys, and
+discarded by her mother, who described the taste of that time as "pure,
+but provincial." Crystal and ivories and carved wood and Italian
+embroideries did not please Miss Severance half so well as the austere
+lines of those work-tables and high-boys.
+
+It was after five, almost half-past, and he had said "about five." Miss
+Severance, impatient to begin the delicious experience of anticipation,
+had allowed herself to be ready at a quarter before the hour. Not that
+she had been entirely without some form of anticipation since she woke
+up; not, perhaps, since she had parted from him under the windy awning
+the night before. They had held up a long line of restless motors as she
+stood huddled in her fur-trimmed cloak, and he stamped and jigged to
+keep warm, bareheaded, in his thin pumps and shining shirt-front, with
+his shoulders drawn up and his hands in his pockets, while they almost
+awkwardly arranged this meeting for the next day.
+
+Several times during the preceding evening she had thought he was going
+to say something of the kind, for they had danced together a great deal;
+but they had always danced in silence. At the time, with his arm about
+her, silence had seemed enough; but in separation there is something
+wonderfully solid and comforting in the memory of a spoken word; it is
+like a coin in the pocket. And after Miss Severance had bidden him good
+night at the long glass door of the paneled ball-room without his saying
+anything of a future meeting, she had gone up-stairs with a heavy heart
+to find her maid and her wrap. She knew as soon as she reached the
+dressing-room that she had actually hurried her departure for the sake of
+the parting; for the hope, as their time together grew short, of having
+some certainty to look forward to. But he had said nothing, and she had
+been ashamed to find that she was waiting, leaving her hand in his too
+long; so that at last she snatched it away, and was gone up-stairs in an
+instant, fearing he might have guessed what was going on in her mind.
+
+She had thought it just an accident that he was in the hall when she
+came down again, and he hadn't much choice, she said to herself, about
+helping her into her motor. Then at the very last moment he had asked
+if he mightn't come and see her the next afternoon. Miss Severance, who
+was usually sensitive to inconveniencing other people, had not cared at
+all about the motor behind hers that was tooting its horn or for the
+elderly lady in feathers and diamonds who was waiting to get into it.
+She had cared only about arranging the hour and impressing the address
+upon him. He had given her back the pleasure of her whole evening like
+a parting gift.
+
+As she drove home she couldn't bring herself to doubt, though she tried
+to be rational about the whole experience, that it had meant as much to
+him as it had to her, perhaps more. Her lips curved a little at the
+thought, and she glanced quickly at her maid to see if the smile had
+been visible in the glare of the tall, double lamps of Fifth Avenue.
+
+To say she had not slept would be untrue, but she had slept close to the
+surface of consciousness, as if a bright light were shining somewhere
+near, and she had waked with the definite knowledge that this light was
+the certainty of seeing him that very day. The morning had gone very
+well; she had even forgotten once or twice for a few seconds, and then
+remembered with a start of joy that was almost painful: but, after lunch,
+time had begun to drag like the last day of a long sea-voyage.
+
+About three she had gone out with her mother in the motor, with the
+understanding that she was to be left at home at four; her mother was
+going on to tea with an elderly relation. Fifth Avenue had seemed
+unusually crowded even for Fifth Avenue, and the girl had fretted and
+wondered at the perversity of the police, who held them up just at the
+moment most promising for slipping through; and why Andrews, the
+chauffeur, could not see that he would do better by going to Madison
+Avenue. She did not speak these thoughts aloud, for she had not told
+her mother, not from any natural love of concealment, but because any
+announcement of her plans for the afternoon would have made them seem
+less certain of fulfilment. Perhaps, too, she had felt an
+unacknowledged fear of certain of her mother's phrases that could
+delicately puncture delight.
+
+She had been dropped at the house by ten minutes after four, and exactly
+at a quarter before five she had been in the drawing-room, in her
+favorite dress, with her best slippers, her hands cold, but her heart
+warm with the knowledge that he would soon be there.
+
+Only after forty-five minutes of waiting did that faith begin to grow
+dim. She was too inexperienced in such matters to know that this was the
+inevitable consequence of being ready too early. She had had time to run
+through the whole cycle of certainty, eagerness, doubt, and she was now
+rapidly approaching despair. He was not coming. Perhaps he had never
+meant to come. Possibly he had merely yielded to a polite impulse;
+possibly her manner had betrayed her wishes so plainly that a clever,
+older person, two or three years out of college, had only too clearly
+read her in the moment when she had detained his hand at the door of the
+ball-room.
+
+There was a ring at the bell. Her heart stood perfectly still, and then
+began beating with a terrible force, as if it gathered itself into a
+hard, weighty lump again and again. Several minutes went by, too long for
+a man to give to taking off his coat. At last she got up and cautiously
+opened the door; a servant was carrying a striped cardboard box to her
+mother's room. Miss Severance went back and sat down. She took a long
+breath; her heart returned to its normal movement.
+
+Yet, for some unexplained reason, the fact that the door-bell had rung
+once made it more possible that it would ring again, and she began to
+feel a slight return of confidence.
+
+A servant opened the door, and in the instant before she turned her head
+she had time to debate the possibility of a visitor having come in
+without ringing while the messenger with the striped box was going out.
+But, no; Pringle was alone.
+
+Pringle had been with the family since her mother was a girl, but, like
+many red-haired men, he retained an appearance of youth. He wanted to
+know if he should take away the tea.
+
+She knew perfectly why he asked. He liked to have the tea-things put away
+before he had his own supper and began his arrangements for the family
+dinner. She felt that the crisis had come.
+
+If she said yes, she knew that her visitor would come just as tea had
+disappeared. If she said no, she would sit there alone, waiting for
+another half-hour, and when she finally did ring and tell Pringle he
+could take away the tea-things, he would look wise and reproachful.
+Nevertheless, she did say no, and Pringle with admirable
+self-control, withdrew.
+
+The afternoon seemed very quiet. Miss Severance became aware of all
+sorts of bells that she had never heard before--other door-bells,
+telephone-bells in the adjacent houses, loud, hideous bells on motor
+delivery-wagons, but not her own front door-bell.
+
+Her heart felt like lead. Things would never be the same now. Probably
+there was some explanation of his not coming, but it could never be
+really atoned for. The wild romance and confidence in this first visit
+could never be regained.
+
+And then there was a loud, quick ring at the bell, and at once he was in
+the room, breathing rapidly, as if he had run up-stairs or even from the
+corner. She could do nothing but stare at him. She had tried in the last
+ten minutes to remember what he looked like, and now she was astonished
+to find how exactly he looked as she remembered him.
+
+To her horror, the change between her late despair and her present joy
+was so extreme that she wanted to cry. The best she knew how to do was to
+pucker her face into a smile and to offer him those chilly finger-tips.
+
+He hardly took them, but said, as if announcing a black, but
+incontrovertible, fact:
+
+"You're not a bit glad to see me."
+
+"Oh, yes, I am," she returned, with an attempt at an easy social manner.
+"Will you have some tea?"
+
+"But why aren't you glad?"
+
+Miss Severance clasped her hands on the edge of the tea-tray and looked
+down. She pressed her palms together; she set her teeth, but the muscles
+in her throat went on contracting; and the heroic struggle was lost.
+
+"I thought you weren't coming," she said, and making no further effort
+to conceal the fact that her eyes were full of tears she looked straight
+up at him.
+
+He sat down beside her on the small, low sofa and put his hand on hers.
+
+"But I was perfectly certain to come," he said very gently, "because, you
+see, I think I love you."
+
+"Do you think I love you?" she asked, seeking information.
+
+"I can't tell," he answered. "Your being sorry I did not come doesn't
+prove anything. We'll see. You're so wonderfully young, my dear!"
+
+"I don't think eighteen is so young. My mother was married before she
+was twenty."
+
+He sat silent for a few seconds, and she felt his hand shut more firmly
+on hers. Then he got up, and, pulling a chair to the opposite side of
+the table, said briskly:
+
+"And now give me some tea. I haven't had any lunch."
+
+"Oh, why not?" She blew her nose, tucked away her handkerchief, and began
+her operations on the tea-tray.
+
+"I work very hard," he returned. "You don't know what at, do you? I'm a
+statistician."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"I make reports on properties, on financial ventures, for the firm I'm
+with, Benson & Honaton. They're brokers. When they are asked to
+underwrite a scheme--"
+
+"Underwrite? I never heard that word."
+
+The boy laughed.
+
+"You'll hear it a good many times if our acquaintance continues." Then
+more gravely, but quite parenthetically, he added: "If a firm puts up
+money for a business, they want to know all about it, of course. I tell
+them. I've just been doing a report this afternoon, a wonder; it's what
+made me late. Shall I tell you about it?"
+
+She nodded with the same eagerness with which ten years before she might
+have answered an inquiry as to whether he should tell her a fairy-story.
+
+"Well, it was on a coal-mine in Pennsylvania. I'm afraid my report is
+going to be a disappointment to the firm. The mine's good, a sound, rich
+vein, and the labor conditions aren't bad; but there's one fatal
+defect--a car shortage on the only railroad that reaches it. They can't
+make a penny on their old mine until that's met, and that can't be
+straightened out for a year, anyhow; and so I shall report against it."
+
+"Car shortage," said Miss Severance. "I never should have thought of
+that. I think you must be wonderful."
+
+He laughed.
+
+"I wish the firm thought so," he said. "In a way they do; they pay
+attention to what I say, but they give me an awfully small salary. In
+fact," he added briskly, "I have almost no money at all." There was a
+pause, and he went on, "I suppose you know that when I was sitting beside
+you just now I wanted most terribly to kiss you."
+
+"Oh, no!"
+
+"Oh, no? Oh, yes. I wanted to, but I didn't. Don't worry. I won't for a
+long time, perhaps never."
+
+"Never?" said Miss Severance, and she smiled.
+
+"I said _perhaps_ never. You can't tell. Life turns up some awfully queer
+tricks now and then. Last night, for example. I walked into that ballroom
+thinking of nothing, and there you were--all the rest of the room like a
+sort of shrine for you. I said to a man I was with, 'I want to meet the
+girl who looks like cream in a gold saucer,' and he introduced us. What
+could be stranger than that? Not, as a matter of fact, that I ever
+thought love at first sight impossible, as so many people do."
+
+"But if you don't know the very first thing about a person--" Miss
+Severance began, but he interrupted:
+
+"You have to begin some time. Every pair of lovers have to have a first
+meeting, and those who fall in love at once are just that much further
+ahead." He smiled. "I don't even know your first name."
+
+It seemed miraculous good fortune to have a first name.
+
+"Mathilde."
+
+"Mathilde," he repeated in a lower tone, and his eyes shone
+extraordinarily.
+
+Both of them took some time to recover from the intensity of this moment.
+She wanted to ask him his, but foreseeing that she would immediately be
+required to use it, and feeling unequal to such an adventure, she decided
+it would be wiser to wait. It was he who presently went on:
+
+"Isn't it strange to know so little about each other? I rather like
+it. It's so mad--like opening a chest of buried treasure. You don't
+know what's going to be in it, but you know it's certain to be rare
+and desirable. What do you do, Mathilde? Live here with your father
+and mother?"
+
+She sat looking at him. The truth was that she found everything he said
+so unexpected and thrilling that now and then she lost all sense of being
+expected to answer.
+
+"Oh, yes," she said, suddenly remembering. "I live here with my mother
+and stepfather. My mother has married again. She is Mrs. Vincent Farron."
+
+"Didn't I tell you life played strange tricks?" he exclaimed. He sprang
+up, and took a position on the hearth-rug. "I know all about him. I once
+reported on the Electric Equipment Company. That's the same Farron, isn't
+it? I believe that that company is the most efficient for its size in
+this country, in the world, perhaps. And Farron is your stepfather! He
+must be a wonder."
+
+"Yes, I think he is."
+
+"You don't like him?"
+
+"I like him very much. I don't _love_ him."
+
+"The poor devil!"
+
+"I don't believe he wants people to love him. It would bore him. No,
+that's not quite just. He's kind, wonderfully kind, but he has no little
+pleasantnesses. He says things in a very quiet way that make you feel
+he's laughing at you, though he never does laugh. He said to me this
+morning at breakfast, 'Well, Mathilde, was it a marvelous party?' That
+made me feel as if I used the word 'marvelous' all the time, not a bit
+as if he really wanted to know whether I had enjoyed myself last night."
+
+"And did you?"
+
+She gave him a rapid smile and went on:
+
+"Now, my grandfather, my mother's father--his name is Lanley--(Mr. Lanley
+evidently was not in active business, for it was plain that Wayne,
+searching his memory, found nothing)--my grandfather often scolds me
+terribly for my English,--says I talk like a barmaid, although I tell
+him he ought not to know how barmaids talk,--but he never makes me feel
+small. Sometimes Mr. Farron repeats, weeks afterward, something I've
+said, word for word, the way I said it. It makes it sound so foolish. I'd
+rather he said straight out that he thought I was a goose."
+
+"Perhaps you wouldn't if he did."
+
+"I like people to be human. Mr. Farron's not human."
+
+"Doesn't your mother think so?"
+
+"Mama thinks he's perfect."
+
+"How long have they been married?"
+
+"Ages! Five years!"
+
+"And they're just as much in love?"
+
+Miss Severance looked at him.
+
+"In love?" she said. "At their age?" He laughed at her, and she added:
+"I don't mean they are not fond of each other, but Mr. Farron must be
+forty-five. What I mean by love--" she hesitated.
+
+"Don't stop."
+
+But she did stop, for her quick ears told her that some one was coming,
+and, Pringle opening the door, Mrs. Farron came in.
+
+She was a very beautiful person. In her hat and veil, lit by the friendly
+light of her own drawing-room, she seemed so young as to be actually
+girlish, except that she was too stately and finished for such a word.
+Mathilde did not inherit her blondness from her mother. Mrs. Farron's
+hair was a dark brown, with a shade of red in it where it curved behind
+her ears. She had the white skin that often goes with such hair, and a
+high, delicate color in her cheeks. Her eyebrows were fine and
+excessively dark--penciled, many people thought.
+
+"Mama, this is Mr. Wayne," said Mathilde. Here was another tremendous
+moment crowding upon her--the introduction of her beautiful mother to
+this new friend, but even more, the introduction to her mother of this
+wonderful new friend, whose flavor of romance and interest no one, she
+supposed, could miss. Yet Mrs. Farron seemed to be taking it all very
+calmly, greeting him, taking his chair as being a trifle more comfortable
+than the others, trying to cover the doubt in her own mind whether she
+ought to recognize him as an old acquaintance. Was he new or one of the
+ones she had seen a dozen times before?
+
+There was nothing exactly artificial in Mrs. Farron's manner, but, like a
+great singer who has learned perfect enunciation even in the most trivial
+sentences of every-day matters, she, as a great beauty, had learned the
+perfection of self-presentation, which probably did not wholly desert her
+even in the dentist's chair.
+
+She drew off her long, pale, spotless gloves.
+
+"No tea, my dear," she said. "I've just had it," she added to Wayne,
+"with an old aunt of mine. Aunt Alberta," she threw over her shoulder to
+Mathilde. "I am very unfortunate, Mr. Wayne; this town is full of my
+relations, tucked away in forgotten oases, and I'm their only connection
+with the vulgar, modern world. My aunt's favorite excitement is
+disapproving of me. She was particularly trying to-day." Mrs. Farron
+seemed to debate whether or not it would be tiresome to go thoroughly
+into the problem of Aunt Alberta, and to decide that it would; for she
+said, with an abrupt change, "Were you at this party last night that
+Mathilde enjoyed so much?"
+
+"Yes," said Wayne. "Why weren't you?"
+
+"I wasn't asked. It isn't the fashion to ask mothers and daughters to the
+same parties any more. We dance so much better than they do." She leaned
+over, and rang the little enamel bell that dangled at the arm of her
+daughter's sofa. "You can't imagine, Mr. Wayne, how much better I dance
+than Mathilde."
+
+"I hope it needn't be left to the imagination."
+
+"Oh, I'm not sure. That was the subject of Aunt Alberta's talk this
+afternoon--my still dancing. She says she put on caps at thirty-five."
+Mrs. Farron ran her eyebrows whimsically together and looked up at her
+daughter's visitor.
+
+Mathilde was immensely grateful to her mother for taking so much trouble
+to be charming; only now she rather spoiled it by interrupting Wayne in
+the midst of a sentence, as if she had never been as much interested as
+she had seemed. Pringle had appeared in answer to her ring, and she asked
+him sharply:
+
+"Is Mr. Farron in?"
+
+"Mr. Farron's in his room, Madam."
+
+At this she appeared to give her attention wholly back to Wayne, but
+Mathilde knew that she was really busy composing an escape. She seemed to
+settle back, to encourage her visitor to talk indefinitely; but when the
+moment came for her to answer, she rose to her feet in the midst of her
+sentence, and, still talking, wandered to the door and disappeared.
+
+As the door shut firmly behind her Wayne said, as if there had been no
+interruption:
+
+"It was love you were speaking of, you know."
+
+"But don't you think my mother is marvelous?" she asked, not content to
+take up even the absorbing topic until this other matter had received due
+attention.
+
+"I should say so! But one isn't, of course, overwhelmed to find that
+your mother is beautiful."
+
+"And she's so good!" Mathilde went on. "She's always thinking of things
+to do for me and my grandfather and Mr. Farron and all these old, old
+relations. She went away just now only because she knows that as soon as
+Mr. Farron comes in he asks for her. She's perfect to every one."
+
+He came and sat down beside her again.
+
+"It's going to be much easier for her daughter," he said: "you have to
+be perfect only to one person. Now, what was it you were going to say
+about love?"
+
+Again they looked at each other; again Miss Severance had the sensation
+of drowning, of being submerged in some strange elixir.
+
+She was rescued by Pringle's opening the door and announcing:
+
+"Mr. Lanley."
+
+Wayne stood up.
+
+"I suppose I must go," he said.
+
+"No, no," she returned a little wildly, and added, as if this were
+the reason why she opposed his departure. "This is my grandfather. You
+must see him."
+
+Wayne sat down again, in the chair on the other side of the tea-table.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Mathilde had been wrong in telling Wayne that her mother had gone
+upstairs in obedience to an impulse of kindness. She had gone to quiet a
+small, gnawing anxiety that had been with her all the day, a haunting,
+elusive, persistent impression that something was wrong between her and
+her husband.
+
+All the day, as she had gone about from one thing to another, her mind
+had been diligently seeking in some event of the outside world an
+explanation of a slight obscuration of his spirit; but her heart, more
+egotistical, had stoutly insisted that the cause must lie in her. Did he
+love her less? Was she losing her charm for him? Were five years the
+limit of a human relation like theirs? Was she to watch the dying down of
+his flame, and try to shelter and fan it back to life as she had seen so
+many other women do?
+
+Or was the trouble only that she had done something to wound his aloof
+and sensitive spirit, seldom aloof to her? Their intimate life had never
+been a calm one. Farron's interests were concentrated, and his
+temperament was jealous. A woman couldn't, as Adelaide sometimes had
+occasion to say to herself, keep men from making love to her; she did not
+always want to. Farron could be relentless, and she was not without a
+certain contemptuous obstinacy. Yet such conflicts as these she had
+learned not to dread, but sometimes deliberately to precipitate, for they
+ended always in a deeper sense of unity, and, on her part, in a fresh
+sense of his supremacy.
+
+If he had been like most of the men she knew, she would have assumed that
+something had gone wrong in business. With her first husband she had
+always been able to read in his face as he entered the house the full
+history of his business day. Sometimes she had felt that there was
+something insulting in the promptness of her inquiry, "Has anything gone
+wrong, Joe?" But Severance had never appeared to feel the insult; only as
+time went on, had grown more and more ready, as her interest became more
+and more lackadaisical, to pour out the troubles and, much more rarely,
+the joys of his day. One of the things she secretly admired most about
+Farron was his independence of her in such matters. No half-contemptuous
+question would elicit confidence from him, so that she had come to think
+it a great honor if by any chance he did drop her a hint as to the mood
+that his day's work had occasioned. But for the most part he was
+unaffected by such matters. Newspaper attacks and business successes did
+not seem to reach the area where he suffered or rejoiced. They were to be
+dealt with or ignored, but they could neither shadow or elate him.
+
+So that not only egotism, but experience, bade her look to her own
+conduct for some explanation of the chilly little mist that had been
+between them for twenty-four hours.
+
+As soon as the drawing-room door closed behind her she ran up-stairs like
+a girl. There was no light in his study, and she went on into his
+bedroom. He was lying on the sofa; he had taken off his coat, and his
+arms were clasped under his head; he was smoking a long cigar. To find
+him idle was unusual. His was not a contemplative nature; a trade
+journal or a detective novel were the customary solace of odd moments
+like this.
+
+He did not move as she entered, but he turned his eyes slowly and
+seriously upon her. His eyes were black. He was a very dark man, with a
+smooth, brown skin and thick, fine hair, which clung closely to his
+broad, rather massive head. He was clean shaven, so that, as Adelaide
+loved to remember a friend of his had once suggested, his business
+competitors might take note of the stern lines of his mouth and chin.
+
+She came in quickly, and shut the door behind her, and then dropping on
+her knees beside him, she laid her head against his heart. He put out his
+hand, touched her face, and said:
+
+"Take off this veil."
+
+The taking off of Adelaide's veil was not a process to be accomplished
+ill-advisedly or lightly. Lucie, her maid, had put it on, with much
+gathering together and looking into the glass over her mistress's
+shoulder, and it was held in place with shining pins and hair-pins. She
+lifted her head, sank back upon her heels, and raised her arms to the
+offending cobweb of black meshes, while her husband went on in a tone
+not absolutely denuded of reproach:
+
+"You've been in some time."
+
+"Yes,"--she stuck the first pin into the upholstery of the sofa,--"but
+Pringle told me Mathilde had a visitor, and I thought it was my duty to
+stop and be a little parental."
+
+"A young man?"
+
+"Yes. I forget his name--just like all these young men nowadays, alert
+and a little too much at his ease, but amusing in his way. He said, among
+other things--"
+
+But Farron, it appeared, was not exclusively interested in the words of
+Mathilde's visitor; for at this instant, perceiving that his wife had
+disengaged herself from her veil, he sat up, caught her to him, and
+pressed his lips to hers.
+
+"O Adelaide!" he said, and it seemed to her he spoke with a sort of
+agony.
+
+She held him away from her.
+
+"Vincent, what is it?" she asked.
+
+"What is what?"
+
+"Is anything wrong?"
+
+"Between us?"
+
+Oh, she knew that method of his, to lead her on to make definite
+statements about impressions of which nothing definite could be
+accurately said.
+
+"No, I won't be pinned down," she said; "but I feel it, the way a
+rheumatic feels it, when the wind goes into the east."
+
+He continued to look at her gravely; she thought he was going to speak
+when a knock came at the door. It was Pringle announcing the visit of
+Mr. Lanley.
+
+Adelaide rose slowly to her feet, and, walking to her husband's
+dressing-table, repinned her hat, and caught up the little stray locks
+which grew in deep, sharp points at the back of her head.
+
+"You'll come down, too?" she said.
+
+Farron was looking about for his coat, and as he put it on he
+observed dryly:
+
+"The young man is seeing all the family."
+
+"Oh, he won't mind," she answered. "He probably hasn't the slightest wish
+to see Mathilde alone. They both struck me as sorry when I left them;
+they were running down. You can't imagine, Vin, how little romance there
+is among all these young people."
+
+"They leave it to us," he answered. This was exactly in his accustomed
+manner, and as they went down-stairs together her heart felt lighter,
+though the long, black, shiny pin stuck harmlessly into the upholstery of
+the sofa was like a mile-stone, for afterward she remembered that her
+questions had gone unanswered.
+
+Wayne was still in the drawing-room, and Mathilde, who loved her
+grandfather, was making a gentle fuss over him, a process which consisted
+largely in saying: "O Grandfather! Oh, you didn't! O _Grandfather_!"
+
+Mr. Lanley, though a small man and now over sixty, had a distinct
+presence. He wore excellent gray clothes of the same shade as his hair,
+and out of this neutrality of tint his bright, brown eyes sparkled
+piercingly.
+
+He had begun life with the assumption that to be a New York Lanley was in
+itself enough, a comfortable creed in which many of his relations had
+obscurely lived and died. But before he was graduated from Columbia
+College he began to doubt whether the profession of being an aristocrat
+in a democracy was a man's job. At no time in his life did he deny the
+value of birth and breeding; but he came to regard them as a
+responsibility solemn and often irritating to those who did not possess
+them, though he was no longer content with the current views of his
+family that they were a sufficient attainment in themselves.
+
+He was graduated from college in 1873, and after a summer at the family
+place on the Hudson, hot, fertile, and inaccessible, which his sister
+Alberta was at that time occupying, he had arranged a trip round the
+world. September of that year brought the great panic, and swept away
+many larger and solider fortunes than the Lanleys'. Mr. Lanley decided
+that he must go to work, though he abandoned his traditions no further
+than to study law. His ancestors, like many of the aristocrats of the
+early days, had allowed their opinions of fashion to influence too much
+their selection of real estate. All through the late seventies, while his
+brothers and sisters were clinging sentimentally to brownstone fronts in
+Stuyvesant Square or red-brick facades in Great Jones Street, Mr. Lanley
+himself, unaffected by recollections of Uncle Joel's death or grandma's
+marriage, had been parting with his share in such properties, and
+investing along the east side of the park.
+
+By the time he was forty he was once more a fairly rich man. He had left
+the practice of law to become the president of the Peter Stuyvesant Trust
+Company, for which he had been counsel. After fifteen years he had
+retired from this, too, and had become, what he insisted nature had
+always intended him to be, a gentleman of leisure. He retained a
+directorship in the trust company, was a trustee of his university, and
+was a thorny and inquiring member of many charitable boards.
+
+He prided himself on having emancipated himself from the ideas of his own
+generation. It bored him to listen to his cousins lamenting the
+vulgarities of modern life, the lack of elegance in present-day English,
+or to hear them explain as they borrowed money from him the sort of thing
+a gentleman could or could not do for a living. But on the subject of
+what a lady might do he still held fixed and unalterable notions; nor
+did he ever find it tiresome to hear his own daughter expound the axioms
+of this subject with a finality he had taught her in her youth. Having
+freed himself from fine-gentlemanism, he had quite unconsciously fallen
+the more easily a prey to fine-ladyism; all his conservatism had gone
+into that, as a man, forced to give up his garden, might cherish one
+lovely potted plant.
+
+At a time when private schools were beginning to flourish once more he
+had been careful to educate Adelaide entirely at home with governesses.
+Every summer he took her abroad, and showed her, and talked with her
+about, books, pictures, and buildings; he inoculated her with such
+fundamentals as that a lady never wears imitation lace on her
+underclothes, and the past of the verb to "eat" is pronounced to rhyme
+with "bet." She spoke French and German fluently, and could read Italian.
+He considered her a perfectly educated woman. She knew nothing of
+business, political economy, politics, or science. He himself had never
+been deeply interested in American politics, though very familiar with
+the lives of English statesmen. He was a great reader of memoirs and of
+the novels of Disraeli and Trollope. Of late he had taken to motoring.
+
+He kissed his daughter and nodded--a real New York nod--to his
+son-in-law.
+
+"I've come to tell you, Adelaide," he began.
+
+"Such a thing!" murmured Mathilde, shaking her golden head above the cup
+of tea she was making for him, making in just the way he liked; for she
+was a little person who remembered people's tastes.
+
+"I thought you'd rather hear it than read it in the papers."
+
+"Goodness, Papa, you talk as if you had been getting married!"
+
+"No." Mr. Lanley hesitated, and looked up at her brightly. "No; but I
+think I did have a proposal the other day."
+
+"From Mrs. Baxter?" asked Adelaide. This was almost war. Mrs. Baxter was
+a regal and possessive widow from Baltimore whose long and regular visits
+to Mr. Lanley had once occasioned his family some alarm, though time had
+now given them a certain institutional safety.
+
+Her father was not flurried by the reference.
+
+"No," he said; "though she writes me, I'm glad to say, that she is
+coming soon."
+
+"You don't tell me!" said Adelaide. The cream of the winter season was
+usually the time Mrs. Baxter selected for her visit.
+
+Her father did not notice her.
+
+"If Mrs. Baxter should ever propose to me," he went on thoughtfully, "I
+shouldn't refuse. I don't think I should have the--"
+
+"The chance?" said his daughter.
+
+"I was going to say the fortitude. But this," he went on, "was an elderly
+cousin, who expressed a wish to come and be my housekeeper. Perhaps
+matrimony was not intended. Mathilde, my dear, how does one tell nowadays
+whether one is being proposed to or not?"
+
+In this poignant and unexpected crisis Mathilde turned slowly and
+painfully crimson. How _did_ one tell? It was a question which at the
+moment was anything but clear to her.
+
+"I should always assume it in doubtful cases, sir," said Wayne, very
+distinctly. He and Mathilde did not even glance at each other.
+
+"It wasn't your proposal that you came to announce to us, though, was
+it, Papa?" said Adelaide.
+
+"No," answered Mr. Lanley. "The fact is, I've been arrested."
+
+"Again?"
+
+"Yes; most unjustly, most unjustly." His brows contracted, and then
+relaxed at a happy memory. "It's the long, low build of the car. It looks
+so powerful that the police won't give you a chance. It was nosing
+through the park--"
+
+"At about thirty miles an hour," said Farron.
+
+"Well, not a bit over thirty-five. A lovely morning, no one in sight, I
+may have let her out a little. All of a sudden one of these mounted
+fellows jumped out from the bushes along the bridle-path. They're a
+fine-looking lot, Vincent."
+
+Farron asked who the judge was, and, Mr. Lanley named him--named him
+slightly wrong, and Farron corrected him.
+
+"I'll get you off," he said.
+
+Adelaide looked up at her husband admiringly. This was the aspect of him
+that she loved best. It seemed to her like magic what Vincent could do.
+Her father, she thought, took it very calmly. What would have happened to
+him if she had not brought Farron into the family to rescue and protect?
+The visiting boy, she noticed, was properly impressed. She saw him give
+Farron quite a dog-like look as he took his departure. To Mathilde he
+only bowed. No arrangements had been made for a future meeting. Mathilde
+tried to convey to him in a prolonged look that if he would wait only
+five minutes all would be well, that her grandfather never paid long
+visits; but the door closed behind him. She became immediately
+overwhelmed by the fear, which had an element of desire in it, too, that
+her family would fall to discussing him, would question her as to how
+long she had known him, and why she liked him, and what they talked
+about, and whether she had been expecting a visit, sitting there in her
+best dress. Then slowly she took in the fact that they were going to talk
+about nothing but Mr. Lanley's arrest. She marveled at the obtuseness of
+older people--to have stood at the red-hot center of youth and love and
+not even to know it! She drew her shoulders together, feeling very
+lonely and strong. As they talked, she allowed her eyes to rest first on
+one speaker and then on the other, as if she were following each word of
+the discussion. As a matter of fact she was rehearsing with an inner
+voice the tone of Wayne's voice when he had said that he loved her.
+
+Then suddenly she decided that she would be much happier alone in her own
+room. She rose, patted her grandfather on the shoulder, and prepared to
+escape. He, not wishing to be interrupted at the moment, patted her hand
+in return.
+
+"Hello!" he exclaimed. "Hands are cold, my dear."
+
+She caught Farron's cool, black eyes, and surprised herself by answering:
+
+"Yes; but, then, they always are." This was quite untrue, but every one
+was perfectly satisfied with it.
+
+As she left the room Mr. Lanley was saying:
+
+"Yes, I don't want to go to Blackwell's Island. Lovely spot, of course.
+My grandfather used to tell me he remembered it when the Blackwell family
+still lived there. But I shouldn't care to wear stripes--except for the
+pleasure of telling Alberta about it. It would give her a year's
+occupation, her suffering over my disgrace, wouldn't it, Adelaide?"
+
+"She'd scold me," said Adelaide, looking beautifully martyred. Then
+turning to her husband, she asked. "Will it be very difficult, Vincent,
+getting papa off?" She wanted it to be difficult, she wanted him to give
+her material out of which she could form a picture of him as a savior;
+but he only shook his head and said:
+
+"That young man is in love with Mathilde."
+
+"O Vin! Those children?"
+
+Mr. Lanley pricked up his ears like a terrier.
+
+"In love?" he exclaimed. "And who is he? Not one of the East Sussex
+Waynes, I hope. Vulgar people. They always were; began life as
+auctioneers in my father's time. Is he one of those, Adelaide?"
+
+"I have no idea who he is, if any one," said Adelaide. "I never saw or
+heard of him before this afternoon."
+
+"And may I ask," said her father, "if you intend to let your daughter
+become engaged to a young man of whom you know nothing whatsoever?"
+
+Adelaide looked extremely languid, one of her methods of showing
+annoyance.
+
+"Really, Papa," she said, "the fact that he has come once to pay an
+afternoon visit to Mathilde does not, it seems to me, make an engagement
+inevitable. My child is not absolutely repellent, you know, and a good
+many young men come to the house." Then suddenly remembering that her
+oracle had already spoken on this subject, she asked more humbly, "What
+was it made you say he was in love, Vin?"
+
+"Just an impression," said Farron.
+
+Mr. Lanley had been thinking it over.
+
+"It was not the custom in my day," he began, and then remembering that
+this was one of his sister Alberta's favorite openings, he changed the
+form of his sentence. "I never allowed you to see stray young men--"
+
+His daughter interrupted him.
+
+"But I always saw them, Papa. I used to let them come early in the
+afternoon before you came in."
+
+In his heart Mr. Lanley doubted that this had been a regular custom, but
+he knew it would be unwise to argue the point; so he started fresh.
+
+"When a young man is attentive to a girl like Mathilde--"
+
+"But he isn't," said Adelaide. "At least not what I should have called
+attentive when I was a girl."
+
+"Your experience was not long, my dear. You were married at
+Mathilde's age."
+
+"You may be sure of one thing, Papa, that I don't desire an early
+marriage for my daughter."
+
+"Very likely," returned her father, getting up, and buttoning the last
+button of his coat; "but you may have noticed that we can't always get
+just what we most desire for our children."
+
+When he had gone, Vincent looked at his wife and smiled, but smiled
+without approval. She twisted her shoulders.
+
+"Oh, I suppose so," she said; "but I do so hate to be scolded about the
+way I bring up Mathilde."
+
+"Or about anything else, my dear."
+
+"I don't hate to be scolded by you," she returned. "In fact, I sometimes
+get a sort of servile enjoyment from it. Besides," she went on, "as a
+matter of fact, I bring Mathilde up particularly well, quite unlike these
+wild young women I see everywhere else. She tells me everything, and I
+have perfectly the power of making her hate any one I disapprove of. But
+you'll try and find out something about this young man, won't you, Vin?"
+
+"We'll have a full report on him to-morrow. Do you know what his
+first name is?"
+
+"At the moment I don't recall his last. Oh, yes--Wayne. I'll ask Mathilde
+when we go up-stairs."
+
+From her own bedroom door she called up.
+
+"Mathilde, what is the name of your young friend?"
+
+There was a little pause before Mathilde answered that she was sorry, but
+she didn't know.
+
+Mrs. Farron turned to her husband and made a little gesture to indicate
+that this ignorance on the girl's part did not bear out his theory; but
+she saw that he did not admit it, that he clung still to his
+impression. "And Vincent's impressions--" she said to herself as she
+went in to dress.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Mr. Lanley was ruffled as he left his daughter's drawing-room.
+
+"As if I had wanted her to marry at eighteen," he said to himself; and
+he took his hat crossly from Pringle and set it hard on his head at the
+slight angle which he preferred. Then reflecting that Pringle was not
+in any way involved, he unbent slightly, and said something that
+sounded like:
+
+"Haryer, Pringle?"
+
+Pringle, despite his stalwart masculine appearance, had in speaking a
+surprisingly high, squeaky voice.
+
+"I keep my health, thank you, sir," he said. "Anna has been somewhat
+ailing." Anna was his wife, to whom he usually referred as "Mrs.
+Pringle"; but he made an exception in speaking to Mr. Lanley, for she had
+once been the Lanleys' kitchen-maid. "Your car, sir?"
+
+No, Mr. Lanley was walking--walking, indeed, more quickly than usual
+under the stimulus of annoyance.
+
+Nothing had ever happened that made him suffer as he had suffered through
+his daughter's divorce. Divorce was one of the modern ideas which he had
+imagined he had accepted. As a lawyer he had expressed himself as willing
+always to take the lady's side; but in the cases which he actually took
+he liked to believe that the wife was perfect and the husband
+inexcusable. He could not comfort himself with any such belief in his
+daughter's case.
+
+Adelaide's conduct had been, as far as he could see, irreproachable; but,
+then, so had Severance's. This was what had made the gossip, almost the
+scandal, of the thing. Even his sister Alberta had whispered to him that
+if Severance had been unfaithful to Adelaide--But poor Severance had not
+been unfaithful; he had not even become indifferent. He loved his wife,
+he said, as much as on the day he married her. He was extremely unhappy.
+Mr. Lanley grew to dread the visits of his huge, blond son-in-law, who
+used actually to sob in the library, and ask for explanations of
+something which Mr. Lanley had never been able to understand.
+
+And how obstinate Adelaide had been! She, who had been such a docile
+girl, and then for many years so completely under the thumb of her
+splendid-looking husband, had suddenly become utterly intractable. She
+would listen to no reason and brook no delay. She had been willing enough
+to explain; she had explained repeatedly, but the trouble was he could
+not understand the explanation. She did not love her husband any more,
+she said. Mr. Lanley pointed out to her that this was no legal grounds
+for a divorce.
+
+"Yes, but I look down upon him," she went on.
+
+"On poor Joe?" her father had asked innocently, and had then discovered
+that this was the wrong thing to say. She had burst out, "Poor Joe! poor
+Joe!" That was the way every one considered him. Was it her fault if he
+excited pity and contempt instead of love and respect? Her love, she
+intimated, had been of a peculiarly eternal sort; Severance himself was
+to blame for its extinction. Mr. Lanley discovered that in some way she
+considered the intemperance of Severance's habits to be involved. But
+this was absurd. It was true that for a year or two Severance had taken
+to drinking rather more than was wise; but, Mr. Lanley had thought at the
+time, the poor young man had not needed any artificial stimulant in the
+days when Adelaide had fully and constantly admired him. He had seen
+Severance come home several times not exactly drunk, but rather more
+boyishly boastful and hilarious than usual. Even Mr. Lanley, a naturally
+temperate man, had not found Joe repellent in the circumstances.
+Afterward he had been thankful for this weakness: it gave him the only
+foundation on which he could build a case not for the courts, of course,
+but for the world. Unfortunately, however, Severance had pulled up before
+there was any question of divorce.
+
+That was another confusing fact. Adelaide had managed him so beautifully.
+Her father had not known her wonderful powers until he saw the skill and
+patience with which she had dealt with Joe Severance's drinking. Joe
+himself was eager to own that he owed his cure entirely to her. Mr.
+Lanley had been proud of her; she had turned out, he thought, just what a
+woman ought to be; and then, on top of it, she had come to him one day
+and announced that she would never live with Joe again.
+
+"But why not?" he had asked.
+
+"Because I don't love him," she had said.
+
+Then Mr. Lanley knew how little his acceptance of the idea of divorce in
+general had reconciled him to the idea of the divorce of his own
+daughter--a Lanley--Mrs. Adelaide Lanley, Mrs. Adelaide Severance. His
+sense of fitness was shocked, though he pleaded with her first on the
+ground of duty, and then under the threat of scandal. With her beauty
+and Severance's popularity, for from his college days he had been
+extremely popular with men, the divorce excited uncommon interest.
+Severance's unconcealed grief, a rather large circle of devoted friends
+in whom he confided, and the fact that Adelaide had to go to Nevada to
+get her divorce, led most people to believe that she had simply found
+some one she liked better. Mr. Lanley would have believed it himself,
+but he couldn't. Farron had not appeared until she had been divorced for
+several years.
+
+Lanley still cherished an affection for Severance, who had very soon
+married again, a local belle in the Massachusetts manufacturing town
+where he now lived. She was said to resemble Adelaide.
+
+No, Mr. Lanley could not see that he had had anything to reproach himself
+with in regard to his daughter's first marriage. They had been young, of
+course; all the better. He had known the Severances for years; and Joe
+was handsome, hard working, had rowed on his crew, and every one spoke
+well of him. Certainly they had been in love--more in love than he liked
+to see two people, at least when one of them was his own daughter. He had
+suggested their waiting a year or two, but no one had backed him up. The
+Severances had been eager for the marriage, naturally. Mr. Lanley could
+still see the young couple as they turned from the altar, young,
+beautiful, and confident.
+
+He had missed his daughter terribly, not only her physical presence in
+the house, but the exercise of his influence over her, which in old
+times had been perhaps a trifle autocratic. He had hated being told what
+Joe thought and said; yet he could hardly object to her docility. That
+was the way he had brought her up. He did not reckon pliancy in a woman
+as a weakness; or if he had had any temptation to do so, it had vanished
+in the period when Joe Severance had taken to drink. In that crisis
+Adelaide had been anything but weak. Every one had been so grateful to
+her,--he and Joe and the Severances,--and then immediately afterward the
+crash came.
+
+Women! Mr. Lanley shook his head, still moving briskly northward with
+that quick jaunty walk of his. And this second marriage--what about that?
+They seemed happy. Farron was a fine fellow, but not, it seemed to him,
+so attractive to a woman as Severance. Could he hold a woman like
+Adelaide? He wasn't a man to stand any nonsense, though, and Mr. Lanley
+nodded; then, as it were, withdrew the nod on remembering that poor Joe
+had not wanted to stand any nonsense either. What in similar
+circumstances could Farron do? Adelaide always resented his asking how
+things were going, but how could he help being anxious? How could any one
+rest content on a hillside who had once been blown up by a volcano?
+
+He might not have been any more content if he had stayed to dinner at his
+son-in-law's, as he had been asked to do. The Farrons were alone.
+Mathilde was going to a dinner, with a dance after. She came into the
+dining-room to say good night and to promise to be home early, not to
+stay and dance. She was not allowed two parties on successive nights, not
+because her health was anything but robust, but rather because her mother
+considered her too young for such vulgar excess.
+
+When she had gone, Farron observed:
+
+"That child has a will of iron."
+
+"Vincent!" said his wife. "She does everything I suggest to her."
+
+"Her will just now is to please you in everything. Wait until she
+rebels."
+
+"But women don't rebel against the people they love. I don't have to tell
+you that, do I? I never have to manoeuver the child, never have to coax
+or charm her to do what I want."
+
+He smiled at her across the table.
+
+"You have great faith in those methods, haven't you?"
+
+"They work, Vin."
+
+He nodded as if no one knew that better than he.
+
+Soon after dinner he went up-stairs to write some letters. She followed
+him about ten o'clock. She came and leaned one hand on his shoulder and
+one on his desk.
+
+"Still working?" she said. She had been aware of no desire to see what he
+was writing, but she was instantly aware that his blotting-paper had
+fallen across the sheet, that the sheet was not a piece of note-paper,
+but one of a large pad on which he had been apparently making notes.
+
+Her diamond bracelet had slipped down her wrist and lay upon the
+blotting-paper; he slowly and carefully pushed it up her slim, round arm
+until it once more clung in place.
+
+"I've nearly finished," he said; and to her ears there was some under
+sound of pain or of constraint in his tone.
+
+A little later he strolled, still dressed, into her room. She was already
+in bed, and he came and sat on the foot of the bed, with one foot tucked
+under him and his arms folded.
+
+Her mind during the interval had been exclusively occupied with the
+position of that piece of blotting-paper. Could it be there was some
+other woman whose ghost-like presence she was just beginning to feel
+haunting their relation? The impersonality of Vincent's manner was an
+armor against such attacks, but this armor, as Adelaide knew, was more
+apparent than real. If one could get beyond that, one was at the very
+heart of the man. If some fortuitous circumstance had brought a sudden
+accidental intimacy between him and another woman--What woman loving
+strength and power could resist the sight of Vincent in action, Vincent
+as she saw him?
+
+Yet with a good capacity for believing the worst of her fellow-creatures,
+Adelaide did not really believe in the other woman. That, she knew,
+would bring a change in the fundamentals of her relationship with her
+husband. This was only a barrier that left the relation itself untouched.
+
+Before very long she began to think the situation was all in her own
+imagination. He was so amused, so eager to talk. Silent as he was apt to
+be with the rest of the world, with her he sometimes showed a love of
+gossip that enchanted her. And now it seemed to her that he was leading
+her on from subject to subject through a childish dislike to going to
+bed. They were actually giggling over Mr. Lanley's adventure when a
+motor-brake squeaked in the silence of the night, a motor-door slammed.
+For the first time Adelaide remembered her daughter. It was after twelve
+o'clock. A knock came at her door. She wrapped her swan's-down garment
+about her and went to the door.
+
+"O Mama, have you been worried?" the girl asked. She was standing in the
+narrow corridor, with her arms full of shining favors; there could be no
+question whatever that she had stayed for the dance. "Are you angry?
+Have I been keeping you awake?"
+
+"I thought you would have been home an hour ago."
+
+"I know. I want to tell you about it. Mama, how lovely you look in that
+blue thing! Won't you come up-stairs with me while I undress?"
+
+Adelaide shook her head.
+
+"Not to-night," she answered.
+
+"You are angry with me," the girl went on. "But if you will come, I will
+explain. I have something to tell you, Mama."
+
+Mrs. Farron's heart stood still. The phrase could mean only one thing.
+She went up-stairs with her daughter, sent the maid away, and herself
+began to undo the soft, pink silk.
+
+"It needs an extra hook," she murmured. "I told her it did."
+
+Mathilde craned her neck over her shoulder, as if she had ever been able
+to see the middle of her back.
+
+"But it doesn't show, does it?" she asked.
+
+"It perfectly well might."
+
+Mathilde stepped out of her dress, and flung it over a chair. In her
+short petticoat, with her ankles showing and her arms bare, she looked
+like a very young girl, and when she put up her hands and took the pins
+out of her hair, so that it fell over her shoulders, she might have
+been a child.
+
+The silence began to grow awkward. Mathilde put on her dressing-gown; it
+was perfectly straight, and made her look like a little white column. A
+glass of milk and some biscuits were waiting for her. She pushed a chair
+near her fire for her mother, and herself remained standing, with her
+glass of milk in her hand.
+
+"Mama," she said suddenly, "I suppose I'm what you'd call engaged."
+
+"O Mathilde! not to that boy who was here to-day?"
+
+"Why not to him?"
+
+"I know nothing about him."
+
+"I don't know very much myself. Yes, it's Pete Wayne. Pierson his name
+is, but every one calls him Pete. How strange it was that I did not even
+know his first name when you asked me!"
+
+A single ray pierced Mrs. Farron's depression: Vincent had known,
+Vincent's infallibility was confirmed. She did not know what to say. She
+sat looking sadly, obliquely at the floor like a person who has been
+aggrieved. She was wondering whether she should be to her daughter a
+comrade or a ruler, a confederate or a policeman. Of course in all
+probability the thing would be better stopped. But could this be
+accomplished by immediate action, or could she invite confidences and yet
+commit herself to nothing?
+
+She raised her eyes.
+
+"I do not approve of youthful marriages," she said.
+
+"O Mama! And you were only eighteen yourself."
+
+"That is why."
+
+Mathilde was frightened not only by the intense bitterness of her
+mother's tone, but also by the obvious fact that she was face to face
+with the explanation of the separation of her parents. She had been only
+nine years old at the time. She had loved her father, had found him a
+better playfellow than her mother, had wept bitterly at parting with him,
+and had missed him. And then gradually her mother, who had before seemed
+like a beautiful, but remote, princess, had begun to make of her an
+intimate and grown-up friend, to consult her and read with her and
+arrange happinesses in her life, to win, to, if the truth must be told,
+reconquer her. Perhaps even Adelaide would not have succeeded so easily
+in effacing Severance's image had not he himself so quickly remarried.
+Mathilde went several times to stay with the new household after Adelaide
+in secret, tearful conference with her father had been forced to consent.
+
+To Mathilde these visits had been an unacknowledged torture. She never
+knew quite what to mention and what to leave untouched. There was always
+a constraint between the three of them. Her father, when alone with her,
+would question her, with strange, eager pauses, as to how her mother
+looked. Her mother's successor, whom she could not really like, would
+question her more searchingly, more embarrassingly, with an ill-concealed
+note of jealousy in every word. Even at twelve years Mathilde was shocked
+by the strain of hatred in her father's new wife, who seemed to reproach
+her for fashion and fineness and fastidiousness, qualities of which the
+girl was utterly unaware. She could have loved her little half-brother
+when he appeared upon the scene, but Mrs. Severance did not encourage the
+bond, and gradually Mathilde's visits to her father ceased.
+
+As a child she had been curious about the reasons for the parting, but as
+she grew older it had seemed mere loyalty to accept the fact without
+asking why; she had perhaps not wanted to know why. But now, she saw, she
+was to hear.
+
+"Mathilde, do you still love your father?"
+
+"I think I do, Mama. I feel very sorry for him."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I don't know why. I dare say he is happy."
+
+"I dare say he is, poor Joe." Adelaide paused. "Well, my dear, that was
+the reason of our parting. One can pity a son or a brother, but not a
+husband. Weakness kills love. A woman cannot be the leader, the guide,
+and keep any romance. O Mathilde, I never want you to feel the
+humiliation of finding yourself stronger than the man you love. That is
+why I left your father, and my justification is his present happiness.
+This inferior little person he has married, she does as well. Any one
+would have done as well."
+
+Mathilde was puzzled by her mother's evident conviction that the
+explanation was complete. She asked after a moment:
+
+"But what was it that made you think at first that you did love
+him, Mama?"
+
+"Just what makes you think you love this boy--youth, flattery, desire to
+love. He was magnificently handsome, your father. I saw him admired by
+other men, apparently a master; I was too young to judge, my dear. You
+shan't be allowed to make that mistake; you shall have time to consider."
+
+Mathilde smiled.
+
+"I don't want time," she said.
+
+"I did not know I did."
+
+"I don't think I feel about love as you do," said the girl, slowly.
+
+"Every woman does."
+
+Mathilde shook her head.
+
+"It's just Pete as he is that I love. I don't care which of us leads."
+
+"But you will."
+
+The girl had not yet reached a point where she could describe the very
+essence of her passion; she had to let this go. After a moment she said:
+
+"I see now why you chose Mr. Farron."
+
+"You mean you have never seen before?"
+
+"Not so clearly."
+
+Mrs. Farron bit her lips. To have missed understanding this seemed a
+sufficient proof of immaturity. She rose.
+
+"Well, my darling," she said in a tone of extreme reasonableness, "we
+shall decide nothing to-night. I know nothing against Mr. Wayne. He may
+be just the right person. We must see more of him. Do you know anything
+about his family?"
+
+Mathilde shook her head. "He lives alone with his mother. His father is
+dead. She's very good and interested in drunkards."
+
+"In _drunkards_?" Mrs. Farron just shut her eyes a second.
+
+"She has a mission that reforms them."
+
+"Is that his profession, too?"
+
+"Oh, no. He's in Wall Street--quite a good firm. O Mama, don't sigh like
+that! We know we can't be married at once. We are reasonable. You think
+not, because this has all happened so suddenly; but great things do
+happen suddenly. We love each other. That's all I wanted to tell you."
+
+"Love!" Adelaide looked at the little person before her, tried to recall
+the fading image of the young man, and then thought of the dominating
+figure in her own life. "My dear, you have no idea what love is."
+
+She took no notice of the queer, steady look the girl gave her in return.
+She went down-stairs. She had been gone more than an hour, and she knew
+that Vincent would have been long since asleep. He had, and prided
+himself on having, a great capacity for sleep. She tiptoed past his door,
+stole into her own room, and then, glancing in the direction of his, was
+startled to see that a light was burning. She went in; he was reading,
+and once again, as his eyes turned toward her, she thought she saw the
+same tragic appeal that she had felt that afternoon in his kiss.
+Trembling, she threw herself down beside him, clasping him to her.
+
+"O Vincent! oh, my dear!" she whispered, and began to cry. He did not ask
+her why she was crying; she wished that he would; his silence admitted
+that he knew of some adequate reason.
+
+"I feel that there is something wrong," she sobbed, "something
+terribly wrong."
+
+"Nothing could go wrong between you and me, my darling," he answered. His
+tone comforted, his touch was a comfort. Perhaps she was a coward, she
+said to herself, but she questioned him no further.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Wayne was not so prompt as Mathilde in making the announcement of their
+engagement. He and his mother breakfasted together rather hastily, for
+she was going to court that morning to testify in favor of one of her
+backsliding inebriates, and Wayne had not found the moment to introduce
+his own affairs.
+
+That afternoon he came home earlier than usual; it was not five o'clock.
+He passed Dr. Parret's flat on the first floor--Dr. Lily MacComb Parret.
+She was a great friend of his, and he felt a decided temptation to go in
+and tell her the news first; but reflecting that no one ought to hear it
+before his mother, he went on up-stairs. He lived on the fifth floor.
+
+He opened the door of the flat and went into the sitting-room. It was
+empty. He lighted the gas, which flared up, squeaking like a bagpipe. The
+room was square and crowded. Shelves ran all the way round it, tightly
+filled with books. In the center was a large writing-table, littered with
+papers, and on each side of the fireplace stood two worn, but
+comfortable, arm-chairs, each with a reading-lamp at its side. There was
+nothing beautiful in the furniture, and yet the room had its own charm.
+The house was a corner house and had once been a single dwelling. The
+shape of the room, its woodwork, its doors, its flat, white marble
+mantelpiece, belonged to an era of simple taste and good workmanship; but
+the greatest charm of the room was the view from the windows, of which it
+had four, two that looked east and two south, and gave a glimpse of the
+East River and its bridges.
+
+Wayne was not sorry his mother was out. He had begun to dread the
+announcement he had to make. At first he had thought only of her keen
+interest in his affairs, but later he had come to consider what this
+particular piece of news would mean to her. Say what you will, he
+thought, to tell your mother of your engagement is a little like casting
+off an old love.
+
+Ever since he could remember, he and his mother had lived in the
+happiest comradeship. His father, a promising young doctor, had died
+within a few years of his marriage. Pete had been brought up by his
+mother, but he had very little remembrance of any process of molding. It
+seemed to him as if they had lived in a sort of partnership since he had
+been able to walk and talk. It had been as natural for him to spend his
+hours after school in stamping and sealing her large correspondence as it
+had been for her to pinch and arrange for years so as to send him to the
+university from which his father had been graduated. She would have been
+glad, he knew, if he had decided to follow his father in the study of
+medicine, but he recoiled from so long a period of dependence; he liked
+to think that he brought to his financial reports something of a
+scientific inheritance.
+
+She had, he thought, every virtue that a mother could have, and she
+combined them with a gaiety of spirit that made her take her virtues as
+if they were the most delightful amusements. It was of this gaiety that
+he had first thought until Mathilde had pointed out to him that there was
+tragedy in the situation. "What will your mother do without you?" the
+girl kept saying. There was indeed nothing in his mother's life that
+could fill the vacancy he would leave. She had few intimate
+relationships. For all her devotion to her drunkards, he was the only
+personal happiness in her life.
+
+He went into the kitchen in search of her. This was evidently one of
+their servant's uncounted hours. While he was making himself some tea he
+heard his mother's key in the door. He called to her, and she appeared.
+
+"Why my hat, Mother dear?" he asked gently as he kissed her.
+
+Mrs. Wayne smiled absently, and put up her hand to the soft felt hat she
+was wearing.
+
+"I just went out to post some letters," she said, as if this were a
+complete explanation; then she removed a mackintosh that she happened to
+have on, though the day was fine. She was then seen to be wearing a dark
+skirt and a neat plain shirt that was open at the throat. Though no
+longer young, she somehow suggested a boy--a boy rather overtrained; she
+was far more boyish than Wayne. She had a certain queer beauty, too;
+not beauty of Adelaide's type, of structure and coloring and elegance,
+but beauty of expression. Life itself had written some fine lines of
+humor and resolve upon her face, and her blue-gray eyes seemed actually
+to flare with hope and intention. Her hair was of that light-brown shade
+in which plentiful gray made little change of shade; it was wound in a
+knot at the back of her head and gave her trouble. She was always
+pushing it up and repinning it into place, as if it were too heavy for
+her small head.
+
+"I wonder if there's anything to eat in the house," her son said.
+
+"I wonder." They moved together toward the ice-box.
+
+"Mother," said Pete, "that piece of pie has been in the ice-box at least
+three days. Let's throw it away."
+
+She took the saucer thoughtfully.
+
+"I like it so much," she said.
+
+"Then why don't you eat it?"
+
+"It's not good for me." She let Wayne take the saucer. "What do you
+know?" she asked.
+
+She had adopted slang as she adopted most labor-saving devices.
+
+"Well, I do know something new," said Wayne. He sat down on the kitchen
+table and poured out his tea. "New as the garden of Eden. I'm in love."
+
+"O Pete!" his mother cried, and the purest, most conventional maternal
+agony was in the tone. For an instant, crushed and terrified, she looked
+at him; and then something gay and impish appeared in her eyes, and she
+asked with a grin:
+
+"Is it some one perfectly awful?"
+
+"I'm afraid you'll think so. She's a sheltered, young, luxurious child,
+with birth, breeding, and money, everything you hate most."
+
+"O Pete!" she said again, but this time with a sort of sad resignation.
+Then shaking her head as if to say that she wasn't, after all, as narrow
+as he thought, she hitched her chair nearer the table and said eagerly,
+"Well, tell me all about it."
+
+Wayne looked down at his mother as she sat opposite him, with her elbows
+on the table, as keen as a child and as lively as a cricket. He asked
+himself if he had not drifted into a needlessly sentimental state of mind
+about her. He even asked himself, as he had done once or twice before in
+his life, whether her love for him implied the slightest dependence upon
+his society. Wasn't it perfectly possible that his going would free her
+life, would make it easier instead of harder? Every man, he knew, felt
+the element of freedom beneath the despair of breaking even the tenderest
+of ties. Some women, he supposed, might feel the same way about their
+love-affairs. But could they feel the same about their maternal
+relations? Could it be that his mother, that pure, heroic,
+self-sacrificing soul, was now thinking more about her liberty than her
+loss? Had not their relation always been peculiarly free? he found
+himself thinking reproachfully. Once, he remembered, when he had been
+working unusually hard he had welcomed her absence at one of her
+conferences on inebriety. Never before had he imagined that she could
+feel anything but regret at his absences. "Everybody is just alike," he
+found himself rather bitterly thinking.
+
+"What do you want to know about it?" he said aloud.
+
+"Why, everything," she returned.
+
+"I met her," he said, "two evenings ago at a dance. I never expected to
+fall in love at a dance."
+
+"Isn't it funny? No one ever really expects to fall in love at all, and
+everybody does."
+
+He glanced at her. He had been prepared to explain to her about love; and
+now it occurred to him for the first time that she knew all about it. He
+decided to ask her the great question which had been occupying his mind
+as a lover of a scientific habit of thought.
+
+"Mother," he said, "how much dependence is to be placed on love--one's
+own, I mean?"
+
+"Goodness, Pete! What a question to ask!"
+
+"Well, you might take a chance and tell me what you think. I have no
+doubts. My whole nature goes out to this girl; but I can't help knowing
+that if we go on feeling like this till we die, we shall be the
+exception. Love's a miracle. How much can one trust to it?"
+
+The moment he had spoken he knew that he was asking a great deal. It was
+torture to his mother to express an opinion on an abstract question. She
+did not lack decision of conduct. She could resolve in an instant to send
+a drunkard to an institution or take a trip round the world; but on a
+matter of philosophy of life it was as difficult to get her to commit
+herself as if she had been upon the witness-stand. Yet it was just in
+this realm that he particularly valued her opinion.
+
+"Oh," she said at last, "I don't believe that it's possible to play safe
+in love. It's a risk, but it's one of those risks you haven't much choice
+about taking. Life and death are like that, too. I don't think it pays to
+be always thinking about avoiding risks. Nothing, you know," she added,
+as if she were letting him in to rather a horrid little secret, "is
+really safe." And evidently glad to change the subject, she went on,
+"What will her family say?"
+
+"I can't think they will be pleased."
+
+"I suppose not. Who are they?"
+
+Wayne explained the family connections, but woke no associations in his
+mother's mind until he mentioned the name of Farron. Then he was
+astonished at the violence of her interest. She sprang to her feet; her
+eyes lighted up.
+
+"Why," she cried, "that's the man, that's the company, that Marty Burke
+works for! O Pete, don't you think you could get Mr. Farron to use his
+influence over Marty about Anita?"
+
+"Dear mother, do you think you can get him to use his influence over Mrs.
+Farron for me?"
+
+Marty Burke was the leader of the district and was reckoned a bad man.
+He and Mrs. Wayne had been waging a bitter war for some time over a
+young inebriate who had seduced a girl of the neighborhood. Mrs. Wayne
+was sternly trying to prosecute the inebriate; Burke was determined to
+protect him, first, by smirching the girl's name, and, next, by
+getting the girl's family to consent to a marriage, a solution that
+Mrs. Wayne considered most undesirable in view of the character of the
+prospective husband.
+
+Pete felt her interest sweep away from his affairs, and it had not
+returned when the telephone rang. He came back from answering it to tell
+his mother that Mr. Lanley, the grandfather of his love, was asking if
+she would see him for a few minutes that afternoon or evening. A visit
+was arranged for nine o'clock.
+
+"What's he like?" asked Mrs. Wayne, wrinkling her nose and looking
+very impish.
+
+"He seemed like a nice old boy; hasn't had a new idea, I should say,
+since 1880. And, Mother dear, you're going to dress, aren't you?"
+
+She resented the implication.
+
+"I shall be wonderful," she answered with emphasis. "And while he's here,
+I think you might go down and tell this news to Lily, yourself. Oh, I
+don't say she's in love with you--"
+
+"Lily," said Pete, "is leading far too exciting a life to be in love
+with any one."
+
+Punctually at nine, Mr. Lanley rang the bell of the flat. He had paused a
+few minutes before doing so, not wishing to weaken the effect of his
+mission by arriving out of breath. Adelaide had come to see him just
+before lunch. She pretended to minimize the importance of her news, but
+he knew she did so to evade reproach for the culpable irresponsibility of
+her attitude toward the young man's first visit.
+
+"And do you know anything more about him than you did yesterday?" he
+asked.
+
+She did. It appeared that Vincent had telephoned her from down town just
+before she came out.
+
+"Tiresome young man," she said, twisting her shoulders. "It seems there's
+nothing against him. His father was a doctor, his mother comes of decent
+people and is a respected reformer, the young man works for an ambitious
+new firm of brokers, who speak highly of him and give him a salary of
+$5000 a year."
+
+"The whole thing must be put a stop to," said Mr. Lanley.
+
+"Of course, of course," said his daughter. "But how? I can't forbid him
+the house because he's just an average young man."
+
+"I don't see why not, or at least on the ground that he's not the husband
+you would choose for her."
+
+"I think the best way will be to let him come to the house,"--she spoke
+with a sort of imperishable sweetness,--"but to turn Mathilde gradually
+against him."
+
+"But how can you turn her against him?"
+
+Adelaide looked very wistful.
+
+"You don't trust me," she moaned.
+
+"I only ask you how it can be done."
+
+"Oh, there are ways. I made her perfectly hate one of them because he
+always said, 'if you know what I mean.' 'It's a very fine day, Mrs.
+Farron, if you know what I mean.' This young man must have some horrid
+trick like that, only I haven't studied him yet. Give me time."
+
+"It's risky."
+
+Adelaide shook her head.
+
+"Not really," she said. "These young fancies go as quickly as they come.
+Do you remember the time you took me to West Point? I had a passion for
+the adjutant. I forgot him in a week."
+
+"You were only fifteen."
+
+"Mathilde is immature for her age."
+
+It was agreed between them, however, that Mr. Lanley, without authority,
+should go and look the situation over. He had been trying to get the
+Waynes' telephone since one o'clock. He had been told at intervals of
+fifteen minutes by a resolutely cheerful central that their number did
+not answer. Mr. Lanley hated people who did not answer their telephone.
+Nor was he agreeably impressed by the four flights of stairs, or by the
+appearance of the servant who answered his ring.
+
+"Won't do, won't do," he kept repeating in his own mind.
+
+He was shown into the sitting-room. It was in shadow, for only a shaded
+reading-lamp was lighted, and his first impression was of four windows;
+they appeared like four square panels of dark blue, patterned with
+stars. Then a figure rose to meet him--a figure in blue draperies, with
+heavy braids wound around the head, and a low, resonant voice said, "I
+am Mrs. Wayne."
+
+As soon as he could he walked to the windows and looked out to the river
+and the long, lighted curves of the bridges, and beyond to Long Island,
+to just the ground where the Battle of Long Island had been fought--a
+battle in which an ancestor of his had particularly distinguished
+himself. He said something polite about the view.
+
+"Let us sit here where we can look out," she said, and sank down on a
+low sofa drawn under the windows. As she did so she came within the
+circle of light from the lamp. She sat with her head leaned back against
+the window-frame, and he saw the fine line of her jaw, the hollows in her
+cheek, the delicate modeling about her brows, not obscured by much
+eyebrow, and her long, stretched throat. She was not quite maternal
+enough to look like a Madonna, but she did look like a saint, he thought.
+
+He knelt with one knee on the couch and peered out.
+
+"Dear me," he said, "I fancy I used to skate as a boy on a pond just
+about where that factory is now."
+
+He found she knew very little about the history of New York. She had
+been brought up abroad, she said; her father had been a consul in
+France. It was a subject which he liked to expound. He loved his native
+city, which he with his own eyes had seen once as hardly more than a
+village. He and his ancestors--and Mr. Lanley's sense of identification
+with his ancestors was almost Chinese--had watched and had a little
+shaped the growth.
+
+"I suppose you had Dutch ancestry, then," she said, trying to take
+an interest.
+
+"Dutch." Mr. Lanley shut his eyes, resolving, since he had no idea what
+her own descent might be, that he would not explain to her the superior
+attitude of the English settlers of the eighteenth century toward their
+Dutch predecessors. However, perhaps he did not entirely conceal his
+feeling, for he said: "No, I have no Dutch blood--not a drop. Very good
+people in their way, industrious--peasants." He hurried on to the great
+fire of 1835. "Swept between Wall Street and Coenties Slip," he said,
+with a splendid gesture, and then discovered that she had, never heard of
+"Quenches Slip," or worse, she had pronounced it as it was spelled. He
+gently set her right there. His father had often told him that he had
+seen with his own eyes a note of hand which had been blown, during the
+course of the conflagration, as far as Flatbush. And the second fire of
+1845. His father had been a man then, married, a prominent citizen, old
+enough, as Mr. Lanley said, with a faint smile, to have lost heavily. He
+could himself remember the New York of the Civil War, the bitter family
+quarrels, the forced resignations from clubs, the duels, the draft riots.
+
+But, oddly enough, when it came to contemporary New York, it was Mrs.
+Wayne who turned out to be most at home. Had he ever walked across the
+Blackwell's Island Bridge? (This was in the days before it bore the
+elevated trains.) No, he had driven. Ah, she said, that was wholly
+different. Above, where one walked, there was nothing to shut out the
+view of the river. Just to show that he was not a feeble old antiquarian,
+he suggested their taking a walk there at once. She held out her trailing
+garments and thin, blue slippers. And then she went on:
+
+"There's another beautiful place I don't believe you know, for all you're
+such an old New-Yorker--a pier at the foot of East Eighty-something
+Street, where you can almost touch great seagoing vessels as they pass."
+
+"Well, there at least we can go," said Mr. Lanley, and he stood up. "I
+have a car here, but it's open. Is it too cold? Have you a fur coat? I'll
+send back to the house for an extra one." He paused, brisk as he was; the
+thought of those four flights a second time dismayed him.
+
+The servant had gone out, and Pete was still absent, presumably breaking
+the news of his engagement to Dr. Parret.
+
+Mrs. Wayne had an idea. She went to a window on the south side of the
+room, opened it, and looked out. If he had good lungs, she told him, he
+could make his man hear.
+
+Mr. Lanley did not visibly recoil. He leaned out and shouted. The
+chauffeur looked up, made a motion to jump out, fearing that his employer
+was being murdered in these unfamiliar surroundings; then he caught the
+order to go home for an extra coat.
+
+Lanley drew his shoulder back into the room and shut the window; as he
+did so he saw a trace of something impish in the smile of his hostess.
+
+"Why do you smile?" he asked quickly.
+
+She did not make the mistake of trying to arrest her smile; she let
+it broaden.
+
+"I don't suppose you have ever done such a thing before."
+
+"Now, that does annoy me."
+
+"Calling down five stories?"
+
+"No; your thinking I minded."
+
+"Well, I did think so."
+
+"You were mistaken, utterly mistaken."
+
+"I'm glad. If you mind doing such things, you give so much time to
+arranging not to do them."
+
+Mr. Lanley was silent. He was deciding that he should rearrange some of
+the details of his life. Not that he contemplated giving all his orders
+from the fifth story, but he saw he had always devoted too much attention
+to preventing unimportant catastrophes.
+
+Under her direction he was presently driving north; then he turned
+sharply east down a little hill, and came out on a low, flat pier. He put
+out the motor's lights. They were only a few feet above the water, which
+was as black as liquid jet, with flat silver and gold patches on it from
+white and yellow lights. Opposite to them the lighthouse at the north end
+of Blackwell's Island glowed like a hot coal. Then a great steamer
+obscured it.
+
+"Isn't this nice?" Mrs. Wayne asked, and he saw that she wanted her
+discovery praised. He never lost the impression that she enjoyed
+being praised.
+
+Such a spot, within sight of half a dozen historic sites, was a
+temptation to Mr. Lanley, and he would have unresistingly yielded to it
+if Mrs. Wayne had not said:
+
+"But we haven't said a word yet about our children."
+
+"True," answered Mr. Lanley. His heart sank. It is not easy, he thought,
+to explain to a person for whom you have just conceived a liking that her
+son had aspired above his station. He tapped his long, middle finger on
+the steering-wheel, just as at directors' meetings he tapped the table
+before he spoke, and began, "In a society somewhat artificially formed as
+ours is, Mrs. Wayne, it has always been my experience that--" Do what he
+would, it kept turning into a speech, and the essence of the speech was
+that while democracy did very well for men, a strictly aristocratic
+system was the only thing possible for girls--one's own girls, of
+course. In the dim light he could see that she had pushed all her hair
+back from her brows. She was trying to follow him exactly, so exactly
+that she confused him a little. He became more general. "In many ways,"
+he concluded, "the advantages of character and experience are with the
+lower classes." He had not meant to use the word, but when it slipped
+out, he did not regret it.
+
+"In all ways," she answered.
+
+He was not sure he had heard.
+
+"All the advantages?" he said.
+
+"All the advantages of character."
+
+He had to ask her to explain. One reason, perhaps, why Mrs. Wayne
+habitually avoided a direct question was that, when once started, her
+candor had no bounds. Now she began to speak. She spoke more eagerly and
+more fluently than he, and it took him several minutes to see that quite
+unconsciously she was making him a strange, distorted complement to his
+speech, that in her mouth such words as "the leisure classes, your
+sheltered girls," were terms of the deepest reproach. He must understand,
+she said, that as she did not know Miss Severance, there was nothing
+personal, nothing at all personal, in her feeling,--she was as careful
+not to hurt his feelings as he had tried to be not to hurt hers,--but she
+did own to a prejudice--at least Pete told her it was a prejudice--
+
+Against what, in Heaven's name, Lanley at first wondered; and then it
+came to him.
+
+"Oh, you have a prejudice against divorce?" he said.
+
+Mrs. Wayne looked at him reproachfully.
+
+"Oh, no," she answered. "How could you think that? But what has divorce
+to do with it? Your granddaughter hasn't been divorced."
+
+A sound of disgust at the mere suggestion escaped him, and he said
+coldly:
+
+"My daughter divorced her first husband."
+
+"Oh, I did not know."
+
+"Against what, then, is this unconquerable prejudice of yours?"
+
+"Against the daughters of the leisure class."
+
+He was still quite at sea.
+
+"You dislike them?"
+
+"I fear them."
+
+If she had said that she considered roses a menace, he could not have
+been more puzzled. He repeated her words aloud, as if he hoped that
+they might have some meaning for him if he heard his own lips
+pronouncing them:
+
+"You fear them."
+
+"Yes," she went on, now interested only in expressing her belief, "I fear
+their ignorance and idleness and irresponsibility and self-indulgence,
+and, all the more because it is so delicate and attractive and
+unconscious; and their belief that the world owes them luxury and
+happiness without their lifting a finger. I fear their cowardice and lack
+of character--"
+
+"Cowardice!" he cried, catching at the first word he could. "My dear Mrs.
+Wayne, the aristocrats in the French Revolution, the British officer--"
+
+"Oh, yes, they know how to die," she answered; "but do they know how to
+live when the horrible, sordid little strain of every-day life begins to
+make demands upon them, their futile education, the moral feebleness that
+comes with perfect safety! I know something can be made of such girls,
+but I don't want my son sacrificed in the process."
+
+There was a long, dark silence; then Mr. Lanley said with a particularly
+careful and exact enunciation:
+
+"I think, my dear madam, that you cannot have known very many of the
+young women you are describing. It may be that there are some like
+that--daughters of our mushroom finance; but I can assure you that the
+children of ladies and gentlemen are not at all as you seem to imagine."
+
+It was characteristic of Mrs. Wayne that, still absorbed by her own
+convictions, she did not notice the insult of hearing ladies and
+gentlemen described to her as if they were beings wholly alien to her
+experience; but the tone of his speech startled her, and she woke, like a
+person coming out of a trance, to all the harm she had done.
+
+"I may be old-fashioned--" he began and then threw the phrase from him;
+it was thus that Alberta, his sister, began her most offensive
+pronouncements. "It has always appeared to me that we shelter our more
+favored women as we shelter our planted trees, so that they may attain a
+stronger maturity."
+
+"But do they, are they--are sheltered women the strongest in a crisis?"
+
+Fiend in human shape, he thought, she was making him question his
+bringing up of Adelaide. He would not bear that. His foot stole out to
+the self-starter.
+
+For the few minutes that remained of the interview she tried to undo her
+work, but the injury was too deep. His life was too near its end for
+criticism to be anything but destructive; having no time to collect new
+treasure, he simply could not listen to her suggestion that those he
+most valued were imitation. He hated her for holding such opinion. Her
+soft tones, her eager concessions, her flattering sentences, could now
+make no impression upon a man whom half an hour before they would have
+completely won.
+
+He bade her a cold good night, hardly more than bent his head, the
+chauffeur took the heavy coat from her, and the car had wheeled away
+before she was well inside her own doorway.
+
+Pete's brown head was visible over the banisters.
+
+"Hello, Mother!" he said. "Did the old boy kidnap you?"
+
+Mrs. Wayne came up slowly, stumbling over her long, blue draperies in her
+weariness and depression.
+
+"Oh, Pete, my darling," she said, "I think I've spoiled everything."
+
+His heart stood still. He knew better than most people that his mother
+could either make or mar.
+
+"They won't hear of it?"
+
+She nodded distractedly.
+
+"I do make such a mess of things sometimes!"
+
+He put his arm about her.
+
+"So you do, Mother," he said; "but then think how magnificently you
+sometimes pull them out again."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Mr. Lanley had not reported the result of his interview immediately. He
+told himself that it was too late; but it was only a quarter before
+eleven when he was back safe in his own library, feeling somehow not so
+safe as usual. He felt attacked, insulted; and yet he also felt vivified
+and encouraged. He felt as he might have felt if some one, unbidden, had
+cut a vista on the Lanley estates, first outraged in his sense of
+property, but afterward delighted with the widened view and the fresher
+breeze. It was awkward, though, that he didn't want Adelaide to go into
+details as to his visit; he did not think that the expedition to the pier
+could be given the judicial, grandfatherly tone that he wanted to give.
+So he did not communicate at all with his daughter that night.
+
+The next morning about nine, however, when she was sitting up in bed,
+with her tray on her knees, and on her feet a white satin coverlet sown
+as thickly with bright little flowers as the Milky Way with stars, her
+last words to Vincent, who was standing by the fire, with his newspaper
+folded in his hands, ready to go down-town, were interrupted, as they
+nearly always were, by the burr of the telephone.
+
+She took it up from the table by her bed, and as she did so she fixed her
+eyes on her husband and looked steadily at him all the time that central
+was making the connection; she was trying to answer that unsolved problem
+as to whether or not a mist hung between them. Then she got her
+connection.
+
+"Yes, Papa; it is Adelaide." "Yes?" "Did she appear like a lady?" "A
+lady?" "You don't know what I mean by that? Why, Papa!" "Well, did she
+appear respectable?" "How cross you are to me!" "I'm glad to hear it. You
+did not sound cheerful."
+
+She hung up the receiver and turned to Vincent, making eyes of surprise.
+
+"Really, papa is too strange. Why should he be cross to me because he has
+had an unsatisfactory interview with the Wayne boy's mother? I never
+wanted him to go, anyhow, Vin. I wanted to send _you_."
+
+"It would probably be better for you to go yourself."
+
+He left the room as if he had said nothing remarkable. But it was
+remarkable, in Adelaide's experience, that he should avoid any
+responsibility, and even more so that he should shift it to her
+shoulders. For an instant she faced the possibility, the most terrible of
+any that had occurred to her, that the balance was changing between them;
+that she, so willing to be led, was to be forced to guide. She had seen
+it happen so often between married couples--the weight of character begin
+on one side of the scale, and then slowly the beam would shift. Once it
+had happened to her. Was it to happen again? No, she told herself; never
+with Farron. He would command or die, lead her or leave her.
+
+Mathilde knocked at her door, as she did every morning as soon as her
+stepfather had gone down town. She had had an earlier account of Mr.
+Lanley's interview. It had read:
+
+"DEAREST GIRL:
+
+"The great discussion did not go very well, apparently. The opinion
+prevails at the moment that no engagement can be allowed to exist between
+us. I feel as if they were all meeting to discuss whether or not the sun
+is to rise to-morrow morning. You and I, my love, have special
+information that it will."
+
+After this it needed no courage to go down and hear her mother's account
+of the interview. Adelaide was still in bed, but one long, pointed
+fingertip, pressed continuously upon the dangling bell, a summons that
+had long since lost its poignancy for the temperamental Lucie, indicated
+that she was about to get up.
+
+"My dear," she said in answer to Mathilde's question, "your grandfather's
+principal interest seems to be to tell me nothing at all, and he has been
+wonderfully successful. I can get nothing from him, so I'm going myself."
+
+The girl's heart sank at hearing this. Her mother saw things clearly and
+definitely, and had a talent for expressing her impressions in
+unforgetable words. Mathilde could still remember with a pang certain
+books, poems, pictures, and even people whose charms her mother had
+destroyed in one poisonous phrase. Adelaide was too careful of her
+personal dignity to indulge in mimicry, but she had a way of catching and
+repeating the exact phrasing of some foolish sentence that was almost
+better--or worse--than mimicry. Mathilde remembered a governess, a kind
+and patient person of whom Adelaide had greatly wearied, who had a habit
+of beginning many observations, "It may strike you as strange, but I am
+the sort of person who--" Mathilde was present at luncheon one day when
+Adelaide was repeating one of these sentences. "It may strike you as
+strange, but I like to feel myself in good health." Mathilde resented the
+laughter that followed, and sprang to her governess's defense, yet
+sickeningly soon she came to see the innocent egotism that directed the
+choice of the phrase.
+
+She felt as if she could not bear this process to be turned against
+Pete's mother, not because it would alter the respectful love she was
+prepared to offer this unknown figure, but because it might very slightly
+alter her attitude toward her own mother. That was one of the
+characteristics of this great emotion: all her old beliefs had to be
+revised to accord with new discoveries.
+
+This was what lay behind the shrinking of her soul as she watched her
+mother dress for the visit to Mrs. Wayne. For the first time in her life
+Mathilde wished that her mother was not so elaborate. Hitherto she had
+always gloried in Adelaide's elegance as a part of her beauty; but now,
+as she watched the ritual of ribbons and laces and perfumes and jewels,
+she felt vaguely that there was in it all a covert insult to Pete's
+mother, who, she knew, would not be a bit like that.
+
+"How young you are, Mama!" she exclaimed as, the whole long process
+complete, Adelaide stood holding out her hand for her gloves, like a
+little girl ready for a party.
+
+Her mother smiled.
+
+"It's well I am," she said, "if you go on trying to get yourself involved
+with young men who live up four flights of stairs. I have always avoided
+even dressmakers who lived above the second story," she added wistfully.
+
+The wistful tone was repeated when her car stopped at the Wayne door and
+she stepped out.
+
+"Are you sure this is the number, Andrews?" she asked. She and the
+chauffeur looked slowly up at the house and up and down the street. They
+were at one in their feeling about it. Then Adelaide gave a very gentle
+little sigh and started the ascent.
+
+The flat did not look as well by day. Though the eastern sun poured in
+cheerfully, it revealed worn places on the backs of the arm-chairs and
+one fearful calamity with an ink-bottle that Pete had once had on the
+rug. Even Mrs. Wayne, who sprang up from behind her writing-table, had
+not the saint-like mystery that her blue draperies had given her the
+evening before.
+
+Though slim, and in excellent condition for thirty-nine, Adelaide could
+not conceal that four flights were an exertion. Her fine nostrils were
+dilated and her breath not perfectly under control as she said:
+
+"How delightful this is!" a statement that was no more untrue than to say
+good-morning on a rainy day.
+
+Most women in Mrs. Wayne's situation would at the moment have been
+acutely aware of the ink-spot. That was one of Adelaide's assets, on
+which she perhaps unconsciously counted, that her mere appearance made
+nine people out of ten aware of their own physical imperfections. But
+Mrs. Wayne was aware of nothing but Adelaide's great beauty as she sank
+into one of the armchairs with hardly a hint of exhaustion.
+
+"Your son is a very charming person, Mrs. Wayne," she said.
+
+Mrs. Wayne was standing by the mantelpiece, looking boyish and friendly;
+but now she suddenly grew grave, as if something serious had been said.
+
+"Pete has something more unusual than charm," she said.
+
+"But what could be more unusual?" cried Adelaide, who wanted to add, "The
+only question is, does your wretched son possess it?" But she didn't; she
+asked instead, with a tone of disarming sweetness, "Shall we be perfectly
+candid with each other?"
+
+A quick gleam came into Mrs. Wayne's eyes. "Not much," she seemed to say.
+She had learned to distrust nothing so much as her own candor, and her
+interview with Mr. Lanley had put her specially on her guard.
+
+"I hope you will be candid, Mrs. Farron," she said aloud, and for her
+this was the depth of dissimulation.
+
+"Well, then," said Adelaide, "you and I are in about the same position,
+aren't we? We are both willing that our children should marry, and we
+have no objection to offer to their choice except our own ignorance. We
+both want time to judge. But how can we get time, Mrs. Wayne? If we do
+not take definite action _against_ an engagement, we are giving our
+consent to it. I want a little reasonable delay, but we can get delay
+only by refusing to hear of an engagement. Do you see what I mean? Will
+you help me by pretending to be a very stern parent, just so that these
+young people may have a few months to think it over without being too
+definitely committed?"
+
+Mrs. Wayne shrank back. She liked neither diplomacy nor coercion.
+
+"But I have really no control over Pete," she said.
+
+"Surely, if he isn't in a position to support a wife--"
+
+"He is, if she would live as he does."
+
+Such an idea had never crossed Mrs. Farron's mind. She looked round her
+wonderingly, and said without a trace of wilful insolence in her tone:
+
+"Live here, you mean?"
+
+"Yes, or somewhere like it."
+
+Mrs. Farron looked down, and smoothed the delicate dark fur of her muff.
+She hardly knew how to begin at the very beginning like this. She did not
+want to hurt any one's feelings. How could she tell this childlike,
+optimistic creature that to put Mathilde to living in surroundings like
+these would be like exposing a naked baby on a mountaintop? It wasn't
+love of luxury, at least not if luxury meant physical self-indulgence.
+She could imagine suffering privations very happily in a Venetian palace
+or on a tropical island. It was an esthetic, not a moral, problem; it was
+a question of that profound and essential thing in the life of any woman
+who was a woman--her charm. She wished to tell Mrs. Wayne that her son
+wouldn't really like it, that he would hate to see Mathilde going out in
+overshoes; that the background that she, Adelaide, had so expertly
+provided for her child was part of the very attraction that made him want
+to take her out of it. There was no use in saying that most poor mortals
+were forced to get on without this magic atmosphere. They had never been
+goddesses; they did not know what they were going without. But her child,
+who had been, as it were, born a fairy, would miss tragically the
+delicate beauty of her every-day life, would fade under the ugly monotony
+of poverty.
+
+But how could she say this to Mrs. Wayne, in her flat-heeled shoes and
+simple, boyish shirt and that twelfth-century saint's profile, of which
+so much might have been made by a clever woman?
+
+At last she began, still smoothing her muff:
+
+"Mrs. Wayne, I have brought up my daughter very simply. I don't at all
+approve of the extravagances of these modern girls, with their own motors
+and their own bills. Still, she has had a certain background. We must
+admit that marriage with your son on his income alone would mean a
+decrease in her material comforts."
+
+Mrs. Wayne laughed.
+
+"More than you know, probably."
+
+This was candid, and Adelaide pressed on.
+
+"Well is it wise or kind to make such a demand on a young creature when
+we know marriage is difficult at the best?" she asked.
+
+Mrs. Wayne hesitated.
+
+"You see, I have never seen your daughter, and I don't know what her
+feeling for Pete may be."
+
+"I'll answer both questions. She has a pleasant, romantic sentiment for
+Mr. Wayne--you know how one feels to one's first lover. She is a sweet,
+kind, unformed little girl, not heroic. But think of your own spirited
+son. Do you want this persistent, cruel responsibility for him?"
+
+The question was an oratorical one, and Adelaide was astonished to find
+that Mrs. Wayne was answering it.
+
+"Oh, yes," she said; "I want responsibility for Pete. It's exactly what
+he needs."
+
+Adelaide stared at her in horror; she seemed the most unnatural mother
+in the world. She herself would fight to protect her daughter from the
+passive wear and tear of poverty; but she would have died to keep a son,
+if she had had one, from being driven into the active warfare of the
+support of a family.
+
+In the pause that followed there was a ring at the bell, an argument with
+the servant, something that sounded like a scuffle, and then a young man
+strolled into the room. He was tall and beautifully dressed,--at least
+that was the first impression,--though, as a matter of fact, the clothes
+were of the cheapest ready-made variety. But nothing could look cheap or
+ill made on those splendid muscles. He wore a silk shirt, a flower in his
+buttonhole, a gray tie in which was a pearl as big as a pea, long
+patent-leather shoes with elaborate buff-colored tops; he carried a thin
+stick and a pair of new gloves in one hand, but the most conspicuous
+object in his dress was a brand-new, gray felt hat, with a rather wide
+brim, which he wore at an angle greater than Mr. Lanley attempted even at
+his jauntiest. His face was long and rather dark, and his eyes were a
+bright gray blue, under dark brows. He was scowling.
+
+He strode into the middle of the room, and stood there, with his feet
+wide apart and his elbows slightly swaying. His hat was still on.
+
+"Your servant said you couldn't see me," he said, with his back teeth set
+together, a method of enunciation that seemed to be habitual.
+
+"Didn't want to would be truer, Marty," answered Mrs. Wayne, with a
+utmost good temper. "Still, as long as you're here, what do you want?"
+
+Marty Burke didn't answer at once. He stood looking at Mrs. Wayne under
+his lowering brows; he had stopped swinging his elbows, and was now very
+slightly twitching his cane, as an evilly disposed cat will twitch the
+end of its tail.
+
+Mrs. Farron watched him almost breathlessly. She was a little frightened,
+but the sensation was pleasurable. He was, she knew, the finest specimen
+of the human animal that she had ever seen.
+
+"What do I want?" he said at length in a deep, rich voice, shot here and
+there with strange nasal tones, and here and there with the remains of a
+brogue. "Well, I want that you should stop persecuting those poor kids."
+
+"I persecuting them? Don't be absurd, Marty," answered Mrs. Wayne.
+
+"Persecuting them; what else?" retorted Marty, fiercely. "What else is
+it? They wanting to get married, and you determined to send the boy up
+the river."
+
+"I don't think we'll go over that again. I have a lady here on business."
+
+"Oh, please don't mind me," said Mrs. Farron, settling back, and
+wriggling her hands contentedly into her muff. She rather expected the
+frivolous courage of her tone to draw the ire of Burke's glance upon her,
+but it did not.
+
+"Cruel is what I call it," he went on. "She wants it, and he wants it,
+and her family wants it, and only you and the judge that you put up to
+opposing--"
+
+"Her family do not want it. Her brother--"
+
+"Her brother agrees with me. I was talking to him yesterday."
+
+"Oh, that's why he has a black eye, is it?" said Mrs. Wayne.
+
+"Black eyes or blue," said Marty, with a horizontal gesture of his
+hands, "her brother wants to see her married."
+
+"Well, I don't," replied Mrs. Wayne, "at least not to this boy. I will
+never give my consent to putting a child of her age in the power of a
+degenerate little drunkard like that."
+
+Mrs. Farron listened with all her ears. She did not think herself a
+prude, and only a moment before she had been accusing Mrs. Wayne of
+ignorance of the world; but never in all her life had she heard such
+words as were now freely exchanged between Burke and his hostess on the
+subject of the degree of consent that the girl in question had given to
+the advances of Burke's protege. She would have been as embarrassed as a
+girl if either of the disputants had been in the least aware of her
+presence. Once, she thought, Mrs. Wayne, for the sake of good manners,
+was on the point of turning to her and explaining the whole situation;
+but fortunately the exigencies of the dispute swept her on too fast.
+Adelaide was shocked, physically rather than morally, by the nakedness of
+their talk; but she did not want them to stop. She was fascinated by the
+spectacle of Marty Burke in action. She recognized at once that he was a
+dangerous man, not dangerous to female virtue, like all the other men to
+whom she had heard the term applied, but actually dangerous to life and
+property. She was not in the least afraid of him, but she knew he was a
+real danger. She enjoyed the knowledge. In most ways she was a woman
+timid in the face of physical danger, but she had never imagined being
+afraid of another human being. That much, perhaps, her sheltered training
+had done for her. "If she goes on irritating him like this he may murder
+us both," she thought. What she really meant was that he might murder
+Mrs. Wayne, but that, when he came to her and began to twist her neck,
+she would just say, "My dear man, don't be silly!" and he would stop.
+
+In the meantime Burke was not so angry as he was affecting to be. Like
+most leaders of men, he had a strong dramatic instinct, and he had just
+led Mrs. Wayne to the climax of her just violence when his manner
+suddenly completely changed, and he said with the utmost good temper:
+
+"And what do you think of my get-up, Mrs. Wayne? It's a new suit I have
+on, and a boutonniere." The change was so sudden that no one answered,
+and he went on, "It's clothes almost fit for a wedding that I'm wearing."
+
+Mrs. Wayne understood him in a flash. She sprang to her feet.
+
+"Marty Burke," she cried, "you don't mean to say you've got those two
+children married!"
+
+"Not fifteen minutes ago, and I standing up with the groom." He smiled a
+smile of the wildest, most piercing sweetness--a smile so free and
+intense that it seemed impossible to connect it with anything but the
+consciousness of a pure heart. Mrs. Farron had never seen such a smile.
+"I thought I'd just drop around and give you the news," he said, and now
+for the first time took off his hat, displaying his crisp, black hair and
+round, pugnacious head. "Good morning, ladies." He bowed, and for an
+instant his glance rested on Mrs. Farron with an admiration too frank to
+be exactly offensive. He put his hat on his head, turned away, and made
+his exit, whistling.
+
+He left behind him one person at least who had thoroughly enjoyed his
+triumph. To do her justice, however, Mrs. Farron was ashamed of her
+sympathy, and she said gently to Mrs. Wayne:
+
+"You think this marriage a very bad thing."
+
+Mrs. Wayne pushed all her hair away from her temples.
+
+"Oh, yes," she said, "it's a bad thing for the girl; but the worst is
+having Marty Burke put anything over. The district is absolutely under
+his thumb. I do wish, Mrs. Farron, you would get your husband to put the
+fear of God into him."
+
+"My husband?"
+
+"Yes; he works for your husband. He has charge of the loading and
+unloading of the trucks. He's proud of his job, and it gives him power
+over the laborers. He wouldn't want to lose his place. If your husband
+would send for him and say--" Mrs. Wayne hastily outlined the things Mr.
+Farron might say.
+
+"He works for Vincent," Adelaide repeated. It seemed to her an absolutely
+stupendous coincidence, and her imagination pictured the clash between
+them--the effort of Vincent to put the fear of God into this man. Would
+he be able to? Which one would win? Never before had she doubted the
+superior power of her husband; now she did. "I think it would be hard to
+put the fear of God into that young man," she said aloud.
+
+"I do wish Mr. Farron would try."
+
+"Try," thought Adelaide, "and fail?" Could she stand that? Was her
+whole relation to Vincent about to be put to the test? What weapons had
+he against Marty Burke? And if he had none, how stripped he would
+appear in her eyes!
+
+"Won't you ask him, Mrs. Farron?"
+
+Adelaide recoiled. She did not want to be the one to throw her glove
+among the lions.
+
+"I don't think I understand well enough what it is you want. Why don't
+you ask him yourself?" She hesitated, knowing that no opportunity for
+this would offer unless she herself arranged it. "Why don't you come and
+dine with us to-night, and," she added more slowly, "bring your son?"
+
+She had made the bait very attractive, and Mrs. Wayne did not refuse.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+As she drove home, Adelaide's whole being was stirred by the prospect of
+that conflict between Burke and her husband, and it was not until she saw
+Mathilde, pale with an hour of waiting, that she recalled the real object
+of her recent visit. Not, of course, that Adelaide was more interested in
+Marty Burke than in her daughter's future, but a titanic struggle fired
+her imagination more than a pitiful little romance. She felt a pang of
+self-reproach when she saw that Mr. Lanley had come to share the child's
+vigil, that he seemed to be suffering under an anxiety almost as keen as
+Mathilde's.
+
+They did not have to question her; she threw out her hands, casting her
+muff from her as she did so.
+
+"Oh," she said, "I'm a weak, soft-hearted creature! I've asked them both
+to dine tonight."
+
+Mathilde flung herself into her mother's arms.
+
+"O Mama, how marvelous you are!" she exclaimed.
+
+Over her daughter's shoulder Adelaide noted her father's expression, a
+stiffening of the mouth and a brightening of the eyes.
+
+"Your grandfather disapproves of me, Mathilde," she said.
+
+"He couldn't be so unkind," returned the girl.
+
+"After all," said Mr. Lanley, trying to induce a slight scowl, "if we are
+not going to consent to an engagement--"
+
+"But you are," said Mathilde.
+
+"We are not," said her mother; "but there is no reason why we should
+not meet and talk it over like sensible creatures--talk it over
+here"--Adelaide looked lovingly around her own subdued room--"instead
+of five stories up. For really--" She stopped, running her eyebrows
+together at the recollection.
+
+"But the flat is rather--rather comfortable when you get there," said Mr.
+Lanley, suddenly becoming embarrassed over his choice of an adjective.
+
+Adelaide looked at him sharply.
+
+"Dear Papa," she asked, "since when have you become an admirer of
+painted shelves and dirty rugs? And I don't doubt," she added very
+gently, "that for the same money they could have found something quite
+tolerable in the country."
+
+"Perhaps they don't want to live in the country," said Mr. Lanley, rather
+sharply: "I'm sure there is nothing that you'd hate more, Adelaide."
+
+She opened her dark eyes.
+
+"But I don't have to choose between squalor here or--"
+
+"Squalor!" said Mr. Lanley. "Don't be ridiculous!"
+
+Mathilde broke in gently at this point:
+
+"I think you must have liked Mrs. Wayne, Mama, to ask her to dine."
+
+Adelaide saw an opportunity to exercise one of her important talents.
+
+"Yes," she said. "She has a certain na�ve friendliness. Of course I don't
+advocate, after fifty, dressing like an Eton boy; I always think an
+elderly face above a turned-down collar--"
+
+"Mama," broke in Mathilde, quietly, "would you mind not talking of Mrs.
+Wayne like that? You know, she's Pete's mother."
+
+Adelaide was really surprised.
+
+"Why, my love," she answered, "I haven't said half the things I might
+say. I rather thought I was sparing your feelings. After all, when you
+see her, you will admit that she _does_ dress like an Eton boy."
+
+"She didn't when I saw her," said Mr. Lanley.
+
+Adelaide turned to her father.
+
+"Papa, I leave it to you. Did I say anything that should have wounded
+anybody's susceptibilities?"
+
+Mr. Lanley hesitated.
+
+"It was the tone Mathilde did not like, I think."
+
+Adelaide raised her shoulders and looked beautifully hurt.
+
+"My tone?" she wailed.
+
+"It hurt me," said Mathilde, laying her little hand on her heart.
+
+Mr. Lanley smiled at her, and then, springing up, kissed her tenderly on
+the forehead. He said it was time for him to be going on.
+
+"You'll come to dinner to-night, Papa?"
+
+Rather hastily, Mr. Lanley said no, he couldn't; he had an engagement.
+But his daughter did not let him get to the door.
+
+"What are you going to do to-night, Papa?" she asked, firmly.
+
+"There is a governor's meeting--"
+
+"Two in a week, Papa?"
+
+Suddenly Mr. Lanley dropped all pretense of not coming, and said he would
+be there at eight.
+
+During the rest of the day Mathilde's heart never wholly regained its
+normal beat. Not only was she to see Pete again, and see him under the
+gaze of her united family, but she was to see this mother of his, whom he
+loved and admired so much. She pictured her as white-haired, benignant,
+brooding, the essential mother, with all her own mother's grace and charm
+left out, yet with these qualities not ill replaced by others which
+Mathilde sometimes dimly apprehended were lacking in her own beautiful
+parent. She looked at herself in the glass. "My son's wife," was the
+phrase in her mind.
+
+On her way up-stairs to dress for dinner she tried to confide her
+anxieties to her mother.
+
+"Mama," she said, "if you had a son, how would you feel toward the girl
+he wanted to marry?"
+
+"Oh, I should think her a cat, of course," Adelaide answered; and
+added an instant later, "and I should probably be able to make him
+think so, too."
+
+Mathilde sighed and went on up-stairs. Here she decided on an act of some
+insubordination. She would wear her best dress that evening, the dress
+which her mother considered too old for her. She did not want Pete's
+mother to think he had chosen a perfect baby.
+
+Mr. Lanley, too, was a trifle nervous during the afternoon. He tried to
+say to himself that it was because the future of his darling little
+Mathilde was about to be settled. He shook his head, indicating that to
+settle the future of the young was a risky business; and then in a burst
+of self-knowledge he suddenly admitted that what was really making him
+nervous was the incident of the pier. If Mrs. Wayne referred to it, and
+of course there was no possible reason why she should not refer to it,
+Adelaide would never let him hear the last of it. It would be natural for
+Adelaide to think it queer that he hadn't told her about it. And the
+reason he hadn't told was perfectly clear: it was on that infernal pier
+that he had formed such an adverse opinion of Mrs. Wayne. But of course
+he did not wish to prejudice Adelaide; he wanted to leave her free to
+form her own opinions, and he was glad, excessively glad, that she had
+formed so favorable a one as to ask the woman to dinner. There was no
+question about his being glad; he surprised his servant by whistling as
+he put on his white waistcoat, and fastened the buckle rather more snugly
+than usual. Self-knowledge for the moment was not on hand.
+
+He arrived at exactly the hour at which he always arrived, five minutes
+after eight, a moment not too early to embarrass the hostess and not too
+late to endanger the dinner.
+
+No one was in the drawing-room but Mathilde and Farron. Adelaide, for one
+who had been almost perfectly brought up, did sometimes commit the fault
+of allowing her guests to wait for her.
+
+"'Lo, my dear," said Mr. Lanley, kissing Mathilde. "What's that you have
+on? Never saw it before. Not so becoming as the dress you were wearing
+the last time I was here."
+
+Mathilde felt that it would be almost easier to die immediately, and was
+revived only when she heard Farron saying:
+
+"Oh, don't you like this? I was just thinking I had never seen Mathilde
+looking so well, in her rather more mature and subtle vein."
+
+It was just as she wished to appear, but she glanced at her stepfather,
+disturbed by her constant suspicion that he read her heart more clearly
+than any one else, more clearly than she liked.
+
+"How shockingly late they are!" said Adelaide, suddenly appearing in
+the utmost splendor. She moved about, kissing her father and arranging
+the chairs. "Do you know, Vin, why it is that Pringle likes to make the
+room look as if it were arranged for a funeral? Why do you suppose they
+don't come?"
+
+"Any one who arrives after Adelaide is apt to be in wrong," observed
+her husband.
+
+"Well, I think it's awfully incompetent always to be waiting for other
+people," she returned, just laying her hand an instant on his shoulder to
+indicate that he alone was privileged to make fun of her.
+
+"That perhaps is what the Waynes think," he answered.
+
+Mathilde's heart sank a little at this. She knew her mother did not like
+to be kept waiting for dinner.
+
+"When I was a young man--" began Mr. Lanley.
+
+"It was the custom," interrupted Adelaide in exactly the same tone, "for
+a hostess to be in her drawing-room at least five minutes before the hour
+set for the arrival of the guests."
+
+"Adelaide," her father pleaded, "I don't talk like that; at least
+not often."
+
+"You would, though, if you didn't have me to correct you," she retorted.
+"There's the bell at last; but it always takes people like that forever
+to get their wraps off."
+
+"It's only ten minutes past eight," said Farron, and Mathilde blessed
+him with a look.
+
+Mrs. Wayne came quickly into the room, so fast that her dress floated
+behind her; she was in black and very grand. No one would have supposed
+that she had murmured to Pete just before the drawing-room door was
+opened, "I hope they haven't run in any old relations on us."
+
+"I'm afraid I'm late," she began.
+
+"She always is," Pete murmured to Mathilde as he took her hand and quite
+openly squeezed it, and then, before Adelaide had time for the rather
+casual introduction she had planned, he himself put the hand he was
+holding into his mother's. "This is my girl, Mother," he said. They
+smiled at each other. Mathilde tried to say something. Mrs. Wayne stooped
+and kissed her. Mr. Lanley was obviously affected. Adelaide wasn't going
+to have any scene like that.
+
+"Late?" she said, as if not an instant had passed since Mrs. Wayne's
+entrance. "Oh, no, you're not late; exactly on time, I think. I'm only
+just down myself. Isn't that true, Vincent?"
+
+Vincent was studying Mrs. Wayne, and withdrew his eyes slowly. But
+Adelaide's object was accomplished: no public betrothal had taken place.
+
+Pringle announced dinner. Mr. Lanley, rather to his own surprise, found
+that he was insisting on giving Mrs. Wayne his arm; he was not so angry
+at her as he had supposed. He did not think her offensive or unfeminine
+or half baked or socialistic or any of the things he had been saying to
+himself at lengthening intervals for the last twenty-four hours.
+
+Pete saw an opportunity, and tucked Mathilde's hand within his own arm,
+nipping it closely to his heart.
+
+The very instant they were at table Adelaide looked down the alley
+between the candles, for the low, golden dish of hot-house fruit did not
+obstruct her view of Vincent, and said:
+
+"Why have you never told me about Marty Burke?"
+
+"Who's he?" asked Mr. Lanley, quickly, for he had been trying to start a
+little conversational hare of his own, just to keep the conversation away
+from the water-front.
+
+"He's a splendid young super-tough in my employ," said Vincent. "What do
+you know about him, Adelaide?"
+
+The guarded surprise in his tone stimulated her.
+
+"Oh, I know all about him--as much, that is, as one ever can of a
+stupendous natural phenomenon."
+
+"Where did you hear of him?"
+
+"Hear of him? I've seen him. I saw him this morning at Mrs. Wayne's. He
+just dropped in while I was there and, metaphorically speaking, dragged
+us about by the hair of our heads."
+
+"Some women, I believe, confess to enjoying that sensation,"
+Vincent observed.
+
+"Yes, it's exciting," answered his wife.
+
+"It's an easy excitement to attain."
+
+"Oh, one wants it done in good style."
+
+Something so stimulating that it was almost hostile flashed through the
+interchange.
+
+Mathilde murmured to Pete:
+
+"Who are they talking about?"
+
+"A mixture of Alcibiades and _Bill Sykes_," said Adelaide, catching the
+low tone, as she always did.
+
+"He's the district leader and a very bad influence," said Mrs. Wayne.
+
+"He's a champion middle-weight boxer," said Pete.
+
+"He's the head of my stevedores," said Farron.
+
+"O Mr. Farron," Mrs. Wayne exclaimed, "I do wish you would use your
+influence over him."
+
+"My influence? It consists of paying him eighty-five dollars a month and
+giving him a box of cigars at Christmas."
+
+"Don't you think you could tone him down?" pleaded Mrs. Wayne. "He does
+so much harm."
+
+"But I don't want him toned down. His value to me is his being just as he
+is. He's a myth, a hero, a power on the water-front, and I employ him."
+
+"You employ him, but do you control him?" asked Adelaide, languidly, and
+yet with a certain emphasis.
+
+Her husband glanced at her.
+
+"What is it you want, Adelaide?" he said.
+
+She gave a little laugh.
+
+"Oh, I want nothing. It's Mrs. Wayne who wants you to do
+something--rather difficult, too, I should imagine."
+
+He turned gravely to their guest.
+
+"What is it you want, Mrs. Wayne?"
+
+Mrs. Wayne considered an instant, and as she was about to find words for
+her request her son spoke:
+
+"She'll tell you after dinner."
+
+"Pete, I wasn't going to tell the story," his mother put in protestingly.
+"You really do me injustice at times."
+
+Adelaide, remembering the conversation of the morning, wondered whether
+he did. She felt grateful to him for wishing to spare Mathilde the
+hearing of such a story, and she turned to him with a caressing
+graciousness in which she was extremely at her ease. Mathilde,
+recognizing that her mother was pleased, though not being very clear why,
+could not resist joining in their conversation; and Mrs. Wayne was thus
+given an opportunity of murmuring the unfortunate Anita's story into
+Vincent's ear.
+
+Adelaide, holding Pete with a flattering gaze, seeming to drink in every
+word he was saying, heard Mrs. Wayne finish and heard Vincent say:
+
+"And you think you can get it annulled if only Burke doesn't interfere?"
+
+"Yes, if he doesn't get hold of the boy and tell him that his dignity as
+a man is involved."
+
+Adelaide withdrew her gaze from Pete and fixed it on Vincent. Was he
+going to accept that challenge? She wanted him to, and yet she thought he
+would be defeated, and she did not want him to be defeated. She waited
+almost breathless.
+
+"Well, I'll see what I can do," he said. This was an acceptance.
+This from Vincent meant that the matter, as far as he was concerned,
+was settled.
+
+"You two plotters!" exclaimed Adelaide. "For my part, I'm on Marty
+Burke's side. I hate to see wild creatures in cages."
+
+"Dangerous to side with wild beasts," observed Vincent.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"They get the worst of it in the long run."
+
+Adelaide dropped her eyes. It was exactly the right answer. For a moment
+she felt his complete supremacy. Then another thought shot through her
+mind: it was exactly the right answer if he could make it good.
+
+In the meantime Mr. Lanley began to grow dissatisfied with the prolonged
+role of spectator. He preferred danger to oblivion; and turning to Mrs.
+Wayne, he said, with his politest smile:
+
+"How are the bridges?"
+
+"Oh, dear," she answered, "I must have been terribly tactless--to make
+you so angry."
+
+Mr. Lanley drew himself up.
+
+"I was not angry," he said.
+
+She looked at him with a sort of gentle wonder.
+
+"You gave me the impression of being."
+
+The very temperateness of the reply made him see that he had been
+inaccurate.
+
+"Of course I was angry," he said. "What I mean is that I don't understand
+why I was."
+
+Meantime, on the opposite side of the table, Mathilde and Pete were
+equally immersed, murmuring sentences of the profoundest meaning behind
+faces which they felt were mask-like.
+
+Farron looked down the table at his wife. Why, he wondered, did she want
+to tease him to-night, of all nights in his life?
+
+When they came out of the dining-room Pete said to Mathilde with the
+utmost clearness:
+
+"And what was that magazine you spoke of?"
+
+She had spoken of no magazine, but she caught the idea, the clever,
+rather wicked idea. He made her work her mind almost too fast sometimes,
+but she enjoyed it.
+
+"Wasn't it this?" she asked, with a beating heart.
+
+They sat down on the sofa and bent their heads over it with student-like
+absorption.
+
+"I haven't any idea what it is," she whispered.
+
+"Oh, well, I suppose there's something or other in it."
+
+"I think your mother is perfectly wonderful--wonderful."
+
+"I love you so."
+
+The older people took a little longer to settle down. Mr. Lanley stood on
+the hearth-rug, with a cigar in his mouth and his head thrown very far
+back. Adelaide sank into a chair, looking, as she often did, as if she
+had just been brilliantly well posed for a photograph. Farron was
+silent. Mrs. Wayne sat, as she had a bad habit of doing, on one foot. The
+two groups were sufficiently separated for distinct conversations.
+
+"Is this a conference?" asked Farron.
+
+Mrs. Wayne made it so by her reply.
+
+"The whole question is, Are they really in love? At least, that's my
+view."
+
+"In love!" Adelaide twisted her shoulders. "What can they know of it for
+another ten years? You must have some character, some knowledge to fall
+in love. And these babes--"
+
+"No," said Mr. Lanley, stoutly; "you're all wrong, Adelaide. It's first
+love that matters--_Romeo_ and _Juliet_, you know. Afterward we all get
+hardened and world-worn and cynical and material." He stopped short in
+his eloquence at the thought that Mrs. Wayne was quite obviously not
+hardened or world-worn or cynical or material. "By Jove!" he thought to
+himself, "that's it. The woman's spirit is as fresh as a girl's." He had
+by this time utterly forgotten what he had meant to say.
+
+Adelaide turned to her husband.
+
+"Do you think they are in love, Vin?"
+
+Vincent looked at her for a second, and then he nodded two or
+three times.
+
+Though no one at once recognized the fact, the engagement was settled at
+that moment.
+
+It seemed obvious that Mr. Lanley should take the Waynes home in his car.
+Mrs. Wayne, who had prepared for walking with overshoes and with pins for
+her trailing skirt, did not seem too enthusiastic at the suggestion. She
+stood a moment on the step and looked at the sky, where Orion, like a
+banner, was hung across the easterly opening of the side street.
+
+"It's a lovely night," she said.
+
+It was Pete who drew her into the car. Her reluctance deprived Mr.
+Lanley of the delight of bestowing a benefit, but gave him a faint sense
+of capture.
+
+In the drawing-room Mathilde was looking from one to the other of her
+natural guardians, like a well-trained puppy who wants to be fed. She
+wanted Pete praised. Instead, Adelaide said:
+
+"Really, papa is growing too secretive! Do you know, Vin, he and Mrs.
+Wayne quarreled like mad last evening, and he never told me a word
+about it!"
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"Oh, I heard them trying to smooth it out at dinner."
+
+"O Mama," wailed Mathilde, between admiration and complaint, "you hear
+everything!"
+
+"Certainly, I do," Adelaide returned lightly. "Yes, and I heard you, too,
+and understood everything that you meant."
+
+Vincent couldn't help smiling at his stepdaughter's horrified look.
+
+"What a brute you are, Adelaide!" he said.
+
+"Oh, my dear, you're much worse," she retorted. "You don't have to
+overhear. You just read the human heart by some black magic of your own.
+That's really more cruel than my gross methods."
+
+"Well, Mathilde," said Farron, "as a reader of the human heart, I want to
+tell you that I approve of the young man. He has a fine, delicate touch
+on life, which, I am inclined to think, goes only with a good deal of
+strength."
+
+Mathilde blinked her eyes. Gratitude and delight had brought
+tears to them.
+
+"He thinks you're wonderful, Mr. Farron," she answered a little huskily.
+
+"Better and better," answered Vincent, and he held out his hand for a
+letter that Pringle was bringing to him on a tray.
+
+"What's that?" asked Adelaide. One of the first things she had impressed
+on Joe Severance was that he must never inquire about her mail; but she
+always asked Farron about his.
+
+He seemed to be thinking and didn't answer her.
+
+Mathilde, now simply insatiable, pressed nearer to him and asked:
+
+"And what do you think of Mrs. Wayne?"
+
+He raised his eyes from the envelope, and answered with a certain
+absence of tone:
+
+"I thought she was an elderly wood-nymph."
+
+Adelaide glanced over his shoulder, and, seeing that the letter had a
+printed address in the corner, lost interest.
+
+"You may shut the house, Pringle," she said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+Pringle, the last servant up, was soon heard discreetly drawing bolts and
+turning out electric lights. Mathilde went straight up-stairs without
+even an attempt at drawing her mother into an evening gossip. She was
+aware of being tired after two nights rendered almost sleepless by her
+awareness of joy. She went to her room and shut the door. Her bed was
+piled high with extra covers, soft, light blankets and a down coverlet
+covered with pink silk. She took a certain hygienic pride in the extent
+to which she always opened her bedroom windows even when, as at present,
+the night was bitterly cold. In the morning she ran, huddling on her
+dressing-gown, into a heated bathroom, and when she emerged from this,
+the maid had always lighted her fire, and laid her breakfast-tray close
+to the blaze. To-night, when she went to open her window, she noticed
+that the houses opposite had lost courage and showed only cracks. She
+stood a second looking up at the stars, twinkling with tiny blue rays
+through the clear air. By turning her head to the west she could look
+down on the park, with its surface of bare, blurred tree-branches pierced
+by rows of lights. The familiar sight suddenly seemed to her almost
+intolerably beautiful. "Oh, I love him so much!" she said to herself, and
+her lips actually whispered the words, "so much! so much!"
+
+She threw the window high as a reproof of those shivers across the way,
+and, jumping into bed, hastily sandwiched her small body between the warm
+bedclothes. She was almost instantly asleep.
+
+Overhead the faint, but heavy, footfall of Pringle ceased. The house was
+silent; the city had become so. An occasional Madison Avenue car could be
+heard ringing along the cold rails, or rhythmically bounding down hill on
+a flat wheel. Once some distance away came the long, continuous complaint
+of the siren of a fire-engine and the bells and gongs of its comrades;
+and then a young man went past, whistling with the purest accuracy of
+time and tune the air to which he had just been dancing.
+
+At half-past five the kitchen-maid, a young Swede who feared not God,
+neither regarded man, but lived in absolute subjection to the cook, to
+whom, unknown to any one else, she every morning carried up breakfast,
+was stealing down with a candle in her hand. Her senses were alert, for a
+friend of hers had been strangled by burglars in similar circumstances,
+and she had never overcome her own terror of the cold, dark house in
+these early hours of a winter morning.
+
+She went down not the back stairs, for Mr. Pringle objected that she woke
+him as she passed, whereas the carpet on the front stairs was so thick
+that there wasn't the least chance of waking the family. As she passed
+Mrs. Farron's room she was surprised to see a fine crack of light coming
+from under it. She paused, wondering if she was going to be caught, and
+if she had better run back and take to the back stairs despite Pringle's
+well-earned rest; and as she hesitated she heard a sob, then
+another--wild, hysterical sobs. The girl looked startled and then went
+on, shaking her head. What people like that had to cry about beat her.
+But she was glad, because she knew such a splendid bit of news would
+soften the heart of the cook when she took up her breakfast.
+
+By five o'clock it seemed to Adelaide that a whole eternity had passed
+and that another was ahead of her, that this night would never end.
+
+When they went up-stairs, while she was brushing her hair--her hair
+rewarded brushing, for it was fine and long and took a polish like
+bronze--she had wandered into Vincent's room to discuss with him the
+question of her father's secretiveness about Mrs. Wayne. It was not, she
+explained, standing in front of his fire, that she suspected anything,
+but that it was so unfriendly: it deprived one of so much legitimate
+amusement if one's own family practised that kind of reserve. Her just
+anger kept her from observing Farron very closely. As she talked she laid
+her brush on the mantelpiece, and as she did so she knocked down the
+letter that had come for him just before they went up-stairs. She
+stooped, and picked it up without attention, and stood holding it; she
+gesticulated a little with it as she repeated, for her own amusement
+rather than for Vincent's, phrases she had caught at dinner.
+
+The horror to Farron of seeing her standing there chattering, with that
+death-dealing letter in her hand, suddenly and illogically broke down his
+resolution of silence. It was cruel, and though he might have denied
+himself her help, he could not endure cruelty.
+
+"Adelaide," he said in a tone that drove every other sensation
+away--"Adelaide, that letter. No, don't read it." He took it from her
+and laid it on his dressing-table. "My dear love, it has very bad
+news in it."
+
+"There _has_ been something, then?"
+
+"Yes. I have been worried about my health for some time. This letter
+tells me the worst is true. Well, my dear, we did not enter matrimony
+with the idea that either of us was immortal."
+
+But that was his last effort to be superior to the crisis, to pretend
+that the bitterness of death was any less to him than to any other human
+creature, to conceal that he needed help, all the help that he could get.
+
+And Adelaide gave him help. Artificial as she often was in daily
+contact, in a moment like this she was splendidly, almost primitively
+real. She did not conceal her own passionate despair, her conviction that
+her life couldn't go on without his; she did not curb her desire to know
+every detail on which his opinion and his doctor's had been founded; she
+clung to him and wept, refusing to let him discuss business arrangements,
+in which for some reason he seemed to find a certain respite; and yet
+with it all, she gave him strength, the sense that he had an indissoluble
+and loyal companion in the losing fight that lay before him.
+
+Once she was aware of thinking: "Oh, why did he tell me to-night? Things
+are so terrible by night," but it was only a second before she put such a
+thought away from her. What had these nights been to him? The night when
+she had found his light burning so late, and other nights when he had
+probably denied himself the consolation of reading for fear of rousing
+her suspicions. She did not attempt to pity or advise him, she did not
+treat him as a mixture of child and idiot, as affection so often treats
+illness. She simply gave him her love.
+
+Toward morning he fell asleep in her arms, and then she stole back to
+her own room. There everything was unchanged, the light still burning,
+her satin slippers stepping on each other just as she had left them. She
+looked at herself in the glass; she did not look so very different. A
+headache had often ravaged her appearance more.
+
+She had always thought herself a coward, she feared death with a terrible
+repugnance; but now she found, to her surprise, that she would have
+light-heartedly changed places with her husband. She had much more
+courage to die than to watch him die--to watch Vincent die, to see him
+day by day grow weak and pitiful. That was what was intolerable. If he
+would only die now, to-night, or if she could! It was at this moment that
+the kitchen maid had heard her sobbing.
+
+Because there was nothing else to do, she got into bed, and lay there
+staring at the electric light, which she had forgotten to put out. Toward
+seven she got up and gave orders that Mr. Farron was not to be disturbed,
+that the house was to be kept quiet. Strange, she thought, that he could
+sleep like an exhausted child, while she, awake, was a mass of pain. Her
+heart ached, her eyes burned, her very body felt sore. She arranged for
+his sleep, but she wanted him to wake up; she begrudged every moment of
+his absence. Alas! she thought, how long would she continue to do so?
+
+Yet with her suffering came a wonderful ease, an ability to deal with the
+details of life. When at eight o'clock her maid came in and, pulling the
+curtains, exclaimed with Gallic candor, "Oh, comme madame a mauvaise mine
+ce matin!" she smiled at her with unusual gentleness. Later, when
+Mathilde came down at her accustomed hour, and lying across the foot of
+her mother's bed, began to read her scraps of the morning paper, Adelaide
+felt a rush of tenderness for the child, who was so unaware of the
+hideous bargain life really was. Surprising as it was, she found she
+could talk more easily than usual and with a more undivided attention,
+though everything they said was trivial enough.
+
+Then suddenly her heart stood still, for the door opened, and Vincent, in
+his dressing-gown, came in. He had evidently had his bath, for his hair
+was wet and shiny. Thank God! he showed no signs of defeat!
+
+"Oh," cried Mathilde, jumping up, "I thought Mr. Farron had gone
+down-town ages ago."
+
+"He overslept," said Adelaide.
+
+"I had an excellent night," he answered, and she knew he looked at her to
+discover that she had not.
+
+"I'll go," said Mathilde; but with unusual sharpness they both turned to
+her and said simultaneously, "No, no; stay." They knew no better than she
+did why they were so eager to keep her.
+
+"Are you going down-town, Vin?" Adelaide asked, and her voice shook a
+little on the question; she was so eager that he should not institute any
+change in his routine so soon.
+
+"Of course," he answered.
+
+They looked at each other, yet their look said nothing in particular.
+Presently he said:
+
+"I wonder if I might have breakfast in here. I'll go and shave if you'll
+order it; and don't let Mathilde go. I have something to say to her."
+
+When he was gone, Mathilde went and stood at the window, looking out, and
+tying knots in the window-shade's cord. It was a trick Adelaide had
+always objected to, and she was quite surprised to hear herself saying
+now, just as usual:
+
+"Mathilde, don't tie knots in that cord."
+
+Mathilde threw it from her as one whose mind was engaged on higher
+things.
+
+"You know," she observed, "I believe I'm only just beginning to
+appreciate Mr. Farron. He's so wise. I see what you meant about his being
+strong, and he's so clever. He knows just what you're thinking all the
+time. Isn't it nice that he likes Pete? Did he say anything more about
+him after you went up-stairs? I mean, he really does like him, doesn't
+he? He doesn't say that just to please me?"
+
+Presently Vincent came back fully dressed and sat down to his breakfast.
+Oddly enough, there was a spirit of real gaiety in the air.
+
+"What was it you were going to say to me?" Mathilde asked greedily.
+Farron looked at her blankly. Adelaide knew that he had quite forgotten
+the phrase, but he concealed the fact by not allowing the least
+illumination of his expression as he remembered.
+
+"Oh, yes," he said. "I wish to correct myself. I told you that Mrs.
+Wayne was an elderly wood-nymph; but I was wrong. Of course the truth is
+that she's a very young witch."
+
+Mathilde laughed, but not whole-heartedly. She had already identified
+herself so much with the Waynes that she could not take them quite in
+this tone of impersonality.
+
+Farron threw down his napkin, stood up, pulled down his waistcoat.
+
+"I must be off," he said. He went and kissed his wife. Both had to nerve
+themselves for that.
+
+She held his arm in both her hands, feeling it solid, real, and as
+hard as iron.
+
+"You'll be up-town early?"
+
+"I've a busy day."
+
+"By four?"
+
+"I'll telephone." She loved him for refusing to yield to her just at this
+moment of all moments. Some men, she thought, would have hidden their own
+self-pity under the excuse of the necessity of being kind to her.
+
+She was to lunch out with a few critical contemporaries. She was
+horrified when she looked at herself by morning light. Her skin had an
+ivory hue, and there were many fine wrinkles about her eyes. She began to
+repair these damages with the utmost frankness, talking meantime to
+Mathilde and the maid. She swept her whole face with a white lotion,
+rouged lightly, but to her very eyelids, touched a red pencil to her
+lips, all with discretion. The result was satisfactory. The improvement
+in her appearance made her feel braver. She couldn't have faced these
+people--she did not know whether to think of them as intimate enemies or
+hostile friends--if she had been looking anything but her best.
+
+But they were just what she needed; they would be hard and amusing and
+keep her at some tension. She thought rather crossly that she could not
+sit through a meal at home and listen to Mathilde rambling on about love
+and Mr. Farron.
+
+She was inexcusably late, and they had sat down to luncheon--three men
+and two women--by the time she arrived. They had all been, or had wanted
+to go, to an auction sale of _objets d'art_ that had taken place the
+night before. They were discussing it, praising their own purchases, and
+decrying the value of everybody else's when Adelaide came in.
+
+"Oh, Adelaide," said her hostess, "we were just wondering what you paid
+originally for your tapestry."
+
+"The one in the hall?"
+
+"No, the one with the Turk in it."
+
+"I haven't an idea,--" Adelaide was distinctly languid,--"I got it from
+my grandfather."
+
+"Wouldn't you know she'd say that?" exclaimed one of the women. "Not that
+I deny it's true; only, you know, Adelaide, whenever you do want to throw
+a veil over one of your pieces, you always call on the prestige of your
+ancestors."
+
+Adelaide raised her eyebrows.
+
+"Really," she answered, "there isn't anything so very conspicuous about
+having had a grandfather."
+
+"No," her hostess echoed, "even I, so well and favorably known for my
+vulgarity--even _I_ had a grandfather."
+
+"But he wasn't a connoisseur in tapestries, Minnie darling."
+
+"No, but he was in pigs, the dear vulgarian."
+
+"True vulgarity," said one of the men, "vulgarity in the best sense, I
+mean, should betray no consciousness of its own existence. Only thus can
+it be really great."
+
+"Oh, Minnie's vulgarity is just artificial, assumed because she found it
+worked so well."
+
+"Surely you accord her some natural talent along those lines."
+
+"I suspect her secret mind is refined."
+
+"Oh, that's not fair. Vulgar is as vulgar does."
+
+Adelaide stood up, pushing back her chair. She found them utterly
+intolerable. Besides, as they talked she had suddenly seen clearly that
+she must herself speak to Vincent's doctor without an instant's delay. "I
+have to telephone, Minnie," she said, and swept out of the room. She
+never returned.
+
+"Not one of the perfect lady's golden days, I should say," said one of
+the men, raising his eyebrows. "I wonder what's gone wrong?"
+
+"Can Vincent have been straying from the straight and narrow?"
+
+"Something wrong. I could tell by her looks."
+
+"Ah, my dear, I'm afraid her looks is what's wrong."
+
+Adelaide meantime was in her motor on her way to the doctor's office. He
+had given up his sacred lunch-hour in response to her imperious demand
+and to his own intense pity for her sorrow.
+
+He did not know her, but he had had her pointed out to him, and though
+he recognized the unreason of such an attitude, he was aware that her
+great beauty dramatized her suffering, so that his pity for her was
+uncommonly alive.
+
+He was a young man, with a finely cut face and a blond complexion. His
+pity was visible, quivering a little under his mask of impassivity.
+Adelaide's first thought on seeing him was, "Good Heavens! another man to
+be emotionally calmed before I can get at the truth!" She had to be
+tactful, to let him see that she was not going to make a scene. She knew
+that he felt it himself, but she was not grateful to him. What business
+had he to feel it? His feeling was an added burden, and she felt that she
+had enough to carry.
+
+He did not make the mistake, however, of expressing his sympathy
+verbally. His answers were as cold and clear as she could wish. She
+questioned him on the chances of an operation. He could not reduce his
+judgment to a mathematical one; he was inclined to advocate an operation
+on psychological grounds, he said.
+
+"It keeps up the patient's courage to know something is being done." He
+added, "That will be your work, Mrs. Farron, to keep his courage up."
+
+Most women like to know they had their part to play, but Adelaide shook
+her head quickly.
+
+"I would so much rather go through it myself!" she cried.
+
+"Naturally, naturally," he agreed, without getting the full passion
+of her cry.
+
+She stood up.
+
+"Oh," she said, "if it could only be kill or cure!"
+
+He glanced at her.
+
+"We have hardly reached that point yet," he answered.
+
+She went away dissatisfied. He had answered every question, he had even
+encouraged her to hope a little more than her interpretation of what
+Vincent said had allowed her; but as she drove away she knew he had
+failed her. For she had gone to him in order to have Vincent presented to
+her as a hero, as a man who had looked upon the face of death without a
+quiver. Instead, he had been presented to her as a patient, just one of
+the long procession that passed through that office. The doctor had said
+nothing to contradict the heroic picture, but he had said nothing to
+contribute to it. And surely, if Farron had stood out in his calmness and
+courage above all other men, the doctor would have mentioned it, couldn't
+have helped doing so; he certainly would not have spent so much time in
+telling her how she was to guard and encourage him. To the doctor he was
+only a patient, a pitiful human being, a victim of mortality. Was that
+what he was going to become in her eyes, too?
+
+At four she drove down-town to his office. He came out with another man;
+they stood a moment on the steps talking and smiling. Then he drew his
+friend to the car window and introduced him to Adelaide. The man took
+off his hat.
+
+"I was just telling your husband, Mrs. Farron, that I've been looking at
+offices in this building. By the spring he and I will be neighbors."
+
+Adelaide just shut her eyes, and did not open them again until Vincent
+had got in beside her and she felt his arm about her shoulder.
+
+"My poor darling!" he said. "What you need is to go home and get some
+sleep." It was said in his old, cherishing tone, and she, leaning back,
+with her head against the point of his shoulder, felt that, black as it
+was, life for the first time since the night before had assumed its
+normal aspect again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+The morning after their drive up-town Vincent told his wife that all
+his arrangements were made to go to the hospital that night, and to be
+operated upon the next day. She reproached him for having made his
+decision without consulting her, but she loved him for his proud
+independence.
+
+Somehow this second day under the shadow of death was less terrible than
+the first. Vincent stayed up-town, and was very natural and very busy. He
+saw a few people,--men who owed him money, his lawyer, his partner,--but
+most of the time he and Adelaide sat together in his study, as they had
+sat on many other holidays. He insisted on going alone to the hospital,
+although she was to be in the building during the operation.
+
+Mathilde had been told, and inexperienced in disaster, she had felt
+convinced that the outcome couldn't be fatal, yet despite her conviction
+that people did not really die, she was aware of a shyness and
+awkwardness in the tragic situation.
+
+Mr. Lanley had been told, and his attitude was just the opposite. To
+him it seemed absolutely certain that Farron would die,--every one
+did,--but he had for some time been aware of a growing hardness on his
+part toward the death of other people, as if he were thus preparing
+himself for his own.
+
+"Poor Vincent!" he said to himself. "Hard luck at his age, when an old
+man like me is left." But this was not quite honest. In his heart he
+felt there was nothing unnatural in Vincent's being taken or in his
+being left.
+
+As usual in a crisis, Adelaide's behavior was perfect. She contrived to
+make her husband feel every instant the depth, the strength, the passion
+of her love for him without allowing it to add to the weight he was
+already carrying. Alone together, he and she had flashes of real gaiety,
+sometimes not very far from tears.
+
+To Mathilde the brisk naturalness of her mother's manner was a source of
+comfort. All the day the girl suffered from a sense of strangeness and
+isolation, and a fear of doing or saying something unsuitable--something
+either too special or too every-day. She longed to evince sympathy for
+Mr. Farron, but was afraid that, if she did, it would be like intimating
+that he was as good as dead. She was caught between the negative danger
+of seeming indifferent and the positive one of being tactless.
+
+As soon as Vincent had left the house, Adelaide's thought turned to her
+daughter. He had gone about six o'clock. He and she had been sitting by
+his study fire when Pringle announced that the motor was waiting. Vincent
+got up quietly, and so did she. They stood with their arms about each
+other, as if they meant never to forget the sense of that contact; and
+then without any protest they went down-stairs together.
+
+In the hall he had shaken hands with Mr. Lanley and had kissed Mathilde,
+who, do what she would, couldn't help choking a little. All this time
+Adelaide stood on the stairs, very erect, with one hand on the stair-rail
+and one on the wall, not only her eyes, but her whole face, radiating an
+uplifted peace. So angelic and majestic did she seem that Mathilde,
+looking up at her, would hardly have been surprised if she had floated
+out into space from her vantage-ground on the staircase.
+
+Then Farron lit a last cigar, gave a quick, steady glance at his wife,
+and went out. The front door ended the incident as sharply as a shot
+would have done.
+
+It was then that Mathilde expected to see her mother break down. Under
+all her sympathy there was a faint human curiosity as to how people
+contrived to live through such crises. If Pete were on the brink of
+death, she thought that she would go mad: but, then, she and Pete were
+not a middle-aged married couple; they were young, and new to love.
+
+They all went into the drawing-room, Adelaide the calmest of the three.
+
+"I wonder," she said, "if you two would mind dining a little earlier than
+usual. I might sleep if I could get to bed early, and I must be at the
+hospital before eight."
+
+Mr. Lanley agreed a little more quickly than it was his habit to speak.
+
+"O Mama, I think you're so marvelous!" said Mathilde, and touched at her
+own words, she burst into tears. Her mother put her arm about her, and
+Mr. Lanley patted her shoulder--his sovereign care.
+
+"There, there, my dear," he murmured, "you must not cry. You know Vincent
+has a very good chance, a very good chance."
+
+The assumption that he hadn't was just the one Mathilde did not want to
+appear to make. Her mother saw this and said gently:
+
+"She's overstrained, that's all."
+
+The girl wiped her eyes.
+
+"I'm ashamed, when you are so calm and wonderful."
+
+"I'm not wonderful," said her mother. "I have no wish to cry. I'm beyond
+it. Other people's trouble often makes us behave more emotionally than
+our own. If it were your Pete, I should be in tears." She smiled, and
+looked across the girl's head at Mr. Lanley. "She would like to see him,
+Papa. Telephone Pete Wayne, will you, and ask him to come and see her
+this evening? You'll be here, won't you?"
+
+Mr. Lanley nodded without cordiality; he did not approve of encouraging
+the affair unnecessarily.
+
+"How kind you are, Mama!" exclaimed Mathilde, almost inaudibly. It was
+just what she wanted, just what she had been wanting all day, to see her
+own man, to assure herself, since death was seen to be hot on the trail
+of all mortals, that he and she were not wasting their brief time in
+separation.
+
+"We might take a turn in the motor," said Mr. Lanley, thinking that Mrs.
+Wayne might enjoy that.
+
+"It would do you both good."
+
+"And leave you alone, Mama?"
+
+"It's what I really want, dear."
+
+The plan did not fulfil itself quite as Mr. Lanley had imagined. Mrs.
+Wayne was out at some sort of meeting. They waited a moment for Pete.
+Mathilde fixed her eyes on the lighted doorway, and said to herself that
+in a few seconds the thing of all others that she desired would
+happen--he would come through it. And almost at once he did, looking
+particularly young and alive; so that, as he jumped in beside her on the
+back seat, both her hands went out and caught his arm and clung to him.
+Her realization of mortality had been so acute that she felt as if he had
+been restored to her from the dead. She told him the horrors of the day.
+Particularly, she wanted to share with him her gratitude for her mother's
+almost magic kindness.
+
+"I wanted you so much, Pete," she whispered; "but I thought it would be
+heartless even to suggest my having wishes at such a time. And then for
+her to think of it herself--"
+
+"It means they are not really going to oppose our marriage."
+
+They talked about their marriage and the twenty or thirty years of joy
+which they might reasonably hope to snatch from life.
+
+"Think of it," he said--"twenty or thirty years, longer than either of us
+have lived."
+
+"If I could have five years, even one year, with you, I think I could
+bear to die; but not now, Pete."
+
+In the meantime Mr. Lanley, alone on the front seat, for he had left
+his chauffeur at home, was driving north along the Hudson and saying
+to himself:
+
+"Sixty-four. Well, I may be able to knock out ten or twelve pretty
+satisfactory years. On the other hand, might die to-morrow; hope I
+don't, though. As long as I can drive a car and everything goes well
+with Adelaide and this child, I'd be content to live my full time--and a
+little bit more. Not many men are healthier than I am. Poor Vincent! A
+good deal more to live for than I have, most people would say; but I
+don't know that he enjoys it any more than I do." Turning his head a
+little, he shouted over his shoulder to Pete, "Sorry your mother
+couldn't come."
+
+Mathilde made a hasty effort to withdraw her hands; but Wayne, more
+practical, understanding better the limits put upon a driver, held
+them tightly as he answered in a civil tone: "Yes, she would have
+enjoyed this."
+
+"She must come some other time," shouted Mr. Lanley, and reflected that
+it was not always necessary to bring the young people with you.
+
+"You know, he could not possibly have turned enough to see," Pete
+whispered reprovingly to Mathilde.
+
+"I suppose not; and yet it seemed so queer to be talking to my
+grandfather with--"
+
+"You must try and adapt yourself to your environment," he returned, and
+put his arm about her.
+
+The cold of the last few days had given place to a thaw. The melting ice
+in the river was streaked in strange curves, and the bare trees along the
+straight heights of the Palisades were blurred by a faint bluish mist,
+out of which white lights and yellow ones peered like eyes.
+
+"Doesn't it seem cruel to be so happy when Mama and poor Mr. Farron--"
+Mathilde began.
+
+"It's the only lesson to learn," he answered--"to be happy while we are
+young and together."
+
+About ten o'clock Mr. Lanley left her at home, and she tiptoed up-stairs
+and hardly dared to draw breath as she undressed for fear she might wake
+her unhappy mother on the floor below her.
+
+She had resolved to wake early, to breakfast with her mother, to ask to
+be allowed to accompany her to the hospital; but it was nine o'clock when
+she was awakened by her maid's coming in with her breakfast and the
+announcement not only that Mrs. Farron had been gone for more than an
+hour, but that there had already been good news from the hospital.
+
+"Il para�t que monsieur est tr�s fort," she said, with that absolute
+neutrality of accent that sounds in Anglo-Saxon ears almost like a
+complaint.
+
+Adelaide had been in no need of companionship. She was perfectly able
+to go through her day. It seemed as if her soul, with a soul's
+capacity for suffering, had suddenly withdrawn from her body, had
+retreated into some unknown fortress, and left in its place a hard,
+trivial, practical intelligence which tossed off plan after plan for
+the future detail of life. As she drove from her house to the hospital
+she arranged how she would apportion the household in case of a
+prolonged illness, where she would put the nurses. Nor was she less
+clear as to what should be done in case of Vincent's death. The whole
+thing unrolled before her like a panorama.
+
+At the hospital, after a little delay, she was guided to Vincent's own
+room, recently deserted. A nurse came to tell her that all was going
+well; Mr. Farron had had a good night, and was taking the anesthetic
+nicely. Adelaide found the young woman's manner offensively encouraging,
+and received the news with an insolent reserve.
+
+"That girl is too wildly, spiritually bright," she said to herself. But
+no manner would have pleased her.
+
+Left alone, she sat down in a rocking-chair near the window. Vincent's
+bag stood in the corner, his brushes were on the dressing-table, his tie
+hung on the electric light. Immortal trifles, she thought, that might be
+in existence for years.
+
+She began poignantly to regret that she had not insisted on seeing him
+again that morning. She had thought only of what was easiest for him. She
+ought to have thought of herself, of what would make it possible for her
+to go on living without him. If she could have seen him again, he might
+have given her some precept, some master word, by which she could have
+guided her life. She would have welcomed something imprisoning and safe.
+It was cruel of him, she thought, to toss her out like this, rudderless
+and alone. She wondered what he would have given her as a commandment,
+and remembered suddenly the apocryphal last words which Vincent was fond
+of attributing to George Washington, "Never trust a nigger with a gun."
+She found herself smiling over them. Vincent was more likely to have
+quoted the apparition's advice to Macbeth: "Be bloody, bold, and
+resolute." That would have been his motto for himself, but not for her.
+What was the principle by which he infallibly guided her?
+
+How could he have left her so spiritually unprovided for? She felt
+imposed upon, deserted. The busily planning little mind that had suddenly
+taken possession of her could not help her in the larger aspects of her
+existence. It would be much simpler, she thought, to die than to attempt
+life again without Vincent.
+
+She went to the window and looked out at the roofs of neighboring
+houses, a disordered conglomeration of water-tanks and skylights and
+chimney-pots. Then nearer, almost under her feet, she looked into a
+courtyard of the hospital and saw a pale, emaciated man in a wheel-chair.
+She drew back as if it were something indecent. Would Vincent ever become
+like that? she thought. If so, she would rather he died now under the
+anesthetic.
+
+A little while later the nurse came in, and said almost sternly that Dr.
+Crew had sent her to tell Mrs. Farron that the conditions seemed
+extremely favorable, and that all immediate danger was over.
+
+"You mean," said Adelaide, fiercely, "that Mr. Farron will live?"
+
+"I certainly inferred that to be the doctor's meaning," answered the
+nurse. "But here is the assistant, Dr. Withers."
+
+Dr. Withers, bringing with him an intolerable smell of disinfectants and
+chloroform, hurried in, with his hair mussed from the haste with which he
+had removed his operating-garments. He had small, bright, brown eyes,
+with little lines about them that seemed to suggest humor, but actually
+indicated that he buoyed up his life not by exaltation of himself, but by
+half-laughing depreciation of every one else.
+
+"I thought you'd be glad to know, Mrs. Farron," he said, "that any danger
+that may have existed is now over. Your husband--"
+
+"That _may_ have existed," cried Adelaide. "Do you mean to say there
+hasn't been any real danger?"
+
+The young doctor's eyes twinkled.
+
+"An operation even in the best hands is always a danger," he replied.
+
+"But you mean there was no other?" Adelaide asked, aware of a growing
+coldness about her hands and feet.
+
+Withers looked as just as Aristides.
+
+"It was probably wise to operate," he said. "Your husband ought to be up
+and about in three weeks."
+
+Everything grew black and rotatory before Adelaide's eyes, and she sank
+slowly forward into the young doctor's arms.
+
+As he laid her on the bed, he glanced whimsically at the nurse and
+shook his head.
+
+But she made no response, an omission which may not have meant loyalty to
+Dr. Crew so much as unwillingness to support Dr. Withers.
+
+Adelaide returned to consciousness only in time to be hurried away to
+make room for Vincent. His long, limp figure was carried past her in the
+corridor. She was told that in a few hours she might see him. But she
+wasn't, as a matter of fact, very eager to see him. The knowledge that he
+was to live, the lifting of the weight of dread, was enough. The maternal
+strain did not mingle with her love for him; she saw no possible reward,
+no increased sense of possession, in his illness. On the contrary, she
+wanted him to stride back in one day from death to his old powerful,
+dominating self.
+
+She grew to hate the hospital routine, the fixed hours, the regulated
+food. "These rules, these hovering women," she exclaimed, "these
+trays--they make me think of the nursery." But what she really hated was
+Vincent's submission to it all. In her heart she would have been glad to
+see him breaking the rules, defying the doctors, and bullying his nurses.
+
+Before long a strong, silent antagonism grew up between her and the
+bright-eyed, cheerful nurse, Miss Gregory. It irritated Adelaide to gain
+access to her husband through other people's consent; it irritated her to
+see the girl's understanding of the case, and her competent arrangements
+for her patient's comfort. If Vincent had showed any disposition to
+revolt, Adelaide would have pleaded with him to submit; but as it was,
+she watched his docility with a scornful eye.
+
+"That girl rules you with a rod of iron," she said one day. But even then
+Vincent did not rouse himself.
+
+"She knows her business," he said admiringly.
+
+To any other invalid Adelaide could have been a soothing visitor, could
+have adapted the quick turns of her mind to the relaxed attention of
+the sick; but, honestly enough, there seemed to her an impertinence,
+almost an insult, in treating Vincent in such a way. The result was
+that her visits were exhausting, and she knew it. And yet, she said to
+herself, he was ill, not insane; how could she conceal from him the
+happenings of every day? Vincent would be the last person to be
+grateful to her for that.
+
+She saw him one day grow pale; his eyes began to close. She had made up
+her mind to leave him when Miss Gregory came in, and with a quicker eye
+and a more active habit of mind, said at once:
+
+"I think Mr. Farron has had enough excitement for one day."
+
+Adelaide smiled up at the girl almost insolently.
+
+"Is a visit from a wife an excitement?" she asked. Miss Gregory was
+perfectly grave.
+
+"The greatest," she said.
+
+Adelaide yielded to her own irritation.
+
+"Well," she said, "I shan't stay much longer."
+
+"It would be better if you went now, I think, Mrs. Farron."
+
+Adelaide looked at Vincent. It was silly of him, she thought, to pretend
+he didn't hear. She bent over him.
+
+"Your nurse is driving me away from you, dearest," she murmured.
+
+He opened his eyes and took her hand.
+
+"Come back to-morrow early--as early as you can," he said.
+
+She never remembered his siding against her before, and she swept out
+into the hallway, saying to herself that it was childish to be annoyed at
+the whims of an invalid.
+
+Miss Gregory had followed her.
+
+"Mrs. Farron," she said, "do you mind my suggesting that for the present
+it would be better not to talk to Mr. Farron about anything that might
+worry him, even trifles?"
+
+Adelaide laughed.
+
+"You know very little of Mr. Farron," she said, "if you think he worries
+over trifles."
+
+"Any one worries over trifles when he is in a nervous state."
+
+Adelaide passed by without answering, passed by as if she had not heard.
+The suggestion of Vincent nervously worrying over trifles was one of the
+most repellent pictures that had ever been presented to her imagination.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+The firm for which Wayne worked was young and small--Benson & Honaton.
+They made a specialty of circularization in connection with the bond
+issues in which they were interested, and Wayne had charge of their
+"literature," as they described it. He often felt, after he had finished
+a report, that his work deserved the title. A certain number of people in
+Wall Street disapproved of the firm's methods. Sometimes Pete thought
+this was because, for a young firm, they had succeeded too quickly to
+please the more deliberate; but sometimes in darker moments he thought
+there might be some justice in the idea.
+
+During the weeks that Farron was in the hospital Pete, despite his
+constant availability to Mathilde, had been at work on his report on a
+coal property in Pennsylvania. He was extremely pleased with the
+thoroughness with which he had done the job. His report was not
+favorable. The day after it was finished, a little after three, he
+received word that the firm wanted to see him. He was always annoyed with
+himself that these messages caused his heart to beat a trifle faster. He
+couldn't help associating them with former hours with his head-master or
+in the dean's office. Only he had respected his head-master and even the
+dean, whereas he was not at all sure he respected Mr. Benson and he was
+quite sure he did not respect Mr. Honaton.
+
+He rose slowly from his desk, exchanging with the office boy who brought
+the message a long, severe look, under which something very comic lurked,
+though neither knew what.
+
+"And don't miss J.B.'s socks," said the boy.
+
+Mr. Honaton--J.B.--was considered in his office a very beautiful dresser,
+as indeed in some ways he was. He was a tall young man, built like a
+greyhound, with a small, pointed head, a long waist, and a very long
+throat, from which, however, the strongest, loudest voice could issue
+when he so desired. This was his priceless asset. He was the board
+member, and generally admitted to be an excellent broker. It always
+seemed to Pete that he was a broker exactly as a beaver is a
+dam-builder, because nature had adapted him to that task. But outside of
+this one instinctive capacity he had no sense whatsoever. He rarely
+appeared in the office. He was met at the Broad Street entrance of the
+exchange at one minute to ten by a boy with the morning's orders, and
+sometimes he came in for a few minutes after the closing; but usually by
+three-fifteen he had disappeared from financial circles, and was
+understood to be relaxing in the higher social spheres to which he
+belonged. So when Pete, entering Mr. Benson's private office, saw Honaton
+leaning against the window-frame, with his hat-brim held against his
+thigh exactly like a fashion-plate, he knew that something of importance
+must be pending.
+
+Benson, the senior member, was a very different person. He looked like a
+fat, white, pugnacious cat. His hair, which had turned white early, had a
+tendency to grow in a bang; his arms were short--so short that when he
+put his hands on the arms of his swing-chair he hardly bent his elbows.
+He had them there now as Pete entered, and was swinging through short
+arcs in rather a nervous rhythm. He was of Irish parentage, and was
+understood to have political influence.
+
+"Wayne," said Benson, "how would you like to go to China?"
+
+And Honaton repeated portentously, "China," as if Benson might have made
+a mistake in the name of the country if he had not been at his elbow to
+correct him.
+
+Wayne laughed.
+
+"Well," he said, "I have nothing against China."
+
+Benson outlined the situation quickly. The firm had acquired property in
+China not entirely through their own choice, and they wanted a thorough,
+clear report on it; they knew of no one--_no one_, Benson emphasized--who
+could do that as impartially and as well as Wayne. They would pay him a
+good sum and his expenses. It would take him a year, perhaps a year and a
+half. They named the figure. It was one that made marriage possible. They
+talked of the situation and the property and the demand for copper until
+Honaton began to look at his watch, a flat platinum watch, perfectly
+plain, you might have thought, until you caught a glimpse of a narrow
+line of brilliants along its almost imperceptible rim. His usual working
+day was over in half an hour.
+
+"And when I come back, Mr. Benson?" said Wayne.
+
+"Your place will be open for you here."
+
+There was a pause.
+
+"Well, what do you say?" said Honaton.
+
+"I feel very grateful for the offer," said Pete, "but of course I can't
+give you an answer now."
+
+"Why not, why not?" returned Honaton, who felt that he had given up half
+an hour for nothing if the thing couldn't be settled on the spot; and
+even Benson, Wayne noticed, began to glower.
+
+"You could probably give us as good an answer to-day as to-morrow,"
+he said.
+
+Nothing roused Pete's spirit like feeling a tremor in his own soul, and
+so he now answered with great firmness:
+
+"I cannot give you an answer to-day _or_ to-morrow."
+
+"It's all off, then, all off," said Honaton, moving to the door.
+
+"When do the Chinese boats sail, Mr. Honaton?" said Pete, with the
+innocence of manner that an employee should use when putting his superior
+in a hole.
+
+"I don't see what difference that makes to you, Wayne, if you're not
+taking them," said Honaton, as if he were triumphantly concealing the
+fact that he didn't know.
+
+"Don't feel you have to wait, Jack, if you're in a hurry," said his
+partner, and when the other had slid out of the office Benson turned to
+Wayne and went on: "You wouldn't have to go until a week from Saturday.
+You would have to get off then, and we should have to know in time to
+find some one else in case you don't care for it."
+
+Pete asked for three days, and presently left the office.
+
+He had a friend, one of his mother's reformed drunkards, who as janitor
+lived on the top floor of a tall building. He and his wife offered Wayne
+the hospitality of their balcony, and now and then, in moments like this,
+he availed himself of it. Not, indeed, that there had ever been a moment
+quite like this; for he knew that he was facing the most important
+decision he had ever been forced to make.
+
+In the elevator he met the janitor's cat Susan going home after an
+afternoon visit to the restaurant on the sixteenth floor. The elevator
+boy loved to tell how she never made a mistake in the floor.
+
+"Do you think she'd get off at the fifteenth or the seventeenth? Not she.
+Sometimes she puts her nose out and smells at the other floors, but she
+won't get off until I stop at the right one. Sometimes she has to ride up
+and down three or four times before any one wants the sixteenth. Eh,
+Susan?" he added in caressing tones; but Susan was watching the floors
+flash past and paid no attention until, arrived at the top, she and Pete
+stepped off together.
+
+It was a cool, clear day, for the wind was from the north, but on the
+southern balcony the sun was warm. Pete sat down in the kitchen-chair
+set for him, tilted back, and looked out over the Statue of Liberty,
+which stood like a stunted baby, to the blue Narrows. He saw one
+thing clearly, and that was that he would not go if Mathilde would not
+go with him.
+
+He envied people who could make up their minds by thinking. At least
+sometimes he envied them and sometimes he thought they lied. He could
+only think _about_ a subject and wait for the unknown gods to bring him a
+decision. And this is what he now did, with his eyes fixed on the towers
+and tanks and tenements, on the pale winter sky, and, when he got up and
+leaned his elbows on the parapet, on the crowds that looked like a flood
+of purple insects in the streets.
+
+He thought of Mathilde's youth and his own untried capacities for
+success, of poverty and children, of the probable opposition of
+Mathilde's family and of a strange, sinister, disintegrating power he
+felt or suspected in Mrs. Farron. He felt that it was a terrible risk to
+ask a young girl to take and that it was almost an insult to be afraid to
+ask her to take it. That was what his mother had always said about these
+cherished, protected creatures: they were not prepared to meet any strain
+in life. He knew he would not have hesitated to ask a girl differently
+brought up. Ought he to ask Mathilde or ought he not even to hesitate
+about asking her? In his own future he had confidence. He had an unusual
+power of getting his facts together so that they meant something. In a
+small way his work was recognized. A report of his had some weight. He
+felt certain that if on his return he wanted another position he could
+get it unless he made a terrible fiasco in China. Should he consult any
+one? He knew beforehand what they would all think about it. Mr. Lanley
+would think that it was sheer impertinence to want to marry his
+granddaughter on less than fifteen thousand dollars a year; Mrs. Farron
+would think that there were lots of equally agreeable young men in the
+world who would not take a girl to China; and his mother, whom he could
+not help considering the wisest of the three, would think that Mathilde
+lacked discipline and strength of will for such an adventure. And on this
+he found he made up his mind. "After all," he said to himself as he put
+the chair back against the wall, "everything else would be failure, and
+this may be success."
+
+It was the afternoon that Farron was brought back from the hospital, and
+he and Mathilde were sure of having the drawing-room to themselves. He
+told her the situation slowly and with a great deal of detail,
+chronologically, introducing the Chinese trip at the very end. But she
+did not at once understand.
+
+"O Pete, you would not go away from me!" she said. "I could not
+face that."
+
+"Couldn't you? Remember that everything you say is going to be used
+against you."
+
+"Would you be willing to go, Pete?"
+
+"Only if you will go with me."
+
+"Oh!" she clasped her hands to her breast, shrinking back to look at
+him. So that was what he had meant, this stranger whom she had known for
+such a short time. As she looked she half expected that he would smile,
+and say it was all a joke; but his eyes were steadily and seriously
+fixed on hers. It was very queer, she thought. Their meeting, their
+first kiss, their engagement, had all seemed so inevitable, so natural,
+there had not been a hint of doubt or decision about it; but now all of
+a sudden she found herself faced by a situation in which it was
+impossible to say yes or no.
+
+"It would be wonderful, of course," she said, after a minute, but her
+tone showed she was not considering it as a possibility.
+
+Wayne's heart sank; he saw that he had thought it possible that he would
+not allow her to go, but that he had never seriously faced the chance of
+her refusing.
+
+"Mathilde," he said, "it's far and sudden, and we shall be poor, and I
+can't promise that I shall succeed more than other fellows; and yet
+against all that--"
+
+She looked at him.
+
+"You don't think I care for those things? I don't care if you succeed or
+fail, or live all your life in Siam."
+
+"What is it, then?"
+
+"Pete, it's my mother. She would never consent."
+
+Wayne was aware of this, but, then, as he pointed out to Mathilde with
+great care, Mrs. Farron could not bear for her daughter the pain of
+separation.
+
+"Separation!" cried the girl, "But you just said you would not go if
+I did not."
+
+"If you put your mother before me, mayn't I put my profession
+before you?"
+
+"My dear, don't speak in that tone."
+
+"Why, Mathilde," he said, and he sprang up and stood looking down at her
+from a little distance, "this is the real test. We have thought we loved
+each other--"
+
+"Thought!" she interrupted.
+
+"But to get engaged with no immediate prospect of marriage, with all
+our families and friends grouped about, that doesn't mean such a
+lot, does it?"
+
+"It does to me," she answered almost proudly.
+
+"Now, one of us has to sacrifice something. I want to go on this
+expedition. I want to succeed. That may be egotism or legitimate
+ambition. I don't know, but I want to go. I think I mean to go. Ought
+I to give it up because you are afraid of your mother?"
+
+"It's love, not fear, Pete."
+
+"You love me, too, you say."
+
+"I feel an obligation to her."
+
+"And, good Heavens! do you feel none to me?"
+
+"No, no. I love you too much to feel an obligation to you."
+
+"But you love your mother _and_ feel an obligation to her. Why, Mathilde,
+that feeling of obligation _is_ love--love in its most serious form.
+That's what you don't feel for me. That's why you won't go."
+
+"I haven't said I wouldn't go."
+
+"You never even thought of going."
+
+"I have, I do. But how can I help hesitating? You must know I want to
+go."
+
+"I see very little sign of it," he murmured. The interview had not gone
+as he intended. He had not meant, he never imagined, that he would
+attempt to urge and coerce her; but her very detachment seemed to set a
+fire burning within him.
+
+"I think," he said with an effort to sound friendly, "that I had better
+go and let you think this over by yourself."
+
+He was actually moving to the door when she sprang up and put her arms
+about him.
+
+"Weren't you even going to kiss me, Pete?"
+
+He stooped, and touched her cheek with his lips.
+
+"Do you call that a kiss?"
+
+"O Mathilde, do you think any kiss will change the facts?" he answered,
+and was gone.
+
+As soon as he had left her the desire for tears left her, too. She felt
+calm and more herself, more an isolated, independent human being than
+ever before in her life. She thought of all the things she ought to have
+said to Pete. The reason why she felt no obligation to him was that she
+was one with him. She was prepared to sacrifice him exactly as she was,
+or ought to be, willing to sacrifice herself; whereas her mother--it
+seemed as if her mother's power surrounded her in every direction, as
+solid as the ancients believed the dome of heaven.
+
+Pringle appeared in the doorway in his eternal hunt for the tea-things.
+
+"May I take the tray, miss?" he said.
+
+She nodded, hardly glancing at the untouched tea-table. Pringle, as he
+bent over it, observed that it was nice to have Mr. Farron back.
+Mathilde remembered that she, too, had once been interested in her
+stepfather's return.
+
+"Where's my mother, Pringle?"
+
+"Mrs. Farron's in her room, I think, miss, and Mr. Lanley's with her."
+
+Lanley had stopped as usual to ask after his son-in-law. He found his
+daughter writing letters in her room. He thought her looking cross, but
+in deference to her recent anxieties he called it, even in his own mind,
+overstrained.
+
+"Vincent is doing very well, I believe," she answered in response to his
+question. "He ought to be. He is in charge of two lovely young creatures
+hardly Mathilde's age who have already taken complete control of the
+household."
+
+"You've seen him, of course."
+
+"For a few minutes; they allow me a few minutes. They communicate by
+secret signals when they think I have stayed long enough."
+
+Mr. Lanley never knew how to treat this mood of his daughter's, which
+seemed to him as unreasonable as if it were emotional, and yet as cold as
+if it were logic itself. He changed the subject and said boldly:
+
+"Mrs. Baxter is coming to-morrow."
+
+Adelaide's eyes faintly flashed.
+
+"Oh, wouldn't you know it!" she murmured. "Just at the most inconvenient
+time--inconvenient for me, I mean. Really, lovers are the only people you
+can depend on. I wish I had a lover."
+
+"Adelaide," said her father with some sternness, "even in fun you should
+not say such a thing. If Mathilde heard you--"
+
+"Mathilde is the person who made me see it. Her boy is here all the
+time, trying to think of something to please her. And who have I?
+Vincent has his nurses; and you have your old upholstered lady. I can't
+help wishing I had a lover. They are the only people who, as the Wayne
+boy would say, 'stick around.' But don't worry, Papa, I have a loyal
+nature." She was interrupted by a knock at the door, and a nurse--the
+same who had been too encouraging to please her at the hospital--put in
+her head and said brightly:
+
+"You may see Mr. Farron now, Mrs. Farron."
+
+Adelaide turned to her father and made a little bow.
+
+"See how I am favored," she said, and left him.
+
+Nothing of this mood was apparent when she entered her husband's room,
+though she noticed that the arrangement of the furniture had been
+changed, and, what she disliked even more, that they had brushed his hair
+in a new way. This, with his pallor and thinness, made him look strange
+to her. She bent over, and laid her cheek to his almost motionless lips.
+
+"Well, dear," she said, "have you seen the church-warden part they have
+given your hair?"
+
+He shook his head impatiently, and she saw, she had made the mistake of
+trying to give the tone to an interview in which she was not the leading
+character.
+
+"Who has the room above mine, Adelaide?" he asked.
+
+"My maid."
+
+"Ask her not to practice the fox-trot, will you?"
+
+"O Vincent, she is never there."
+
+"My mistake," he answered, and shut his eyes.
+
+She repented at once.
+
+"Of course I'll tell her. I'm sorry that you were disturbed." But she
+was thinking only of his tone. He was not an irritable man, and he had
+never used such a tone to her before. All pleasure in the interview was
+over. She was actually glad when one of the nurses came in and began to
+move about the room in a manner that suggested dismissal.
+
+"Of course I'm not angry," she said to herself. "He's so weak one must
+humor him like a child."
+
+She derived some satisfaction, however, from the idea of sending for her
+maid Lucie and making her uncomfortable; but on her way she met Mathilde
+in the hall.
+
+"May I speak to you, Mama?" she said.
+
+Mrs. Farron laughed.
+
+"May you speak to me?" she said. "Why, yes; you may have the unusual
+privilege. What is it?"
+
+Mathilde followed her mother into the bedroom and shut the door.
+
+"Pete has just been here. He has been offered a position in China."
+
+"In China?" said Mrs. Farron. This was the first piece of luck that had
+come to her in a long time, but she did not betray the least pleasure. "I
+hope it is a good one."
+
+"Yes, he thinks it good. He sails in two weeks."
+
+"In two weeks?" And this time she could not prevent her eye lighting a
+little. She thought how nicely that small complication had settled
+itself, and how clever she had been to have the mother to dinner and
+behave as if she were friendly. She did not notice that her daughter was
+trembling; she couldn't, of course, be expected to know that the girl's
+hands were like ice, and that she had waited several seconds to steady
+her voice sufficiently to pronounce the fatal sentence:
+
+"He wants me to go with him, Mama."
+
+She watched her mother in an agony for the effect of these words.
+Mrs. Farron had suddenly detected a new burn in the hearth-rug. She
+bent over it.
+
+"This wood does snap so!" she murmured.
+
+The rug was a beautiful old Persian carpet of roses and urns.
+
+"Did you understand what I said, Mama?"
+
+"Yes, dear; that Mr. Wayne was going to China in two weeks and wanted you
+to go, too. Was it just a _politesse_, or does he actually imagine that
+you could?"
+
+"He thinks I can."
+
+Mrs. Farron laughed good-temperedly.
+
+"Did you go and see about having your pink silk shortened?" she said.
+
+Mathilde stared at her mother, and in the momentary silence Lucie came in
+and asked what madame wanted for the evening, and Adelaide in her fluent
+French began explaining that what she really desired most was that Lucie
+should not make so much noise in her room that monsieur could not sleep.
+In the midst of it she stopped and turned to her daughter.
+
+"Won't you be late for dinner, darling?" she said.
+
+Mathilde thought it very possible, and went away to get dressed. She went
+into her own room and shut the door sharply behind her.
+
+All the time she was dressing she tried to rehearse her case--that it
+was her life, her love, her chance; but all the time she had a sickening
+sense that a lifted eye-brow of her mother's would make it sound childish
+and absurd even in her own ears. She had counted on a long evening, but
+when she went down-stairs she found three or four friends of her mother's
+were to dine and go to the theater. The dinner was amusing, the talk,
+though avowedly hampered by the presence of Mathilde, was witty and
+unexpected enough; but Mathilde was not amused by it, for she
+particularly dreaded her mother in such a mood of ruthless gaiety. At the
+theater they were extremely critical, and though they missed almost the
+whole first act, appeared, in the entr'acte, to feel no hesitation in
+condemning it. They spoke of French and Italian actors by name, laughed
+heartily over the playwright's conception of social usages, and made
+Mathilde feel as if her own unacknowledged enjoyment of the play was the
+guiltiest of secrets.
+
+As they drove home, she was again alone with her mother, and she said at
+once the sentence she had determined on:
+
+"I don't think you understood, Mama, how seriously I meant what I said
+this afternoon."
+
+Mrs. Farron was bending her long-waisted figure forward to get a good
+look at a picture which, small, lonely, and brightly lighted, hung in a
+picture-dealer's window. It was a picture of an empty room. Hot summer
+sunlight filtered through the lowered Venetian blinds, and fell in bands
+on the golden wood of the floor. Outside the air was burned and dusty,
+but inside the room all was clear, cool, and pure.
+
+"How perfect his things are," murmured Mrs. Farron to herself, and then
+added to her daughter: "Yes, my dear, I did take in what you said. You
+really think you are in love with this Wayne boy, don't you? It's
+immensely to your credit, darling," she went on, her tone taking on a
+flattering sweetness, "to care so much about any one who has such funny,
+stubby little hands--most unattractive hands," she added almost dreamily.
+
+There was a long pause during which an extraordinary thing happened to
+Mathilde. She found that it didn't make the very slightest difference to
+her what her mother thought of Pete or his hands, that it would never
+make any difference to her again. It was as if her will had suddenly
+been born, and the first act of that will was to decide to go with the
+man she loved. How could she have doubted for an instant? It was so
+simple, and no opposition would or could mean anything to her. She was
+not in the least angry; on the contrary, she felt extremely pitiful, as
+if she were saying good-by to some one who did not know she was going
+away, as if in a sense she had now parted from her mother forever. Tears
+came into her eyes.
+
+"Ah, Mama!" she said like a sigh.
+
+Mrs. Farron felt she had been cruel, but without regretting it; for that,
+she thought, was often a parent's duty.
+
+"I don't want to hurt your feelings, Mathilde. The boy is a nice enough
+little person, but really I could not let you set off for China at a
+minute's notice with any broker's clerk who happened to fall in love with
+your golden hair. When you have a little more experience you will
+discriminate between the men you like to have love you and the men there
+is the smallest chance of your loving. I assure you, if little Wayne were
+not in love with you, you would think him a perfectly commonplace boy. If
+one of your friends were engaged to him, you would be the first to say
+that you wondered what it was she saw in him. That isn't the way one
+wants people to feel about one's husband, is it? And as to going to China
+with him, you know that's impossible, don't you?"
+
+"It would be impossible to let him go without me."
+
+"Really, Mathilde!" said Mrs. Farron, gently, as if she, so willing to
+play fair, were being put off with fantasies. "I don't understand you,"
+she added.
+
+"No, Mama; you don't."
+
+The motor stopped at the door, and they went in silence to Mrs. Farron's
+room, where for a bitter hour they talked, neither yielding an inch. At
+last Adelaide sent the girl to bed. Mathilde was aware of profound
+physical exhaustion, and yet underneath there was a high knowledge of
+something unbreakable within her.
+
+Left alone, Adelaide turned instinctively toward her husband's door.
+There were her strength and vision. Then she remembered, and drew back;
+but presently, hearing a stir there, she knocked very softly. A nurse
+appeared on the instant.
+
+"Oh, _please_, Mrs. Farron! Mr. Farron has just got to sleep."
+
+Adelaide stood alone in the middle of the floor. Once again, she thought,
+in a crisis of her life she had no one to depend on but herself. She
+lifted her shoulders. No one was to blame, but there the fact was. They
+urged you to cling and be guided, but when the pinch came, you had to act
+for yourself. She had learned her lesson now. Henceforward she took her
+own life over into her own hands.
+
+She reviewed her past dependences. Her youth, with its dependence on her
+father, particularly in matters of dress. She recalled her early
+photographs with a shudder. Had she really dressed so badly or was it
+only the change of fashion? And then her dependence on Joe Severance.
+What could be more ridiculous than for a woman of her intelligence to
+allow herself to be guided in everything by a man like Joe, who had
+nothing himself but a certain shrewd masculinity? And now Vincent. She
+was still under the spell of his superiority, but perhaps she would come
+to judge him too. She had learned much from him. Perhaps she had learned
+all he had to teach her. Her face looked as if it were carved out of some
+smooth white stone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+After she had gone up-stairs, Mathilde went down again to telephone Pete
+that she had made her decision. She went boldly snapping electric
+switches, for her going was a sort of assertion of her right to
+independent action. She would have hesitated even less if she had known
+how welcome her news was, how he had suffered since their parting.
+
+On going home from his interview with her, he found his mother dressing
+to dine with Mr. Lanley, a party arranged before the unexpected arrival
+of Mrs. Baxter. The only part of dressing that delayed Mrs. Wayne was her
+hair, which was so long that the brushing of it took time. In this
+process she was engaged when her son, in response to her answer, came
+into her room.
+
+"How is Mr. Farron?" she asked at once, and he, rather touched at the
+genuineness of her interest, answered her in detail before her next
+exclamation betrayed that it was entirely for the employer of Marty
+Burke that she was solicitous. "Isn't it too bad he was taken ill just
+now?" she said.
+
+The bitterness and doubt from which Wayne was suffering were not emotions
+that disposed him to confidence. He did not want to tell his mother what
+he was going through, for the obvious and perhaps unworthy reason that it
+was just what she would have expected him to go through. At the same time
+a real deceit was involved in concealing it, and so, tipping his chair
+back against her wall, he said:
+
+"The firm has asked me to go to China for them."
+
+His mother turned, her whole face lit up with interest.
+
+"To China! How interesting!" she said. "China is a wonderful country. How
+I should like to go to China!"
+
+"Come along. I don't start for two weeks."
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"No, if you go, I'll make a trip to that hypnotic clinic of Dr.
+Platerbridge's; and if I can learn the trick, I will open one here."
+
+The idea crossed Wayne's mind that perhaps he had not the power of
+inspiring affection.
+
+"You don't miss people a bit, do you, Mother?" he said.
+
+"Yes, Pete, I do; only there is so much to be done. What does Mathilde
+say to you going off like this? How long will you be gone?"
+
+"More than a year."
+
+"Pete, how awful for her!"
+
+"There is nothing to prevent her going with me."
+
+"You couldn't take that child to China."
+
+"You may be glad to know that she is cordially of your opinion."
+
+The feeling behind his tone at last attracted his mother's full
+attention.
+
+"But, my dear boy," she said gently, "she has never been anywhere in her
+life without a maid. She probably doesn't know how to do her hair or mend
+her clothes or anything practical."
+
+"Mother dear, you are not so awfully practical yourself," he answered;
+"but you would have gone."
+
+Mrs. Wayne looked impish.
+
+"I always loved that sort of thing," she said; and then, becoming more
+maternal, she added, "and that doesn't mean it would be sensible because
+I'd do it."
+
+"Well,"--Wayne stood up preparatory to leaving the room,--"I mean to take
+her if she'll go."
+
+His mother, who had now finished winding her braid very neatly around her
+head, sank into a chair.
+
+"Oh, dear!" she said, "I almost wish I weren't dining with Mr. Lanley.
+He'll think it's all my fault."
+
+"I doubt if he knows about it."
+
+Mrs. Wayne's eyes twinkled.
+
+"May I tell him? I should like to see his face."
+
+"Tell him I am going, if you like. Don't say I want to take her with me."
+
+Her face fell.
+
+"That wouldn't be much fun," she answered, "because I suppose the truth
+is they won't be sorry to have you out of the way."
+
+"I suppose not," he said, and shut the door behind him. He could not
+truthfully say that his mother had been much of a comfort. He had
+suddenly thought that he would go down to the first floor and get Lily
+Parret to go to the theater with him. He and she had the warm friendship
+for each other of two handsome, healthy young people of opposite sexes
+who might have everything to give each other except time. She was
+perhaps ten years older than he, extremely handsome, with dimples and
+dark red hair and blue eyes. She had a large practice among the poor,
+and might have made a conspicuous success of her profession if it had
+not been for her intense and too widely diffused interest. She wanted to
+strike a blow at every abuse that came to her attention, and as, in the
+course of her work, a great many turned up, she was always striking
+blows and never following them up. She went through life in a series of
+springs, each one in a different direction; but the motion of her
+attack was as splendid as that of a tiger. Often she was successful, and
+always she enjoyed herself.
+
+When she answered Pete's ring, and he looked up at her magnificent
+height, her dimples appeared in welcome. She really was glad to see him.
+
+"Come out and dine with me, Lily, and go to the theater."
+
+"Come to a meeting at Cooper Union on capital punishment. I'm going to
+speak, and I'm going to be very good."
+
+"No, Lily; I want to explain to you what a pitiable sex you belong to.
+You have no character, no will--"
+
+She shook her head, laughing.
+
+"You are a personal lot, you young men," she said. "You change your mind
+about women every day, according to how one of them treats you."
+
+"They don't amount to a row of pins, Lily."
+
+"Certainly some men select that kind, Pete."
+
+"O Lily," he answered, "don't talk to me like that! I want some one to
+tell me I'm perfect, and, strangely enough, no one will."
+
+"I will," she answered, with beaming good nature, "and I pretty near
+think so, too. But I can't dine with you, Pete. Wouldn't you like to go
+to my meeting?"
+
+"I should perfectly hate to," he answered, and went off crossly, to
+dine at his college's local club. Here he found an old friend, who most
+fortunately said something derogatory of the firm of Benson & Honaton.
+The opinion coincided with certain phases of Wayne's own views, but he
+contradicted it, held it up to ridicule, and ended by quoting incidents
+in the history of his friend's own firm which, as he said, were
+probably among the crookedest things that had ever been put over in
+Wall Street. Lily would not have distracted his mind more completely.
+He felt almost cheerful when he went home about ten o'clock. His mother
+was still out, and there was no letter from Mathilde. He had been
+counting on finding one.
+
+Before long his mother came in. She was looking very fine. She had on a
+new gray dress that she had had made for her by a fallen woman from an
+asylum, but which had turned out better than such ventures of Mrs.
+Wayne's usually did.
+
+She had supposed she and Mr. Lanley were to dine alone, an idea which
+had not struck her as revolutionary. Accustomed to strange meals in
+strange company--a bowl of milk with a prison chaplain at a dairy
+lunch-room, or even, on one occasion, a supper in an Owl Lunch Wagon with
+a wavering drunkard,--she had thought that a quiet, perfect dinner with
+Mr. Lanley sounded pleasant enough. But she was not sorry to find it had
+been enlarged. She liked to meet new people. She was extremely
+optimistic, and always hoped that they would prove either spiritually
+rewarding, or practically useful to some of her projects. When she saw
+Mrs. Baxter, with her jetty hair, jeweled collar, and eyes a trifle too
+saurian for perfect beauty, she at once saw a subscription to the
+working-girl's club. The fourth person Mr. Wilsey, Lanley's lawyer, she
+knew well by reputation. She wondered if she could make him see that his
+position on the eight-hour law was absolutely anti-social.
+
+Mr. Lanley enjoyed a small triumph when she entered. He had been so
+discreet in his description of her to Mrs. Baxter, he had been so careful
+not to hint that she was an illuminating personality who had suddenly
+come into his life, that he knew he had left his old friend with the
+general impression that Mrs. Wayne was merely the mother of an
+undesirable suitor of Mathilde's who spent most of her life in the
+company of drunkards. So when she came in, a little late as usual, in her
+long, soft, gray dress, with a pink rose at her girdle, looking far more
+feminine than Mrs. Baxter, about whom Adelaide's offensive adjective
+"upholstered" still clung, he felt the full effect of her appearance. He
+even enjoyed the obviously suspicious glance which Mrs. Baxter
+immediately afterward turned upon him.
+
+At dinner things began well. They talked about people and events of which
+Mrs. Wayne knew nothing, but her interest and good temper made her not an
+outsider, but an audience. Anecdotes which even Mr. Lanley might have
+felt were trivial gossip became, through her attention to them, incidents
+of the highest human interest. Such an uncritical interest was perhaps
+too stimulating.
+
+He expected nothing dangerous when, during the game course, Mrs. Baxter
+turned to him and asked how Mathilde had enjoyed what she referred to as
+"her first winter."
+
+Mr. Lanley liked to talk about Mathilde. He described, with a little
+natural exaggeration, how much she had enjoyed herself and how popular
+she had been.
+
+"I hope she hasn't been bitten by any of those modern notions," said
+Mrs. Baxter.
+
+Mr. Wilsey broke in.
+
+"Oh, these modern, restless young women!" he said. "They don't seem able
+to find their natural contentment in their own homes. My daughter came to
+me the other day with a wonderful scheme of working all day long with
+charity organizations. I said to her, 'My dear, charity begins at home.'
+My wife, Mrs. Baxter, is an old-fashioned housekeeper. She gives out all
+supplies used in my house; she knows where the servants are at every
+minute of the day, and we have nine. She--"
+
+"Oh, how is dear Mrs. Wilsey?" said Mrs. Baxter, perhaps not eager for
+the full list of her activities.
+
+"Well, at present she is in a sanatorium," replied her husband, "from
+overwork, just plain overwork."
+
+Mr. Lanley, catching Mrs. Wayne's twinkling eye, could only pray that
+she would not point out that a sojourn in a sanatorium was not
+complete contentment in the home; but before she had a chance, Mrs.
+Baxter had gone on.
+
+"That's so like the modern girl--anything but her obvious duty. She'll
+help any one but her mother and work anywhere but in the home. We've had
+a very painful case at home lately. One of our most charming young girls
+has suddenly developed an absolutely morbid curiosity about the things
+that take place in the women's courts. Why, as her poor father said to
+me, 'Mrs. Baxter, old as I am, I hear things in those courts so shocking
+I have hard work forgetting them; and yet Imogen wants me to let her go
+into those courts day after day--'"
+
+"Oh, that's abnormal, almost perverted," said Mr. Wilsey, judicially.
+"The women's courts are places where no--" he hesitated a bare instant,
+and Mrs. Wayne asked:
+
+"No woman should go?"
+
+"No girl should go."
+
+"Yet many of the girls who come there are under sixteen."
+
+Mr. Wilsey hid a slight annoyance under a manner peculiarly bland.
+
+"Ah, dear lady," he said, "you must forgive my saying that that remark is
+a trifle irrelevant."
+
+"Is it?" she asked, meaning him to answer her; but he only looked
+benevolently at her, and turned to listen to Mrs. Baxter, who was saying:
+
+"Yes, everywhere we look nowadays we see women rushing into things they
+don't understand, and of course we all know what women are--"
+
+"What are they?" asked Mrs. Wayne, and Lanley's heart sank.
+
+"Oh, emotional and inaccurate and untrustworthy and spiteful."
+
+"Mrs. Baxter, I'm sure you're not like that."
+
+"My dear Madam!" exclaimed Wilsey.
+
+"But isn't that logical?" Mrs. Wayne pursued. "If all women are so, and
+she's a woman?"
+
+"Ah, logic, dear lady," said Wilsey, holding up a finger--"logic, you
+know, has never been the specialty of your sex."
+
+"Of course it's logic," said Lanley, crossly. "If you say all Americans
+are liars, Wilsey, and you're an American, the logical inference is that
+you think yourself a liar. But Mrs. Baxter doesn't mean that she thinks
+all women are inferior--"
+
+"I must say I prefer men," she answered almost coquettishly.
+
+"If all women were like you, Mrs. Baxter, I'd believe in giving them the
+vote," said Wilsey.
+
+"Please don't," she answered. "I don't want it."
+
+"Ah, the clever ones don't."
+
+"I never pretended to be clever."
+
+"Perhaps not; but I'd trust your intuition where I would pay no attention
+to a clever person."
+
+Lanley laughed.
+
+"I think you'd better express that a little differently, Wilsey," he
+said; but his legal adviser did not notice him.
+
+"My daughter came to me the other day," he went on to Mrs. Baxter, "and
+said, 'Father, don't you think women ought to have the vote some day?'
+and I said, 'Yes, my dear, just as soon as men have the babies.'"
+
+"There's no answer to that," said Mrs. Baxter.
+
+"I fancy not," said Wilsey. "I think I put the essence of it in that
+sentence."
+
+"If ever women get into power in this country, I shall live abroad."
+
+"O Mrs. Baxter," said Mrs. Wayne, "really you don't understand women--"
+
+"I don't? Why, Mrs. Wayne, I am a woman."
+
+"All human beings are spiteful and inaccurate and all those things you
+said; but that isn't _all_ they are. The women I see, the wives of my
+poor drunkards are so wonderful, so patient. They are mothers and
+wage-earners and sick nurses, too; they're not the sort of women you
+describe. Perhaps," she added, with one of her fatal impulses toward
+concession, "perhaps your friends are untrustworthy and spiteful, as
+you say--"
+
+Mrs. Baxter drew herself up. "My friends, Mrs. Wayne," she said--"my
+friends, I think, will compare favorably even with the wives of your
+drunkards."
+
+Mr. Lanley rose to his feet.
+
+"Shall we go up-stairs?" he said. Mr. Wilsey offered Mrs. Baxter his
+arm. "An admirable answer that of yours," he murmured as he led her from
+the room, "admirable snub to her perfectly unwarranted attack on you and
+your friends."
+
+"Of course you realize that she doesn't know any of the people I know,"
+said Mrs. Baxter. "Why should she begin to abuse them?"
+
+Mr. Wilsey laughed, and shook his finger.
+
+"Just because she doesn't know them. That, I'm afraid, is the rub. That's
+what I usually find lies behind the socialism of socialists--the sense of
+being excluded. This poor lady has evidently very little _usage du
+monde_. It is her pitiful little protest, dear Madam, against your charm,
+your background, your grand manner."
+
+They sank upon an ample sofa near the fire, and though the other end of
+the large room was chilly, Lanley and Mrs. Wayne moved thither with a
+common impulse.
+
+Mrs. Wayne turned almost tearfully to Lanley.
+
+"I'm so sorry I've spoiled your party," she said.
+
+"You've done much worse than that," he returned gravely.
+
+"O Mr. Lanley," she wailed, "what have I done?"
+
+"You've spoiled a friendship."
+
+"Between you and me?"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"Between them and me. I never heard people talk such nonsense, and yet
+I've been hearing people talk like that all my life, and have never taken
+it in. Mrs. Wayne, I want you to tell me something frankly--"
+
+"Oh, I'm so terrible when I'm frank," she said.
+
+"Do I talk like that?"
+
+She looked at him and looked away again.
+
+"Good God! you think I do!"
+
+"No, you don't talk like that often, but I think you feel that way a
+good deal."
+
+"I don't want to," he answered. "I'm sixty-four, but I don't ever want to
+talk like Wilsey. Won't you stop me whenever I do?"
+
+Mrs. Wayne sighed.
+
+"It will make you angry."
+
+"And if it does?"
+
+"I hate to make people angry. I was distressed that evening on the pier."
+
+He looked up, startled.
+
+"I suppose I talked like Wilsey that night?"
+
+"You said you might be old-fashioned but--"
+
+"Don't, please, tell me what I said, Mrs. Wayne." He went on more
+seriously: "I've got to an age when I can't expect great happiness from
+life--just a continuance of fairly satisfactory outside conditions; but
+since I've known you, I've felt a lightening, a brightening, an
+intensifying of my own inner life that I believe comes as near happiness
+as anything I've ever felt, and I don't want to lose it on account of a
+reactionary old couple like that on the sofa over there."
+
+He dreaded being left alone with the reactionary old couple when
+presently Mrs. Wayne, very well pleased with her evening, took her
+departure. He assisted her into her taxi, and as he came upstairs with a
+buoyant step, he wished it were not ridiculous at his age to feel so
+light-hearted.
+
+He saw that his absence had given his guests an instant of freer
+criticism, for they were tucking away smiles as he entered.
+
+"A very unusual type, is she not, our friend, Mrs. Wayne?" said Wilsey.
+
+"A little bit of a reformer, I'm afraid," said Mrs. Baxter.
+
+"Don't be too hard on her," answered Lanley.
+
+"Oh, very charming, very charming," put in Wilsey, feeling, perhaps, that
+Mrs. Baxter had been severe; "but the poor lady's mind is evidently
+seething with a good many undigested ideas."
+
+"You should have pointed out the flaws in her reasoning, Wilsey,"
+said his host.
+
+"Argue with a woman, Lanley!" Mr. Wilsey held up his hand in protest.
+"No, no, I never argue with a woman. They take it so personally."
+
+"I think we had an example of that this evening," said Mrs. Baxter.
+
+"Yes, indeed," the lawyer went on. "See how the dear lady missed the
+point, and became so illogical and excited under our little discussion."
+
+"Funny," said Lanley. "I got just the opposite impression."
+
+"Opposite?"
+
+"I thought it was you who missed the point, Wilsey."
+
+He saw how deeply he had betrayed himself as the others exchanged a
+startled glance. It was Mrs. Baxter who thought of the correct reply.
+
+"_Were_ there any points?" she asked.
+
+Wilsey shook his finger.
+
+"Ah, don't be cruel!" he said, and held out his hand to say good night;
+but Lanley was smoking, with his head tilted up and his eyes on the
+ceiling. What he was thinking was, "It isn't good for an old man to get
+as angry as I am."
+
+"Good night, Lanley; a delightful evening."
+
+Mr. Lanley's chin came down.
+
+"Oh, good night, Wilsey; glad you found it so."
+
+When he was gone, Mrs. Baxter observed that he was a most agreeable
+companion.
+
+"So witty, so amiable, and, for a leader at the bar, he has an
+extraordinarily light touch."
+
+Mr. Lanley had resumed his position on the hearth-rug and his
+contemplation of the ceiling.
+
+"Wilsey's not a leader at the bar," he said, with open crossness.
+
+He showed no disposition to sit and chat over the events of the evening.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Early the next morning, in Mrs. Baxter's parlance,--that is to say, some
+little time before the sun had reached the meridian,--she was ringing
+Adelaide's door-bell, while she minutely observed the curtains, the
+door-mat, the ivy plants in the vestibule, and the brightness of the
+brass knobs on the railing. In this she had a double motive: what was
+evil she would criticize, what was good she would copy.
+
+Adelaide was sitting with her husband when her visitor's name was brought
+up. Since she had discovered that she was to be nothing but a sort of
+super-nurse to him, she found herself expert at rendering such service.
+She had brought in his favorite flowers, chosen a book for his bedside,
+and now sat gossiping beside him, not bringing him, as she said to
+herself, any of her real troubles; that would not be good for him. How
+extraordinarily easy it was to conceal, she thought. She heard her own
+tones, as gay and intimate as ever, as satisfactory to Vincent; and yet
+all the time her mind was working apart on her anxieties about
+Mathilde--anxieties with which, of course, one couldn't bother a poor
+sick creature. She smoothed his pillow with the utmost tenderness.
+
+"Oh, Pringle," she said, in answer to his announcement that Mrs. Baxter
+was down-stairs, "you haven't let her in?"
+
+"She's in the drawing-room, Madam." And Pringle added as a clear
+indication of what he considered her duty, "She came in Mr. Lanley's
+motor."
+
+"Of course she did. Well, say I'll be down," and as Pringle went away
+with this encouraging intelligence, Adelaide sank even farther back in
+her chair and looked at her husband. "What I am called upon to sacrifice
+to other people's love affairs! The Waynes and Mrs. Baxter--I never have
+time for my own friends. I don't mind Mrs. Baxter when you're well, and I
+can have a dinner; I ask all the stupid people together to whom I owe
+parties, and she is so pleased with them, and thinks they represent the
+most brilliant New York circle; but to have to go down and actually talk
+to her, isn't that hard, Vin?"
+
+"Hard on me," said Farron.
+
+"Oh, I shall come back--exhausted."
+
+"By what you have given out?"
+
+"No, but by her intense intimacy. You have no idea how well she knows me.
+It's Adelaide this and Adelaide that and 'the last time you stayed with
+me in Baltimore.' You know, Vin, I never stayed with her but once, and
+that only because she found me in the hotel and kidnapped me.
+However,"--Adelaide stood up with determination,--"one good thing is, I
+have begun to have an effect on my father. He does not like her any more.
+He was distinctly bored at the prospect of her visit this time. He did
+not resent it at all when I called her an upholstered old lady. I really
+think," she added, with modest justice, "that I am rather good at
+poisoning people's minds against their undesirable friends." She paused,
+debating how long it would take her to separate Mathilde from the Wayne
+boy; and recalling that this was no topic for an invalid, she smiled at
+him and went down-stairs.
+
+"My dear Adelaide!" said Mrs. Baxter, enveloping her in a powdery
+caress.
+
+"How wonderfully you're looking, Mrs. Baxter," said Adelaide, choosing
+her adverb with intention.
+
+"Now tell me, dear," said Mrs. Baxter, with a wave of a gloved hand,
+"what are those Italian embroideries?"
+
+"Those?" Adelaide lifted her eyebrows. "Ah, you're in fun! A collector
+like you! Surely you know what those are."
+
+"No," answered Mrs. Baxter, firmly, though she wished she had selected
+something else to comment on.
+
+"Oh, they are the Villanelli embroideries," said Adelaide, carelessly,
+very much as if she had said they were the Raphael cartoons, so that Mrs.
+Baxter was forced to reply in an awestruck tone:
+
+"You don't tell me! Are they, really?"
+
+Adelaide nodded brightly. She had not actually made up the name. It
+was that of an obscure little palace where she had bought the
+hangings, and if Mrs. Baxter had had the courage to acknowledge
+ignorance, Adelaide would have told the truth. As it was, she
+recognized that by methods such as this she could retain absolute
+control over people like Mrs. Baxter.
+
+The lady from Baltimore decided on a more general scope.
+
+"Ah, your room!" she said. "Do you know whose it always reminds me
+of--that lovely salon of Madame de Liantour's?"
+
+"What, of poor little Henrietta's!" cried Adelaide, and she laid her hand
+appealingly for an instant on Mrs. Baxter's knee. "That's a cruel thing
+to say. All her good things, you know, were sold years ago. Everything
+she has is a reproduction. Am I really like her?"
+
+Getting out of this as best she could on a vague statement about
+atmosphere and sunshine and charm, Mrs. Baxter took refuge in inquiries
+about Vincent's health, "your charming child," and "your dear father."
+
+"You know more about my dear father than I do," returned Adelaide,
+sweetly. It was Mrs. Baxter's cue.
+
+"I did not feel last evening that I knew anything about him at all. He
+is in a new phase, almost a new personality. Tell me, who is this
+Mrs. Wayne?"
+
+"Mrs. Wayne?" Mrs. Baxter must have felt herself revenged by the complete
+surprise of Adelaide's tone.
+
+"Yes, she dined at the house last evening. Apparently it was to have been
+a t�te-�-t�te dinner, but my arrival changed it to a _partie carree_."
+She talked on about Wilsey and the conversation of the evening, but it
+made little difference what she said, for her full idea had reached
+Adelaide from the start, and had gathered to itself in an instant a
+hundred confirmatory memories. Like a picture, she saw before her Mrs.
+Wayne's sitting-room, with the ink-spots on the rug. Who would not wish
+to exchange that for Mr. Lanley's series of fresh, beautiful rooms?
+Suddenly she gave her attention back to Mrs. Baxter, who was saying:
+
+"I assure you, when we were alone I was prepared for a formal
+announcement."
+
+It was not safe to be the bearer of ill tidings to Adelaide.
+
+"An announcement?" she said wonderingly. "Oh, no, Mrs. Baxter, my father
+will never marry again. There have always been rumors, and you can't
+imagine how he and I have laughed over them together."
+
+As the indisputable subject of such rumors in past times, Mrs. Baxter
+fitted a little arrow in her bow.
+
+"In the past," she said, "women of suitable age have not perhaps been
+willing to consider the question, but this lady seems to me
+distinctly willing."
+
+"More than willingness on the lady's part has been needed," answered
+Adelaide, and then Pringle's ample form appeared in the doorway. "There's
+a man from the office here, Madam, asking to see Mr. Farron."
+
+"Mr. Farron can see no one." A sudden light flashed upon her. "What is
+his name, Pringle?"
+
+"Burke, Madam."
+
+"Oh, let him come in." Adelaide turned to Mrs. Baxter. "I will show
+you," she said, "one of the finest sights you ever saw." The next
+instant Marty was in the room. Not so gorgeous as in his
+wedding-attire, he was still an exceedingly fine young animal. He was
+not so magnificently defiant as before, but he scowled at his
+unaccustomed surroundings under his dark brows.
+
+"It's Mr. Farron I wanted to see," he said, a soft roll to his r's. At
+Mrs. Wayne's Adelaide had suffered from being out of her own
+surroundings, but here she was on her own field, and she meant to make
+Burke feel it. She was leaning with her elbow on the back of the sofa,
+and now she slipped her bright rings down her slim fingers and shook them
+back again as she looked up at Burke and spoke to him as she would have
+done to a servant.
+
+"Mr. Farron cannot see you."
+
+Cleverer people than Burke had struggled vainly against the poison of
+inferiority which this tone instilled into their minds.
+
+"That's what they keep telling me down-town. I never knew him sick
+before."
+
+"No?"
+
+"It wouldn't take five minutes."
+
+"Mr. Farron is too weak to see you."
+
+Marty made a strange grating sound in his throat, and Adelaide asked
+like a queen bending from the throne:
+
+"What seems to be the matter, Burke?"
+
+"Why,"--Burke turned upon her the flare of his light, fierce eyes,--"they
+have it on me on the dock that as soon as he comes back he means to
+bounce me."
+
+"To bounce you," repeated Adelaide, and she almost smiled as she thought
+of that poor exhausted figure up-stairs.
+
+"I don't care if he does or not," Marty went on. "I'm not so damned stuck
+on the job. There's others."
+
+"There are maidens in Scotland more lovely by far," murmured Adelaide.
+
+Again he scowled, feeling the approach of something hostile to him.
+
+"What's that?" he asked, surmising that she was insulting him.
+
+"I said I supposed you could get a better job if you tried."
+
+He did not like this tone either.
+
+"Well, whether I could or not," he said, "this is no way. I'm losing my
+hold of my men."
+
+"Oh, I can't imagine your doing that, Burke."
+
+He turned on her to see if she were really daring to laugh at him, and
+met an eye as steady as his own.
+
+"I guess I'm wasting my time here," he said, and something intimated that
+some one would pay for that expenditure.
+
+"Shall I take a message to Mr. Farron for you?" said Adelaide.
+
+He nodded.
+
+"Yes. Tell him that if I'm to go, I'll go to-day."
+
+"I see." She rose slowly, as if in response to a vague, amusing caprice.
+"Just that. If you go, you'll go to-day."
+
+For the first time Burke, regaining his self-confidence, saw that she was
+not an enemy, but an appreciative spectator, and his face broke up in a
+smile, queer, crooked, wrinkled, but brilliant.
+
+"I guess you'll get it about right," he said, and no compliment had ever
+pleased Adelaide half so much.
+
+"I think so," she confidently answered, and then at the door she
+turned. "Oh, Mrs. Baxter," she said, "this is Marty Burke, a very
+important person."
+
+Importance, especially Adelaide Farron's idea of importance, was a
+category for which Mrs. Baxter had the highest esteem, so almost against
+her will she looked at Burke, and found him looking her over with such a
+shrewd eye that she looked away, and then looked back again to find that
+his gaze was still upon her. He had made his living since he was a child
+by his faculty for sizing people up, and at his first glimpse of Mrs.
+Baxter's shifting glance he had sized her up; so that now, when she
+remarked with an amiability at once ponderous and shaky that it was a
+very fine day, he replied in exactly the same tone, "It is that," and
+began to walk about the room looking at the pictures. Presently a low,
+but sweet, whistle broke from his lips. He made her feel uncommonly
+uncomfortable, so uncomfortable that she was driven to conversation.
+
+"Are you fond of pictures, Burke?" she asked. He just looked at her over
+his shoulder without answering. She began to wish that Adelaide would
+come back.
+
+Adelaide had found her husband still accessible. He received in silence
+the announcement that Burke was down-stairs. She told the message
+without bias.
+
+"He says that they have it on him on the dock that he is to be bounced.
+He asked me to say this to you: that if he is to go, he'll go to-day."
+
+"What was his manner?"
+
+Adelaide could not resist a note of enjoyment entering into her tone as
+she replied:
+
+"Insolent in the extreme."
+
+She was leaning against the wall at the foot of his bed, and though she
+was not looking at him, she felt his eyes on her.
+
+"Adelaide," he said, "you should not have brought me that message."
+
+"You mean it is bad for your health to be worried, dearest?" she asked
+in a tone so soft that only an expert in tones could have detected
+something not at all soft beneath it. She glanced at her husband under
+her lashes. Wasn't he any more an expert in her tones?
+
+"I mean," he answered, "that you should have told him to go to the
+devil."
+
+"Oh, I leave that to you, Vin." She laughed, and added after a second's
+pause, "I was only a messenger."
+
+"Tell him I shall be down-town next week."
+
+"Oh, Vin, no; not next week."
+
+"Tell him next week."
+
+"I can't do that."
+
+"I thought you were only a messenger."
+
+"Your doctor would not hear of it. It would be madness."
+
+Farron leaned over and touched his bell. The nurse was instantly in
+the room, looking at Vincent, Adelaide thought, as a water-dog looks
+at its master when it perceives that a stick is about to be thrown
+into the pond.
+
+"Miss Gregory," said Vincent, "there's a young man from my office
+down-stairs. Will you tell him that I can't see him to-day, but that I
+shall be down-town next week, and I'll see him then?"
+
+Miss Gregory was almost at the door before Adelaide stopped her.
+
+"You must know that Mr. Farron cannot get down-town next week."
+
+"Has the doctor said not?"
+
+Adelaide shook her head impatiently.
+
+"I don't suppose any one has been so insane as to ask him," she answered.
+
+Miss Gregory smiled temperately.
+
+"Oh, next week is a long time off," she said, and left the room. Adelaide
+turned to her husband.
+
+"Do you enjoy being humored?" she asked.
+
+Farron had closed his eyes, and now opened them.
+
+"I beg your pardon," he said. "I didn't hear."
+
+"She knows quite well that you can't go down-town next week. She takes
+your message just to humor you."
+
+"She's an excellent nurse," said Farron.
+
+"For babies," Adelaide felt like answering, but she didn't. She said
+instead, "Anyhow, Burke will never accept that as an answer." She was
+surprised to hear something almost boastful in her own tone.
+
+"Oh, I think he will."
+
+She waited breathlessly for some sound from down-stairs or even for the
+flurried reentrance of Miss Gregory. There was a short silence, and
+then came the sound of the shutting of the front door. Marty had
+actually gone.
+
+Vincent did not even open his eyes when Miss Gregory returned; he did not
+exert himself to ask how his message had been received. Adelaide waited
+an instant, and then went back to Mrs. Baxter with a strange sense of
+having sustained a small personal defeat.
+
+Mrs. Baxter was so thoroughly ruffled that she was prepared to attack
+even the sacrosanct Adelaide. But she was not given the chance.
+
+"Well, how did Marty treat you?" said Adelaide.
+
+Mrs. Baxter sniffed.
+
+"We had not very much in common," she returned.
+
+"No; Marty's a very real person." There was a pause. "What became of him?
+Did he go?"
+
+"Yes, your husband's trained nurse gave him a message, and he went away."
+
+"Quietly?" The note of disappointment was so plain that Mrs. Baxter asked
+in answer:
+
+"What would you have wanted him to do?"
+
+Adelaide laughed.
+
+"I suppose it would have been too much to expect that he would drag you
+and Miss Gregory about by your hair," she said, "but I own I should have
+liked some little demonstration. But perhaps," she added more brightly,
+"he has gone back to wreck the docks."
+
+At this moment Mathilde entered the room in her hat and furs, and
+distracted the conversation from Burke. Adelaide, who was fond of
+enunciating the belief that you could tell when people were in love by
+the frequency with which they wore their best clothes, noticed now how
+wonderfully lovely Mathilde was looking; but she noticed it quite
+unsuspiciously, for she was thinking, "My child is really a beauty."
+
+"You remember Mrs. Baxter, my dear."
+
+Mathilde did not remember her in the least, though she smiled
+sufficiently. To her Mrs. Baxter seemed just one of many dressy old
+ladies who drifted across the horizon only too often. If any one had told
+her that her grandfather had ever been supposed to be in danger of
+succumbing to charms such as these, she would have thought the notion an
+ugly example of grown-up pessimism.
+
+Mrs. Baxter held her hand and patted it.
+
+"Where does she get that lovely golden hair?" she asked. "Not from you,
+does she?"
+
+"She gets it from her father," answered Adelaide, and her expression
+added, "you dreadful old goose."
+
+In the pause Mathilde made her escape unquestioned. She knew even before
+a last pathetic glance that her mother was unutterably wearied with her
+visitor. In other circumstances she would have stayed to effect a
+rescue, but at present she was engaged in a deed of some recklessness on
+her own account. She was going to meet Pete Wayne secretly at the
+Metropolitan Museum.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+In all her life Mathilde had never felt so conspicuous as she did going
+up the long flight of stairs at the Fifth Avenue entrance of the museum.
+It seemed to her that people, those walking past in the sunshine on the
+sidewalk, and the strangers in town seeing the sights from the top of the
+green busses, were saying to one another as they looked at her, "There
+goes a New York girl to meet her lover in one of the more ancient of the
+Egyptian rooms."
+
+She started as she heard the voice of the guard, though he was saying
+nothing but "Check your umbrella" to a man behind her. She sped across
+the marble floor of the great tapestry hall as a little, furry wild
+animal darts across an open space in the woods. She was thinking that she
+could not bear it if Pete were not there. How could she wait many minutes
+under the eyes of the guards, who must know better than any one else that
+no flesh-and-blood girl took any real interest in Egyptian antiquities?
+The round, unambitious dial at the entrance, like an enlarged
+kitchen-clock, had pointed to the exact hour set for the meeting. She
+ought not to expect that Pete, getting away from the office in business
+hours, could be as punctual as an eager, idle creature like herself.
+
+She had made up her mind so clearly that when she entered the night-blue
+room there would be nothing but tombs and mummies that when she saw Pete
+standing with his overcoat over his arm, in the blue-serge clothes she
+particularly liked, she felt as much surprised as if their meeting were
+accidental.
+
+She tried to draw a long breath.
+
+"I shall never get used to it," she said. "If we had been married a
+thousand years, I should always feel just like this when I see you."
+
+"Oh, no, you won't," he answered. "I hope the very next time we meet you
+will say, quite in a wife's orthodox tone: 'My dear, I've been waiting
+twenty minutes. Not that I mind at all; only I was afraid I must have
+misunderstood you.'"
+
+"You hope? Oh, I hope we shall never be like that."
+
+"Really? Why, I enjoy the idea. I shall enjoy saying to total strangers,
+'Ah, gentlemen, if my wife were ever on time--' It makes me feel so
+indissolubly united to you."
+
+"I like it best as we are now."
+
+"We might try different methods alternate years: one year we could be
+domestic, and the next, detached, and so on."
+
+By this time they had discovered that they were leaning on a mummy-case,
+and Mathilde drew back with an exclamation. "Poor thing!" she said. "I
+suppose she once had a lover, too."
+
+"And very likely met him in the room of Chinese antiquities in the Temple
+Museum," said Pete, and then, changing his tone, he added: "But come
+along. I want to show you a few little things which I have selected to
+furnish our home. I think you'll like them."
+
+Pete was always inventing games like this, and calling on her to enter in
+without the slightest warning. One of them was about a fancy ball he was
+giving in the main hall of the Pennsylvania Station. But this new idea,
+to treat the whole museum as a sort of super-department store, made her
+laugh in a faint, dependent way that she knew Pete liked. She believed
+that such forms of play were peculiar to themselves, so she guarded them
+as the deepest kind of secret; for she thought, if her mother ever found
+out about them, she would at once conclude that the whole relation was
+childish. To all other lovers Mathilde attributed a uniform seriousness.
+
+It took them a long time to choose their house-furnishings: there was a
+piece of black-and-gold lacquer; a set of painted panels; a Persian rug,
+swept by the tails of two haughty peacocks; some cloud-gray Chinese
+porcelains; a set of Du Barry vases; a crystal-and-enamel box, designed
+probably for some sacred purpose, but contributed by Pete as an excellent
+receptacle for chocolates at her bedside. "The Boy with the Sword" for
+the dining-room, Ver Meer's "Women at the Window," the small Bonnington,
+and then, since Mathilde wanted the portrait of Mrs. Fitzherbert, and
+Wayne felt a faint weariness with the English school, a compromise was
+effected by the selection of Constable's landscape of a bridge. Wayne
+kept constantly repeating that he was exactly like Warren Hastings,
+astonished at his own moderation. They had hardly begun, indeed, before
+Mathilde felt herself overcome by that peculiar exhaustion that overtakes
+even the robust in museums.
+
+Wayne guided her to a little sofa in a room of gold and jade.
+
+"How beautifully you know your way about here!" she said. "I suppose
+you've brought lots of girls here before me."
+
+"A glorious army," said Pete, "the matron and the maid. You ought to see
+my mother in a museum. She's lost before she gets well inside the
+turnstile."
+
+But Mathilde was thinking.
+
+"How strange it is," she observed, "that I never should have thought
+before about your caring for any one else. Pete, did you ever ask any one
+else to marry you?"
+
+Wayne nodded.
+
+"Yes; when I was in college. I asked a girl to marry me. She was having
+rather a rotten time."
+
+"Were you in love with her?"
+
+He shook his head, and in the silence shuffling and staccato footsteps
+were heard, announcing the approach of a youthful art class and their
+teacher. "Jade," said the voice of the lady, "one of the hardest of known
+substances, has yet been beautifully worked from time immemorial--"
+
+More pairs of eyes in that art class were fixed on the obviously guilty
+couple in the corner than on the beautiful cloudy objects in the cases,
+and it was not until they had all followed their guide to the armor-room,
+and had grouped themselves about the casque of Joan of Arc, that Wayne
+went on as if no interruption had occurred:
+
+"If you want to know whether I have ever experienced anything like my
+feeling for you since the first moment I saw you, I never have and never
+shall, and thereto I plight thee my troth."
+
+Mathilde turned her full face toward him, shedding gratitude and
+affection as a lamp sheds light before she answered:
+
+"You were terribly unkind to me yesterday."
+
+"I know. I'm sorry."
+
+"I shall never forget the way you kissed me, as if I were a rather
+repulsive piece of wood."
+
+Pete craned his neck, and met the suspicious eye of a guard.
+
+"I don't think anything can be done about it at the moment," he said;
+and added in explanation, "You see, I felt as if you had suddenly
+deserted me."
+
+"Pete, I couldn't ever desert you--unless I committed suicide."
+
+Presently he stood up, declaring that this was not the fitting place for
+arranging the details of their marriage.
+
+"Come to one of the smaller picture galleries," he said, "and as we go
+I'll show you a portrait of my mother."
+
+"Your mother? I did not know she had had a portrait done. By whom?"
+
+"A fellow called Bellini. He thought he was doing the Madonna."
+
+When they reached the picture, a figure was already before it. Mr.
+Lanley was sitting, with his arms folded and his feet stretched out far
+before him, his head bent, but his eyes raised and fixed on the picture.
+They saw him first, and had two or three seconds to take in the profound
+contemplation of his mood. Then he slowly raised his eyes and
+encountered theirs.
+
+There is surely nothing compromising in an elderly gentleman spending a
+contemplative morning alone at the Metropolitan Museum. It might well be
+his daily custom; but the knowledge that it was not, the consciousness of
+the rarity of the mood that had brought him there, oppressed Mr. Lanley
+almost like a crime. He felt caught, outraged, ashamed as he saw them.
+"That's the age which has a right to it," he said to himself. And then as
+if in a mirror he saw an expression of embarrassment on their faces, and
+was reminded that their meeting must have been illicit, too. He stood up
+and looked at them sternly.
+
+"Up-town at this hour, Wayne?" he said.
+
+"Grandfather, I never knew you came here much," said Mathilde.
+
+"It's near me, you know," he answered weakly, so weakly that he felt
+impelled to give an explanation. "Sometimes, my dear," he said, "you will
+find that even the most welcome guest rather fills the house."
+
+"You need not worry about yours," returned Mathilde. "I left her
+with Mama."
+
+Mr. Lanley felt that his brief moment of peace was indeed over. He could
+imagine the impressions that Mrs. Baxter was perhaps at that very moment
+sharing with Adelaide. He longed to question his granddaughter, but did
+not know how to put it.
+
+"How was your mother looking?" he finally decided upon.
+
+"Dreary," answered Mathilde, with a laugh.
+
+"Does this picture remind you of any one?" asked Wayne, suddenly.
+
+Mr. Lanley looked at him as if he hadn't heard, and frowned.
+
+"I don't know what you mean," he said.
+
+"Don't you think there's a look of my mother about it?"
+
+"No," said Mr. Lanley, rather loudly, and then added, "Well, I see what
+you mean, though I shouldn't--" He stopped and turning to them with some
+sternness, he asked them how they accounted for their presence in the
+museum at such an hour and alone.
+
+There was nothing to do but to tell him the truth. And when Wayne had
+finished, Mathilde was surprised at her grandfather's question. She
+thought he would ask what her mother thought of it. If they had been
+alone, she would have told him that Adelaide thought Wayne a commonplace
+young man with stubby hands; but as it was, she had resolved to put her
+mother's opposition on a more dignified plane. Only Mr. Lanley did not
+ask the question of her. It was to Wayne he was speaking, when he said:
+
+"What does your mother think of it?"
+
+"Oh, my mother," answered Pete. "Well, she thinks that if she were a girl
+she'd like to go to China."
+
+Mr. Lanley looked up, and they both smiled with the most perfect
+understanding.
+
+"She would," said the older man, and then he became intensely serious.
+"It's quite out of the question," he said.
+
+"O Grandfather," Mathilde exclaimed, clasping her hands about his
+arm, "don't talk like that! It wouldn't be possible for me to let him
+go without me. O Grandfather, can't you remember what it was like to
+be in love?"
+
+A complete silence followed this little speech--a silence that went on
+and on and seemed to be stronger than human power. Perhaps for the first
+time in his life Lanley felt hostile toward the girl beside him. "Oh,
+dear," Mathilde was thinking, "I suppose I've made him remember my
+grandmother and his youth!" "Can love be remembered," Pete was saying to
+himself, "or is it like a perfume that can be recognized, but not
+recalled?"
+
+Lanley turned at last to Wayne.
+
+"It's out of the question," he said, "that you should take this child to
+China at two weeks' notice. You must see that."
+
+"I see perfectly that many people will think it so. But you must see that
+to us it is the inevitable thing to do."
+
+"If every one else agreed, I should oppose it."
+
+"O Grandfather!" wailed Mathilde. "And you were our great hope--you and
+Mrs. Wayne!"
+
+"In a matter like this I shall stand by your mother, Mathilde," he said,
+and Mathilde imagined he meant as opposed to herself. But he was making
+an even greater renunciation.
+
+Adelaide was surprised and not pleased when Mathilde came home late for
+lunch, bringing the Wayne boy with her. It was not that she had expected
+her one little phrase about Wayne's hands to change her daughter's love
+into repugnance,--that sentence had been only the first drop in a
+distillation that would do its poisonous work gradually,--but she had
+supposed that Mathilde would be too sensitive to expose Pete to further
+criticism. Indeed, there seemed something obtuse, if not actually
+indelicate, in being willing to create a situation in which every one
+was bound to suffer. Obtuseness was not a defect with which Adelaide had
+much patience.
+
+Mathilde saw at once that her mother was going to be what in the family
+slang was called "grand." The grandeur consisted in a polite inattention;
+it went with a soft voice and immobile expression. In this mood Adelaide
+answered you about three seconds later than you expected, and though she
+answered you accurately, it was as if she had forced her mind back from a
+more congenial ether. She seemed to be wrapped in an agreeable cloud
+until you gave her some opening, and then she came out of her cloud like
+a flash of lightning.
+
+Wayne, who had lived his life so far with a woman who did not believe in
+the use of force in human relations, viewed these symptoms of coercion
+with the utmost indifference; but Mathilde had not so far freed herself
+as to ignore them. She was not afraid, but easy conversation under the
+menace was beyond her. She couldn't think of anything to say.
+
+Adelaide was accustomed by these methods to drive the inexperienced--and
+she considered Pete pitifully inexperienced in social fine points--into a
+state of conversational unrest in which they would finally ask
+recklessly, "Have you been to the theater lately?" and she would question
+gently, "The theater?" as much as to say, "I've heard that word
+somewhere before," until the conscientious conversationalist, rushing
+from futility to futility, would be finally engulfed in some yawning
+banality and sink out of sight forever.
+
+But Wayne resisted this temptation, or, rather, he did not feel it. He
+had the courage to be unafraid of silences, and he ate his luncheon and
+thought about the pictures he had been seeing, and at last began to talk
+to Mathilde about them, while Adelaide made it clear that she was not
+listening, until she caught a phrase that drove her grandeur away.
+
+"Near where we met my grandfather?" Mathilde asked.
+
+By this time Adelaide had gathered that the two had been in the museum,
+and the knowledge annoyed her not only as a mother, but as an
+aristocrat. Without being clear about it, she regarded the love of
+beauty--artificial beauty, that is--as a class distinction. It seemed to
+her possible enough that the masses should love mountains and moonlight
+and the sea and sunsets; but it struck her as unfitting that any one but
+the people she knew, and only a few of them, should really care for
+porcelains and pictures. As she held herself aloof from the conversation
+she was annoyed at noticing that Wayne was showing a more
+discriminating taste than her own carefully nurtured child. But all such
+considerations were driven away by the mention of her father, for Mr.
+Lanley had been in her mind ever since Mrs. Baxter had taken her
+unimpeded departure just before luncheon.
+
+"Your grandfather?" she said, coming out of the clouds. "Was he in the
+Metropolitan?"
+
+"Yes," said Mathilde, thankful to be directly addressed. "Wasn't it
+queer? Pete was taking me to see a picture that looks exactly like Mrs.
+Wayne, only Mrs. Wayne hasn't such a round face, and there in front of it
+was grandpapa."
+
+Adelaide rose very slowly from table, lunch being fortunately over. She
+felt as if she could have borne almost anything but this--the idea of her
+father vaporing before a picture of the Madonna. Phrases came into her
+head: silly old man, the time has come to protect him against himself;
+the Wayne family must be suppressed.
+
+Her silence in the drawing-room was of a more concentrated sort, and when
+she had taken her coffee and cigarette she said to Mathilde:
+
+"My dear, I promised to go back to Vincent at this time. Will you go
+instead? I want to have a word with Mr. Wayne."
+
+Adelaide had never entered any contest in her life, whether it was a
+dispute with a dressmaker or a quarrel with her husband, without
+remembering the comfortable fact that she was a beauty. With men she did
+not neglect the advantage that being a woman gave her, and with the
+particular man now before her she had, she knew, a third line of defense;
+she was the mother of his love, and she thought she detected in him a
+special weakness for mothers. But it would have been better if he had
+respected women and mothers less, for he thought so highly of them that
+he believed they ought to play fair.
+
+Sitting in a very low chair, she looked up at him.
+
+"Mathilde has been telling me something about a plan of yours to take her
+to China with you. We could not consent to that, you know."
+
+"I'm sorry," said Pete. The tone was pleasant. That was the trouble;
+it was too pleasant a tone for a man relinquishing a cherished hope.
+It sounded almost as if he regretted the inevitable disappointment of
+the family.
+
+Adelaide tried a new attack.
+
+"Your mother--have you consulted her?"
+
+"Yes, I've told her our plans."
+
+"And she approves?"
+
+Wayne might choose to betray his mother in the full irresponsibility of
+her attitude to so sympathetic a listener as Mr. Lanley, but he had no
+intention of giving Mrs. Farron such a weapon. At the same time he did
+not intend to be untruthful. His answer was this:
+
+"My mother," he said, "is not like most women of her age. She
+believes in love."
+
+"In all love, quite indiscriminately?"
+
+He hesitated an instant.
+
+"I put it wrong," he answered. "I meant that she believes in the
+importance of real love."
+
+"And has she a spell by which she tells real love?"
+
+"She believes mine to be real."
+
+"Oh, yours! Very likely. Perhaps it's maternal vanity on my part, Mr.
+Wayne, but I must own I can imagine a man's contriving to love my
+daughter, so gentle, so intelligent, and so extraordinarily lovely to
+look at. I was not thinking of your feelings, but of hers."
+
+"You can see no reason why she should love me?"
+
+Adelaide moved her shoulders about.
+
+"Well, I want it explained, that's all, from your own point of view. I
+see my daughter as an unusual person, ignorant of life, to whom it seems
+to me all things are possible. And I see you, a very nice young man. But
+what else? I ask to be told why you fulfil all possibilities. Don't
+misunderstand me. I am not mercenary. Mathilde will have plenty of money
+of her own some day. I don't want a millionaire. I want a _person_."
+
+"Of course, if you ask me why Mathilde should love me--"
+
+"Don't be untruthful, Mr. Wayne. I thought better of you. If you should
+come back from China next year to find her engaged to some one else, you
+could tell a great many reasons why he was not good enough for her. Now
+tell me some of the reasons why you are. And please don't include
+because you love her so much, for almost any one would do that."
+
+Pete fought down his panic, reminding himself that no man living could
+hear such words without terror. His egotism, never colossal, stood
+feebly between him and Mrs. Farron's estimate of him. He seemed to sink
+back into the general human species. If he had felt inclined to detail
+his own qualities, he could not have thought of one. There was a long
+silence, while Adelaide sat with a look of docile teachableness upon her
+expectant face.
+
+At last Wayne stood up.
+
+"It's no use, Mrs. Farron," he said "That question of yours can't be
+answered. I believe she loves me. It's my bet against yours."
+
+"I won't gamble with my child's future," she returned. "I did with my
+own. Sit down again, Mr. Wayne. You have heard, I suppose, that I have
+been married twice?"
+
+"Yes." He sat down again reluctantly.
+
+"I was Mathilde's age--a little older. I was more in love than she. And
+if he had been asked the question I just asked you, he could have
+answered it. He could have said: 'I have been a leader in a group in
+which I was, an athlete, an oarsman, and the most superb physical
+specimen of my race'--brought up, too, he might have added, in the same
+traditions that I had had. Well, that wasn't enough, Mr. Wayne, and that
+was a good deal. If my father had only made me wait, only given me time
+to see that my choice was the choice of ignorance, that the man I thought
+a hero was, oh, the most pitifully commonplace clay--Mathilde shan't make
+my mistake."
+
+Wayne's eyes lit up.
+
+"But that's it," he said. "She wouldn't make your mistake. She'd choose
+right. That's what I ought to have said. You spoke of Mathilde's spirit.
+She has a feeling for the right thing. Some people have, and some people
+are bound to choose wrong."
+
+Adelaide laid her hand on her breast.
+
+"You mean me?" she asked, too much interested to be angry.
+
+He was too absorbed in his own interests to give his full
+attention to hers.
+
+"Yes," he answered. "I mean your principles of choice weren't right
+ones--leaders of men, you know, and all that. It never works out.
+Leaders of men are the ones who always cry on their wives' shoulders, and
+the martinets at home are imposed on by every one else." He gave out this
+dictum in passing: "But don't trouble about your responsibility in this,
+Mrs. Farron. It's out of your hands. It's our chance, and Mathilde and I
+mean to take it. I don't want to give you a warning, exactly, but--it's
+going to go through."
+
+She looked at him with large, terrified eyes. She was repeating, 'they
+cry on their wives' shoulders,' or, he might have said, 'on the
+shoulders of their trained nurses.' She knew that he was talking to her,
+saying something. She couldn't listen to it. And then he was gone. She
+was glad he was.
+
+She sat quite still, with her hands lying idly, softly in her lap. It was
+possible that what he said was true. Perhaps all these people who made
+such a show of strength to the world were those who sucked double
+strength by sapping the vitality of a life's companion. It had been true
+of Joe Severance. She had heard him praised for the courage with which
+he went forth against temptation, but she had known that it was her
+strength he was using. She looked up, to see her daughter, pale and
+eager, standing before her.
+
+"O Mama, was it very terrible?"
+
+"What, dear?"
+
+"Did Pete tell you of our plan?"
+
+Adelaide wished she could have listened to those last sentences of his;
+but they were gone completely.
+
+She put up her hand and patted the unutterably soft cheek before her.
+
+"He told me something about putting through your absurd idea of an
+immediate marriage," she said.
+
+"We don't want to do it in a sneaky way, Mama."
+
+"I know. You want to have your own way and to have every one approve of
+you, too. Is that it?"
+
+Mathilde's lips trembled.
+
+"O Mama," she cried, "you are so different from what you used to be!"
+
+Adelaide nodded.
+
+"One changes," she said. "One's life changes." She had meant this
+sentence to end the interview, but when she saw the girl still standing
+before her, she said to herself that it made little difference that she
+hadn't heard the plans of the Wayne boy, since Mathilde, her own
+tractable daughter, was still within her power. She moved into the corner
+of the sofa. "Sit down, dear," she said, and when Mathilde had obeyed
+with an almost imperceptible shrinking in her attitude, Adelaide went on,
+with a sort of serious ease of manner:
+
+"I've never been a particularly flattering mother, have I? Never thought
+you were perfect just because you were mine? Well, I hope you'll pay the
+more attention to what I have to say. You are remarkable. You are going
+to be one of the most attractive women that ever was. Years ago old Count
+Bartiani--do you remember him, at Lucerne?"
+
+"The one who used scent and used to look so long at me?"
+
+"Yes, he was old and rather horrid, but he knew what he was talking
+about. He said then you would be the most attractive woman in Europe. I
+heard the same thing from all my friends, and it's true. You have
+something rare and perfect---"
+
+These were great words. Mathilde, accustomed all her life to receive
+information from her mother, received this; and for the first time felt
+the egotism of her beauty awake, a sense of her own importance the more
+vivid because she had always been humble-minded. She did not look at her
+mother; she sat up very straight and stared as if at new fields before
+her, while a faint smile flickered at the corners of her mouth--a smile
+of an awakening sense of power.
+
+"What you have," Adelaide went on, "ought to bring great happiness,
+great position, great love; and how can I let you throw yourself away
+at eighteen on a commonplace boy with a glib tongue and a high opinion
+of himself? Don't tell me that it will make you happy. That would be
+the worst of all, if you turned out to be so limited that you were
+satisfied,--that would be a living death. O my darling, I give you my
+word that if you will give up this idea, ten years from now, when you
+see this boy, still glib, still vain, and perhaps a little fat, you
+will actually shudder when you think how near he came to cutting you
+off from the wonderful, full life that you were entitled to." And then,
+as if she could not hope to better this, Adelaide sprang up, and left
+the girl alone.
+
+Mathilde rose, too, and looked at herself in the glass. She was stirred,
+she was changed, she was awakened, but awakened to something her mother
+had not counted on. Almost too gentle, too humble, too reasonable, as she
+had always been, the drop of egotism which her mother had succeeded in
+instilling into her nature served to solidify her will, to inspire her
+with a needed power of aggression.
+
+She nodded once at her image in the mirror.
+
+"Well," she said, "it's my life, and I'm willing to take the
+consequences."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+When Mathilde emerged from the subway into the sunlight of City Hall
+Park, Pete was nowhere to be seen. She had spent several minutes
+wandering in the subterranean labyrinth which threatened to bring her to
+Brooklyn Bridge and nowhere else, so she was a little late for her
+appointment; and yet Pete was not there. He had promised to be waiting
+for her. This was a more important occasion than the meeting in the
+museum and more terrifying, too.
+
+Their plans were simple. They were going to get their marriage license,
+they were going to be married immediately, they were then going to inform
+their respective families, and start two days later for San Francisco.
+
+Mathilde stared furtively about her. A policeman strolled past, striking
+terror to a guilty heart; a gentleman of evidently unbroken leisure
+regarded her with a benevolent eye completely ringed by red. Crowds were
+surging in and out of the newspaper offices and the Municipal Building
+and the post office, but stare where she would, she couldn't find Pete.
+
+She had ten minutes to think of horrors before she saw him rushing across
+the park toward her, and she had the idea of saying to him those words
+which he himself had selected as typically wifely, "Not that I mind at
+all, but I was afraid I must have misunderstood you." But she did not get
+very far in her mild little joke, for it was evident at once that
+something had happened.
+
+"My dear love," he said, "it's no go. We can't sail, we can't be married.
+I think I'm out of a job."
+
+As they stood there, her pretty clothes, the bright sun shining on her
+golden hair and dark furs and polished shoes, her beauty, but, above all,
+their complete absorption in each other, made them conspicuous. They were
+utterly oblivious.
+
+Pete told her exactly what had happened. Some months before he had been
+sent to make a report on a coal property in Pennsylvania. He had made it
+under the assumption that the firm was thinking of underwriting its
+bonds. He had been mistaken. As owners Honaton & Benson had already
+acquired the majority of interest in it. His report,--she remembered his
+report, for he had told her about it the first day he came to see
+her,--had been favorable except for one important fact. There was in that
+district a car shortage which for at least a year would hamper the
+marketing of the supply. That had been the point of the whole thing. He
+had advised against taking the property over until this defect could be
+remedied or allowed for. They had accepted the report.
+
+Well, late in the afternoon of the preceding day he had gone to the
+office to say good-by to the firm. He could not help being touched by the
+friendliness of both men's manner. Honaton gave him a silver
+traveling-flask, plain except for an offensive cat's-eye set in the top.
+Benson, more humane and practical, gave him a check.
+
+"I think I've cleared up everything before I leave," Wayne said, trying
+to be conscientious in return for their kindness, "except one thing.
+I've never corrected the proof of my report on the Southerland coal
+property."
+
+For a second there was something strange in the air. The partners
+exchanged the merest flicker of a look, which Wayne, as far as he thought
+of it at all, supposed to be a recognition on their part of his
+carefulness in thinking of such a detail.
+
+"You need not give that another thought," said Benson. "We are not
+thinking of publishing that report at present. And when we do, I have
+your manuscript. I'll go over the proof myself."
+
+Relieved to be spared another task, Wayne shook hands with his employers
+and withdrew. Outside he met David.
+
+"Say," said David, "I am sorry you're leaving us; but, gee!" he added,
+his face twisting with joy, "ain't the firm glad to have you go!"
+
+It had long been Wayne's habit to pay strict attention to the
+impressions of David.
+
+"Why do you think they are glad?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, they're glad all right," said David. "I heard the old man say
+yesterday, 'And by next Saturday he will be at sea.' It was as if
+he was going to get a Christmas present." And David went on about
+other business.
+
+Once put on the right track, it was not difficult to get the idea. He
+went to the firm's printer, but found they had had no orders for printing
+his report. The next morning, instead of spending his time with his own
+last arrangements, he began hunting up other printing offices, and
+finally found what he was looking for. His report was already in print,
+with one paragraph left out--that one which related to the shortage of
+cars. His name was signed to it, with a little preamble by the firm,
+urging the investment on the favorable notice of their customers, and
+spoke in high terms of the accuracy of his estimates.
+
+To say that Pete did not once contemplate continuing his arrangements as
+if nothing had happened would not be true. All he had to do was to go.
+The thing was dishonest, clearly enough, but it was not his action. His
+original report would always be proof of his own integrity, and on his
+return he could sever his connection with the firm on some other pretext.
+On the other hand, to break his connection with Honaton & Benson, to
+force the suppression of the report unless given in full, to give up his
+trip, to confess that immediate marriage was impossible, that he himself
+was out of a job, that the whole basis of his good fortune was a fraud
+that he had been too stupid to discover--all this seemed to him more than
+man could be asked to do.
+
+But that was what he decided must be done. From the printer's he
+telephoned to the Farrons, but found that Miss Severance was out. He knew
+she must have already started for their appointment in the City Hall
+Park. He had made up his mind, and yet when he saw her, so confident of
+the next step, waiting for him, he very nearly yielded to a sudden
+temptation to make her his wife, to be sure of that, whatever else might
+have to be altered.
+
+He had known she wouldn't reproach him, but he was deeply grateful to her
+for being so unaware that there was any grounds for reproach. She
+understood the courage his renunciation had required. That seemed to be
+what she cared for most.
+
+At length he said to her:
+
+"Now I must go and get this off my chest with the firm. Go home, and I'll
+come as soon as ever I can."
+
+But here she shook her head.
+
+"I couldn't go home," she answered. "It might all come out before you
+arrived, and I could not listen to things that"--she avoided naming her
+mother--"that will be said about you, Pete. Isn't there somewhere I can
+wait while you have your interview?"
+
+There was the outer office of Honaton & Benson. He let her go with him,
+and turned her over to the care of David, who found her a corner out of
+the way, and left her only once. That was to say to a friend of his in
+the cage: "When you go out, cast your eye over Pete's girl. Somewhat of a
+peacherino."
+
+In the meantime Wayne went into Benson's office. There wasn't a flicker
+of alarm on the senior partner's face on seeing him.
+
+"Hullo, Pete!" he said, "I thought you'd be packing your bags."
+
+"I'm not packing anything," said Wayne. "I've come to tell you I can't go
+to China for you. Mr. Benson."
+
+"Oh, come, come," said the other, very paternally, "we can't let you off
+like that. This is business, my dear boy. It would cost us money, after
+having made all our arrangements, if you changed your mind."
+
+"So I understand."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"I mean just what you think I mean, Mr. Benson."
+
+Wayne would have said that he could never forget the presence under any
+circumstances of his future wife, waiting, probably nervously, in the
+outer office; but he did. The interest of the next hour drove out
+everything else. Honaton was sent for from the exchange, a lawsuit was
+threatened, a bribe--he couldn't mistake it--offered. He was told he
+might find it difficult to find another position if he left their firm
+under such conditions.
+
+"On the contrary," said Peter, firmly, "from what I have heard, I believe
+it will improve my standing."
+
+That he came off well in the struggle was due not so much to his
+ability, but to the fact that he now had nothing to lose or gain from the
+situation. As soon as Benson grasped this fact he began a masterly
+retreat. Wayne noticed the difference between the partners: Honaton, the
+less able of the two, wanted to save the situation, but before everything
+else wanted to leave in Wayne's mind the sense that he had made a fool of
+himself. Benson, more practical, would have been glad to put Pete in jail
+if he could; but as he couldn't do that, his interest was in nothing but
+saving the situation. The only way to do this was to give up all idea of
+publishing any report. He did this by assuming that Wayne had simply
+changed his mind or had at least utterly failed to convey his meaning in
+his written words. He made this point of view very plausible by quoting
+the more laudatory of Wayne's sentences; and when Pete explained that the
+whole point of his report was in the sentence that had been omitted,
+Benson leaned back, chuckling, and biting off the end of his cigar.
+
+"Oh, you college men!" he said. "I'm afraid I'm not up to your
+subtleties. When you said it was the richest vein and favorably situated,
+I supposed that was what you meant. If you meant just the opposite, well,
+let it go. Honaton & Benson certainly don't want to get out a report
+contrary to fact."
+
+"That's what he has accused us of," said Honaton.
+
+"Oh, no, no," said Benson; "don't be too literal, Jack. In the heat of
+argument we all say things we don't mean. Pete here doesn't like to have
+his lovely English all messed up by a practical dub like me. I doubt if
+he wants to sever his connection with this firm."
+
+Honaton yielded.
+
+"Oh," he said, "I'm willing enough he should stay, if--"
+
+"Well, I'm not," said Pete, and put an end to the conversation by walking
+out of the room. He found David explaining the filing system to Mathilde,
+and she, hanging on his every word, partly on account of his native
+charm, partly on account of her own interest in anything neat, but most
+because she imagined the knowledge might some day make her a more
+serviceable wife to Pete.
+
+Pete dreaded the coming interview with Mrs. Farron more than that with
+the firm--more, indeed, than he had ever dreaded anything. He and
+Mathilde reached the house about a quarter before one, and Adelaide was
+not in. This was fortunate, for while they waited they discovered a
+difference of intention. Mathilde saw no reason for mentioning the fact
+that they had actually been on the point of taking out their marriage
+license. She thought it was enough to tell her mother that the trip had
+been abandoned and that Pete had given up his job. Pete contemplated
+nothing less than the whole truth.
+
+"You can't tell people half a story," he said. "It never works."
+
+Mathilde really quailed.
+
+"It will be terrible to tell mama that," she groaned. "She thinks
+failure is worse than crime."
+
+"And she's dead right," said Pete.
+
+When Adelaide came in she had Mr. Lanley with her. She had seen him
+walking down Fifth Avenue with his hat at quite an outrageous angle, and
+she had ordered the motor to stop, and had beckoned him to her. It was
+two days since her interview with Mrs. Baxter, and she had had no good
+opportunity of speaking to him. The suspicion that he was avoiding her
+nerved her hand; but there was no hint of discipline in her smile, and
+she knew as well as if he had said it that he was thinking as he came to
+the side of the car how handsome and how creditable a daughter she was.
+"Come to lunch with me," she said; "or must you go home to your guest?"
+
+"No, I was going to the club. She's lunching with a mysterious relation
+near Columbia University."
+
+"Don't you know who it is? Tell him home."
+
+"Home, Andrews. No, she never says."
+
+"Don't put your stick against the glass, there's an angel. I'll tell you
+who it is. An elder sister who supported and educated her, of whom she's
+ashamed now."
+
+"How do you know? It wouldn't break the glass."
+
+"No; but I hate the noise. I don't know; I just made it up because it's
+so likely."
+
+"She always speaks so affectionately of you."
+
+"She's a coward; that's the only difference. She hates me just as much."
+
+"Well, you've never been nice to her, Adelaide."
+
+"I should think not."
+
+"She's not as bad as you think," said Mr. Lanley, who believed in
+old-fashioned loyalty.
+
+"I can't bear her," said Adelaide.
+
+"Why not?" As far as his feelings went, this seemed a perfectly safe
+question; but it wasn't.
+
+"Because she tries so hard to make you ridiculous. Oh, not intentionally;
+but she talks of you as if you were a _Don Juan_ of twenty-five. You
+ought to be flattered, Papa dear, at having jealous scenes made about you
+when you are--what is it?--sixty-five."
+
+"Four," said Mr. Lanley.
+
+"Yes; such a morning as I had! Not a minute with poor Vincent because you
+had had Mrs. Wayne to dine. I'm not complaining, but I don't like my
+father represented as a sort of comic-paper old man, you poor
+dear,"--and she laid her long, gloved hand on his knee,--"who have always
+been so conspicuously dignified."
+
+"If I have," said her father, "I don't know that anything she says can
+change it."
+
+"No, of course; only it was horrible to me to hear her describing you in
+the grip of a boyish passion. But don't let's talk of it. I hear," she
+said, as if she were changing the subject, "that you have taken to going
+to the Metropolitan Museum at odd moments."
+
+He felt utterly stripped, and said without hope:
+
+"Yes; I'm a trustee, you know."
+
+Adelaide just glanced at him.
+
+"You always have been, I think." They drove home in silence.
+
+One reason why she was determined to have her father come home was that
+it was the first time that Vincent was to take luncheon downstairs, and
+when Adelaide had a part to play she liked to have an audience. She was
+even glad to find Wayne in the drawing-room, though she did wonder to
+herself if the little creature had entirely given up earning his living.
+It was a very different occasion from Pete's last luncheon there; every
+one was as pleasant as possible. As soon as the meal was over, Adelaide
+put her hand on her husband's shoulder.
+
+"You're going to lie down at once, Vin."
+
+He rose obediently, but Wayne interposed. It seemed to him that it would
+be possible to tell his story to Farron.
+
+"Oh, can't Mr. Farron stay a few minutes?" he said. "I want so much to
+speak to you and him together about--"
+
+Adelaide cut him short.
+
+"No, he can't. It's more important that he should get strong than
+anything else is. You can talk to me all you like when I come down.
+Come, Vin."
+
+When they were up-stairs, and she was tucking him up on his sofa, he
+asked gently:
+
+"What did that boy want?"
+
+Adelaide made a little face.
+
+"Nothing of any importance," she said.
+
+Things had indeed changed between them if he would accept such an answer
+as that. She thought his indifference like the studied oblivion of the
+debtor who says, "Don't I owe you something?" and is content with the
+most non-committal reply. He lay back and smiled at her. His expression
+was not easy to read.
+
+She went down-stairs, where conversation had not prospered. Mr. Lanley
+was smoking, with his cigar drooping from a corner of his mouth. He felt
+very unhappy. Mathilde was frightened. Wayne had recast his opening
+sentence a dozen times. He kept saying to himself that he wanted it to be
+perfectly simple, but not infantile, and each phrase he thought of in
+conformity with his one rule sounded like the opening lines of the stage
+child's speech.
+
+In the crisis of Adelaide's being actually back again in the room he
+found himself saying:
+
+"Mrs. Farron, I think you ought to know exactly what has been happening."
+
+"Don't I?" she asked.
+
+"No. You know that I was going to San Francisco the day after
+to-morrow--"
+
+"Oh dear," said Adelaide, regretfully, "is it given up?"
+
+He told her rather slowly the whole story. The most terrible moment was,
+as he had expected, when he explained that they had met, he and Mathilde,
+to apply for their marriage license. Adelaide turned, and looked full at
+her daughter.
+
+"You were going to treat me like that?" Mathilde burst into tears. She
+had long been on the brink of them, and now they came more from nerves
+than from a sense of the justice of her mother's complaint. But the sound
+of them upset Wayne hopelessly. He couldn't go on for a minute, and Mr.
+Lanley rose to his feet.
+
+"Good Lord! good Lord!" he said, "that was dishonorable! Can't you see
+that that is dishonorable, to marry her on the sly when we trusted her to
+go about with you--"
+
+"O Papa, never mind about the dishonorableness," said Adelaide. "The
+point is"--and she looked at Wayne--"that they were building their
+elopement on something that turned out to be a fraud. That doesn't make
+one think very highly of your judgment, Mr. Wayne."
+
+"I made a mistake, Mrs. Farron."
+
+"It was a bad moment to make one. You have worked three years with this
+firm and never suspected anything wrong?"
+
+"Yes, sometimes I have--"
+
+Adelaide's eyebrows went up.
+
+"Oh, you have suspected. You had reason to think the whole thing might be
+dishonest, but you were willing to run away with Mathilde and let her get
+inextricably committed before you found out--"
+
+"That's irresponsible, sir," said Lanley. "I don't suppose you
+understood what you were doing, but it was utterly irresponsible."
+
+"I think," said Adelaide, "that it finally answers the question as to
+whether or not you are too young to be married."
+
+"Mama, I will marry Pete," said Mathilde, trying to make a voice broken
+with sobs sound firm and resolute.
+
+"Mr. Wayne at the moment has no means whatsoever, as I understand it,"
+said Adelaide.
+
+"I don't care whether he has or not," said Mathilde.
+
+Adelaide laughed. The laugh rather shocked Mr. Lanley. He tried to
+explain.
+
+"I feel sorry for you, but you can't imagine how painful it is to us to
+think that Mathilde came so near to being mixed up with a crooked deal
+like that--Mathilde, of all people. You ought to see that for yourself."
+
+"I see it, thank you," said Pete.
+
+"Really, Mr. Wayne, I don't think that's quite the tone to take," put
+in Adelaide.
+
+"I don't think it is," said Wayne.
+
+Mathilde, making one last grasp at self-control, said:
+
+"They wouldn't be so horrid to you, Pete, if they understood--" But the
+muscles of her throat contracted, and she never got any further.
+
+"I suppose I shall be thought a very cruel parent," said Adelaide, almost
+airily, "but this sort of thing can't go on, really, you know."
+
+"No, it really can't," said Mr. Lanley. "We feel you have abused our
+confidence."
+
+"No, I don't reproach Mr. Wayne along those lines," said Adelaide. "He
+owes me nothing. I had not supposed Mathilde would deceive me, but we
+won't discuss that now. It isn't anything against Mr. Wayne to say he has
+made a mistake. Five years from now, I'm sure, he would not put himself,
+or let himself be put, in such an extremely humiliating position. And I
+don't say that if he came back five years from now with some financial
+standing I should be any more opposed to him than to any one else. Only
+in the meantime there can be no engagement." Adelaide looked very
+reasonable. "You must see that."
+
+"You mean I'm not to see him?"
+
+"Of course not."
+
+"I must see him," said Mathilde.
+
+Lanley looked at Wayne.
+
+"This is an opportunity for you to rehabilitate yourself. You ought to be
+man enough to promise you won't see her until you are in a position to
+ask her to be your wife."
+
+"I have asked her that already, you know," returned Wayne with an attempt
+at a smile.
+
+"Pete, you wouldn't desert me?" said Mathilde.
+
+"If Mr. Wayne had any pride, my dear, he would not wish to come to a
+house where he was unwelcome," said her mother.
+
+"I'm afraid I haven't any of that sort of pride at all, Mrs. Farron."
+
+Adelaide made a little gesture, as much as to say, with her traditions,
+she really did not know how to deal with people who hadn't.
+
+"Mathilde,"--Wayne spoke very gently,--"don't you think you could
+stop crying?"
+
+"I'm trying all the time, Pete. You won't go away, no matter what
+they say?"
+
+"Of course not."
+
+"It seems to be a question between what I think best for my daughter as
+opposed to what you think best--for yourself," observed Adelaide.
+
+"Nobody wants to turn you out of the house, you know," said Mr. Lanley in
+a conciliatory tone, "but the engagement is at an end."
+
+"If you do turn him out, I'll go with him," said Mathilde, and she took
+his hand and held it in a tight, moist clasp.
+
+They looked so young and so distressed as they stood there hand in hand
+that Lanley found himself relenting.
+
+"We don't say that your marriage will never be possible," he said. "We
+are asking you to wait--consent to a separation of six months."
+
+"Six months!" wailed Mathilde.
+
+"With your whole life before you?" her grandfather returned wistfully.
+
+"I'm afraid I am asking a little more than that, Papa," said Adelaide. "I
+have never been enthusiastic about this engagement, but while I was
+watching and trying to be cooperative, it seems Mr. Wayne intended to run
+off with my daughter. I know Mathilde is young and easily influenced, but
+I don't think, I don't really think,"--Adelaide made it evident that she
+was being just,--"that any other of all the young men who come to the
+house would have tried to do that, and none of them would have got
+themselves into this difficulty. I mean,"--she looked up at Wayne,--"I
+think almost any of them would have had a little better business judgment
+than you have shown."
+
+"Mama," put in her daughter, "can't you see how honest it was of Pete not
+to go, anyhow?"
+
+Adelaide smiled ironically.
+
+"No; I can't think that an unusually high standard, dear."
+
+This seemed to represent the final outrage to Mathilde. She turned.
+
+"O Pete, wouldn't your mother take me in?" she asked.
+
+And as if to answer the question, Pringle opened the door and announced
+Mrs. Wayne.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+In all the short, but crowded, time since Lanley had first known Mrs.
+Wayne he had never been otherwise than glad to see her, but now his heart
+sank. It seemed to him that an abyss was about to open between them, and
+that all their differences of spirit, stimulating enough while they
+remained in the abstract, were about to be cast into concrete form.
+
+Mathilde and Pete were so glad to see her that they said nothing, but
+looked at her beamingly. Whatever Adelaide's feelings may have been,
+she greeted her guest with a positive courtesy, and she was the only
+one who did.
+
+Mrs. Wayne nodded to her son, smiled more formally at Mr. Lanley, and
+then her eyes falling upon Mathilde, she realized that she had intruded
+on some sort of conference. She had a natural dread of such meetings, at
+which it seemed to her that the only thing which she must not do was the
+only thing that she knew how to do, namely, to speak her mind. So she at
+once decided to withdraw.
+
+"Your man insisted on my coming in, Mrs. Farron," she said. "I came to
+ask about Mr. Farron; but I see you are in the midst of a family
+discussion, and so I won't--"
+
+Everybody separately cried out to her to stay as she began to retreat to
+the door, and no one more firmly than Adelaide, who thought it as
+careless as Mr. Lanley thought it creditable that a mother would be
+willing to go away and leave the discussion of her son's life to others.
+Adelaide saw an opportunity of killing two birds.
+
+"You are just the person for whom I have been longing, Mrs. Wayne," she
+said. "Now you have come, we can settle the whole question."
+
+"And just what is the question?" asked Mrs. Wayne. She sat down,
+looking distressed and rather guilty. She knew they were going to ask
+her what she knew about all the things that had been going on, and a
+hasty examination of her consciousness showed her that she knew
+everything, though she had avoided Pete's full confidence. She knew
+simply by knowing that any two young people who loved each other would
+rather marry than separate for a year. But she was aware that this
+deduction, so inevitable to her, was exactly the one which would be
+denied by the others. So she sat, with a nervously pleasant smile on
+her usually untroubled face, and waited for Adelaide to speak. She did
+not have long to wait.
+
+"You did not know, I am sure, Mrs. Wayne, that your son intended to run
+away with my daughter?"
+
+All four of them stared at her, making her feel more and more guilty; and
+at last Lanley, unable to bear it, asked:
+
+"Did you know that, Mrs. Wayne?"
+
+"Oh, dear!" said Mrs. Wayne. "Yes. I knew it was possible; so did you.
+Pete didn't tell me about it, though."
+
+"But I did tell Mrs. Farron," said Pete.
+
+Adelaide protested at once.
+
+"You told me?" Then she remembered that a cloud had obscured the end of
+their last interview, but she did not withdraw her protest.
+
+"You know, Mrs. Farron, you have a bad habit of not listening to what is
+said to you," Wayne answered firmly.
+
+This sort of impersonal criticism was to Adelaide the greatest
+impertinence, and she showed her annoyance.
+
+"In spite of the disabilities of age, Mr. Wayne," she said, "I find I
+usually can get a simple idea if clearly presented."
+
+"Why, how absurd that is, Wayne!" put in Mr. Lanley. "You don't mean to
+say that you told Mrs. Farron you were going to elope with her daughter,
+and she didn't take in what you said?"
+
+"And yet that is just what took place."
+
+Adelaide glanced at her father, as much as to say, "You see what kind of
+young man it is," and then went on:
+
+"One fact at least I have learned only this minute--that is that the
+finances for this romantic trip were to be furnished by a dishonorable
+firm from which your son has been dismissed; or, no, resigned, isn't it?"
+
+The human interest attached to losing a job brought mother and son
+together on the instant.
+
+"O Pete, you've left the firm!"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"O my poor boy!"
+
+He made a gesture, indicating that this was not the time to discuss the
+economic situation, and Adelaide went smoothly on:
+
+"And now, Mrs. Wayne, the point is this. I am considered harsh because I
+insist that a young man without an income who has just come near to
+running off with my child on money that was almost a bribe is not a
+person in whom I have unlimited confidence. I ask--it seems a tolerably
+mild request--that they do not see each other for six months."
+
+"I cannot agree to that," said Wayne decidedly.
+
+"Really, Mr. Wayne, do you feel yourself in a position to agree or
+disagree? We have never consented to your engagement. We have never
+thought the marriage a suitable one, have we, Papa?"
+
+"No," said Mr. Lanley in a tone strangely dead.
+
+"Why is it not suitable?" asked Mrs. Wayne, as if she really hoped that
+an agreement might be reached by rational discussion.
+
+"Why?" said Adelaide, and smiled. "Dear Mrs. Wayne, these things are
+rather difficult to explain. Wouldn't it be easier for all of us if you
+would just accept the statement that we think so without trying to decide
+whether we are right or wrong?"
+
+"I'm afraid it must be discussed," answered Mrs. Wayne.
+
+Adelaide leaned back, still with her faint smile, as if defying, though
+very politely, any one to discuss it with _her_.
+
+It was inevitable that Mrs. Wayne should turn to Mr. Lanley.
+
+"You, too, think it unsuitable?"
+
+He bowed gravely.
+
+"You dislike my son?"
+
+"Quite the contrary."
+
+"Then you must be able to tell me the reason."
+
+"I will try," he said. He felt like a soldier called upon to defend a
+lost cause. It was his cause, he couldn't desert it. His daughter and
+his granddaughter needed his protection; but he knew he was giving up
+something that he valued more than his life as he began to speak. "We
+feel the difference in background," he said, "of early traditions, of
+judging life from the same point of view. Such differences can be
+overcome by time and money--" He stopped, for she was looking at him with
+the same wondering interest, devoid of anger, with which he had seen her
+study Wilsey. "I express myself badly," he murmured.
+
+Mrs. Wayne rose to her feet.
+
+"The trouble isn't with your expression," she said.
+
+"You mean that what I am trying to express is wrong?"
+
+"It seems so to me."
+
+"What is wrong about it?"
+
+She seemed to think over the possibilities for an instant, and then she
+shook her head.
+
+"I don't think I could make you understand," she answered. She said it
+very gently, but it was cruel, and he turned white under the pain,
+suffering all the more that she was so entirely without malice. She
+turned to her son. "I'm going, Pete. Don't you think you might as well
+come, too?"
+
+Mathilde sprang up and caught Mrs. Wayne's hand.
+
+"Oh, don't go!" she cried. "Don't take him away! You know they are trying
+to separate us. Oh, Mrs. Wayne, won't you take me in? Can't I stay with
+you while we are waiting?"
+
+At this every one focused their eyes on Mrs. Wayne. Pete felt sorry for
+his mother, knowing how she hated to make a sudden decision, knowing how
+she hated to do anything disagreeable to those about her; but he never
+for an instant doubted what her decision would be. Therefore he could
+hardly believe his eyes when he saw her shaking her head.
+
+"I couldn't do that, my dear."
+
+"Mother!"
+
+"Of course you couldn't," said Mr. Lanley, blowing his nose immediately
+after under the tremendous emotion of finding that she was not an enemy,
+after all. Adelaide smiled to herself. She was thinking, "You could and
+would, if I hadn't put in that sting about his failures."
+
+"Why can't you, Mother?" asked Pete.
+
+"We'll talk that over at home."
+
+"My dear boy," said Mr. Lanley, kindly, "no one over thirty would have
+to ask why."
+
+"No parent likes to assist at the kidnapping of another parent's child,"
+said Adelaide.
+
+"Good Heavens! my mother has kidnapped so many children in her day!"
+
+"From the wrong sort of home, I suppose," said Lanley, in explanation, to
+no one, perhaps, so much as to himself.
+
+"Am I to infer that she thinks mine the right sort? How delightful!"
+said Adelaide.
+
+"Mrs. Wayne, is it because I'm richer than Pete that you won't take me
+in?" asked Mathilde, visions of bestowing her wealth in charity flitting
+across her mind.
+
+The other nodded. Wayne stared.
+
+"Mother," he said, "you don't mean to say you are letting yourself be
+influenced by a taunt like that of Mrs. Farron's, which she didn't even
+believe herself?"
+
+Mrs. Wayne was shocked.
+
+"Oh, no; not that, Pete. It isn't that at all. But when a girl has been
+brought up--"
+
+Wayne saw it all in an instant.
+
+"Oh, yes, I see. We'll talk of that later."
+
+But Adelaide had seen, too.
+
+"No; do go on, Mrs. Wayne. You don't approve of the way my daughter has
+been brought up."
+
+"I don't think she has been brought up to be a poor man's wife."
+
+"No. I own I did not have that particular destiny in mind."
+
+"And when I heard you assuming just now that every one was always
+concerned about money, and when I realized that the girl must have been
+brought up in that atmosphere and belief--"
+
+"I see. You thought she was not quite the right wife for your son?"
+
+"But I would try so hard," said Mathilde. "I would learn; I--"
+
+"Mathilde," interrupted her mother, "when a lady tells you you are not
+good enough for her son, you must not protest."
+
+"Come, come, Adelaide, there is no use in being disagreeable," said
+Mr. Lanley.
+
+"Disagreeable!" returned his daughter. "Mrs. Wayne and I are entirely
+agreed. She thinks her son too good for my daughter, and I think my
+daughter too good for her son. Really, there seems nothing more to be
+said. Good-by, Mr. Wayne." She held out her long, white hand to him. Mrs.
+Wayne was trying to make her position clearer to Mathilde, but Pete
+thought this an undesirable moment for such an attempt.
+
+Partly as an assertion of his rights, partly because she looked so young
+and helpless, he stopped and kissed her.
+
+"I'll come and see you about half-past ten tomorrow morning," he said
+very clearly, so that every one could hear. Adelaide looked blank; she
+was thinking that on Pringle she could absolutely depend. Wayne saw his
+mother and Lanley bow to each other, and the next moment he had contrived
+to get her out of the house.
+
+Mathilde rushed away to her own room, and Adelaide and her father were
+left alone. She turned to him with one of her rare caresses.
+
+"Dear Papa," she said, "what a comfort you are to me! What should I do
+without you? You'll never desert me, will you?" And she put her head on
+his shoulder. He patted her with an absent-minded rhythm, and then he
+said, as if he were answering some secret train of thought:
+
+"I don't see what else I could have done."
+
+"You couldn't have done anything else," replied his daughter, still
+nestling against him. "But Mrs. Baxter had frightened me with her account
+of your sentimental admiration for Mrs. Wayne, and I thought you might
+want to make yourself agreeable to her at the expense of my poor child."
+
+She felt his shoulder heave with a longer breath.
+
+"I can't imagine putting anything before Mathilde's happiness," he said,
+and after a pause he added: "I really must go home. Mrs. Baxter will
+think me a neglectful host."
+
+"Don't you want to bring her to dine here to-night? I'll try and get
+some one to meet her. Let me see. She thinks Mr. Wilsey--"
+
+"Oh, I can't stand Wilsey," answered her father, crossly.
+
+"Well, I'll think of some one to sacrifice on the altar of your
+friendship. I certainly don't want to dine alone with Mathilde. And, by
+the way, Papa, I haven't mentioned any of this to Vincent."
+
+He thought it was admirable of her to bear her anxieties alone so as to
+spare her sick husband.
+
+"Poor girl!" he said. "You've had a tot of trouble lately."
+
+In the meantime Wayne and his mother walked slowly home.
+
+"I suppose you're furious at me, Pete," she said.
+
+"Not a bit," he answered. "For a moment, when I saw what you were going
+to say, I was terrified. But no amount of tact would have made Mrs.
+Farron feel differently, and I think they might as well know what we
+really think and feel. I was only sorry if it hurt Mathilde."
+
+"Oh dear, it's so hard to be truthful!" exclaimed his mother. He
+laughed, for he wished she sometimes found it harder; and she went on:
+
+"Poor little Mathilde! You know I wouldn't hurt her if I could help it.
+It's not her fault. But what a terrible system it is, and how money does
+blind people! They can't see you at all as you are, and yet if you had
+fifty thousand dollars a year, they'd be more aware of your good points
+than I am. They can't see that you have resolution and charm and a sense
+of honor. They don't see the person, they just see the lack of income."
+
+Pete smiled.
+
+"A person is all Mrs. Farron says she asks for her daughter."
+
+"She does not know a person when she sees one."
+
+"She knew one when she married Farron."
+
+Mrs. Wayne sniffed.
+
+"Perhaps he married her," she replied.
+
+Her son thought this likely, but he did not answer, for she had given him
+an idea--to see Farron. Farron would at least understand the situation.
+His mother approved of the suggestion.
+
+"Of course he's not Mathilde's father."
+
+"He's not a snob."
+
+They had reached the house, and Pete was fishing in his pocket for his
+keys.
+
+"Do you think Mr. Lanley is a snob?" he asked.
+
+As usual Mrs. Wayne evaded the direct answer.
+
+"I got an unfavorable impression of him this afternoon."
+
+"For failing to see that I was a king among men?"
+
+"For backing up every stupid thing his daughter said."
+
+"Loyalty is a fine quality."
+
+"Justice is better," answered his mother.
+
+"Oh, well, he's old," said Wayne, dismissing the whole subject.
+
+They walked up their four flights in silence, and then Wayne remembered
+to ask something that had been in his mind several times.
+
+"By the way, Mother, how did you happen to come to the Farrons at all?"
+
+She laughed rather self-consciously.
+
+"I hoped perhaps Mr. Farron might be well enough to see me a moment
+about Marty. The truth is, Pete, Mr. Farron is the real person in that
+whole family."
+
+That evening he wrote Farron a note, asking him to see him the next
+morning at half-past ten about "this trouble of which, of course,
+Mrs. Farron has told you." He added a request that he would tell
+Pringle of his intention in case he could give the interview, because
+Mrs. Farron had been quite frank in saying that she would give orders
+not to let him in.
+
+Farron received this note with his breakfast. Adelaide was not there. He
+had had no hint from her of any crisis. He had not come down to dinner
+the evening before to meet Mrs. Baxter and the useful people asked to
+entertain her, but he had seen Mathilde's tear-stained face, and in a few
+minutes with his father-in-law had encountered one or two evident
+evasions. Only Adelaide had been unfathomable.
+
+After he had read the letter and thought over the situation, he sent for
+Pringle, and gave orders that when Mr. Wayne came he would see him.
+
+Pringle did not exactly make an objection, but stated a fact when he
+replied that Mrs. Farron had given orders that Mr. Wayne was not to be
+allowed to see Miss Severance.
+
+"Exactly," said Farron. "Show him here." Here was his own study.
+
+As it happened, Adelaide was sitting with him, making very good invalid's
+talk, when Pringle announced, "Mr. Wayne."
+
+"Pringle, I told you--" Adelaide began, but her husband cut her short.
+
+"He has an appointment with me, Adelaide."
+
+"You don't understand, Vin. You mustn't see him."
+
+Wayne was by this time in the room.
+
+"But I wish to see him, my dear Adelaide, and," Farron added, "I wish to
+see him alone."
+
+"No," she answered, with a good deal of excitement; "that you cannot.
+This is my affair, Vincent--the affair of my child."
+
+He looked at her for a second, and then opening the door into his
+bedroom, he said to Wayne:
+
+"Will you come in here?" The door was closed behind the two men.
+
+Wayne was not a coward, although he had dreaded his interview with
+Adelaide; it was his very respect for Farron that kept him from feeling
+even nervous.
+
+"Perhaps I ought not to have asked you to see me," he began.
+
+"I'm very glad to see you," answered Farron. "Sit down, and tell me the
+story as you see it from the beginning."
+
+It was a comfort to tell the story at last to an expert. Wayne, who had
+been trying for twenty-four hours to explain what underwriting meant,
+what were the responsibilities of brokers in such matters, what was the
+function of such a report as his, felt as if he had suddenly groped his
+way out of a fog as he talked, with hardly an interruption but a nod or a
+lightening eye from Farron. He spoke of Benson. "I know the man," said
+Farron; of Honaton, "He was in my office once." Wayne told how Mathilde,
+and then he himself, had tried to inform Mrs. Farron of the definiteness
+of their plans to be married.
+
+"How long has this been going on?" Farron asked.
+
+"At least ten days."
+
+Farron nodded. Then Wayne told of the discovery of the proof at the
+printer's and his hurried meeting in the park to tell Mathilde. Here
+Farron stopped him suddenly.
+
+"What was it kept you from going through with it just the same?"
+
+"You're the first person who has asked me that," answered Pete.
+
+"Perhaps you did not even think of such a thing?"
+
+"No one could help thinking of it who saw her there--"
+
+"And you didn't do it?"
+
+"It wasn't consideration for her family that held me back."
+
+"What was it?"
+
+Pete found a moral scruple was a difficult motive to avow.
+
+"It was Mathilde herself. That would not have been treating her as
+an equal."
+
+"You intend always to treat her as an equal?"
+
+Wayne was ashamed to find how difficult it was to answer truthfully. The
+tone of the question gave him no clue to the speaker's own thoughts.
+
+"Yes, I do," he said; and then blurted out hastily, "Don't you believe in
+treating a woman as an equal?"
+
+"I believe in treating her exactly as she wants to be treated."
+
+"But every one wants to be treated as an equal, if they're any good."
+Farron smiled, showing those blue-white teeth for an instant, and Wayne,
+feeling he was not quite doing himself justice, added, "I call that just
+ordinary respect, you know, and I could not love any one I didn't
+respect. Could you?"
+
+The question was, or Farron chose to consider it, a purely rhetorical
+one.
+
+"I suppose," he observed, "that they are to be counted the most fortunate
+who love and respect at the same time."
+
+"Of course," said Wayne.
+
+Farron nodded.
+
+"And yet perhaps they miss a good deal."
+
+"I don't know _what_ they miss," answered Wayne, to whom the sentiment
+was as shocking as anything not understood can be.
+
+"No; I'm sure you don't," answered his future stepfather-in-law. "Go on
+with your story."
+
+Wayne went on, but not as rapidly as he had expected. Farron kept him a
+long time on the interview of the afternoon before, and particularly on
+Mrs. Farron's part, just the point Wayne did not want to discuss for fear
+of betraying the bitterness he felt toward her. But again and again
+Farron made him quote her words wherever he could remember them; and
+then, as if this had not been clear enough, he asked:
+
+"You think my wife has definitely made up her mind against the marriage?"
+
+"Irrevocably."
+
+"Irrevocably?" Farron questioned more as if it were the sound of the word
+than the meaning that he was doubting.
+
+"Ah, you've been rather out of it lately, sir," said Wayne. "You haven't
+followed, perhaps, all that's been going on."
+
+"Perhaps not."
+
+Wayne felt he must be candid.
+
+"If it is your idea that your wife's opposition could be changed, I'm
+afraid I must tell you, Mr. Farron--" He paused, meeting a quick, sudden
+look; then Farron turned his head, and stared, with folded arms, out of
+the window. Wayne had plenty of time to wonder what he was going to say.
+What he did say was surprising.
+
+"I think you are an honest man, and I should be glad to have you working
+for me. I could make you one of my secretaries, with a salary of six
+thousand dollars."
+
+In the shock Pete heard himself saying the first thing that came
+into his head:
+
+"That's a large salary, sir."
+
+"Some people would say large enough to marry on."
+
+Wayne drew back.
+
+"Don't you think you ought to consult Mrs. Farron before you offer it to
+me?" he asked hesitatingly.
+
+"Don't carry honesty too far. No, I don't consult my wife about my
+office appointments."
+
+"It isn't honesty; but I couldn't stand having you change your
+mind when--"
+
+"When my wife tells me to? I promise you not to do that."
+
+Wayne found that the interview was over, although he had not been able to
+express his gratitude.
+
+"I know what you are feeling," said Farron. "Good-by."
+
+"I can't understand why you are doing it, Mr. Farron; but--"
+
+"It needn't matter to you. Good-by."
+
+With a sensation that in another instant he might be out of the house,
+Wayne metaphorically caught at the door-post.
+
+"I must see Mathilde before I go," he said.
+
+Farron shook his head.
+
+"No, not to-day."
+
+"She's terribly afraid I am going to be moved by insults to desert her,"
+Wayne urged.
+
+"I'll see she understands. I'll send for you in a day or two; then it
+will be all right." They shook hands. He was glad Farron showed him out
+through the corridor and not through the study, where, he knew, Mrs.
+Farron was still waiting like a fine, sleek cat at a rat-hole.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+During this interview Adelaide sat in her husband's study and waited. She
+looked back upon that other period of suspense--the hour when she had
+waited at the hospital during his operation--as a time of comparative
+peace. She had been able then, she remembered, to sit still, to pursue,
+if not a train of thought, at least a set of connected images; but now
+her whole spirit seemed to be seething with a sort of poison that made
+her muscles jerk and start and her mind dart and faint. Then she had
+foreseen loss through the fate common to humanity; now she foresaw it
+through the action of her own tyrannical contempt for anything that
+seemed to her weak.
+
+She had never rebelled against coercion from Vincent. She had even loved
+it, but she had loved it when he had seemed to her a superior being;
+coercion from one who only yesterday had been under the dominion of
+nerves and nurses was intolerable to her. She was at heart a courtier,
+would do menial service to a king, and refuse common civility to an
+inferior. She knew how St. Christopher had felt at seeing his satanic
+captain tremble at the sign of the cross; and though, unlike the saint,
+she had no intention of setting out to discover the stronger lord, she
+knew that he might now any day appear.
+
+From any one not an acknowledged superior that shut door was an insult to
+be avenged, and she sat and waited for the moment to arrive when she
+would most adequately avenge it. There was still something terrifying in
+the idea of going out to do battle with Vincent. Hitherto in their
+quarrels he had always been the aggressor, had always startled her out of
+an innocent calm by an accusation or complaint. But this, as she said to
+herself, was not a quarrel, but a readjustment, of which probably he was
+still unaware. She hoped he was. She hoped he would come in with his
+accustomed manner and say civilly, "Forgive me for shutting the door; but
+my reason was--"
+
+And she would answer, "Really, I don't think we need trouble about your
+reasons, Vincent." She knew just the tone she would use, just the
+expression of a smile suppressed. Then his quick eyes would fasten
+themselves on her face, and perhaps at the first glance would read the
+story of his defeat. She knew her own glance would not waver.
+
+At the end of half an hour she heard the low tones of conversation change
+to the brisk notes of leave-taking. Her heart began to beat with fear,
+but not the kind of fear that makes people run away; rather the kind that
+makes them abdicate all reason and fan their emotions into a sort of
+inspiring flame.
+
+She heard the door open into the corridor, but even then Vincent did not
+immediately come. Miss Gregory had been waiting to say good-by to him. As
+a case he was finished. Adelaide heard her clear voice say gaily:
+
+"Well, I'm off, Mr. Vincent."
+
+They went back into the room and shut the door. Adelaide clenched her
+hands; these delays were hard to bear.
+
+It was not a long delay, though in that next room a very human bond
+was about to be broken. Possibly if Vincent had done exactly what
+his impulses prompted, he would have taken Miss Gregory in his arms
+and kissed her. But instead he said quietly, for his manner had not
+much range:
+
+"I shall miss you."
+
+"It's time I went."
+
+"To some case more interestingly dangerous?"
+
+"Your case was dangerous enough for me," said the girl; and then for fear
+he might miss her meaning, "I never met any one like you, Mr. Farron."
+
+"I've never been taken care of as you took care of me."
+
+"I wish"--she looked straight up at him--"I could take care of you
+altogether."
+
+"That," he answered, "would end in my taking care of you."
+
+"And your hands are pretty full as it is?"
+
+He nodded, and she went away without even shaking hands. She omitted her
+farewells to any other member of the family except Pringle, who, Farron
+heard, was congratulating her on her consideration for servants as he put
+her into her taxi.
+
+Then he opened the door of his study, went to the chair he had risen
+from, and took up the paper at the paragraph at which he had dropped it.
+Adelaide's eyes followed him like search-lights.
+
+"May I ask," she said with her edged voice, "if you have been disposing
+of my child's future in there without consulting me?"
+
+If their places had been reversed, Adelaide would have raised her
+eyebrows and repeated, "Your child's future?" but Farron was more direct.
+
+"I have been engaging Wayne as a secretary," he said, and, turning to the
+financial page, glanced down the quotations.
+
+"Then you must dismiss him again."
+
+"He will be a useful man to me," said Farron, as if she had not spoken.
+"I have needed some one whom I could depend on--"
+
+"Vincent, it is absurd for you to pretend you don't know he wanted to
+marry Mathilde."
+
+He did not raise his eyes.
+
+"Yes," he said; "I remember you and I had some talk about it before my
+operation."
+
+"Since then circumstances have arisen of which you know nothing--things
+I did not tell you."
+
+"Do you think that was wise?"
+
+With a sense that a rapid and resistless current was carrying them both
+to destruction she saw for the first time that he was as angry as she.
+
+"I do not like your tone," she said.
+
+"What's the matter with it?"
+
+"It isn't polite; it isn't friendly."
+
+"Why should it be?"
+
+"Why? What a question! Love--"
+
+"I doubt if it is any longer a question of love between you and me."
+
+These words, which so exactly embodied her own idea, came to her as a
+shock, a brutal blow from him.
+
+"Vincent!" she cried protestingly.
+
+"I don't know what it is that has your attention now, what private
+anxieties that I am not privileged to share--"
+
+"You have been ill."
+
+"But not imbecile. Do you suppose I've missed one tone of your voice, or
+haven't understood what has been going on in your mind? Have you lived
+with me five years and think me a forgiving man--"
+
+"May I ask what you have to forgive?"
+
+"Do you suppose a pat to my pillow or an occasional kind word takes the
+place to me of what our relation used to be?"
+
+"You speak as if our relation was over."
+
+"Have you been imagining I was going to come whining to you for a return
+of your love and respect? What nonsense! Love makes love, and
+indifference makes indifference."
+
+"You expect me to say I am indifferent to you?"
+
+"I care very little what you say. I judge your conduct."
+
+She had an unerring instinct for what would wound him. If she had
+answered with conviction, "Yes, I am indifferent to you," there would
+have been enough temper and exaggeration in it for him to discount the
+whole statement. But to say, "No, I still love you, Vincent," in a tone
+that conceded the very utmost that she could,--namely, that she still
+loved him for the old, rather pitiful association,--that would be to
+inflict the most painful wound possible. And so that was what she said.
+She was prepared to have him take it up and cry: "You still love me? Do
+you mean as you love your Aunt Alberta?" and she, still trying to be
+just, would answer: "Oh, more than Aunt Alberta. Only, of course--"
+
+The trouble was he did not make the right answer. When she said, "No, I
+still love you, Vincent," he answered:
+
+"I cannot say the same."
+
+It was one of those replies that change the face of the world. It drove
+every other idea out of her head. She stared at him for an instant.
+
+"Nobody," she answered, "need tell me such a thing as that twice." It
+was a fine phrase to cover a retreat; she left him and went to her own
+room. It no more occurred to her to ask whether he meant what he said
+than if she had been struck in the head she would have inquired if the
+blow was real.
+
+She did not come down to lunch. Vincent and Mathilde ate alone. Mathilde,
+as she told Pete, had begun to understand her stepfather, but she had not
+progressed so far as to see in his silence anything but an
+unapproachable sternness. It never crossed her mind that this middle-aged
+man, who seemed to control his life so completely, was suffering far more
+than she, and she was suffering a good deal.
+
+Pete had promised to come that morning, and she hadn't seen him yet. She
+supposed he had come, and that, though she had been on the lookout for
+him, she had missed him. She felt as if they were never going to see each
+other again. When she found she was to be alone at luncheon with Farron,
+she thought of appealing to him, but was restrained by two
+considerations. She was a kind person, and her mother had repeatedly
+impressed upon her how badly at present Mr. Farron supported any anxiety.
+More important than this, however, was her belief that he would never
+work at cross-purposes with his wife. What were she and Pete to do? she
+thought. Mrs. Wayne would not take her in, her mother would not let Pete
+come to the house, and they had no money.
+
+Both cups of soup left the table almost untasted.
+
+"I'm sorry Mama has one of her headaches," said Mathilde.
+
+"Yes," said Farron. "You'd better take some of that chicken, Mathilde.
+It's very good."
+
+She did not notice that the piece he had taken on his own plate was
+untouched.
+
+"I'm not hungry," she answered.
+
+"Anything wrong?"
+
+She could not lie, and so she looked at him and smiled and answered:
+
+"Nothing, as Mama would say, to trouble an invalid with."
+
+She did not have a great success. In fact, his brows showed a slight
+disposition to contract, and after a moment of silence he said:
+
+"Does your mother say that?"
+
+"She's always trying to protect you nowadays, Mr. Farron."
+
+"I saw your friend Pete Wayne this morning."
+
+"You saw--" Surprise, excitement, alarm flooded her face with crimson.
+"Oh, why did _you_ see him?"
+
+"I saw him by appointment. He asked me to tell you--only, I'm afraid,
+other things put it out of my head--that he has accepted a job I
+offered him."
+
+"O Mr. Farron, what kind of job?"
+
+"Well, the kind of job that would enable two self-denying young people to
+marry, I think."
+
+Not knowing how clearly all that she felt was written on her face
+Mathilde tried to put it all into words.
+
+"How wonderful! how kind! But my mother--"
+
+"I will arrange it with your mother."
+
+"Have you known all along? Oh, why did you do this wonderful thing?"
+
+"Because--perhaps you won't agree with me--I have taken rather a fancy to
+this young man. And I had other reasons."
+
+Mathilde took her stepfather's hand as it lay upon the table.
+
+"I've only just begun to understand you, Mr. Farron. To
+understand, I mean, what Mama means when she says you are the
+strongest, wisest person--"
+
+He pretended to smile.
+
+"When did your mother say that?"
+
+"Oh, ages ago." She stopped, aware of a faint motion to withdraw on the
+part of the hand she held. "I suppose you want to go to her."
+
+"No. The sort of headache she has is better left alone, I think, though
+you might stop as you go up."
+
+"I will. When do you think I can see Pete?"
+
+"I'd wait a day or two; but you might telephone him at once, if you like,
+and say--or do you know what to say?"
+
+She laughed.
+
+"It used to frighten me when you made fun of me like that; but now--It
+must be simply delirious to be able to make people as happy as you've
+just made us."
+
+He smiled at her word.
+
+"Other people's happiness is not exactly delirious," he said.
+
+She was moving in the direction of the nearest telephone, but she said
+over her shoulder:
+
+"Oh, well, I think you did pretty well for yourself when you chose Mama."
+
+She left him sipping his black coffee; he took every drop of that.
+
+When he had finished he did not go back to his study, but to the
+drawing-room, where he sat down in a large chair by the fire. He lit a
+cigar. It was a quiet hour in the house, and he might have been supposed
+to be a man entirely at peace.
+
+Mr. Lanley, coming in about an hour later, certainly imagined he was
+rousing an invalid from a refreshing rest. He tried to retreat, but found
+Vincent's black eyes were on him.
+
+"I'm sorry to disturb you," he said. "Just wanted to see Adelaide."
+
+"Adelaide has a headache."
+
+Life was taking so many wrong turnings that Mr. Lanley had grown
+apprehensive. He suddenly remembered how many headaches Adelaide had had
+just before he knew of her troubles with Severance.
+
+"A headache?" he said nervously.
+
+"Nothing serious." Vincent looked more closely at his father-in-law. "You
+yourself don't look just the thing, sir."
+
+Mr. Lanley sat down more limply than was his custom.
+
+"I'm getting to an age," he said, "when I can't stand scenes. We had
+something of a scene here yesterday afternoon. God bless my soul! though,
+I believe Adelaide told me not to mention it to you."
+
+"Adelaide is very considerate," replied her husband. His extreme
+susceptibility to sorrow made Mr. Lanley notice a tone which ordinarily
+would have escaped him, and he looked up so sharply that Farron was
+forced to add quickly: "But you haven't made a break. I know about what
+took place."
+
+The egotism of suffering, the distorted vision of a sleepless night, made
+Mr. Lanley blurt out suddenly:
+
+"I want to ask you, Vincent, do you think I could have done anything
+different?"
+
+Now, none of the accounts which Farron had received had made any mention
+of Mr. Lanley's part in the proceedings at all, and so he paused a
+moment, and in that pause Mr. Lanley went on:
+
+"It's a difficult position--before a boy's mother. There isn't anything
+against him, of course. One's reasons for not wanting the marriage do
+sound a little snobbish when one says them--right out. In fact, I suppose
+they are snobbish. Do you find it hard to get away from early prejudices,
+Vincent? I do. I think Adelaide is quite right; and yet the boy is a nice
+boy. What do you think of him?"
+
+"I have taken him into my office."
+
+Mr. Lanley was startled by a courage so far beyond his own.
+
+"But," he asked, "did you consult Adelaide?"
+
+Farron shook his head.
+
+"But, Vincent, was that quite loyal?"
+
+A change in Farron's expression made Mr. Lanley turn his head, and he saw
+that Adelaide had come into the room. Her appearance bore out the legend
+of her headache: she looked like a garden after an early frost. But
+perhaps the most terrifying thing about her aspect was her complete
+indifference to it. A recollection suddenly came to Mr. Lanley of a
+railway accident that he and Adelaide had been in. He had seen her
+stepping toward him through the debris, buttoning her gloves. She was far
+beyond such considerations now.
+
+She had come to put her very life to the test. There was one hope, there
+was one way in which Vincent could rehabilitate himself, and that was by
+showing himself victor in the hardest of all struggles, the personal
+struggle with her. That would be hard, because she would make it so, if
+she perished in the attempt.
+
+The crisis came in the first meeting of their eyes. If his glance had
+said: "My poor dear, you're tired. Rest. All will be well," his cause
+would have been lost. But his glance said nothing, only studied her
+coolly, and she began to speak.
+
+"Oh, Papa, Vincent does not consider such minor points as loyalty to me."
+Her voice and manner left Mr. Lanley in no doubt that if he stayed an
+instant he would witness a domestic quarrel. The idea shocked him
+unspeakably. That these two reserved and dignified people should quarrel
+at all was bad enough, but that they should have reached a point where
+they were indifferent to the presence of a third person was terrible. He
+got himself out of the room without ceremony, but not before he saw
+Vincent rise and heard the first words of his sentence:
+
+"And what right have you to speak of loyalty?" Here, fortunately,
+Lanley shut the door behind him, for Vincent's next words would have
+shocked him still more: "A prostitute would have stuck better to a man
+when he was ill."
+
+But Adelaide was now in good fighting trim. She laughed out loud.
+
+"Really, Vincent," she said, "your language! You must make your complaint
+against me a little more definite."
+
+"Not much; and give you a chance to get up a little rational explanation.
+Besides, we neither of us need explanations. We know what has been
+happening."
+
+"You mean you really doubt my feeling for you? No, Vincent, I still
+love you," and her voice had a flute-like quality which, though it was
+without a trace of conviction, very few people who had ever heard it
+had resisted.
+
+"I am aware of that," said Vincent quietly.
+
+She looked beautifully dazed.
+
+"Yet this morning you spoke--as if--"
+
+"But what is love such as yours worth? A man must be on the crest of the
+wave to keep it; otherwise it changes automatically into contempt. I
+don't care about it, Adelaide. I can't use it in a life like mine."
+
+She looked at him, and a dreamlike state began to come over her. She
+simply couldn't believe in the state of mind of those sick-room days; she
+could never really, she thought, have been less passionately admiring
+than she was at that minute, yet the half-recollection confused her and
+kept her silent.
+
+"Perhaps it's vanity on my part," he said, "but contempt like yours is
+something I could never forgive."
+
+"You would forgive me anything if you loved me." Her tone was noble
+and sincere.
+
+"Perhaps."
+
+"You mean you don't?"
+
+"Adelaide, there are times when a person chooses between loving and
+being loved."
+
+The sentence made her feel sick with fear, but she asked:
+
+"Tell me just what you mean."
+
+"Perhaps I could keep on loving you if I shut my eyes to the kind of
+person you are; but if I did that, I could not hold you an instant."
+
+She stared at him as fascinated as a bird by a snake. This, it seemed to
+her, was the truth, the final summing up of their relation. She had lost
+him, and yet she was eternally his.
+
+As she looked at him she became aware that he was growing slowly pale. He
+was standing, and he put his hand out to the mantelpiece to steady
+himself. She thought he was going to faint.
+
+"Vincent," she said, "let me help you to the sofa."
+
+She wanted now to see him falter, to feel his hand on her shoulder,
+anything for a closer touch with him. For half a minute, perhaps, they
+remained motionless, and then the color began to come back into his face.
+
+He smiled bitterly.
+
+"They tell me you are such a good sick nurse, Mrs. Farron," he said, "so
+considerate to the weak. But I don't need your help, thank you."
+
+She covered her face with her hands. He seemed to her stronger and more
+cruel than anything she had imagined. In a minute he left her alone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+Farron cared, perhaps, no more for appearances than Adelaide did, but
+his habitual manner was much better adapted to concealment. In him the
+fluctuations between the deepest depression and the highest elation were
+accompanied by such slight variations of look and tone that they escaped
+almost every one but Adelaide herself. He came down to dinner that
+evening, and while Adelaide sat in silence, with her elbows on the table
+and her long fingers clasping and unclasping themselves in a sort of
+rhythmic desperation, conversation went on pleasantly enough between
+Mathilde and Vincent. This was facilitated by the fact that Mathilde had
+now transferred to Vincent the flattering affection which she used to
+give to her grandfather. She agreed with, wondered at, and drank in
+every word.
+
+Naturally, Mathilde attributed her mother's distress to the crisis in her
+own love-affairs. She had had no word with her as to Wayne's new
+position, and it came to her in a flash that it would be daring, but
+wise, to take the matter up in the presence of her stepfather. So, as
+soon as they were in the drawing-room, and Farron had opened the evening
+paper, and his wife, with a wild decision, had opened a book, Mathilde
+ruthlessly interrupted them both, recalling them from what appeared to be
+the depths of absorptions in their respective pages by saying:
+
+"Mr. Farron, did you tell Mama what you had done about Pete?"
+
+Farron raised his eyes and said:
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And what did she say?"
+
+"What is there for me to say?" answered Adelaide in the terrible, crisp
+voice that Mathilde hated.
+
+There was a pause. To Mathilde it seemed extraordinary the way older
+people sometimes stalled and shifted about perfectly obvious issues; but,
+wishing to be patient, she explained:
+
+"Don't you see it makes some difference in our situation?"
+
+"The greatest, I should think," said Adelaide, and just hinted that she
+might go back to her book at any instant.
+
+"But don't you think--" Mathilde began again, when Farron interrupted her
+almost sharply.
+
+"Mathilde," he said, "there's a well-known business axiom, not to try to
+get things on paper too early."
+
+She bent her head a trifle on one side in the way a puppy will when an
+unusual strain is being put upon its faculties. It seemed to her curious,
+but she saw she was being advised to drop the subject. Suddenly Adelaide
+sprang to her feet and said she was going to bed.
+
+"I hope your headache will be better, Mama," Mathilde hazarded; but
+Adelaide went without answering. Mathilde looked at Mr. Farron.
+
+"You haven't learned to wait," he said.
+
+"It's so hard to wait when you are on bad terms with people you love!"
+
+She was surprised that he smiled--a smile that conveyed more pain than
+amusement.
+
+"It is hard," he said.
+
+This closed the evening. The next morning Vincent went down-town. He
+went about half-past ten. Adelaide, breakfasting in her room and dressing
+at her leisure, did not appear until after eleven, and then discovered
+for the first time that her husband had gone. She was angry at Mathilde,
+who had breakfasted with him, at Pringle, for not telling her what was
+happening.
+
+"You shouldn't have let him go, Mathilde," she said. "You are old enough
+to have some judgment in such matters. He is not strong enough. He almost
+fainted yesterday."
+
+"But, Mama," protested the girl, "I could not stop Mr. Farron. I don't
+think even you could have if he'd made up his mind."
+
+"Tell Pringle to order the motor at once," was her mother's answer.
+
+Her distraction at her husband's imprudence touched Mathilde so that she
+forgot everything else between them.
+
+"O Mama," she said, "I'm so sorry you're worried! I'm sorry I'm one of
+your worries; but don't you see I love Pete just as you do Mr. Farron?"
+
+"God help you, then!" said Adelaide, quickly, and went to her room to
+put on with a haste none the less meticulous her small velvet hat, her
+veil, her spotless, pale gloves, her muff, and warm coat.
+
+She drove to Vincent's office. It was not really care for his health that
+drove her, but the restlessness of despair; she had reached a point where
+she was more wretched away from him than with him.
+
+The office was high in a gigantic building. Every one knew her by sight,
+the giant at the door and the men in the elevators. Once in the office
+itself, a junior partner hurried to her side.
+
+"So glad to see Vincent back again," he said, proud of the fact that he
+called his present partner and late employer by his first name. "You want
+to see him?" There was a short hesitation. "He left word not to be
+disturbed--"
+
+"Who is there?" Adelaide asked.
+
+"Dr. Parret."
+
+"He's not been taken ill?"
+
+He tried to reassure her, but Adelaide, without waiting or listening,
+moved at once to Vincent's door and opened it. As she did so she heard,
+him laughing and then she saw that he was laughing at the words of the
+handsomest woman she had ever seen. A great many people had this first
+impression of Lily Parret. Lily was standing on the opposite side of the
+table from him, leaning with both palms flat on the polished wood,
+telling him some continued narrative that made her blue eyes shine and
+her dimples deepen.
+
+Adelaide was not temperamentally jealous. She did not, like Vincent, hate
+and fear any person or thing or idea that drew his attention away; on the
+contrary, she wanted him to give his full attention to anything that
+would make for his power and success. She was not jealous, but it did
+cross her mind that she was looking now at her successor.
+
+They stopped laughing as she entered, and Vincent said:
+
+"Thank you, Dr. Parret, you have given me just what I wanted."
+
+"Marty would just as lief as not stick a knife in me if he knew," said
+Lily, not as if she were afraid, but as if this was one of the normal
+risks of her profession. She turned to Adelaide, "O Mrs. Farron, I've
+heard of you from Pete Wayne. Isn't he perfectly delightful? But, then,
+he ought to be with such a mother."
+
+Adelaide had a very useful smile, which could maintain a long, but
+somewhat meaningless, brilliance. She employed it now, and it lasted
+until Lily had gone.
+
+"That's a very remarkable girl," said Farron, remembrances of smiles
+still on his lips.
+
+"Does she think every one perfect?"
+
+"Almost every one; that's how she keeps going at such a rate."
+
+"How long have you known her?"
+
+"About ten minutes. Pete got her here. She knew something about Marty
+that I needed." He spoke as if he was really interested in the business
+before him; he did not betray by so much as a glance the recognition that
+they were alone, though she was calling his attention to the fact by
+every line of her figure and expression of her face. She saw his hand
+move on his desk. Was it coming to hers? He rang a bell. "Is Burke in the
+outer office? Send him in."
+
+Adelaide's heart began to beat as Marty, in his working-clothes,
+entered. He was more suppressed and more sulky than she had yet seen him.
+
+"I've been trying to see you, Mr. Farron," he began; but Vincent cut in:
+
+"One moment, Burke. I have something to say to you. That bout you said
+you had with O'Hallohan--"
+
+"Well, what of it?" answered Marty, suddenly raising his voice.
+
+"He knocked you out."
+
+"Who says so?" roared Burke.
+
+"He knocked you out," repeated Vincent.
+
+"Who says so?" Burke roared again, and somehow there was less confidence
+in the same volume of sound.
+
+"Well, not O'Hallohan; He stayed bought. But I have it straight. No, I'm
+not trying to draw you out on a guess. I don't play that kind of game. If
+I tell you I know it for a fact, I do."
+
+"Well, and what of it?" said Marty.
+
+"Just this. I wouldn't dismiss a man for getting knocked out by a
+bigger man--"
+
+"He ain't bigger."
+
+"By a better fighter, then; but I doubt whether or not I want a
+foreman who has to resort to that kind of thing--to buying off the man
+who licked--"
+
+"I didn't _buy_ him off," said Burke, as if he knew the distinction, even
+in his own mind, was a fine one.
+
+"Oh, yes, you did," answered Farron. And getting up, with his hands in
+his pockets, he added, "I'm afraid your usefulness to me is over, Burke."
+
+"The hell it is!"
+
+"My wife is here, Marty," said Farron, very pleasantly. "But this story
+isn't the only thing I have against you. My friend Mrs. Wayne tells me
+you are exerting a bad influence over a fellow whose marriage she wants
+to get annulled."
+
+"Oh, let 'em get it annulled!" shouted Marty on a high and rising key.
+"What do I care? I'll do anything to oblige if I'm asked right; but when
+Mrs. Wayne and that gang come around bullying me, I won't do a thing for
+them. But, if you ask me to, Mr. Farron, why, I'm glad to oblige you."
+
+"Thank you, Marty," returned his employer, cordially. "If you arrange
+that for me, I must own it would make me feel differently. I tell
+you," he added, as one who suggests an honorable compromise, "you get
+that settled up, you get that marriage annulled--that is, if you think
+you can--"
+
+"Sure I can," Burke replied, swaying his body about from the waist up, as
+if to indicate the ease with which it could be accomplished.
+
+"Well, when that's done, come back, and we'll talk over the other matter.
+Perhaps, after all--well, we'll talk it over."
+
+Burke walked to the door with his usual conquering step, but there
+turned.
+
+"Say," he said, "that story about the fight--" He looked at Adelaide.
+"Ladies don't always understand these matters. Tell her, will you, that
+it's done in some first-class fights?"
+
+"I'll explain," answered Vincent.
+
+"And there ain't any use in the story's getting about," Burke added.
+
+"It won't," said Vincent. On which assurance Marty went away and left the
+husband and wife alone.
+
+Adelaide got up and went to the window and looked out toward the
+Palisades. Marty Burke had been a symbol that enabled her to recall some
+of her former attitudes of mind. She remembered that dinner where she had
+pitted him against her husband. She felt deeply humiliated in her own
+sight and in Vincent's, for she was now ready to believe that he had read
+her mind from the beginning. It seemed to her as if she had been mad, and
+in that madness had thrown away the only thing in the world she would
+ever value. The thought of acknowledging her fault was not repugnant to
+her; she had no special objection to groveling, but she knew it would do
+no good. Vincent, though not ungenerous, saw clearly; and he had summed
+up the situation in that terrible phrase about choosing between loving
+and being loved. "I suppose I shouldn't respect him much if he did
+forgive me," she thought; and suddenly she felt his arms about her; he
+snatched her to him, turned her face to his, calling her by strange,
+unpremeditated terms of endearment. Beyond these, no words at all were
+exchanged between them; they were undesired. Adelaide did not know
+whether it were servile or superb to care little about knowing his
+opinion and intentions in regard to her. All that she cared about was
+that in her eyes he was once more supreme and that his arms were about
+her. Words, she knew, would have been her enemies, and she did not make
+use of them.
+
+When they went out, they passed Wayne in the outer office.
+
+"Come to dinner to-night, Pete," said Farron, and added, turning to his
+wife, "That's all right, isn't it, Adelaide?"
+
+She indicated that it was perfect, like everything he did.
+
+Wayne looked at his future mother-in-law in surprise. His pride had been
+unforgetably stung by some of her sentences, but he could have forgiven
+those more easily than the easy smile with which she now nodded at her
+husband's invitation, as if a pleasant intention on her part could wipe
+out everything that had gone before. That, it seemed to him, was the very
+essence of insolence.
+
+Appreciating that some sort of doubt was disturbing him, Adelaide said
+most graciously:
+
+"Yes, you really must come, Mr. Wayne."
+
+At this moment Farron's own stenographer, Chandler, approached him with
+an unsigned letter in his hand.
+
+Chandler took the routine of the office more seriously than Farron did,
+and acquired thereby a certain power over his employer. He had something
+of the attitude of a child's nurse, who, knowing that her charge has
+almost passed beyond her care, recognizes that she has no authority
+except that bestowed by devotion.
+
+"I think you meant to sign this letter, Mr. Farron," he said, just as a
+nurse might say before strangers, "You weren't going to the party
+without washing your hands?"
+
+"Oh." Farron fished in his waistcoat for his pen, and while he was
+writing, and Chandler just keeping an eye on him to see that it was done
+right, Adelaide said:
+
+"And how is Mrs. Chandler?"
+
+Chandler's face lit up as he received the letter back.
+
+"Oh, much better, thank you, Mrs. Farron--out of all danger."
+
+Wayne saw, what Chandler did not, that Adelaide had never even heard of
+Mrs. Chandler's ill health; but she murmured as she turned away:
+
+"I'm so glad. You must have been very anxious."
+
+When they were gone, Wayne and Chandler were left a minute alone.
+
+"What a personality!" Chandler exclaimed. "Imagine her remembering my
+troubles, when you think what she has had to worry about! A remarkable
+couple, Mr. Wayne. I have been up to the house a number of times since
+Mr. Farron's illness, and she is always there, so brave, so attentive. A
+queenly woman, and," he added, as if the two did not always go together,
+"a good wife."
+
+Wayne could think of no answer to this eulogy, and as they stood in
+silence the office door opened and Mr. Lanley came in. He nodded to each
+of the two, and moved to Vincent's room.
+
+"Mr. Farron has just gone," said Chandler, firmly. He could not bear to
+have people running in and out of Farron's room.
+
+"Gone?" said Lanley, as if it were somebody's fault.
+
+"Mrs. Farron came down for him in the motor. He appeared to stand his
+first day very well."
+
+Mr. Lanley glanced quickly from one to the other. This did not sound as
+if any final break had occurred between the Farrons, yet on this subject
+he could hardly question his son-in-law's secretaries. He made one
+further effort.
+
+"I suppose Mr. Farron thought he was good for a whole day's work."
+
+Chandler smiled.
+
+"Mr. Farron, like all wise men, sir, does what his wife tells him." And
+then, as he loved his own work far more than conversation, Chandler
+hurried back to his desk.
+
+"I understand," said Lanley to Wayne, "that you are here regularly now."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Like your work?" Lanley was obviously delaying, hoping that some
+information would turn up unexpectedly.
+
+"Very much."
+
+"Humph! What does your mother think about it?"
+
+"About my new job?" Wayne smiled. "You know those aren't the kind of
+facts--jobs and salaries--that my mother scrutinizes very closely."
+
+Lanley stared at him with brows slightly contracted.
+
+"What does she scrutinize?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, motives--spiritual things."
+
+"I see." Mr. Lanley couldn't go a step further, couldn't take this young
+man into his confidence an inch further. He stuck his stick into his
+overcoat-pocket so that it stood upright, and wheeled sharply.
+
+"Good-by," he said, and added at the door, "I suppose you think this
+makes a difference in your prospects."
+
+"Mrs. Farron has asked me to come to dinner to-night."
+
+Lanley wheeled back again.
+
+"What?" he said.
+
+"Yes, she almost urged me, though I didn't need urging."
+
+Lanley didn't answer, but presently went out in silence. He was
+experiencing the extreme loneliness that follows being more royalist
+than the king.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+On Mondays and Thursdays, the only days Mr. Lanley went down-town, he
+expected to have the corner table at the restaurant where he always
+lunched and where, on leaving Farron's office, he went. He had barely
+finished ordering luncheon--oyster stew, cold tongue, salad, and a
+bottle of Rhine wine--when, looking up, he saw Wilsey was approaching
+him, beaming.
+
+"Haryer, Wilsey?" he said, without cordiality.
+
+Wilsey, it fortunately appeared, had already had his midday meal, and had
+only a moment or two to give to sociability.
+
+"Haven't seen you since that delightful evening," he murmured. "I hope
+Mrs. Baxter got my card." He mentioned his card as if it had been a gift,
+not munificent, but not negligible, either.
+
+"Suppose she got it if you left it," said Mr. Lanley, who had heard her
+comment on it. "My man's pretty good at that sort of thing."
+
+"Ah, how rare they are getting!" said Wilsey, with a sigh--"good
+servants. Upon my word, Lanley, I'm almost ready to go."
+
+"Because you can't get good servants?" said his friend, who was drumming
+on the table and looking blankly about.
+
+"Because all the old order is passing, all the standards and backgrounds
+that I value. I don't think I'm a snob--"
+
+"Of course you're a snob, Wilsey."
+
+Mr. Wilsey smiled temperately.
+
+"What do you mean by the word?"
+
+It was a question about which Lanley had been thinking, and he answered:
+
+"I mean a person who values himself for qualities that have no moral,
+financial, or intellectual value whatsoever. You, for instance, Wilsey,
+value yourself not because you are a pretty good lawyer, but because your
+great-grandfather signed the Declaration."
+
+A shade of slight embarrassment crossed the lawyer's face.
+
+"I own," he said, "that I value birth, but so do you, Lanley. You attach
+importance to being a New York Lanley."
+
+"I do," answered Lanley; "but I have sense enough to be ashamed of doing
+so. You're proud of being proud of your old Signer."
+
+"As a matter of fact," Mr. Wilsey remarked slowly, "Josiah Wilsey did not
+sign the Declaration."
+
+"What!" cried Lanley. "You've always told me he did."
+
+Wilsey shook his head gently, as one who went about correcting errors.
+
+"No. What I said was that I feel no moral doubt he would have signed it
+if an attack of illness--"
+
+Lanley gave a short roar.
+
+"That's just like _you_, Wilsey. You wouldn't have signed it, either. You
+would have said that while in cordial sympathy with the ideas set forth,
+you would not care to put your name to a document that might give pain to
+a monarch who, though not as liberal as some of us could wish, was yet--"
+
+"As a matter of fact," Wilsey began again even more coldly, "I should
+have signed--"
+
+"Oh, you think so now. A hundred years from now you'd sign a petition for
+the eight-hour law."
+
+"Never!" said Wilsey, raising his hand. "I should never put my name to a
+document--" He stopped at another roar from his friend, and never took
+the sentence up again, but indicated with a gesture that only legal minds
+were worth arguing with on points of this sort.
+
+When he had gone, Lanley dipped the spoon in his oyster stew with not a
+little pleasure. Nothing, apparently, could have raised his spirits more
+than the knowledge that old Josiah Wilsey had not signed the Declaration.
+He actually chuckled a little. "So like Wilsey himself," he thought. "No
+moral courage; calls it conservatism." Then his joy abated. Just so, he
+thought, must he himself appear to Mrs. Wayne. Yet his self-respect
+insisted that his case was different. Loyalty had been responsible not
+for his conservatism, but for the pig-headedness with which he had acted
+upon it. He would have asked nothing better than to profess himself
+open-minded to Mrs. Wayne's views, only he could not desert Adelaide in
+the moment of her struggle for beliefs in which he himself had brought
+her up. And now she had deserted him. He alone was left to flaunt a
+banner the motto of which he didn't wholly believe, while Adelaide, at a
+word from Vincent, had gone over to the other side. And no one knew what
+his loyalty had cost him. Long ago, in his first year at college, he had
+flunked the examination of the professor whom he reverenced above all
+others. No one had cared, no one had long remembered, except Lanley
+himself, and he had remembered because some one had told him what the
+professor said on reading his paper. It was nothing but, "I had supposed
+Lanley was intelligent." Never again had he had that professor's
+attention for a single instant. This, it seemed to him, was about to
+happen to him again, now when it was too late in his life to do anything
+but despair.
+
+He called the waiter, paid his bill and tip,--he was an extremely liberal
+tipper; "it's expected of us," he used to say, meaning that it was
+expected of people like the New York Lanleys,--and went away.
+
+In old times he had been an inventor of many clever tricks for getting
+up-town by unpopular elevated trains and horse-cars that avoided the
+crowd, but the subway was a great leveler, and he knew no magic except to
+take a local in rush hours. At three o'clock, however, even this was not
+necessary. He took an express, and got off at the Grand Central, turned
+up Park Avenue, and then east. He had just found out that he was going to
+visit Mrs. Wayne.
+
+He read the names in the vestibule, never doubting that Dr. Parret was
+a masculine practitioner, and hesitated at the name of Wayne. He
+thought he ought to ring the bell, but he wanted to go straight up.
+Some one had left the front door unlatched. He pushed it open and began
+the steep ascent.
+
+She came to the door of the flat herself. She had a funny little gray
+shawl about her shoulders and a pen in her hand. She tried to make her
+voice sound very cordial as she greeted him, but he thought he caught
+something that sounded as if, while perfectly well disposed to him, she
+couldn't for the life of her imagine why he had come.
+
+"Come in," she said, "though I'm afraid it's a little cold in here. Our
+janitor--"
+
+"Let me light your fire for you," he answered, and extracting a
+parlor-match from his pocket,--safety-matches were his bugbear,--he
+stooped, and put the flame to the fire. As he did so he understood
+that it was not the mere forgetfulness of a servant that had left it
+unlighted, but probably a deliberate economy, and he rose crimson
+and unhappy.
+
+It took him some time to recover, and during the entire time she sat in
+her gray shawl, looking very amiable, but plainly unable to think of
+anything to say.
+
+"I saw your son in Farron's office to-day."
+
+"Mr. Farron has been so kind, so wonderfully kind!"
+
+Only a guilty conscience could have found reproach in this statement, and
+Lanley said:
+
+"And I hear he is dining at my daughter's this evening."
+
+Mrs. Wayne had had a telephone message to that effect.
+
+"I wondered, if you were alone--" Lanley hesitated. He had of course been
+going to ask her to come and dine with him, but a better inspiration came
+to him. "I wondered if you would ask me to dine with you."
+
+"Oh, I'm so sorry," said Mrs. Wayne, "but I can't. I have a boy coming.
+He's studying for the ministry, the most interesting person. He had not
+been sober for three years when I took hold of him, and now he hasn't
+touched a drop for two."
+
+He sighed. She said she was sorry, but he could see plainly enough that
+any reformed, or even more any unreformed, drunkard would always far
+surpass him in ability to command her interest. He did not belong to a
+generation that cleared things up with words; he would have thought it
+impertinent, almost ungentlemanly, to probe her attitude of mind about
+the scene at Adelaide's; and he would have considered himself unmanly to
+make any plea to her on the ground of his own suffering. One simply
+supported such things as best one could; it was expected of one, like
+tipping waiters. He had neither the vocabulary nor the habit of mind that
+made an impersonal exposition of an emotional difficulty possible; but
+even had he possessed these powers he would have retained his tradition
+against using them. Perhaps, if she had been his sister or his wife, he
+might have admitted that he had had a hard day or that every one had
+moments of depression; but that was not the way to talk in a lady's
+drawing-room. In the silence he saw her eyes steal longingly to her
+writing-table, deeply and hopelessly littered with papers and open books.
+
+"I'm afraid I'm detaining you," he said. The visit had been a failure.
+
+"Oh, not at all," she replied, and then added in a tone of more
+sincerity: "I do have the most terrible time with my check-book. And,"
+she added, as one confessing to an absurdly romantic ideal, "I was trying
+to balance it."
+
+"You should not be troubled with such things," said Mr. Lanley, thinking
+how long it was since any one but a secretary had balanced his books.
+
+Pete, it appeared, usually did attend to his mother's checks, but of
+late she had not liked to bother him, and that was just the moment the
+bank had chosen to notify her that she had overdrawn. "I don't see how I
+can be," she said, too hopeless to deny it.
+
+"If you would allow me," said Mr. Lanley. "I am an excellent bookkeeper."
+
+"Oh, I shouldn't like to trouble you," said Mrs. Wayne, but she made it
+clear she would like it above everything; so Lanley put on his
+spectacles, drew up his chair, and squared his elbows to the job.
+
+"It hasn't been balanced since--dear me! not since October," he said.
+
+"I know; but I draw such small checks."
+
+"But you draw a good many."
+
+She had risen, and was standing before the fire, with her hands behind
+her back. Her shawl had slipped off, and she looked, in her short
+walking-skirt, rather like a school-girl being reprimanded for a poor
+exercise. She felt so when, looking up at her over his spectacles, he
+observed severely:
+
+"You really must be more careful about carrying forward. Twice you have
+carried forward an amount from two pages back instead of--"
+
+"That's always the way," she interrupted. "Whenever people look at my
+check-book they take so long scolding me about the way I do it that
+there's no time left for putting it right."
+
+"I won't say another word," returned Lanley; "only it would really
+help you--"
+
+"I don't want any one to do it who says my sevens are like fours," she
+went on. Lanley compressed his lips slightly, but contented himself by
+merely lengthening the tail of a seven. He said nothing more, but every
+time he found an error he gave a little shake of his head that went
+through her like a knife.
+
+The task was a long one. The light of the winter afternoon faded, and she
+lit the lamps before he finished. At first he had tried not to be aware
+of revelations that the book made; but as he went on and he found he was
+obliged now and then to question her about payments and receipts, he saw
+that she was so utterly without any sense of privacy in the matter that
+his own decreased.
+
+He had never thought of her as being particularly poor, not at least in
+the sense of worrying over every bill, but now when he saw the small
+margin between the amounts paid in and the amounts paid out, when he
+noticed how large a proportion of what she had she spent in free gifts
+and not in living expenses, he found himself facing something he could
+not tolerate. He put his pen down carefully in the crease of the book,
+and rose to his feet.
+
+"Mrs. Wayne," he said, "I must tell you something."
+
+"You're going to say, after all, that my sevens are like fours."
+
+"I'm going to say something worse--more inexcusable. I'm going to tell
+you how much I want you to honor me by becoming my wife."
+
+She pronounced only one syllable. She said, "_Oh_!" as crowds say it when
+a rocket goes off.
+
+"I suppose you think it ridiculous in a man of my age to speak of love,
+but it's not ridiculous, by Heaven! It's tragic. I shouldn't have
+presumed, though, to mention the subject to you, only it is intolerable
+to me to think of your lacking anything when I have so much. I can't
+explain why this knowledge gave me courage. I know that you care nothing
+for luxuries and money, less than any one I know; but the fact that you
+haven't everything that you ought to have makes me suffer so much that I
+hope you will at least listen to me."
+
+"But you know it doesn't make me suffer a bit," said Mrs. Wayne.
+
+"To know you at all has been such a happiness that I am shocked at my own
+presumption in asking for your companionship for the rest of my life, and
+if in addition to that I could take care of you, share with you--"
+
+No one ever presented a proposition to Mrs. Wayne without finding her
+willing to consider it, an open-mindedness that often led her into the
+consideration of absurdities. And now the sacred cupidity of the
+reformer did for an instant leap up within her. All the distressed
+persons, all the tottering causes in which she was interested, seemed to
+parade before her eyes. Then, too, the childish streak in her character
+made her remember how amusing it would be to be Adelaide Farron's
+mother-in-law, and Peter's grandmother by marriage. Nor was she at all
+indifferent to the flattery of the offer or the touching reserves of her
+suitor's nature.
+
+"I should think you would be so lonely!" he said gently.
+
+She nodded.
+
+"I am often. I miss not having any one to talk to over the little things
+that"--she laughed--"I probably wouldn't talk over if I had some one.
+But even with Pete I am lonely. I want to be first with some one again."
+
+"You will always be first with me."
+
+"Even if I don't marry you?"
+
+"Whatever you do."
+
+Like the veriest coquette, she instantly decided to take all and give
+nothing--to take his interest, his devotion, his loyalty, all of the
+first degree, and give him in return a divided interest, a loyalty too
+much infected by humor to be complete, and a devotion in which several
+causes and Pete took precedence. She did not do this in ignorance. On the
+contrary, she knew just how it would be; that he would wait and she be
+late, that he would adjust himself and she remain unchanged, that he
+would give and give and she would never remember that it would be kind
+some day to ask. Yet it did not seem to her an unfair bargain, and
+perhaps she was right.
+
+"I couldn't marry you," she said. "I couldn't change. All your pretty
+things and the way you live--it would be like a cage to me. I like my
+life the way it is; but yours--"
+
+"Do you think I would ask Wilsey to dinner every night or try to mold you
+to be like Mrs. Baxter?"
+
+She laughed.
+
+"You'd have a hard time. I never could have married again. I'd make you a
+poor wife, but I'm a wonderful friend."
+
+"Your friendship would be more happiness than I had any right to hope
+for," and then he added in a less satisfied tone: "But friendship is so
+uncertain. You don't make any announcements to your friends or vows to
+each other, unless you're at an age when you cut your initials in the
+bark of a tree. That's what I'd like to do. I suppose you think I'm an
+old fool."
+
+"Two of us," said Mrs. Wayne, and wiped her eyes. She cried easily, and
+had never felt the least shame about it.
+
+It was a strange compact--strange at least for her, considering that only
+a few hours before she had thought of him as a friendly, but
+narrow-minded, old stranger. Something weak and malleable in her nature
+made her enter lightly into the compact, although all the time she knew
+that something more deeply serious and responsible would never allow her
+to break it. A faint regret for even an atom of lost freedom, a vein of
+caution and candor, made her say:
+
+"I'm so afraid you'll find me unsatisfactory. Every one has, even Pete."
+
+"I think I shall ask less than any one," he returned.
+
+The answer pleased her strangely.
+
+Presently a ring came at the bell--a telegram. The expected guest was
+detained at the seminary. Lanley watched with agonized attention. She
+appeared to be delighted.
+
+"Now you'll stay to dine," she said. "I can't remember what there is
+for dinner."
+
+"Now, that's not friendly at the start," said he, "to think I
+care so much."
+
+"Well, you're not like a theological student."
+
+"A good deal better, probably," answered Lanley, with a gruffness that
+only partly hid his happiness. There was no real cloud in his sky. If
+Mrs. Wayne had accepted his offer of marriage, by this time he would have
+begun to think of the horror of telling Adelaide and Mathilde and his own
+servants. Now he thought of nothing but the agreeable evening before him,
+one of many.
+
+When Pete came in to dress, Lanley was just in the act of drawing the
+last neat double lines for his balance. He had been delayed by the fact
+that Mrs. Wayne had been talking to him almost continuously since his
+return to figuring. She was in high spirits, for even saints are
+stimulated by a respectful adoration.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+Recognizing the neat back of Mr. Lanley's gray head, Pete's first idea
+was that he must have come to induce Mrs. Wayne to conspire with him
+against the marriage; but he abandoned this notion on seeing his
+occupation.
+
+"Hullo, Mr. Lanley," he said, stooping to kiss his mother with the casual
+affection of the domesticated male. "You have my job."
+
+"It is a great pleasure to be of any service," said Mr. Lanley.
+
+"It was in a terrible state, it seems, Pete," said his mother.
+
+"She makes her fours just like sevens, doesn't she?" observed Pete.
+
+"I did not notice the similarity," replied Mr. Lanley. He glanced at Mrs.
+Wayne, however, and enjoyed his denial almost as much as he had enjoyed
+the discovery that the Wilsey ancestor had not been a Signer. He felt
+that somehow, owing to his late-nineteenth-century tact, the breach
+between him and Pete had been healed.
+
+"Mr. Lanley is going to stay and dine with me," said Mrs. Wayne.
+
+Pete looked a little grave, but his next sentence explained the cause of
+his anxiety.
+
+"Wouldn't you like me to go out and get something to eat, Mother?"
+
+"No, no," answered his mother, firmly. "This time there really is
+something in the house quite good. I don't remember what it is."
+
+And then Pete, who felt he had done his duty, went off to dress. Soon,
+however, his voice called from an adjoining room.
+
+"Hasn't that woman sent back any of my collars, Mother dear?"
+
+"O Pete, her daughter got out of the reformatory only yesterday," Mrs.
+Wayne replied. Lanley saw that the Wayne housekeeping was immensely
+complicated by crime. "I believe I am the only person in your employ not
+a criminal," he said, closing the books. "These balance now."
+
+"Have I anything left?"
+
+"Only about a hundred and fifty."
+
+She brightened at this.
+
+"Oh, come," she said, "that's not so bad. I couldn't have been so
+terribly overdrawn, after all."
+
+"You ought not to overdraw at all," said Mr. Lanley, severely. "It's not
+fair to the bank."
+
+"Well, I never mean to," she replied, as if no one could ask more
+than that.
+
+Presently she left him to go and dress for dinner. He felt
+extraordinarily at home, left alone like this among her belongings. He
+wandered about looking at the photographs--photographs of Pete as a
+child, a photograph of an old white house with wisteria-vines on it; a
+picture of her looking very much as she did now, with Pete as a little
+boy, in a sailor suit, leaning against her; and then a little photograph
+of her as a girl not much older than Mathilde, he thought--a girl who
+looked a little frightened and awkward, as girls so often looked, and yet
+to whom the French photographer--for it was taken in the Place de la
+Madeleine--had somehow contrived to give a Parisian air. He had never
+thought of her in Paris. He took the picture up; it was dated May, 1884.
+He thought back carefully. Yes, he had been in Paris himself that spring,
+a man of thirty-three or so, feeling as old almost as he did to-day, a
+widower with his little girl. If only they might have met then, he and
+that serious, starry-eyed girl in the photograph!
+
+Hearing Pete coming, he set the photograph back in its place, and,
+sitting down, picked up the first paper within reach.
+
+"Good night, sir," said Pete from the doorway.
+
+"Good night, my dear boy. Good luck!" They shook hands.
+
+"Funny old duck," Pete thought as he went down-stairs whistling,
+"sitting there so contentedly reading 'The Harvard Lampoon.' Wonder what
+he thinks of it."
+
+He did not wonder long, though, for more interesting subjects of
+consideration were at hand. What reception would he meet at the Farrons?
+What arrangements would be made, what assumptions permitted? But even
+more immediate than this was the problem how could he contrive to greet
+Mrs. Farron? He was shocked to find how little he had been able to
+forgive her. There was something devilish, he thought, in the way she had
+contrived to shake his self-confidence at the moment of all others when
+he had needed it. He could never forget a certain contemptuous curve in
+her fine, clear profile or the smooth delight of her tone at some of her
+own cruelties. Some day he would have it out with her when the right
+moment came. Before he reached the house he had had time to sketch a
+number of scenes in which she, caught extraordinarily red-handed, was
+forced to listen to his exposition of the evil of such methods as hers.
+He would say to her, "I remember that you once said to me, Mrs.
+Farron--" Anger cut short his vision as a cloud of her phrases came back
+to him, like stinging bees.
+
+He had hoped for a minute alone with Mathilde, but as Pringle opened the
+drawing-room door for him he heard the sound of laughter, and seeing that
+even Mrs. Farron herself was down, he exclaimed quickly:
+
+"What, am I late?"
+
+Every one laughed all the more at this.
+
+"That's just what Mr. Farron said you would say at finding that Mama was
+dressed in time," exclaimed Mathilde, casting an admiring glance at her
+stepfather.
+
+"You'd suppose I'd never been in time for dinner before," remarked
+Adelaide, giving Wayne her long hand.
+
+"But isn't it wonderful, Pete," put in Mathilde, "how Mr. Farron is
+always right?"
+
+"Oh, I hope he isn't," said Adelaide; "for what do you think he has just
+been telling me--that you'd always hate me, Pete, as long as you lived.
+You see," she went on, the little knot coming in her eyebrows, "I've been
+telling him all the things I said to you yesterday. They did sound rather
+awful, and I think I've forgotten some of the worst."
+
+"_I_ haven't," said Pete.
+
+"I remember I told you you were no one."
+
+"You said I was a perfectly nice young man."
+
+"And that you had no business judgment."
+
+"And that I was mixing Mathilde up with a fraud."
+
+"And that I couldn't see any particular reason why she cared about you."
+
+"That you only asked that your son-in-law should be a person."
+
+"I am afraid I said something about not coming to a house where you
+weren't welcome."
+
+"I know you said something about a bribe."
+
+At this Adelaide laughed out loud.
+
+"I believe I did," she said. "What things one does say sometimes! There's
+dinner." She rose, and tucked her hand under his arm. "Will you take me
+in to dinner, Pete, or do you think I'm too despicable to be fed?"
+
+The truth was that they were all four in such high spirits that they
+could no more help playing together than four colts could help playing in
+a grass field. Besides, Vincent had taunted Adelaide with her inability
+ever to make it up with Wayne. She left no trick unturned.
+
+"I don't know," she went on as they sat down at table, "that a marriage
+is quite legal unless you hate your mother-in-law. I ought to give you
+some opportunity to go home and say to Mrs. Wayne, 'But I'm afraid I
+shall never be able to get on with Mrs. Farron.'"
+
+"Oh, he's said that already," remarked Vincent.
+
+"Many a time," said Pete.
+
+Mathilde glanced a little fearfully at her mother. The talk seemed to her
+amusing, but dangerous.
+
+"Well, then, shall we have a feud, Pete?" said Adelaide in a
+glass-of-wine-with-you-sir tone. "A good feud in a family can be made
+very amusing."
+
+"It would be all right for us, of course," said Pete, "but it would be
+rather hard on Mathilde."
+
+"Mathilde is a better fighter than either of you," put in Vincent.
+"Adelaide has no continuity of purpose, and you, Pete, are wretchedly
+kind-hearted; but Mathilde would go into it to the death."
+
+"Oh, I don't know what you mean, Mr. Farron," exclaimed Mathilde,
+tremendously flattered, and hoping he would go on. "I don't like
+to fight."
+
+"Neither did Stonewall Jackson, I believe, until they fixed bayonets."
+
+Mathilde, dropping her eyes, saw Pete's hand lying on the table. It was
+stubby, and she loved it the better for being so; it was firm and boyish
+and exactly like Pete. Looking up, she caught her mother's eye, and they
+both remembered. For an instant indecision flickered in Adelaide's look,
+but she lacked the complete courage to add that to the list--to tell any
+human being that she had said his hands were stubby; and so her eyes fell
+before her daughter's.
+
+As dinner went on the adjustment between the four became more nearly
+perfect; the gaiety, directed by Adelaide, lost all sting. But even as
+she talked to Pete she was only dimly aware of his existence. Her
+audience was her husband. She was playing for his praise and admiration,
+and before soup was over she knew she had it; she knew better than words
+could tell her that he thought her the most desirable woman in the world.
+Fortified by that knowledge, the pacification of a cross boy seemed to
+Adelaide an inconsiderable task.
+
+By the time they rose from table it was accomplished. As they went into
+the drawing-room Adelaide was thinking that young men were really rather
+geese, but, then, one wouldn't have them different if one could.
+
+Vincent was thinking how completely attaching a nature like hers would
+always be to him, since when she yielded her will to his she did it with
+such complete generosity.
+
+Mathilde was saying to herself:
+
+"Of course I knew Pete's charm would win Mama at last, but even I did not
+suppose he could do it the very first evening."
+
+And Pete was thinking:
+
+"A former beauty thinks she can put anything over, and in a way she can.
+I feel rather friendly toward her."
+
+The Farrons had decided while they were dressing that after dinner they
+would retire to Vincent's study and give the lovers a few minutes to
+themselves.
+
+Left alone, Pete and Mathilde stood looking seriously at each other, and
+then at the room which only a few weeks before had witnessed their first
+prolonged talk.
+
+"I never saw your mother look a quarter as beautiful as she does this
+evening," said Wayne.
+
+"Isn't she marvelous, the way she can make up for everything when she
+wants?" Mathilde answered with enthusiasm.
+
+Pete shook his head.
+
+"She can never make up for one thing."
+
+"O Pete!"
+
+"She can never give me back my first instinctive, egotistical, divine
+conviction that there was every reason why you should love me. I shall
+always hear her voice saying, 'But why should Mathilde love you?' And I
+shall never know a good answer."
+
+"What," cried Mathilde, "don't you know the answer to that! I do. Mama
+doesn't, of course. Mama loves people for reasons outside themselves: she
+loves me because I'm her child, and Grandpapa because he's her father,
+and Mr. Farron because she thinks he's strong. If she didn't think him
+strong, I'm not sure she'd love him. But _I_ love _you_ for being just as
+you are, because you are my choice. Whatever you do or say, that can't be
+changed--"
+
+The door opened, and Pringle entered with a tray in his hand, and his
+eyes began darting about in search of empty coffee-cups. Mathilde and
+Pete were aware of a common feeling of guilt, not that they were
+concealing the cups, though there was something of that accusation in
+Pringle's expression, but because the pause between them was so obvious.
+So Mathilde said suddenly:
+
+"Pringle, Mr. Wayne and I are engaged to be married."
+
+"Indeed, Miss?" said Pringle, with a smile; and so seldom was this
+phenomenon seen to take place that Wayne noted for the first time that
+Pringle's teeth were false. "I'm delighted to hear it; and you, too, sir.
+This is a bad world to go through alone."
+
+"Do you approve of marriage, Pringle?" said Wayne.
+
+The cups, revealing themselves one by one, were secured as Pringle
+answered:
+
+"In my class of life, sir, we don't give much time to considering what we
+approve of and disapprove of. But young people are all alike when they're
+first engaged, always wondering how it is going to turn out, and hoping
+the other party won't know that they're wondering. But when you get old,
+and you look back on all the mistakes and the disadvantages and the
+sacrifices, you'll find that you won't be able to imagine that you could
+have gone through it with any other person--in spite of her faults," he
+added almost to himself.
+
+When he was gone, Pete and Mathilde turned and kissed each other.
+
+"When we get old--" they murmured.
+
+They really believed that it could never happen to them.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HAPPIEST TIME OF THEIR LIVES ***
+
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Happiest Time of Their Lives , by Alice
+Duer Miller
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Happiest Time of Their Lives 
+
+Author: Alice Duer Miller
+
+Release Date: February 26, 2004  [eBook #11325]
+[Date last updated: October 6, 2004]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HAPPIEST TIME OF THEIR LIVES
+***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Mary Meehan and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team. Produced from page
+images provided by the Million Book Project.
+
+
+
+THE HAPPIEST TIME OF THEIR LIVES
+
+BY ALICE DUER MILLER
+
+Author of "Come Out of the Kitchen," "Ladies Must Live," "Wings in the
+Nights," etc.
+
+1918
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TO CLARENCE DAY, JR.
+
+
+"... and then he added in a less satisfied tone: "But friendship is so
+uncertain. You don't make any announcement to your friends or vows to
+each other, unless you're at an age when you cut your initials in the
+bark of a tree. That's what I'd like to do."
+
+
+
+
+THE HAPPIEST TIME OF THEIR LIVES
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Little Miss Severance sat with her hands as cold as ice. The stage of her
+coming adventure was beautifully set--the conventional stage for the
+adventure of a young girl, her mother's drawing-room. Her mother had the
+art of setting stages. The room was not large,--a New York brownstone
+front in the upper Sixties even though altered as to entrance, and
+allowed to sprawl backward over yards not originally intended for its
+use, is not a palace,--but it was a room and not a corridor; you had the
+comfortable sense of four walls about you when its one small door was
+once shut. It was filled, perhaps a little too much filled, with objects
+which seemed to have nothing in common except beauty; but propinquity,
+propinquity of older date than the house in which they now were, had
+given them harmony. Nothing in the room was modern except some uncommonly
+comfortable sofas and chairs, and the pink and yellow roses that stood
+about in Chinese bowls.
+
+Miss Severance herself was hardly aware of the charm of the room. On the
+third floor she had her own room, which she liked much better. There was
+a great deal of bright chintz in it, and maple furniture of a late
+colonial date, inherited from her mother's family, the Lanleys, and
+discarded by her mother, who described the taste of that time as "pure,
+but provincial." Crystal and ivories and carved wood and Italian
+embroideries did not please Miss Severance half so well as the austere
+lines of those work-tables and high-boys.
+
+It was after five, almost half-past, and he had said "about five." Miss
+Severance, impatient to begin the delicious experience of anticipation,
+had allowed herself to be ready at a quarter before the hour. Not that
+she had been entirely without some form of anticipation since she woke
+up; not, perhaps, since she had parted from him under the windy awning
+the night before. They had held up a long line of restless motors as she
+stood huddled in her fur-trimmed cloak, and he stamped and jigged to
+keep warm, bareheaded, in his thin pumps and shining shirt-front, with
+his shoulders drawn up and his hands in his pockets, while they almost
+awkwardly arranged this meeting for the next day.
+
+Several times during the preceding evening she had thought he was going
+to say something of the kind, for they had danced together a great deal;
+but they had always danced in silence. At the time, with his arm about
+her, silence had seemed enough; but in separation there is something
+wonderfully solid and comforting in the memory of a spoken word; it is
+like a coin in the pocket. And after Miss Severance had bidden him good
+night at the long glass door of the paneled ball-room without his saying
+anything of a future meeting, she had gone up-stairs with a heavy heart
+to find her maid and her wrap. She knew as soon as she reached the
+dressing-room that she had actually hurried her departure for the sake of
+the parting; for the hope, as their time together grew short, of having
+some certainty to look forward to. But he had said nothing, and she had
+been ashamed to find that she was waiting, leaving her hand in his too
+long; so that at last she snatched it away, and was gone up-stairs in an
+instant, fearing he might have guessed what was going on in her mind.
+
+She had thought it just an accident that he was in the hall when she
+came down again, and he hadn't much choice, she said to herself, about
+helping her into her motor. Then at the very last moment he had asked
+if he mightn't come and see her the next afternoon. Miss Severance, who
+was usually sensitive to inconveniencing other people, had not cared at
+all about the motor behind hers that was tooting its horn or for the
+elderly lady in feathers and diamonds who was waiting to get into it.
+She had cared only about arranging the hour and impressing the address
+upon him. He had given her back the pleasure of her whole evening like
+a parting gift.
+
+As she drove home she couldn't bring herself to doubt, though she tried
+to be rational about the whole experience, that it had meant as much to
+him as it had to her, perhaps more. Her lips curved a little at the
+thought, and she glanced quickly at her maid to see if the smile had
+been visible in the glare of the tall, double lamps of Fifth Avenue.
+
+To say she had not slept would be untrue, but she had slept close to the
+surface of consciousness, as if a bright light were shining somewhere
+near, and she had waked with the definite knowledge that this light was
+the certainty of seeing him that very day. The morning had gone very
+well; she had even forgotten once or twice for a few seconds, and then
+remembered with a start of joy that was almost painful: but, after lunch,
+time had begun to drag like the last day of a long sea-voyage.
+
+About three she had gone out with her mother in the motor, with the
+understanding that she was to be left at home at four; her mother was
+going on to tea with an elderly relation. Fifth Avenue had seemed
+unusually crowded even for Fifth Avenue, and the girl had fretted and
+wondered at the perversity of the police, who held them up just at the
+moment most promising for slipping through; and why Andrews, the
+chauffeur, could not see that he would do better by going to Madison
+Avenue. She did not speak these thoughts aloud, for she had not told
+her mother, not from any natural love of concealment, but because any
+announcement of her plans for the afternoon would have made them seem
+less certain of fulfilment. Perhaps, too, she had felt an
+unacknowledged fear of certain of her mother's phrases that could
+delicately puncture delight.
+
+She had been dropped at the house by ten minutes after four, and exactly
+at a quarter before five she had been in the drawing-room, in her
+favorite dress, with her best slippers, her hands cold, but her heart
+warm with the knowledge that he would soon be there.
+
+Only after forty-five minutes of waiting did that faith begin to grow
+dim. She was too inexperienced in such matters to know that this was the
+inevitable consequence of being ready too early. She had had time to run
+through the whole cycle of certainty, eagerness, doubt, and she was now
+rapidly approaching despair. He was not coming. Perhaps he had never
+meant to come. Possibly he had merely yielded to a polite impulse;
+possibly her manner had betrayed her wishes so plainly that a clever,
+older person, two or three years out of college, had only too clearly
+read her in the moment when she had detained his hand at the door of the
+ball-room.
+
+There was a ring at the bell. Her heart stood perfectly still, and then
+began beating with a terrible force, as if it gathered itself into a
+hard, weighty lump again and again. Several minutes went by, too long for
+a man to give to taking off his coat. At last she got up and cautiously
+opened the door; a servant was carrying a striped cardboard box to her
+mother's room. Miss Severance went back and sat down. She took a long
+breath; her heart returned to its normal movement.
+
+Yet, for some unexplained reason, the fact that the door-bell had rung
+once made it more possible that it would ring again, and she began to
+feel a slight return of confidence.
+
+A servant opened the door, and in the instant before she turned her head
+she had time to debate the possibility of a visitor having come in
+without ringing while the messenger with the striped box was going out.
+But, no; Pringle was alone.
+
+Pringle had been with the family since her mother was a girl, but, like
+many red-haired men, he retained an appearance of youth. He wanted to
+know if he should take away the tea.
+
+She knew perfectly why he asked. He liked to have the tea-things put away
+before he had his own supper and began his arrangements for the family
+dinner. She felt that the crisis had come.
+
+If she said yes, she knew that her visitor would come just as tea had
+disappeared. If she said no, she would sit there alone, waiting for
+another half-hour, and when she finally did ring and tell Pringle he
+could take away the tea-things, he would look wise and reproachful.
+Nevertheless, she did say no, and Pringle with admirable
+self-control, withdrew.
+
+The afternoon seemed very quiet. Miss Severance became aware of all
+sorts of bells that she had never heard before--other door-bells,
+telephone-bells in the adjacent houses, loud, hideous bells on motor
+delivery-wagons, but not her own front door-bell.
+
+Her heart felt like lead. Things would never be the same now. Probably
+there was some explanation of his not coming, but it could never be
+really atoned for. The wild romance and confidence in this first visit
+could never be regained.
+
+And then there was a loud, quick ring at the bell, and at once he was in
+the room, breathing rapidly, as if he had run up-stairs or even from the
+corner. She could do nothing but stare at him. She had tried in the last
+ten minutes to remember what he looked like, and now she was astonished
+to find how exactly he looked as she remembered him.
+
+To her horror, the change between her late despair and her present joy
+was so extreme that she wanted to cry. The best she knew how to do was to
+pucker her face into a smile and to offer him those chilly finger-tips.
+
+He hardly took them, but said, as if announcing a black, but
+incontrovertible, fact:
+
+"You're not a bit glad to see me."
+
+"Oh, yes, I am," she returned, with an attempt at an easy social manner.
+"Will you have some tea?"
+
+"But why aren't you glad?"
+
+Miss Severance clasped her hands on the edge of the tea-tray and looked
+down. She pressed her palms together; she set her teeth, but the muscles
+in her throat went on contracting; and the heroic struggle was lost.
+
+"I thought you weren't coming," she said, and making no further effort
+to conceal the fact that her eyes were full of tears she looked straight
+up at him.
+
+He sat down beside her on the small, low sofa and put his hand on hers.
+
+"But I was perfectly certain to come," he said very gently, "because, you
+see, I think I love you."
+
+"Do you think I love you?" she asked, seeking information.
+
+"I can't tell," he answered. "Your being sorry I did not come doesn't
+prove anything. We'll see. You're so wonderfully young, my dear!"
+
+"I don't think eighteen is so young. My mother was married before she
+was twenty."
+
+He sat silent for a few seconds, and she felt his hand shut more firmly
+on hers. Then he got up, and, pulling a chair to the opposite side of
+the table, said briskly:
+
+"And now give me some tea. I haven't had any lunch."
+
+"Oh, why not?" She blew her nose, tucked away her handkerchief, and began
+her operations on the tea-tray.
+
+"I work very hard," he returned. "You don't know what at, do you? I'm a
+statistician."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"I make reports on properties, on financial ventures, for the firm I'm
+with, Benson & Honaton. They're brokers. When they are asked to
+underwrite a scheme--"
+
+"Underwrite? I never heard that word."
+
+The boy laughed.
+
+"You'll hear it a good many times if our acquaintance continues." Then
+more gravely, but quite parenthetically, he added: "If a firm puts up
+money for a business, they want to know all about it, of course. I tell
+them. I've just been doing a report this afternoon, a wonder; it's what
+made me late. Shall I tell you about it?"
+
+She nodded with the same eagerness with which ten years before she might
+have answered an inquiry as to whether he should tell her a fairy-story.
+
+"Well, it was on a coal-mine in Pennsylvania. I'm afraid my report is
+going to be a disappointment to the firm. The mine's good, a sound, rich
+vein, and the labor conditions aren't bad; but there's one fatal
+defect--a car shortage on the only railroad that reaches it. They can't
+make a penny on their old mine until that's met, and that can't be
+straightened out for a year, anyhow; and so I shall report against it."
+
+"Car shortage," said Miss Severance. "I never should have thought of
+that. I think you must be wonderful."
+
+He laughed.
+
+"I wish the firm thought so," he said. "In a way they do; they pay
+attention to what I say, but they give me an awfully small salary. In
+fact," he added briskly, "I have almost no money at all." There was a
+pause, and he went on, "I suppose you know that when I was sitting beside
+you just now I wanted most terribly to kiss you."
+
+"Oh, no!"
+
+"Oh, no? Oh, yes. I wanted to, but I didn't. Don't worry. I won't for a
+long time, perhaps never."
+
+"Never?" said Miss Severance, and she smiled.
+
+"I said _perhaps_ never. You can't tell. Life turns up some awfully queer
+tricks now and then. Last night, for example. I walked into that ballroom
+thinking of nothing, and there you were--all the rest of the room like a
+sort of shrine for you. I said to a man I was with, 'I want to meet the
+girl who looks like cream in a gold saucer,' and he introduced us. What
+could be stranger than that? Not, as a matter of fact, that I ever
+thought love at first sight impossible, as so many people do."
+
+"But if you don't know the very first thing about a person--" Miss
+Severance began, but he interrupted:
+
+"You have to begin some time. Every pair of lovers have to have a first
+meeting, and those who fall in love at once are just that much further
+ahead." He smiled. "I don't even know your first name."
+
+It seemed miraculous good fortune to have a first name.
+
+"Mathilde."
+
+"Mathilde," he repeated in a lower tone, and his eyes shone
+extraordinarily.
+
+Both of them took some time to recover from the intensity of this moment.
+She wanted to ask him his, but foreseeing that she would immediately be
+required to use it, and feeling unequal to such an adventure, she decided
+it would be wiser to wait. It was he who presently went on:
+
+"Isn't it strange to know so little about each other? I rather like
+it. It's so mad--like opening a chest of buried treasure. You don't
+know what's going to be in it, but you know it's certain to be rare
+and desirable. What do you do, Mathilde? Live here with your father
+and mother?"
+
+She sat looking at him. The truth was that she found everything he said
+so unexpected and thrilling that now and then she lost all sense of being
+expected to answer.
+
+"Oh, yes," she said, suddenly remembering. "I live here with my mother
+and stepfather. My mother has married again. She is Mrs. Vincent Farron."
+
+"Didn't I tell you life played strange tricks?" he exclaimed. He sprang
+up, and took a position on the hearth-rug. "I know all about him. I once
+reported on the Electric Equipment Company. That's the same Farron, isn't
+it? I believe that that company is the most efficient for its size in
+this country, in the world, perhaps. And Farron is your stepfather! He
+must be a wonder."
+
+"Yes, I think he is."
+
+"You don't like him?"
+
+"I like him very much. I don't _love_ him."
+
+"The poor devil!"
+
+"I don't believe he wants people to love him. It would bore him. No,
+that's not quite just. He's kind, wonderfully kind, but he has no little
+pleasantnesses. He says things in a very quiet way that make you feel
+he's laughing at you, though he never does laugh. He said to me this
+morning at breakfast, 'Well, Mathilde, was it a marvelous party?' That
+made me feel as if I used the word 'marvelous' all the time, not a bit
+as if he really wanted to know whether I had enjoyed myself last night."
+
+"And did you?"
+
+She gave him a rapid smile and went on:
+
+"Now, my grandfather, my mother's father--his name is Lanley--(Mr. Lanley
+evidently was not in active business, for it was plain that Wayne,
+searching his memory, found nothing)--my grandfather often scolds me
+terribly for my English,--says I talk like a barmaid, although I tell
+him he ought not to know how barmaids talk,--but he never makes me feel
+small. Sometimes Mr. Farron repeats, weeks afterward, something I've
+said, word for word, the way I said it. It makes it sound so foolish. I'd
+rather he said straight out that he thought I was a goose."
+
+"Perhaps you wouldn't if he did."
+
+"I like people to be human. Mr. Farron's not human."
+
+"Doesn't your mother think so?"
+
+"Mama thinks he's perfect."
+
+"How long have they been married?"
+
+"Ages! Five years!"
+
+"And they're just as much in love?"
+
+Miss Severance looked at him.
+
+"In love?" she said. "At their age?" He laughed at her, and she added:
+"I don't mean they are not fond of each other, but Mr. Farron must be
+forty-five. What I mean by love--" she hesitated.
+
+"Don't stop."
+
+But she did stop, for her quick ears told her that some one was coming,
+and, Pringle opening the door, Mrs. Farron came in.
+
+She was a very beautiful person. In her hat and veil, lit by the friendly
+light of her own drawing-room, she seemed so young as to be actually
+girlish, except that she was too stately and finished for such a word.
+Mathilde did not inherit her blondness from her mother. Mrs. Farron's
+hair was a dark brown, with a shade of red in it where it curved behind
+her ears. She had the white skin that often goes with such hair, and a
+high, delicate color in her cheeks. Her eyebrows were fine and
+excessively dark--penciled, many people thought.
+
+"Mama, this is Mr. Wayne," said Mathilde. Here was another tremendous
+moment crowding upon her--the introduction of her beautiful mother to
+this new friend, but even more, the introduction to her mother of this
+wonderful new friend, whose flavor of romance and interest no one, she
+supposed, could miss. Yet Mrs. Farron seemed to be taking it all very
+calmly, greeting him, taking his chair as being a trifle more comfortable
+than the others, trying to cover the doubt in her own mind whether she
+ought to recognize him as an old acquaintance. Was he new or one of the
+ones she had seen a dozen times before?
+
+There was nothing exactly artificial in Mrs. Farron's manner, but, like a
+great singer who has learned perfect enunciation even in the most trivial
+sentences of every-day matters, she, as a great beauty, had learned the
+perfection of self-presentation, which probably did not wholly desert her
+even in the dentist's chair.
+
+She drew off her long, pale, spotless gloves.
+
+"No tea, my dear," she said. "I've just had it," she added to Wayne,
+"with an old aunt of mine. Aunt Alberta," she threw over her shoulder to
+Mathilde. "I am very unfortunate, Mr. Wayne; this town is full of my
+relations, tucked away in forgotten oases, and I'm their only connection
+with the vulgar, modern world. My aunt's favorite excitement is
+disapproving of me. She was particularly trying to-day." Mrs. Farron
+seemed to debate whether or not it would be tiresome to go thoroughly
+into the problem of Aunt Alberta, and to decide that it would; for she
+said, with an abrupt change, "Were you at this party last night that
+Mathilde enjoyed so much?"
+
+"Yes," said Wayne. "Why weren't you?"
+
+"I wasn't asked. It isn't the fashion to ask mothers and daughters to the
+same parties any more. We dance so much better than they do." She leaned
+over, and rang the little enamel bell that dangled at the arm of her
+daughter's sofa. "You can't imagine, Mr. Wayne, how much better I dance
+than Mathilde."
+
+"I hope it needn't be left to the imagination."
+
+"Oh, I'm not sure. That was the subject of Aunt Alberta's talk this
+afternoon--my still dancing. She says she put on caps at thirty-five."
+Mrs. Farron ran her eyebrows whimsically together and looked up at her
+daughter's visitor.
+
+Mathilde was immensely grateful to her mother for taking so much trouble
+to be charming; only now she rather spoiled it by interrupting Wayne in
+the midst of a sentence, as if she had never been as much interested as
+she had seemed. Pringle had appeared in answer to her ring, and she asked
+him sharply:
+
+"Is Mr. Farron in?"
+
+"Mr. Farron's in his room, Madam."
+
+At this she appeared to give her attention wholly back to Wayne, but
+Mathilde knew that she was really busy composing an escape. She seemed to
+settle back, to encourage her visitor to talk indefinitely; but when the
+moment came for her to answer, she rose to her feet in the midst of her
+sentence, and, still talking, wandered to the door and disappeared.
+
+As the door shut firmly behind her Wayne said, as if there had been no
+interruption:
+
+"It was love you were speaking of, you know."
+
+"But don't you think my mother is marvelous?" she asked, not content to
+take up even the absorbing topic until this other matter had received due
+attention.
+
+"I should say so! But one isn't, of course, overwhelmed to find that
+your mother is beautiful."
+
+"And she's so good!" Mathilde went on. "She's always thinking of things
+to do for me and my grandfather and Mr. Farron and all these old, old
+relations. She went away just now only because she knows that as soon as
+Mr. Farron comes in he asks for her. She's perfect to every one."
+
+He came and sat down beside her again.
+
+"It's going to be much easier for her daughter," he said: "you have to
+be perfect only to one person. Now, what was it you were going to say
+about love?"
+
+Again they looked at each other; again Miss Severance had the sensation
+of drowning, of being submerged in some strange elixir.
+
+She was rescued by Pringle's opening the door and announcing:
+
+"Mr. Lanley."
+
+Wayne stood up.
+
+"I suppose I must go," he said.
+
+"No, no," she returned a little wildly, and added, as if this were
+the reason why she opposed his departure. "This is my grandfather. You
+must see him."
+
+Wayne sat down again, in the chair on the other side of the tea-table.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Mathilde had been wrong in telling Wayne that her mother had gone
+upstairs in obedience to an impulse of kindness. She had gone to quiet a
+small, gnawing anxiety that had been with her all the day, a haunting,
+elusive, persistent impression that something was wrong between her and
+her husband.
+
+All the day, as she had gone about from one thing to another, her mind
+had been diligently seeking in some event of the outside world an
+explanation of a slight obscuration of his spirit; but her heart, more
+egotistical, had stoutly insisted that the cause must lie in her. Did he
+love her less? Was she losing her charm for him? Were five years the
+limit of a human relation like theirs? Was she to watch the dying down of
+his flame, and try to shelter and fan it back to life as she had seen so
+many other women do?
+
+Or was the trouble only that she had done something to wound his aloof
+and sensitive spirit, seldom aloof to her? Their intimate life had never
+been a calm one. Farron's interests were concentrated, and his
+temperament was jealous. A woman couldn't, as Adelaide sometimes had
+occasion to say to herself, keep men from making love to her; she did not
+always want to. Farron could be relentless, and she was not without a
+certain contemptuous obstinacy. Yet such conflicts as these she had
+learned not to dread, but sometimes deliberately to precipitate, for they
+ended always in a deeper sense of unity, and, on her part, in a fresh
+sense of his supremacy.
+
+If he had been like most of the men she knew, she would have assumed that
+something had gone wrong in business. With her first husband she had
+always been able to read in his face as he entered the house the full
+history of his business day. Sometimes she had felt that there was
+something insulting in the promptness of her inquiry, "Has anything gone
+wrong, Joe?" But Severance had never appeared to feel the insult; only as
+time went on, had grown more and more ready, as her interest became more
+and more lackadaisical, to pour out the troubles and, much more rarely,
+the joys of his day. One of the things she secretly admired most about
+Farron was his independence of her in such matters. No half-contemptuous
+question would elicit confidence from him, so that she had come to think
+it a great honor if by any chance he did drop her a hint as to the mood
+that his day's work had occasioned. But for the most part he was
+unaffected by such matters. Newspaper attacks and business successes did
+not seem to reach the area where he suffered or rejoiced. They were to be
+dealt with or ignored, but they could neither shadow or elate him.
+
+So that not only egotism, but experience, bade her look to her own
+conduct for some explanation of the chilly little mist that had been
+between them for twenty-four hours.
+
+As soon as the drawing-room door closed behind her she ran up-stairs like
+a girl. There was no light in his study, and she went on into his
+bedroom. He was lying on the sofa; he had taken off his coat, and his
+arms were clasped under his head; he was smoking a long cigar. To find
+him idle was unusual. His was not a contemplative nature; a trade
+journal or a detective novel were the customary solace of odd moments
+like this.
+
+He did not move as she entered, but he turned his eyes slowly and
+seriously upon her. His eyes were black. He was a very dark man, with a
+smooth, brown skin and thick, fine hair, which clung closely to his
+broad, rather massive head. He was clean shaven, so that, as Adelaide
+loved to remember a friend of his had once suggested, his business
+competitors might take note of the stern lines of his mouth and chin.
+
+She came in quickly, and shut the door behind her, and then dropping on
+her knees beside him, she laid her head against his heart. He put out his
+hand, touched her face, and said:
+
+"Take off this veil."
+
+The taking off of Adelaide's veil was not a process to be accomplished
+ill-advisedly or lightly. Lucie, her maid, had put it on, with much
+gathering together and looking into the glass over her mistress's
+shoulder, and it was held in place with shining pins and hair-pins. She
+lifted her head, sank back upon her heels, and raised her arms to the
+offending cobweb of black meshes, while her husband went on in a tone
+not absolutely denuded of reproach:
+
+"You've been in some time."
+
+"Yes,"--she stuck the first pin into the upholstery of the sofa,--"but
+Pringle told me Mathilde had a visitor, and I thought it was my duty to
+stop and be a little parental."
+
+"A young man?"
+
+"Yes. I forget his name--just like all these young men nowadays, alert
+and a little too much at his ease, but amusing in his way. He said, among
+other things--"
+
+But Farron, it appeared, was not exclusively interested in the words of
+Mathilde's visitor; for at this instant, perceiving that his wife had
+disengaged herself from her veil, he sat up, caught her to him, and
+pressed his lips to hers.
+
+"O Adelaide!" he said, and it seemed to her he spoke with a sort of
+agony.
+
+She held him away from her.
+
+"Vincent, what is it?" she asked.
+
+"What is what?"
+
+"Is anything wrong?"
+
+"Between us?"
+
+Oh, she knew that method of his, to lead her on to make definite
+statements about impressions of which nothing definite could be
+accurately said.
+
+"No, I won't be pinned down," she said; "but I feel it, the way a
+rheumatic feels it, when the wind goes into the east."
+
+He continued to look at her gravely; she thought he was going to speak
+when a knock came at the door. It was Pringle announcing the visit of
+Mr. Lanley.
+
+Adelaide rose slowly to her feet, and, walking to her husband's
+dressing-table, repinned her hat, and caught up the little stray locks
+which grew in deep, sharp points at the back of her head.
+
+"You'll come down, too?" she said.
+
+Farron was looking about for his coat, and as he put it on he
+observed dryly:
+
+"The young man is seeing all the family."
+
+"Oh, he won't mind," she answered. "He probably hasn't the slightest wish
+to see Mathilde alone. They both struck me as sorry when I left them;
+they were running down. You can't imagine, Vin, how little romance there
+is among all these young people."
+
+"They leave it to us," he answered. This was exactly in his accustomed
+manner, and as they went down-stairs together her heart felt lighter,
+though the long, black, shiny pin stuck harmlessly into the upholstery of
+the sofa was like a mile-stone, for afterward she remembered that her
+questions had gone unanswered.
+
+Wayne was still in the drawing-room, and Mathilde, who loved her
+grandfather, was making a gentle fuss over him, a process which consisted
+largely in saying: "O Grandfather! Oh, you didn't! O _Grandfather_!"
+
+Mr. Lanley, though a small man and now over sixty, had a distinct
+presence. He wore excellent gray clothes of the same shade as his hair,
+and out of this neutrality of tint his bright, brown eyes sparkled
+piercingly.
+
+He had begun life with the assumption that to be a New York Lanley was in
+itself enough, a comfortable creed in which many of his relations had
+obscurely lived and died. But before he was graduated from Columbia
+College he began to doubt whether the profession of being an aristocrat
+in a democracy was a man's job. At no time in his life did he deny the
+value of birth and breeding; but he came to regard them as a
+responsibility solemn and often irritating to those who did not possess
+them, though he was no longer content with the current views of his
+family that they were a sufficient attainment in themselves.
+
+He was graduated from college in 1873, and after a summer at the family
+place on the Hudson, hot, fertile, and inaccessible, which his sister
+Alberta was at that time occupying, he had arranged a trip round the
+world. September of that year brought the great panic, and swept away
+many larger and solider fortunes than the Lanleys'. Mr. Lanley decided
+that he must go to work, though he abandoned his traditions no further
+than to study law. His ancestors, like many of the aristocrats of the
+early days, had allowed their opinions of fashion to influence too much
+their selection of real estate. All through the late seventies, while his
+brothers and sisters were clinging sentimentally to brownstone fronts in
+Stuyvesant Square or red-brick facades in Great Jones Street, Mr. Lanley
+himself, unaffected by recollections of Uncle Joel's death or grandma's
+marriage, had been parting with his share in such properties, and
+investing along the east side of the park.
+
+By the time he was forty he was once more a fairly rich man. He had left
+the practice of law to become the president of the Peter Stuyvesant Trust
+Company, for which he had been counsel. After fifteen years he had
+retired from this, too, and had become, what he insisted nature had
+always intended him to be, a gentleman of leisure. He retained a
+directorship in the trust company, was a trustee of his university, and
+was a thorny and inquiring member of many charitable boards.
+
+He prided himself on having emancipated himself from the ideas of his own
+generation. It bored him to listen to his cousins lamenting the
+vulgarities of modern life, the lack of elegance in present-day English,
+or to hear them explain as they borrowed money from him the sort of thing
+a gentleman could or could not do for a living. But on the subject of
+what a lady might do he still held fixed and unalterable notions; nor
+did he ever find it tiresome to hear his own daughter expound the axioms
+of this subject with a finality he had taught her in her youth. Having
+freed himself from fine-gentlemanism, he had quite unconsciously fallen
+the more easily a prey to fine-ladyism; all his conservatism had gone
+into that, as a man, forced to give up his garden, might cherish one
+lovely potted plant.
+
+At a time when private schools were beginning to flourish once more he
+had been careful to educate Adelaide entirely at home with governesses.
+Every summer he took her abroad, and showed her, and talked with her
+about, books, pictures, and buildings; he inoculated her with such
+fundamentals as that a lady never wears imitation lace on her
+underclothes, and the past of the verb to "eat" is pronounced to rhyme
+with "bet." She spoke French and German fluently, and could read Italian.
+He considered her a perfectly educated woman. She knew nothing of
+business, political economy, politics, or science. He himself had never
+been deeply interested in American politics, though very familiar with
+the lives of English statesmen. He was a great reader of memoirs and of
+the novels of Disraeli and Trollope. Of late he had taken to motoring.
+
+He kissed his daughter and nodded--a real New York nod--to his
+son-in-law.
+
+"I've come to tell you, Adelaide," he began.
+
+"Such a thing!" murmured Mathilde, shaking her golden head above the cup
+of tea she was making for him, making in just the way he liked; for she
+was a little person who remembered people's tastes.
+
+"I thought you'd rather hear it than read it in the papers."
+
+"Goodness, Papa, you talk as if you had been getting married!"
+
+"No." Mr. Lanley hesitated, and looked up at her brightly. "No; but I
+think I did have a proposal the other day."
+
+"From Mrs. Baxter?" asked Adelaide. This was almost war. Mrs. Baxter was
+a regal and possessive widow from Baltimore whose long and regular visits
+to Mr. Lanley had once occasioned his family some alarm, though time had
+now given them a certain institutional safety.
+
+Her father was not flurried by the reference.
+
+"No," he said; "though she writes me, I'm glad to say, that she is
+coming soon."
+
+"You don't tell me!" said Adelaide. The cream of the winter season was
+usually the time Mrs. Baxter selected for her visit.
+
+Her father did not notice her.
+
+"If Mrs. Baxter should ever propose to me," he went on thoughtfully, "I
+shouldn't refuse. I don't think I should have the--"
+
+"The chance?" said his daughter.
+
+"I was going to say the fortitude. But this," he went on, "was an elderly
+cousin, who expressed a wish to come and be my housekeeper. Perhaps
+matrimony was not intended. Mathilde, my dear, how does one tell nowadays
+whether one is being proposed to or not?"
+
+In this poignant and unexpected crisis Mathilde turned slowly and
+painfully crimson. How _did_ one tell? It was a question which at the
+moment was anything but clear to her.
+
+"I should always assume it in doubtful cases, sir," said Wayne, very
+distinctly. He and Mathilde did not even glance at each other.
+
+"It wasn't your proposal that you came to announce to us, though, was
+it, Papa?" said Adelaide.
+
+"No," answered Mr. Lanley. "The fact is, I've been arrested."
+
+"Again?"
+
+"Yes; most unjustly, most unjustly." His brows contracted, and then
+relaxed at a happy memory. "It's the long, low build of the car. It looks
+so powerful that the police won't give you a chance. It was nosing
+through the park--"
+
+"At about thirty miles an hour," said Farron.
+
+"Well, not a bit over thirty-five. A lovely morning, no one in sight, I
+may have let her out a little. All of a sudden one of these mounted
+fellows jumped out from the bushes along the bridle-path. They're a
+fine-looking lot, Vincent."
+
+Farron asked who the judge was, and, Mr. Lanley named him--named him
+slightly wrong, and Farron corrected him.
+
+"I'll get you off," he said.
+
+Adelaide looked up at her husband admiringly. This was the aspect of him
+that she loved best. It seemed to her like magic what Vincent could do.
+Her father, she thought, took it very calmly. What would have happened to
+him if she had not brought Farron into the family to rescue and protect?
+The visiting boy, she noticed, was properly impressed. She saw him give
+Farron quite a dog-like look as he took his departure. To Mathilde he
+only bowed. No arrangements had been made for a future meeting. Mathilde
+tried to convey to him in a prolonged look that if he would wait only
+five minutes all would be well, that her grandfather never paid long
+visits; but the door closed behind him. She became immediately
+overwhelmed by the fear, which had an element of desire in it, too, that
+her family would fall to discussing him, would question her as to how
+long she had known him, and why she liked him, and what they talked
+about, and whether she had been expecting a visit, sitting there in her
+best dress. Then slowly she took in the fact that they were going to talk
+about nothing but Mr. Lanley's arrest. She marveled at the obtuseness of
+older people--to have stood at the red-hot center of youth and love and
+not even to know it! She drew her shoulders together, feeling very
+lonely and strong. As they talked, she allowed her eyes to rest first on
+one speaker and then on the other, as if she were following each word of
+the discussion. As a matter of fact she was rehearsing with an inner
+voice the tone of Wayne's voice when he had said that he loved her.
+
+Then suddenly she decided that she would be much happier alone in her own
+room. She rose, patted her grandfather on the shoulder, and prepared to
+escape. He, not wishing to be interrupted at the moment, patted her hand
+in return.
+
+"Hello!" he exclaimed. "Hands are cold, my dear."
+
+She caught Farron's cool, black eyes, and surprised herself by answering:
+
+"Yes; but, then, they always are." This was quite untrue, but every one
+was perfectly satisfied with it.
+
+As she left the room Mr. Lanley was saying:
+
+"Yes, I don't want to go to Blackwell's Island. Lovely spot, of course.
+My grandfather used to tell me he remembered it when the Blackwell family
+still lived there. But I shouldn't care to wear stripes--except for the
+pleasure of telling Alberta about it. It would give her a year's
+occupation, her suffering over my disgrace, wouldn't it, Adelaide?"
+
+"She'd scold me," said Adelaide, looking beautifully martyred. Then
+turning to her husband, she asked. "Will it be very difficult, Vincent,
+getting papa off?" She wanted it to be difficult, she wanted him to give
+her material out of which she could form a picture of him as a savior;
+but he only shook his head and said:
+
+"That young man is in love with Mathilde."
+
+"O Vin! Those children?"
+
+Mr. Lanley pricked up his ears like a terrier.
+
+"In love?" he exclaimed. "And who is he? Not one of the East Sussex
+Waynes, I hope. Vulgar people. They always were; began life as
+auctioneers in my father's time. Is he one of those, Adelaide?"
+
+"I have no idea who he is, if any one," said Adelaide. "I never saw or
+heard of him before this afternoon."
+
+"And may I ask," said her father, "if you intend to let your daughter
+become engaged to a young man of whom you know nothing whatsoever?"
+
+Adelaide looked extremely languid, one of her methods of showing
+annoyance.
+
+"Really, Papa," she said, "the fact that he has come once to pay an
+afternoon visit to Mathilde does not, it seems to me, make an engagement
+inevitable. My child is not absolutely repellent, you know, and a good
+many young men come to the house." Then suddenly remembering that her
+oracle had already spoken on this subject, she asked more humbly, "What
+was it made you say he was in love, Vin?"
+
+"Just an impression," said Farron.
+
+Mr. Lanley had been thinking it over.
+
+"It was not the custom in my day," he began, and then remembering that
+this was one of his sister Alberta's favorite openings, he changed the
+form of his sentence. "I never allowed you to see stray young men--"
+
+His daughter interrupted him.
+
+"But I always saw them, Papa. I used to let them come early in the
+afternoon before you came in."
+
+In his heart Mr. Lanley doubted that this had been a regular custom, but
+he knew it would be unwise to argue the point; so he started fresh.
+
+"When a young man is attentive to a girl like Mathilde--"
+
+"But he isn't," said Adelaide. "At least not what I should have called
+attentive when I was a girl."
+
+"Your experience was not long, my dear. You were married at
+Mathilde's age."
+
+"You may be sure of one thing, Papa, that I don't desire an early
+marriage for my daughter."
+
+"Very likely," returned her father, getting up, and buttoning the last
+button of his coat; "but you may have noticed that we can't always get
+just what we most desire for our children."
+
+When he had gone, Vincent looked at his wife and smiled, but smiled
+without approval. She twisted her shoulders.
+
+"Oh, I suppose so," she said; "but I do so hate to be scolded about the
+way I bring up Mathilde."
+
+"Or about anything else, my dear."
+
+"I don't hate to be scolded by you," she returned. "In fact, I sometimes
+get a sort of servile enjoyment from it. Besides," she went on, "as a
+matter of fact, I bring Mathilde up particularly well, quite unlike these
+wild young women I see everywhere else. She tells me everything, and I
+have perfectly the power of making her hate any one I disapprove of. But
+you'll try and find out something about this young man, won't you, Vin?"
+
+"We'll have a full report on him to-morrow. Do you know what his
+first name is?"
+
+"At the moment I don't recall his last. Oh, yes--Wayne. I'll ask Mathilde
+when we go up-stairs."
+
+From her own bedroom door she called up.
+
+"Mathilde, what is the name of your young friend?"
+
+There was a little pause before Mathilde answered that she was sorry, but
+she didn't know.
+
+Mrs. Farron turned to her husband and made a little gesture to indicate
+that this ignorance on the girl's part did not bear out his theory; but
+she saw that he did not admit it, that he clung still to his
+impression. "And Vincent's impressions--" she said to herself as she
+went in to dress.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Mr. Lanley was ruffled as he left his daughter's drawing-room.
+
+"As if I had wanted her to marry at eighteen," he said to himself; and
+he took his hat crossly from Pringle and set it hard on his head at the
+slight angle which he preferred. Then reflecting that Pringle was not
+in any way involved, he unbent slightly, and said something that
+sounded like:
+
+"Haryer, Pringle?"
+
+Pringle, despite his stalwart masculine appearance, had in speaking a
+surprisingly high, squeaky voice.
+
+"I keep my health, thank you, sir," he said. "Anna has been somewhat
+ailing." Anna was his wife, to whom he usually referred as "Mrs.
+Pringle"; but he made an exception in speaking to Mr. Lanley, for she had
+once been the Lanleys' kitchen-maid. "Your car, sir?"
+
+No, Mr. Lanley was walking--walking, indeed, more quickly than usual
+under the stimulus of annoyance.
+
+Nothing had ever happened that made him suffer as he had suffered through
+his daughter's divorce. Divorce was one of the modern ideas which he had
+imagined he had accepted. As a lawyer he had expressed himself as willing
+always to take the lady's side; but in the cases which he actually took
+he liked to believe that the wife was perfect and the husband
+inexcusable. He could not comfort himself with any such belief in his
+daughter's case.
+
+Adelaide's conduct had been, as far as he could see, irreproachable; but,
+then, so had Severance's. This was what had made the gossip, almost the
+scandal, of the thing. Even his sister Alberta had whispered to him that
+if Severance had been unfaithful to Adelaide--But poor Severance had not
+been unfaithful; he had not even become indifferent. He loved his wife,
+he said, as much as on the day he married her. He was extremely unhappy.
+Mr. Lanley grew to dread the visits of his huge, blond son-in-law, who
+used actually to sob in the library, and ask for explanations of
+something which Mr. Lanley had never been able to understand.
+
+And how obstinate Adelaide had been! She, who had been such a docile
+girl, and then for many years so completely under the thumb of her
+splendid-looking husband, had suddenly become utterly intractable. She
+would listen to no reason and brook no delay. She had been willing enough
+to explain; she had explained repeatedly, but the trouble was he could
+not understand the explanation. She did not love her husband any more,
+she said. Mr. Lanley pointed out to her that this was no legal grounds
+for a divorce.
+
+"Yes, but I look down upon him," she went on.
+
+"On poor Joe?" her father had asked innocently, and had then discovered
+that this was the wrong thing to say. She had burst out, "Poor Joe! poor
+Joe!" That was the way every one considered him. Was it her fault if he
+excited pity and contempt instead of love and respect? Her love, she
+intimated, had been of a peculiarly eternal sort; Severance himself was
+to blame for its extinction. Mr. Lanley discovered that in some way she
+considered the intemperance of Severance's habits to be involved. But
+this was absurd. It was true that for a year or two Severance had taken
+to drinking rather more than was wise; but, Mr. Lanley had thought at the
+time, the poor young man had not needed any artificial stimulant in the
+days when Adelaide had fully and constantly admired him. He had seen
+Severance come home several times not exactly drunk, but rather more
+boyishly boastful and hilarious than usual. Even Mr. Lanley, a naturally
+temperate man, had not found Joe repellent in the circumstances.
+Afterward he had been thankful for this weakness: it gave him the only
+foundation on which he could build a case not for the courts, of course,
+but for the world. Unfortunately, however, Severance had pulled up before
+there was any question of divorce.
+
+That was another confusing fact. Adelaide had managed him so beautifully.
+Her father had not known her wonderful powers until he saw the skill and
+patience with which she had dealt with Joe Severance's drinking. Joe
+himself was eager to own that he owed his cure entirely to her. Mr.
+Lanley had been proud of her; she had turned out, he thought, just what a
+woman ought to be; and then, on top of it, she had come to him one day
+and announced that she would never live with Joe again.
+
+"But why not?" he had asked.
+
+"Because I don't love him," she had said.
+
+Then Mr. Lanley knew how little his acceptance of the idea of divorce in
+general had reconciled him to the idea of the divorce of his own
+daughter--a Lanley--Mrs. Adelaide Lanley, Mrs. Adelaide Severance. His
+sense of fitness was shocked, though he pleaded with her first on the
+ground of duty, and then under the threat of scandal. With her beauty
+and Severance's popularity, for from his college days he had been
+extremely popular with men, the divorce excited uncommon interest.
+Severance's unconcealed grief, a rather large circle of devoted friends
+in whom he confided, and the fact that Adelaide had to go to Nevada to
+get her divorce, led most people to believe that she had simply found
+some one she liked better. Mr. Lanley would have believed it himself,
+but he couldn't. Farron had not appeared until she had been divorced for
+several years.
+
+Lanley still cherished an affection for Severance, who had very soon
+married again, a local belle in the Massachusetts manufacturing town
+where he now lived. She was said to resemble Adelaide.
+
+No, Mr. Lanley could not see that he had had anything to reproach himself
+with in regard to his daughter's first marriage. They had been young, of
+course; all the better. He had known the Severances for years; and Joe
+was handsome, hard working, had rowed on his crew, and every one spoke
+well of him. Certainly they had been in love--more in love than he liked
+to see two people, at least when one of them was his own daughter. He had
+suggested their waiting a year or two, but no one had backed him up. The
+Severances had been eager for the marriage, naturally. Mr. Lanley could
+still see the young couple as they turned from the altar, young,
+beautiful, and confident.
+
+He had missed his daughter terribly, not only her physical presence in
+the house, but the exercise of his influence over her, which in old
+times had been perhaps a trifle autocratic. He had hated being told what
+Joe thought and said; yet he could hardly object to her docility. That
+was the way he had brought her up. He did not reckon pliancy in a woman
+as a weakness; or if he had had any temptation to do so, it had vanished
+in the period when Joe Severance had taken to drink. In that crisis
+Adelaide had been anything but weak. Every one had been so grateful to
+her,--he and Joe and the Severances,--and then immediately afterward the
+crash came.
+
+Women! Mr. Lanley shook his head, still moving briskly northward with
+that quick jaunty walk of his. And this second marriage--what about that?
+They seemed happy. Farron was a fine fellow, but not, it seemed to him,
+so attractive to a woman as Severance. Could he hold a woman like
+Adelaide? He wasn't a man to stand any nonsense, though, and Mr. Lanley
+nodded; then, as it were, withdrew the nod on remembering that poor Joe
+had not wanted to stand any nonsense either. What in similar
+circumstances could Farron do? Adelaide always resented his asking how
+things were going, but how could he help being anxious? How could any one
+rest content on a hillside who had once been blown up by a volcano?
+
+He might not have been any more content if he had stayed to dinner at his
+son-in-law's, as he had been asked to do. The Farrons were alone.
+Mathilde was going to a dinner, with a dance after. She came into the
+dining-room to say good night and to promise to be home early, not to
+stay and dance. She was not allowed two parties on successive nights, not
+because her health was anything but robust, but rather because her mother
+considered her too young for such vulgar excess.
+
+When she had gone, Farron observed:
+
+"That child has a will of iron."
+
+"Vincent!" said his wife. "She does everything I suggest to her."
+
+"Her will just now is to please you in everything. Wait until she
+rebels."
+
+"But women don't rebel against the people they love. I don't have to tell
+you that, do I? I never have to manoeuver the child, never have to coax
+or charm her to do what I want."
+
+He smiled at her across the table.
+
+"You have great faith in those methods, haven't you?"
+
+"They work, Vin."
+
+He nodded as if no one knew that better than he.
+
+Soon after dinner he went up-stairs to write some letters. She followed
+him about ten o'clock. She came and leaned one hand on his shoulder and
+one on his desk.
+
+"Still working?" she said. She had been aware of no desire to see what he
+was writing, but she was instantly aware that his blotting-paper had
+fallen across the sheet, that the sheet was not a piece of note-paper,
+but one of a large pad on which he had been apparently making notes.
+
+Her diamond bracelet had slipped down her wrist and lay upon the
+blotting-paper; he slowly and carefully pushed it up her slim, round arm
+until it once more clung in place.
+
+"I've nearly finished," he said; and to her ears there was some under
+sound of pain or of constraint in his tone.
+
+A little later he strolled, still dressed, into her room. She was already
+in bed, and he came and sat on the foot of the bed, with one foot tucked
+under him and his arms folded.
+
+Her mind during the interval had been exclusively occupied with the
+position of that piece of blotting-paper. Could it be there was some
+other woman whose ghost-like presence she was just beginning to feel
+haunting their relation? The impersonality of Vincent's manner was an
+armor against such attacks, but this armor, as Adelaide knew, was more
+apparent than real. If one could get beyond that, one was at the very
+heart of the man. If some fortuitous circumstance had brought a sudden
+accidental intimacy between him and another woman--What woman loving
+strength and power could resist the sight of Vincent in action, Vincent
+as she saw him?
+
+Yet with a good capacity for believing the worst of her fellow-creatures,
+Adelaide did not really believe in the other woman. That, she knew,
+would bring a change in the fundamentals of her relationship with her
+husband. This was only a barrier that left the relation itself untouched.
+
+Before very long she began to think the situation was all in her own
+imagination. He was so amused, so eager to talk. Silent as he was apt to
+be with the rest of the world, with her he sometimes showed a love of
+gossip that enchanted her. And now it seemed to her that he was leading
+her on from subject to subject through a childish dislike to going to
+bed. They were actually giggling over Mr. Lanley's adventure when a
+motor-brake squeaked in the silence of the night, a motor-door slammed.
+For the first time Adelaide remembered her daughter. It was after twelve
+o'clock. A knock came at her door. She wrapped her swan's-down garment
+about her and went to the door.
+
+"O Mama, have you been worried?" the girl asked. She was standing in the
+narrow corridor, with her arms full of shining favors; there could be no
+question whatever that she had stayed for the dance. "Are you angry?
+Have I been keeping you awake?"
+
+"I thought you would have been home an hour ago."
+
+"I know. I want to tell you about it. Mama, how lovely you look in that
+blue thing! Won't you come up-stairs with me while I undress?"
+
+Adelaide shook her head.
+
+"Not to-night," she answered.
+
+"You are angry with me," the girl went on. "But if you will come, I will
+explain. I have something to tell you, Mama."
+
+Mrs. Farron's heart stood still. The phrase could mean only one thing.
+She went up-stairs with her daughter, sent the maid away, and herself
+began to undo the soft, pink silk.
+
+"It needs an extra hook," she murmured. "I told her it did."
+
+Mathilde craned her neck over her shoulder, as if she had ever been able
+to see the middle of her back.
+
+"But it doesn't show, does it?" she asked.
+
+"It perfectly well might."
+
+Mathilde stepped out of her dress, and flung it over a chair. In her
+short petticoat, with her ankles showing and her arms bare, she looked
+like a very young girl, and when she put up her hands and took the pins
+out of her hair, so that it fell over her shoulders, she might have
+been a child.
+
+The silence began to grow awkward. Mathilde put on her dressing-gown; it
+was perfectly straight, and made her look like a little white column. A
+glass of milk and some biscuits were waiting for her. She pushed a chair
+near her fire for her mother, and herself remained standing, with her
+glass of milk in her hand.
+
+"Mama," she said suddenly, "I suppose I'm what you'd call engaged."
+
+"O Mathilde! not to that boy who was here to-day?"
+
+"Why not to him?"
+
+"I know nothing about him."
+
+"I don't know very much myself. Yes, it's Pete Wayne. Pierson his name
+is, but every one calls him Pete. How strange it was that I did not even
+know his first name when you asked me!"
+
+A single ray pierced Mrs. Farron's depression: Vincent had known,
+Vincent's infallibility was confirmed. She did not know what to say. She
+sat looking sadly, obliquely at the floor like a person who has been
+aggrieved. She was wondering whether she should be to her daughter a
+comrade or a ruler, a confederate or a policeman. Of course in all
+probability the thing would be better stopped. But could this be
+accomplished by immediate action, or could she invite confidences and yet
+commit herself to nothing?
+
+She raised her eyes.
+
+"I do not approve of youthful marriages," she said.
+
+"O Mama! And you were only eighteen yourself."
+
+"That is why."
+
+Mathilde was frightened not only by the intense bitterness of her
+mother's tone, but also by the obvious fact that she was face to face
+with the explanation of the separation of her parents. She had been only
+nine years old at the time. She had loved her father, had found him a
+better playfellow than her mother, had wept bitterly at parting with him,
+and had missed him. And then gradually her mother, who had before seemed
+like a beautiful, but remote, princess, had begun to make of her an
+intimate and grown-up friend, to consult her and read with her and
+arrange happinesses in her life, to win, to, if the truth must be told,
+reconquer her. Perhaps even Adelaide would not have succeeded so easily
+in effacing Severance's image had not he himself so quickly remarried.
+Mathilde went several times to stay with the new household after Adelaide
+in secret, tearful conference with her father had been forced to consent.
+
+To Mathilde these visits had been an unacknowledged torture. She never
+knew quite what to mention and what to leave untouched. There was always
+a constraint between the three of them. Her father, when alone with her,
+would question her, with strange, eager pauses, as to how her mother
+looked. Her mother's successor, whom she could not really like, would
+question her more searchingly, more embarrassingly, with an ill-concealed
+note of jealousy in every word. Even at twelve years Mathilde was shocked
+by the strain of hatred in her father's new wife, who seemed to reproach
+her for fashion and fineness and fastidiousness, qualities of which the
+girl was utterly unaware. She could have loved her little half-brother
+when he appeared upon the scene, but Mrs. Severance did not encourage the
+bond, and gradually Mathilde's visits to her father ceased.
+
+As a child she had been curious about the reasons for the parting, but as
+she grew older it had seemed mere loyalty to accept the fact without
+asking why; she had perhaps not wanted to know why. But now, she saw, she
+was to hear.
+
+"Mathilde, do you still love your father?"
+
+"I think I do, Mama. I feel very sorry for him."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I don't know why. I dare say he is happy."
+
+"I dare say he is, poor Joe." Adelaide paused. "Well, my dear, that was
+the reason of our parting. One can pity a son or a brother, but not a
+husband. Weakness kills love. A woman cannot be the leader, the guide,
+and keep any romance. O Mathilde, I never want you to feel the
+humiliation of finding yourself stronger than the man you love. That is
+why I left your father, and my justification is his present happiness.
+This inferior little person he has married, she does as well. Any one
+would have done as well."
+
+Mathilde was puzzled by her mother's evident conviction that the
+explanation was complete. She asked after a moment:
+
+"But what was it that made you think at first that you did love
+him, Mama?"
+
+"Just what makes you think you love this boy--youth, flattery, desire to
+love. He was magnificently handsome, your father. I saw him admired by
+other men, apparently a master; I was too young to judge, my dear. You
+shan't be allowed to make that mistake; you shall have time to consider."
+
+Mathilde smiled.
+
+"I don't want time," she said.
+
+"I did not know I did."
+
+"I don't think I feel about love as you do," said the girl, slowly.
+
+"Every woman does."
+
+Mathilde shook her head.
+
+"It's just Pete as he is that I love. I don't care which of us leads."
+
+"But you will."
+
+The girl had not yet reached a point where she could describe the very
+essence of her passion; she had to let this go. After a moment she said:
+
+"I see now why you chose Mr. Farron."
+
+"You mean you have never seen before?"
+
+"Not so clearly."
+
+Mrs. Farron bit her lips. To have missed understanding this seemed a
+sufficient proof of immaturity. She rose.
+
+"Well, my darling," she said in a tone of extreme reasonableness, "we
+shall decide nothing to-night. I know nothing against Mr. Wayne. He may
+be just the right person. We must see more of him. Do you know anything
+about his family?"
+
+Mathilde shook her head. "He lives alone with his mother. His father is
+dead. She's very good and interested in drunkards."
+
+"In _drunkards_?" Mrs. Farron just shut her eyes a second.
+
+"She has a mission that reforms them."
+
+"Is that his profession, too?"
+
+"Oh, no. He's in Wall Street--quite a good firm. O Mama, don't sigh like
+that! We know we can't be married at once. We are reasonable. You think
+not, because this has all happened so suddenly; but great things do
+happen suddenly. We love each other. That's all I wanted to tell you."
+
+"Love!" Adelaide looked at the little person before her, tried to recall
+the fading image of the young man, and then thought of the dominating
+figure in her own life. "My dear, you have no idea what love is."
+
+She took no notice of the queer, steady look the girl gave her in return.
+She went down-stairs. She had been gone more than an hour, and she knew
+that Vincent would have been long since asleep. He had, and prided
+himself on having, a great capacity for sleep. She tiptoed past his door,
+stole into her own room, and then, glancing in the direction of his, was
+startled to see that a light was burning. She went in; he was reading,
+and once again, as his eyes turned toward her, she thought she saw the
+same tragic appeal that she had felt that afternoon in his kiss.
+Trembling, she threw herself down beside him, clasping him to her.
+
+"O Vincent! oh, my dear!" she whispered, and began to cry. He did not ask
+her why she was crying; she wished that he would; his silence admitted
+that he knew of some adequate reason.
+
+"I feel that there is something wrong," she sobbed, "something
+terribly wrong."
+
+"Nothing could go wrong between you and me, my darling," he answered. His
+tone comforted, his touch was a comfort. Perhaps she was a coward, she
+said to herself, but she questioned him no further.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Wayne was not so prompt as Mathilde in making the announcement of their
+engagement. He and his mother breakfasted together rather hastily, for
+she was going to court that morning to testify in favor of one of her
+backsliding inebriates, and Wayne had not found the moment to introduce
+his own affairs.
+
+That afternoon he came home earlier than usual; it was not five o'clock.
+He passed Dr. Parret's flat on the first floor--Dr. Lily MacComb Parret.
+She was a great friend of his, and he felt a decided temptation to go in
+and tell her the news first; but reflecting that no one ought to hear it
+before his mother, he went on up-stairs. He lived on the fifth floor.
+
+He opened the door of the flat and went into the sitting-room. It was
+empty. He lighted the gas, which flared up, squeaking like a bagpipe. The
+room was square and crowded. Shelves ran all the way round it, tightly
+filled with books. In the center was a large writing-table, littered with
+papers, and on each side of the fireplace stood two worn, but
+comfortable, arm-chairs, each with a reading-lamp at its side. There was
+nothing beautiful in the furniture, and yet the room had its own charm.
+The house was a corner house and had once been a single dwelling. The
+shape of the room, its woodwork, its doors, its flat, white marble
+mantelpiece, belonged to an era of simple taste and good workmanship; but
+the greatest charm of the room was the view from the windows, of which it
+had four, two that looked east and two south, and gave a glimpse of the
+East River and its bridges.
+
+Wayne was not sorry his mother was out. He had begun to dread the
+announcement he had to make. At first he had thought only of her keen
+interest in his affairs, but later he had come to consider what this
+particular piece of news would mean to her. Say what you will, he
+thought, to tell your mother of your engagement is a little like casting
+off an old love.
+
+Ever since he could remember, he and his mother had lived in the
+happiest comradeship. His father, a promising young doctor, had died
+within a few years of his marriage. Pete had been brought up by his
+mother, but he had very little remembrance of any process of molding. It
+seemed to him as if they had lived in a sort of partnership since he had
+been able to walk and talk. It had been as natural for him to spend his
+hours after school in stamping and sealing her large correspondence as it
+had been for her to pinch and arrange for years so as to send him to the
+university from which his father had been graduated. She would have been
+glad, he knew, if he had decided to follow his father in the study of
+medicine, but he recoiled from so long a period of dependence; he liked
+to think that he brought to his financial reports something of a
+scientific inheritance.
+
+She had, he thought, every virtue that a mother could have, and she
+combined them with a gaiety of spirit that made her take her virtues as
+if they were the most delightful amusements. It was of this gaiety that
+he had first thought until Mathilde had pointed out to him that there was
+tragedy in the situation. "What will your mother do without you?" the
+girl kept saying. There was indeed nothing in his mother's life that
+could fill the vacancy he would leave. She had few intimate
+relationships. For all her devotion to her drunkards, he was the only
+personal happiness in her life.
+
+He went into the kitchen in search of her. This was evidently one of
+their servant's uncounted hours. While he was making himself some tea he
+heard his mother's key in the door. He called to her, and she appeared.
+
+"Why my hat, Mother dear?" he asked gently as he kissed her.
+
+Mrs. Wayne smiled absently, and put up her hand to the soft felt hat she
+was wearing.
+
+"I just went out to post some letters," she said, as if this were a
+complete explanation; then she removed a mackintosh that she happened to
+have on, though the day was fine. She was then seen to be wearing a dark
+skirt and a neat plain shirt that was open at the throat. Though no
+longer young, she somehow suggested a boy--a boy rather overtrained; she
+was far more boyish than Wayne. She had a certain queer beauty, too;
+not beauty of Adelaide's type, of structure and coloring and elegance,
+but beauty of expression. Life itself had written some fine lines of
+humor and resolve upon her face, and her blue-gray eyes seemed actually
+to flare with hope and intention. Her hair was of that light-brown shade
+in which plentiful gray made little change of shade; it was wound in a
+knot at the back of her head and gave her trouble. She was always
+pushing it up and repinning it into place, as if it were too heavy for
+her small head.
+
+"I wonder if there's anything to eat in the house," her son said.
+
+"I wonder." They moved together toward the ice-box.
+
+"Mother," said Pete, "that piece of pie has been in the ice-box at least
+three days. Let's throw it away."
+
+She took the saucer thoughtfully.
+
+"I like it so much," she said.
+
+"Then why don't you eat it?"
+
+"It's not good for me." She let Wayne take the saucer. "What do you
+know?" she asked.
+
+She had adopted slang as she adopted most labor-saving devices.
+
+"Well, I do know something new," said Wayne. He sat down on the kitchen
+table and poured out his tea. "New as the garden of Eden. I'm in love."
+
+"O Pete!" his mother cried, and the purest, most conventional maternal
+agony was in the tone. For an instant, crushed and terrified, she looked
+at him; and then something gay and impish appeared in her eyes, and she
+asked with a grin:
+
+"Is it some one perfectly awful?"
+
+"I'm afraid you'll think so. She's a sheltered, young, luxurious child,
+with birth, breeding, and money, everything you hate most."
+
+"O Pete!" she said again, but this time with a sort of sad resignation.
+Then shaking her head as if to say that she wasn't, after all, as narrow
+as he thought, she hitched her chair nearer the table and said eagerly,
+"Well, tell me all about it."
+
+Wayne looked down at his mother as she sat opposite him, with her elbows
+on the table, as keen as a child and as lively as a cricket. He asked
+himself if he had not drifted into a needlessly sentimental state of mind
+about her. He even asked himself, as he had done once or twice before in
+his life, whether her love for him implied the slightest dependence upon
+his society. Wasn't it perfectly possible that his going would free her
+life, would make it easier instead of harder? Every man, he knew, felt
+the element of freedom beneath the despair of breaking even the tenderest
+of ties. Some women, he supposed, might feel the same way about their
+love-affairs. But could they feel the same about their maternal
+relations? Could it be that his mother, that pure, heroic,
+self-sacrificing soul, was now thinking more about her liberty than her
+loss? Had not their relation always been peculiarly free? he found
+himself thinking reproachfully. Once, he remembered, when he had been
+working unusually hard he had welcomed her absence at one of her
+conferences on inebriety. Never before had he imagined that she could
+feel anything but regret at his absences. "Everybody is just alike," he
+found himself rather bitterly thinking.
+
+"What do you want to know about it?" he said aloud.
+
+"Why, everything," she returned.
+
+"I met her," he said, "two evenings ago at a dance. I never expected to
+fall in love at a dance."
+
+"Isn't it funny? No one ever really expects to fall in love at all, and
+everybody does."
+
+He glanced at her. He had been prepared to explain to her about love; and
+now it occurred to him for the first time that she knew all about it. He
+decided to ask her the great question which had been occupying his mind
+as a lover of a scientific habit of thought.
+
+"Mother," he said, "how much dependence is to be placed on love--one's
+own, I mean?"
+
+"Goodness, Pete! What a question to ask!"
+
+"Well, you might take a chance and tell me what you think. I have no
+doubts. My whole nature goes out to this girl; but I can't help knowing
+that if we go on feeling like this till we die, we shall be the
+exception. Love's a miracle. How much can one trust to it?"
+
+The moment he had spoken he knew that he was asking a great deal. It was
+torture to his mother to express an opinion on an abstract question. She
+did not lack decision of conduct. She could resolve in an instant to send
+a drunkard to an institution or take a trip round the world; but on a
+matter of philosophy of life it was as difficult to get her to commit
+herself as if she had been upon the witness-stand. Yet it was just in
+this realm that he particularly valued her opinion.
+
+"Oh," she said at last, "I don't believe that it's possible to play safe
+in love. It's a risk, but it's one of those risks you haven't much choice
+about taking. Life and death are like that, too. I don't think it pays to
+be always thinking about avoiding risks. Nothing, you know," she added,
+as if she were letting him in to rather a horrid little secret, "is
+really safe." And evidently glad to change the subject, she went on,
+"What will her family say?"
+
+"I can't think they will be pleased."
+
+"I suppose not. Who are they?"
+
+Wayne explained the family connections, but woke no associations in his
+mother's mind until he mentioned the name of Farron. Then he was
+astonished at the violence of her interest. She sprang to her feet; her
+eyes lighted up.
+
+"Why," she cried, "that's the man, that's the company, that Marty Burke
+works for! O Pete, don't you think you could get Mr. Farron to use his
+influence over Marty about Anita?"
+
+"Dear mother, do you think you can get him to use his influence over Mrs.
+Farron for me?"
+
+Marty Burke was the leader of the district and was reckoned a bad man.
+He and Mrs. Wayne had been waging a bitter war for some time over a
+young inebriate who had seduced a girl of the neighborhood. Mrs. Wayne
+was sternly trying to prosecute the inebriate; Burke was determined to
+protect him, first, by smirching the girl's name, and, next, by
+getting the girl's family to consent to a marriage, a solution that
+Mrs. Wayne considered most undesirable in view of the character of the
+prospective husband.
+
+Pete felt her interest sweep away from his affairs, and it had not
+returned when the telephone rang. He came back from answering it to tell
+his mother that Mr. Lanley, the grandfather of his love, was asking if
+she would see him for a few minutes that afternoon or evening. A visit
+was arranged for nine o'clock.
+
+"What's he like?" asked Mrs. Wayne, wrinkling her nose and looking
+very impish.
+
+"He seemed like a nice old boy; hasn't had a new idea, I should say,
+since 1880. And, Mother dear, you're going to dress, aren't you?"
+
+She resented the implication.
+
+"I shall be wonderful," she answered with emphasis. "And while he's here,
+I think you might go down and tell this news to Lily, yourself. Oh, I
+don't say she's in love with you--"
+
+"Lily," said Pete, "is leading far too exciting a life to be in love
+with any one."
+
+Punctually at nine, Mr. Lanley rang the bell of the flat. He had paused a
+few minutes before doing so, not wishing to weaken the effect of his
+mission by arriving out of breath. Adelaide had come to see him just
+before lunch. She pretended to minimize the importance of her news, but
+he knew she did so to evade reproach for the culpable irresponsibility of
+her attitude toward the young man's first visit.
+
+"And do you know anything more about him than you did yesterday?" he
+asked.
+
+She did. It appeared that Vincent had telephoned her from down town just
+before she came out.
+
+"Tiresome young man," she said, twisting her shoulders. "It seems there's
+nothing against him. His father was a doctor, his mother comes of decent
+people and is a respected reformer, the young man works for an ambitious
+new firm of brokers, who speak highly of him and give him a salary of
+$5000 a year."
+
+"The whole thing must be put a stop to," said Mr. Lanley.
+
+"Of course, of course," said his daughter. "But how? I can't forbid him
+the house because he's just an average young man."
+
+"I don't see why not, or at least on the ground that he's not the husband
+you would choose for her."
+
+"I think the best way will be to let him come to the house,"--she spoke
+with a sort of imperishable sweetness,--"but to turn Mathilde gradually
+against him."
+
+"But how can you turn her against him?"
+
+Adelaide looked very wistful.
+
+"You don't trust me," she moaned.
+
+"I only ask you how it can be done."
+
+"Oh, there are ways. I made her perfectly hate one of them because he
+always said, 'if you know what I mean.' 'It's a very fine day, Mrs.
+Farron, if you know what I mean.' This young man must have some horrid
+trick like that, only I haven't studied him yet. Give me time."
+
+"It's risky."
+
+Adelaide shook her head.
+
+"Not really," she said. "These young fancies go as quickly as they come.
+Do you remember the time you took me to West Point? I had a passion for
+the adjutant. I forgot him in a week."
+
+"You were only fifteen."
+
+"Mathilde is immature for her age."
+
+It was agreed between them, however, that Mr. Lanley, without authority,
+should go and look the situation over. He had been trying to get the
+Waynes' telephone since one o'clock. He had been told at intervals of
+fifteen minutes by a resolutely cheerful central that their number did
+not answer. Mr. Lanley hated people who did not answer their telephone.
+Nor was he agreeably impressed by the four flights of stairs, or by the
+appearance of the servant who answered his ring.
+
+"Won't do, won't do," he kept repeating in his own mind.
+
+He was shown into the sitting-room. It was in shadow, for only a shaded
+reading-lamp was lighted, and his first impression was of four windows;
+they appeared like four square panels of dark blue, patterned with
+stars. Then a figure rose to meet him--a figure in blue draperies, with
+heavy braids wound around the head, and a low, resonant voice said, "I
+am Mrs. Wayne."
+
+As soon as he could he walked to the windows and looked out to the river
+and the long, lighted curves of the bridges, and beyond to Long Island,
+to just the ground where the Battle of Long Island had been fought--a
+battle in which an ancestor of his had particularly distinguished
+himself. He said something polite about the view.
+
+"Let us sit here where we can look out," she said, and sank down on a
+low sofa drawn under the windows. As she did so she came within the
+circle of light from the lamp. She sat with her head leaned back against
+the window-frame, and he saw the fine line of her jaw, the hollows in her
+cheek, the delicate modeling about her brows, not obscured by much
+eyebrow, and her long, stretched throat. She was not quite maternal
+enough to look like a Madonna, but she did look like a saint, he thought.
+
+He knelt with one knee on the couch and peered out.
+
+"Dear me," he said, "I fancy I used to skate as a boy on a pond just
+about where that factory is now."
+
+He found she knew very little about the history of New York. She had
+been brought up abroad, she said; her father had been a consul in
+France. It was a subject which he liked to expound. He loved his native
+city, which he with his own eyes had seen once as hardly more than a
+village. He and his ancestors--and Mr. Lanley's sense of identification
+with his ancestors was almost Chinese--had watched and had a little
+shaped the growth.
+
+"I suppose you had Dutch ancestry, then," she said, trying to take
+an interest.
+
+"Dutch." Mr. Lanley shut his eyes, resolving, since he had no idea what
+her own descent might be, that he would not explain to her the superior
+attitude of the English settlers of the eighteenth century toward their
+Dutch predecessors. However, perhaps he did not entirely conceal his
+feeling, for he said: "No, I have no Dutch blood--not a drop. Very good
+people in their way, industrious--peasants." He hurried on to the great
+fire of 1835. "Swept between Wall Street and Coenties Slip," he said,
+with a splendid gesture, and then discovered that she had, never heard of
+"Quenches Slip," or worse, she had pronounced it as it was spelled. He
+gently set her right there. His father had often told him that he had
+seen with his own eyes a note of hand which had been blown, during the
+course of the conflagration, as far as Flatbush. And the second fire of
+1845. His father had been a man then, married, a prominent citizen, old
+enough, as Mr. Lanley said, with a faint smile, to have lost heavily. He
+could himself remember the New York of the Civil War, the bitter family
+quarrels, the forced resignations from clubs, the duels, the draft riots.
+
+But, oddly enough, when it came to contemporary New York, it was Mrs.
+Wayne who turned out to be most at home. Had he ever walked across the
+Blackwell's Island Bridge? (This was in the days before it bore the
+elevated trains.) No, he had driven. Ah, she said, that was wholly
+different. Above, where one walked, there was nothing to shut out the
+view of the river. Just to show that he was not a feeble old antiquarian,
+he suggested their taking a walk there at once. She held out her trailing
+garments and thin, blue slippers. And then she went on:
+
+"There's another beautiful place I don't believe you know, for all you're
+such an old New-Yorker--a pier at the foot of East Eighty-something
+Street, where you can almost touch great seagoing vessels as they pass."
+
+"Well, there at least we can go," said Mr. Lanley, and he stood up. "I
+have a car here, but it's open. Is it too cold? Have you a fur coat? I'll
+send back to the house for an extra one." He paused, brisk as he was; the
+thought of those four flights a second time dismayed him.
+
+The servant had gone out, and Pete was still absent, presumably breaking
+the news of his engagement to Dr. Parret.
+
+Mrs. Wayne had an idea. She went to a window on the south side of the
+room, opened it, and looked out. If he had good lungs, she told him, he
+could make his man hear.
+
+Mr. Lanley did not visibly recoil. He leaned out and shouted. The
+chauffeur looked up, made a motion to jump out, fearing that his employer
+was being murdered in these unfamiliar surroundings; then he caught the
+order to go home for an extra coat.
+
+Lanley drew his shoulder back into the room and shut the window; as he
+did so he saw a trace of something impish in the smile of his hostess.
+
+"Why do you smile?" he asked quickly.
+
+She did not make the mistake of trying to arrest her smile; she let
+it broaden.
+
+"I don't suppose you have ever done such a thing before."
+
+"Now, that does annoy me."
+
+"Calling down five stories?"
+
+"No; your thinking I minded."
+
+"Well, I did think so."
+
+"You were mistaken, utterly mistaken."
+
+"I'm glad. If you mind doing such things, you give so much time to
+arranging not to do them."
+
+Mr. Lanley was silent. He was deciding that he should rearrange some of
+the details of his life. Not that he contemplated giving all his orders
+from the fifth story, but he saw he had always devoted too much attention
+to preventing unimportant catastrophes.
+
+Under her direction he was presently driving north; then he turned
+sharply east down a little hill, and came out on a low, flat pier. He put
+out the motor's lights. They were only a few feet above the water, which
+was as black as liquid jet, with flat silver and gold patches on it from
+white and yellow lights. Opposite to them the lighthouse at the north end
+of Blackwell's Island glowed like a hot coal. Then a great steamer
+obscured it.
+
+"Isn't this nice?" Mrs. Wayne asked, and he saw that she wanted her
+discovery praised. He never lost the impression that she enjoyed
+being praised.
+
+Such a spot, within sight of half a dozen historic sites, was a
+temptation to Mr. Lanley, and he would have unresistingly yielded to it
+if Mrs. Wayne had not said:
+
+"But we haven't said a word yet about our children."
+
+"True," answered Mr. Lanley. His heart sank. It is not easy, he thought,
+to explain to a person for whom you have just conceived a liking that her
+son had aspired above his station. He tapped his long, middle finger on
+the steering-wheel, just as at directors' meetings he tapped the table
+before he spoke, and began, "In a society somewhat artificially formed as
+ours is, Mrs. Wayne, it has always been my experience that--" Do what he
+would, it kept turning into a speech, and the essence of the speech was
+that while democracy did very well for men, a strictly aristocratic
+system was the only thing possible for girls--one's own girls, of
+course. In the dim light he could see that she had pushed all her hair
+back from her brows. She was trying to follow him exactly, so exactly
+that she confused him a little. He became more general. "In many ways,"
+he concluded, "the advantages of character and experience are with the
+lower classes." He had not meant to use the word, but when it slipped
+out, he did not regret it.
+
+"In all ways," she answered.
+
+He was not sure he had heard.
+
+"All the advantages?" he said.
+
+"All the advantages of character."
+
+He had to ask her to explain. One reason, perhaps, why Mrs. Wayne
+habitually avoided a direct question was that, when once started, her
+candor had no bounds. Now she began to speak. She spoke more eagerly and
+more fluently than he, and it took him several minutes to see that quite
+unconsciously she was making him a strange, distorted complement to his
+speech, that in her mouth such words as "the leisure classes, your
+sheltered girls," were terms of the deepest reproach. He must understand,
+she said, that as she did not know Miss Severance, there was nothing
+personal, nothing at all personal, in her feeling,--she was as careful
+not to hurt his feelings as he had tried to be not to hurt hers,--but she
+did own to a prejudice--at least Pete told her it was a prejudice--
+
+Against what, in Heaven's name, Lanley at first wondered; and then it
+came to him.
+
+"Oh, you have a prejudice against divorce?" he said.
+
+Mrs. Wayne looked at him reproachfully.
+
+"Oh, no," she answered. "How could you think that? But what has divorce
+to do with it? Your granddaughter hasn't been divorced."
+
+A sound of disgust at the mere suggestion escaped him, and he said
+coldly:
+
+"My daughter divorced her first husband."
+
+"Oh, I did not know."
+
+"Against what, then, is this unconquerable prejudice of yours?"
+
+"Against the daughters of the leisure class."
+
+He was still quite at sea.
+
+"You dislike them?"
+
+"I fear them."
+
+If she had said that she considered roses a menace, he could not have
+been more puzzled. He repeated her words aloud, as if he hoped that
+they might have some meaning for him if he heard his own lips
+pronouncing them:
+
+"You fear them."
+
+"Yes," she went on, now interested only in expressing her belief, "I fear
+their ignorance and idleness and irresponsibility and self-indulgence,
+and, all the more because it is so delicate and attractive and
+unconscious; and their belief that the world owes them luxury and
+happiness without their lifting a finger. I fear their cowardice and lack
+of character--"
+
+"Cowardice!" he cried, catching at the first word he could. "My dear Mrs.
+Wayne, the aristocrats in the French Revolution, the British officer--"
+
+"Oh, yes, they know how to die," she answered; "but do they know how to
+live when the horrible, sordid little strain of every-day life begins to
+make demands upon them, their futile education, the moral feebleness that
+comes with perfect safety! I know something can be made of such girls,
+but I don't want my son sacrificed in the process."
+
+There was a long, dark silence; then Mr. Lanley said with a particularly
+careful and exact enunciation:
+
+"I think, my dear madam, that you cannot have known very many of the
+young women you are describing. It may be that there are some like
+that--daughters of our mushroom finance; but I can assure you that the
+children of ladies and gentlemen are not at all as you seem to imagine."
+
+It was characteristic of Mrs. Wayne that, still absorbed by her own
+convictions, she did not notice the insult of hearing ladies and
+gentlemen described to her as if they were beings wholly alien to her
+experience; but the tone of his speech startled her, and she woke, like a
+person coming out of a trance, to all the harm she had done.
+
+"I may be old-fashioned--" he began and then threw the phrase from him;
+it was thus that Alberta, his sister, began her most offensive
+pronouncements. "It has always appeared to me that we shelter our more
+favored women as we shelter our planted trees, so that they may attain a
+stronger maturity."
+
+"But do they, are they--are sheltered women the strongest in a crisis?"
+
+Fiend in human shape, he thought, she was making him question his
+bringing up of Adelaide. He would not bear that. His foot stole out to
+the self-starter.
+
+For the few minutes that remained of the interview she tried to undo her
+work, but the injury was too deep. His life was too near its end for
+criticism to be anything but destructive; having no time to collect new
+treasure, he simply could not listen to her suggestion that those he
+most valued were imitation. He hated her for holding such opinion. Her
+soft tones, her eager concessions, her flattering sentences, could now
+make no impression upon a man whom half an hour before they would have
+completely won.
+
+He bade her a cold good night, hardly more than bent his head, the
+chauffeur took the heavy coat from her, and the car had wheeled away
+before she was well inside her own doorway.
+
+Pete's brown head was visible over the banisters.
+
+"Hello, Mother!" he said. "Did the old boy kidnap you?"
+
+Mrs. Wayne came up slowly, stumbling over her long, blue draperies in her
+weariness and depression.
+
+"Oh, Pete, my darling," she said, "I think I've spoiled everything."
+
+His heart stood still. He knew better than most people that his mother
+could either make or mar.
+
+"They won't hear of it?"
+
+She nodded distractedly.
+
+"I do make such a mess of things sometimes!"
+
+He put his arm about her.
+
+"So you do, Mother," he said; "but then think how magnificently you
+sometimes pull them out again."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Mr. Lanley had not reported the result of his interview immediately. He
+told himself that it was too late; but it was only a quarter before
+eleven when he was back safe in his own library, feeling somehow not so
+safe as usual. He felt attacked, insulted; and yet he also felt vivified
+and encouraged. He felt as he might have felt if some one, unbidden, had
+cut a vista on the Lanley estates, first outraged in his sense of
+property, but afterward delighted with the widened view and the fresher
+breeze. It was awkward, though, that he didn't want Adelaide to go into
+details as to his visit; he did not think that the expedition to the pier
+could be given the judicial, grandfatherly tone that he wanted to give.
+So he did not communicate at all with his daughter that night.
+
+The next morning about nine, however, when she was sitting up in bed,
+with her tray on her knees, and on her feet a white satin coverlet sown
+as thickly with bright little flowers as the Milky Way with stars, her
+last words to Vincent, who was standing by the fire, with his newspaper
+folded in his hands, ready to go down-town, were interrupted, as they
+nearly always were, by the burr of the telephone.
+
+She took it up from the table by her bed, and as she did so she fixed her
+eyes on her husband and looked steadily at him all the time that central
+was making the connection; she was trying to answer that unsolved problem
+as to whether or not a mist hung between them. Then she got her
+connection.
+
+"Yes, Papa; it is Adelaide." "Yes?" "Did she appear like a lady?" "A
+lady?" "You don't know what I mean by that? Why, Papa!" "Well, did she
+appear respectable?" "How cross you are to me!" "I'm glad to hear it. You
+did not sound cheerful."
+
+She hung up the receiver and turned to Vincent, making eyes of surprise.
+
+"Really, papa is too strange. Why should he be cross to me because he has
+had an unsatisfactory interview with the Wayne boy's mother? I never
+wanted him to go, anyhow, Vin. I wanted to send _you_."
+
+"It would probably be better for you to go yourself."
+
+He left the room as if he had said nothing remarkable. But it was
+remarkable, in Adelaide's experience, that he should avoid any
+responsibility, and even more so that he should shift it to her
+shoulders. For an instant she faced the possibility, the most terrible of
+any that had occurred to her, that the balance was changing between them;
+that she, so willing to be led, was to be forced to guide. She had seen
+it happen so often between married couples--the weight of character begin
+on one side of the scale, and then slowly the beam would shift. Once it
+had happened to her. Was it to happen again? No, she told herself; never
+with Farron. He would command or die, lead her or leave her.
+
+Mathilde knocked at her door, as she did every morning as soon as her
+stepfather had gone down town. She had had an earlier account of Mr.
+Lanley's interview. It had read:
+
+"DEAREST GIRL:
+
+"The great discussion did not go very well, apparently. The opinion
+prevails at the moment that no engagement can be allowed to exist between
+us. I feel as if they were all meeting to discuss whether or not the sun
+is to rise to-morrow morning. You and I, my love, have special
+information that it will."
+
+After this it needed no courage to go down and hear her mother's account
+of the interview. Adelaide was still in bed, but one long, pointed
+fingertip, pressed continuously upon the dangling bell, a summons that
+had long since lost its poignancy for the temperamental Lucie, indicated
+that she was about to get up.
+
+"My dear," she said in answer to Mathilde's question, "your grandfather's
+principal interest seems to be to tell me nothing at all, and he has been
+wonderfully successful. I can get nothing from him, so I'm going myself."
+
+The girl's heart sank at hearing this. Her mother saw things clearly and
+definitely, and had a talent for expressing her impressions in
+unforgetable words. Mathilde could still remember with a pang certain
+books, poems, pictures, and even people whose charms her mother had
+destroyed in one poisonous phrase. Adelaide was too careful of her
+personal dignity to indulge in mimicry, but she had a way of catching and
+repeating the exact phrasing of some foolish sentence that was almost
+better--or worse--than mimicry. Mathilde remembered a governess, a kind
+and patient person of whom Adelaide had greatly wearied, who had a habit
+of beginning many observations, "It may strike you as strange, but I am
+the sort of person who--" Mathilde was present at luncheon one day when
+Adelaide was repeating one of these sentences. "It may strike you as
+strange, but I like to feel myself in good health." Mathilde resented the
+laughter that followed, and sprang to her governess's defense, yet
+sickeningly soon she came to see the innocent egotism that directed the
+choice of the phrase.
+
+She felt as if she could not bear this process to be turned against
+Pete's mother, not because it would alter the respectful love she was
+prepared to offer this unknown figure, but because it might very slightly
+alter her attitude toward her own mother. That was one of the
+characteristics of this great emotion: all her old beliefs had to be
+revised to accord with new discoveries.
+
+This was what lay behind the shrinking of her soul as she watched her
+mother dress for the visit to Mrs. Wayne. For the first time in her life
+Mathilde wished that her mother was not so elaborate. Hitherto she had
+always gloried in Adelaide's elegance as a part of her beauty; but now,
+as she watched the ritual of ribbons and laces and perfumes and jewels,
+she felt vaguely that there was in it all a covert insult to Pete's
+mother, who, she knew, would not be a bit like that.
+
+"How young you are, Mama!" she exclaimed as, the whole long process
+complete, Adelaide stood holding out her hand for her gloves, like a
+little girl ready for a party.
+
+Her mother smiled.
+
+"It's well I am," she said, "if you go on trying to get yourself involved
+with young men who live up four flights of stairs. I have always avoided
+even dressmakers who lived above the second story," she added wistfully.
+
+The wistful tone was repeated when her car stopped at the Wayne door and
+she stepped out.
+
+"Are you sure this is the number, Andrews?" she asked. She and the
+chauffeur looked slowly up at the house and up and down the street. They
+were at one in their feeling about it. Then Adelaide gave a very gentle
+little sigh and started the ascent.
+
+The flat did not look as well by day. Though the eastern sun poured in
+cheerfully, it revealed worn places on the backs of the arm-chairs and
+one fearful calamity with an ink-bottle that Pete had once had on the
+rug. Even Mrs. Wayne, who sprang up from behind her writing-table, had
+not the saint-like mystery that her blue draperies had given her the
+evening before.
+
+Though slim, and in excellent condition for thirty-nine, Adelaide could
+not conceal that four flights were an exertion. Her fine nostrils were
+dilated and her breath not perfectly under control as she said:
+
+"How delightful this is!" a statement that was no more untrue than to say
+good-morning on a rainy day.
+
+Most women in Mrs. Wayne's situation would at the moment have been
+acutely aware of the ink-spot. That was one of Adelaide's assets, on
+which she perhaps unconsciously counted, that her mere appearance made
+nine people out of ten aware of their own physical imperfections. But
+Mrs. Wayne was aware of nothing but Adelaide's great beauty as she sank
+into one of the armchairs with hardly a hint of exhaustion.
+
+"Your son is a very charming person, Mrs. Wayne," she said.
+
+Mrs. Wayne was standing by the mantelpiece, looking boyish and friendly;
+but now she suddenly grew grave, as if something serious had been said.
+
+"Pete has something more unusual than charm," she said.
+
+"But what could be more unusual?" cried Adelaide, who wanted to add, "The
+only question is, does your wretched son possess it?" But she didn't; she
+asked instead, with a tone of disarming sweetness, "Shall we be perfectly
+candid with each other?"
+
+A quick gleam came into Mrs. Wayne's eyes. "Not much," she seemed to say.
+She had learned to distrust nothing so much as her own candor, and her
+interview with Mr. Lanley had put her specially on her guard.
+
+"I hope you will be candid, Mrs. Farron," she said aloud, and for her
+this was the depth of dissimulation.
+
+"Well, then," said Adelaide, "you and I are in about the same position,
+aren't we? We are both willing that our children should marry, and we
+have no objection to offer to their choice except our own ignorance. We
+both want time to judge. But how can we get time, Mrs. Wayne? If we do
+not take definite action _against_ an engagement, we are giving our
+consent to it. I want a little reasonable delay, but we can get delay
+only by refusing to hear of an engagement. Do you see what I mean? Will
+you help me by pretending to be a very stern parent, just so that these
+young people may have a few months to think it over without being too
+definitely committed?"
+
+Mrs. Wayne shrank back. She liked neither diplomacy nor coercion.
+
+"But I have really no control over Pete," she said.
+
+"Surely, if he isn't in a position to support a wife--"
+
+"He is, if she would live as he does."
+
+Such an idea had never crossed Mrs. Farron's mind. She looked round her
+wonderingly, and said without a trace of wilful insolence in her tone:
+
+"Live here, you mean?"
+
+"Yes, or somewhere like it."
+
+Mrs. Farron looked down, and smoothed the delicate dark fur of her muff.
+She hardly knew how to begin at the very beginning like this. She did not
+want to hurt any one's feelings. How could she tell this childlike,
+optimistic creature that to put Mathilde to living in surroundings like
+these would be like exposing a naked baby on a mountaintop? It wasn't
+love of luxury, at least not if luxury meant physical self-indulgence.
+She could imagine suffering privations very happily in a Venetian palace
+or on a tropical island. It was an esthetic, not a moral, problem; it was
+a question of that profound and essential thing in the life of any woman
+who was a woman--her charm. She wished to tell Mrs. Wayne that her son
+wouldn't really like it, that he would hate to see Mathilde going out in
+overshoes; that the background that she, Adelaide, had so expertly
+provided for her child was part of the very attraction that made him want
+to take her out of it. There was no use in saying that most poor mortals
+were forced to get on without this magic atmosphere. They had never been
+goddesses; they did not know what they were going without. But her child,
+who had been, as it were, born a fairy, would miss tragically the
+delicate beauty of her every-day life, would fade under the ugly monotony
+of poverty.
+
+But how could she say this to Mrs. Wayne, in her flat-heeled shoes and
+simple, boyish shirt and that twelfth-century saint's profile, of which
+so much might have been made by a clever woman?
+
+At last she began, still smoothing her muff:
+
+"Mrs. Wayne, I have brought up my daughter very simply. I don't at all
+approve of the extravagances of these modern girls, with their own motors
+and their own bills. Still, she has had a certain background. We must
+admit that marriage with your son on his income alone would mean a
+decrease in her material comforts."
+
+Mrs. Wayne laughed.
+
+"More than you know, probably."
+
+This was candid, and Adelaide pressed on.
+
+"Well is it wise or kind to make such a demand on a young creature when
+we know marriage is difficult at the best?" she asked.
+
+Mrs. Wayne hesitated.
+
+"You see, I have never seen your daughter, and I don't know what her
+feeling for Pete may be."
+
+"I'll answer both questions. She has a pleasant, romantic sentiment for
+Mr. Wayne--you know how one feels to one's first lover. She is a sweet,
+kind, unformed little girl, not heroic. But think of your own spirited
+son. Do you want this persistent, cruel responsibility for him?"
+
+The question was an oratorical one, and Adelaide was astonished to find
+that Mrs. Wayne was answering it.
+
+"Oh, yes," she said; "I want responsibility for Pete. It's exactly what
+he needs."
+
+Adelaide stared at her in horror; she seemed the most unnatural mother
+in the world. She herself would fight to protect her daughter from the
+passive wear and tear of poverty; but she would have died to keep a son,
+if she had had one, from being driven into the active warfare of the
+support of a family.
+
+In the pause that followed there was a ring at the bell, an argument with
+the servant, something that sounded like a scuffle, and then a young man
+strolled into the room. He was tall and beautifully dressed,--at least
+that was the first impression,--though, as a matter of fact, the clothes
+were of the cheapest ready-made variety. But nothing could look cheap or
+ill made on those splendid muscles. He wore a silk shirt, a flower in his
+buttonhole, a gray tie in which was a pearl as big as a pea, long
+patent-leather shoes with elaborate buff-colored tops; he carried a thin
+stick and a pair of new gloves in one hand, but the most conspicuous
+object in his dress was a brand-new, gray felt hat, with a rather wide
+brim, which he wore at an angle greater than Mr. Lanley attempted even at
+his jauntiest. His face was long and rather dark, and his eyes were a
+bright gray blue, under dark brows. He was scowling.
+
+He strode into the middle of the room, and stood there, with his feet
+wide apart and his elbows slightly swaying. His hat was still on.
+
+"Your servant said you couldn't see me," he said, with his back teeth set
+together, a method of enunciation that seemed to be habitual.
+
+"Didn't want to would be truer, Marty," answered Mrs. Wayne, with a
+utmost good temper. "Still, as long as you're here, what do you want?"
+
+Marty Burke didn't answer at once. He stood looking at Mrs. Wayne under
+his lowering brows; he had stopped swinging his elbows, and was now very
+slightly twitching his cane, as an evilly disposed cat will twitch the
+end of its tail.
+
+Mrs. Farron watched him almost breathlessly. She was a little frightened,
+but the sensation was pleasurable. He was, she knew, the finest specimen
+of the human animal that she had ever seen.
+
+"What do I want?" he said at length in a deep, rich voice, shot here and
+there with strange nasal tones, and here and there with the remains of a
+brogue. "Well, I want that you should stop persecuting those poor kids."
+
+"I persecuting them? Don't be absurd, Marty," answered Mrs. Wayne.
+
+"Persecuting them; what else?" retorted Marty, fiercely. "What else is
+it? They wanting to get married, and you determined to send the boy up
+the river."
+
+"I don't think we'll go over that again. I have a lady here on business."
+
+"Oh, please don't mind me," said Mrs. Farron, settling back, and
+wriggling her hands contentedly into her muff. She rather expected the
+frivolous courage of her tone to draw the ire of Burke's glance upon her,
+but it did not.
+
+"Cruel is what I call it," he went on. "She wants it, and he wants it,
+and her family wants it, and only you and the judge that you put up to
+opposing--"
+
+"Her family do not want it. Her brother--"
+
+"Her brother agrees with me. I was talking to him yesterday."
+
+"Oh, that's why he has a black eye, is it?" said Mrs. Wayne.
+
+"Black eyes or blue," said Marty, with a horizontal gesture of his
+hands, "her brother wants to see her married."
+
+"Well, I don't," replied Mrs. Wayne, "at least not to this boy. I will
+never give my consent to putting a child of her age in the power of a
+degenerate little drunkard like that."
+
+Mrs. Farron listened with all her ears. She did not think herself a
+prude, and only a moment before she had been accusing Mrs. Wayne of
+ignorance of the world; but never in all her life had she heard such
+words as were now freely exchanged between Burke and his hostess on the
+subject of the degree of consent that the girl in question had given to
+the advances of Burke's protege. She would have been as embarrassed as a
+girl if either of the disputants had been in the least aware of her
+presence. Once, she thought, Mrs. Wayne, for the sake of good manners,
+was on the point of turning to her and explaining the whole situation;
+but fortunately the exigencies of the dispute swept her on too fast.
+Adelaide was shocked, physically rather than morally, by the nakedness of
+their talk; but she did not want them to stop. She was fascinated by the
+spectacle of Marty Burke in action. She recognized at once that he was a
+dangerous man, not dangerous to female virtue, like all the other men to
+whom she had heard the term applied, but actually dangerous to life and
+property. She was not in the least afraid of him, but she knew he was a
+real danger. She enjoyed the knowledge. In most ways she was a woman
+timid in the face of physical danger, but she had never imagined being
+afraid of another human being. That much, perhaps, her sheltered training
+had done for her. "If she goes on irritating him like this he may murder
+us both," she thought. What she really meant was that he might murder
+Mrs. Wayne, but that, when he came to her and began to twist her neck,
+she would just say, "My dear man, don't be silly!" and he would stop.
+
+In the meantime Burke was not so angry as he was affecting to be. Like
+most leaders of men, he had a strong dramatic instinct, and he had just
+led Mrs. Wayne to the climax of her just violence when his manner
+suddenly completely changed, and he said with the utmost good temper:
+
+"And what do you think of my get-up, Mrs. Wayne? It's a new suit I have
+on, and a boutonniere." The change was so sudden that no one answered,
+and he went on, "It's clothes almost fit for a wedding that I'm wearing."
+
+Mrs. Wayne understood him in a flash. She sprang to her feet.
+
+"Marty Burke," she cried, "you don't mean to say you've got those two
+children married!"
+
+"Not fifteen minutes ago, and I standing up with the groom." He smiled a
+smile of the wildest, most piercing sweetness--a smile so free and
+intense that it seemed impossible to connect it with anything but the
+consciousness of a pure heart. Mrs. Farron had never seen such a smile.
+"I thought I'd just drop around and give you the news," he said, and now
+for the first time took off his hat, displaying his crisp, black hair and
+round, pugnacious head. "Good morning, ladies." He bowed, and for an
+instant his glance rested on Mrs. Farron with an admiration too frank to
+be exactly offensive. He put his hat on his head, turned away, and made
+his exit, whistling.
+
+He left behind him one person at least who had thoroughly enjoyed his
+triumph. To do her justice, however, Mrs. Farron was ashamed of her
+sympathy, and she said gently to Mrs. Wayne:
+
+"You think this marriage a very bad thing."
+
+Mrs. Wayne pushed all her hair away from her temples.
+
+"Oh, yes," she said, "it's a bad thing for the girl; but the worst is
+having Marty Burke put anything over. The district is absolutely under
+his thumb. I do wish, Mrs. Farron, you would get your husband to put the
+fear of God into him."
+
+"My husband?"
+
+"Yes; he works for your husband. He has charge of the loading and
+unloading of the trucks. He's proud of his job, and it gives him power
+over the laborers. He wouldn't want to lose his place. If your husband
+would send for him and say--" Mrs. Wayne hastily outlined the things Mr.
+Farron might say.
+
+"He works for Vincent," Adelaide repeated. It seemed to her an absolutely
+stupendous coincidence, and her imagination pictured the clash between
+them--the effort of Vincent to put the fear of God into this man. Would
+he be able to? Which one would win? Never before had she doubted the
+superior power of her husband; now she did. "I think it would be hard to
+put the fear of God into that young man," she said aloud.
+
+"I do wish Mr. Farron would try."
+
+"Try," thought Adelaide, "and fail?" Could she stand that? Was her
+whole relation to Vincent about to be put to the test? What weapons had
+he against Marty Burke? And if he had none, how stripped he would
+appear in her eyes!
+
+"Won't you ask him, Mrs. Farron?"
+
+Adelaide recoiled. She did not want to be the one to throw her glove
+among the lions.
+
+"I don't think I understand well enough what it is you want. Why don't
+you ask him yourself?" She hesitated, knowing that no opportunity for
+this would offer unless she herself arranged it. "Why don't you come and
+dine with us to-night, and," she added more slowly, "bring your son?"
+
+She had made the bait very attractive, and Mrs. Wayne did not refuse.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+As she drove home, Adelaide's whole being was stirred by the prospect of
+that conflict between Burke and her husband, and it was not until she saw
+Mathilde, pale with an hour of waiting, that she recalled the real object
+of her recent visit. Not, of course, that Adelaide was more interested in
+Marty Burke than in her daughter's future, but a titanic struggle fired
+her imagination more than a pitiful little romance. She felt a pang of
+self-reproach when she saw that Mr. Lanley had come to share the child's
+vigil, that he seemed to be suffering under an anxiety almost as keen as
+Mathilde's.
+
+They did not have to question her; she threw out her hands, casting her
+muff from her as she did so.
+
+"Oh," she said, "I'm a weak, soft-hearted creature! I've asked them both
+to dine tonight."
+
+Mathilde flung herself into her mother's arms.
+
+"O Mama, how marvelous you are!" she exclaimed.
+
+Over her daughter's shoulder Adelaide noted her father's expression, a
+stiffening of the mouth and a brightening of the eyes.
+
+"Your grandfather disapproves of me, Mathilde," she said.
+
+"He couldn't be so unkind," returned the girl.
+
+"After all," said Mr. Lanley, trying to induce a slight scowl, "if we are
+not going to consent to an engagement--"
+
+"But you are," said Mathilde.
+
+"We are not," said her mother; "but there is no reason why we should
+not meet and talk it over like sensible creatures--talk it over
+here"--Adelaide looked lovingly around her own subdued room--"instead
+of five stories up. For really--" She stopped, running her eyebrows
+together at the recollection.
+
+"But the flat is rather--rather comfortable when you get there," said Mr.
+Lanley, suddenly becoming embarrassed over his choice of an adjective.
+
+Adelaide looked at him sharply.
+
+"Dear Papa," she asked, "since when have you become an admirer of
+painted shelves and dirty rugs? And I don't doubt," she added very
+gently, "that for the same money they could have found something quite
+tolerable in the country."
+
+"Perhaps they don't want to live in the country," said Mr. Lanley, rather
+sharply: "I'm sure there is nothing that you'd hate more, Adelaide."
+
+She opened her dark eyes.
+
+"But I don't have to choose between squalor here or--"
+
+"Squalor!" said Mr. Lanley. "Don't be ridiculous!"
+
+Mathilde broke in gently at this point:
+
+"I think you must have liked Mrs. Wayne, Mama, to ask her to dine."
+
+Adelaide saw an opportunity to exercise one of her important talents.
+
+"Yes," she said. "She has a certain naive friendliness. Of course I don't
+advocate, after fifty, dressing like an Eton boy; I always think an
+elderly face above a turned-down collar--"
+
+"Mama," broke in Mathilde, quietly, "would you mind not talking of Mrs.
+Wayne like that? You know, she's Pete's mother."
+
+Adelaide was really surprised.
+
+"Why, my love," she answered, "I haven't said half the things I might
+say. I rather thought I was sparing your feelings. After all, when you
+see her, you will admit that she _does_ dress like an Eton boy."
+
+"She didn't when I saw her," said Mr. Lanley.
+
+Adelaide turned to her father.
+
+"Papa, I leave it to you. Did I say anything that should have wounded
+anybody's susceptibilities?"
+
+Mr. Lanley hesitated.
+
+"It was the tone Mathilde did not like, I think."
+
+Adelaide raised her shoulders and looked beautifully hurt.
+
+"My tone?" she wailed.
+
+"It hurt me," said Mathilde, laying her little hand on her heart.
+
+Mr. Lanley smiled at her, and then, springing up, kissed her tenderly on
+the forehead. He said it was time for him to be going on.
+
+"You'll come to dinner to-night, Papa?"
+
+Rather hastily, Mr. Lanley said no, he couldn't; he had an engagement.
+But his daughter did not let him get to the door.
+
+"What are you going to do to-night, Papa?" she asked, firmly.
+
+"There is a governor's meeting--"
+
+"Two in a week, Papa?"
+
+Suddenly Mr. Lanley dropped all pretense of not coming, and said he would
+be there at eight.
+
+During the rest of the day Mathilde's heart never wholly regained its
+normal beat. Not only was she to see Pete again, and see him under the
+gaze of her united family, but she was to see this mother of his, whom he
+loved and admired so much. She pictured her as white-haired, benignant,
+brooding, the essential mother, with all her own mother's grace and charm
+left out, yet with these qualities not ill replaced by others which
+Mathilde sometimes dimly apprehended were lacking in her own beautiful
+parent. She looked at herself in the glass. "My son's wife," was the
+phrase in her mind.
+
+On her way up-stairs to dress for dinner she tried to confide her
+anxieties to her mother.
+
+"Mama," she said, "if you had a son, how would you feel toward the girl
+he wanted to marry?"
+
+"Oh, I should think her a cat, of course," Adelaide answered; and
+added an instant later, "and I should probably be able to make him
+think so, too."
+
+Mathilde sighed and went on up-stairs. Here she decided on an act of some
+insubordination. She would wear her best dress that evening, the dress
+which her mother considered too old for her. She did not want Pete's
+mother to think he had chosen a perfect baby.
+
+Mr. Lanley, too, was a trifle nervous during the afternoon. He tried to
+say to himself that it was because the future of his darling little
+Mathilde was about to be settled. He shook his head, indicating that to
+settle the future of the young was a risky business; and then in a burst
+of self-knowledge he suddenly admitted that what was really making him
+nervous was the incident of the pier. If Mrs. Wayne referred to it, and
+of course there was no possible reason why she should not refer to it,
+Adelaide would never let him hear the last of it. It would be natural for
+Adelaide to think it queer that he hadn't told her about it. And the
+reason he hadn't told was perfectly clear: it was on that infernal pier
+that he had formed such an adverse opinion of Mrs. Wayne. But of course
+he did not wish to prejudice Adelaide; he wanted to leave her free to
+form her own opinions, and he was glad, excessively glad, that she had
+formed so favorable a one as to ask the woman to dinner. There was no
+question about his being glad; he surprised his servant by whistling as
+he put on his white waistcoat, and fastened the buckle rather more snugly
+than usual. Self-knowledge for the moment was not on hand.
+
+He arrived at exactly the hour at which he always arrived, five minutes
+after eight, a moment not too early to embarrass the hostess and not too
+late to endanger the dinner.
+
+No one was in the drawing-room but Mathilde and Farron. Adelaide, for one
+who had been almost perfectly brought up, did sometimes commit the fault
+of allowing her guests to wait for her.
+
+"'Lo, my dear," said Mr. Lanley, kissing Mathilde. "What's that you have
+on? Never saw it before. Not so becoming as the dress you were wearing
+the last time I was here."
+
+Mathilde felt that it would be almost easier to die immediately, and was
+revived only when she heard Farron saying:
+
+"Oh, don't you like this? I was just thinking I had never seen Mathilde
+looking so well, in her rather more mature and subtle vein."
+
+It was just as she wished to appear, but she glanced at her stepfather,
+disturbed by her constant suspicion that he read her heart more clearly
+than any one else, more clearly than she liked.
+
+"How shockingly late they are!" said Adelaide, suddenly appearing in
+the utmost splendor. She moved about, kissing her father and arranging
+the chairs. "Do you know, Vin, why it is that Pringle likes to make the
+room look as if it were arranged for a funeral? Why do you suppose they
+don't come?"
+
+"Any one who arrives after Adelaide is apt to be in wrong," observed
+her husband.
+
+"Well, I think it's awfully incompetent always to be waiting for other
+people," she returned, just laying her hand an instant on his shoulder to
+indicate that he alone was privileged to make fun of her.
+
+"That perhaps is what the Waynes think," he answered.
+
+Mathilde's heart sank a little at this. She knew her mother did not like
+to be kept waiting for dinner.
+
+"When I was a young man--" began Mr. Lanley.
+
+"It was the custom," interrupted Adelaide in exactly the same tone, "for
+a hostess to be in her drawing-room at least five minutes before the hour
+set for the arrival of the guests."
+
+"Adelaide," her father pleaded, "I don't talk like that; at least
+not often."
+
+"You would, though, if you didn't have me to correct you," she retorted.
+"There's the bell at last; but it always takes people like that forever
+to get their wraps off."
+
+"It's only ten minutes past eight," said Farron, and Mathilde blessed
+him with a look.
+
+Mrs. Wayne came quickly into the room, so fast that her dress floated
+behind her; she was in black and very grand. No one would have supposed
+that she had murmured to Pete just before the drawing-room door was
+opened, "I hope they haven't run in any old relations on us."
+
+"I'm afraid I'm late," she began.
+
+"She always is," Pete murmured to Mathilde as he took her hand and quite
+openly squeezed it, and then, before Adelaide had time for the rather
+casual introduction she had planned, he himself put the hand he was
+holding into his mother's. "This is my girl, Mother," he said. They
+smiled at each other. Mathilde tried to say something. Mrs. Wayne stooped
+and kissed her. Mr. Lanley was obviously affected. Adelaide wasn't going
+to have any scene like that.
+
+"Late?" she said, as if not an instant had passed since Mrs. Wayne's
+entrance. "Oh, no, you're not late; exactly on time, I think. I'm only
+just down myself. Isn't that true, Vincent?"
+
+Vincent was studying Mrs. Wayne, and withdrew his eyes slowly. But
+Adelaide's object was accomplished: no public betrothal had taken place.
+
+Pringle announced dinner. Mr. Lanley, rather to his own surprise, found
+that he was insisting on giving Mrs. Wayne his arm; he was not so angry
+at her as he had supposed. He did not think her offensive or unfeminine
+or half baked or socialistic or any of the things he had been saying to
+himself at lengthening intervals for the last twenty-four hours.
+
+Pete saw an opportunity, and tucked Mathilde's hand within his own arm,
+nipping it closely to his heart.
+
+The very instant they were at table Adelaide looked down the alley
+between the candles, for the low, golden dish of hot-house fruit did not
+obstruct her view of Vincent, and said:
+
+"Why have you never told me about Marty Burke?"
+
+"Who's he?" asked Mr. Lanley, quickly, for he had been trying to start a
+little conversational hare of his own, just to keep the conversation away
+from the water-front.
+
+"He's a splendid young super-tough in my employ," said Vincent. "What do
+you know about him, Adelaide?"
+
+The guarded surprise in his tone stimulated her.
+
+"Oh, I know all about him--as much, that is, as one ever can of a
+stupendous natural phenomenon."
+
+"Where did you hear of him?"
+
+"Hear of him? I've seen him. I saw him this morning at Mrs. Wayne's. He
+just dropped in while I was there and, metaphorically speaking, dragged
+us about by the hair of our heads."
+
+"Some women, I believe, confess to enjoying that sensation,"
+Vincent observed.
+
+"Yes, it's exciting," answered his wife.
+
+"It's an easy excitement to attain."
+
+"Oh, one wants it done in good style."
+
+Something so stimulating that it was almost hostile flashed through the
+interchange.
+
+Mathilde murmured to Pete:
+
+"Who are they talking about?"
+
+"A mixture of Alcibiades and _Bill Sykes_," said Adelaide, catching the
+low tone, as she always did.
+
+"He's the district leader and a very bad influence," said Mrs. Wayne.
+
+"He's a champion middle-weight boxer," said Pete.
+
+"He's the head of my stevedores," said Farron.
+
+"O Mr. Farron," Mrs. Wayne exclaimed, "I do wish you would use your
+influence over him."
+
+"My influence? It consists of paying him eighty-five dollars a month and
+giving him a box of cigars at Christmas."
+
+"Don't you think you could tone him down?" pleaded Mrs. Wayne. "He does
+so much harm."
+
+"But I don't want him toned down. His value to me is his being just as he
+is. He's a myth, a hero, a power on the water-front, and I employ him."
+
+"You employ him, but do you control him?" asked Adelaide, languidly, and
+yet with a certain emphasis.
+
+Her husband glanced at her.
+
+"What is it you want, Adelaide?" he said.
+
+She gave a little laugh.
+
+"Oh, I want nothing. It's Mrs. Wayne who wants you to do
+something--rather difficult, too, I should imagine."
+
+He turned gravely to their guest.
+
+"What is it you want, Mrs. Wayne?"
+
+Mrs. Wayne considered an instant, and as she was about to find words for
+her request her son spoke:
+
+"She'll tell you after dinner."
+
+"Pete, I wasn't going to tell the story," his mother put in protestingly.
+"You really do me injustice at times."
+
+Adelaide, remembering the conversation of the morning, wondered whether
+he did. She felt grateful to him for wishing to spare Mathilde the
+hearing of such a story, and she turned to him with a caressing
+graciousness in which she was extremely at her ease. Mathilde,
+recognizing that her mother was pleased, though not being very clear why,
+could not resist joining in their conversation; and Mrs. Wayne was thus
+given an opportunity of murmuring the unfortunate Anita's story into
+Vincent's ear.
+
+Adelaide, holding Pete with a flattering gaze, seeming to drink in every
+word he was saying, heard Mrs. Wayne finish and heard Vincent say:
+
+"And you think you can get it annulled if only Burke doesn't interfere?"
+
+"Yes, if he doesn't get hold of the boy and tell him that his dignity as
+a man is involved."
+
+Adelaide withdrew her gaze from Pete and fixed it on Vincent. Was he
+going to accept that challenge? She wanted him to, and yet she thought he
+would be defeated, and she did not want him to be defeated. She waited
+almost breathless.
+
+"Well, I'll see what I can do," he said. This was an acceptance.
+This from Vincent meant that the matter, as far as he was concerned,
+was settled.
+
+"You two plotters!" exclaimed Adelaide. "For my part, I'm on Marty
+Burke's side. I hate to see wild creatures in cages."
+
+"Dangerous to side with wild beasts," observed Vincent.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"They get the worst of it in the long run."
+
+Adelaide dropped her eyes. It was exactly the right answer. For a moment
+she felt his complete supremacy. Then another thought shot through her
+mind: it was exactly the right answer if he could make it good.
+
+In the meantime Mr. Lanley began to grow dissatisfied with the prolonged
+role of spectator. He preferred danger to oblivion; and turning to Mrs.
+Wayne, he said, with his politest smile:
+
+"How are the bridges?"
+
+"Oh, dear," she answered, "I must have been terribly tactless--to make
+you so angry."
+
+Mr. Lanley drew himself up.
+
+"I was not angry," he said.
+
+She looked at him with a sort of gentle wonder.
+
+"You gave me the impression of being."
+
+The very temperateness of the reply made him see that he had been
+inaccurate.
+
+"Of course I was angry," he said. "What I mean is that I don't understand
+why I was."
+
+Meantime, on the opposite side of the table, Mathilde and Pete were
+equally immersed, murmuring sentences of the profoundest meaning behind
+faces which they felt were mask-like.
+
+Farron looked down the table at his wife. Why, he wondered, did she want
+to tease him to-night, of all nights in his life?
+
+When they came out of the dining-room Pete said to Mathilde with the
+utmost clearness:
+
+"And what was that magazine you spoke of?"
+
+She had spoken of no magazine, but she caught the idea, the clever,
+rather wicked idea. He made her work her mind almost too fast sometimes,
+but she enjoyed it.
+
+"Wasn't it this?" she asked, with a beating heart.
+
+They sat down on the sofa and bent their heads over it with student-like
+absorption.
+
+"I haven't any idea what it is," she whispered.
+
+"Oh, well, I suppose there's something or other in it."
+
+"I think your mother is perfectly wonderful--wonderful."
+
+"I love you so."
+
+The older people took a little longer to settle down. Mr. Lanley stood on
+the hearth-rug, with a cigar in his mouth and his head thrown very far
+back. Adelaide sank into a chair, looking, as she often did, as if she
+had just been brilliantly well posed for a photograph. Farron was
+silent. Mrs. Wayne sat, as she had a bad habit of doing, on one foot. The
+two groups were sufficiently separated for distinct conversations.
+
+"Is this a conference?" asked Farron.
+
+Mrs. Wayne made it so by her reply.
+
+"The whole question is, Are they really in love? At least, that's my
+view."
+
+"In love!" Adelaide twisted her shoulders. "What can they know of it for
+another ten years? You must have some character, some knowledge to fall
+in love. And these babes--"
+
+"No," said Mr. Lanley, stoutly; "you're all wrong, Adelaide. It's first
+love that matters--_Romeo_ and _Juliet_, you know. Afterward we all get
+hardened and world-worn and cynical and material." He stopped short in
+his eloquence at the thought that Mrs. Wayne was quite obviously not
+hardened or world-worn or cynical or material. "By Jove!" he thought to
+himself, "that's it. The woman's spirit is as fresh as a girl's." He had
+by this time utterly forgotten what he had meant to say.
+
+Adelaide turned to her husband.
+
+"Do you think they are in love, Vin?"
+
+Vincent looked at her for a second, and then he nodded two or
+three times.
+
+Though no one at once recognized the fact, the engagement was settled at
+that moment.
+
+It seemed obvious that Mr. Lanley should take the Waynes home in his car.
+Mrs. Wayne, who had prepared for walking with overshoes and with pins for
+her trailing skirt, did not seem too enthusiastic at the suggestion. She
+stood a moment on the step and looked at the sky, where Orion, like a
+banner, was hung across the easterly opening of the side street.
+
+"It's a lovely night," she said.
+
+It was Pete who drew her into the car. Her reluctance deprived Mr.
+Lanley of the delight of bestowing a benefit, but gave him a faint sense
+of capture.
+
+In the drawing-room Mathilde was looking from one to the other of her
+natural guardians, like a well-trained puppy who wants to be fed. She
+wanted Pete praised. Instead, Adelaide said:
+
+"Really, papa is growing too secretive! Do you know, Vin, he and Mrs.
+Wayne quarreled like mad last evening, and he never told me a word
+about it!"
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"Oh, I heard them trying to smooth it out at dinner."
+
+"O Mama," wailed Mathilde, between admiration and complaint, "you hear
+everything!"
+
+"Certainly, I do," Adelaide returned lightly. "Yes, and I heard you, too,
+and understood everything that you meant."
+
+Vincent couldn't help smiling at his stepdaughter's horrified look.
+
+"What a brute you are, Adelaide!" he said.
+
+"Oh, my dear, you're much worse," she retorted. "You don't have to
+overhear. You just read the human heart by some black magic of your own.
+That's really more cruel than my gross methods."
+
+"Well, Mathilde," said Farron, "as a reader of the human heart, I want to
+tell you that I approve of the young man. He has a fine, delicate touch
+on life, which, I am inclined to think, goes only with a good deal of
+strength."
+
+Mathilde blinked her eyes. Gratitude and delight had brought
+tears to them.
+
+"He thinks you're wonderful, Mr. Farron," she answered a little huskily.
+
+"Better and better," answered Vincent, and he held out his hand for a
+letter that Pringle was bringing to him on a tray.
+
+"What's that?" asked Adelaide. One of the first things she had impressed
+on Joe Severance was that he must never inquire about her mail; but she
+always asked Farron about his.
+
+He seemed to be thinking and didn't answer her.
+
+Mathilde, now simply insatiable, pressed nearer to him and asked:
+
+"And what do you think of Mrs. Wayne?"
+
+He raised his eyes from the envelope, and answered with a certain
+absence of tone:
+
+"I thought she was an elderly wood-nymph."
+
+Adelaide glanced over his shoulder, and, seeing that the letter had a
+printed address in the corner, lost interest.
+
+"You may shut the house, Pringle," she said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+Pringle, the last servant up, was soon heard discreetly drawing bolts and
+turning out electric lights. Mathilde went straight up-stairs without
+even an attempt at drawing her mother into an evening gossip. She was
+aware of being tired after two nights rendered almost sleepless by her
+awareness of joy. She went to her room and shut the door. Her bed was
+piled high with extra covers, soft, light blankets and a down coverlet
+covered with pink silk. She took a certain hygienic pride in the extent
+to which she always opened her bedroom windows even when, as at present,
+the night was bitterly cold. In the morning she ran, huddling on her
+dressing-gown, into a heated bathroom, and when she emerged from this,
+the maid had always lighted her fire, and laid her breakfast-tray close
+to the blaze. To-night, when she went to open her window, she noticed
+that the houses opposite had lost courage and showed only cracks. She
+stood a second looking up at the stars, twinkling with tiny blue rays
+through the clear air. By turning her head to the west she could look
+down on the park, with its surface of bare, blurred tree-branches pierced
+by rows of lights. The familiar sight suddenly seemed to her almost
+intolerably beautiful. "Oh, I love him so much!" she said to herself, and
+her lips actually whispered the words, "so much! so much!"
+
+She threw the window high as a reproof of those shivers across the way,
+and, jumping into bed, hastily sandwiched her small body between the warm
+bedclothes. She was almost instantly asleep.
+
+Overhead the faint, but heavy, footfall of Pringle ceased. The house was
+silent; the city had become so. An occasional Madison Avenue car could be
+heard ringing along the cold rails, or rhythmically bounding down hill on
+a flat wheel. Once some distance away came the long, continuous complaint
+of the siren of a fire-engine and the bells and gongs of its comrades;
+and then a young man went past, whistling with the purest accuracy of
+time and tune the air to which he had just been dancing.
+
+At half-past five the kitchen-maid, a young Swede who feared not God,
+neither regarded man, but lived in absolute subjection to the cook, to
+whom, unknown to any one else, she every morning carried up breakfast,
+was stealing down with a candle in her hand. Her senses were alert, for a
+friend of hers had been strangled by burglars in similar circumstances,
+and she had never overcome her own terror of the cold, dark house in
+these early hours of a winter morning.
+
+She went down not the back stairs, for Mr. Pringle objected that she woke
+him as she passed, whereas the carpet on the front stairs was so thick
+that there wasn't the least chance of waking the family. As she passed
+Mrs. Farron's room she was surprised to see a fine crack of light coming
+from under it. She paused, wondering if she was going to be caught, and
+if she had better run back and take to the back stairs despite Pringle's
+well-earned rest; and as she hesitated she heard a sob, then
+another--wild, hysterical sobs. The girl looked startled and then went
+on, shaking her head. What people like that had to cry about beat her.
+But she was glad, because she knew such a splendid bit of news would
+soften the heart of the cook when she took up her breakfast.
+
+By five o'clock it seemed to Adelaide that a whole eternity had passed
+and that another was ahead of her, that this night would never end.
+
+When they went up-stairs, while she was brushing her hair--her hair
+rewarded brushing, for it was fine and long and took a polish like
+bronze--she had wandered into Vincent's room to discuss with him the
+question of her father's secretiveness about Mrs. Wayne. It was not, she
+explained, standing in front of his fire, that she suspected anything,
+but that it was so unfriendly: it deprived one of so much legitimate
+amusement if one's own family practised that kind of reserve. Her just
+anger kept her from observing Farron very closely. As she talked she laid
+her brush on the mantelpiece, and as she did so she knocked down the
+letter that had come for him just before they went up-stairs. She
+stooped, and picked it up without attention, and stood holding it; she
+gesticulated a little with it as she repeated, for her own amusement
+rather than for Vincent's, phrases she had caught at dinner.
+
+The horror to Farron of seeing her standing there chattering, with that
+death-dealing letter in her hand, suddenly and illogically broke down his
+resolution of silence. It was cruel, and though he might have denied
+himself her help, he could not endure cruelty.
+
+"Adelaide," he said in a tone that drove every other sensation
+away--"Adelaide, that letter. No, don't read it." He took it from her
+and laid it on his dressing-table. "My dear love, it has very bad
+news in it."
+
+"There _has_ been something, then?"
+
+"Yes. I have been worried about my health for some time. This letter
+tells me the worst is true. Well, my dear, we did not enter matrimony
+with the idea that either of us was immortal."
+
+But that was his last effort to be superior to the crisis, to pretend
+that the bitterness of death was any less to him than to any other human
+creature, to conceal that he needed help, all the help that he could get.
+
+And Adelaide gave him help. Artificial as she often was in daily
+contact, in a moment like this she was splendidly, almost primitively
+real. She did not conceal her own passionate despair, her conviction that
+her life couldn't go on without his; she did not curb her desire to know
+every detail on which his opinion and his doctor's had been founded; she
+clung to him and wept, refusing to let him discuss business arrangements,
+in which for some reason he seemed to find a certain respite; and yet
+with it all, she gave him strength, the sense that he had an indissoluble
+and loyal companion in the losing fight that lay before him.
+
+Once she was aware of thinking: "Oh, why did he tell me to-night? Things
+are so terrible by night," but it was only a second before she put such a
+thought away from her. What had these nights been to him? The night when
+she had found his light burning so late, and other nights when he had
+probably denied himself the consolation of reading for fear of rousing
+her suspicions. She did not attempt to pity or advise him, she did not
+treat him as a mixture of child and idiot, as affection so often treats
+illness. She simply gave him her love.
+
+Toward morning he fell asleep in her arms, and then she stole back to
+her own room. There everything was unchanged, the light still burning,
+her satin slippers stepping on each other just as she had left them. She
+looked at herself in the glass; she did not look so very different. A
+headache had often ravaged her appearance more.
+
+She had always thought herself a coward, she feared death with a terrible
+repugnance; but now she found, to her surprise, that she would have
+light-heartedly changed places with her husband. She had much more
+courage to die than to watch him die--to watch Vincent die, to see him
+day by day grow weak and pitiful. That was what was intolerable. If he
+would only die now, to-night, or if she could! It was at this moment that
+the kitchen maid had heard her sobbing.
+
+Because there was nothing else to do, she got into bed, and lay there
+staring at the electric light, which she had forgotten to put out. Toward
+seven she got up and gave orders that Mr. Farron was not to be disturbed,
+that the house was to be kept quiet. Strange, she thought, that he could
+sleep like an exhausted child, while she, awake, was a mass of pain. Her
+heart ached, her eyes burned, her very body felt sore. She arranged for
+his sleep, but she wanted him to wake up; she begrudged every moment of
+his absence. Alas! she thought, how long would she continue to do so?
+
+Yet with her suffering came a wonderful ease, an ability to deal with the
+details of life. When at eight o'clock her maid came in and, pulling the
+curtains, exclaimed with Gallic candor, "Oh, comme madame a mauvaise mine
+ce matin!" she smiled at her with unusual gentleness. Later, when
+Mathilde came down at her accustomed hour, and lying across the foot of
+her mother's bed, began to read her scraps of the morning paper, Adelaide
+felt a rush of tenderness for the child, who was so unaware of the
+hideous bargain life really was. Surprising as it was, she found she
+could talk more easily than usual and with a more undivided attention,
+though everything they said was trivial enough.
+
+Then suddenly her heart stood still, for the door opened, and Vincent, in
+his dressing-gown, came in. He had evidently had his bath, for his hair
+was wet and shiny. Thank God! he showed no signs of defeat!
+
+"Oh," cried Mathilde, jumping up, "I thought Mr. Farron had gone
+down-town ages ago."
+
+"He overslept," said Adelaide.
+
+"I had an excellent night," he answered, and she knew he looked at her to
+discover that she had not.
+
+"I'll go," said Mathilde; but with unusual sharpness they both turned to
+her and said simultaneously, "No, no; stay." They knew no better than she
+did why they were so eager to keep her.
+
+"Are you going down-town, Vin?" Adelaide asked, and her voice shook a
+little on the question; she was so eager that he should not institute any
+change in his routine so soon.
+
+"Of course," he answered.
+
+They looked at each other, yet their look said nothing in particular.
+Presently he said:
+
+"I wonder if I might have breakfast in here. I'll go and shave if you'll
+order it; and don't let Mathilde go. I have something to say to her."
+
+When he was gone, Mathilde went and stood at the window, looking out, and
+tying knots in the window-shade's cord. It was a trick Adelaide had
+always objected to, and she was quite surprised to hear herself saying
+now, just as usual:
+
+"Mathilde, don't tie knots in that cord."
+
+Mathilde threw it from her as one whose mind was engaged on higher
+things.
+
+"You know," she observed, "I believe I'm only just beginning to
+appreciate Mr. Farron. He's so wise. I see what you meant about his being
+strong, and he's so clever. He knows just what you're thinking all the
+time. Isn't it nice that he likes Pete? Did he say anything more about
+him after you went up-stairs? I mean, he really does like him, doesn't
+he? He doesn't say that just to please me?"
+
+Presently Vincent came back fully dressed and sat down to his breakfast.
+Oddly enough, there was a spirit of real gaiety in the air.
+
+"What was it you were going to say to me?" Mathilde asked greedily.
+Farron looked at her blankly. Adelaide knew that he had quite forgotten
+the phrase, but he concealed the fact by not allowing the least
+illumination of his expression as he remembered.
+
+"Oh, yes," he said. "I wish to correct myself. I told you that Mrs.
+Wayne was an elderly wood-nymph; but I was wrong. Of course the truth is
+that she's a very young witch."
+
+Mathilde laughed, but not whole-heartedly. She had already identified
+herself so much with the Waynes that she could not take them quite in
+this tone of impersonality.
+
+Farron threw down his napkin, stood up, pulled down his waistcoat.
+
+"I must be off," he said. He went and kissed his wife. Both had to nerve
+themselves for that.
+
+She held his arm in both her hands, feeling it solid, real, and as
+hard as iron.
+
+"You'll be up-town early?"
+
+"I've a busy day."
+
+"By four?"
+
+"I'll telephone." She loved him for refusing to yield to her just at this
+moment of all moments. Some men, she thought, would have hidden their own
+self-pity under the excuse of the necessity of being kind to her.
+
+She was to lunch out with a few critical contemporaries. She was
+horrified when she looked at herself by morning light. Her skin had an
+ivory hue, and there were many fine wrinkles about her eyes. She began to
+repair these damages with the utmost frankness, talking meantime to
+Mathilde and the maid. She swept her whole face with a white lotion,
+rouged lightly, but to her very eyelids, touched a red pencil to her
+lips, all with discretion. The result was satisfactory. The improvement
+in her appearance made her feel braver. She couldn't have faced these
+people--she did not know whether to think of them as intimate enemies or
+hostile friends--if she had been looking anything but her best.
+
+But they were just what she needed; they would be hard and amusing and
+keep her at some tension. She thought rather crossly that she could not
+sit through a meal at home and listen to Mathilde rambling on about love
+and Mr. Farron.
+
+She was inexcusably late, and they had sat down to luncheon--three men
+and two women--by the time she arrived. They had all been, or had wanted
+to go, to an auction sale of _objets d'art_ that had taken place the
+night before. They were discussing it, praising their own purchases, and
+decrying the value of everybody else's when Adelaide came in.
+
+"Oh, Adelaide," said her hostess, "we were just wondering what you paid
+originally for your tapestry."
+
+"The one in the hall?"
+
+"No, the one with the Turk in it."
+
+"I haven't an idea,--" Adelaide was distinctly languid,--"I got it from
+my grandfather."
+
+"Wouldn't you know she'd say that?" exclaimed one of the women. "Not that
+I deny it's true; only, you know, Adelaide, whenever you do want to throw
+a veil over one of your pieces, you always call on the prestige of your
+ancestors."
+
+Adelaide raised her eyebrows.
+
+"Really," she answered, "there isn't anything so very conspicuous about
+having had a grandfather."
+
+"No," her hostess echoed, "even I, so well and favorably known for my
+vulgarity--even _I_ had a grandfather."
+
+"But he wasn't a connoisseur in tapestries, Minnie darling."
+
+"No, but he was in pigs, the dear vulgarian."
+
+"True vulgarity," said one of the men, "vulgarity in the best sense, I
+mean, should betray no consciousness of its own existence. Only thus can
+it be really great."
+
+"Oh, Minnie's vulgarity is just artificial, assumed because she found it
+worked so well."
+
+"Surely you accord her some natural talent along those lines."
+
+"I suspect her secret mind is refined."
+
+"Oh, that's not fair. Vulgar is as vulgar does."
+
+Adelaide stood up, pushing back her chair. She found them utterly
+intolerable. Besides, as they talked she had suddenly seen clearly that
+she must herself speak to Vincent's doctor without an instant's delay. "I
+have to telephone, Minnie," she said, and swept out of the room. She
+never returned.
+
+"Not one of the perfect lady's golden days, I should say," said one of
+the men, raising his eyebrows. "I wonder what's gone wrong?"
+
+"Can Vincent have been straying from the straight and narrow?"
+
+"Something wrong. I could tell by her looks."
+
+"Ah, my dear, I'm afraid her looks is what's wrong."
+
+Adelaide meantime was in her motor on her way to the doctor's office. He
+had given up his sacred lunch-hour in response to her imperious demand
+and to his own intense pity for her sorrow.
+
+He did not know her, but he had had her pointed out to him, and though
+he recognized the unreason of such an attitude, he was aware that her
+great beauty dramatized her suffering, so that his pity for her was
+uncommonly alive.
+
+He was a young man, with a finely cut face and a blond complexion. His
+pity was visible, quivering a little under his mask of impassivity.
+Adelaide's first thought on seeing him was, "Good Heavens! another man to
+be emotionally calmed before I can get at the truth!" She had to be
+tactful, to let him see that she was not going to make a scene. She knew
+that he felt it himself, but she was not grateful to him. What business
+had he to feel it? His feeling was an added burden, and she felt that she
+had enough to carry.
+
+He did not make the mistake, however, of expressing his sympathy
+verbally. His answers were as cold and clear as she could wish. She
+questioned him on the chances of an operation. He could not reduce his
+judgment to a mathematical one; he was inclined to advocate an operation
+on psychological grounds, he said.
+
+"It keeps up the patient's courage to know something is being done." He
+added, "That will be your work, Mrs. Farron, to keep his courage up."
+
+Most women like to know they had their part to play, but Adelaide shook
+her head quickly.
+
+"I would so much rather go through it myself!" she cried.
+
+"Naturally, naturally," he agreed, without getting the full passion
+of her cry.
+
+She stood up.
+
+"Oh," she said, "if it could only be kill or cure!"
+
+He glanced at her.
+
+"We have hardly reached that point yet," he answered.
+
+She went away dissatisfied. He had answered every question, he had even
+encouraged her to hope a little more than her interpretation of what
+Vincent said had allowed her; but as she drove away she knew he had
+failed her. For she had gone to him in order to have Vincent presented to
+her as a hero, as a man who had looked upon the face of death without a
+quiver. Instead, he had been presented to her as a patient, just one of
+the long procession that passed through that office. The doctor had said
+nothing to contradict the heroic picture, but he had said nothing to
+contribute to it. And surely, if Farron had stood out in his calmness and
+courage above all other men, the doctor would have mentioned it, couldn't
+have helped doing so; he certainly would not have spent so much time in
+telling her how she was to guard and encourage him. To the doctor he was
+only a patient, a pitiful human being, a victim of mortality. Was that
+what he was going to become in her eyes, too?
+
+At four she drove down-town to his office. He came out with another man;
+they stood a moment on the steps talking and smiling. Then he drew his
+friend to the car window and introduced him to Adelaide. The man took
+off his hat.
+
+"I was just telling your husband, Mrs. Farron, that I've been looking at
+offices in this building. By the spring he and I will be neighbors."
+
+Adelaide just shut her eyes, and did not open them again until Vincent
+had got in beside her and she felt his arm about her shoulder.
+
+"My poor darling!" he said. "What you need is to go home and get some
+sleep." It was said in his old, cherishing tone, and she, leaning back,
+with her head against the point of his shoulder, felt that, black as it
+was, life for the first time since the night before had assumed its
+normal aspect again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+The morning after their drive up-town Vincent told his wife that all
+his arrangements were made to go to the hospital that night, and to be
+operated upon the next day. She reproached him for having made his
+decision without consulting her, but she loved him for his proud
+independence.
+
+Somehow this second day under the shadow of death was less terrible than
+the first. Vincent stayed up-town, and was very natural and very busy. He
+saw a few people,--men who owed him money, his lawyer, his partner,--but
+most of the time he and Adelaide sat together in his study, as they had
+sat on many other holidays. He insisted on going alone to the hospital,
+although she was to be in the building during the operation.
+
+Mathilde had been told, and inexperienced in disaster, she had felt
+convinced that the outcome couldn't be fatal, yet despite her conviction
+that people did not really die, she was aware of a shyness and
+awkwardness in the tragic situation.
+
+Mr. Lanley had been told, and his attitude was just the opposite. To
+him it seemed absolutely certain that Farron would die,--every one
+did,--but he had for some time been aware of a growing hardness on his
+part toward the death of other people, as if he were thus preparing
+himself for his own.
+
+"Poor Vincent!" he said to himself. "Hard luck at his age, when an old
+man like me is left." But this was not quite honest. In his heart he
+felt there was nothing unnatural in Vincent's being taken or in his
+being left.
+
+As usual in a crisis, Adelaide's behavior was perfect. She contrived to
+make her husband feel every instant the depth, the strength, the passion
+of her love for him without allowing it to add to the weight he was
+already carrying. Alone together, he and she had flashes of real gaiety,
+sometimes not very far from tears.
+
+To Mathilde the brisk naturalness of her mother's manner was a source of
+comfort. All the day the girl suffered from a sense of strangeness and
+isolation, and a fear of doing or saying something unsuitable--something
+either too special or too every-day. She longed to evince sympathy for
+Mr. Farron, but was afraid that, if she did, it would be like intimating
+that he was as good as dead. She was caught between the negative danger
+of seeming indifferent and the positive one of being tactless.
+
+As soon as Vincent had left the house, Adelaide's thought turned to her
+daughter. He had gone about six o'clock. He and she had been sitting by
+his study fire when Pringle announced that the motor was waiting. Vincent
+got up quietly, and so did she. They stood with their arms about each
+other, as if they meant never to forget the sense of that contact; and
+then without any protest they went down-stairs together.
+
+In the hall he had shaken hands with Mr. Lanley and had kissed Mathilde,
+who, do what she would, couldn't help choking a little. All this time
+Adelaide stood on the stairs, very erect, with one hand on the stair-rail
+and one on the wall, not only her eyes, but her whole face, radiating an
+uplifted peace. So angelic and majestic did she seem that Mathilde,
+looking up at her, would hardly have been surprised if she had floated
+out into space from her vantage-ground on the staircase.
+
+Then Farron lit a last cigar, gave a quick, steady glance at his wife,
+and went out. The front door ended the incident as sharply as a shot
+would have done.
+
+It was then that Mathilde expected to see her mother break down. Under
+all her sympathy there was a faint human curiosity as to how people
+contrived to live through such crises. If Pete were on the brink of
+death, she thought that she would go mad: but, then, she and Pete were
+not a middle-aged married couple; they were young, and new to love.
+
+They all went into the drawing-room, Adelaide the calmest of the three.
+
+"I wonder," she said, "if you two would mind dining a little earlier than
+usual. I might sleep if I could get to bed early, and I must be at the
+hospital before eight."
+
+Mr. Lanley agreed a little more quickly than it was his habit to speak.
+
+"O Mama, I think you're so marvelous!" said Mathilde, and touched at her
+own words, she burst into tears. Her mother put her arm about her, and
+Mr. Lanley patted her shoulder--his sovereign care.
+
+"There, there, my dear," he murmured, "you must not cry. You know Vincent
+has a very good chance, a very good chance."
+
+The assumption that he hadn't was just the one Mathilde did not want to
+appear to make. Her mother saw this and said gently:
+
+"She's overstrained, that's all."
+
+The girl wiped her eyes.
+
+"I'm ashamed, when you are so calm and wonderful."
+
+"I'm not wonderful," said her mother. "I have no wish to cry. I'm beyond
+it. Other people's trouble often makes us behave more emotionally than
+our own. If it were your Pete, I should be in tears." She smiled, and
+looked across the girl's head at Mr. Lanley. "She would like to see him,
+Papa. Telephone Pete Wayne, will you, and ask him to come and see her
+this evening? You'll be here, won't you?"
+
+Mr. Lanley nodded without cordiality; he did not approve of encouraging
+the affair unnecessarily.
+
+"How kind you are, Mama!" exclaimed Mathilde, almost inaudibly. It was
+just what she wanted, just what she had been wanting all day, to see her
+own man, to assure herself, since death was seen to be hot on the trail
+of all mortals, that he and she were not wasting their brief time in
+separation.
+
+"We might take a turn in the motor," said Mr. Lanley, thinking that Mrs.
+Wayne might enjoy that.
+
+"It would do you both good."
+
+"And leave you alone, Mama?"
+
+"It's what I really want, dear."
+
+The plan did not fulfil itself quite as Mr. Lanley had imagined. Mrs.
+Wayne was out at some sort of meeting. They waited a moment for Pete.
+Mathilde fixed her eyes on the lighted doorway, and said to herself that
+in a few seconds the thing of all others that she desired would
+happen--he would come through it. And almost at once he did, looking
+particularly young and alive; so that, as he jumped in beside her on the
+back seat, both her hands went out and caught his arm and clung to him.
+Her realization of mortality had been so acute that she felt as if he had
+been restored to her from the dead. She told him the horrors of the day.
+Particularly, she wanted to share with him her gratitude for her mother's
+almost magic kindness.
+
+"I wanted you so much, Pete," she whispered; "but I thought it would be
+heartless even to suggest my having wishes at such a time. And then for
+her to think of it herself--"
+
+"It means they are not really going to oppose our marriage."
+
+They talked about their marriage and the twenty or thirty years of joy
+which they might reasonably hope to snatch from life.
+
+"Think of it," he said--"twenty or thirty years, longer than either of us
+have lived."
+
+"If I could have five years, even one year, with you, I think I could
+bear to die; but not now, Pete."
+
+In the meantime Mr. Lanley, alone on the front seat, for he had left
+his chauffeur at home, was driving north along the Hudson and saying
+to himself:
+
+"Sixty-four. Well, I may be able to knock out ten or twelve pretty
+satisfactory years. On the other hand, might die to-morrow; hope I
+don't, though. As long as I can drive a car and everything goes well
+with Adelaide and this child, I'd be content to live my full time--and a
+little bit more. Not many men are healthier than I am. Poor Vincent! A
+good deal more to live for than I have, most people would say; but I
+don't know that he enjoys it any more than I do." Turning his head a
+little, he shouted over his shoulder to Pete, "Sorry your mother
+couldn't come."
+
+Mathilde made a hasty effort to withdraw her hands; but Wayne, more
+practical, understanding better the limits put upon a driver, held
+them tightly as he answered in a civil tone: "Yes, she would have
+enjoyed this."
+
+"She must come some other time," shouted Mr. Lanley, and reflected that
+it was not always necessary to bring the young people with you.
+
+"You know, he could not possibly have turned enough to see," Pete
+whispered reprovingly to Mathilde.
+
+"I suppose not; and yet it seemed so queer to be talking to my
+grandfather with--"
+
+"You must try and adapt yourself to your environment," he returned, and
+put his arm about her.
+
+The cold of the last few days had given place to a thaw. The melting ice
+in the river was streaked in strange curves, and the bare trees along the
+straight heights of the Palisades were blurred by a faint bluish mist,
+out of which white lights and yellow ones peered like eyes.
+
+"Doesn't it seem cruel to be so happy when Mama and poor Mr. Farron--"
+Mathilde began.
+
+"It's the only lesson to learn," he answered--"to be happy while we are
+young and together."
+
+About ten o'clock Mr. Lanley left her at home, and she tiptoed up-stairs
+and hardly dared to draw breath as she undressed for fear she might wake
+her unhappy mother on the floor below her.
+
+She had resolved to wake early, to breakfast with her mother, to ask to
+be allowed to accompany her to the hospital; but it was nine o'clock when
+she was awakened by her maid's coming in with her breakfast and the
+announcement not only that Mrs. Farron had been gone for more than an
+hour, but that there had already been good news from the hospital.
+
+"Il parait que monsieur est tres fort," she said, with that absolute
+neutrality of accent that sounds in Anglo-Saxon ears almost like a
+complaint.
+
+Adelaide had been in no need of companionship. She was perfectly able
+to go through her day. It seemed as if her soul, with a soul's
+capacity for suffering, had suddenly withdrawn from her body, had
+retreated into some unknown fortress, and left in its place a hard,
+trivial, practical intelligence which tossed off plan after plan for
+the future detail of life. As she drove from her house to the hospital
+she arranged how she would apportion the household in case of a
+prolonged illness, where she would put the nurses. Nor was she less
+clear as to what should be done in case of Vincent's death. The whole
+thing unrolled before her like a panorama.
+
+At the hospital, after a little delay, she was guided to Vincent's own
+room, recently deserted. A nurse came to tell her that all was going
+well; Mr. Farron had had a good night, and was taking the anesthetic
+nicely. Adelaide found the young woman's manner offensively encouraging,
+and received the news with an insolent reserve.
+
+"That girl is too wildly, spiritually bright," she said to herself. But
+no manner would have pleased her.
+
+Left alone, she sat down in a rocking-chair near the window. Vincent's
+bag stood in the corner, his brushes were on the dressing-table, his tie
+hung on the electric light. Immortal trifles, she thought, that might be
+in existence for years.
+
+She began poignantly to regret that she had not insisted on seeing him
+again that morning. She had thought only of what was easiest for him. She
+ought to have thought of herself, of what would make it possible for her
+to go on living without him. If she could have seen him again, he might
+have given her some precept, some master word, by which she could have
+guided her life. She would have welcomed something imprisoning and safe.
+It was cruel of him, she thought, to toss her out like this, rudderless
+and alone. She wondered what he would have given her as a commandment,
+and remembered suddenly the apocryphal last words which Vincent was fond
+of attributing to George Washington, "Never trust a nigger with a gun."
+She found herself smiling over them. Vincent was more likely to have
+quoted the apparition's advice to Macbeth: "Be bloody, bold, and
+resolute." That would have been his motto for himself, but not for her.
+What was the principle by which he infallibly guided her?
+
+How could he have left her so spiritually unprovided for? She felt
+imposed upon, deserted. The busily planning little mind that had suddenly
+taken possession of her could not help her in the larger aspects of her
+existence. It would be much simpler, she thought, to die than to attempt
+life again without Vincent.
+
+She went to the window and looked out at the roofs of neighboring
+houses, a disordered conglomeration of water-tanks and skylights and
+chimney-pots. Then nearer, almost under her feet, she looked into a
+courtyard of the hospital and saw a pale, emaciated man in a wheel-chair.
+She drew back as if it were something indecent. Would Vincent ever become
+like that? she thought. If so, she would rather he died now under the
+anesthetic.
+
+A little while later the nurse came in, and said almost sternly that Dr.
+Crew had sent her to tell Mrs. Farron that the conditions seemed
+extremely favorable, and that all immediate danger was over.
+
+"You mean," said Adelaide, fiercely, "that Mr. Farron will live?"
+
+"I certainly inferred that to be the doctor's meaning," answered the
+nurse. "But here is the assistant, Dr. Withers."
+
+Dr. Withers, bringing with him an intolerable smell of disinfectants and
+chloroform, hurried in, with his hair mussed from the haste with which he
+had removed his operating-garments. He had small, bright, brown eyes,
+with little lines about them that seemed to suggest humor, but actually
+indicated that he buoyed up his life not by exaltation of himself, but by
+half-laughing depreciation of every one else.
+
+"I thought you'd be glad to know, Mrs. Farron," he said, "that any danger
+that may have existed is now over. Your husband--"
+
+"That _may_ have existed," cried Adelaide. "Do you mean to say there
+hasn't been any real danger?"
+
+The young doctor's eyes twinkled.
+
+"An operation even in the best hands is always a danger," he replied.
+
+"But you mean there was no other?" Adelaide asked, aware of a growing
+coldness about her hands and feet.
+
+Withers looked as just as Aristides.
+
+"It was probably wise to operate," he said. "Your husband ought to be up
+and about in three weeks."
+
+Everything grew black and rotatory before Adelaide's eyes, and she sank
+slowly forward into the young doctor's arms.
+
+As he laid her on the bed, he glanced whimsically at the nurse and
+shook his head.
+
+But she made no response, an omission which may not have meant loyalty to
+Dr. Crew so much as unwillingness to support Dr. Withers.
+
+Adelaide returned to consciousness only in time to be hurried away to
+make room for Vincent. His long, limp figure was carried past her in the
+corridor. She was told that in a few hours she might see him. But she
+wasn't, as a matter of fact, very eager to see him. The knowledge that he
+was to live, the lifting of the weight of dread, was enough. The maternal
+strain did not mingle with her love for him; she saw no possible reward,
+no increased sense of possession, in his illness. On the contrary, she
+wanted him to stride back in one day from death to his old powerful,
+dominating self.
+
+She grew to hate the hospital routine, the fixed hours, the regulated
+food. "These rules, these hovering women," she exclaimed, "these
+trays--they make me think of the nursery." But what she really hated was
+Vincent's submission to it all. In her heart she would have been glad to
+see him breaking the rules, defying the doctors, and bullying his nurses.
+
+Before long a strong, silent antagonism grew up between her and the
+bright-eyed, cheerful nurse, Miss Gregory. It irritated Adelaide to gain
+access to her husband through other people's consent; it irritated her to
+see the girl's understanding of the case, and her competent arrangements
+for her patient's comfort. If Vincent had showed any disposition to
+revolt, Adelaide would have pleaded with him to submit; but as it was,
+she watched his docility with a scornful eye.
+
+"That girl rules you with a rod of iron," she said one day. But even then
+Vincent did not rouse himself.
+
+"She knows her business," he said admiringly.
+
+To any other invalid Adelaide could have been a soothing visitor, could
+have adapted the quick turns of her mind to the relaxed attention of
+the sick; but, honestly enough, there seemed to her an impertinence,
+almost an insult, in treating Vincent in such a way. The result was
+that her visits were exhausting, and she knew it. And yet, she said to
+herself, he was ill, not insane; how could she conceal from him the
+happenings of every day? Vincent would be the last person to be
+grateful to her for that.
+
+She saw him one day grow pale; his eyes began to close. She had made up
+her mind to leave him when Miss Gregory came in, and with a quicker eye
+and a more active habit of mind, said at once:
+
+"I think Mr. Farron has had enough excitement for one day."
+
+Adelaide smiled up at the girl almost insolently.
+
+"Is a visit from a wife an excitement?" she asked. Miss Gregory was
+perfectly grave.
+
+"The greatest," she said.
+
+Adelaide yielded to her own irritation.
+
+"Well," she said, "I shan't stay much longer."
+
+"It would be better if you went now, I think, Mrs. Farron."
+
+Adelaide looked at Vincent. It was silly of him, she thought, to pretend
+he didn't hear. She bent over him.
+
+"Your nurse is driving me away from you, dearest," she murmured.
+
+He opened his eyes and took her hand.
+
+"Come back to-morrow early--as early as you can," he said.
+
+She never remembered his siding against her before, and she swept out
+into the hallway, saying to herself that it was childish to be annoyed at
+the whims of an invalid.
+
+Miss Gregory had followed her.
+
+"Mrs. Farron," she said, "do you mind my suggesting that for the present
+it would be better not to talk to Mr. Farron about anything that might
+worry him, even trifles?"
+
+Adelaide laughed.
+
+"You know very little of Mr. Farron," she said, "if you think he worries
+over trifles."
+
+"Any one worries over trifles when he is in a nervous state."
+
+Adelaide passed by without answering, passed by as if she had not heard.
+The suggestion of Vincent nervously worrying over trifles was one of the
+most repellent pictures that had ever been presented to her imagination.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+The firm for which Wayne worked was young and small--Benson & Honaton.
+They made a specialty of circularization in connection with the bond
+issues in which they were interested, and Wayne had charge of their
+"literature," as they described it. He often felt, after he had finished
+a report, that his work deserved the title. A certain number of people in
+Wall Street disapproved of the firm's methods. Sometimes Pete thought
+this was because, for a young firm, they had succeeded too quickly to
+please the more deliberate; but sometimes in darker moments he thought
+there might be some justice in the idea.
+
+During the weeks that Farron was in the hospital Pete, despite his
+constant availability to Mathilde, had been at work on his report on a
+coal property in Pennsylvania. He was extremely pleased with the
+thoroughness with which he had done the job. His report was not
+favorable. The day after it was finished, a little after three, he
+received word that the firm wanted to see him. He was always annoyed with
+himself that these messages caused his heart to beat a trifle faster. He
+couldn't help associating them with former hours with his head-master or
+in the dean's office. Only he had respected his head-master and even the
+dean, whereas he was not at all sure he respected Mr. Benson and he was
+quite sure he did not respect Mr. Honaton.
+
+He rose slowly from his desk, exchanging with the office boy who brought
+the message a long, severe look, under which something very comic lurked,
+though neither knew what.
+
+"And don't miss J.B.'s socks," said the boy.
+
+Mr. Honaton--J.B.--was considered in his office a very beautiful dresser,
+as indeed in some ways he was. He was a tall young man, built like a
+greyhound, with a small, pointed head, a long waist, and a very long
+throat, from which, however, the strongest, loudest voice could issue
+when he so desired. This was his priceless asset. He was the board
+member, and generally admitted to be an excellent broker. It always
+seemed to Pete that he was a broker exactly as a beaver is a
+dam-builder, because nature had adapted him to that task. But outside of
+this one instinctive capacity he had no sense whatsoever. He rarely
+appeared in the office. He was met at the Broad Street entrance of the
+exchange at one minute to ten by a boy with the morning's orders, and
+sometimes he came in for a few minutes after the closing; but usually by
+three-fifteen he had disappeared from financial circles, and was
+understood to be relaxing in the higher social spheres to which he
+belonged. So when Pete, entering Mr. Benson's private office, saw Honaton
+leaning against the window-frame, with his hat-brim held against his
+thigh exactly like a fashion-plate, he knew that something of importance
+must be pending.
+
+Benson, the senior member, was a very different person. He looked like a
+fat, white, pugnacious cat. His hair, which had turned white early, had a
+tendency to grow in a bang; his arms were short--so short that when he
+put his hands on the arms of his swing-chair he hardly bent his elbows.
+He had them there now as Pete entered, and was swinging through short
+arcs in rather a nervous rhythm. He was of Irish parentage, and was
+understood to have political influence.
+
+"Wayne," said Benson, "how would you like to go to China?"
+
+And Honaton repeated portentously, "China," as if Benson might have made
+a mistake in the name of the country if he had not been at his elbow to
+correct him.
+
+Wayne laughed.
+
+"Well," he said, "I have nothing against China."
+
+Benson outlined the situation quickly. The firm had acquired property in
+China not entirely through their own choice, and they wanted a thorough,
+clear report on it; they knew of no one--_no one_, Benson emphasized--who
+could do that as impartially and as well as Wayne. They would pay him a
+good sum and his expenses. It would take him a year, perhaps a year and a
+half. They named the figure. It was one that made marriage possible. They
+talked of the situation and the property and the demand for copper until
+Honaton began to look at his watch, a flat platinum watch, perfectly
+plain, you might have thought, until you caught a glimpse of a narrow
+line of brilliants along its almost imperceptible rim. His usual working
+day was over in half an hour.
+
+"And when I come back, Mr. Benson?" said Wayne.
+
+"Your place will be open for you here."
+
+There was a pause.
+
+"Well, what do you say?" said Honaton.
+
+"I feel very grateful for the offer," said Pete, "but of course I can't
+give you an answer now."
+
+"Why not, why not?" returned Honaton, who felt that he had given up half
+an hour for nothing if the thing couldn't be settled on the spot; and
+even Benson, Wayne noticed, began to glower.
+
+"You could probably give us as good an answer to-day as to-morrow,"
+he said.
+
+Nothing roused Pete's spirit like feeling a tremor in his own soul, and
+so he now answered with great firmness:
+
+"I cannot give you an answer to-day _or_ to-morrow."
+
+"It's all off, then, all off," said Honaton, moving to the door.
+
+"When do the Chinese boats sail, Mr. Honaton?" said Pete, with the
+innocence of manner that an employee should use when putting his superior
+in a hole.
+
+"I don't see what difference that makes to you, Wayne, if you're not
+taking them," said Honaton, as if he were triumphantly concealing the
+fact that he didn't know.
+
+"Don't feel you have to wait, Jack, if you're in a hurry," said his
+partner, and when the other had slid out of the office Benson turned to
+Wayne and went on: "You wouldn't have to go until a week from Saturday.
+You would have to get off then, and we should have to know in time to
+find some one else in case you don't care for it."
+
+Pete asked for three days, and presently left the office.
+
+He had a friend, one of his mother's reformed drunkards, who as janitor
+lived on the top floor of a tall building. He and his wife offered Wayne
+the hospitality of their balcony, and now and then, in moments like this,
+he availed himself of it. Not, indeed, that there had ever been a moment
+quite like this; for he knew that he was facing the most important
+decision he had ever been forced to make.
+
+In the elevator he met the janitor's cat Susan going home after an
+afternoon visit to the restaurant on the sixteenth floor. The elevator
+boy loved to tell how she never made a mistake in the floor.
+
+"Do you think she'd get off at the fifteenth or the seventeenth? Not she.
+Sometimes she puts her nose out and smells at the other floors, but she
+won't get off until I stop at the right one. Sometimes she has to ride up
+and down three or four times before any one wants the sixteenth. Eh,
+Susan?" he added in caressing tones; but Susan was watching the floors
+flash past and paid no attention until, arrived at the top, she and Pete
+stepped off together.
+
+It was a cool, clear day, for the wind was from the north, but on the
+southern balcony the sun was warm. Pete sat down in the kitchen-chair
+set for him, tilted back, and looked out over the Statue of Liberty,
+which stood like a stunted baby, to the blue Narrows. He saw one
+thing clearly, and that was that he would not go if Mathilde would not
+go with him.
+
+He envied people who could make up their minds by thinking. At least
+sometimes he envied them and sometimes he thought they lied. He could
+only think _about_ a subject and wait for the unknown gods to bring him a
+decision. And this is what he now did, with his eyes fixed on the towers
+and tanks and tenements, on the pale winter sky, and, when he got up and
+leaned his elbows on the parapet, on the crowds that looked like a flood
+of purple insects in the streets.
+
+He thought of Mathilde's youth and his own untried capacities for
+success, of poverty and children, of the probable opposition of
+Mathilde's family and of a strange, sinister, disintegrating power he
+felt or suspected in Mrs. Farron. He felt that it was a terrible risk to
+ask a young girl to take and that it was almost an insult to be afraid to
+ask her to take it. That was what his mother had always said about these
+cherished, protected creatures: they were not prepared to meet any strain
+in life. He knew he would not have hesitated to ask a girl differently
+brought up. Ought he to ask Mathilde or ought he not even to hesitate
+about asking her? In his own future he had confidence. He had an unusual
+power of getting his facts together so that they meant something. In a
+small way his work was recognized. A report of his had some weight. He
+felt certain that if on his return he wanted another position he could
+get it unless he made a terrible fiasco in China. Should he consult any
+one? He knew beforehand what they would all think about it. Mr. Lanley
+would think that it was sheer impertinence to want to marry his
+granddaughter on less than fifteen thousand dollars a year; Mrs. Farron
+would think that there were lots of equally agreeable young men in the
+world who would not take a girl to China; and his mother, whom he could
+not help considering the wisest of the three, would think that Mathilde
+lacked discipline and strength of will for such an adventure. And on this
+he found he made up his mind. "After all," he said to himself as he put
+the chair back against the wall, "everything else would be failure, and
+this may be success."
+
+It was the afternoon that Farron was brought back from the hospital, and
+he and Mathilde were sure of having the drawing-room to themselves. He
+told her the situation slowly and with a great deal of detail,
+chronologically, introducing the Chinese trip at the very end. But she
+did not at once understand.
+
+"O Pete, you would not go away from me!" she said. "I could not
+face that."
+
+"Couldn't you? Remember that everything you say is going to be used
+against you."
+
+"Would you be willing to go, Pete?"
+
+"Only if you will go with me."
+
+"Oh!" she clasped her hands to her breast, shrinking back to look at
+him. So that was what he had meant, this stranger whom she had known for
+such a short time. As she looked she half expected that he would smile,
+and say it was all a joke; but his eyes were steadily and seriously
+fixed on hers. It was very queer, she thought. Their meeting, their
+first kiss, their engagement, had all seemed so inevitable, so natural,
+there had not been a hint of doubt or decision about it; but now all of
+a sudden she found herself faced by a situation in which it was
+impossible to say yes or no.
+
+"It would be wonderful, of course," she said, after a minute, but her
+tone showed she was not considering it as a possibility.
+
+Wayne's heart sank; he saw that he had thought it possible that he would
+not allow her to go, but that he had never seriously faced the chance of
+her refusing.
+
+"Mathilde," he said, "it's far and sudden, and we shall be poor, and I
+can't promise that I shall succeed more than other fellows; and yet
+against all that--"
+
+She looked at him.
+
+"You don't think I care for those things? I don't care if you succeed or
+fail, or live all your life in Siam."
+
+"What is it, then?"
+
+"Pete, it's my mother. She would never consent."
+
+Wayne was aware of this, but, then, as he pointed out to Mathilde with
+great care, Mrs. Farron could not bear for her daughter the pain of
+separation.
+
+"Separation!" cried the girl, "But you just said you would not go if
+I did not."
+
+"If you put your mother before me, mayn't I put my profession
+before you?"
+
+"My dear, don't speak in that tone."
+
+"Why, Mathilde," he said, and he sprang up and stood looking down at her
+from a little distance, "this is the real test. We have thought we loved
+each other--"
+
+"Thought!" she interrupted.
+
+"But to get engaged with no immediate prospect of marriage, with all
+our families and friends grouped about, that doesn't mean such a
+lot, does it?"
+
+"It does to me," she answered almost proudly.
+
+"Now, one of us has to sacrifice something. I want to go on this
+expedition. I want to succeed. That may be egotism or legitimate
+ambition. I don't know, but I want to go. I think I mean to go. Ought
+I to give it up because you are afraid of your mother?"
+
+"It's love, not fear, Pete."
+
+"You love me, too, you say."
+
+"I feel an obligation to her."
+
+"And, good Heavens! do you feel none to me?"
+
+"No, no. I love you too much to feel an obligation to you."
+
+"But you love your mother _and_ feel an obligation to her. Why, Mathilde,
+that feeling of obligation _is_ love--love in its most serious form.
+That's what you don't feel for me. That's why you won't go."
+
+"I haven't said I wouldn't go."
+
+"You never even thought of going."
+
+"I have, I do. But how can I help hesitating? You must know I want to
+go."
+
+"I see very little sign of it," he murmured. The interview had not gone
+as he intended. He had not meant, he never imagined, that he would
+attempt to urge and coerce her; but her very detachment seemed to set a
+fire burning within him.
+
+"I think," he said with an effort to sound friendly, "that I had better
+go and let you think this over by yourself."
+
+He was actually moving to the door when she sprang up and put her arms
+about him.
+
+"Weren't you even going to kiss me, Pete?"
+
+He stooped, and touched her cheek with his lips.
+
+"Do you call that a kiss?"
+
+"O Mathilde, do you think any kiss will change the facts?" he answered,
+and was gone.
+
+As soon as he had left her the desire for tears left her, too. She felt
+calm and more herself, more an isolated, independent human being than
+ever before in her life. She thought of all the things she ought to have
+said to Pete. The reason why she felt no obligation to him was that she
+was one with him. She was prepared to sacrifice him exactly as she was,
+or ought to be, willing to sacrifice herself; whereas her mother--it
+seemed as if her mother's power surrounded her in every direction, as
+solid as the ancients believed the dome of heaven.
+
+Pringle appeared in the doorway in his eternal hunt for the tea-things.
+
+"May I take the tray, miss?" he said.
+
+She nodded, hardly glancing at the untouched tea-table. Pringle, as he
+bent over it, observed that it was nice to have Mr. Farron back.
+Mathilde remembered that she, too, had once been interested in her
+stepfather's return.
+
+"Where's my mother, Pringle?"
+
+"Mrs. Farron's in her room, I think, miss, and Mr. Lanley's with her."
+
+Lanley had stopped as usual to ask after his son-in-law. He found his
+daughter writing letters in her room. He thought her looking cross, but
+in deference to her recent anxieties he called it, even in his own mind,
+overstrained.
+
+"Vincent is doing very well, I believe," she answered in response to his
+question. "He ought to be. He is in charge of two lovely young creatures
+hardly Mathilde's age who have already taken complete control of the
+household."
+
+"You've seen him, of course."
+
+"For a few minutes; they allow me a few minutes. They communicate by
+secret signals when they think I have stayed long enough."
+
+Mr. Lanley never knew how to treat this mood of his daughter's, which
+seemed to him as unreasonable as if it were emotional, and yet as cold as
+if it were logic itself. He changed the subject and said boldly:
+
+"Mrs. Baxter is coming to-morrow."
+
+Adelaide's eyes faintly flashed.
+
+"Oh, wouldn't you know it!" she murmured. "Just at the most inconvenient
+time--inconvenient for me, I mean. Really, lovers are the only people you
+can depend on. I wish I had a lover."
+
+"Adelaide," said her father with some sternness, "even in fun you should
+not say such a thing. If Mathilde heard you--"
+
+"Mathilde is the person who made me see it. Her boy is here all the
+time, trying to think of something to please her. And who have I?
+Vincent has his nurses; and you have your old upholstered lady. I can't
+help wishing I had a lover. They are the only people who, as the Wayne
+boy would say, 'stick around.' But don't worry, Papa, I have a loyal
+nature." She was interrupted by a knock at the door, and a nurse--the
+same who had been too encouraging to please her at the hospital--put in
+her head and said brightly:
+
+"You may see Mr. Farron now, Mrs. Farron."
+
+Adelaide turned to her father and made a little bow.
+
+"See how I am favored," she said, and left him.
+
+Nothing of this mood was apparent when she entered her husband's room,
+though she noticed that the arrangement of the furniture had been
+changed, and, what she disliked even more, that they had brushed his hair
+in a new way. This, with his pallor and thinness, made him look strange
+to her. She bent over, and laid her cheek to his almost motionless lips.
+
+"Well, dear," she said, "have you seen the church-warden part they have
+given your hair?"
+
+He shook his head impatiently, and she saw, she had made the mistake of
+trying to give the tone to an interview in which she was not the leading
+character.
+
+"Who has the room above mine, Adelaide?" he asked.
+
+"My maid."
+
+"Ask her not to practice the fox-trot, will you?"
+
+"O Vincent, she is never there."
+
+"My mistake," he answered, and shut his eyes.
+
+She repented at once.
+
+"Of course I'll tell her. I'm sorry that you were disturbed." But she
+was thinking only of his tone. He was not an irritable man, and he had
+never used such a tone to her before. All pleasure in the interview was
+over. She was actually glad when one of the nurses came in and began to
+move about the room in a manner that suggested dismissal.
+
+"Of course I'm not angry," she said to herself. "He's so weak one must
+humor him like a child."
+
+She derived some satisfaction, however, from the idea of sending for her
+maid Lucie and making her uncomfortable; but on her way she met Mathilde
+in the hall.
+
+"May I speak to you, Mama?" she said.
+
+Mrs. Farron laughed.
+
+"May you speak to me?" she said. "Why, yes; you may have the unusual
+privilege. What is it?"
+
+Mathilde followed her mother into the bedroom and shut the door.
+
+"Pete has just been here. He has been offered a position in China."
+
+"In China?" said Mrs. Farron. This was the first piece of luck that had
+come to her in a long time, but she did not betray the least pleasure. "I
+hope it is a good one."
+
+"Yes, he thinks it good. He sails in two weeks."
+
+"In two weeks?" And this time she could not prevent her eye lighting a
+little. She thought how nicely that small complication had settled
+itself, and how clever she had been to have the mother to dinner and
+behave as if she were friendly. She did not notice that her daughter was
+trembling; she couldn't, of course, be expected to know that the girl's
+hands were like ice, and that she had waited several seconds to steady
+her voice sufficiently to pronounce the fatal sentence:
+
+"He wants me to go with him, Mama."
+
+She watched her mother in an agony for the effect of these words.
+Mrs. Farron had suddenly detected a new burn in the hearth-rug. She
+bent over it.
+
+"This wood does snap so!" she murmured.
+
+The rug was a beautiful old Persian carpet of roses and urns.
+
+"Did you understand what I said, Mama?"
+
+"Yes, dear; that Mr. Wayne was going to China in two weeks and wanted you
+to go, too. Was it just a _politesse_, or does he actually imagine that
+you could?"
+
+"He thinks I can."
+
+Mrs. Farron laughed good-temperedly.
+
+"Did you go and see about having your pink silk shortened?" she said.
+
+Mathilde stared at her mother, and in the momentary silence Lucie came in
+and asked what madame wanted for the evening, and Adelaide in her fluent
+French began explaining that what she really desired most was that Lucie
+should not make so much noise in her room that monsieur could not sleep.
+In the midst of it she stopped and turned to her daughter.
+
+"Won't you be late for dinner, darling?" she said.
+
+Mathilde thought it very possible, and went away to get dressed. She went
+into her own room and shut the door sharply behind her.
+
+All the time she was dressing she tried to rehearse her case--that it
+was her life, her love, her chance; but all the time she had a sickening
+sense that a lifted eye-brow of her mother's would make it sound childish
+and absurd even in her own ears. She had counted on a long evening, but
+when she went down-stairs she found three or four friends of her mother's
+were to dine and go to the theater. The dinner was amusing, the talk,
+though avowedly hampered by the presence of Mathilde, was witty and
+unexpected enough; but Mathilde was not amused by it, for she
+particularly dreaded her mother in such a mood of ruthless gaiety. At the
+theater they were extremely critical, and though they missed almost the
+whole first act, appeared, in the entr'acte, to feel no hesitation in
+condemning it. They spoke of French and Italian actors by name, laughed
+heartily over the playwright's conception of social usages, and made
+Mathilde feel as if her own unacknowledged enjoyment of the play was the
+guiltiest of secrets.
+
+As they drove home, she was again alone with her mother, and she said at
+once the sentence she had determined on:
+
+"I don't think you understood, Mama, how seriously I meant what I said
+this afternoon."
+
+Mrs. Farron was bending her long-waisted figure forward to get a good
+look at a picture which, small, lonely, and brightly lighted, hung in a
+picture-dealer's window. It was a picture of an empty room. Hot summer
+sunlight filtered through the lowered Venetian blinds, and fell in bands
+on the golden wood of the floor. Outside the air was burned and dusty,
+but inside the room all was clear, cool, and pure.
+
+"How perfect his things are," murmured Mrs. Farron to herself, and then
+added to her daughter: "Yes, my dear, I did take in what you said. You
+really think you are in love with this Wayne boy, don't you? It's
+immensely to your credit, darling," she went on, her tone taking on a
+flattering sweetness, "to care so much about any one who has such funny,
+stubby little hands--most unattractive hands," she added almost dreamily.
+
+There was a long pause during which an extraordinary thing happened to
+Mathilde. She found that it didn't make the very slightest difference to
+her what her mother thought of Pete or his hands, that it would never
+make any difference to her again. It was as if her will had suddenly
+been born, and the first act of that will was to decide to go with the
+man she loved. How could she have doubted for an instant? It was so
+simple, and no opposition would or could mean anything to her. She was
+not in the least angry; on the contrary, she felt extremely pitiful, as
+if she were saying good-by to some one who did not know she was going
+away, as if in a sense she had now parted from her mother forever. Tears
+came into her eyes.
+
+"Ah, Mama!" she said like a sigh.
+
+Mrs. Farron felt she had been cruel, but without regretting it; for that,
+she thought, was often a parent's duty.
+
+"I don't want to hurt your feelings, Mathilde. The boy is a nice enough
+little person, but really I could not let you set off for China at a
+minute's notice with any broker's clerk who happened to fall in love with
+your golden hair. When you have a little more experience you will
+discriminate between the men you like to have love you and the men there
+is the smallest chance of your loving. I assure you, if little Wayne were
+not in love with you, you would think him a perfectly commonplace boy. If
+one of your friends were engaged to him, you would be the first to say
+that you wondered what it was she saw in him. That isn't the way one
+wants people to feel about one's husband, is it? And as to going to China
+with him, you know that's impossible, don't you?"
+
+"It would be impossible to let him go without me."
+
+"Really, Mathilde!" said Mrs. Farron, gently, as if she, so willing to
+play fair, were being put off with fantasies. "I don't understand you,"
+she added.
+
+"No, Mama; you don't."
+
+The motor stopped at the door, and they went in silence to Mrs. Farron's
+room, where for a bitter hour they talked, neither yielding an inch. At
+last Adelaide sent the girl to bed. Mathilde was aware of profound
+physical exhaustion, and yet underneath there was a high knowledge of
+something unbreakable within her.
+
+Left alone, Adelaide turned instinctively toward her husband's door.
+There were her strength and vision. Then she remembered, and drew back;
+but presently, hearing a stir there, she knocked very softly. A nurse
+appeared on the instant.
+
+"Oh, _please_, Mrs. Farron! Mr. Farron has just got to sleep."
+
+Adelaide stood alone in the middle of the floor. Once again, she thought,
+in a crisis of her life she had no one to depend on but herself. She
+lifted her shoulders. No one was to blame, but there the fact was. They
+urged you to cling and be guided, but when the pinch came, you had to act
+for yourself. She had learned her lesson now. Henceforward she took her
+own life over into her own hands.
+
+She reviewed her past dependences. Her youth, with its dependence on her
+father, particularly in matters of dress. She recalled her early
+photographs with a shudder. Had she really dressed so badly or was it
+only the change of fashion? And then her dependence on Joe Severance.
+What could be more ridiculous than for a woman of her intelligence to
+allow herself to be guided in everything by a man like Joe, who had
+nothing himself but a certain shrewd masculinity? And now Vincent. She
+was still under the spell of his superiority, but perhaps she would come
+to judge him too. She had learned much from him. Perhaps she had learned
+all he had to teach her. Her face looked as if it were carved out of some
+smooth white stone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+After she had gone up-stairs, Mathilde went down again to telephone Pete
+that she had made her decision. She went boldly snapping electric
+switches, for her going was a sort of assertion of her right to
+independent action. She would have hesitated even less if she had known
+how welcome her news was, how he had suffered since their parting.
+
+On going home from his interview with her, he found his mother dressing
+to dine with Mr. Lanley, a party arranged before the unexpected arrival
+of Mrs. Baxter. The only part of dressing that delayed Mrs. Wayne was her
+hair, which was so long that the brushing of it took time. In this
+process she was engaged when her son, in response to her answer, came
+into her room.
+
+"How is Mr. Farron?" she asked at once, and he, rather touched at the
+genuineness of her interest, answered her in detail before her next
+exclamation betrayed that it was entirely for the employer of Marty
+Burke that she was solicitous. "Isn't it too bad he was taken ill just
+now?" she said.
+
+The bitterness and doubt from which Wayne was suffering were not emotions
+that disposed him to confidence. He did not want to tell his mother what
+he was going through, for the obvious and perhaps unworthy reason that it
+was just what she would have expected him to go through. At the same time
+a real deceit was involved in concealing it, and so, tipping his chair
+back against her wall, he said:
+
+"The firm has asked me to go to China for them."
+
+His mother turned, her whole face lit up with interest.
+
+"To China! How interesting!" she said. "China is a wonderful country. How
+I should like to go to China!"
+
+"Come along. I don't start for two weeks."
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"No, if you go, I'll make a trip to that hypnotic clinic of Dr.
+Platerbridge's; and if I can learn the trick, I will open one here."
+
+The idea crossed Wayne's mind that perhaps he had not the power of
+inspiring affection.
+
+"You don't miss people a bit, do you, Mother?" he said.
+
+"Yes, Pete, I do; only there is so much to be done. What does Mathilde
+say to you going off like this? How long will you be gone?"
+
+"More than a year."
+
+"Pete, how awful for her!"
+
+"There is nothing to prevent her going with me."
+
+"You couldn't take that child to China."
+
+"You may be glad to know that she is cordially of your opinion."
+
+The feeling behind his tone at last attracted his mother's full
+attention.
+
+"But, my dear boy," she said gently, "she has never been anywhere in her
+life without a maid. She probably doesn't know how to do her hair or mend
+her clothes or anything practical."
+
+"Mother dear, you are not so awfully practical yourself," he answered;
+"but you would have gone."
+
+Mrs. Wayne looked impish.
+
+"I always loved that sort of thing," she said; and then, becoming more
+maternal, she added, "and that doesn't mean it would be sensible because
+I'd do it."
+
+"Well,"--Wayne stood up preparatory to leaving the room,--"I mean to take
+her if she'll go."
+
+His mother, who had now finished winding her braid very neatly around her
+head, sank into a chair.
+
+"Oh, dear!" she said, "I almost wish I weren't dining with Mr. Lanley.
+He'll think it's all my fault."
+
+"I doubt if he knows about it."
+
+Mrs. Wayne's eyes twinkled.
+
+"May I tell him? I should like to see his face."
+
+"Tell him I am going, if you like. Don't say I want to take her with me."
+
+Her face fell.
+
+"That wouldn't be much fun," she answered, "because I suppose the truth
+is they won't be sorry to have you out of the way."
+
+"I suppose not," he said, and shut the door behind him. He could not
+truthfully say that his mother had been much of a comfort. He had
+suddenly thought that he would go down to the first floor and get Lily
+Parret to go to the theater with him. He and she had the warm friendship
+for each other of two handsome, healthy young people of opposite sexes
+who might have everything to give each other except time. She was
+perhaps ten years older than he, extremely handsome, with dimples and
+dark red hair and blue eyes. She had a large practice among the poor,
+and might have made a conspicuous success of her profession if it had
+not been for her intense and too widely diffused interest. She wanted to
+strike a blow at every abuse that came to her attention, and as, in the
+course of her work, a great many turned up, she was always striking
+blows and never following them up. She went through life in a series of
+springs, each one in a different direction; but the motion of her
+attack was as splendid as that of a tiger. Often she was successful, and
+always she enjoyed herself.
+
+When she answered Pete's ring, and he looked up at her magnificent
+height, her dimples appeared in welcome. She really was glad to see him.
+
+"Come out and dine with me, Lily, and go to the theater."
+
+"Come to a meeting at Cooper Union on capital punishment. I'm going to
+speak, and I'm going to be very good."
+
+"No, Lily; I want to explain to you what a pitiable sex you belong to.
+You have no character, no will--"
+
+She shook her head, laughing.
+
+"You are a personal lot, you young men," she said. "You change your mind
+about women every day, according to how one of them treats you."
+
+"They don't amount to a row of pins, Lily."
+
+"Certainly some men select that kind, Pete."
+
+"O Lily," he answered, "don't talk to me like that! I want some one to
+tell me I'm perfect, and, strangely enough, no one will."
+
+"I will," she answered, with beaming good nature, "and I pretty near
+think so, too. But I can't dine with you, Pete. Wouldn't you like to go
+to my meeting?"
+
+"I should perfectly hate to," he answered, and went off crossly, to
+dine at his college's local club. Here he found an old friend, who most
+fortunately said something derogatory of the firm of Benson & Honaton.
+The opinion coincided with certain phases of Wayne's own views, but he
+contradicted it, held it up to ridicule, and ended by quoting incidents
+in the history of his friend's own firm which, as he said, were
+probably among the crookedest things that had ever been put over in
+Wall Street. Lily would not have distracted his mind more completely.
+He felt almost cheerful when he went home about ten o'clock. His mother
+was still out, and there was no letter from Mathilde. He had been
+counting on finding one.
+
+Before long his mother came in. She was looking very fine. She had on a
+new gray dress that she had had made for her by a fallen woman from an
+asylum, but which had turned out better than such ventures of Mrs.
+Wayne's usually did.
+
+She had supposed she and Mr. Lanley were to dine alone, an idea which
+had not struck her as revolutionary. Accustomed to strange meals in
+strange company--a bowl of milk with a prison chaplain at a dairy
+lunch-room, or even, on one occasion, a supper in an Owl Lunch Wagon with
+a wavering drunkard,--she had thought that a quiet, perfect dinner with
+Mr. Lanley sounded pleasant enough. But she was not sorry to find it had
+been enlarged. She liked to meet new people. She was extremely
+optimistic, and always hoped that they would prove either spiritually
+rewarding, or practically useful to some of her projects. When she saw
+Mrs. Baxter, with her jetty hair, jeweled collar, and eyes a trifle too
+saurian for perfect beauty, she at once saw a subscription to the
+working-girl's club. The fourth person Mr. Wilsey, Lanley's lawyer, she
+knew well by reputation. She wondered if she could make him see that his
+position on the eight-hour law was absolutely anti-social.
+
+Mr. Lanley enjoyed a small triumph when she entered. He had been so
+discreet in his description of her to Mrs. Baxter, he had been so careful
+not to hint that she was an illuminating personality who had suddenly
+come into his life, that he knew he had left his old friend with the
+general impression that Mrs. Wayne was merely the mother of an
+undesirable suitor of Mathilde's who spent most of her life in the
+company of drunkards. So when she came in, a little late as usual, in her
+long, soft, gray dress, with a pink rose at her girdle, looking far more
+feminine than Mrs. Baxter, about whom Adelaide's offensive adjective
+"upholstered" still clung, he felt the full effect of her appearance. He
+even enjoyed the obviously suspicious glance which Mrs. Baxter
+immediately afterward turned upon him.
+
+At dinner things began well. They talked about people and events of which
+Mrs. Wayne knew nothing, but her interest and good temper made her not an
+outsider, but an audience. Anecdotes which even Mr. Lanley might have
+felt were trivial gossip became, through her attention to them, incidents
+of the highest human interest. Such an uncritical interest was perhaps
+too stimulating.
+
+He expected nothing dangerous when, during the game course, Mrs. Baxter
+turned to him and asked how Mathilde had enjoyed what she referred to as
+"her first winter."
+
+Mr. Lanley liked to talk about Mathilde. He described, with a little
+natural exaggeration, how much she had enjoyed herself and how popular
+she had been.
+
+"I hope she hasn't been bitten by any of those modern notions," said
+Mrs. Baxter.
+
+Mr. Wilsey broke in.
+
+"Oh, these modern, restless young women!" he said. "They don't seem able
+to find their natural contentment in their own homes. My daughter came to
+me the other day with a wonderful scheme of working all day long with
+charity organizations. I said to her, 'My dear, charity begins at home.'
+My wife, Mrs. Baxter, is an old-fashioned housekeeper. She gives out all
+supplies used in my house; she knows where the servants are at every
+minute of the day, and we have nine. She--"
+
+"Oh, how is dear Mrs. Wilsey?" said Mrs. Baxter, perhaps not eager for
+the full list of her activities.
+
+"Well, at present she is in a sanatorium," replied her husband, "from
+overwork, just plain overwork."
+
+Mr. Lanley, catching Mrs. Wayne's twinkling eye, could only pray that
+she would not point out that a sojourn in a sanatorium was not
+complete contentment in the home; but before she had a chance, Mrs.
+Baxter had gone on.
+
+"That's so like the modern girl--anything but her obvious duty. She'll
+help any one but her mother and work anywhere but in the home. We've had
+a very painful case at home lately. One of our most charming young girls
+has suddenly developed an absolutely morbid curiosity about the things
+that take place in the women's courts. Why, as her poor father said to
+me, 'Mrs. Baxter, old as I am, I hear things in those courts so shocking
+I have hard work forgetting them; and yet Imogen wants me to let her go
+into those courts day after day--'"
+
+"Oh, that's abnormal, almost perverted," said Mr. Wilsey, judicially.
+"The women's courts are places where no--" he hesitated a bare instant,
+and Mrs. Wayne asked:
+
+"No woman should go?"
+
+"No girl should go."
+
+"Yet many of the girls who come there are under sixteen."
+
+Mr. Wilsey hid a slight annoyance under a manner peculiarly bland.
+
+"Ah, dear lady," he said, "you must forgive my saying that that remark is
+a trifle irrelevant."
+
+"Is it?" she asked, meaning him to answer her; but he only looked
+benevolently at her, and turned to listen to Mrs. Baxter, who was saying:
+
+"Yes, everywhere we look nowadays we see women rushing into things they
+don't understand, and of course we all know what women are--"
+
+"What are they?" asked Mrs. Wayne, and Lanley's heart sank.
+
+"Oh, emotional and inaccurate and untrustworthy and spiteful."
+
+"Mrs. Baxter, I'm sure you're not like that."
+
+"My dear Madam!" exclaimed Wilsey.
+
+"But isn't that logical?" Mrs. Wayne pursued. "If all women are so, and
+she's a woman?"
+
+"Ah, logic, dear lady," said Wilsey, holding up a finger--"logic, you
+know, has never been the specialty of your sex."
+
+"Of course it's logic," said Lanley, crossly. "If you say all Americans
+are liars, Wilsey, and you're an American, the logical inference is that
+you think yourself a liar. But Mrs. Baxter doesn't mean that she thinks
+all women are inferior--"
+
+"I must say I prefer men," she answered almost coquettishly.
+
+"If all women were like you, Mrs. Baxter, I'd believe in giving them the
+vote," said Wilsey.
+
+"Please don't," she answered. "I don't want it."
+
+"Ah, the clever ones don't."
+
+"I never pretended to be clever."
+
+"Perhaps not; but I'd trust your intuition where I would pay no attention
+to a clever person."
+
+Lanley laughed.
+
+"I think you'd better express that a little differently, Wilsey," he
+said; but his legal adviser did not notice him.
+
+"My daughter came to me the other day," he went on to Mrs. Baxter, "and
+said, 'Father, don't you think women ought to have the vote some day?'
+and I said, 'Yes, my dear, just as soon as men have the babies.'"
+
+"There's no answer to that," said Mrs. Baxter.
+
+"I fancy not," said Wilsey. "I think I put the essence of it in that
+sentence."
+
+"If ever women get into power in this country, I shall live abroad."
+
+"O Mrs. Baxter," said Mrs. Wayne, "really you don't understand women--"
+
+"I don't? Why, Mrs. Wayne, I am a woman."
+
+"All human beings are spiteful and inaccurate and all those things you
+said; but that isn't _all_ they are. The women I see, the wives of my
+poor drunkards are so wonderful, so patient. They are mothers and
+wage-earners and sick nurses, too; they're not the sort of women you
+describe. Perhaps," she added, with one of her fatal impulses toward
+concession, "perhaps your friends are untrustworthy and spiteful, as
+you say--"
+
+Mrs. Baxter drew herself up. "My friends, Mrs. Wayne," she said--"my
+friends, I think, will compare favorably even with the wives of your
+drunkards."
+
+Mr. Lanley rose to his feet.
+
+"Shall we go up-stairs?" he said. Mr. Wilsey offered Mrs. Baxter his
+arm. "An admirable answer that of yours," he murmured as he led her from
+the room, "admirable snub to her perfectly unwarranted attack on you and
+your friends."
+
+"Of course you realize that she doesn't know any of the people I know,"
+said Mrs. Baxter. "Why should she begin to abuse them?"
+
+Mr. Wilsey laughed, and shook his finger.
+
+"Just because she doesn't know them. That, I'm afraid, is the rub. That's
+what I usually find lies behind the socialism of socialists--the sense of
+being excluded. This poor lady has evidently very little _usage du
+monde_. It is her pitiful little protest, dear Madam, against your charm,
+your background, your grand manner."
+
+They sank upon an ample sofa near the fire, and though the other end of
+the large room was chilly, Lanley and Mrs. Wayne moved thither with a
+common impulse.
+
+Mrs. Wayne turned almost tearfully to Lanley.
+
+"I'm so sorry I've spoiled your party," she said.
+
+"You've done much worse than that," he returned gravely.
+
+"O Mr. Lanley," she wailed, "what have I done?"
+
+"You've spoiled a friendship."
+
+"Between you and me?"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"Between them and me. I never heard people talk such nonsense, and yet
+I've been hearing people talk like that all my life, and have never taken
+it in. Mrs. Wayne, I want you to tell me something frankly--"
+
+"Oh, I'm so terrible when I'm frank," she said.
+
+"Do I talk like that?"
+
+She looked at him and looked away again.
+
+"Good God! you think I do!"
+
+"No, you don't talk like that often, but I think you feel that way a
+good deal."
+
+"I don't want to," he answered. "I'm sixty-four, but I don't ever want to
+talk like Wilsey. Won't you stop me whenever I do?"
+
+Mrs. Wayne sighed.
+
+"It will make you angry."
+
+"And if it does?"
+
+"I hate to make people angry. I was distressed that evening on the pier."
+
+He looked up, startled.
+
+"I suppose I talked like Wilsey that night?"
+
+"You said you might be old-fashioned but--"
+
+"Don't, please, tell me what I said, Mrs. Wayne." He went on more
+seriously: "I've got to an age when I can't expect great happiness from
+life--just a continuance of fairly satisfactory outside conditions; but
+since I've known you, I've felt a lightening, a brightening, an
+intensifying of my own inner life that I believe comes as near happiness
+as anything I've ever felt, and I don't want to lose it on account of a
+reactionary old couple like that on the sofa over there."
+
+He dreaded being left alone with the reactionary old couple when
+presently Mrs. Wayne, very well pleased with her evening, took her
+departure. He assisted her into her taxi, and as he came upstairs with a
+buoyant step, he wished it were not ridiculous at his age to feel so
+light-hearted.
+
+He saw that his absence had given his guests an instant of freer
+criticism, for they were tucking away smiles as he entered.
+
+"A very unusual type, is she not, our friend, Mrs. Wayne?" said Wilsey.
+
+"A little bit of a reformer, I'm afraid," said Mrs. Baxter.
+
+"Don't be too hard on her," answered Lanley.
+
+"Oh, very charming, very charming," put in Wilsey, feeling, perhaps, that
+Mrs. Baxter had been severe; "but the poor lady's mind is evidently
+seething with a good many undigested ideas."
+
+"You should have pointed out the flaws in her reasoning, Wilsey,"
+said his host.
+
+"Argue with a woman, Lanley!" Mr. Wilsey held up his hand in protest.
+"No, no, I never argue with a woman. They take it so personally."
+
+"I think we had an example of that this evening," said Mrs. Baxter.
+
+"Yes, indeed," the lawyer went on. "See how the dear lady missed the
+point, and became so illogical and excited under our little discussion."
+
+"Funny," said Lanley. "I got just the opposite impression."
+
+"Opposite?"
+
+"I thought it was you who missed the point, Wilsey."
+
+He saw how deeply he had betrayed himself as the others exchanged a
+startled glance. It was Mrs. Baxter who thought of the correct reply.
+
+"_Were_ there any points?" she asked.
+
+Wilsey shook his finger.
+
+"Ah, don't be cruel!" he said, and held out his hand to say good night;
+but Lanley was smoking, with his head tilted up and his eyes on the
+ceiling. What he was thinking was, "It isn't good for an old man to get
+as angry as I am."
+
+"Good night, Lanley; a delightful evening."
+
+Mr. Lanley's chin came down.
+
+"Oh, good night, Wilsey; glad you found it so."
+
+When he was gone, Mrs. Baxter observed that he was a most agreeable
+companion.
+
+"So witty, so amiable, and, for a leader at the bar, he has an
+extraordinarily light touch."
+
+Mr. Lanley had resumed his position on the hearth-rug and his
+contemplation of the ceiling.
+
+"Wilsey's not a leader at the bar," he said, with open crossness.
+
+He showed no disposition to sit and chat over the events of the evening.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Early the next morning, in Mrs. Baxter's parlance,--that is to say, some
+little time before the sun had reached the meridian,--she was ringing
+Adelaide's door-bell, while she minutely observed the curtains, the
+door-mat, the ivy plants in the vestibule, and the brightness of the
+brass knobs on the railing. In this she had a double motive: what was
+evil she would criticize, what was good she would copy.
+
+Adelaide was sitting with her husband when her visitor's name was brought
+up. Since she had discovered that she was to be nothing but a sort of
+super-nurse to him, she found herself expert at rendering such service.
+She had brought in his favorite flowers, chosen a book for his bedside,
+and now sat gossiping beside him, not bringing him, as she said to
+herself, any of her real troubles; that would not be good for him. How
+extraordinarily easy it was to conceal, she thought. She heard her own
+tones, as gay and intimate as ever, as satisfactory to Vincent; and yet
+all the time her mind was working apart on her anxieties about
+Mathilde--anxieties with which, of course, one couldn't bother a poor
+sick creature. She smoothed his pillow with the utmost tenderness.
+
+"Oh, Pringle," she said, in answer to his announcement that Mrs. Baxter
+was down-stairs, "you haven't let her in?"
+
+"She's in the drawing-room, Madam." And Pringle added as a clear
+indication of what he considered her duty, "She came in Mr. Lanley's
+motor."
+
+"Of course she did. Well, say I'll be down," and as Pringle went away
+with this encouraging intelligence, Adelaide sank even farther back in
+her chair and looked at her husband. "What I am called upon to sacrifice
+to other people's love affairs! The Waynes and Mrs. Baxter--I never have
+time for my own friends. I don't mind Mrs. Baxter when you're well, and I
+can have a dinner; I ask all the stupid people together to whom I owe
+parties, and she is so pleased with them, and thinks they represent the
+most brilliant New York circle; but to have to go down and actually talk
+to her, isn't that hard, Vin?"
+
+"Hard on me," said Farron.
+
+"Oh, I shall come back--exhausted."
+
+"By what you have given out?"
+
+"No, but by her intense intimacy. You have no idea how well she knows me.
+It's Adelaide this and Adelaide that and 'the last time you stayed with
+me in Baltimore.' You know, Vin, I never stayed with her but once, and
+that only because she found me in the hotel and kidnapped me.
+However,"--Adelaide stood up with determination,--"one good thing is, I
+have begun to have an effect on my father. He does not like her any more.
+He was distinctly bored at the prospect of her visit this time. He did
+not resent it at all when I called her an upholstered old lady. I really
+think," she added, with modest justice, "that I am rather good at
+poisoning people's minds against their undesirable friends." She paused,
+debating how long it would take her to separate Mathilde from the Wayne
+boy; and recalling that this was no topic for an invalid, she smiled at
+him and went down-stairs.
+
+"My dear Adelaide!" said Mrs. Baxter, enveloping her in a powdery
+caress.
+
+"How wonderfully you're looking, Mrs. Baxter," said Adelaide, choosing
+her adverb with intention.
+
+"Now tell me, dear," said Mrs. Baxter, with a wave of a gloved hand,
+"what are those Italian embroideries?"
+
+"Those?" Adelaide lifted her eyebrows. "Ah, you're in fun! A collector
+like you! Surely you know what those are."
+
+"No," answered Mrs. Baxter, firmly, though she wished she had selected
+something else to comment on.
+
+"Oh, they are the Villanelli embroideries," said Adelaide, carelessly,
+very much as if she had said they were the Raphael cartoons, so that Mrs.
+Baxter was forced to reply in an awestruck tone:
+
+"You don't tell me! Are they, really?"
+
+Adelaide nodded brightly. She had not actually made up the name. It
+was that of an obscure little palace where she had bought the
+hangings, and if Mrs. Baxter had had the courage to acknowledge
+ignorance, Adelaide would have told the truth. As it was, she
+recognized that by methods such as this she could retain absolute
+control over people like Mrs. Baxter.
+
+The lady from Baltimore decided on a more general scope.
+
+"Ah, your room!" she said. "Do you know whose it always reminds me
+of--that lovely salon of Madame de Liantour's?"
+
+"What, of poor little Henrietta's!" cried Adelaide, and she laid her hand
+appealingly for an instant on Mrs. Baxter's knee. "That's a cruel thing
+to say. All her good things, you know, were sold years ago. Everything
+she has is a reproduction. Am I really like her?"
+
+Getting out of this as best she could on a vague statement about
+atmosphere and sunshine and charm, Mrs. Baxter took refuge in inquiries
+about Vincent's health, "your charming child," and "your dear father."
+
+"You know more about my dear father than I do," returned Adelaide,
+sweetly. It was Mrs. Baxter's cue.
+
+"I did not feel last evening that I knew anything about him at all. He
+is in a new phase, almost a new personality. Tell me, who is this
+Mrs. Wayne?"
+
+"Mrs. Wayne?" Mrs. Baxter must have felt herself revenged by the complete
+surprise of Adelaide's tone.
+
+"Yes, she dined at the house last evening. Apparently it was to have been
+a tete-a-tete dinner, but my arrival changed it to a _partie carree_."
+She talked on about Wilsey and the conversation of the evening, but it
+made little difference what she said, for her full idea had reached
+Adelaide from the start, and had gathered to itself in an instant a
+hundred confirmatory memories. Like a picture, she saw before her Mrs.
+Wayne's sitting-room, with the ink-spots on the rug. Who would not wish
+to exchange that for Mr. Lanley's series of fresh, beautiful rooms?
+Suddenly she gave her attention back to Mrs. Baxter, who was saying:
+
+"I assure you, when we were alone I was prepared for a formal
+announcement."
+
+It was not safe to be the bearer of ill tidings to Adelaide.
+
+"An announcement?" she said wonderingly. "Oh, no, Mrs. Baxter, my father
+will never marry again. There have always been rumors, and you can't
+imagine how he and I have laughed over them together."
+
+As the indisputable subject of such rumors in past times, Mrs. Baxter
+fitted a little arrow in her bow.
+
+"In the past," she said, "women of suitable age have not perhaps been
+willing to consider the question, but this lady seems to me
+distinctly willing."
+
+"More than willingness on the lady's part has been needed," answered
+Adelaide, and then Pringle's ample form appeared in the doorway. "There's
+a man from the office here, Madam, asking to see Mr. Farron."
+
+"Mr. Farron can see no one." A sudden light flashed upon her. "What is
+his name, Pringle?"
+
+"Burke, Madam."
+
+"Oh, let him come in." Adelaide turned to Mrs. Baxter. "I will show
+you," she said, "one of the finest sights you ever saw." The next
+instant Marty was in the room. Not so gorgeous as in his
+wedding-attire, he was still an exceedingly fine young animal. He was
+not so magnificently defiant as before, but he scowled at his
+unaccustomed surroundings under his dark brows.
+
+"It's Mr. Farron I wanted to see," he said, a soft roll to his r's. At
+Mrs. Wayne's Adelaide had suffered from being out of her own
+surroundings, but here she was on her own field, and she meant to make
+Burke feel it. She was leaning with her elbow on the back of the sofa,
+and now she slipped her bright rings down her slim fingers and shook them
+back again as she looked up at Burke and spoke to him as she would have
+done to a servant.
+
+"Mr. Farron cannot see you."
+
+Cleverer people than Burke had struggled vainly against the poison of
+inferiority which this tone instilled into their minds.
+
+"That's what they keep telling me down-town. I never knew him sick
+before."
+
+"No?"
+
+"It wouldn't take five minutes."
+
+"Mr. Farron is too weak to see you."
+
+Marty made a strange grating sound in his throat, and Adelaide asked
+like a queen bending from the throne:
+
+"What seems to be the matter, Burke?"
+
+"Why,"--Burke turned upon her the flare of his light, fierce eyes,--"they
+have it on me on the dock that as soon as he comes back he means to
+bounce me."
+
+"To bounce you," repeated Adelaide, and she almost smiled as she thought
+of that poor exhausted figure up-stairs.
+
+"I don't care if he does or not," Marty went on. "I'm not so damned stuck
+on the job. There's others."
+
+"There are maidens in Scotland more lovely by far," murmured Adelaide.
+
+Again he scowled, feeling the approach of something hostile to him.
+
+"What's that?" he asked, surmising that she was insulting him.
+
+"I said I supposed you could get a better job if you tried."
+
+He did not like this tone either.
+
+"Well, whether I could or not," he said, "this is no way. I'm losing my
+hold of my men."
+
+"Oh, I can't imagine your doing that, Burke."
+
+He turned on her to see if she were really daring to laugh at him, and
+met an eye as steady as his own.
+
+"I guess I'm wasting my time here," he said, and something intimated that
+some one would pay for that expenditure.
+
+"Shall I take a message to Mr. Farron for you?" said Adelaide.
+
+He nodded.
+
+"Yes. Tell him that if I'm to go, I'll go to-day."
+
+"I see." She rose slowly, as if in response to a vague, amusing caprice.
+"Just that. If you go, you'll go to-day."
+
+For the first time Burke, regaining his self-confidence, saw that she was
+not an enemy, but an appreciative spectator, and his face broke up in a
+smile, queer, crooked, wrinkled, but brilliant.
+
+"I guess you'll get it about right," he said, and no compliment had ever
+pleased Adelaide half so much.
+
+"I think so," she confidently answered, and then at the door she
+turned. "Oh, Mrs. Baxter," she said, "this is Marty Burke, a very
+important person."
+
+Importance, especially Adelaide Farron's idea of importance, was a
+category for which Mrs. Baxter had the highest esteem, so almost against
+her will she looked at Burke, and found him looking her over with such a
+shrewd eye that she looked away, and then looked back again to find that
+his gaze was still upon her. He had made his living since he was a child
+by his faculty for sizing people up, and at his first glimpse of Mrs.
+Baxter's shifting glance he had sized her up; so that now, when she
+remarked with an amiability at once ponderous and shaky that it was a
+very fine day, he replied in exactly the same tone, "It is that," and
+began to walk about the room looking at the pictures. Presently a low,
+but sweet, whistle broke from his lips. He made her feel uncommonly
+uncomfortable, so uncomfortable that she was driven to conversation.
+
+"Are you fond of pictures, Burke?" she asked. He just looked at her over
+his shoulder without answering. She began to wish that Adelaide would
+come back.
+
+Adelaide had found her husband still accessible. He received in silence
+the announcement that Burke was down-stairs. She told the message
+without bias.
+
+"He says that they have it on him on the dock that he is to be bounced.
+He asked me to say this to you: that if he is to go, he'll go to-day."
+
+"What was his manner?"
+
+Adelaide could not resist a note of enjoyment entering into her tone as
+she replied:
+
+"Insolent in the extreme."
+
+She was leaning against the wall at the foot of his bed, and though she
+was not looking at him, she felt his eyes on her.
+
+"Adelaide," he said, "you should not have brought me that message."
+
+"You mean it is bad for your health to be worried, dearest?" she asked
+in a tone so soft that only an expert in tones could have detected
+something not at all soft beneath it. She glanced at her husband under
+her lashes. Wasn't he any more an expert in her tones?
+
+"I mean," he answered, "that you should have told him to go to the
+devil."
+
+"Oh, I leave that to you, Vin." She laughed, and added after a second's
+pause, "I was only a messenger."
+
+"Tell him I shall be down-town next week."
+
+"Oh, Vin, no; not next week."
+
+"Tell him next week."
+
+"I can't do that."
+
+"I thought you were only a messenger."
+
+"Your doctor would not hear of it. It would be madness."
+
+Farron leaned over and touched his bell. The nurse was instantly in
+the room, looking at Vincent, Adelaide thought, as a water-dog looks
+at its master when it perceives that a stick is about to be thrown
+into the pond.
+
+"Miss Gregory," said Vincent, "there's a young man from my office
+down-stairs. Will you tell him that I can't see him to-day, but that I
+shall be down-town next week, and I'll see him then?"
+
+Miss Gregory was almost at the door before Adelaide stopped her.
+
+"You must know that Mr. Farron cannot get down-town next week."
+
+"Has the doctor said not?"
+
+Adelaide shook her head impatiently.
+
+"I don't suppose any one has been so insane as to ask him," she answered.
+
+Miss Gregory smiled temperately.
+
+"Oh, next week is a long time off," she said, and left the room. Adelaide
+turned to her husband.
+
+"Do you enjoy being humored?" she asked.
+
+Farron had closed his eyes, and now opened them.
+
+"I beg your pardon," he said. "I didn't hear."
+
+"She knows quite well that you can't go down-town next week. She takes
+your message just to humor you."
+
+"She's an excellent nurse," said Farron.
+
+"For babies," Adelaide felt like answering, but she didn't. She said
+instead, "Anyhow, Burke will never accept that as an answer." She was
+surprised to hear something almost boastful in her own tone.
+
+"Oh, I think he will."
+
+She waited breathlessly for some sound from down-stairs or even for the
+flurried reentrance of Miss Gregory. There was a short silence, and
+then came the sound of the shutting of the front door. Marty had
+actually gone.
+
+Vincent did not even open his eyes when Miss Gregory returned; he did not
+exert himself to ask how his message had been received. Adelaide waited
+an instant, and then went back to Mrs. Baxter with a strange sense of
+having sustained a small personal defeat.
+
+Mrs. Baxter was so thoroughly ruffled that she was prepared to attack
+even the sacrosanct Adelaide. But she was not given the chance.
+
+"Well, how did Marty treat you?" said Adelaide.
+
+Mrs. Baxter sniffed.
+
+"We had not very much in common," she returned.
+
+"No; Marty's a very real person." There was a pause. "What became of him?
+Did he go?"
+
+"Yes, your husband's trained nurse gave him a message, and he went away."
+
+"Quietly?" The note of disappointment was so plain that Mrs. Baxter asked
+in answer:
+
+"What would you have wanted him to do?"
+
+Adelaide laughed.
+
+"I suppose it would have been too much to expect that he would drag you
+and Miss Gregory about by your hair," she said, "but I own I should have
+liked some little demonstration. But perhaps," she added more brightly,
+"he has gone back to wreck the docks."
+
+At this moment Mathilde entered the room in her hat and furs, and
+distracted the conversation from Burke. Adelaide, who was fond of
+enunciating the belief that you could tell when people were in love by
+the frequency with which they wore their best clothes, noticed now how
+wonderfully lovely Mathilde was looking; but she noticed it quite
+unsuspiciously, for she was thinking, "My child is really a beauty."
+
+"You remember Mrs. Baxter, my dear."
+
+Mathilde did not remember her in the least, though she smiled
+sufficiently. To her Mrs. Baxter seemed just one of many dressy old
+ladies who drifted across the horizon only too often. If any one had told
+her that her grandfather had ever been supposed to be in danger of
+succumbing to charms such as these, she would have thought the notion an
+ugly example of grown-up pessimism.
+
+Mrs. Baxter held her hand and patted it.
+
+"Where does she get that lovely golden hair?" she asked. "Not from you,
+does she?"
+
+"She gets it from her father," answered Adelaide, and her expression
+added, "you dreadful old goose."
+
+In the pause Mathilde made her escape unquestioned. She knew even before
+a last pathetic glance that her mother was unutterably wearied with her
+visitor. In other circumstances she would have stayed to effect a
+rescue, but at present she was engaged in a deed of some recklessness on
+her own account. She was going to meet Pete Wayne secretly at the
+Metropolitan Museum.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+In all her life Mathilde had never felt so conspicuous as she did going
+up the long flight of stairs at the Fifth Avenue entrance of the museum.
+It seemed to her that people, those walking past in the sunshine on the
+sidewalk, and the strangers in town seeing the sights from the top of the
+green busses, were saying to one another as they looked at her, "There
+goes a New York girl to meet her lover in one of the more ancient of the
+Egyptian rooms."
+
+She started as she heard the voice of the guard, though he was saying
+nothing but "Check your umbrella" to a man behind her. She sped across
+the marble floor of the great tapestry hall as a little, furry wild
+animal darts across an open space in the woods. She was thinking that she
+could not bear it if Pete were not there. How could she wait many minutes
+under the eyes of the guards, who must know better than any one else that
+no flesh-and-blood girl took any real interest in Egyptian antiquities?
+The round, unambitious dial at the entrance, like an enlarged
+kitchen-clock, had pointed to the exact hour set for the meeting. She
+ought not to expect that Pete, getting away from the office in business
+hours, could be as punctual as an eager, idle creature like herself.
+
+She had made up her mind so clearly that when she entered the night-blue
+room there would be nothing but tombs and mummies that when she saw Pete
+standing with his overcoat over his arm, in the blue-serge clothes she
+particularly liked, she felt as much surprised as if their meeting were
+accidental.
+
+She tried to draw a long breath.
+
+"I shall never get used to it," she said. "If we had been married a
+thousand years, I should always feel just like this when I see you."
+
+"Oh, no, you won't," he answered. "I hope the very next time we meet you
+will say, quite in a wife's orthodox tone: 'My dear, I've been waiting
+twenty minutes. Not that I mind at all; only I was afraid I must have
+misunderstood you.'"
+
+"You hope? Oh, I hope we shall never be like that."
+
+"Really? Why, I enjoy the idea. I shall enjoy saying to total strangers,
+'Ah, gentlemen, if my wife were ever on time--' It makes me feel so
+indissolubly united to you."
+
+"I like it best as we are now."
+
+"We might try different methods alternate years: one year we could be
+domestic, and the next, detached, and so on."
+
+By this time they had discovered that they were leaning on a mummy-case,
+and Mathilde drew back with an exclamation. "Poor thing!" she said. "I
+suppose she once had a lover, too."
+
+"And very likely met him in the room of Chinese antiquities in the Temple
+Museum," said Pete, and then, changing his tone, he added: "But come
+along. I want to show you a few little things which I have selected to
+furnish our home. I think you'll like them."
+
+Pete was always inventing games like this, and calling on her to enter in
+without the slightest warning. One of them was about a fancy ball he was
+giving in the main hall of the Pennsylvania Station. But this new idea,
+to treat the whole museum as a sort of super-department store, made her
+laugh in a faint, dependent way that she knew Pete liked. She believed
+that such forms of play were peculiar to themselves, so she guarded them
+as the deepest kind of secret; for she thought, if her mother ever found
+out about them, she would at once conclude that the whole relation was
+childish. To all other lovers Mathilde attributed a uniform seriousness.
+
+It took them a long time to choose their house-furnishings: there was a
+piece of black-and-gold lacquer; a set of painted panels; a Persian rug,
+swept by the tails of two haughty peacocks; some cloud-gray Chinese
+porcelains; a set of Du Barry vases; a crystal-and-enamel box, designed
+probably for some sacred purpose, but contributed by Pete as an excellent
+receptacle for chocolates at her bedside. "The Boy with the Sword" for
+the dining-room, Ver Meer's "Women at the Window," the small Bonnington,
+and then, since Mathilde wanted the portrait of Mrs. Fitzherbert, and
+Wayne felt a faint weariness with the English school, a compromise was
+effected by the selection of Constable's landscape of a bridge. Wayne
+kept constantly repeating that he was exactly like Warren Hastings,
+astonished at his own moderation. They had hardly begun, indeed, before
+Mathilde felt herself overcome by that peculiar exhaustion that overtakes
+even the robust in museums.
+
+Wayne guided her to a little sofa in a room of gold and jade.
+
+"How beautifully you know your way about here!" she said. "I suppose
+you've brought lots of girls here before me."
+
+"A glorious army," said Pete, "the matron and the maid. You ought to see
+my mother in a museum. She's lost before she gets well inside the
+turnstile."
+
+But Mathilde was thinking.
+
+"How strange it is," she observed, "that I never should have thought
+before about your caring for any one else. Pete, did you ever ask any one
+else to marry you?"
+
+Wayne nodded.
+
+"Yes; when I was in college. I asked a girl to marry me. She was having
+rather a rotten time."
+
+"Were you in love with her?"
+
+He shook his head, and in the silence shuffling and staccato footsteps
+were heard, announcing the approach of a youthful art class and their
+teacher. "Jade," said the voice of the lady, "one of the hardest of known
+substances, has yet been beautifully worked from time immemorial--"
+
+More pairs of eyes in that art class were fixed on the obviously guilty
+couple in the corner than on the beautiful cloudy objects in the cases,
+and it was not until they had all followed their guide to the armor-room,
+and had grouped themselves about the casque of Joan of Arc, that Wayne
+went on as if no interruption had occurred:
+
+"If you want to know whether I have ever experienced anything like my
+feeling for you since the first moment I saw you, I never have and never
+shall, and thereto I plight thee my troth."
+
+Mathilde turned her full face toward him, shedding gratitude and
+affection as a lamp sheds light before she answered:
+
+"You were terribly unkind to me yesterday."
+
+"I know. I'm sorry."
+
+"I shall never forget the way you kissed me, as if I were a rather
+repulsive piece of wood."
+
+Pete craned his neck, and met the suspicious eye of a guard.
+
+"I don't think anything can be done about it at the moment," he said;
+and added in explanation, "You see, I felt as if you had suddenly
+deserted me."
+
+"Pete, I couldn't ever desert you--unless I committed suicide."
+
+Presently he stood up, declaring that this was not the fitting place for
+arranging the details of their marriage.
+
+"Come to one of the smaller picture galleries," he said, "and as we go
+I'll show you a portrait of my mother."
+
+"Your mother? I did not know she had had a portrait done. By whom?"
+
+"A fellow called Bellini. He thought he was doing the Madonna."
+
+When they reached the picture, a figure was already before it. Mr.
+Lanley was sitting, with his arms folded and his feet stretched out far
+before him, his head bent, but his eyes raised and fixed on the picture.
+They saw him first, and had two or three seconds to take in the profound
+contemplation of his mood. Then he slowly raised his eyes and
+encountered theirs.
+
+There is surely nothing compromising in an elderly gentleman spending a
+contemplative morning alone at the Metropolitan Museum. It might well be
+his daily custom; but the knowledge that it was not, the consciousness of
+the rarity of the mood that had brought him there, oppressed Mr. Lanley
+almost like a crime. He felt caught, outraged, ashamed as he saw them.
+"That's the age which has a right to it," he said to himself. And then as
+if in a mirror he saw an expression of embarrassment on their faces, and
+was reminded that their meeting must have been illicit, too. He stood up
+and looked at them sternly.
+
+"Up-town at this hour, Wayne?" he said.
+
+"Grandfather, I never knew you came here much," said Mathilde.
+
+"It's near me, you know," he answered weakly, so weakly that he felt
+impelled to give an explanation. "Sometimes, my dear," he said, "you will
+find that even the most welcome guest rather fills the house."
+
+"You need not worry about yours," returned Mathilde. "I left her
+with Mama."
+
+Mr. Lanley felt that his brief moment of peace was indeed over. He could
+imagine the impressions that Mrs. Baxter was perhaps at that very moment
+sharing with Adelaide. He longed to question his granddaughter, but did
+not know how to put it.
+
+"How was your mother looking?" he finally decided upon.
+
+"Dreary," answered Mathilde, with a laugh.
+
+"Does this picture remind you of any one?" asked Wayne, suddenly.
+
+Mr. Lanley looked at him as if he hadn't heard, and frowned.
+
+"I don't know what you mean," he said.
+
+"Don't you think there's a look of my mother about it?"
+
+"No," said Mr. Lanley, rather loudly, and then added, "Well, I see what
+you mean, though I shouldn't--" He stopped and turning to them with some
+sternness, he asked them how they accounted for their presence in the
+museum at such an hour and alone.
+
+There was nothing to do but to tell him the truth. And when Wayne had
+finished, Mathilde was surprised at her grandfather's question. She
+thought he would ask what her mother thought of it. If they had been
+alone, she would have told him that Adelaide thought Wayne a commonplace
+young man with stubby hands; but as it was, she had resolved to put her
+mother's opposition on a more dignified plane. Only Mr. Lanley did not
+ask the question of her. It was to Wayne he was speaking, when he said:
+
+"What does your mother think of it?"
+
+"Oh, my mother," answered Pete. "Well, she thinks that if she were a girl
+she'd like to go to China."
+
+Mr. Lanley looked up, and they both smiled with the most perfect
+understanding.
+
+"She would," said the older man, and then he became intensely serious.
+"It's quite out of the question," he said.
+
+"O Grandfather," Mathilde exclaimed, clasping her hands about his
+arm, "don't talk like that! It wouldn't be possible for me to let him
+go without me. O Grandfather, can't you remember what it was like to
+be in love?"
+
+A complete silence followed this little speech--a silence that went on
+and on and seemed to be stronger than human power. Perhaps for the first
+time in his life Lanley felt hostile toward the girl beside him. "Oh,
+dear," Mathilde was thinking, "I suppose I've made him remember my
+grandmother and his youth!" "Can love be remembered," Pete was saying to
+himself, "or is it like a perfume that can be recognized, but not
+recalled?"
+
+Lanley turned at last to Wayne.
+
+"It's out of the question," he said, "that you should take this child to
+China at two weeks' notice. You must see that."
+
+"I see perfectly that many people will think it so. But you must see that
+to us it is the inevitable thing to do."
+
+"If every one else agreed, I should oppose it."
+
+"O Grandfather!" wailed Mathilde. "And you were our great hope--you and
+Mrs. Wayne!"
+
+"In a matter like this I shall stand by your mother, Mathilde," he said,
+and Mathilde imagined he meant as opposed to herself. But he was making
+an even greater renunciation.
+
+Adelaide was surprised and not pleased when Mathilde came home late for
+lunch, bringing the Wayne boy with her. It was not that she had expected
+her one little phrase about Wayne's hands to change her daughter's love
+into repugnance,--that sentence had been only the first drop in a
+distillation that would do its poisonous work gradually,--but she had
+supposed that Mathilde would be too sensitive to expose Pete to further
+criticism. Indeed, there seemed something obtuse, if not actually
+indelicate, in being willing to create a situation in which every one
+was bound to suffer. Obtuseness was not a defect with which Adelaide had
+much patience.
+
+Mathilde saw at once that her mother was going to be what in the family
+slang was called "grand." The grandeur consisted in a polite inattention;
+it went with a soft voice and immobile expression. In this mood Adelaide
+answered you about three seconds later than you expected, and though she
+answered you accurately, it was as if she had forced her mind back from a
+more congenial ether. She seemed to be wrapped in an agreeable cloud
+until you gave her some opening, and then she came out of her cloud like
+a flash of lightning.
+
+Wayne, who had lived his life so far with a woman who did not believe in
+the use of force in human relations, viewed these symptoms of coercion
+with the utmost indifference; but Mathilde had not so far freed herself
+as to ignore them. She was not afraid, but easy conversation under the
+menace was beyond her. She couldn't think of anything to say.
+
+Adelaide was accustomed by these methods to drive the inexperienced--and
+she considered Pete pitifully inexperienced in social fine points--into a
+state of conversational unrest in which they would finally ask
+recklessly, "Have you been to the theater lately?" and she would question
+gently, "The theater?" as much as to say, "I've heard that word
+somewhere before," until the conscientious conversationalist, rushing
+from futility to futility, would be finally engulfed in some yawning
+banality and sink out of sight forever.
+
+But Wayne resisted this temptation, or, rather, he did not feel it. He
+had the courage to be unafraid of silences, and he ate his luncheon and
+thought about the pictures he had been seeing, and at last began to talk
+to Mathilde about them, while Adelaide made it clear that she was not
+listening, until she caught a phrase that drove her grandeur away.
+
+"Near where we met my grandfather?" Mathilde asked.
+
+By this time Adelaide had gathered that the two had been in the museum,
+and the knowledge annoyed her not only as a mother, but as an
+aristocrat. Without being clear about it, she regarded the love of
+beauty--artificial beauty, that is--as a class distinction. It seemed to
+her possible enough that the masses should love mountains and moonlight
+and the sea and sunsets; but it struck her as unfitting that any one but
+the people she knew, and only a few of them, should really care for
+porcelains and pictures. As she held herself aloof from the conversation
+she was annoyed at noticing that Wayne was showing a more
+discriminating taste than her own carefully nurtured child. But all such
+considerations were driven away by the mention of her father, for Mr.
+Lanley had been in her mind ever since Mrs. Baxter had taken her
+unimpeded departure just before luncheon.
+
+"Your grandfather?" she said, coming out of the clouds. "Was he in the
+Metropolitan?"
+
+"Yes," said Mathilde, thankful to be directly addressed. "Wasn't it
+queer? Pete was taking me to see a picture that looks exactly like Mrs.
+Wayne, only Mrs. Wayne hasn't such a round face, and there in front of it
+was grandpapa."
+
+Adelaide rose very slowly from table, lunch being fortunately over. She
+felt as if she could have borne almost anything but this--the idea of her
+father vaporing before a picture of the Madonna. Phrases came into her
+head: silly old man, the time has come to protect him against himself;
+the Wayne family must be suppressed.
+
+Her silence in the drawing-room was of a more concentrated sort, and when
+she had taken her coffee and cigarette she said to Mathilde:
+
+"My dear, I promised to go back to Vincent at this time. Will you go
+instead? I want to have a word with Mr. Wayne."
+
+Adelaide had never entered any contest in her life, whether it was a
+dispute with a dressmaker or a quarrel with her husband, without
+remembering the comfortable fact that she was a beauty. With men she did
+not neglect the advantage that being a woman gave her, and with the
+particular man now before her she had, she knew, a third line of defense;
+she was the mother of his love, and she thought she detected in him a
+special weakness for mothers. But it would have been better if he had
+respected women and mothers less, for he thought so highly of them that
+he believed they ought to play fair.
+
+Sitting in a very low chair, she looked up at him.
+
+"Mathilde has been telling me something about a plan of yours to take her
+to China with you. We could not consent to that, you know."
+
+"I'm sorry," said Pete. The tone was pleasant. That was the trouble;
+it was too pleasant a tone for a man relinquishing a cherished hope.
+It sounded almost as if he regretted the inevitable disappointment of
+the family.
+
+Adelaide tried a new attack.
+
+"Your mother--have you consulted her?"
+
+"Yes, I've told her our plans."
+
+"And she approves?"
+
+Wayne might choose to betray his mother in the full irresponsibility of
+her attitude to so sympathetic a listener as Mr. Lanley, but he had no
+intention of giving Mrs. Farron such a weapon. At the same time he did
+not intend to be untruthful. His answer was this:
+
+"My mother," he said, "is not like most women of her age. She
+believes in love."
+
+"In all love, quite indiscriminately?"
+
+He hesitated an instant.
+
+"I put it wrong," he answered. "I meant that she believes in the
+importance of real love."
+
+"And has she a spell by which she tells real love?"
+
+"She believes mine to be real."
+
+"Oh, yours! Very likely. Perhaps it's maternal vanity on my part, Mr.
+Wayne, but I must own I can imagine a man's contriving to love my
+daughter, so gentle, so intelligent, and so extraordinarily lovely to
+look at. I was not thinking of your feelings, but of hers."
+
+"You can see no reason why she should love me?"
+
+Adelaide moved her shoulders about.
+
+"Well, I want it explained, that's all, from your own point of view. I
+see my daughter as an unusual person, ignorant of life, to whom it seems
+to me all things are possible. And I see you, a very nice young man. But
+what else? I ask to be told why you fulfil all possibilities. Don't
+misunderstand me. I am not mercenary. Mathilde will have plenty of money
+of her own some day. I don't want a millionaire. I want a _person_."
+
+"Of course, if you ask me why Mathilde should love me--"
+
+"Don't be untruthful, Mr. Wayne. I thought better of you. If you should
+come back from China next year to find her engaged to some one else, you
+could tell a great many reasons why he was not good enough for her. Now
+tell me some of the reasons why you are. And please don't include
+because you love her so much, for almost any one would do that."
+
+Pete fought down his panic, reminding himself that no man living could
+hear such words without terror. His egotism, never colossal, stood
+feebly between him and Mrs. Farron's estimate of him. He seemed to sink
+back into the general human species. If he had felt inclined to detail
+his own qualities, he could not have thought of one. There was a long
+silence, while Adelaide sat with a look of docile teachableness upon her
+expectant face.
+
+At last Wayne stood up.
+
+"It's no use, Mrs. Farron," he said "That question of yours can't be
+answered. I believe she loves me. It's my bet against yours."
+
+"I won't gamble with my child's future," she returned. "I did with my
+own. Sit down again, Mr. Wayne. You have heard, I suppose, that I have
+been married twice?"
+
+"Yes." He sat down again reluctantly.
+
+"I was Mathilde's age--a little older. I was more in love than she. And
+if he had been asked the question I just asked you, he could have
+answered it. He could have said: 'I have been a leader in a group in
+which I was, an athlete, an oarsman, and the most superb physical
+specimen of my race'--brought up, too, he might have added, in the same
+traditions that I had had. Well, that wasn't enough, Mr. Wayne, and that
+was a good deal. If my father had only made me wait, only given me time
+to see that my choice was the choice of ignorance, that the man I thought
+a hero was, oh, the most pitifully commonplace clay--Mathilde shan't make
+my mistake."
+
+Wayne's eyes lit up.
+
+"But that's it," he said. "She wouldn't make your mistake. She'd choose
+right. That's what I ought to have said. You spoke of Mathilde's spirit.
+She has a feeling for the right thing. Some people have, and some people
+are bound to choose wrong."
+
+Adelaide laid her hand on her breast.
+
+"You mean me?" she asked, too much interested to be angry.
+
+He was too absorbed in his own interests to give his full
+attention to hers.
+
+"Yes," he answered. "I mean your principles of choice weren't right
+ones--leaders of men, you know, and all that. It never works out.
+Leaders of men are the ones who always cry on their wives' shoulders, and
+the martinets at home are imposed on by every one else." He gave out this
+dictum in passing: "But don't trouble about your responsibility in this,
+Mrs. Farron. It's out of your hands. It's our chance, and Mathilde and I
+mean to take it. I don't want to give you a warning, exactly, but--it's
+going to go through."
+
+She looked at him with large, terrified eyes. She was repeating, 'they
+cry on their wives' shoulders,' or, he might have said, 'on the
+shoulders of their trained nurses.' She knew that he was talking to her,
+saying something. She couldn't listen to it. And then he was gone. She
+was glad he was.
+
+She sat quite still, with her hands lying idly, softly in her lap. It was
+possible that what he said was true. Perhaps all these people who made
+such a show of strength to the world were those who sucked double
+strength by sapping the vitality of a life's companion. It had been true
+of Joe Severance. She had heard him praised for the courage with which
+he went forth against temptation, but she had known that it was her
+strength he was using. She looked up, to see her daughter, pale and
+eager, standing before her.
+
+"O Mama, was it very terrible?"
+
+"What, dear?"
+
+"Did Pete tell you of our plan?"
+
+Adelaide wished she could have listened to those last sentences of his;
+but they were gone completely.
+
+She put up her hand and patted the unutterably soft cheek before her.
+
+"He told me something about putting through your absurd idea of an
+immediate marriage," she said.
+
+"We don't want to do it in a sneaky way, Mama."
+
+"I know. You want to have your own way and to have every one approve of
+you, too. Is that it?"
+
+Mathilde's lips trembled.
+
+"O Mama," she cried, "you are so different from what you used to be!"
+
+Adelaide nodded.
+
+"One changes," she said. "One's life changes." She had meant this
+sentence to end the interview, but when she saw the girl still standing
+before her, she said to herself that it made little difference that she
+hadn't heard the plans of the Wayne boy, since Mathilde, her own
+tractable daughter, was still within her power. She moved into the corner
+of the sofa. "Sit down, dear," she said, and when Mathilde had obeyed
+with an almost imperceptible shrinking in her attitude, Adelaide went on,
+with a sort of serious ease of manner:
+
+"I've never been a particularly flattering mother, have I? Never thought
+you were perfect just because you were mine? Well, I hope you'll pay the
+more attention to what I have to say. You are remarkable. You are going
+to be one of the most attractive women that ever was. Years ago old Count
+Bartiani--do you remember him, at Lucerne?"
+
+"The one who used scent and used to look so long at me?"
+
+"Yes, he was old and rather horrid, but he knew what he was talking
+about. He said then you would be the most attractive woman in Europe. I
+heard the same thing from all my friends, and it's true. You have
+something rare and perfect---"
+
+These were great words. Mathilde, accustomed all her life to receive
+information from her mother, received this; and for the first time felt
+the egotism of her beauty awake, a sense of her own importance the more
+vivid because she had always been humble-minded. She did not look at her
+mother; she sat up very straight and stared as if at new fields before
+her, while a faint smile flickered at the corners of her mouth--a smile
+of an awakening sense of power.
+
+"What you have," Adelaide went on, "ought to bring great happiness,
+great position, great love; and how can I let you throw yourself away
+at eighteen on a commonplace boy with a glib tongue and a high opinion
+of himself? Don't tell me that it will make you happy. That would be
+the worst of all, if you turned out to be so limited that you were
+satisfied,--that would be a living death. O my darling, I give you my
+word that if you will give up this idea, ten years from now, when you
+see this boy, still glib, still vain, and perhaps a little fat, you
+will actually shudder when you think how near he came to cutting you
+off from the wonderful, full life that you were entitled to." And then,
+as if she could not hope to better this, Adelaide sprang up, and left
+the girl alone.
+
+Mathilde rose, too, and looked at herself in the glass. She was stirred,
+she was changed, she was awakened, but awakened to something her mother
+had not counted on. Almost too gentle, too humble, too reasonable, as she
+had always been, the drop of egotism which her mother had succeeded in
+instilling into her nature served to solidify her will, to inspire her
+with a needed power of aggression.
+
+She nodded once at her image in the mirror.
+
+"Well," she said, "it's my life, and I'm willing to take the
+consequences."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+When Mathilde emerged from the subway into the sunlight of City Hall
+Park, Pete was nowhere to be seen. She had spent several minutes
+wandering in the subterranean labyrinth which threatened to bring her to
+Brooklyn Bridge and nowhere else, so she was a little late for her
+appointment; and yet Pete was not there. He had promised to be waiting
+for her. This was a more important occasion than the meeting in the
+museum and more terrifying, too.
+
+Their plans were simple. They were going to get their marriage license,
+they were going to be married immediately, they were then going to inform
+their respective families, and start two days later for San Francisco.
+
+Mathilde stared furtively about her. A policeman strolled past, striking
+terror to a guilty heart; a gentleman of evidently unbroken leisure
+regarded her with a benevolent eye completely ringed by red. Crowds were
+surging in and out of the newspaper offices and the Municipal Building
+and the post office, but stare where she would, she couldn't find Pete.
+
+She had ten minutes to think of horrors before she saw him rushing across
+the park toward her, and she had the idea of saying to him those words
+which he himself had selected as typically wifely, "Not that I mind at
+all, but I was afraid I must have misunderstood you." But she did not get
+very far in her mild little joke, for it was evident at once that
+something had happened.
+
+"My dear love," he said, "it's no go. We can't sail, we can't be married.
+I think I'm out of a job."
+
+As they stood there, her pretty clothes, the bright sun shining on her
+golden hair and dark furs and polished shoes, her beauty, but, above all,
+their complete absorption in each other, made them conspicuous. They were
+utterly oblivious.
+
+Pete told her exactly what had happened. Some months before he had been
+sent to make a report on a coal property in Pennsylvania. He had made it
+under the assumption that the firm was thinking of underwriting its
+bonds. He had been mistaken. As owners Honaton & Benson had already
+acquired the majority of interest in it. His report,--she remembered his
+report, for he had told her about it the first day he came to see
+her,--had been favorable except for one important fact. There was in that
+district a car shortage which for at least a year would hamper the
+marketing of the supply. That had been the point of the whole thing. He
+had advised against taking the property over until this defect could be
+remedied or allowed for. They had accepted the report.
+
+Well, late in the afternoon of the preceding day he had gone to the
+office to say good-by to the firm. He could not help being touched by the
+friendliness of both men's manner. Honaton gave him a silver
+traveling-flask, plain except for an offensive cat's-eye set in the top.
+Benson, more humane and practical, gave him a check.
+
+"I think I've cleared up everything before I leave," Wayne said, trying
+to be conscientious in return for their kindness, "except one thing.
+I've never corrected the proof of my report on the Southerland coal
+property."
+
+For a second there was something strange in the air. The partners
+exchanged the merest flicker of a look, which Wayne, as far as he thought
+of it at all, supposed to be a recognition on their part of his
+carefulness in thinking of such a detail.
+
+"You need not give that another thought," said Benson. "We are not
+thinking of publishing that report at present. And when we do, I have
+your manuscript. I'll go over the proof myself."
+
+Relieved to be spared another task, Wayne shook hands with his employers
+and withdrew. Outside he met David.
+
+"Say," said David, "I am sorry you're leaving us; but, gee!" he added,
+his face twisting with joy, "ain't the firm glad to have you go!"
+
+It had long been Wayne's habit to pay strict attention to the
+impressions of David.
+
+"Why do you think they are glad?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, they're glad all right," said David. "I heard the old man say
+yesterday, 'And by next Saturday he will be at sea.' It was as if
+he was going to get a Christmas present." And David went on about
+other business.
+
+Once put on the right track, it was not difficult to get the idea. He
+went to the firm's printer, but found they had had no orders for printing
+his report. The next morning, instead of spending his time with his own
+last arrangements, he began hunting up other printing offices, and
+finally found what he was looking for. His report was already in print,
+with one paragraph left out--that one which related to the shortage of
+cars. His name was signed to it, with a little preamble by the firm,
+urging the investment on the favorable notice of their customers, and
+spoke in high terms of the accuracy of his estimates.
+
+To say that Pete did not once contemplate continuing his arrangements as
+if nothing had happened would not be true. All he had to do was to go.
+The thing was dishonest, clearly enough, but it was not his action. His
+original report would always be proof of his own integrity, and on his
+return he could sever his connection with the firm on some other pretext.
+On the other hand, to break his connection with Honaton & Benson, to
+force the suppression of the report unless given in full, to give up his
+trip, to confess that immediate marriage was impossible, that he himself
+was out of a job, that the whole basis of his good fortune was a fraud
+that he had been too stupid to discover--all this seemed to him more than
+man could be asked to do.
+
+But that was what he decided must be done. From the printer's he
+telephoned to the Farrons, but found that Miss Severance was out. He knew
+she must have already started for their appointment in the City Hall
+Park. He had made up his mind, and yet when he saw her, so confident of
+the next step, waiting for him, he very nearly yielded to a sudden
+temptation to make her his wife, to be sure of that, whatever else might
+have to be altered.
+
+He had known she wouldn't reproach him, but he was deeply grateful to her
+for being so unaware that there was any grounds for reproach. She
+understood the courage his renunciation had required. That seemed to be
+what she cared for most.
+
+At length he said to her:
+
+"Now I must go and get this off my chest with the firm. Go home, and I'll
+come as soon as ever I can."
+
+But here she shook her head.
+
+"I couldn't go home," she answered. "It might all come out before you
+arrived, and I could not listen to things that"--she avoided naming her
+mother--"that will be said about you, Pete. Isn't there somewhere I can
+wait while you have your interview?"
+
+There was the outer office of Honaton & Benson. He let her go with him,
+and turned her over to the care of David, who found her a corner out of
+the way, and left her only once. That was to say to a friend of his in
+the cage: "When you go out, cast your eye over Pete's girl. Somewhat of a
+peacherino."
+
+In the meantime Wayne went into Benson's office. There wasn't a flicker
+of alarm on the senior partner's face on seeing him.
+
+"Hullo, Pete!" he said, "I thought you'd be packing your bags."
+
+"I'm not packing anything," said Wayne. "I've come to tell you I can't go
+to China for you. Mr. Benson."
+
+"Oh, come, come," said the other, very paternally, "we can't let you off
+like that. This is business, my dear boy. It would cost us money, after
+having made all our arrangements, if you changed your mind."
+
+"So I understand."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"I mean just what you think I mean, Mr. Benson."
+
+Wayne would have said that he could never forget the presence under any
+circumstances of his future wife, waiting, probably nervously, in the
+outer office; but he did. The interest of the next hour drove out
+everything else. Honaton was sent for from the exchange, a lawsuit was
+threatened, a bribe--he couldn't mistake it--offered. He was told he
+might find it difficult to find another position if he left their firm
+under such conditions.
+
+"On the contrary," said Peter, firmly, "from what I have heard, I believe
+it will improve my standing."
+
+That he came off well in the struggle was due not so much to his
+ability, but to the fact that he now had nothing to lose or gain from the
+situation. As soon as Benson grasped this fact he began a masterly
+retreat. Wayne noticed the difference between the partners: Honaton, the
+less able of the two, wanted to save the situation, but before everything
+else wanted to leave in Wayne's mind the sense that he had made a fool of
+himself. Benson, more practical, would have been glad to put Pete in jail
+if he could; but as he couldn't do that, his interest was in nothing but
+saving the situation. The only way to do this was to give up all idea of
+publishing any report. He did this by assuming that Wayne had simply
+changed his mind or had at least utterly failed to convey his meaning in
+his written words. He made this point of view very plausible by quoting
+the more laudatory of Wayne's sentences; and when Pete explained that the
+whole point of his report was in the sentence that had been omitted,
+Benson leaned back, chuckling, and biting off the end of his cigar.
+
+"Oh, you college men!" he said. "I'm afraid I'm not up to your
+subtleties. When you said it was the richest vein and favorably situated,
+I supposed that was what you meant. If you meant just the opposite, well,
+let it go. Honaton & Benson certainly don't want to get out a report
+contrary to fact."
+
+"That's what he has accused us of," said Honaton.
+
+"Oh, no, no," said Benson; "don't be too literal, Jack. In the heat of
+argument we all say things we don't mean. Pete here doesn't like to have
+his lovely English all messed up by a practical dub like me. I doubt if
+he wants to sever his connection with this firm."
+
+Honaton yielded.
+
+"Oh," he said, "I'm willing enough he should stay, if--"
+
+"Well, I'm not," said Pete, and put an end to the conversation by walking
+out of the room. He found David explaining the filing system to Mathilde,
+and she, hanging on his every word, partly on account of his native
+charm, partly on account of her own interest in anything neat, but most
+because she imagined the knowledge might some day make her a more
+serviceable wife to Pete.
+
+Pete dreaded the coming interview with Mrs. Farron more than that with
+the firm--more, indeed, than he had ever dreaded anything. He and
+Mathilde reached the house about a quarter before one, and Adelaide was
+not in. This was fortunate, for while they waited they discovered a
+difference of intention. Mathilde saw no reason for mentioning the fact
+that they had actually been on the point of taking out their marriage
+license. She thought it was enough to tell her mother that the trip had
+been abandoned and that Pete had given up his job. Pete contemplated
+nothing less than the whole truth.
+
+"You can't tell people half a story," he said. "It never works."
+
+Mathilde really quailed.
+
+"It will be terrible to tell mama that," she groaned. "She thinks
+failure is worse than crime."
+
+"And she's dead right," said Pete.
+
+When Adelaide came in she had Mr. Lanley with her. She had seen him
+walking down Fifth Avenue with his hat at quite an outrageous angle, and
+she had ordered the motor to stop, and had beckoned him to her. It was
+two days since her interview with Mrs. Baxter, and she had had no good
+opportunity of speaking to him. The suspicion that he was avoiding her
+nerved her hand; but there was no hint of discipline in her smile, and
+she knew as well as if he had said it that he was thinking as he came to
+the side of the car how handsome and how creditable a daughter she was.
+"Come to lunch with me," she said; "or must you go home to your guest?"
+
+"No, I was going to the club. She's lunching with a mysterious relation
+near Columbia University."
+
+"Don't you know who it is? Tell him home."
+
+"Home, Andrews. No, she never says."
+
+"Don't put your stick against the glass, there's an angel. I'll tell you
+who it is. An elder sister who supported and educated her, of whom she's
+ashamed now."
+
+"How do you know? It wouldn't break the glass."
+
+"No; but I hate the noise. I don't know; I just made it up because it's
+so likely."
+
+"She always speaks so affectionately of you."
+
+"She's a coward; that's the only difference. She hates me just as much."
+
+"Well, you've never been nice to her, Adelaide."
+
+"I should think not."
+
+"She's not as bad as you think," said Mr. Lanley, who believed in
+old-fashioned loyalty.
+
+"I can't bear her," said Adelaide.
+
+"Why not?" As far as his feelings went, this seemed a perfectly safe
+question; but it wasn't.
+
+"Because she tries so hard to make you ridiculous. Oh, not intentionally;
+but she talks of you as if you were a _Don Juan_ of twenty-five. You
+ought to be flattered, Papa dear, at having jealous scenes made about you
+when you are--what is it?--sixty-five."
+
+"Four," said Mr. Lanley.
+
+"Yes; such a morning as I had! Not a minute with poor Vincent because you
+had had Mrs. Wayne to dine. I'm not complaining, but I don't like my
+father represented as a sort of comic-paper old man, you poor
+dear,"--and she laid her long, gloved hand on his knee,--"who have always
+been so conspicuously dignified."
+
+"If I have," said her father, "I don't know that anything she says can
+change it."
+
+"No, of course; only it was horrible to me to hear her describing you in
+the grip of a boyish passion. But don't let's talk of it. I hear," she
+said, as if she were changing the subject, "that you have taken to going
+to the Metropolitan Museum at odd moments."
+
+He felt utterly stripped, and said without hope:
+
+"Yes; I'm a trustee, you know."
+
+Adelaide just glanced at him.
+
+"You always have been, I think." They drove home in silence.
+
+One reason why she was determined to have her father come home was that
+it was the first time that Vincent was to take luncheon downstairs, and
+when Adelaide had a part to play she liked to have an audience. She was
+even glad to find Wayne in the drawing-room, though she did wonder to
+herself if the little creature had entirely given up earning his living.
+It was a very different occasion from Pete's last luncheon there; every
+one was as pleasant as possible. As soon as the meal was over, Adelaide
+put her hand on her husband's shoulder.
+
+"You're going to lie down at once, Vin."
+
+He rose obediently, but Wayne interposed. It seemed to him that it would
+be possible to tell his story to Farron.
+
+"Oh, can't Mr. Farron stay a few minutes?" he said. "I want so much to
+speak to you and him together about--"
+
+Adelaide cut him short.
+
+"No, he can't. It's more important that he should get strong than
+anything else is. You can talk to me all you like when I come down.
+Come, Vin."
+
+When they were up-stairs, and she was tucking him up on his sofa, he
+asked gently:
+
+"What did that boy want?"
+
+Adelaide made a little face.
+
+"Nothing of any importance," she said.
+
+Things had indeed changed between them if he would accept such an answer
+as that. She thought his indifference like the studied oblivion of the
+debtor who says, "Don't I owe you something?" and is content with the
+most non-committal reply. He lay back and smiled at her. His expression
+was not easy to read.
+
+She went down-stairs, where conversation had not prospered. Mr. Lanley
+was smoking, with his cigar drooping from a corner of his mouth. He felt
+very unhappy. Mathilde was frightened. Wayne had recast his opening
+sentence a dozen times. He kept saying to himself that he wanted it to be
+perfectly simple, but not infantile, and each phrase he thought of in
+conformity with his one rule sounded like the opening lines of the stage
+child's speech.
+
+In the crisis of Adelaide's being actually back again in the room he
+found himself saying:
+
+"Mrs. Farron, I think you ought to know exactly what has been happening."
+
+"Don't I?" she asked.
+
+"No. You know that I was going to San Francisco the day after
+to-morrow--"
+
+"Oh dear," said Adelaide, regretfully, "is it given up?"
+
+He told her rather slowly the whole story. The most terrible moment was,
+as he had expected, when he explained that they had met, he and Mathilde,
+to apply for their marriage license. Adelaide turned, and looked full at
+her daughter.
+
+"You were going to treat me like that?" Mathilde burst into tears. She
+had long been on the brink of them, and now they came more from nerves
+than from a sense of the justice of her mother's complaint. But the sound
+of them upset Wayne hopelessly. He couldn't go on for a minute, and Mr.
+Lanley rose to his feet.
+
+"Good Lord! good Lord!" he said, "that was dishonorable! Can't you see
+that that is dishonorable, to marry her on the sly when we trusted her to
+go about with you--"
+
+"O Papa, never mind about the dishonorableness," said Adelaide. "The
+point is"--and she looked at Wayne--"that they were building their
+elopement on something that turned out to be a fraud. That doesn't make
+one think very highly of your judgment, Mr. Wayne."
+
+"I made a mistake, Mrs. Farron."
+
+"It was a bad moment to make one. You have worked three years with this
+firm and never suspected anything wrong?"
+
+"Yes, sometimes I have--"
+
+Adelaide's eyebrows went up.
+
+"Oh, you have suspected. You had reason to think the whole thing might be
+dishonest, but you were willing to run away with Mathilde and let her get
+inextricably committed before you found out--"
+
+"That's irresponsible, sir," said Lanley. "I don't suppose you
+understood what you were doing, but it was utterly irresponsible."
+
+"I think," said Adelaide, "that it finally answers the question as to
+whether or not you are too young to be married."
+
+"Mama, I will marry Pete," said Mathilde, trying to make a voice broken
+with sobs sound firm and resolute.
+
+"Mr. Wayne at the moment has no means whatsoever, as I understand it,"
+said Adelaide.
+
+"I don't care whether he has or not," said Mathilde.
+
+Adelaide laughed. The laugh rather shocked Mr. Lanley. He tried to
+explain.
+
+"I feel sorry for you, but you can't imagine how painful it is to us to
+think that Mathilde came so near to being mixed up with a crooked deal
+like that--Mathilde, of all people. You ought to see that for yourself."
+
+"I see it, thank you," said Pete.
+
+"Really, Mr. Wayne, I don't think that's quite the tone to take," put
+in Adelaide.
+
+"I don't think it is," said Wayne.
+
+Mathilde, making one last grasp at self-control, said:
+
+"They wouldn't be so horrid to you, Pete, if they understood--" But the
+muscles of her throat contracted, and she never got any further.
+
+"I suppose I shall be thought a very cruel parent," said Adelaide, almost
+airily, "but this sort of thing can't go on, really, you know."
+
+"No, it really can't," said Mr. Lanley. "We feel you have abused our
+confidence."
+
+"No, I don't reproach Mr. Wayne along those lines," said Adelaide. "He
+owes me nothing. I had not supposed Mathilde would deceive me, but we
+won't discuss that now. It isn't anything against Mr. Wayne to say he has
+made a mistake. Five years from now, I'm sure, he would not put himself,
+or let himself be put, in such an extremely humiliating position. And I
+don't say that if he came back five years from now with some financial
+standing I should be any more opposed to him than to any one else. Only
+in the meantime there can be no engagement." Adelaide looked very
+reasonable. "You must see that."
+
+"You mean I'm not to see him?"
+
+"Of course not."
+
+"I must see him," said Mathilde.
+
+Lanley looked at Wayne.
+
+"This is an opportunity for you to rehabilitate yourself. You ought to be
+man enough to promise you won't see her until you are in a position to
+ask her to be your wife."
+
+"I have asked her that already, you know," returned Wayne with an attempt
+at a smile.
+
+"Pete, you wouldn't desert me?" said Mathilde.
+
+"If Mr. Wayne had any pride, my dear, he would not wish to come to a
+house where he was unwelcome," said her mother.
+
+"I'm afraid I haven't any of that sort of pride at all, Mrs. Farron."
+
+Adelaide made a little gesture, as much as to say, with her traditions,
+she really did not know how to deal with people who hadn't.
+
+"Mathilde,"--Wayne spoke very gently,--"don't you think you could
+stop crying?"
+
+"I'm trying all the time, Pete. You won't go away, no matter what
+they say?"
+
+"Of course not."
+
+"It seems to be a question between what I think best for my daughter as
+opposed to what you think best--for yourself," observed Adelaide.
+
+"Nobody wants to turn you out of the house, you know," said Mr. Lanley in
+a conciliatory tone, "but the engagement is at an end."
+
+"If you do turn him out, I'll go with him," said Mathilde, and she took
+his hand and held it in a tight, moist clasp.
+
+They looked so young and so distressed as they stood there hand in hand
+that Lanley found himself relenting.
+
+"We don't say that your marriage will never be possible," he said. "We
+are asking you to wait--consent to a separation of six months."
+
+"Six months!" wailed Mathilde.
+
+"With your whole life before you?" her grandfather returned wistfully.
+
+"I'm afraid I am asking a little more than that, Papa," said Adelaide. "I
+have never been enthusiastic about this engagement, but while I was
+watching and trying to be cooperative, it seems Mr. Wayne intended to run
+off with my daughter. I know Mathilde is young and easily influenced, but
+I don't think, I don't really think,"--Adelaide made it evident that she
+was being just,--"that any other of all the young men who come to the
+house would have tried to do that, and none of them would have got
+themselves into this difficulty. I mean,"--she looked up at Wayne,--"I
+think almost any of them would have had a little better business judgment
+than you have shown."
+
+"Mama," put in her daughter, "can't you see how honest it was of Pete not
+to go, anyhow?"
+
+Adelaide smiled ironically.
+
+"No; I can't think that an unusually high standard, dear."
+
+This seemed to represent the final outrage to Mathilde. She turned.
+
+"O Pete, wouldn't your mother take me in?" she asked.
+
+And as if to answer the question, Pringle opened the door and announced
+Mrs. Wayne.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+In all the short, but crowded, time since Lanley had first known Mrs.
+Wayne he had never been otherwise than glad to see her, but now his heart
+sank. It seemed to him that an abyss was about to open between them, and
+that all their differences of spirit, stimulating enough while they
+remained in the abstract, were about to be cast into concrete form.
+
+Mathilde and Pete were so glad to see her that they said nothing, but
+looked at her beamingly. Whatever Adelaide's feelings may have been,
+she greeted her guest with a positive courtesy, and she was the only
+one who did.
+
+Mrs. Wayne nodded to her son, smiled more formally at Mr. Lanley, and
+then her eyes falling upon Mathilde, she realized that she had intruded
+on some sort of conference. She had a natural dread of such meetings, at
+which it seemed to her that the only thing which she must not do was the
+only thing that she knew how to do, namely, to speak her mind. So she at
+once decided to withdraw.
+
+"Your man insisted on my coming in, Mrs. Farron," she said. "I came to
+ask about Mr. Farron; but I see you are in the midst of a family
+discussion, and so I won't--"
+
+Everybody separately cried out to her to stay as she began to retreat to
+the door, and no one more firmly than Adelaide, who thought it as
+careless as Mr. Lanley thought it creditable that a mother would be
+willing to go away and leave the discussion of her son's life to others.
+Adelaide saw an opportunity of killing two birds.
+
+"You are just the person for whom I have been longing, Mrs. Wayne," she
+said. "Now you have come, we can settle the whole question."
+
+"And just what is the question?" asked Mrs. Wayne. She sat down,
+looking distressed and rather guilty. She knew they were going to ask
+her what she knew about all the things that had been going on, and a
+hasty examination of her consciousness showed her that she knew
+everything, though she had avoided Pete's full confidence. She knew
+simply by knowing that any two young people who loved each other would
+rather marry than separate for a year. But she was aware that this
+deduction, so inevitable to her, was exactly the one which would be
+denied by the others. So she sat, with a nervously pleasant smile on
+her usually untroubled face, and waited for Adelaide to speak. She did
+not have long to wait.
+
+"You did not know, I am sure, Mrs. Wayne, that your son intended to run
+away with my daughter?"
+
+All four of them stared at her, making her feel more and more guilty; and
+at last Lanley, unable to bear it, asked:
+
+"Did you know that, Mrs. Wayne?"
+
+"Oh, dear!" said Mrs. Wayne. "Yes. I knew it was possible; so did you.
+Pete didn't tell me about it, though."
+
+"But I did tell Mrs. Farron," said Pete.
+
+Adelaide protested at once.
+
+"You told me?" Then she remembered that a cloud had obscured the end of
+their last interview, but she did not withdraw her protest.
+
+"You know, Mrs. Farron, you have a bad habit of not listening to what is
+said to you," Wayne answered firmly.
+
+This sort of impersonal criticism was to Adelaide the greatest
+impertinence, and she showed her annoyance.
+
+"In spite of the disabilities of age, Mr. Wayne," she said, "I find I
+usually can get a simple idea if clearly presented."
+
+"Why, how absurd that is, Wayne!" put in Mr. Lanley. "You don't mean to
+say that you told Mrs. Farron you were going to elope with her daughter,
+and she didn't take in what you said?"
+
+"And yet that is just what took place."
+
+Adelaide glanced at her father, as much as to say, "You see what kind of
+young man it is," and then went on:
+
+"One fact at least I have learned only this minute--that is that the
+finances for this romantic trip were to be furnished by a dishonorable
+firm from which your son has been dismissed; or, no, resigned, isn't it?"
+
+The human interest attached to losing a job brought mother and son
+together on the instant.
+
+"O Pete, you've left the firm!"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"O my poor boy!"
+
+He made a gesture, indicating that this was not the time to discuss the
+economic situation, and Adelaide went smoothly on:
+
+"And now, Mrs. Wayne, the point is this. I am considered harsh because I
+insist that a young man without an income who has just come near to
+running off with my child on money that was almost a bribe is not a
+person in whom I have unlimited confidence. I ask--it seems a tolerably
+mild request--that they do not see each other for six months."
+
+"I cannot agree to that," said Wayne decidedly.
+
+"Really, Mr. Wayne, do you feel yourself in a position to agree or
+disagree? We have never consented to your engagement. We have never
+thought the marriage a suitable one, have we, Papa?"
+
+"No," said Mr. Lanley in a tone strangely dead.
+
+"Why is it not suitable?" asked Mrs. Wayne, as if she really hoped that
+an agreement might be reached by rational discussion.
+
+"Why?" said Adelaide, and smiled. "Dear Mrs. Wayne, these things are
+rather difficult to explain. Wouldn't it be easier for all of us if you
+would just accept the statement that we think so without trying to decide
+whether we are right or wrong?"
+
+"I'm afraid it must be discussed," answered Mrs. Wayne.
+
+Adelaide leaned back, still with her faint smile, as if defying, though
+very politely, any one to discuss it with _her_.
+
+It was inevitable that Mrs. Wayne should turn to Mr. Lanley.
+
+"You, too, think it unsuitable?"
+
+He bowed gravely.
+
+"You dislike my son?"
+
+"Quite the contrary."
+
+"Then you must be able to tell me the reason."
+
+"I will try," he said. He felt like a soldier called upon to defend a
+lost cause. It was his cause, he couldn't desert it. His daughter and
+his granddaughter needed his protection; but he knew he was giving up
+something that he valued more than his life as he began to speak. "We
+feel the difference in background," he said, "of early traditions, of
+judging life from the same point of view. Such differences can be
+overcome by time and money--" He stopped, for she was looking at him with
+the same wondering interest, devoid of anger, with which he had seen her
+study Wilsey. "I express myself badly," he murmured.
+
+Mrs. Wayne rose to her feet.
+
+"The trouble isn't with your expression," she said.
+
+"You mean that what I am trying to express is wrong?"
+
+"It seems so to me."
+
+"What is wrong about it?"
+
+She seemed to think over the possibilities for an instant, and then she
+shook her head.
+
+"I don't think I could make you understand," she answered. She said it
+very gently, but it was cruel, and he turned white under the pain,
+suffering all the more that she was so entirely without malice. She
+turned to her son. "I'm going, Pete. Don't you think you might as well
+come, too?"
+
+Mathilde sprang up and caught Mrs. Wayne's hand.
+
+"Oh, don't go!" she cried. "Don't take him away! You know they are trying
+to separate us. Oh, Mrs. Wayne, won't you take me in? Can't I stay with
+you while we are waiting?"
+
+At this every one focused their eyes on Mrs. Wayne. Pete felt sorry for
+his mother, knowing how she hated to make a sudden decision, knowing how
+she hated to do anything disagreeable to those about her; but he never
+for an instant doubted what her decision would be. Therefore he could
+hardly believe his eyes when he saw her shaking her head.
+
+"I couldn't do that, my dear."
+
+"Mother!"
+
+"Of course you couldn't," said Mr. Lanley, blowing his nose immediately
+after under the tremendous emotion of finding that she was not an enemy,
+after all. Adelaide smiled to herself. She was thinking, "You could and
+would, if I hadn't put in that sting about his failures."
+
+"Why can't you, Mother?" asked Pete.
+
+"We'll talk that over at home."
+
+"My dear boy," said Mr. Lanley, kindly, "no one over thirty would have
+to ask why."
+
+"No parent likes to assist at the kidnapping of another parent's child,"
+said Adelaide.
+
+"Good Heavens! my mother has kidnapped so many children in her day!"
+
+"From the wrong sort of home, I suppose," said Lanley, in explanation, to
+no one, perhaps, so much as to himself.
+
+"Am I to infer that she thinks mine the right sort? How delightful!"
+said Adelaide.
+
+"Mrs. Wayne, is it because I'm richer than Pete that you won't take me
+in?" asked Mathilde, visions of bestowing her wealth in charity flitting
+across her mind.
+
+The other nodded. Wayne stared.
+
+"Mother," he said, "you don't mean to say you are letting yourself be
+influenced by a taunt like that of Mrs. Farron's, which she didn't even
+believe herself?"
+
+Mrs. Wayne was shocked.
+
+"Oh, no; not that, Pete. It isn't that at all. But when a girl has been
+brought up--"
+
+Wayne saw it all in an instant.
+
+"Oh, yes, I see. We'll talk of that later."
+
+But Adelaide had seen, too.
+
+"No; do go on, Mrs. Wayne. You don't approve of the way my daughter has
+been brought up."
+
+"I don't think she has been brought up to be a poor man's wife."
+
+"No. I own I did not have that particular destiny in mind."
+
+"And when I heard you assuming just now that every one was always
+concerned about money, and when I realized that the girl must have been
+brought up in that atmosphere and belief--"
+
+"I see. You thought she was not quite the right wife for your son?"
+
+"But I would try so hard," said Mathilde. "I would learn; I--"
+
+"Mathilde," interrupted her mother, "when a lady tells you you are not
+good enough for her son, you must not protest."
+
+"Come, come, Adelaide, there is no use in being disagreeable," said
+Mr. Lanley.
+
+"Disagreeable!" returned his daughter. "Mrs. Wayne and I are entirely
+agreed. She thinks her son too good for my daughter, and I think my
+daughter too good for her son. Really, there seems nothing more to be
+said. Good-by, Mr. Wayne." She held out her long, white hand to him. Mrs.
+Wayne was trying to make her position clearer to Mathilde, but Pete
+thought this an undesirable moment for such an attempt.
+
+Partly as an assertion of his rights, partly because she looked so young
+and helpless, he stopped and kissed her.
+
+"I'll come and see you about half-past ten tomorrow morning," he said
+very clearly, so that every one could hear. Adelaide looked blank; she
+was thinking that on Pringle she could absolutely depend. Wayne saw his
+mother and Lanley bow to each other, and the next moment he had contrived
+to get her out of the house.
+
+Mathilde rushed away to her own room, and Adelaide and her father were
+left alone. She turned to him with one of her rare caresses.
+
+"Dear Papa," she said, "what a comfort you are to me! What should I do
+without you? You'll never desert me, will you?" And she put her head on
+his shoulder. He patted her with an absent-minded rhythm, and then he
+said, as if he were answering some secret train of thought:
+
+"I don't see what else I could have done."
+
+"You couldn't have done anything else," replied his daughter, still
+nestling against him. "But Mrs. Baxter had frightened me with her account
+of your sentimental admiration for Mrs. Wayne, and I thought you might
+want to make yourself agreeable to her at the expense of my poor child."
+
+She felt his shoulder heave with a longer breath.
+
+"I can't imagine putting anything before Mathilde's happiness," he said,
+and after a pause he added: "I really must go home. Mrs. Baxter will
+think me a neglectful host."
+
+"Don't you want to bring her to dine here to-night? I'll try and get
+some one to meet her. Let me see. She thinks Mr. Wilsey--"
+
+"Oh, I can't stand Wilsey," answered her father, crossly.
+
+"Well, I'll think of some one to sacrifice on the altar of your
+friendship. I certainly don't want to dine alone with Mathilde. And, by
+the way, Papa, I haven't mentioned any of this to Vincent."
+
+He thought it was admirable of her to bear her anxieties alone so as to
+spare her sick husband.
+
+"Poor girl!" he said. "You've had a tot of trouble lately."
+
+In the meantime Wayne and his mother walked slowly home.
+
+"I suppose you're furious at me, Pete," she said.
+
+"Not a bit," he answered. "For a moment, when I saw what you were going
+to say, I was terrified. But no amount of tact would have made Mrs.
+Farron feel differently, and I think they might as well know what we
+really think and feel. I was only sorry if it hurt Mathilde."
+
+"Oh dear, it's so hard to be truthful!" exclaimed his mother. He
+laughed, for he wished she sometimes found it harder; and she went on:
+
+"Poor little Mathilde! You know I wouldn't hurt her if I could help it.
+It's not her fault. But what a terrible system it is, and how money does
+blind people! They can't see you at all as you are, and yet if you had
+fifty thousand dollars a year, they'd be more aware of your good points
+than I am. They can't see that you have resolution and charm and a sense
+of honor. They don't see the person, they just see the lack of income."
+
+Pete smiled.
+
+"A person is all Mrs. Farron says she asks for her daughter."
+
+"She does not know a person when she sees one."
+
+"She knew one when she married Farron."
+
+Mrs. Wayne sniffed.
+
+"Perhaps he married her," she replied.
+
+Her son thought this likely, but he did not answer, for she had given him
+an idea--to see Farron. Farron would at least understand the situation.
+His mother approved of the suggestion.
+
+"Of course he's not Mathilde's father."
+
+"He's not a snob."
+
+They had reached the house, and Pete was fishing in his pocket for his
+keys.
+
+"Do you think Mr. Lanley is a snob?" he asked.
+
+As usual Mrs. Wayne evaded the direct answer.
+
+"I got an unfavorable impression of him this afternoon."
+
+"For failing to see that I was a king among men?"
+
+"For backing up every stupid thing his daughter said."
+
+"Loyalty is a fine quality."
+
+"Justice is better," answered his mother.
+
+"Oh, well, he's old," said Wayne, dismissing the whole subject.
+
+They walked up their four flights in silence, and then Wayne remembered
+to ask something that had been in his mind several times.
+
+"By the way, Mother, how did you happen to come to the Farrons at all?"
+
+She laughed rather self-consciously.
+
+"I hoped perhaps Mr. Farron might be well enough to see me a moment
+about Marty. The truth is, Pete, Mr. Farron is the real person in that
+whole family."
+
+That evening he wrote Farron a note, asking him to see him the next
+morning at half-past ten about "this trouble of which, of course,
+Mrs. Farron has told you." He added a request that he would tell
+Pringle of his intention in case he could give the interview, because
+Mrs. Farron had been quite frank in saying that she would give orders
+not to let him in.
+
+Farron received this note with his breakfast. Adelaide was not there. He
+had had no hint from her of any crisis. He had not come down to dinner
+the evening before to meet Mrs. Baxter and the useful people asked to
+entertain her, but he had seen Mathilde's tear-stained face, and in a few
+minutes with his father-in-law had encountered one or two evident
+evasions. Only Adelaide had been unfathomable.
+
+After he had read the letter and thought over the situation, he sent for
+Pringle, and gave orders that when Mr. Wayne came he would see him.
+
+Pringle did not exactly make an objection, but stated a fact when he
+replied that Mrs. Farron had given orders that Mr. Wayne was not to be
+allowed to see Miss Severance.
+
+"Exactly," said Farron. "Show him here." Here was his own study.
+
+As it happened, Adelaide was sitting with him, making very good invalid's
+talk, when Pringle announced, "Mr. Wayne."
+
+"Pringle, I told you--" Adelaide began, but her husband cut her short.
+
+"He has an appointment with me, Adelaide."
+
+"You don't understand, Vin. You mustn't see him."
+
+Wayne was by this time in the room.
+
+"But I wish to see him, my dear Adelaide, and," Farron added, "I wish to
+see him alone."
+
+"No," she answered, with a good deal of excitement; "that you cannot.
+This is my affair, Vincent--the affair of my child."
+
+He looked at her for a second, and then opening the door into his
+bedroom, he said to Wayne:
+
+"Will you come in here?" The door was closed behind the two men.
+
+Wayne was not a coward, although he had dreaded his interview with
+Adelaide; it was his very respect for Farron that kept him from feeling
+even nervous.
+
+"Perhaps I ought not to have asked you to see me," he began.
+
+"I'm very glad to see you," answered Farron. "Sit down, and tell me the
+story as you see it from the beginning."
+
+It was a comfort to tell the story at last to an expert. Wayne, who had
+been trying for twenty-four hours to explain what underwriting meant,
+what were the responsibilities of brokers in such matters, what was the
+function of such a report as his, felt as if he had suddenly groped his
+way out of a fog as he talked, with hardly an interruption but a nod or a
+lightening eye from Farron. He spoke of Benson. "I know the man," said
+Farron; of Honaton, "He was in my office once." Wayne told how Mathilde,
+and then he himself, had tried to inform Mrs. Farron of the definiteness
+of their plans to be married.
+
+"How long has this been going on?" Farron asked.
+
+"At least ten days."
+
+Farron nodded. Then Wayne told of the discovery of the proof at the
+printer's and his hurried meeting in the park to tell Mathilde. Here
+Farron stopped him suddenly.
+
+"What was it kept you from going through with it just the same?"
+
+"You're the first person who has asked me that," answered Pete.
+
+"Perhaps you did not even think of such a thing?"
+
+"No one could help thinking of it who saw her there--"
+
+"And you didn't do it?"
+
+"It wasn't consideration for her family that held me back."
+
+"What was it?"
+
+Pete found a moral scruple was a difficult motive to avow.
+
+"It was Mathilde herself. That would not have been treating her as
+an equal."
+
+"You intend always to treat her as an equal?"
+
+Wayne was ashamed to find how difficult it was to answer truthfully. The
+tone of the question gave him no clue to the speaker's own thoughts.
+
+"Yes, I do," he said; and then blurted out hastily, "Don't you believe in
+treating a woman as an equal?"
+
+"I believe in treating her exactly as she wants to be treated."
+
+"But every one wants to be treated as an equal, if they're any good."
+Farron smiled, showing those blue-white teeth for an instant, and Wayne,
+feeling he was not quite doing himself justice, added, "I call that just
+ordinary respect, you know, and I could not love any one I didn't
+respect. Could you?"
+
+The question was, or Farron chose to consider it, a purely rhetorical
+one.
+
+"I suppose," he observed, "that they are to be counted the most fortunate
+who love and respect at the same time."
+
+"Of course," said Wayne.
+
+Farron nodded.
+
+"And yet perhaps they miss a good deal."
+
+"I don't know _what_ they miss," answered Wayne, to whom the sentiment
+was as shocking as anything not understood can be.
+
+"No; I'm sure you don't," answered his future stepfather-in-law. "Go on
+with your story."
+
+Wayne went on, but not as rapidly as he had expected. Farron kept him a
+long time on the interview of the afternoon before, and particularly on
+Mrs. Farron's part, just the point Wayne did not want to discuss for fear
+of betraying the bitterness he felt toward her. But again and again
+Farron made him quote her words wherever he could remember them; and
+then, as if this had not been clear enough, he asked:
+
+"You think my wife has definitely made up her mind against the marriage?"
+
+"Irrevocably."
+
+"Irrevocably?" Farron questioned more as if it were the sound of the word
+than the meaning that he was doubting.
+
+"Ah, you've been rather out of it lately, sir," said Wayne. "You haven't
+followed, perhaps, all that's been going on."
+
+"Perhaps not."
+
+Wayne felt he must be candid.
+
+"If it is your idea that your wife's opposition could be changed, I'm
+afraid I must tell you, Mr. Farron--" He paused, meeting a quick, sudden
+look; then Farron turned his head, and stared, with folded arms, out of
+the window. Wayne had plenty of time to wonder what he was going to say.
+What he did say was surprising.
+
+"I think you are an honest man, and I should be glad to have you working
+for me. I could make you one of my secretaries, with a salary of six
+thousand dollars."
+
+In the shock Pete heard himself saying the first thing that came
+into his head:
+
+"That's a large salary, sir."
+
+"Some people would say large enough to marry on."
+
+Wayne drew back.
+
+"Don't you think you ought to consult Mrs. Farron before you offer it to
+me?" he asked hesitatingly.
+
+"Don't carry honesty too far. No, I don't consult my wife about my
+office appointments."
+
+"It isn't honesty; but I couldn't stand having you change your
+mind when--"
+
+"When my wife tells me to? I promise you not to do that."
+
+Wayne found that the interview was over, although he had not been able to
+express his gratitude.
+
+"I know what you are feeling," said Farron. "Good-by."
+
+"I can't understand why you are doing it, Mr. Farron; but--"
+
+"It needn't matter to you. Good-by."
+
+With a sensation that in another instant he might be out of the house,
+Wayne metaphorically caught at the door-post.
+
+"I must see Mathilde before I go," he said.
+
+Farron shook his head.
+
+"No, not to-day."
+
+"She's terribly afraid I am going to be moved by insults to desert her,"
+Wayne urged.
+
+"I'll see she understands. I'll send for you in a day or two; then it
+will be all right." They shook hands. He was glad Farron showed him out
+through the corridor and not through the study, where, he knew, Mrs.
+Farron was still waiting like a fine, sleek cat at a rat-hole.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+During this interview Adelaide sat in her husband's study and waited. She
+looked back upon that other period of suspense--the hour when she had
+waited at the hospital during his operation--as a time of comparative
+peace. She had been able then, she remembered, to sit still, to pursue,
+if not a train of thought, at least a set of connected images; but now
+her whole spirit seemed to be seething with a sort of poison that made
+her muscles jerk and start and her mind dart and faint. Then she had
+foreseen loss through the fate common to humanity; now she foresaw it
+through the action of her own tyrannical contempt for anything that
+seemed to her weak.
+
+She had never rebelled against coercion from Vincent. She had even loved
+it, but she had loved it when he had seemed to her a superior being;
+coercion from one who only yesterday had been under the dominion of
+nerves and nurses was intolerable to her. She was at heart a courtier,
+would do menial service to a king, and refuse common civility to an
+inferior. She knew how St. Christopher had felt at seeing his satanic
+captain tremble at the sign of the cross; and though, unlike the saint,
+she had no intention of setting out to discover the stronger lord, she
+knew that he might now any day appear.
+
+From any one not an acknowledged superior that shut door was an insult to
+be avenged, and she sat and waited for the moment to arrive when she
+would most adequately avenge it. There was still something terrifying in
+the idea of going out to do battle with Vincent. Hitherto in their
+quarrels he had always been the aggressor, had always startled her out of
+an innocent calm by an accusation or complaint. But this, as she said to
+herself, was not a quarrel, but a readjustment, of which probably he was
+still unaware. She hoped he was. She hoped he would come in with his
+accustomed manner and say civilly, "Forgive me for shutting the door; but
+my reason was--"
+
+And she would answer, "Really, I don't think we need trouble about your
+reasons, Vincent." She knew just the tone she would use, just the
+expression of a smile suppressed. Then his quick eyes would fasten
+themselves on her face, and perhaps at the first glance would read the
+story of his defeat. She knew her own glance would not waver.
+
+At the end of half an hour she heard the low tones of conversation change
+to the brisk notes of leave-taking. Her heart began to beat with fear,
+but not the kind of fear that makes people run away; rather the kind that
+makes them abdicate all reason and fan their emotions into a sort of
+inspiring flame.
+
+She heard the door open into the corridor, but even then Vincent did not
+immediately come. Miss Gregory had been waiting to say good-by to him. As
+a case he was finished. Adelaide heard her clear voice say gaily:
+
+"Well, I'm off, Mr. Vincent."
+
+They went back into the room and shut the door. Adelaide clenched her
+hands; these delays were hard to bear.
+
+It was not a long delay, though in that next room a very human bond
+was about to be broken. Possibly if Vincent had done exactly what
+his impulses prompted, he would have taken Miss Gregory in his arms
+and kissed her. But instead he said quietly, for his manner had not
+much range:
+
+"I shall miss you."
+
+"It's time I went."
+
+"To some case more interestingly dangerous?"
+
+"Your case was dangerous enough for me," said the girl; and then for fear
+he might miss her meaning, "I never met any one like you, Mr. Farron."
+
+"I've never been taken care of as you took care of me."
+
+"I wish"--she looked straight up at him--"I could take care of you
+altogether."
+
+"That," he answered, "would end in my taking care of you."
+
+"And your hands are pretty full as it is?"
+
+He nodded, and she went away without even shaking hands. She omitted her
+farewells to any other member of the family except Pringle, who, Farron
+heard, was congratulating her on her consideration for servants as he put
+her into her taxi.
+
+Then he opened the door of his study, went to the chair he had risen
+from, and took up the paper at the paragraph at which he had dropped it.
+Adelaide's eyes followed him like search-lights.
+
+"May I ask," she said with her edged voice, "if you have been disposing
+of my child's future in there without consulting me?"
+
+If their places had been reversed, Adelaide would have raised her
+eyebrows and repeated, "Your child's future?" but Farron was more direct.
+
+"I have been engaging Wayne as a secretary," he said, and, turning to the
+financial page, glanced down the quotations.
+
+"Then you must dismiss him again."
+
+"He will be a useful man to me," said Farron, as if she had not spoken.
+"I have needed some one whom I could depend on--"
+
+"Vincent, it is absurd for you to pretend you don't know he wanted to
+marry Mathilde."
+
+He did not raise his eyes.
+
+"Yes," he said; "I remember you and I had some talk about it before my
+operation."
+
+"Since then circumstances have arisen of which you know nothing--things
+I did not tell you."
+
+"Do you think that was wise?"
+
+With a sense that a rapid and resistless current was carrying them both
+to destruction she saw for the first time that he was as angry as she.
+
+"I do not like your tone," she said.
+
+"What's the matter with it?"
+
+"It isn't polite; it isn't friendly."
+
+"Why should it be?"
+
+"Why? What a question! Love--"
+
+"I doubt if it is any longer a question of love between you and me."
+
+These words, which so exactly embodied her own idea, came to her as a
+shock, a brutal blow from him.
+
+"Vincent!" she cried protestingly.
+
+"I don't know what it is that has your attention now, what private
+anxieties that I am not privileged to share--"
+
+"You have been ill."
+
+"But not imbecile. Do you suppose I've missed one tone of your voice, or
+haven't understood what has been going on in your mind? Have you lived
+with me five years and think me a forgiving man--"
+
+"May I ask what you have to forgive?"
+
+"Do you suppose a pat to my pillow or an occasional kind word takes the
+place to me of what our relation used to be?"
+
+"You speak as if our relation was over."
+
+"Have you been imagining I was going to come whining to you for a return
+of your love and respect? What nonsense! Love makes love, and
+indifference makes indifference."
+
+"You expect me to say I am indifferent to you?"
+
+"I care very little what you say. I judge your conduct."
+
+She had an unerring instinct for what would wound him. If she had
+answered with conviction, "Yes, I am indifferent to you," there would
+have been enough temper and exaggeration in it for him to discount the
+whole statement. But to say, "No, I still love you, Vincent," in a tone
+that conceded the very utmost that she could,--namely, that she still
+loved him for the old, rather pitiful association,--that would be to
+inflict the most painful wound possible. And so that was what she said.
+She was prepared to have him take it up and cry: "You still love me? Do
+you mean as you love your Aunt Alberta?" and she, still trying to be
+just, would answer: "Oh, more than Aunt Alberta. Only, of course--"
+
+The trouble was he did not make the right answer. When she said, "No, I
+still love you, Vincent," he answered:
+
+"I cannot say the same."
+
+It was one of those replies that change the face of the world. It drove
+every other idea out of her head. She stared at him for an instant.
+
+"Nobody," she answered, "need tell me such a thing as that twice." It
+was a fine phrase to cover a retreat; she left him and went to her own
+room. It no more occurred to her to ask whether he meant what he said
+than if she had been struck in the head she would have inquired if the
+blow was real.
+
+She did not come down to lunch. Vincent and Mathilde ate alone. Mathilde,
+as she told Pete, had begun to understand her stepfather, but she had not
+progressed so far as to see in his silence anything but an
+unapproachable sternness. It never crossed her mind that this middle-aged
+man, who seemed to control his life so completely, was suffering far more
+than she, and she was suffering a good deal.
+
+Pete had promised to come that morning, and she hadn't seen him yet. She
+supposed he had come, and that, though she had been on the lookout for
+him, she had missed him. She felt as if they were never going to see each
+other again. When she found she was to be alone at luncheon with Farron,
+she thought of appealing to him, but was restrained by two
+considerations. She was a kind person, and her mother had repeatedly
+impressed upon her how badly at present Mr. Farron supported any anxiety.
+More important than this, however, was her belief that he would never
+work at cross-purposes with his wife. What were she and Pete to do? she
+thought. Mrs. Wayne would not take her in, her mother would not let Pete
+come to the house, and they had no money.
+
+Both cups of soup left the table almost untasted.
+
+"I'm sorry Mama has one of her headaches," said Mathilde.
+
+"Yes," said Farron. "You'd better take some of that chicken, Mathilde.
+It's very good."
+
+She did not notice that the piece he had taken on his own plate was
+untouched.
+
+"I'm not hungry," she answered.
+
+"Anything wrong?"
+
+She could not lie, and so she looked at him and smiled and answered:
+
+"Nothing, as Mama would say, to trouble an invalid with."
+
+She did not have a great success. In fact, his brows showed a slight
+disposition to contract, and after a moment of silence he said:
+
+"Does your mother say that?"
+
+"She's always trying to protect you nowadays, Mr. Farron."
+
+"I saw your friend Pete Wayne this morning."
+
+"You saw--" Surprise, excitement, alarm flooded her face with crimson.
+"Oh, why did _you_ see him?"
+
+"I saw him by appointment. He asked me to tell you--only, I'm afraid,
+other things put it out of my head--that he has accepted a job I
+offered him."
+
+"O Mr. Farron, what kind of job?"
+
+"Well, the kind of job that would enable two self-denying young people to
+marry, I think."
+
+Not knowing how clearly all that she felt was written on her face
+Mathilde tried to put it all into words.
+
+"How wonderful! how kind! But my mother--"
+
+"I will arrange it with your mother."
+
+"Have you known all along? Oh, why did you do this wonderful thing?"
+
+"Because--perhaps you won't agree with me--I have taken rather a fancy to
+this young man. And I had other reasons."
+
+Mathilde took her stepfather's hand as it lay upon the table.
+
+"I've only just begun to understand you, Mr. Farron. To
+understand, I mean, what Mama means when she says you are the
+strongest, wisest person--"
+
+He pretended to smile.
+
+"When did your mother say that?"
+
+"Oh, ages ago." She stopped, aware of a faint motion to withdraw on the
+part of the hand she held. "I suppose you want to go to her."
+
+"No. The sort of headache she has is better left alone, I think, though
+you might stop as you go up."
+
+"I will. When do you think I can see Pete?"
+
+"I'd wait a day or two; but you might telephone him at once, if you like,
+and say--or do you know what to say?"
+
+She laughed.
+
+"It used to frighten me when you made fun of me like that; but now--It
+must be simply delirious to be able to make people as happy as you've
+just made us."
+
+He smiled at her word.
+
+"Other people's happiness is not exactly delirious," he said.
+
+She was moving in the direction of the nearest telephone, but she said
+over her shoulder:
+
+"Oh, well, I think you did pretty well for yourself when you chose Mama."
+
+She left him sipping his black coffee; he took every drop of that.
+
+When he had finished he did not go back to his study, but to the
+drawing-room, where he sat down in a large chair by the fire. He lit a
+cigar. It was a quiet hour in the house, and he might have been supposed
+to be a man entirely at peace.
+
+Mr. Lanley, coming in about an hour later, certainly imagined he was
+rousing an invalid from a refreshing rest. He tried to retreat, but found
+Vincent's black eyes were on him.
+
+"I'm sorry to disturb you," he said. "Just wanted to see Adelaide."
+
+"Adelaide has a headache."
+
+Life was taking so many wrong turnings that Mr. Lanley had grown
+apprehensive. He suddenly remembered how many headaches Adelaide had had
+just before he knew of her troubles with Severance.
+
+"A headache?" he said nervously.
+
+"Nothing serious." Vincent looked more closely at his father-in-law. "You
+yourself don't look just the thing, sir."
+
+Mr. Lanley sat down more limply than was his custom.
+
+"I'm getting to an age," he said, "when I can't stand scenes. We had
+something of a scene here yesterday afternoon. God bless my soul! though,
+I believe Adelaide told me not to mention it to you."
+
+"Adelaide is very considerate," replied her husband. His extreme
+susceptibility to sorrow made Mr. Lanley notice a tone which ordinarily
+would have escaped him, and he looked up so sharply that Farron was
+forced to add quickly: "But you haven't made a break. I know about what
+took place."
+
+The egotism of suffering, the distorted vision of a sleepless night, made
+Mr. Lanley blurt out suddenly:
+
+"I want to ask you, Vincent, do you think I could have done anything
+different?"
+
+Now, none of the accounts which Farron had received had made any mention
+of Mr. Lanley's part in the proceedings at all, and so he paused a
+moment, and in that pause Mr. Lanley went on:
+
+"It's a difficult position--before a boy's mother. There isn't anything
+against him, of course. One's reasons for not wanting the marriage do
+sound a little snobbish when one says them--right out. In fact, I suppose
+they are snobbish. Do you find it hard to get away from early prejudices,
+Vincent? I do. I think Adelaide is quite right; and yet the boy is a nice
+boy. What do you think of him?"
+
+"I have taken him into my office."
+
+Mr. Lanley was startled by a courage so far beyond his own.
+
+"But," he asked, "did you consult Adelaide?"
+
+Farron shook his head.
+
+"But, Vincent, was that quite loyal?"
+
+A change in Farron's expression made Mr. Lanley turn his head, and he saw
+that Adelaide had come into the room. Her appearance bore out the legend
+of her headache: she looked like a garden after an early frost. But
+perhaps the most terrifying thing about her aspect was her complete
+indifference to it. A recollection suddenly came to Mr. Lanley of a
+railway accident that he and Adelaide had been in. He had seen her
+stepping toward him through the debris, buttoning her gloves. She was far
+beyond such considerations now.
+
+She had come to put her very life to the test. There was one hope, there
+was one way in which Vincent could rehabilitate himself, and that was by
+showing himself victor in the hardest of all struggles, the personal
+struggle with her. That would be hard, because she would make it so, if
+she perished in the attempt.
+
+The crisis came in the first meeting of their eyes. If his glance had
+said: "My poor dear, you're tired. Rest. All will be well," his cause
+would have been lost. But his glance said nothing, only studied her
+coolly, and she began to speak.
+
+"Oh, Papa, Vincent does not consider such minor points as loyalty to me."
+Her voice and manner left Mr. Lanley in no doubt that if he stayed an
+instant he would witness a domestic quarrel. The idea shocked him
+unspeakably. That these two reserved and dignified people should quarrel
+at all was bad enough, but that they should have reached a point where
+they were indifferent to the presence of a third person was terrible. He
+got himself out of the room without ceremony, but not before he saw
+Vincent rise and heard the first words of his sentence:
+
+"And what right have you to speak of loyalty?" Here, fortunately,
+Lanley shut the door behind him, for Vincent's next words would have
+shocked him still more: "A prostitute would have stuck better to a man
+when he was ill."
+
+But Adelaide was now in good fighting trim. She laughed out loud.
+
+"Really, Vincent," she said, "your language! You must make your complaint
+against me a little more definite."
+
+"Not much; and give you a chance to get up a little rational explanation.
+Besides, we neither of us need explanations. We know what has been
+happening."
+
+"You mean you really doubt my feeling for you? No, Vincent, I still
+love you," and her voice had a flute-like quality which, though it was
+without a trace of conviction, very few people who had ever heard it
+had resisted.
+
+"I am aware of that," said Vincent quietly.
+
+She looked beautifully dazed.
+
+"Yet this morning you spoke--as if--"
+
+"But what is love such as yours worth? A man must be on the crest of the
+wave to keep it; otherwise it changes automatically into contempt. I
+don't care about it, Adelaide. I can't use it in a life like mine."
+
+She looked at him, and a dreamlike state began to come over her. She
+simply couldn't believe in the state of mind of those sick-room days; she
+could never really, she thought, have been less passionately admiring
+than she was at that minute, yet the half-recollection confused her and
+kept her silent.
+
+"Perhaps it's vanity on my part," he said, "but contempt like yours is
+something I could never forgive."
+
+"You would forgive me anything if you loved me." Her tone was noble
+and sincere.
+
+"Perhaps."
+
+"You mean you don't?"
+
+"Adelaide, there are times when a person chooses between loving and
+being loved."
+
+The sentence made her feel sick with fear, but she asked:
+
+"Tell me just what you mean."
+
+"Perhaps I could keep on loving you if I shut my eyes to the kind of
+person you are; but if I did that, I could not hold you an instant."
+
+She stared at him as fascinated as a bird by a snake. This, it seemed to
+her, was the truth, the final summing up of their relation. She had lost
+him, and yet she was eternally his.
+
+As she looked at him she became aware that he was growing slowly pale. He
+was standing, and he put his hand out to the mantelpiece to steady
+himself. She thought he was going to faint.
+
+"Vincent," she said, "let me help you to the sofa."
+
+She wanted now to see him falter, to feel his hand on her shoulder,
+anything for a closer touch with him. For half a minute, perhaps, they
+remained motionless, and then the color began to come back into his face.
+
+He smiled bitterly.
+
+"They tell me you are such a good sick nurse, Mrs. Farron," he said, "so
+considerate to the weak. But I don't need your help, thank you."
+
+She covered her face with her hands. He seemed to her stronger and more
+cruel than anything she had imagined. In a minute he left her alone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+Farron cared, perhaps, no more for appearances than Adelaide did, but
+his habitual manner was much better adapted to concealment. In him the
+fluctuations between the deepest depression and the highest elation were
+accompanied by such slight variations of look and tone that they escaped
+almost every one but Adelaide herself. He came down to dinner that
+evening, and while Adelaide sat in silence, with her elbows on the table
+and her long fingers clasping and unclasping themselves in a sort of
+rhythmic desperation, conversation went on pleasantly enough between
+Mathilde and Vincent. This was facilitated by the fact that Mathilde had
+now transferred to Vincent the flattering affection which she used to
+give to her grandfather. She agreed with, wondered at, and drank in
+every word.
+
+Naturally, Mathilde attributed her mother's distress to the crisis in her
+own love-affairs. She had had no word with her as to Wayne's new
+position, and it came to her in a flash that it would be daring, but
+wise, to take the matter up in the presence of her stepfather. So, as
+soon as they were in the drawing-room, and Farron had opened the evening
+paper, and his wife, with a wild decision, had opened a book, Mathilde
+ruthlessly interrupted them both, recalling them from what appeared to be
+the depths of absorptions in their respective pages by saying:
+
+"Mr. Farron, did you tell Mama what you had done about Pete?"
+
+Farron raised his eyes and said:
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And what did she say?"
+
+"What is there for me to say?" answered Adelaide in the terrible, crisp
+voice that Mathilde hated.
+
+There was a pause. To Mathilde it seemed extraordinary the way older
+people sometimes stalled and shifted about perfectly obvious issues; but,
+wishing to be patient, she explained:
+
+"Don't you see it makes some difference in our situation?"
+
+"The greatest, I should think," said Adelaide, and just hinted that she
+might go back to her book at any instant.
+
+"But don't you think--" Mathilde began again, when Farron interrupted her
+almost sharply.
+
+"Mathilde," he said, "there's a well-known business axiom, not to try to
+get things on paper too early."
+
+She bent her head a trifle on one side in the way a puppy will when an
+unusual strain is being put upon its faculties. It seemed to her curious,
+but she saw she was being advised to drop the subject. Suddenly Adelaide
+sprang to her feet and said she was going to bed.
+
+"I hope your headache will be better, Mama," Mathilde hazarded; but
+Adelaide went without answering. Mathilde looked at Mr. Farron.
+
+"You haven't learned to wait," he said.
+
+"It's so hard to wait when you are on bad terms with people you love!"
+
+She was surprised that he smiled--a smile that conveyed more pain than
+amusement.
+
+"It is hard," he said.
+
+This closed the evening. The next morning Vincent went down-town. He
+went about half-past ten. Adelaide, breakfasting in her room and dressing
+at her leisure, did not appear until after eleven, and then discovered
+for the first time that her husband had gone. She was angry at Mathilde,
+who had breakfasted with him, at Pringle, for not telling her what was
+happening.
+
+"You shouldn't have let him go, Mathilde," she said. "You are old enough
+to have some judgment in such matters. He is not strong enough. He almost
+fainted yesterday."
+
+"But, Mama," protested the girl, "I could not stop Mr. Farron. I don't
+think even you could have if he'd made up his mind."
+
+"Tell Pringle to order the motor at once," was her mother's answer.
+
+Her distraction at her husband's imprudence touched Mathilde so that she
+forgot everything else between them.
+
+"O Mama," she said, "I'm so sorry you're worried! I'm sorry I'm one of
+your worries; but don't you see I love Pete just as you do Mr. Farron?"
+
+"God help you, then!" said Adelaide, quickly, and went to her room to
+put on with a haste none the less meticulous her small velvet hat, her
+veil, her spotless, pale gloves, her muff, and warm coat.
+
+She drove to Vincent's office. It was not really care for his health that
+drove her, but the restlessness of despair; she had reached a point where
+she was more wretched away from him than with him.
+
+The office was high in a gigantic building. Every one knew her by sight,
+the giant at the door and the men in the elevators. Once in the office
+itself, a junior partner hurried to her side.
+
+"So glad to see Vincent back again," he said, proud of the fact that he
+called his present partner and late employer by his first name. "You want
+to see him?" There was a short hesitation. "He left word not to be
+disturbed--"
+
+"Who is there?" Adelaide asked.
+
+"Dr. Parret."
+
+"He's not been taken ill?"
+
+He tried to reassure her, but Adelaide, without waiting or listening,
+moved at once to Vincent's door and opened it. As she did so she heard,
+him laughing and then she saw that he was laughing at the words of the
+handsomest woman she had ever seen. A great many people had this first
+impression of Lily Parret. Lily was standing on the opposite side of the
+table from him, leaning with both palms flat on the polished wood,
+telling him some continued narrative that made her blue eyes shine and
+her dimples deepen.
+
+Adelaide was not temperamentally jealous. She did not, like Vincent, hate
+and fear any person or thing or idea that drew his attention away; on the
+contrary, she wanted him to give his full attention to anything that
+would make for his power and success. She was not jealous, but it did
+cross her mind that she was looking now at her successor.
+
+They stopped laughing as she entered, and Vincent said:
+
+"Thank you, Dr. Parret, you have given me just what I wanted."
+
+"Marty would just as lief as not stick a knife in me if he knew," said
+Lily, not as if she were afraid, but as if this was one of the normal
+risks of her profession. She turned to Adelaide, "O Mrs. Farron, I've
+heard of you from Pete Wayne. Isn't he perfectly delightful? But, then,
+he ought to be with such a mother."
+
+Adelaide had a very useful smile, which could maintain a long, but
+somewhat meaningless, brilliance. She employed it now, and it lasted
+until Lily had gone.
+
+"That's a very remarkable girl," said Farron, remembrances of smiles
+still on his lips.
+
+"Does she think every one perfect?"
+
+"Almost every one; that's how she keeps going at such a rate."
+
+"How long have you known her?"
+
+"About ten minutes. Pete got her here. She knew something about Marty
+that I needed." He spoke as if he was really interested in the business
+before him; he did not betray by so much as a glance the recognition that
+they were alone, though she was calling his attention to the fact by
+every line of her figure and expression of her face. She saw his hand
+move on his desk. Was it coming to hers? He rang a bell. "Is Burke in the
+outer office? Send him in."
+
+Adelaide's heart began to beat as Marty, in his working-clothes,
+entered. He was more suppressed and more sulky than she had yet seen him.
+
+"I've been trying to see you, Mr. Farron," he began; but Vincent cut in:
+
+"One moment, Burke. I have something to say to you. That bout you said
+you had with O'Hallohan--"
+
+"Well, what of it?" answered Marty, suddenly raising his voice.
+
+"He knocked you out."
+
+"Who says so?" roared Burke.
+
+"He knocked you out," repeated Vincent.
+
+"Who says so?" Burke roared again, and somehow there was less confidence
+in the same volume of sound.
+
+"Well, not O'Hallohan; He stayed bought. But I have it straight. No, I'm
+not trying to draw you out on a guess. I don't play that kind of game. If
+I tell you I know it for a fact, I do."
+
+"Well, and what of it?" said Marty.
+
+"Just this. I wouldn't dismiss a man for getting knocked out by a
+bigger man--"
+
+"He ain't bigger."
+
+"By a better fighter, then; but I doubt whether or not I want a
+foreman who has to resort to that kind of thing--to buying off the man
+who licked--"
+
+"I didn't _buy_ him off," said Burke, as if he knew the distinction, even
+in his own mind, was a fine one.
+
+"Oh, yes, you did," answered Farron. And getting up, with his hands in
+his pockets, he added, "I'm afraid your usefulness to me is over, Burke."
+
+"The hell it is!"
+
+"My wife is here, Marty," said Farron, very pleasantly. "But this story
+isn't the only thing I have against you. My friend Mrs. Wayne tells me
+you are exerting a bad influence over a fellow whose marriage she wants
+to get annulled."
+
+"Oh, let 'em get it annulled!" shouted Marty on a high and rising key.
+"What do I care? I'll do anything to oblige if I'm asked right; but when
+Mrs. Wayne and that gang come around bullying me, I won't do a thing for
+them. But, if you ask me to, Mr. Farron, why, I'm glad to oblige you."
+
+"Thank you, Marty," returned his employer, cordially. "If you arrange
+that for me, I must own it would make me feel differently. I tell
+you," he added, as one who suggests an honorable compromise, "you get
+that settled up, you get that marriage annulled--that is, if you think
+you can--"
+
+"Sure I can," Burke replied, swaying his body about from the waist up, as
+if to indicate the ease with which it could be accomplished.
+
+"Well, when that's done, come back, and we'll talk over the other matter.
+Perhaps, after all--well, we'll talk it over."
+
+Burke walked to the door with his usual conquering step, but there
+turned.
+
+"Say," he said, "that story about the fight--" He looked at Adelaide.
+"Ladies don't always understand these matters. Tell her, will you, that
+it's done in some first-class fights?"
+
+"I'll explain," answered Vincent.
+
+"And there ain't any use in the story's getting about," Burke added.
+
+"It won't," said Vincent. On which assurance Marty went away and left the
+husband and wife alone.
+
+Adelaide got up and went to the window and looked out toward the
+Palisades. Marty Burke had been a symbol that enabled her to recall some
+of her former attitudes of mind. She remembered that dinner where she had
+pitted him against her husband. She felt deeply humiliated in her own
+sight and in Vincent's, for she was now ready to believe that he had read
+her mind from the beginning. It seemed to her as if she had been mad, and
+in that madness had thrown away the only thing in the world she would
+ever value. The thought of acknowledging her fault was not repugnant to
+her; she had no special objection to groveling, but she knew it would do
+no good. Vincent, though not ungenerous, saw clearly; and he had summed
+up the situation in that terrible phrase about choosing between loving
+and being loved. "I suppose I shouldn't respect him much if he did
+forgive me," she thought; and suddenly she felt his arms about her; he
+snatched her to him, turned her face to his, calling her by strange,
+unpremeditated terms of endearment. Beyond these, no words at all were
+exchanged between them; they were undesired. Adelaide did not know
+whether it were servile or superb to care little about knowing his
+opinion and intentions in regard to her. All that she cared about was
+that in her eyes he was once more supreme and that his arms were about
+her. Words, she knew, would have been her enemies, and she did not make
+use of them.
+
+When they went out, they passed Wayne in the outer office.
+
+"Come to dinner to-night, Pete," said Farron, and added, turning to his
+wife, "That's all right, isn't it, Adelaide?"
+
+She indicated that it was perfect, like everything he did.
+
+Wayne looked at his future mother-in-law in surprise. His pride had been
+unforgetably stung by some of her sentences, but he could have forgiven
+those more easily than the easy smile with which she now nodded at her
+husband's invitation, as if a pleasant intention on her part could wipe
+out everything that had gone before. That, it seemed to him, was the very
+essence of insolence.
+
+Appreciating that some sort of doubt was disturbing him, Adelaide said
+most graciously:
+
+"Yes, you really must come, Mr. Wayne."
+
+At this moment Farron's own stenographer, Chandler, approached him with
+an unsigned letter in his hand.
+
+Chandler took the routine of the office more seriously than Farron did,
+and acquired thereby a certain power over his employer. He had something
+of the attitude of a child's nurse, who, knowing that her charge has
+almost passed beyond her care, recognizes that she has no authority
+except that bestowed by devotion.
+
+"I think you meant to sign this letter, Mr. Farron," he said, just as a
+nurse might say before strangers, "You weren't going to the party
+without washing your hands?"
+
+"Oh." Farron fished in his waistcoat for his pen, and while he was
+writing, and Chandler just keeping an eye on him to see that it was done
+right, Adelaide said:
+
+"And how is Mrs. Chandler?"
+
+Chandler's face lit up as he received the letter back.
+
+"Oh, much better, thank you, Mrs. Farron--out of all danger."
+
+Wayne saw, what Chandler did not, that Adelaide had never even heard of
+Mrs. Chandler's ill health; but she murmured as she turned away:
+
+"I'm so glad. You must have been very anxious."
+
+When they were gone, Wayne and Chandler were left a minute alone.
+
+"What a personality!" Chandler exclaimed. "Imagine her remembering my
+troubles, when you think what she has had to worry about! A remarkable
+couple, Mr. Wayne. I have been up to the house a number of times since
+Mr. Farron's illness, and she is always there, so brave, so attentive. A
+queenly woman, and," he added, as if the two did not always go together,
+"a good wife."
+
+Wayne could think of no answer to this eulogy, and as they stood in
+silence the office door opened and Mr. Lanley came in. He nodded to each
+of the two, and moved to Vincent's room.
+
+"Mr. Farron has just gone," said Chandler, firmly. He could not bear to
+have people running in and out of Farron's room.
+
+"Gone?" said Lanley, as if it were somebody's fault.
+
+"Mrs. Farron came down for him in the motor. He appeared to stand his
+first day very well."
+
+Mr. Lanley glanced quickly from one to the other. This did not sound as
+if any final break had occurred between the Farrons, yet on this subject
+he could hardly question his son-in-law's secretaries. He made one
+further effort.
+
+"I suppose Mr. Farron thought he was good for a whole day's work."
+
+Chandler smiled.
+
+"Mr. Farron, like all wise men, sir, does what his wife tells him." And
+then, as he loved his own work far more than conversation, Chandler
+hurried back to his desk.
+
+"I understand," said Lanley to Wayne, "that you are here regularly now."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Like your work?" Lanley was obviously delaying, hoping that some
+information would turn up unexpectedly.
+
+"Very much."
+
+"Humph! What does your mother think about it?"
+
+"About my new job?" Wayne smiled. "You know those aren't the kind of
+facts--jobs and salaries--that my mother scrutinizes very closely."
+
+Lanley stared at him with brows slightly contracted.
+
+"What does she scrutinize?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, motives--spiritual things."
+
+"I see." Mr. Lanley couldn't go a step further, couldn't take this young
+man into his confidence an inch further. He stuck his stick into his
+overcoat-pocket so that it stood upright, and wheeled sharply.
+
+"Good-by," he said, and added at the door, "I suppose you think this
+makes a difference in your prospects."
+
+"Mrs. Farron has asked me to come to dinner to-night."
+
+Lanley wheeled back again.
+
+"What?" he said.
+
+"Yes, she almost urged me, though I didn't need urging."
+
+Lanley didn't answer, but presently went out in silence. He was
+experiencing the extreme loneliness that follows being more royalist
+than the king.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+On Mondays and Thursdays, the only days Mr. Lanley went down-town, he
+expected to have the corner table at the restaurant where he always
+lunched and where, on leaving Farron's office, he went. He had barely
+finished ordering luncheon--oyster stew, cold tongue, salad, and a
+bottle of Rhine wine--when, looking up, he saw Wilsey was approaching
+him, beaming.
+
+"Haryer, Wilsey?" he said, without cordiality.
+
+Wilsey, it fortunately appeared, had already had his midday meal, and had
+only a moment or two to give to sociability.
+
+"Haven't seen you since that delightful evening," he murmured. "I hope
+Mrs. Baxter got my card." He mentioned his card as if it had been a gift,
+not munificent, but not negligible, either.
+
+"Suppose she got it if you left it," said Mr. Lanley, who had heard her
+comment on it. "My man's pretty good at that sort of thing."
+
+"Ah, how rare they are getting!" said Wilsey, with a sigh--"good
+servants. Upon my word, Lanley, I'm almost ready to go."
+
+"Because you can't get good servants?" said his friend, who was drumming
+on the table and looking blankly about.
+
+"Because all the old order is passing, all the standards and backgrounds
+that I value. I don't think I'm a snob--"
+
+"Of course you're a snob, Wilsey."
+
+Mr. Wilsey smiled temperately.
+
+"What do you mean by the word?"
+
+It was a question about which Lanley had been thinking, and he answered:
+
+"I mean a person who values himself for qualities that have no moral,
+financial, or intellectual value whatsoever. You, for instance, Wilsey,
+value yourself not because you are a pretty good lawyer, but because your
+great-grandfather signed the Declaration."
+
+A shade of slight embarrassment crossed the lawyer's face.
+
+"I own," he said, "that I value birth, but so do you, Lanley. You attach
+importance to being a New York Lanley."
+
+"I do," answered Lanley; "but I have sense enough to be ashamed of doing
+so. You're proud of being proud of your old Signer."
+
+"As a matter of fact," Mr. Wilsey remarked slowly, "Josiah Wilsey did not
+sign the Declaration."
+
+"What!" cried Lanley. "You've always told me he did."
+
+Wilsey shook his head gently, as one who went about correcting errors.
+
+"No. What I said was that I feel no moral doubt he would have signed it
+if an attack of illness--"
+
+Lanley gave a short roar.
+
+"That's just like _you_, Wilsey. You wouldn't have signed it, either. You
+would have said that while in cordial sympathy with the ideas set forth,
+you would not care to put your name to a document that might give pain to
+a monarch who, though not as liberal as some of us could wish, was yet--"
+
+"As a matter of fact," Wilsey began again even more coldly, "I should
+have signed--"
+
+"Oh, you think so now. A hundred years from now you'd sign a petition for
+the eight-hour law."
+
+"Never!" said Wilsey, raising his hand. "I should never put my name to a
+document--" He stopped at another roar from his friend, and never took
+the sentence up again, but indicated with a gesture that only legal minds
+were worth arguing with on points of this sort.
+
+When he had gone, Lanley dipped the spoon in his oyster stew with not a
+little pleasure. Nothing, apparently, could have raised his spirits more
+than the knowledge that old Josiah Wilsey had not signed the Declaration.
+He actually chuckled a little. "So like Wilsey himself," he thought. "No
+moral courage; calls it conservatism." Then his joy abated. Just so, he
+thought, must he himself appear to Mrs. Wayne. Yet his self-respect
+insisted that his case was different. Loyalty had been responsible not
+for his conservatism, but for the pig-headedness with which he had acted
+upon it. He would have asked nothing better than to profess himself
+open-minded to Mrs. Wayne's views, only he could not desert Adelaide in
+the moment of her struggle for beliefs in which he himself had brought
+her up. And now she had deserted him. He alone was left to flaunt a
+banner the motto of which he didn't wholly believe, while Adelaide, at a
+word from Vincent, had gone over to the other side. And no one knew what
+his loyalty had cost him. Long ago, in his first year at college, he had
+flunked the examination of the professor whom he reverenced above all
+others. No one had cared, no one had long remembered, except Lanley
+himself, and he had remembered because some one had told him what the
+professor said on reading his paper. It was nothing but, "I had supposed
+Lanley was intelligent." Never again had he had that professor's
+attention for a single instant. This, it seemed to him, was about to
+happen to him again, now when it was too late in his life to do anything
+but despair.
+
+He called the waiter, paid his bill and tip,--he was an extremely liberal
+tipper; "it's expected of us," he used to say, meaning that it was
+expected of people like the New York Lanleys,--and went away.
+
+In old times he had been an inventor of many clever tricks for getting
+up-town by unpopular elevated trains and horse-cars that avoided the
+crowd, but the subway was a great leveler, and he knew no magic except to
+take a local in rush hours. At three o'clock, however, even this was not
+necessary. He took an express, and got off at the Grand Central, turned
+up Park Avenue, and then east. He had just found out that he was going to
+visit Mrs. Wayne.
+
+He read the names in the vestibule, never doubting that Dr. Parret was
+a masculine practitioner, and hesitated at the name of Wayne. He
+thought he ought to ring the bell, but he wanted to go straight up.
+Some one had left the front door unlatched. He pushed it open and began
+the steep ascent.
+
+She came to the door of the flat herself. She had a funny little gray
+shawl about her shoulders and a pen in her hand. She tried to make her
+voice sound very cordial as she greeted him, but he thought he caught
+something that sounded as if, while perfectly well disposed to him, she
+couldn't for the life of her imagine why he had come.
+
+"Come in," she said, "though I'm afraid it's a little cold in here. Our
+janitor--"
+
+"Let me light your fire for you," he answered, and extracting a
+parlor-match from his pocket,--safety-matches were his bugbear,--he
+stooped, and put the flame to the fire. As he did so he understood
+that it was not the mere forgetfulness of a servant that had left it
+unlighted, but probably a deliberate economy, and he rose crimson
+and unhappy.
+
+It took him some time to recover, and during the entire time she sat in
+her gray shawl, looking very amiable, but plainly unable to think of
+anything to say.
+
+"I saw your son in Farron's office to-day."
+
+"Mr. Farron has been so kind, so wonderfully kind!"
+
+Only a guilty conscience could have found reproach in this statement, and
+Lanley said:
+
+"And I hear he is dining at my daughter's this evening."
+
+Mrs. Wayne had had a telephone message to that effect.
+
+"I wondered, if you were alone--" Lanley hesitated. He had of course been
+going to ask her to come and dine with him, but a better inspiration came
+to him. "I wondered if you would ask me to dine with you."
+
+"Oh, I'm so sorry," said Mrs. Wayne, "but I can't. I have a boy coming.
+He's studying for the ministry, the most interesting person. He had not
+been sober for three years when I took hold of him, and now he hasn't
+touched a drop for two."
+
+He sighed. She said she was sorry, but he could see plainly enough that
+any reformed, or even more any unreformed, drunkard would always far
+surpass him in ability to command her interest. He did not belong to a
+generation that cleared things up with words; he would have thought it
+impertinent, almost ungentlemanly, to probe her attitude of mind about
+the scene at Adelaide's; and he would have considered himself unmanly to
+make any plea to her on the ground of his own suffering. One simply
+supported such things as best one could; it was expected of one, like
+tipping waiters. He had neither the vocabulary nor the habit of mind that
+made an impersonal exposition of an emotional difficulty possible; but
+even had he possessed these powers he would have retained his tradition
+against using them. Perhaps, if she had been his sister or his wife, he
+might have admitted that he had had a hard day or that every one had
+moments of depression; but that was not the way to talk in a lady's
+drawing-room. In the silence he saw her eyes steal longingly to her
+writing-table, deeply and hopelessly littered with papers and open books.
+
+"I'm afraid I'm detaining you," he said. The visit had been a failure.
+
+"Oh, not at all," she replied, and then added in a tone of more
+sincerity: "I do have the most terrible time with my check-book. And,"
+she added, as one confessing to an absurdly romantic ideal, "I was trying
+to balance it."
+
+"You should not be troubled with such things," said Mr. Lanley, thinking
+how long it was since any one but a secretary had balanced his books.
+
+Pete, it appeared, usually did attend to his mother's checks, but of
+late she had not liked to bother him, and that was just the moment the
+bank had chosen to notify her that she had overdrawn. "I don't see how I
+can be," she said, too hopeless to deny it.
+
+"If you would allow me," said Mr. Lanley. "I am an excellent bookkeeper."
+
+"Oh, I shouldn't like to trouble you," said Mrs. Wayne, but she made it
+clear she would like it above everything; so Lanley put on his
+spectacles, drew up his chair, and squared his elbows to the job.
+
+"It hasn't been balanced since--dear me! not since October," he said.
+
+"I know; but I draw such small checks."
+
+"But you draw a good many."
+
+She had risen, and was standing before the fire, with her hands behind
+her back. Her shawl had slipped off, and she looked, in her short
+walking-skirt, rather like a school-girl being reprimanded for a poor
+exercise. She felt so when, looking up at her over his spectacles, he
+observed severely:
+
+"You really must be more careful about carrying forward. Twice you have
+carried forward an amount from two pages back instead of--"
+
+"That's always the way," she interrupted. "Whenever people look at my
+check-book they take so long scolding me about the way I do it that
+there's no time left for putting it right."
+
+"I won't say another word," returned Lanley; "only it would really
+help you--"
+
+"I don't want any one to do it who says my sevens are like fours," she
+went on. Lanley compressed his lips slightly, but contented himself by
+merely lengthening the tail of a seven. He said nothing more, but every
+time he found an error he gave a little shake of his head that went
+through her like a knife.
+
+The task was a long one. The light of the winter afternoon faded, and she
+lit the lamps before he finished. At first he had tried not to be aware
+of revelations that the book made; but as he went on and he found he was
+obliged now and then to question her about payments and receipts, he saw
+that she was so utterly without any sense of privacy in the matter that
+his own decreased.
+
+He had never thought of her as being particularly poor, not at least in
+the sense of worrying over every bill, but now when he saw the small
+margin between the amounts paid in and the amounts paid out, when he
+noticed how large a proportion of what she had she spent in free gifts
+and not in living expenses, he found himself facing something he could
+not tolerate. He put his pen down carefully in the crease of the book,
+and rose to his feet.
+
+"Mrs. Wayne," he said, "I must tell you something."
+
+"You're going to say, after all, that my sevens are like fours."
+
+"I'm going to say something worse--more inexcusable. I'm going to tell
+you how much I want you to honor me by becoming my wife."
+
+She pronounced only one syllable. She said, "_Oh_!" as crowds say it when
+a rocket goes off.
+
+"I suppose you think it ridiculous in a man of my age to speak of love,
+but it's not ridiculous, by Heaven! It's tragic. I shouldn't have
+presumed, though, to mention the subject to you, only it is intolerable
+to me to think of your lacking anything when I have so much. I can't
+explain why this knowledge gave me courage. I know that you care nothing
+for luxuries and money, less than any one I know; but the fact that you
+haven't everything that you ought to have makes me suffer so much that I
+hope you will at least listen to me."
+
+"But you know it doesn't make me suffer a bit," said Mrs. Wayne.
+
+"To know you at all has been such a happiness that I am shocked at my own
+presumption in asking for your companionship for the rest of my life, and
+if in addition to that I could take care of you, share with you--"
+
+No one ever presented a proposition to Mrs. Wayne without finding her
+willing to consider it, an open-mindedness that often led her into the
+consideration of absurdities. And now the sacred cupidity of the
+reformer did for an instant leap up within her. All the distressed
+persons, all the tottering causes in which she was interested, seemed to
+parade before her eyes. Then, too, the childish streak in her character
+made her remember how amusing it would be to be Adelaide Farron's
+mother-in-law, and Peter's grandmother by marriage. Nor was she at all
+indifferent to the flattery of the offer or the touching reserves of her
+suitor's nature.
+
+"I should think you would be so lonely!" he said gently.
+
+She nodded.
+
+"I am often. I miss not having any one to talk to over the little things
+that"--she laughed--"I probably wouldn't talk over if I had some one.
+But even with Pete I am lonely. I want to be first with some one again."
+
+"You will always be first with me."
+
+"Even if I don't marry you?"
+
+"Whatever you do."
+
+Like the veriest coquette, she instantly decided to take all and give
+nothing--to take his interest, his devotion, his loyalty, all of the
+first degree, and give him in return a divided interest, a loyalty too
+much infected by humor to be complete, and a devotion in which several
+causes and Pete took precedence. She did not do this in ignorance. On the
+contrary, she knew just how it would be; that he would wait and she be
+late, that he would adjust himself and she remain unchanged, that he
+would give and give and she would never remember that it would be kind
+some day to ask. Yet it did not seem to her an unfair bargain, and
+perhaps she was right.
+
+"I couldn't marry you," she said. "I couldn't change. All your pretty
+things and the way you live--it would be like a cage to me. I like my
+life the way it is; but yours--"
+
+"Do you think I would ask Wilsey to dinner every night or try to mold you
+to be like Mrs. Baxter?"
+
+She laughed.
+
+"You'd have a hard time. I never could have married again. I'd make you a
+poor wife, but I'm a wonderful friend."
+
+"Your friendship would be more happiness than I had any right to hope
+for," and then he added in a less satisfied tone: "But friendship is so
+uncertain. You don't make any announcements to your friends or vows to
+each other, unless you're at an age when you cut your initials in the
+bark of a tree. That's what I'd like to do. I suppose you think I'm an
+old fool."
+
+"Two of us," said Mrs. Wayne, and wiped her eyes. She cried easily, and
+had never felt the least shame about it.
+
+It was a strange compact--strange at least for her, considering that only
+a few hours before she had thought of him as a friendly, but
+narrow-minded, old stranger. Something weak and malleable in her nature
+made her enter lightly into the compact, although all the time she knew
+that something more deeply serious and responsible would never allow her
+to break it. A faint regret for even an atom of lost freedom, a vein of
+caution and candor, made her say:
+
+"I'm so afraid you'll find me unsatisfactory. Every one has, even Pete."
+
+"I think I shall ask less than any one," he returned.
+
+The answer pleased her strangely.
+
+Presently a ring came at the bell--a telegram. The expected guest was
+detained at the seminary. Lanley watched with agonized attention. She
+appeared to be delighted.
+
+"Now you'll stay to dine," she said. "I can't remember what there is
+for dinner."
+
+"Now, that's not friendly at the start," said he, "to think I
+care so much."
+
+"Well, you're not like a theological student."
+
+"A good deal better, probably," answered Lanley, with a gruffness that
+only partly hid his happiness. There was no real cloud in his sky. If
+Mrs. Wayne had accepted his offer of marriage, by this time he would have
+begun to think of the horror of telling Adelaide and Mathilde and his own
+servants. Now he thought of nothing but the agreeable evening before him,
+one of many.
+
+When Pete came in to dress, Lanley was just in the act of drawing the
+last neat double lines for his balance. He had been delayed by the fact
+that Mrs. Wayne had been talking to him almost continuously since his
+return to figuring. She was in high spirits, for even saints are
+stimulated by a respectful adoration.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+Recognizing the neat back of Mr. Lanley's gray head, Pete's first idea
+was that he must have come to induce Mrs. Wayne to conspire with him
+against the marriage; but he abandoned this notion on seeing his
+occupation.
+
+"Hullo, Mr. Lanley," he said, stooping to kiss his mother with the casual
+affection of the domesticated male. "You have my job."
+
+"It is a great pleasure to be of any service," said Mr. Lanley.
+
+"It was in a terrible state, it seems, Pete," said his mother.
+
+"She makes her fours just like sevens, doesn't she?" observed Pete.
+
+"I did not notice the similarity," replied Mr. Lanley. He glanced at Mrs.
+Wayne, however, and enjoyed his denial almost as much as he had enjoyed
+the discovery that the Wilsey ancestor had not been a Signer. He felt
+that somehow, owing to his late-nineteenth-century tact, the breach
+between him and Pete had been healed.
+
+"Mr. Lanley is going to stay and dine with me," said Mrs. Wayne.
+
+Pete looked a little grave, but his next sentence explained the cause of
+his anxiety.
+
+"Wouldn't you like me to go out and get something to eat, Mother?"
+
+"No, no," answered his mother, firmly. "This time there really is
+something in the house quite good. I don't remember what it is."
+
+And then Pete, who felt he had done his duty, went off to dress. Soon,
+however, his voice called from an adjoining room.
+
+"Hasn't that woman sent back any of my collars, Mother dear?"
+
+"O Pete, her daughter got out of the reformatory only yesterday," Mrs.
+Wayne replied. Lanley saw that the Wayne housekeeping was immensely
+complicated by crime. "I believe I am the only person in your employ not
+a criminal," he said, closing the books. "These balance now."
+
+"Have I anything left?"
+
+"Only about a hundred and fifty."
+
+She brightened at this.
+
+"Oh, come," she said, "that's not so bad. I couldn't have been so
+terribly overdrawn, after all."
+
+"You ought not to overdraw at all," said Mr. Lanley, severely. "It's not
+fair to the bank."
+
+"Well, I never mean to," she replied, as if no one could ask more
+than that.
+
+Presently she left him to go and dress for dinner. He felt
+extraordinarily at home, left alone like this among her belongings. He
+wandered about looking at the photographs--photographs of Pete as a
+child, a photograph of an old white house with wisteria-vines on it; a
+picture of her looking very much as she did now, with Pete as a little
+boy, in a sailor suit, leaning against her; and then a little photograph
+of her as a girl not much older than Mathilde, he thought--a girl who
+looked a little frightened and awkward, as girls so often looked, and yet
+to whom the French photographer--for it was taken in the Place de la
+Madeleine--had somehow contrived to give a Parisian air. He had never
+thought of her in Paris. He took the picture up; it was dated May, 1884.
+He thought back carefully. Yes, he had been in Paris himself that spring,
+a man of thirty-three or so, feeling as old almost as he did to-day, a
+widower with his little girl. If only they might have met then, he and
+that serious, starry-eyed girl in the photograph!
+
+Hearing Pete coming, he set the photograph back in its place, and,
+sitting down, picked up the first paper within reach.
+
+"Good night, sir," said Pete from the doorway.
+
+"Good night, my dear boy. Good luck!" They shook hands.
+
+"Funny old duck," Pete thought as he went down-stairs whistling,
+"sitting there so contentedly reading 'The Harvard Lampoon.' Wonder what
+he thinks of it."
+
+He did not wonder long, though, for more interesting subjects of
+consideration were at hand. What reception would he meet at the Farrons?
+What arrangements would be made, what assumptions permitted? But even
+more immediate than this was the problem how could he contrive to greet
+Mrs. Farron? He was shocked to find how little he had been able to
+forgive her. There was something devilish, he thought, in the way she had
+contrived to shake his self-confidence at the moment of all others when
+he had needed it. He could never forget a certain contemptuous curve in
+her fine, clear profile or the smooth delight of her tone at some of her
+own cruelties. Some day he would have it out with her when the right
+moment came. Before he reached the house he had had time to sketch a
+number of scenes in which she, caught extraordinarily red-handed, was
+forced to listen to his exposition of the evil of such methods as hers.
+He would say to her, "I remember that you once said to me, Mrs.
+Farron--" Anger cut short his vision as a cloud of her phrases came back
+to him, like stinging bees.
+
+He had hoped for a minute alone with Mathilde, but as Pringle opened the
+drawing-room door for him he heard the sound of laughter, and seeing that
+even Mrs. Farron herself was down, he exclaimed quickly:
+
+"What, am I late?"
+
+Every one laughed all the more at this.
+
+"That's just what Mr. Farron said you would say at finding that Mama was
+dressed in time," exclaimed Mathilde, casting an admiring glance at her
+stepfather.
+
+"You'd suppose I'd never been in time for dinner before," remarked
+Adelaide, giving Wayne her long hand.
+
+"But isn't it wonderful, Pete," put in Mathilde, "how Mr. Farron is
+always right?"
+
+"Oh, I hope he isn't," said Adelaide; "for what do you think he has just
+been telling me--that you'd always hate me, Pete, as long as you lived.
+You see," she went on, the little knot coming in her eyebrows, "I've been
+telling him all the things I said to you yesterday. They did sound rather
+awful, and I think I've forgotten some of the worst."
+
+"_I_ haven't," said Pete.
+
+"I remember I told you you were no one."
+
+"You said I was a perfectly nice young man."
+
+"And that you had no business judgment."
+
+"And that I was mixing Mathilde up with a fraud."
+
+"And that I couldn't see any particular reason why she cared about you."
+
+"That you only asked that your son-in-law should be a person."
+
+"I am afraid I said something about not coming to a house where you
+weren't welcome."
+
+"I know you said something about a bribe."
+
+At this Adelaide laughed out loud.
+
+"I believe I did," she said. "What things one does say sometimes! There's
+dinner." She rose, and tucked her hand under his arm. "Will you take me
+in to dinner, Pete, or do you think I'm too despicable to be fed?"
+
+The truth was that they were all four in such high spirits that they
+could no more help playing together than four colts could help playing in
+a grass field. Besides, Vincent had taunted Adelaide with her inability
+ever to make it up with Wayne. She left no trick unturned.
+
+"I don't know," she went on as they sat down at table, "that a marriage
+is quite legal unless you hate your mother-in-law. I ought to give you
+some opportunity to go home and say to Mrs. Wayne, 'But I'm afraid I
+shall never be able to get on with Mrs. Farron.'"
+
+"Oh, he's said that already," remarked Vincent.
+
+"Many a time," said Pete.
+
+Mathilde glanced a little fearfully at her mother. The talk seemed to her
+amusing, but dangerous.
+
+"Well, then, shall we have a feud, Pete?" said Adelaide in a
+glass-of-wine-with-you-sir tone. "A good feud in a family can be made
+very amusing."
+
+"It would be all right for us, of course," said Pete, "but it would be
+rather hard on Mathilde."
+
+"Mathilde is a better fighter than either of you," put in Vincent.
+"Adelaide has no continuity of purpose, and you, Pete, are wretchedly
+kind-hearted; but Mathilde would go into it to the death."
+
+"Oh, I don't know what you mean, Mr. Farron," exclaimed Mathilde,
+tremendously flattered, and hoping he would go on. "I don't like
+to fight."
+
+"Neither did Stonewall Jackson, I believe, until they fixed bayonets."
+
+Mathilde, dropping her eyes, saw Pete's hand lying on the table. It was
+stubby, and she loved it the better for being so; it was firm and boyish
+and exactly like Pete. Looking up, she caught her mother's eye, and they
+both remembered. For an instant indecision flickered in Adelaide's look,
+but she lacked the complete courage to add that to the list--to tell any
+human being that she had said his hands were stubby; and so her eyes fell
+before her daughter's.
+
+As dinner went on the adjustment between the four became more nearly
+perfect; the gaiety, directed by Adelaide, lost all sting. But even as
+she talked to Pete she was only dimly aware of his existence. Her
+audience was her husband. She was playing for his praise and admiration,
+and before soup was over she knew she had it; she knew better than words
+could tell her that he thought her the most desirable woman in the world.
+Fortified by that knowledge, the pacification of a cross boy seemed to
+Adelaide an inconsiderable task.
+
+By the time they rose from table it was accomplished. As they went into
+the drawing-room Adelaide was thinking that young men were really rather
+geese, but, then, one wouldn't have them different if one could.
+
+Vincent was thinking how completely attaching a nature like hers would
+always be to him, since when she yielded her will to his she did it with
+such complete generosity.
+
+Mathilde was saying to herself:
+
+"Of course I knew Pete's charm would win Mama at last, but even I did not
+suppose he could do it the very first evening."
+
+And Pete was thinking:
+
+"A former beauty thinks she can put anything over, and in a way she can.
+I feel rather friendly toward her."
+
+The Farrons had decided while they were dressing that after dinner they
+would retire to Vincent's study and give the lovers a few minutes to
+themselves.
+
+Left alone, Pete and Mathilde stood looking seriously at each other, and
+then at the room which only a few weeks before had witnessed their first
+prolonged talk.
+
+"I never saw your mother look a quarter as beautiful as she does this
+evening," said Wayne.
+
+"Isn't she marvelous, the way she can make up for everything when she
+wants?" Mathilde answered with enthusiasm.
+
+Pete shook his head.
+
+"She can never make up for one thing."
+
+"O Pete!"
+
+"She can never give me back my first instinctive, egotistical, divine
+conviction that there was every reason why you should love me. I shall
+always hear her voice saying, 'But why should Mathilde love you?' And I
+shall never know a good answer."
+
+"What," cried Mathilde, "don't you know the answer to that! I do. Mama
+doesn't, of course. Mama loves people for reasons outside themselves: she
+loves me because I'm her child, and Grandpapa because he's her father,
+and Mr. Farron because she thinks he's strong. If she didn't think him
+strong, I'm not sure she'd love him. But _I_ love _you_ for being just as
+you are, because you are my choice. Whatever you do or say, that can't be
+changed--"
+
+The door opened, and Pringle entered with a tray in his hand, and his
+eyes began darting about in search of empty coffee-cups. Mathilde and
+Pete were aware of a common feeling of guilt, not that they were
+concealing the cups, though there was something of that accusation in
+Pringle's expression, but because the pause between them was so obvious.
+So Mathilde said suddenly:
+
+"Pringle, Mr. Wayne and I are engaged to be married."
+
+"Indeed, Miss?" said Pringle, with a smile; and so seldom was this
+phenomenon seen to take place that Wayne noted for the first time that
+Pringle's teeth were false. "I'm delighted to hear it; and you, too, sir.
+This is a bad world to go through alone."
+
+"Do you approve of marriage, Pringle?" said Wayne.
+
+The cups, revealing themselves one by one, were secured as Pringle
+answered:
+
+"In my class of life, sir, we don't give much time to considering what we
+approve of and disapprove of. But young people are all alike when they're
+first engaged, always wondering how it is going to turn out, and hoping
+the other party won't know that they're wondering. But when you get old,
+and you look back on all the mistakes and the disadvantages and the
+sacrifices, you'll find that you won't be able to imagine that you could
+have gone through it with any other person--in spite of her faults," he
+added almost to himself.
+
+When he was gone, Pete and Mathilde turned and kissed each other.
+
+"When we get old--" they murmured.
+
+They really believed that it could never happen to them.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HAPPIEST TIME OF THEIR LIVES ***
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